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“The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information."

-- William O. Douglas

News and Opinion

Chris Hedges: Journalists Abandoned Julian Assange and Slit Their Own Throats

The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous. The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating 17 counts of the Espionage Act. They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism.

The U.S. and the U.K. brazenly violated a series of judicial norms and diplomatic protocols to keep Julian trapped for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy after he had been granted political asylum by Ecuador. The CIA, through the Spanish security firm UC Global, made recordings of Julian’s meetings with his attorneys, which alone should invalidate the extradition case. Julian has been held for more than four years in the notorious Belmarsh high-security prison since the British Metropolitan Police dragged him out of the embassy on April 11, 2019. The embassy is supposed to be the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication. The U.K. courts, which have engaged in what can only be described as a show trial, appear ready to turn him over to the U.S. once his final appeal, as we expect, is rejected. This could happen in a matter of days or weeks.

On Wednesday night at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Stella Assange, an attorney who is married to Julian; Matt Kennard, co-founder and chief investigator of Declassified UK, and I examined the collapse of the press, especially with regard to Julian’s case. You can watch our discussion here.

“I feel like I’m living in 1984,” Matt said. “This is a journalist who revealed more crimes of the world’s superpower than anyone in history. He’s sitting in a maximum-security prison in London. The state that wants to bring him over to that country to put him in prison for the rest of his life is on record as spying on his privileged conversations with his lawyers. They’re on record plotting to assassinate him. Any of those things, if you told someone from a different time ‘Yeah this is what happened and he was sent anyway and not only that, but the media didn’t cover it at all.’ It’s really scary. If they can do that to Assange, if civil society can drop the ball and the media can drop the ball, they can do that to any of us.” ...

“This is not just about Assange,” Matt continued. “This is about all of our futures, the future for our kids and our grandkids. The things we hold dear, democracy, freedom of speech, free press, they’re very, very fragile, much more fragile than we realize. That’s been exposed by Assange. If they get Assange, the levies will break. It’s not like they’re going to stop. That’s not how power works. They don’t pick off one person and say we’re going to hold off now. They’ll use those tools to go after anyone who wants to expose them.”

“If you’re working in an environment in London where there’s a journalist imprisoned for exposing war crimes, maybe not consciously but somewhere you [know you] shouldn’t do that,” Matt said. “You shouldn’t question power. You shouldn’t question people who are committing crimes secretly because you don’t know what’s going to happen…The U.K. government is trying to introduce laws which make it explicit that you can’t publish [their crimes]. They want to formalize what they’ve done to Assange and make it a crime to reveal war crimes and other things. When you have laws and a societal-wide psyche that you cannot question power, when they tell you what is in your interest, that’s fascism.”

Biden to CNN, USA is running out of ammo

Wagner boss met Vladimir Putin five days after mutiny, Kremlin says

The Kremlin has said the Wagner group head, Yevgeny Prigozhin, met Vladimir Putin on 29 June, five days after his mercenary fighters marched towards Moscow in an aborted rebellion. The Russian president’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that Putin invited 35 senior Wagner commanders including Prigozhin to the Kremlin, adding that the meeting lasted three hours. ...

According to Peskov, Prigozhin assured Putin during the meeting that his Wagner troops were loyal to the country and the Russian president. “The commanders outlined their version of what happened [on 24 June]. They emphasised that they are staunch supporters of the head of state … and also said that they were ready to continue to fight for their homeland,” Peskov said. ...

Moscow’s apparent lenience towards Prigozhin, only weeks after he attempted to march on Moscow with his mercenaries, stands in stark contrast to how the Putin regime usually treats dissent.

What's behind Zelensky's Zaporizhzhia nuclear deception?

Russia Slams Repatriation of Ukrainian Troops From Turkey

The Kremlin on Saturday slammed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s decision to repatriate several Ukrainian commanders who should have remained in Turkey until the end of the conflict under a deal.

The Ukrainian presidency confirmed that it had secured the return of members of the crack Azov regiment, which is despised in Russia, after “negotiations with the Turkish side.” ...

“The return of Azov commanders from Turkey to Ukraine is nothing but a direct violation of the terms of existing agreements,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

He said both Ukraine and Turkey had violated the terms of the agreement, under which the men were supposed to remain in Turkey until the end of the conflict.

Peskov said the return was linked to the “failure of the counter-offensive” launched by Ukraine, and Ankara’s desire to show its “solidarity” ahead of a July 11-12 NATO summit in Vilnius.

Ukraine turns heat on allies as NATO stalls on membership bid

Biden Keeps Lying About The US “Not Trying To Surround” China

President Biden had a recent interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria during which he defended his controversial decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine and suggested that the US can continually support Ukraine the way it supports Israel rather than adding it to the NATO alliance.

About halfway through the interview Biden said something about China that’s worth flagging, because the claim he makes is self-evidently false, and it’s not the first time he’s made it.

Describing the conversations he’s been having with China’s President Xi Jinping, Biden said the following:

“We’re going to put together the Quad which is India, Australia, the United States and Japan. I got a call from him [Xi] on that. He said why are you doing that. I said we’re not doing that to surround you, we’re doing that to maintain stability in the Indian Ocean and in the South China Sea. Because we believe the rules of the road about what constitutes international air space, international space and the water should be maintained.”

Biden uttered this same bogus talking point about not trying to surround China last month at the private fundraising event where he made headlines by calling Xi a “dictator”:

“But what he was really upset about was that I insisted that we — we reunite the Qu- — so-called Quad. He called me and told me not to do that because it was putting him in a bind. I said, All we’re doing — we’re not trying to surround you, we’re just trying to make sure the international rules with air and sea lanes remain open.”

Biden is lying. The US is deliberately surrounding China with war machinery and has been for years, and has rapidly escalated its efforts to do so during Biden’s term. There are currently no fewer than 313 US military bases in East Asia by the Pentagon’s own admission, with the Biden administration adding four new ones in the Philippines. Biden’s war machine has been busy instituting the AUKUS alliance which is specifically set up to menace China, moving nuclear-capable bombers to Indonesia, signing a military deal with Papua New Guinea, working to station missile-armed marines at Japan’s Okinawa islands, staging provocations in Taiwan, and getting into increasingly confrontational encounters with Chinese military vessels and aircraft off China’s coast as part of its dramatically increased military presence in the area.

So of course the US is trying to surround China, as evidenced by the mountains of US war machinery that are being moved into areas surrounding China. Biden can babble all he wants about wanting to secure sea lanes and protect international waters, but only a drooling idiot would believe the world’s most powerful empire is militarily surrounding its top geopolitical rival as an act of defense.

And Beijing is under no illusions about this. Xi said in a speech earlier this year that “Western countries — led by the U.S. — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development.”

So Biden isn’t trying to fool the Chinese government with his “We’re not trying to surround you” schtick — he’s trying to fool you. He’s trying to fool the western public and the allies of the United States, who would get spooked if the US president openly admitted to a deliberate campaign of militarily encirclement against an economic superpower they all trade with extensively.

You simply cannot understand the geopolitics and major conflicts of the 2020s without understanding that the US empire has been actively amassing military threats in the immediate surroundings of its top two rivals — China and Russia — that it would never tolerate anyone else amassing anywhere near the United States. The single dumbest thing the US empire asks us to believe nowadays is that surrounding its two biggest foes with war machinery is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression.

The best advice I can offer about US-China tensions is to ignore the words and watch the actions. Ignore what officials say about wanting peace and not trying to surround China and supporting the One China policy etc, and just watch all the US war machinery that’s being rapidly added to that region. The US empire is better at international narrative manipulation than any power structure that has ever existed in human history, but what they can’t spin away is the concrete maneuverings of solid pieces of war machinery, because they are physical realities and not narratives.

"A Historic Mistake": Swedish Peace Activist Decries Move to Join NATO & Abandon Neutrality

Turkey agrees to support Sweden’s Nato application

Sweden is to be allowed to join Nato after Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, agreed to set aside his veto and recommend to his parliament that Sweden’s application go ahead.

The Monday night breakthrough came in last-ditch talks on the eve of the Nato summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The surprise announcement ended nearly a year of brinkmanship by Turkey, which has insisted it will not accede to Sweden’s application to join Nato unless Stockholm did more to clamp down on exiled Kurdish activists it accuses of terrorism. ...

The Nato chief avoided answering precisely when Sweden would be joining the alliance, saying that Erdogan had agreed to push ratification in parliament “as soon as possible”. It took two weeks for Turkey’s parliament to ratify Finland’s membership.

Hungary is also yet to approve it, although Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government has vowed it will not be the last to make the step, implying it will move soon.

Mark Rutte: the everyman Dutch PM whose ‘Teflon’ powers finally waned

He was the great survivor of Dutch politics, a man whose capacity to swerve criticism and survive scandal earned him the nickname “Teflon Mark”, combining backroom skills with everyman appeal to become the country’s longest-serving leader. But Mark Rutte came unstuck on Monday, telling shocked MPs and reporters in The Hague he would not be standing in the next elections after his divided coalition government collapsed on Friday over asylum policy.

The decision brings to an end the 56-year-old’s 17-year tenure as leader of the liberal-conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and 13 years as prime minister of the Netherlands at the head of four different governments. ...

Rutte ultimately ran out of road, however, over his demands for a limit on family reunifications for asylum seekers, a move bitterly opposed by his coalition partners ChristenUnie, a Christian democratic party, and the centre-left Democracy 66.

A managerial rather than a visionary leader – his favourite quote is reportedly one of the former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s: “People with visions should see a doctor” – his longstanding policy of meeveren, altijd meeveren (go with the flow, always go with the flow) – finally failed him.

Texas Governor Outlaws Life-Saving Water Breaks for Workers as Climate Crisis Fuels Heat Waves

“Feds Were ALL OVER Jan. 6!” – Capitol Police Chief Tells Tucker

(Video) “Biden Family Took MILLIONS In Chinese Bribes!” – Says China Whistleblower

Brazil says illegal miners driven from Indigenous territory, but ‘war’ not over

Brazil’s top federal police chief for the Amazon has celebrated the government’s success in driving thousands of illegal miners from the country’s largest Indigenous territory, but warned the “war” against environmental criminals is not yet over.

Speaking during a visit to the Amazon city of Belém, Humberto Freire estimated environmental and police special forces had expelled 90% of the 20,000 miners who had been devastating the protected Yanomami territory, since launching their clampdown in February.

Freire, who was appointed after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became president in January, said the eviction of those garimpeiros was bearing fruit. “In April 2022, we received 444 mine-related deforestation alerts. In April 2023, it was 19 – a reduction of more than 95%. In May, there were 10 alerts and in the first half of June none at all. So we’ve seen a significant reduction.”

Images released by Brazil’s armed forces last week showed the waters of the Uraricoera River, which runs through the Portugal-sized Indigenous enclave, had become dramatically less cloudy, purportedly as a result of the destruction of illegal mines. But Freire, director of the newly created federal police department for the environment and Amazon, warned that 1,500 to 2,000 cassiterite and gold miners remained and were resisting. ...

There was a brutal reminder of the challenges authorities still face last week when a Yanomami child was shot dead and five others, including an Indigenous leader, were injured during an attack on a Yanomami village. It was the latest in a series of deadly incidents to hit the territory since the eviction campaign began. But there was also evidence that renewed efforts to slow environmental crime across the Amazon are paying off as authorities announced a 33.6% drop in deforestation in the first six months of Lula’s administration.

Drop carbon offsetting-based environmental claims, companies urged

Companies should drop offsetting-based environmental claims and adopt a “climate contribution” model instead, according to a new quality standard. In a new code of practice, the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI) has published guidance on how companies should use carbon credits as part of high-quality corporate action. It recommends that firms should disclose their emissions every year, show they are successfully meeting a science-based target aligned with the Paris agreement, and only use carbon credits to contribute to climate mitigation, moving away from claims that they have “cancelled out” their emissions by purchasing offsets.

The rules, which are limited to voluntary corporate action on the climate, were the result of consultation with civil society, the private sector, Indigenous communities and governments. They aim to introduce a standardised method for assessing the quality of corporate claims amid accusations of greenwashing and intense scrutiny of the carbon offsetting industry. The VCMI recommends firms should buy high-quality credits from a separate standards body, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), which will release its recommendations on what counts as a “good” carbon credit later this summer. ...

Gilles Dufrasne, a policy officer with Carbon Market Watch, said the time for carbon neutrality claims was over. “Companies must step up their transparency game and provide real information that consumers can understand. Beyond reducing their emissions, the richest companies have a responsibility to contribute finance to climate action, even in sectors that they are not directly impacting. If the largest and richest companies do not step up to provide the finance that we urgently need, then who will?” he said.

FLOODS Rage Northeast As SCORCHING HEAT DEVASTATE The US Coast-To-Coast

US faces week of dangerous weather with flooding and heatwave alerts

Deadly flooding in the north-east on Monday coupled with alerts over longer, hotter heatwaves set to boil much of the southern and western US kicked off a week of dangerous weather, as July warnings about the climate crisis intensify.

Rescue teams raced into Vermont after relentless, torrential rain drenched parts of New England and north-east overnight, washing out roads, forcing evacuations and halting some airline travel. One person was killed in upstate New York as she was trying to leave her home and some in Ulster county said the flooding was the worst they’ve seen since Hurricane Irene, called the worst weather event in that county’s history, when it hit in 2011.

Roads collapsed in parts of the Hudson Valley and waves of water hit some areas with little warning, as the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, declared a state of emergency for Orange county, about 60 miles north of New York City. Mike Cannon of Vermont Urban Search and Rescue said crews from North Carolina, Michigan and Connecticut were among those helping to get to towns on Monday that so far had been unreachable since storms hit late on Sunday.

Heavy downpours with possible flash flooding were forecast in parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine after the flash floods had already ravaged parts of upstate New York and the Green Mountains region of Vermont.

US atmospheric scientists warned that although the destruction in American states might seem distant and unconnected from massive flooding disasters in India, Japan, China and Turkey this year, they have this in common: storms are forming in a warmer atmosphere, making extreme rainfall a reality right now. And the additional warming that scientists predict is coming will only make it worse

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Scott Ritter: NATO Summit, a Theater of the Absurd

We Must Stop Biden From Sending Cluster Bombs to Ukraine

Underestimate Russia at Your Own Risk: A Comparison of Hubris by Germany During WWII and Today’s Collective West

Ukraine SitRep: 'Mosquito' Tactics - S-200 Land Attacks

Russia seeks UN Security Council meeting on Nord Stream blasts

Iraq’s Climate Crisis: America’s War for Oil and the Great Mesopotamian Dustbowl

‘French people are angry’: communities react after protests

‘We’re used to being told no’: the Lakota people’s fight for sacred land

Morning Joe Tells Americans SHUT UP About Economy

US Faith In Institutions HITS ALL TIME LOW

NYTimes Gets Massively RATIO’d For RFK Jr. Smear Job!

A Little Night Music

Mose Allison - That's The Stuff You Gotta Watch

Mose Allison - Ever Since I Stole The Blues

Mose Allison - Young Man's Blues

Mose Allison - I Ain't Got Nothing but the Blues

Mose Allison - Rollin' Stone

Mose Allison - Wild Man On The Loose

Mose Allison – Middle Class White Boy

Mose Allison - Your Molecular Structure

Mose Allison - The Seventh Son