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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Amos Milburn

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues and boogie-woogie piano player Amos Milburn. Enjoy!

^{Amos Milburn - Roomin' House Boogie}

"I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction."

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky

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News and Opinion

Chris Hedges On the War On Gaza & Strategy For the Movement

Biden attacks request by ICC prosecutor for Netanyahu arrest warrant

Joe Biden has attacked as “outrageous” an application by the international criminal court for warrants seeking the arrest of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, along with senior members of Hamas, for actions carried out in Gaza.

The US president sided unambiguously with Israel after the ICC’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced he was pursuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister. Khan is also pursuing the arrests of three leading Hamas figures, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri – better known as Mohammed Deif – and Ismail Haniyeh over Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October last year.

The prosecutor’s announcement prompted Biden’s most outspoken remarks in Israel’s support in months, with the president accusing the ICC of drawing a false moral equivalence between the country and Hamas, a militant Islamist group that has run Gaza since 2006.

“The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” Biden said in the statement. “And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”

Establishment FREAKS Over ICC Warrants for Israeli Leaders: Calls Accountability 'OUTRAGEOUS'

'War Crimes Are War Crimes': Biden Rebuked for Decrying ICC Bid to Arrest Israeli Leaders

Human rights defenders around the world on Monday accused U.S. President Joe Biden of double standards and worse after he condemned a decision by the International Criminal Court's top prosecutor to pursue arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders for alleged crimes committed during the October 7 attacks and subsequent obliteration of Gaza.

Karim Khan, the ICC's chief prosecutor, said the court has formally applied for arrest warrants targeting two Israeli and three Palestinian officials. Khan is seeking to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged "crimes of causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict."

Khan said charges against Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed Deif include "extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape, and sexual assault in detention."

A panel of ICC judges will determine whether to issue arrest warrants for any of the suspects.

Note language Biden uses to dismiss ICC action, referring to "this prosecutor," attributing the decision to one man, when in fact there was unanimous support for this action by the ICC's panel of experts; and "this prosecutor" was Israel's preferred candidate for the position. https://t.co/7EeuSxQ9iO

— Shibley Telhami (@ShibleyTelhami) May 20, 2024

Biden blasted the effort to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant as "outrageous."

"Let me be clear: Whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas," the president said in a statement. "We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned what he called the ICC's "shameful... equivalence of Israel with Hamas."

Critics were quick to pounce on what some called Biden's hypocritically disparate responses to the ICC's pursuit of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders and for Russian President Vladmir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine.

"What's outrageous is Biden's utter disregard for victims of war crimes," said Mark Kersten, an assistant professor of international law at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. "But let's be clear: Biden will feel he must attack the ICC because it directly implicates his own decision-making to repeatedly defend atrocities and their authors."

Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, said that "there's certainly no quantitative equivalence between Hamas and Israeli officials in terms of the sheer number of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including humans murdered, homes demolished, hospitals bombarded, journalists executed, aid workers snuffed, land stolen, children starved, men tortured... I could go on and on."

Furthermore, "'equivalence' between two actors has zero bearing on who should be arrested and prosecuted," Whitson added. "The ICC has prosecuted individuals for a single offense irrespective of how it compares to other crimes committed by other actors at the same time."

This is the same childish logic as "Gaza can't be a genocide bc genocide=Holocaust."

The ICC is not asserting equivalence. It's charging a slate of crimes.

Imagine someone gets shot, and the police say "The only murder I ever saw was a stabbing, so this can't be murder, sorry"

— Megan K. Stack (@Megankstack) May 20, 2024

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis—who heads the leftist Democracy in Europe Movement 2025—said on social media that "Biden just declared the International Criminal Court null and void because it dared pursue Israel's war crimes which Biden is actively and enthusiastically enabling."

"In the tradition of George W. Bush, the U.S. president has declared the U.S. a rogue state," he added.

Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé on Interrogation at U.S. Airport and “Collapse of the Zionist Project”

‘Only Hamas can defend us’: Israeli raids and Fatah failures boost support in West Bank

Shuffling around his family home in the hills around Ramallah, Khalil was nervous after his release from prison the day before. His mother was also terrified that he would be rearrested. Khalil, a shy 21-year-old whose name has been changed, was arrested in a pre-dawn raid last October for his allegiance to Hamas. But when Israeli forces smashed through the door of his family home, they didn’t tell him why they were detaining him. He was imprisoned for six months without charge, in conditions he described as “unbelievable”.

“The Israelis are trying to restrain and terrorise us using these methods,” he said. “People are afraid. There is no freedom of speech … I’m scared to travel to any of the cities in the West Bank in case I get detained. Still, it feels like they could raid my house at any minute.”

Israeli officials, notably the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed to wipe out Hamas after the group staged an unprecedented raid on Israeli towns and kibbutzim last October, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 more. But as Israeli forces continue to pummel Gaza, claiming to be targeting the remaining Hamas brigades, they have also swept up thousands of Palestinians in raids in the West Bank. The majority, according to the Palestinian prisoners’ commission, are not aligned to Hamas. Even so, the raids and an increasing number of settler attacks have succeeded in creating a climate of fear that is undermining Hamas’s rivals Fatah, who operate the ruling Palestinian Authority, highlighting its inability to protect Palestinians and quietly fuelling Hamas’s popularity.

“These raids are generating distrust towards the Palestinian Authority but also fear of attack by them – they can’t protect us but at the same time they could attack us too,” said Khalil, pointing to the authority’s history of detaining members of Hamas in the West Bank. For Khalil, the wave of Israeli raids have achieved little other than making people angry. A student at Birzeit university, he noted that almost all of the 24 leaders of the student council are either detained or fearing detention. The Hamas-backed bloc at Birzeit has swept the annual student elections in recent years, in a victory often regarded as a rare democratic bellwether for the entire West Bank.

Hamas views these successes as a clear sign of its grassroots support, in the absence of Palestinian Authority elections for almost two decades. But now fear of arrest, or in some cases rearrest, has smothered many open expressions of politics across the West Bank, where even casual discussions of support for Hamas can mean risking detention.

Smotrich Calls for Israel To Take Over Southern Lebanon If Hezbollah Doesn’t Withdraw from Border

On Sunday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the Israeli military to invade and take over southern Lebanon if Hezbollah does not withdraw from the border.

Smotrich called for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to issue an ultimatum to Hezbollah. “A public ultimatum must be issued to Hezbollah that they completely stop firing and withdraw all forces to beyond the Litani River,” he said at a faction meeting of his Religious Zionism party.

“If the ultimatum is not fully met, the IDF will launch an assault deep in Lebanese territory to defend the northern communities, including ground entry and Israeli military takeover of the southern Lebanese area,” Smotrich added.

He said the only way to return Israelis to northern areas that have been evacuated is “through a military decision with a devastating assault on Hezbollah, its infrastructure, and the destruction of its power.”

Blinken THREATENS GLOBAL STARVATION In Secret Arab Meeting

Ryan and Saagar are joined by Bilal Hammoud to discuss a closed doors meeting with Biden officials where they threatened to starve the world if Palestine was given a state.

Academic workers at UC Santa Cruz strike over crackdown on Gaza protests

Academic workers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, took to the picket line on Monday morning as part of a rolling strike in protest against the university system’s response to pro-Palestine demonstrations.

The campus is the first in the University of California to do so as part of a systemwide protest against the public university, which union members argue violated the rights of pro-Palestinian advocates and workers.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) union, which represents 48,000 graduate workers in California’s vast university system, voted to authorize a strike last week. The union has accused the University of California of unfair labor practices, including allowing violent attacks on pro-Palestine protesters, summoning police to arrest union members participating in protests, and unilaterally changing working conditions, among other charges.

The strike is expected to cause widespread disruption within the University of California system, which has more than 280,000 students at its 10 campuses across the state.

Officials with the University of California have said the strike is illegal, violating their collective bargaining agreement, and has in turn filed an unfair labor practice charge against the union.

The intimidation of student protestors is unprecedented

Outrage over police violence at pro-Palestine rally in Brooklyn

Outrage was growing on Monday to a “cumulatively aggressive” response by the New York police department to a weekend pro-Palestine street rally in Brooklyn, in which officers were caught on video beating protesters who had already been detained.

Cellphone footage by witnesses at Saturday’s gathering in Bay Ridge showed NYPD officers – including two wearing the uniforms of police commanders – punching at least three people on the ground.

One man was repeatedly punched in the ribs by an officer who had him pinned – while another protester was struck violently on the left side of his face as an officer pinned his head to the asphalt, according to the New York Times.

“From my vantage point, the [NYPD] response appeared pre-emptive, retaliatory and cumulatively aggressive,” the Democratic city council member Justin Brannan told the newspaper. “These were not our local cops. Clearly, there was a zero-tolerance edict sent down, which escalated everything and made it worse.”

A spokesperson for the NYPD said Monday that 41 people were arrested at the event, held annually in Bay Ridge to commemorate Nakba Day, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.

Presidency ends, mobilization begins

Nevada activists secure signatures for vote on abortion access in November

Activists in Nevada, a key state in the upcoming US presidential elections, announced on Monday afternoon that they had turned in nearly double the number of signatures they need to get an abortion-related measure on the November ballot.

Nevada currently allows abortions up until fetal viability, or the point at which an infant can survive outside the womb, which is generally pegged to around 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Activists are hoping that, by enshrining the right to an abortion in the state constitution, abortion access will be protected from any legislative attempts to limit it.

State officials still need to verify the signatures before confirming the measure will appear on the ballot. If the measure moves forward, Democrats are hoping that it will boost their candidates in the battleground state – particularly Joe Biden, who is currently trailing Donald Trump in Nevada polling.

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Pro-Israel group pours millions into unseating New York progressive Jamaal Bowman

A Super Pac affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) has revved up its campaign spending, pouring $2m into a New York congressional primary to oppose the progressive incumbent Jamaal Bowman.

Campaign finance disclosures released this weekend showed the Super Pac, called United Democracy Project (UDP), spending about $1m in support of Bowman’s opponent, the moderate Democrat George Latimer and $1m in negative advertisements opposing Bowman. If the group succeeds in defeating Bowman, it will deliver a significant blow to the progressive wing of the House.

“They don’t want Israel to be criticized, they don’t want Israel to be held accountable – they don’t want anyone to mention Palestine or speak up for Palestinian rights and lives,” said Bowman during an interview with MSNBC on Saturday. ...

In an email to the Guardian, an Aipac spokesperson previously described Latimer as “a strong advocate for the US-Israel relationship in clear contrast to his opponent who is aligned with the anti-Israel extremist fringe”. Bowman has sharply criticized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and was among the first of his colleagues to call for a ceasefire. ...

Aipac’s forays into campaigns represent a new avenue of political activism for the pro-Israel lobbying group, which until the 2022 election cycle did not spend on campaigns. By forming a Super Pac, which can legally contribute unlimited amounts of money on advertisements and communications in races, Aipac has been able to ramp up its influence.

Trump DEMANDS Biden DRUG TEST Before Debate

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Green activists push Biden to freeze ‘disastrous’ deepwater oil export rigs

Joe Biden’s administration is coming under renewed pressure to escalate its curbs on the US’s booming trade in fossil fuels by halting new deepwater oil-export facilities, as well as entrenching its pause in gas-export licences.

A coalition of 20 environmental groups, sensing election-year traction with Biden as he seeks a second term as US president, has written to officials demanding a freeze on deepwater oil-export facilities, similar to the move announced by the Biden administration earlier this year when it paused new licenses for liquified natural gas (or LNG) exports.

A letter to the US Department of Transportation asks for a re-evaluation of whether the crude oil exports are in the national interest, given they cause “disastrous climate-disrupting pollution and environmental injustices and would lock in decades of fossil fuel dependence that undercut the pathway to a clean energy economy”.

This week, activists are also set to press the Biden administration to indefinitely extend its pause on new LNG export licenses, citing the industry’s huge emissions and impacts upon communities and fishers along the Gulf of Mexico coast, even though the administration has indicated the pause will end within a year.

Meanwhile, a further 200 groups have called for congressional leaders to end all funding that supports fossil fuel extraction across federal lands and waters, citing the need to rapidly phase out oil, gas and coal production to avoid disastrous climate change. “Congress has coddled the fossil fuel industry for decades, scarring millions of acres of public lands in the process,” said Ashley Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s past time our leaders take this simple step and stop funding activities that are completely at odds with protecting our climate.”

More than third of Amazon rainforest struggling to recover from drought, study finds

More than a third of the Amazon rainforest is struggling to recover from drought, according to a new study that warns of a “critical slowing down” of this globally important ecosystem. The signs of weakening resilience raise concerns that the world’s greatest tropical forest – and biggest terrestrial carbon sink – is degrading towards a point of no return.

It follows four supposedly “one-in-a-century” dry spells in less than 20 years, highlighting how a human-disrupted climate is putting unusually intense strains on trees and other plants, many of which are dying of dehydration.

In the past, the canopy of the South American tropical forest, which covers an area equivalent to about half of Europe, would shrink and expand in tandem with the annual dry and rainy seasons. It also had the capacity to bounce back from a single drought. But in recent times, recoveries have become more sluggish because droughts are growing more intense in the south-east of the Amazon and more frequent in the north-west.

The new paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examines satellite images of vegetation activity from 2001 to 2019. Tens of thousands of pixels, each covering a 25-sq km (9.65-sq mile) area, were analysed on a month-by-month basis and correlated with local rainfall data. The authors’ goal was to investigate how “the frequency, intensity, or duration of droughts contributes to stability loss of Amazon vegetation”. They found 37% of the mature vegetation in the region exhibited a slowing-down trend. While the patterns varied from area to area, they concluded that the highly deforested and degraded south-eastern Amazon was most vulnerable to a “tipping event”: in other words, a calamitous decline of the tropical rainforest to a different, drier state.

Microplastics found in every human testicle in study

Microplastics have been found in human testicles, with researchers saying the discovery might be linked to declining sperm counts in men.

The scientists tested 23 human testes, as well as 47 testes from pet dogs. They found microplastic pollution in every sample.

The human testicles had been preserved and so their sperm count could not be measured. However, the sperm count in the dogs’ testes could be assessed and was lower in samples with higher contamination with PVC. The study demonstrates a correlation but further research is needed to prove microplastics cause sperm counts to fall.

Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades, with chemical pollution such as pesticides implicated by many studies. Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory.

Vast amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water as well as breathing them in.

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Also of Interest

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

ICC Prosecutor Asks For Arrest Warrants For Netanyahoo, Gallant And Others

Displaced Palestinians facing acute water shortage as Israel's offensive intensifies

Under Siege – Israeli Forces Surround Al Awda Hospital in Jabaliya

Houthis Say They Downed 4th US MQ-9 Reaper Drone

Assassination Attempt on Slovak PM Highlights Dangers of Constant EU Demonization of Project Ukraine Opponents and Hypocrisy of ‘Misinformation’ Crackdown

Armenia, Azerbaijan Agree Deal on Disputed Sections of Shared Border

‘It became a beacon of hope’: the incredible story of Stax Records

“A Watershed Event”: ICC Charges Against Netanyahu First Time Court Has Gone After Western Leader

China & Russia Join Forces To Build A “New World Order”!

Scott Ritter : Reality in Ukraine

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A Little Night Music

Amos Milburn - Chicken Shack Boogie

Amos Milburn - Just One More Drink

Amos Milburn - I Done Done It

Amos Milburn - One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer

Amos Milburn - French Fried Potatoes and Ketchup

Amos Milburn - Atomic Baby

Amos Milburn - Thinking and Drinking

Amos Milburn - Walking Blues

Amos Milburn - Down The Road Apiece

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