Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist and singer John Brim. Enjoy!

"Every random religion in the world must be gifted its own entire country, in which they have the right to displace, steal from, oppress and exterminate the people who were already living there. If you disagree with this, you are essentially a Nazi."

-- Caitlin Johnstone

News and Opinion

US ‘evaluating’ Hamas response to Gaza ceasefire proposal

The US has said it is “evaluating” Hamas’ formal response to its Gaza ceasefire proposal, as the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, attempts to channel global support for a UN security council resolution backing the proposal into pressure on the Palestinian militant group and Israel.

Late on Tuesday, a Hamas official said they had submitted a response to Egyptian and Qatari mediators, seeking some “amendments”, and that their priority was to bring a “complete stop” to the war. A separate Hamas spokesperson, Jihad Taha, said the response included “amendments that confirm the ceasefire, withdrawal, reconstruction and [prisoner] exchange”.

Washington received the reply and was “evaluating it right now,” national security council spokesperson John Kirby told journalists on Tuesday night, while declining to provide details on its content. Blinken, on his second day of a visit to the Middle East, said Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had “reaffirmed his commitment” to the proposal.

Blinken met Israeli opposition leaders on Tuesday morning, and spoke privately to hostages’ families before travelling to Jordan for an emergency summit on humanitarian aid for Gaza, where more than a million people are on the brink of famine and most of the population are displaced. ...

The deal, which was approved by the UN on Monday, was unveiled by the US president, Joe Biden, at the end of May. Biden presented it as an Israeli initiative although Netanyahu has been at best ambivalent about the plan, saying any ceasefire proposal before Hamas military and governance capacity had been destroyed was a “non-starter”. That position appears to contradict the terms of the agreement.

Sarah Leah Whitson: U.S. Ceasefire Push in Gaza Is Welcome, But "40,000 Dead Palestinians Too Late"

‘Unprecedented scale’ of violations against children in Gaza, West Bank and Israel, UN report says

More grave violations against children were committed in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel than anywhere else in the world last year, according to a UN report due to be published this week. The report on children and armed conflict, which has been seen by the Guardian, verified more cases of war crimes against children in the occupied territories and Israel than anywhere else, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Somalia, Nigeria and Sudan.

“Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory presents an unprecedented scale and intensity of grave violations against children,” the report said. The annual assessment – due to be presented to the UN general assembly later this week by the secretary general, António Guterres – lists Israel for the first time in an annex of state offenders responsible for violations of children’s rights, triggering outrage from the Israeli government.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a statement that the UN had “added itself to the black list of history when it joined those who support the Hamas murderers”.

The report details only cases that UN investigators were able to verify, so it accounts for just part of the total number of deaths and injuries of children in the course of last year. In all, the UN verified “8,009 grave violations against 4,360 children” in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank – more than twice the figures for the DRC, the next worst place for violence against children. Of the total number of child victims verified, 4,247 were Palestinian, 113 were Israeli.

In all, 5,698 violations were attributed to Israeli armed and security forces, and 116 to Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Israeli settlers were judged responsible in 51 cases, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades was involved in 21.

Biden GASLIGHTS On Ceasefire As Hezbollah ATTACKS Israel

World Food Programme Pauses Use of US Aid Pier in Gaza Due to Israeli Attacks

The UN food program has been forced to pause aid shipments through the U.S. military’s “humanitarian aid” pier in Gaza after its warehouses came under attack amid Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Nuseirat on Saturday, the agency announced as it warned that famine is looming in Gaza.

UN World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director Cindy McCain said on Sunday in a CBS interview that “two of our warehouses were rocketed yesterday, so we’ve stepped back just for the moment to make sure that we’re on safe terms.” One person was injured in the shelling, she said.

McCain said she did not have details on how the warehouses were attacked. However, the warehouses were attacked on Saturday — the same day that Israeli forces carried out a horrific massacre of 274 Palestinians, including at least 64 children, in an attack on Nuseirat refugee camp that was part of an effort to free four Israeli hostages. ...

“We are reassessing the safety aspects of where we should be and what this means for us,” McCain added in an interview with The Washington Post. “It made things a lot more dangerous…. The crowd is already hungry. They’re desperate. And then to have something like this occur?”'

Palestinians and aid groups have fiercely criticized the construction of the pier, saying that it is at best a PR response and at worst a covert way for the U.S. to increase its military presence in Gaza. “There are more than 1,000 soldiers and marines, American soldiers and marines, besides Israeli soldiers now in the port, why? To distribute food? We can do it. Humanitarian workers can do it also. So why? Because it is a military base,” said Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda in May. “It’s a military base. It’s not a seaport, it’s not a temporary seaport, it’s not a humanitarian sea port. If you wanna solve the humanitarian crisis, you can open the borders.”

Bassem Tamimi was released today after 9 months in Israeli captivity, where he was held without charge or trial like thousands of other Palestinian hostages in Israeli torture camps. Bassem is a dear friend, and a human rights activists who peacefully defended his village Nabi… pic.twitter.com/2KcRqE0io1

— Husam Zomlot (@hzomlot) June 9, 2024

UK: Pro-Palestine activists smash windows at Barclays branches over Israel arms links

Pro-Palestine activists threw rocks and sprayed red paint on 20 branches of the British bank Barclays over its ties to arms firms supplying Israel in its ongoing war on Gaza. Protest group Palestine Action claimed responsibility for the targeting of the buildings on Monday, adding it worked in coordination with the climate group Shut the System.

In a statement, the group said it “aims to halt the Palestinian genocide by undermining suppliers of weapons to the Israeli military… along with financial companies involved with these weapons suppliers". Palestine Action has previously targeted the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems in so-called direct action protests, which involve physical damage and occupation of British properties associated with the company.

The group says it has “adopted radical direct action tactics which include sabotage of key infrastructure to physically prevent continued support for destructive and lethal business operations".

In May, several Palestinian solidarity organisations published a report stating that Barclays has £2bn ($2.48bn) of investments in companies involved in supplying arms to Israel.

University of California workers ordered to end strike over Palestine protest response

Thousands of University of California academic workers who went on strike across six campuses protesting administrators’ response to pro-Palestinian protests returned to the job on Monday under court order, but their union vowed more protests to come. An Orange county superior court judge late on Friday granted a temporary restraining order sought by the university, which asserted that the walkout stemmed from non-labor issues and that it violated the no-strike clause in the union’s contract.

University officials had originally petitioned the California public employment relations board, but the panel twice rejected their requests for an injunction. Unionized academic researchers, graduate teaching assistants and post-doctoral scholars walked off the job over what they called unfair labor practices in the university’s handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in recent weeks.

Judge Randall Sherman set a hearing for 27 June to hear arguments on whether to extend the injunction. The union’s own strike authorization expires on 30 June. UAW 4811 leaders denounced the ruling, saying the judge defied the authority of the employment relations board by intervening in a labor matter outside the court’s jurisdiction.

Nevertheless, the union said its members were abiding by the court order. The UAW said it would focus its efforts on an upcoming grievance proceeding against the university.

Scott Ritter: Risking Nuclear War

Pakistan ABDUCTS Imran Khan Allies, Families

Bananas and Blood: Chiquita Ordered to Pay Colombian Families $38 Million for Backing Death Squads

US banana giant ordered to pay $38m to families of Colombian men killed by death squads

A Florida court has ordered Chiquita Brands International to pay $38m to the families of eight Colombian men murdered by a paramilitary death squad, after the US banana giant was shown to have financed the terrorist organisation from 1997 to 2004. The landmark ruling late on Monday came after 17 years of legal efforts and is the first time that the fruit multinational has paid out compensation to Colombian victims, opening the way for thousands of others to seek restitution.

It also marks the first time a major US corporation has been held liable for such rights abuses in another country and could lead to a series of similar lawsuits involving rights violations across the world. ...

Chiquita pleaded guilty in 2007 to funding “a specially designated global terrorist” for secretly paying the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) $1.7m over seven years at the height of Colombia’s brutal conflict, but had never before been ordered to pay compensation to victims. The rightwing AUC sprang up in the 1980s to protect landowners from leftist rebels such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), but went on to become the worst perpetrators of human rights violations in the south American nation – and one of the country’s largest drug-traffickers.

Until it disarmed as part of a 2004 peace process, the AUC was responsible for most of the civilian lives lost in Colombia’s brutal, six-decade-long conflict, which left 450,000 people dead and millions displaced. ...

Court documents show that Chiquita continued paying the AUC after it had been designated an international terrorist organisation in the US in 2001 and that executives saw the payment as the “cost of doing business in Colombia”. New evidence presented to the Florida courts also showed that Chiquita allowed the AUC to use its ports to import automatic rifles and its banana boats to smuggle cocaine across the seas, human rights lawyers at International Rights Advocates (IRAdvocates) said.

Book about book bans banned by Florida school board

A book about book bans has been banned in a Florida school district. Ban This Book, a children’s book written by Alan Gratz, will no longer be available in the Indian River county school district since the school board voted to remove the book last month.

Gratz’s book, which came out in 2017, follows fourth-grader Amy Anne Ollinger as she tries to check out her favorite book. Ollinger is told by the librarian she cannot, because it was banned after a classmate’s parent thought it was inappropriate. She then creates a secret banned-books library, entering into “an unexpected battle over book banning, censorship, and who has the right to decide what she and her fellow students can read”, according to the book’s description on Gratz’s website.

In a peculiar case of life imitating art, Jennifer Pippin, a parent in the coastal community, challenged the book. Pippin’s opposition is what prompted the school board to vote 3-2 in favor of removing it from shelves. The vote happened despite the district’s book-review committee vetting the work and deciding to keep it in schools.

Indian River county school board members disagreed with how Gratz’s book referred to other works that had been taken out of school, and accused it of “teaching rebellion of school-board authority”, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.

Hunter Biden found guilty on all three charges in federal gun case

Hunter Biden, the eldest living son of the US president, was found guilty Tuesday on all three felony counts he faced relating to buying a handgun while being a user of crack cocaine.

Biden received the verdict in court as his friends and family, including the first lady, Jill Biden, stood in support.

The jury reached its verdict after about three hours of deliberation over two days. It followed a weeklong trial in the Biden family’s home town of Wilmington, Delaware, that featured sometimes excruciating testimony about his addiction habit, from some of his closest relatives. Hunter Biden chose not to take the witness stand in his own defence.

Joe Biden said Tuesday: “I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.

The president has previously said he would not pardon his son should he be convicted.

Top Former Trump Aide Mick Mulvaney Floats 'Revenge-a-Thon' Against Political Foes

"What's wrong with a little revenge?"

That's what Mick Mulvaney, former President Donald Trump's one-time acting White House chief of staff—who consumer advocate Ralph Nader once described as the twice-impeached Republican's "sadist-in-chief"—asked Tuesday in a Hill opinion column suggesting that there would be nothing unseemly if his ex-boss is reelected and decides to embark on a campaign of retribution targeting Democrats.

"Would any investigation by the next Trump administration, or by an assertive state attorney general, constitute 'revenge'? Or would it simply be applying the exact same standard to Democrats that they have applied to Donald Trump?" he asked.

"Here is my question: What is the difference between 'payback' or 'a revenge-a-thon' and simply applying the same standards to other elected officials that have now been applied to Trump?" Mulvaney wrote.

"Put another way: Now that Democrats in law enforcement have established a new standard for what justifies a criminal indictment of a former elected official or a current candidate for office, what is wrong with having Republican law enforcement apply those exact same standards to Democratic officials and candidates?" he added.

Mulvaney continued:

Don't get me wrong. I abhor the fact that the standard for pursuing government leaders has been lowered so dramatically. I cringe at what precedents Trump Derangement Syndrome is bringing to our politics and civic institutions. I am extraordinarily worried over the Machiavellian trails the left is blazing in order to 'get Trump.'

But they have set the standard now. They lowered the bar. It is now not only acceptable but praiseworthy to charge a former president of the United States with 34 felonies for a bookkeeping discrepancy of which he may not even have been fully aware.

...

Trump has attempted to brush off last month's conviction by disparaging the prosecution and jury and declaring that the "real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people," a reference to Election Day.

The former president also raised eyebrows last week by threatening to imprison political opponents including the president, First Lady Jill Biden, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Harmful gases destroying ozone layer falling faster than expected, study finds

International efforts to protect the ozone layer have been a “huge global success”, scientists have said, after revealing that damaging gases in the atmosphere were declining faster than expected.

The Montreal protocol, signed in 1987, aimed to phase out ozone-depleting substances found primarily in refrigeration, air conditioning and aerosol sprays.

A study has found that atmospheric levels of hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), harmful gases responsible for holes in the ozone layer, peaked in 2021 – five years ahead of projections.

“This has been a huge global success. We’re seeing that things are going in the right direction,” the study’s lead author, Luke Western from the University of Bristol, said.

The most harmful CFCs were phased out by 2010 in the effort to protect the ozone layer – the shield that protects life on Earth from harmful levels of ultraviolet rays from the Sun. The HCFC chemicals that replaced them are expected to be eliminated by 2040.

Air in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ likely more toxic than previously thought

The air throughout south-east Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” is probably being poisoned with a highly carcinogenic gas at levels much higher than previously thought, new research reveals.

Using cutting-edge equipment that more accurately checks for the gas, ethylene oxide, which is primarily used in plastic production, researchers found levels more than 1,000 times above previous measurements, and about 10 times higher on average than regulators’ modeling.

The levels pose a “worrisome” risk to residents and workers in the region, especially children, said Pete DeCarlo, a Johns Hopkins University researcher and senior author of the paper. Residents in the region are majority lower-income and African American.

“I don’t think there’s any census tract in the area that wasn’t at higher risk for cancer than we would deem acceptable,” DeCarlo said. “We expected to see ethylene oxide in this area. But we didn’t expect the levels that we saw, and they certainly were much, much higher than EPA’s estimated levels.”

Ethylene oxide is linked at low levels of exposure to multiple cancers, DNA damage, lung injury and other serious health issues. It’s used in the production of other chemicals for plastic and in a fumigation process for sterilizing surgical equipment and food canisters. Though ethylene oxide is emitted from industrial plants around the nation, it’s most widely used in Louisiana because of the high number of chemical facilities.

‘It’s unbearable’: in ever-hotter US cities, air conditioning is no longer enough

Conventional wisdom and public policy have long operated on the assumption that, no matter how bad the heat gets, air conditioning will be enough to keep people safe. But the last few years of record-breaking temperatures are shattering that myth. “The home environment can actually be a substantial risk in and of itself,” said Jaime Madrigano, a public health researcher with Johns Hopkins University. “We find, during extreme heat events, that more people die in their homes than in other types of places. They’re not making it to the hospital.” ...

Power grids stumble and fail during periods of high demand. And many cooling systems are simply not powerful enough to contend with the worsening heat. Some experts have begun to warn of the looming threat of a “Heat Katrina” – a mass-casualty heat event. A study published last year that modeled heatwave-related blackouts in different cities showed that a two-day blackout in Phoenix could lead to the deaths of more than 12,000 people. ...

“The types of [cooling] systems that we sold 10 years ago are not able to keep up with the weather we have,” said Simi Hoque, an architectural engineer at Drexel University who studies how building design contributes to indoor heat. As temperatures climb, air conditioners – which work by sucking in indoor air, heating it via compressor and then dumping that heat outside – must work exponentially harder. According to Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler, keeping a home steady at 75F requires about 30% more power when outside temperatures creep from 95F to 98F.

Some older AC units simply cannot keep up with those demands. Even if they can, many residents can’t afford higher energy bills. Sharp rises in energy demand stress electrical grids: in 2021, a heatwave in the Pacific north-west triggered rolling blackouts, which led to at least 600 deaths. ...

Black and Hispanic communities, in particular, are more likely to live in urban heat islands, where asphalt traps more heat than greener, typically wealthier neighborhoods. The disparity is a legacy of decades of redlining and other racist housing policies. People at higher risk of indoor heat also “tend to have fewer resources to be able to pay for things like air conditioning or fans”, said Hoque, and these factors have serious public health implications: in New York City, according to state data about last year’s record heat, Black residents are twice as likely to die of heat than their white counterparts. Even when heat isn’t deadly, it’s damaging. Heat triggers respiratory distress, acute cardiovascular events, disrupted sleep and impaired cognition – in other words, heat makes it hard to breathe, hard to sleep, hard to think.

Also of Interest

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

Ignoring Daily Massacres In Gaza While Still Babbling About October 7

A Maryland House Race Shows How Not to Cover AIPAC

Russian General Staff Aims at Ending the Ukraine by Electric War

Carbon Capture Will Extend Oil Production by 84 Years, Industry Study Finds

Inside Mexico’s anti-avocado militias

Baltimore shipping channel fully reopens after Key Bridge collapse

From stealing to Spotify: the story behind how music got free

Ukraine All About $$$$ Says Senator Lindsey Graham!

FT, Zelensky bizarre decisions. F-16 dangerous scheme

A Little Night Music

John Brim - Tough Times

John Brim - You Got Me Where You Want Me

John Brim - Be Careful What You Do

John Brim – Drinking Woman

John Brim - Gary Stomp

John Brim - Lonesome Man Blues

John Brim - Go Away

John Brim - Lifetime Baby

John And Grace Brim – I Love My Baby Tk. 1

John Brim - Ice Cream Man

John Brim - Wake up America