Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues singer, guitarist and songwriter Memphis Minnie. Enjoy!

"Israel isn’t killing all these people because it was attacked, Israel is killing all these people because it was given an excuse. Israel has always wanted to grab more land and eliminate the populations who oppose it. It’s using the political moment that October 7 gave it to roll out agendas it has wanted to roll out for generations. Israel has been squeezing and squeezing and squeezing its targets for generation after generation waiting for them to push back sufficiently to hand them an excuse."

-- Caitlin Johnstone

News and Opinion

Ignore Their Words; Watch Their Actions

Israel has been raining hellfire on Lebanon with such extreme ferocity that as of this writing authorities can only make the roughest estimates of the number of dead. Hundreds of people were killed today.

CNN reports destruction “as large as a city block” in Beirut from a strike on six residential towers in what Israel claims was an attempt to assassinate Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. From the looks of things they’ll probably be counting the dead for many days as they comb through the rubble.

As you might expect, the imperial spin machine is falling all over itself to wash the US government’s hands of this savagery. Axios has published another of its signature “sources say Biden is privately angry with Netanyahu” pieces, reporting that the president is experiencing such adjectives as “frustrated”, “humiliated” and “livid” toward the Israeli prime minister over rejected ceasefire proposals and increased escalations.

Netanyahu has clearly never wanted peace, and yet, this was yesterday. Biden looks really “livid at Netanyahu.” https://t.co/wiI51epler pic.twitter.com/W76FPUknyJ

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) September 27, 2024

We’ve been seeing articles like this for a year now. It’s become a whole new genre of news reporting in the mainstream press to transcribe statements fed to the media by anonymous White House officials saying the president’s feelings are feeling upset feelings toward the Israeli government in order to frame the Biden administration as some kind of reluctant passive witness to all this butchery and genocide instead of the willing participant that it so obviously is.

CNN has an article out titled “Blinken issues forceful plea for diplomacy after Israeli strike on Beirut,” which is of course nonsense. “Forceful plea” is an oxymoron; the two words contradict each other. You don’t plead with someone forcefully, you make demands forcefully. This administration could have reined in Israel at any time between last October and today with a phone call, because Israel’s military operations and very existence are fully dependent on US military support. Instead they’re making a performative “plea” that Israel start acting nice, because they don’t actually want these atrocities to end.

You can see that the Biden administration is a willing participant in all this bloodshed by simply ignoring their words and their narrative spin and watching their actions instead. While the mass media publish White House press releases disguised as news stories about the president’s feelings and celebrity progressives assure us that this administration is “working tirelessly for a ceasefire,” the Israeli Defense Ministry is announcing that it has secured another $8.7 billion in military aid from the US. 

That’s really all you need to know to understand what’s really happening here: that this administration is continuing to pour mountains of war machinery into Israel after a year of genocide. Their words say one thing, but their actions say another.

Ignore their words, and watch their actions. This is great advice for this current situation in particular and for politicians in general, and even more broadly for anyone in your life whose real motives you’re unsure about.

The other day I got into a conversation online with a Kamala supporter who insisted that backing Harris is the best way to support Israel’s victims, because Harris sometimes says nice words about Palestinian people while Donald Trump does not.

“Given the current two options, would you prefer a president who urges Netanyahu to cease, who calls for a ceasefire, and calls for Palestinian freedom and rights, over one who does none of those?” he asked.

I told him, “You’re asking me if I prefer someone who murders kids while saying nice words or someone who murders kids while not saying nice words. I don’t care. They are exactly the same to me.”

But that’s what Democrats have to offer. Nice feelings and words. Vibes. Bombing middle eastern kids to shreds while saying they support human rights and a two-state solution. It’s their whole entire schtick.

These people are in a cult. https://t.co/By4sEpSOqr

— Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) September 24, 2024

I saw a liberal think tanker named Maya Luna saying “If you’re not voting for Kamala, you don’t care about Palestinians,” arguing that “it’s objectively the case that Kamala has a policy that will be much more empathetic to Palestinians.”

This is the Democratic Party right here. They can’t point to any concrete material reason to believe their candidate would be better on Palestine, so they say their candidate “will be much more empathetic”, i.e. words and feelings as opposed to actions. This is who western liberals are.

And Trump supporters are the same. They insist their candidate will bring peace if elected even after he spent four years as president advancing the longstanding agendas of neocons and the US intelligence cartel, with a cabinet staffed with some of the nastiest warmongers in Washington. If they’d ignored his words which occasionally give lip service to peace and watched his actions instead, they’d see that the empire will never let anyone elect a peacemaker as president.

Mentally mute the narratives and instead watch the actual material movements of war machinery, troops, resources and wealth. That’s how you sort out what’s really happening in this world from the empty narrative fluff, and that’s how you recognize who the true monsters really are.

After Netanyahu’s speech saying there are no civilian spaces in Lebanon and calling hospitals, schools and every home a legitimate target, Israel attacked Beirut.

He stood at the UN, declared his war crimes and carried them out. This is what total impunity looks like. https://t.co/WiTZj2B85H

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) September 27, 2024

Alastair Crooke : Netanyahu Gambles on Slaughter

Israel strikes Houthi targets in Yemen as it continues to bomb Lebanon

Israel launched a wave of airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen on Sunday while continuing to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the Lebanese health ministry said 105 people had been killed and another 359 injured. The fresh assaults on Iran-backed proxies across the Middle East risk accelerating a slide towards a devastating regional conflict on multiple fronts.

The attack on the port of Hodeidah in Yemen involved dozens of Israeli planes and appears to have targeted fuel facilities, power plants and docks at the Ras Issa and Hodeidah ports. It one of the biggest such operations yet seen in the near year-long crisis in the region. Houthi media reports said the strikes had killed four people and wounded 33. Residents said the strikes caused power cuts in most parts of Hodeidah. Israeli military officials said the raid targeted the Houthis, an armed Iranian-backed group that controls most of Yemen. They have fired at Israeli targets for months in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. They have also targeted international shipping in the Red Sea. On Saturday, they launched a ballistic missile attack on Israel’s main international airport when Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was arriving.

The strikes in Yemen and the new wave of attacks in Lebanon came 48 hours after the Israeli operation that killed Hassan Nasrallah, the veteran leader of Hezbollah, in Beirut.

Since Nasrallah’s death, Hezbollah, which is also backed by Iran, has said it will continue fighting Israel.

A series of salvos were launched from Lebanon on Sunday, including one that Hezbollah said targeted a group of Israeli soldiers. Others targeted built-up areas in northern Israel, according to officials in Israel.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Israeli Extremists Prevail

The US was reportedly informed of this mass Israeli attack on Beirut in Lebanon shortly beforehand.
Comes just one day after US released $8.7 billion more in aid to Israel & hours after Netanyahu told the UN “Israel seeks peace. Israel yearns for peace.”pic.twitter.com/LW2ST4DixB

— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) September 27, 2024

US was not given notice of Israeli strike that killed Nasrallah, top Biden aide says

The White House said on Sunday it had not been warned in advance of the airstrike that killed Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in a Beirut suburb and assumed it had caused civilian casualties, while reaffirming its “ironclad” support to Israel.

John Kirby, the national security spokesperson, said the US had not been informed of the airstrike, and that the president, Joe Biden, only found out about it once Israeli planes were already in the air.

Speaking to CNN, Kirby also said there was “no question” that civilians had been killed in the attack. “We certainly assume there have been civilian casualties. I don’t think we can quantify it right now but we are in touch with our Israeli counterparts,” Kirby said.

Iran has said the US is “complicit” in Israel’s action and promised retaliation for Friday’s massive airstrike in Beirut, which killed Nasrallah and raised fears that the conflict in the Middle East could spin out of control.

Stepping off a plane at Dover air force base on Sunday, Joe Biden said: “We really have to avoid” an all-out war in the Middle East and he would speak with the Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trita Parsi on Israel's Nasrallah Assassination and Why Netanyahu Still Wants War with Iran

Tlaib Slams US-Funded 'Bloodbath' as Biden Calls Israel Bombing Lebanon 'Justice'

U.S. President Joe Biden and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on Saturday had notably different responses to Israel's intense bombing campaign in Lebanon over the past 24 hours, which killed hundreds of people including key Hezbollah leaders.

"Our country is funding this bloodbath," Tlaib (D-Mich.) said on social media Saturday morning, sharing a post from Zeteo's Prem Thakker with videos of the Israeli assault on Lebanon that began Friday, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly.

"Sending more of our troops and bombs to the region is not advancing peace," added Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress and a leading critic of Israel's yearlong genocide in the Gaza Strip. "The U.S. government are conspirators to the war criminal Netanyahu's genocidal plan."

In the post shared by Tlaib, Thakker noted that "the U.S. was reportedly informed of this mass Israeli attack on Beirut in Lebanon shortly beforehand," which "comes just one day after [the] U.S. released $8.7 billion more in aid to Israel."

Tlaib also shared that her office is fielding "desperate calls" from U.S. citizens who are struggling to leave Lebanon. She declared that "the mission of the U.S. Department of State is to protect Americans, and they are failing AGAIN."

The desperate calls in my office are heart-wrenching. The mission of the @StateDept is to protect Americans, and they are failing AGAIN.

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) September 28, 2024

Biden, meanwhile, began his Saturday afternoon statement by noting that Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, which the Iran-backed Lebanese political and paramilitary group confirmed earlier in the day—a development that elevated fears of a broader regional war.

"Hassan Nasrallah and the terrorist group he led, Hezbollah, were responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade reign of terror," Biden said. "His death from an Israeli airstrike is a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians."

The president continued:

The strike that killed Nasrallah took place in the broader context of the conflict that began with Hamas' massacre on October 7, 2023. Nasrallah, the next day, made the fateful decision to join hands with Hamas and open what he called a "northern front" against Israel.

The United States fully supports Israel's right to defend itself against Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and any other Iranian-supported terrorist groups. Just yesterday, I directed my secretary of defense to further enhance the defense posture of U.S. military forces in the Middle East region to deter aggression and reduce the risk of a broader regional war.

Ultimately, our aim is to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts in both Gaza and Lebanon through diplomatic means. In Gaza, we have been pursuing a deal backed by the U.N. Security Council for a ceasefire and the release of hostages. In Lebanon, we have been negotiating a deal that would return people safely to their homes in Israel and southern Lebanon. It is time for these deals to close, for the threats to Israel to be removed, and for the broader Middle East region to gain greater stability.

While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) thanked Biden "for standing with our democratic ally Israel," journalists from around the world and other critics highlighted that his statement "has not a word on civilian casualties."

Ali Abunimah, director of The Electronic Intifada, was among those who pointed out that Biden said the "assassination of Nasrallah, in an Israeli massacre that killed hundreds, 'is a measure of justice for his many victims.'"

"Utterly depraved, and by this twisted, criminal Biden logic, those who tried to assassinate Trump were also instruments of 'justice," Abunimah said, referring to former U.S. President Donald Trump, Republican nominee for the November election.

Biden statement on Nasrallah praises not just his killing but how it was done—calling Israel’s strike on an area full of civilians “a measure of justice.” Striking.

Calls to “de-escalate” in Gaza + Lebanon without changes to US policy that’s battered both https://t.co/ySZbKwFMZj

— Akbar Shahid Ahmed (@AkbarSAhmed) September 28, 2024

Middle East expert Assal Rad said: "Biden calls massive bombs in a densely-populated area that leveled six apartment buildings in Lebanon 'a measure of justice.' The torching of international law and the precedent that is being set should terrify us all."

Rad also slammed Biden's cease-fire call, saying: "This is nonsense. You can't provide the funding and weapons to continue the conflict *without* conditions, twist humanitarian law to give Israel total impunity, and reject every international institution that seeks accountability, and then say your 'aim is to de-escalate.'"

Others recalled Israel's 2004 assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin, which also killed seven other people. The administration of former Republican U.S. President George W. Bush—who launched the global War on Terror in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks—didn't issue a forceful condemnation like some European leaders, but a spokesperson for the State Department said at the time that "we are deeply troubled" by the attack.

As'ad Abukhalil, a Lebanese American professor at California State University, Stanislus, declared Saturday that "there has been no U.S. president EVER who has unconditionally allowed unrestrained Israeli savagery in the Middle East as Biden has done."

Abukhalil warned that "the U.S. will suffer for years to come from the policies of Biden in the Middle East," which he described as "more far-reaching [than] Bush's."

For many months, major media outlets have promoted this narrative of Biden as frustrated, annoyed, angry with Netanyahu. Now we have “deepened tensions.” It’s so tense Biden literally just endorsed an assassination conducted with American bombs in a crowded Beirut neighborhood. https://t.co/z5Fdzj1rMV

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) September 28, 2024

Biden, a Democrat, was initially seeking reelection in November, but after a disastrous summer debate performance against Trump, he passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. After putting out Biden's Saturday statement, the White House released a similar one from Harris—which was also lauded by AIPAC.

"Hassan Nasrallah was a terrorist with American blood on his hands. Across decades, his leadership of Hezbollah destabilized the Middle East and led to the killing of countless innocent people in Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and around the world. Today, Hezbollah's victims have a measure of justice," Harris said. "I have an unwavering commitment to the security of Israel. I will always support Israel’s right to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis."

"President Biden and I do not want to see conflict in the Middle East escalate into a broader regional war," she added. "We have been working on a diplomatic solution along the Israel-Lebanon border so that people can safely return home on both sides of that border. Diplomacy remains the best path forward to protect civilians and achieve lasting stability in the region."

In response, Margaret Zaknoen DeReus, executive director at the California-based Institute for Middle East Understanding, said: "Like Biden, not a word from the VP , from the candidate of joy & freedom, about the 1,000+ Lebanese men, women and children Israel obliterated. Not a word about hundreds of thousands of Lebanese displaced, entire city blocks destroyed. We don't exist as human beings to this [administration]."

Responding to both statements on social media, the anti-war group CodePink said that the Biden-Harris administration "believes flattening a residential area with... bombs is 'justice.'"

Biden ADMITS Bibi HUMILIATED Him. Does Nothing

Mass Walkout as 'Global Pariah' Netanyahu Addresses UN General Assembly

A large number of diplomats and other officials walked out of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on Friday as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to defend his nation's slaughter of more than 41,000 people in the Gaza Strip during the past year and over 700 in Lebanon this week.

Journalists and critics of the "global pariah" shared photos and videos of people filing out of the hall before Netanyahu's address—which came just a day after 25 anti-genocide protesters were arrested for blocking his motorcade in Manhattan.

While there was some audience applause from the sparsely populated room on Friday, Al Jazeera Arabic's Rami Ayari explained that "the people you hear cheering the PM during the speech are in the gallery who he brought for that purpose."

Most diplomatic delegations have left the United Nations Hall as the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu begins his speech. pic.twitter.com/cdB3M0iPSv

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) September 27, 2024

Max Blumenthal slams Israeli-US state terror at RATWM '24

Anya Parampil: Will the Killing Stop?

US Bolsters Forces in Middle East, Issues Warning to Iran

The Pentagon on Sunday announced steps to bolster its forces in the Middle East amid Israel’s non-stop bombardment of Lebanon.

Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said the US will reinforce its “air-support capabilities” in the coming days and said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin “increased the readiness of additional US forces to deploy, elevating our preparedness to respond to various contingencies.”

Ryder said Austin also ordered the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group to stay in the region. The USS Wasp Amphibious Ready Group / Marine Expeditionary Unit will also continue to operate in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Ryder also issued a warning to Iran in the statement. “Secretary Austin stressed that the United States is determined to prevent Iran and Iranian-backed partners and proxies from exploiting the situation or expanding the conflict,” he said.

Israel Kills 61 Palestinians in Gaza Over Three Days

Israeli forces have killed at least 61 Palestinians in Gaza over the past three days, according to numbers released by Gaza’s Health Ministry.

On Saturday, the ministry said 52 Palestinians were killed, and 118 were wounded in the previous 48-hour period. On Sunday, the ministry said nine were killed and 41 were injured over the previous 24-hour period.

The violence brings the Health Ministry’s death toll since October 7, 2023, to 41,595 and the number of wounded to 96,251. The numbers are an undercount since they don’t account for the estimated 10,000 Palestinians who are missing and presumed dead under the rubble, and the number of indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege is unknown.

Why Antony Blinken lied for Israel

Far-right Freedom party finishes first in Austrian election, latest results suggest

The far right won the most votes in an Austrian election for the first time since the Nazi era on Sunday, as the Freedom party (FPÖ) rode a tide of public anger over migration and the cost of living to beat the centre-right People’s party (ÖVP). The pro-Kremlin, anti-Islam FPÖ won 28.8% of votes, beating the ruling ÖVP of the chancellor, Karl Nehammer, into second place on 26.3%, according to near-complete results.

The opposition Social Democratic party scored its worst ever result – 21.1% – while the liberal NEOS drew about 9%. Despite devastating flooding this month from Storm Boris bringing the climate crisis to the fore, the Greens, junior partners in the government coalition, tallied 8.3% in a dismal fifth place. The Communist party and the apolitical Beer party looked unlikely to clear the 4% hurdle to representation. Turnout was high at about 78%.

Profiting from a rightwing surge in many parts of Europe and taking Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as a model, the FPÖ capitalised on fears around migration, asylum and crime heightened by the August cancellation of three Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna over an alleged Islamist terror plot. Mounting inflation, tepid economic growth and lingering resentment over strict government measures during Covid dovetailed into a huge leap in support for the FPÖ since the last election in 2019.

Its polarising lead candidate, Herbert Kickl, who campaigned using the “people’s chancellor” moniker once used to describe the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, said he was ready to form a government with “each and every one” of the parties in parliament. “We have written a piece of history together today,” he told cheering party supporters in Vienna. “We have opened a door to a new era.”

Nehammer called the result, which will send shock waves through Europe, “bitter” while his defence minister, Klaudia Tanner, admitted the debacle for the governing parties was a “wake-up call”.

Macron works to break left coalition

Kyle Rittenhouse texts pledging to ‘murder’ shoplifters disillusion his ex-spokesperson

A former spokesperson for Kyle Rittenhouse says he became disillusioned with his ex-client after learning that he had sent text messages pledging to “fucking murder” shoplifters outside a pharmacy before later shooting two people to death during racial justice protests in Wisconsin in 2020.

Dave Hancock made that remark about Rittenhouse – for whom he also worked as a security guard – on a Law & Crime documentary that premiered on Friday. The show explored the unsuccessful criminal prosecution of Rittenhouse, who killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

As Hancock told it on The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 90-minute film’s main subject had “a history of things he was doing prior to [the double slaying], specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a fight”.

Hancock nonetheless said he initially believed Rittenhouse’s claims of self-defense when he first relayed his story about fatally shooting Rosenbaum and Huber. Yet that changed when he later became aware of text messages that surfaced as part of a civil lawsuit filed by the family of one of the men slain in Kenosha demanding wrongful death damages from Rittenhouse.

Rittenhouse sent the texts from the phone he had the night of the 25 August double slaying in Kenosha, according to what Hancock says in the new film. The texts were in response to seeing shoplifters at a CVS pharmacy on 10 August, a little more than two weeks before the deadly shooting in Kenosha.

Ron DeSantis accused of ‘intimidation campaign’ against abortion rights

Ron DeSantis is making a concerted effort to maintain draconian limits on abortion access in Florida that have led to accusations the rightwing Republican governor is conducting a “state-sponsored intimidation campaign” against abortion rights and trampling on civil liberties in the state.

A near total ban on abortions after the first six weeks of pregnancy took effect in Florida in May after the state supreme court ruled that the right to an abortion was no longer covered by the privacy clause in the Florida constitution.

Passage of legislation called Amendment 4 would change the state constitution to prohibit government interference with the right to an abortion before the viability of a fetus, which typically begins around the 24th week of a pregnancy.

But registered voters in Florida have recently reported unannounced visits from law enforcement personnel that appear to be part of an all-out drive by DeSantis to use state government agencies and public funds to block passage of Amendment 4, which would enshrine in the state constitution a woman’s right to an abortion.

Florida politics sure is weird:

Florida Republican charged with threat to ‘call up hit squad’ to kill primary rival

The justice department has charged a Florida man for threatening to “call up my Russian-Ukrainian hit squad” to kill his political opponent, the Republican congressional representative Anna Paulina Luna, in 2021.

The department unsealed an indictment against 41-year-old William Robert Braddock III of St Petersburg, Florida on Thursday, alleging that on 8 June 2021 he made multiple threats to hurt and kill Luna – identified as Victim 1 in the indictment – in a phone call with another individual, Victim 2.

Braddock and Luna were candidates in the 2021 Republican primary election in Florida’s 13th congressional district. Victim 2 was identified as a private citizen and acquaintance of Luna.

In 2021, the Associated Press reported that Luna alleged in a Florida court that Braddock was stalking her and had threatened to hurt her. ...

The justice department said that Braddock subsequently left the US and was living in the Philippines, but was recently deported back to the US, where he made his first court appearance on Thursday in Los Angeles.

Kid DESTROYS Kamala Harris With One Sentence On CNN!

Hurricane Helene’s ‘historic flooding’ made worse by global heating, Fema says

The head of the US disaster relief agency has called Hurricane Helene, which has killed nearly 70 people so far, a “true multi-state event” that caused “significant infrastructure damage” and had been made worse because of global heating.

The storm killed at least 69 people, according to state and local officials in South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. Officials feared still more bodies would be discovered.

“This is going to be a really complicated recovery in each of the five states” of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, the Fema administrator, Deanne Criswell, said. ... The devastation, Criswell said, was linked to the climate emergency. “This storm took a while to develop, but once it did it intensified very rapidly – and that’s because of the warm waters in the Gulf that’s creating more storms that are reaching this major category level.”

The conditions, she said, were creating greater amounts of storm surge in the coastal areas and increased rainfall as the storms moved north. “In the past, damage from hurricanes was primarily wind damage, but now we’re seeing so much more water damage and that is a result of the warm waters which is a result of climate change,” Criswell told CBS.

Cows help farms capture more carbon in soil, study shows

Cows may belch methane into the atmosphere at alarming rates, but new data shows they may play an important role in renewing farm soil.

Research by the Soil Association Exchange shows that farms with a mixture of arable crops and livestock have about a third more carbon stored within their soil than those with only arable crops, thanks to the animals’ manure.

This also has an effect on biodiversity: mixed arable and livestock farms support about 28 grassland plant species in every field, compared with 25 for arable-only and 22 for dairy-only.

Joseph Gridley, chief executive of SAE, which was set up by the Soil Association in 2021 to support and measure sustainable farming, said it was unlikely that carbon captured in soil would balance out the enormous amounts of methane created by cattle. Farm livestock around the world creates about 14% of human-induced climate emissions.

“It’s pretty unequivocal in the data that having livestock on your farm does mean you have more emissions – five or six times more emissions,” he said. “But if you integrate livestock into the system, on every metric on soil health, there’s an improvement, and on a lot of the biodiversity measures as well.”

More detail at the link:

Leonard Leo-linked group attacking efforts to educate judges on climate

A rightwing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightwing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Trump’s supreme court nominees, the Guardian has learned.

The Washington DC-based non-profit Environmental Law Institute (ELI)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation”, according to ELI’s website.

The American Energy Institute (AEI), a rightwing, pro-fossil fuel thinktank, has been attacking ELI and their climate trainings in recent months. In August, the organization published a report saying ELI was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science”.

ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project is “falsely portraying itself as a neutral entity teaching judges about questionable climate science”, the report says. In reality, AEI claims, the project is a partner to the more than two dozen US cities and states who are suing big oil for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the climate dangers of coal, oil and gas usage. ...

Both the report and [a] PowerPoint presentation link AEI to CRC Advisors, a public relations firm chaired by rightwing dark money impresario Leo. Given his outsize role in shaping the US judiciary – Leo helped select multiple judicial nominees for former president Donald Trump, including personally lobbying for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment – his firm’s role in opposing climate litigation is notable.

Also of Interest

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

Israel Isn’t Attacking Because It Was Attacked, It’s Attacking Because It Got An Excuse

In Lebanon carnage, Biden deepens US ‘obligation’ to Israeli aggression

Hezbollah Confirms Hassan Nasrallah's Death as Israel Carpet-Bombs Lebanon

Bombing A Way To Peace?

Cornell Under Fire as Suspended Pro-Palestinian Student at Risk of Deportation

Netanyahu: 'Nothing Can Stop Us,' Not Even the Majority of Israelis

Got Him!

‘US Complicity’ – World Reacts to Assassination of Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah

Scott Ritter: Life, Preempted

Melting glaciers force Switzerland and Italy to redraw part of Alpine border

‘Every tree used to be blanketed with them’: photographer captures campaign to save monarch butterfly

New Zealand reclaims world record for largest mass haka

US politician wants to "choke out" Arab countries

Gideon Levy: "Barbaric Glee over Nasrallah's Assassination Is a New Low for Israeli Society"

NETANYAHU Snubs Biden; ISRAEL Ups War in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen

Big change in Russia's nuclear doctrine

A Little Night Music

Memphis Minnie - Me And My Chauffeur Blues

Memphis Minnie & Kansas Joe McCoy - Pile Driver Blues

Kansas Joe & Memphis Minnie - What's the Matter with the Mill

Memphis Minnie - You Can't Rule Me

Memphis Minnie - Pig Meat On The Line

Memphis Minnie - Kissing In The Dark

Memphis Minnie & Memphis Jug Band - Meningitis Blues

Memphis Minnie - Hoodoo Lady Blues

Memphis Minnie & Kansas Joe McCoy - When the Levee Breaks