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This evening's music features Chicago slide guitarist and harmonica player Studebaker John. Enjoy!

“How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?”

-- Hunter S. Thompson

News and Opinion

“Too Much Evidence” Of Genocide

South Africa’s legal team has submitted hundreds of documents containing what it calls “undeniable evidence” as part of its ongoing genocide case against the state of Israel, with the South African representative to The Hague telling Al Jazeera that “The problem we have is that we have too much evidence.”

The Israeli outlet Haaretz reports that IDF soldiers are actively blocking the return of Palestinians they have driven out of northern Gaza as part of the so-called “General’s Plan” — a land grab of Palestinian territory using ethnic cleansing by violent force.

Haaretz has been far more critical of Israel’s actions than western media outlets have been. It recently published an editorial titled “If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is”. Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken is now publicly advocating international sanctions on the Israeli government for its apartheid abuses and opposition to a Palestinian state, drawing an outraged response from the Netanyahu regime.

“A Palestinian state must be established, and the only to achieve this is to apply sanctions against Israel.”

Haaretz publisher called for sanctions against Israeli leaders who oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state, describing the policies as an "apartheid regime" pic.twitter.com/IMXsL6wNOP

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) October 31, 2024

Last week there was a two-day rally attended by multiple Israeli government officials called the “Preparing to Resettle Gaza Conference,” which was exactly what it sounds like: high-profile Israelis gathering to discuss the agenda to drive Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and replace their territory with Jewish settlements.

Humanitarian aid in Gaza has reportedly fallen to its lowest level since Israel’s genocidal onslaught began, with just a few hundred truckloads entering the enclave from October 1 to October 22 and nothing getting through to the north. The UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs recently warned that “The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying,” a warning that was issued shortly before the Israeli Knesset voted to cut off UNRWA aid throughout all the territories it controls.

According to a new report from The Washington Post, the US State Department has been inundated with hundreds of reports of US-supplied weapons being used to needlessly kill and harm civilians in Gaza, but in violation of its own rules it has failed to take any action on a single one of them. According to one WaPo source, investigations of these reports have tended to stall out at the “verification” stage, which consists of asking the Israeli government for its side of the story.

Biden Administration Overwhelmed With Reports of Israel Using Weapons To Kill Civilians but Has Not Taken Any Action
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Israel #Gaza #Palestinians #Biden https://t.co/litCsa1LMD pic.twitter.com/irQBkURoKX

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) October 30, 2024

Israeli forces reportedly killed 109 Palestinians in a single massacre on Tuesday — including dozens of children — when Israel blew up an apartment building where hundreds of civilians were sleeping.

The IDF killed five journalists in a single day last Sunday, bringing the total number of journalists murdered in Israel’s genocidal assault to at least 180. This occurred shortly after Israel published a kill list of six Al Jazeera journalists who it claims are secret Hamas fighters, although no Al Jazeera reporters were among the five killed.

And this is just in Gaza. Israel has already killed some 164 healthcare workers in its ongoing assault on Lebanon, where the Netanyahu government is sabotaging ceasefire negotiations by inserting ridiculous non-starter demands like Israeli planes being allowed to enter Lebanese airspace and Israeli forces being allowed to police the ceasefire deal with military operations in southern Lebanon as they see fit.

Every day there’s more and more ugly news in the middle east, perpetrated by Israel and its powerful western backers who make its abuses possible. It’s getting harder and harder to stay on top of. There really is “too much evidence” to keep up with.

UN should consider suspending Israel over ‘genocide’ against Palestinians, says special rapporteur

The UN should consider suspending Israel as a member state due to its continuing “genocide” against the Palestinians, the divisive special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories has said. Francesca Albanese was speaking to a UN committee on the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in New York the day after she published her latest report alleging that Israel was not just committing war crimes or crimes against humanity in Gaza, but a genocide.

“It is time to consider suspending the credentials of Israel as a member state of the UN,” she said. “I understand the sensitivity because none of you have clean hands when it comes to human rights.”

She said no other country had defied so many UN resolutions for so long.

In her report, Albanese claimed: “Israel has pursued a pattern of conduct ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’.”

She is a divisive UN rapporteur, and was prevented from holding a briefing at the US Congress this week. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, described her in a tweet as unfit for office, adding: “The United Nations should not tolerate antisemitism from a UN-affiliated official hired to promote human rights.”

Albanese said she was right to insist on the term “genocide”, adding: “Palestinians had experienced war crimes all their lives, but this was different. It is very important to understand why this is recognised as a genocide. In the same way as international community has failed to protect the victims of genocide in the case of the Jewish people in Europe and then Bosnians in former Yugoslavia and the Tutsi in Rwanda, in the same way we are failing the Palestinians.”

US inundated with claims that American arms killed Gaza civilians

The Biden administration has received nearly 500 reports alleging that Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip, but it has failed to comply with its own policies requiring swift investigations of such claims, according to people familiar with the matter.

At least some of these cases presented to the State Department over the past year probably amount to violations of U.S. and international law, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

The reports are received from across the U.S. government, international aid organizations, nonprofits, media reports and other eyewitnesses. Dozens include photo documentation of U.S.-made bomb fragments at sites where scores of children were killed, according to human rights advocates briefed on the process.

Yet despite the State Department’s internal Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, which directs officials to complete an investigation and recommend action within two months of launching an inquiry, no single case has reached the “action” stage, current and former officials told The Washington Post. More than two-thirds of cases remain unresolved, they said, with many pending response from the Israeli government, which the State Department consults to verify each case’s circumstances.

Critics of the Biden administration’s consistent provision of arms to Israel, now about 13 months into a war that has killed at least 43,000 people, according to Gaza’s health authorities, say the handling of these reports is another illustration of the administration’s unwillingness to hold its close ally accountable for the conflict’s staggering toll. ... The State Department declined to detail the volume of incidents under investigation. A spokesman, Matthew Miller, confirmed on Wednesday during a news conference held after the publication of this report that officials are reviewing “a number of incidents” and that “we have not yet gotten to the point with any of them that we’ve been able to make final determinations.”

Will Hezbollah and Israel agree on a ceasefire?

Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk want to broker a ceasefire? Pull the other one!

US attempts to broker ceasefire as civilians killed in Lebanon and Israel

Senior US officials have held talks in Israel aimed at brokering a ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon, on a day when more civilians in both countries were killed in the year-long war. Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, who had expressed optimism of a speedy settlement “in hours or days” earlier on Thursday, said that Israel’s “ongoing escalation” in his country “does not inspire optimism”.

The country’s health ministry said that Israeli attacks had killed 45 people in the previous 24 hours, amid bombing in the north-east Bekaa valley and infantry battles in the south. In one Bekaa village, eight people were killed from the same family. In northern Israel, seven people were killed by rocket fire from Lebanon, including four Thai agricultural workers, in the worst civilian losses in Israel on a single day since Israel began its ground incursions into Lebanon on 1 October. ...

Two senior US envoys, Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, met Netanyahu at his office on Thursday to talk about a ceasefire proposal for Lebanon. Later, Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister had “thanked our American friends for their efforts” but “made it clear that the main point is not this or that agreement on paper but Israel’s ability and determination to enforce the agreement and thwart any threat to its security from Lebanon, in a manner that will return our residents securely to their homes”.

According to the Israeli state broadcaster, Kan, the US-proposed deal is similar to the agreement which ended the last Israeli-Hezbollah war in 2006. Israel would withdraw its forces from Lebanon within the first week of the agreement. The Lebanese army would be deployed along the border, while Hezbollah would end its armed presence in the south.

Israel would still have the right to target Hezbollah in self-defence and to take steps to ensure Hezbollah does not reconstitute in the south, while Israeli aircraft would continue to be able to carry out aerial reconnaissance over Lebanon. It is far from clear such conditions would be acceptable to either the Lebanese government or Hezbollah.

“Turning Gaza Into A Place No Human Can Exist!”

Gaza Aid at Its Lowest Level Yet

The amount of aid entering Gaza has fallen to its lowest level since Israel unleashed its brutal military campaign on the territory in October 2023 as Israel imposed a starvation blockade on northern Gaza earlier this month.

According to the UN, only 703 truckloads of aid entered Gaza between October 1 and October 22. The number marks a significant decline in the previous rate of aid entering the Strip. In September, just over 3,000 aid trucks were allowed into Gaza, which was already the lowest rate in any month of the past year.

The decline in aid deliveries has continued despite a letter that the US sent to Israel on October 14 that gave Israeli officials 30 days to ease the starvation blockade, a deadline that comes after the US presidential election. The letter called for Israel to allow 350 aid trucks into Gaza per day and said if the demands were not met there would be “implications” for US policy related to foreign assistance laws.

But the letter did not explicitly say the US would cut off military aid and the State Department has refused to say if there would be any consequences.

Hamas rejects ceasefire proposal that would keep Israeli troops in Gaza

Hamas has rejected a ceasefire proposal that would have brought the release of a small number of Israeli captives and a 30-day cessation of hostilities, but no withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. Sources close to the Palestinian group told Middle East Eye that they had officially dismissed the proposal put forward by Qatar, Egypt and the US, despite reports in Israeli media that it was still under consideration.

Hamas has been adamant that any ceasefire deal must eventually lead to the total withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. Egypt and Qatar have been acting as mediators between Israel and Hamas for months.

In November, a prisoner swap deal led to the release of about 100 Israeli captives in exchange for about 240 Palestinian detainees.

Tehran 'Will Strike the Israeli Regime' in Retaliation for Attack on Iran –Seyed Mohammad Marandi

Pentagon Runs Low on Air-Defense Missiles as Demand Surges

The U.S. is running low on some types of air-defense missiles, raising questions about the Pentagon’s readiness to respond to the continuing wars in the Middle East and Europe and a potential conflict in the Pacific.

Interceptors are fast becoming the most sought-after ordnance during the widening crisis in the Middle East, as Israel and other U.S. allies face an increasing threat from missiles and drones fired by Iran and the militias it supports. The shortfall could become even more urgent after Israel’s Friday night strikes on Iran, which U.S. officials fear might spark another wave of attacks by Tehran. ...

The heavy use of the Pentagon’s limited stockpile of missile interceptors is raising concerns about the ability of the U.S. and its allies to keep pace with unexpected, high demand created by the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. The Pentagon worries it could run through its inventory faster than it can replace them, leaving the U.S. vulnerable in a potential conflict in the Pacific, analysts and officials said.

“The U.S. has not developed a defense industrial base intended for a large-scale war of attrition in both Europe and the Middle East, while meeting its own readiness standards,” said Elias Yousif, a fellow and deputy director of the Conventional Defense Program at the Stimson Center in Washington. “And both of those wars are extended conflicts, which was not part of the U.S. defense planning.”

About 8,000 North Korean soldiers at Ukraine border, says US

About 8,000 North Korean soldiers are stationed in Russia on the border with Ukraine, the US secretary of state has said, warning that Moscow is preparing to deploy those troops into combat “in the coming days”.

Antony Blinken said the US believed that North Korea had sent 10,000 troops to Russia in total, deploying them first to training bases in the far east before sending the vast majority to the Kursk region on the border with Ukraine.

Blinken told a press conference that the North Korean troops had received Russian training in “artillery, UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles], basic infantry operations, including trench clearing, indicating that they fully intend to use these forces in frontline operations”. The announcement was the clearest statement yet from the US that it anticipated the first large-scale deployment of foreign troops into the Russia-Ukraine war since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. ...

“One of the reasons that Russia is turning to these North Korean troops is that it’s desperate,” Blinken said during the press conference as he met South Korea’s foreign and defence ministers in Washington. “Putin has been throwing more and more Russians into a meat grinder of his own making in Ukraine. Now he’s turning to North Korean troops, and that is a clear sign of weakness.” ...

US officials from the White House, state department and Pentagon have all warned Russia and North Korea against deploying North Korean troops in battle. If they did, Blinken said, they would become a “legitimate military target”. Speaking before a UN security council meeting this week, the US envoy to the UN said that if Pyongyang’s forces “enter Ukraine in support of Russia, they will surely return in body bags”.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Is the West Deteriorating?

Russia says $20 decillion fine against Google is ‘symbolic’

The Kremlin has said that Russia’s huge fines imposed on Google were largely symbolic and designed to spur the US tech company into lifting restrictions on Russian YouTube channels.

The total sum of legal claims against Google in Russia has reached two undecillion roubles ($20 decillion), according to the Russian news outlet RBK, a figure higher than all the money in the world combined.

“I can’t even pronounce this number, but it is more likely imbued with symbolism,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told Russian news agencies. “Google should not restrict the actions of our broadcasters, but it does. This should be a reason for Google’s management to pay attention to this and correct the situation,” he added.

Zelensky FURIOUS, Scolds US Tomahawks, KURSK NPP Bizarre Claims; MOSCOW: No Talks Energy Truce

US inflation falls to 2.1%, almost hitting Federal Reserve target

A closely watched measure of US inflation has slipped to its lowest level since 2021, within striking distance of policymakers’ target, after the Federal Reserve scrambled to bring down price growth from its highest level in a generation.

The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index rose at an annual rate of 2.1% last month, down from 2.2% in August and in line with economists’ expectations. ...

Inflation surged three years ago, peaking at its highest level in four decades as the impact of Covid-19 continued to roil the global economy.

Officials at the Fed, having initially insisted that an acceleration in price growth would be “transitory”, later engineered an extraordinary U-turn and embarked upon an aggressive campaign to tackle it. The Fed would go on to lift interest rates to a two-decade high – and only started to cut them last month.

Sleep on it: the $700 San Francisco ‘pod’ with privacy curtains and charging ports

A company that rents “sleeping pods” in downtown San Francisco for $700 a month has had 300 people apply for its remaining 17 beds, the company’s CEO said.

Brownstone Shared Housing describes its mission as “providing low cost housing in the most expensive cities”. Its bunkbed-style “pods” measure approximately 3.5ft-by-4ft-by-6.5ft, large enough to fit a twin mattress. The pods come with privacy curtains, inside lighting and charging ports.

A year ago, Brownstone’s sleeping pod facility, located in a former bank in downtown San Francisco, was flagged by the city’s department of building inspection for violating city codes, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. But the facility, which opened last July, is now in compliance, allowing the company to rent out its remaining 17 pods, James Stallworth, the company’s CEO, said. Thirteen residents continued to live in the building during the code-enforcement process, he said.

Stormy Daniels honored at witches’ ceremony in Salem, Massachusetts

Practicing witches from around the world gathered in Salem by the hundreds on Thursday night to honor Stormy Daniels at their annual “magic circle” ceremony recognizing loved ones who have died.

Daniels – the adult film actor who allegedly had an affair with Donald Trump and was at the center of his May criminal trial that led to the former president’s conviction on 34 felonies – was chosen to be honored in the Halloween ceremony as the organizers believe that she has been the victim of a modern-day witch hunt. ...

About 1,500 people gathered in the large witch circle on Salem Common, some dressed as witches, others in an array of Halloween costumes. They chanted and clapped to a beating drum while they blessed the four corners: north, south, east and west.

At the event, Daniels was awarded the first ever “Salem Witches’ Woman of Power Award” which, according to the Boston Globe is given in recognition of someone’s strength, intuition and magic.

“A lot of people know Stormy for being a porn star and fighting against Trump in court,” said Christian Day, an organizer of the event and a local warlock. “But a lot of people don’t know that she is a practicing witch, and that she is someone who stands out as a woman of power.”

Do Not Vote for those Who Support Genocide (w/ Kshama Sawant) | The Chris Hedges Report

On the Voting Dilemma for Those Who Want Peace and an End to Genocide

On October 24th, a U.S. presidential candidate told an interviewer, “Our day one agenda… also includes picking up the phone and telling Bibi Netanyahu that the war is over, because it’s basically our proxy war. We control the armaments, the funding, the diplomatic cover, the intelligence, etc., so we can end this in the blink of an eye with a single phone call, which is what Ronald Reagan did when Israel had gone into Lebanon and was massacring thousands of people. So we can do that right now. That’s day one.”

Tragically, the candidate who said that was not Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, but Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Most Americans have been persuaded that Stein cannot win the election, and many believe that voting for her in swing states will help elect Trump by siphoning voters from Harris.

There are many other “third-party” candidates for president, and many of them have good policy proposals for ending the genocidal U.S.-Israeli massacre in Gaza. As the website for Claudia de la Cruz, the presidential candidate for the Party of Socialism and Liberation, explains, “Our tax dollars should be used to meet people's needs -- not pay for the bullets, bombs and missiles used in the massacre in Gaza.”

Many of the principles and policy proposals of “third-party” and independent candidates are more in line with the views of most Americans than those of Harris or Trump. This is hardly surprising given the widely recognized corruption of the U.S. political system. While Trump cynically flip-flops to appeal to both sides on many questions, and Harris generally avoids committing to policy specifics at all, especially regarding foreign policy, most Americans understand that they are both more beholden to the billionaires and corporate interests who fund their campaigns than to the well-being of working Americans or the future of the planet.

Michael Moore has published a flier titled “This Is America,” which shows that large majorities of Americans support “liberal” positions on 18 different issues, from a ceasefire in Gaza to Medicare For All to getting money out of politics.

Moore implies that this should be reassuring to Democrats and Harris supporters, and it would be if she was running on those positions. But, for the most part, she isn’t. On the other hand, many third party and independent candidates for president are running on those positions, but the anti-democratic U.S. political system ensures that they can’t win, even when most Americans agree with them.

War and militarism are the most deadly and destructive forces in human society, with real world, everyday, physical impacts that kill or maim people and destroy their homes, communities and entire countries. So it is deeply disturbing that the political system in the United States has been corrupted into bipartisan subservience to a military-industrial complex (or MICIMATT, to use a contemporary term) that wields precisely the “unwarranted influence” that President Eisenhower warned us against 64 years ago, and uses its influence to drag us into wars that wreak death and destruction in country after country.

Apart from brief wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, all now many decades ago, the U.S. military has not won a war since 1945. It systematically fails on its own terms, while its nakedly lethal and destructive power only fills graveyards and leaves countries in ruins. Far from being an effective vehicle to project American power, unleashing the brutality of the U.S. war machine has become the fastest, surest way to further undermine America’s international standing in the eyes of our neighbors.

After so many wars under so many administrations of both parties, neither Republicans nor Democrats can claim to be a “lesser evil” on questions of war and peace, let alone a “peace party.”

As with so many of America’s problems, from the expansion of corporate and oligarchic power to the generational decline in living standards, the combined impact of decades of Democratic and Republican government is more dangerous, more lasting and more intractable than the policies of any single administration. On no question is this more obvious than on questions of war and peace.

For decades, there was a small but growing progressive wing in the Democratic Party that voted against record military spending and opposed U.S. wars, occupations and coups. But when Bernie Sanders ran for president and millions of grassroots Democrats rallied around his progressive agenda, the Party leaders and their corporate, plutocratic backers fought back more aggressively to defeat Bernie and the progressives than they ever fought to win elections against the Republicans, or to oppose the war on Iraq or tax cuts for the wealthy.

This year, flush with blood money from the Israel lobby, pro-Israel Democrats defeated two of the most progressive, public-spirited Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman.

On the Republican side, in response to the U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the libertarian Republican member of Congress Ron Paul led a small group of Republicans to join progressive Democrats in an informal bipartisan peace caucus in Congress. In recent years though, the number of members of either party willing to take any kind of stand for peace has shrunk dramatically. So while there are now over 100 Congressional caucuses, from the Candy Caucus to the Pickleball Caucus, there is still not one for peace.

After the neocons who provided the ideological fuel for Bush’s catastrophic wars reconvened around Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Trump tried to “make America’s military great again” by appointing retired generals to his cabinet and characteristically staking out positions all over the map, from a call to kill the families of “terrorists” to a National Defense Strategy naming Russia and China as the “central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security,” to casting himself as a peacemaker by trying to negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea.

Trump is now running against Biden’s war in Ukraine and trying to have it both ways on Gaza, with undying support for Israel and a promise to end the war immediately. Some Palestinian-Americans are supporting Trump for not being the VP for Genocide Joe, just as other people support Harris for not being Trump.

But most Americans know little about Trump’s actual war policy as president. The unique value of a leader like Trump to the military-industrial complex is that he draws attention to himself and diverts attention away from U.S. atrocities overseas.

In 2017, Trump’s first year in office, he oversaw the climax of Obama’s war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, which probably killed as many civilians as Israel has massacred in Gaza. In that year alone, the U.S. and its allies dropped over 60,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan,Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Somalia. That was the heaviest bombing since the first Gulf War in 1991, and double the destruction of the “Shock & Awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003.

Most chillingly, the Iraqi forces who defeated the last remnants of ISIS in Mosul’s Old City were ordered to kill all the survivors, fulfilling Trump’s threat to “take out their families.” "We killed them all," an Iraqi soldier told Middle East Eye. "Daesh, men, women and children. We killed everyone." If anyone is counting on Trump to save the people of Gaza from Netanyahu and Biden’s genocide, that should be a reality check.

In other areas, Trump’s back-pedaling on Obama’s diplomatic achievements with Iran and Cuba have led to new crises for both those countries on the eve of this election. By moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, bribing Arab despots with ‘Abraham’ deals, and encouraging Netanyahu’s Greater Israel ambitions, Trump primed the powder-keg for the genocide in Gaza and the new crisis in the Middle East under Biden.

On the other side, Harris shares responsibility for genocide, arguably the most serious international crime in the book. To make matters worse, she has connived in a grotesque scheme to provide cover for the genocide by pretending to be working for a ceasefire that, as Jill Stein and many others have said, the U.S. could enforce “in the blink of an eye, with a single phone call” if it really wanted to. As for the future, Harris has only committed to making the U.S. military even more “lethal.”

The movement for a Free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza has failed to win the support of the Republican or Democratic presidential campaigns. But this is not a failure on the part of the Palestinian-Americans we have listened to and worked with, who have engaged in brilliant organizing, gradually raised public awareness and won over more Americans to their cause. They are leading the most successful anti-war organizing campaign in America since the Iraq War.

The refusal of Trump or Harris to listen to the calls of Americans whose families are being massacred in Gaza, and now in Lebanon too, is a failure on the part of the corrupt, anti-democratic political system of which Trump and Harris are figureheads, not a failure of activism or organizing.

Whomever each of us votes for in the presidential election, the campaign to end the genocide in Gaza will continue, and we must grow stronger and smarter and more inclusive until politicians cannot ignore us, no matter how much money the Israel lobby and other corrupt interests throw at them, or at their political opponents.

Whomever we vote for, the elephant in the room will still be U.S. militarism and the violence and chaos it inflicts on the world. Whether Trump or Harris is president, the result will be more of the same, unless we do something to change it. As legendary Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu famously said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

No American should be condemned for voting for a candidate of their choice, however successfully the Democrats and Republicans have marginalized the very concept of multi-party democracy that the U.S. claims to support in other countries. Whoever wins this election, we must find a way to put peace back on this country’s national agenda, and to make our collective voices heard in ways that cannot be drowned out by oligarchs with big bags of cash.

‘Democrats pretend to be the lesser evil’: Jill Stein on the US election

EU emissions fall by 8% in steep reduction reminiscent of Covid shutdown

The EU’s greenhouse gas emissions fell 8% last year, the European Environment Agency (EEA) has found, as the continent continues to close down coal-fired power plants and make more electricity from sun and wind. The steep drop in planet-heating pollution in 2023 is close to the fall recorded in Europe at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when travel restrictions grounded planes and shuttered factories.

The findings come as scientists say that the climate crisis acted to strengthen the furious downpours that inundated southern and eastern Spain on Tuesday, killing more than 150 people. “The impact of climate change is accelerating,” said the EEA’s executive director, Leena Ylä-Mononen. “This leaves us no choice but to strengthen our resilience to climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The report found the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions were now 37% below their levels in 1990.

The European Commission, which released a separate progress report on Tuesday, described the reduction as “very encouraging”. It said it “reinforced confidence” in the EU’s ability to meet its target of cutting emissions 55% by 2030.

But the EEA found there was still a gap to close. Current policies from member states are expected to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030 from their 1990 levels. Planned measures that have not yet been rolled out would bring this up to 49% – still leaving a gap of six percentage points. “The significant emissions reductions in 2023 mark a major step towards the overall 2030 climate target,” the authors wrote. But “an acceleration of efforts will be needed”, they added.

Alarm grows over ‘disturbing’ lack of progress to save nature at Cop16

Governments risk another decade of failure on biodiversity loss, due to the slow implementation of an international agreement to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems, experts have warned.

Less than two years ago, the world reached a historic agreement at the Cop15 summit in Montreal to stop the human-caused destruction of life on our planet. The deal included targets to protect 30% of the planet for nature by the end of the decade (30x30), reform $500bn (then £410bn) of environmentally damaging subsidies, and begin restoring 30% of the planet’s degraded ecosystems.

But as country representatives dig into their second week of negotiations at Cop16 in Cali, Colombia – their first meeting since Montreal – alarm is growing at the lack of concrete progress on any of the major targets they agreed upon. An increasing number of indicators show that governments are not on track. They still need to protect an area of land equivalent to the combined size of Brazil and Australia, and an expanse of sea larger than the Indian Ocean to meet the headline 30x30 target, according to a new UN report.

Weak progress on funding for nature and almost no progress on subsidy reform have also frustrated observers. At the time of publication, 158 countries are yet to submit formal plans on how they are going to meet the targets, according to Carbon Brief, missing their deadline this month ahead of the biodiversity summit in Cali, where governments are not likely to set a new deadline. ...

The world has never met a target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems. Amid growing scientific warnings about the state of life on Earth, there has been a major push to make sure this decade is different, and that governments comply with targets designed to prevent wildlife extinctions, such as cuts to pesticides use and pollution.

Alaska governor awards $1m in state funds to Indigenous group backing oil drilling

The administration of Alaska’s Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, awarded at least $1m in state funds to a group claiming to represent a consensus of Indigenous support for new Arctic oil drilling, new research shows.

The group, called Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat (VAI), had just months earlier communicated with the governor’s office on ways to counter other Alaska Native groups opposed to new drilling.

In Alaska, Indigenous voices hold sway in the Arctic drilling debate, an issue the upcoming presidential election will help settle. The Arctic is home to diverse Alaska Native communities dependent on healthy lands and caribou herds, which oil development can harm. Yet industry and for-profit Alaska Native corporations also bring in oil-related jobs and revenue.

“Our research shows a taxpayer-funded effort to tip the scale of public opinion toward Arctic drilling,” said Chris Marshall, spokesperson for Accountable.US, a non-partisan group that researched the VAI’s funding using public records requests. Indigenous groups who oppose drilling criticized the funding.

Also of Interest

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

‘Haunted by Our Genocide From Half a World Away’

‘The Arabs will disappear’: emboldened Israeli settlers eye return to Gaza

‘I couldn’t cry over my children like everyone else’: the tragedy of Palestinian journalist Wael al-Dahdouh

A Little Night Music

Studebaker John & The Hawks - Two Time Boogie

Studebaker John - Son of the Seventh Son

Studebaker John & The Hawks - Howl With The Wolf

Studebaker John & The Hawks - Rolling & Tumbling Around

Studebaker John & The Hawks - This City

Studebaker John & The Hawks - Hey Baby!

Studebaker John´s Maxwell Street Kings - Mississippi To Chicago

Studebaker John & The Hawks - Dirty Business

Studebaker John & The Hawks - Flame Of Desire

Studebaker John & The Hawks - Come On