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"For the dead and the living, we must bear witness."

-- Elie Wiesel

News and Opinion

Never, Ever Let Anyone Forget What They Did To Gaza

I will never forget the Gaza holocaust. I will never let anyone else forget about the Gaza holocaust.

No matter what happens or how this thing turns out, I will never let anyone my voice touches forget that our rulers did the most evil things imaginable right in front of us and lied to us about it the entire time.

I will never stop doing everything I can with my own small platform to help ensure that the perpetrators of this mass atrocity are brought to justice.

I will never stop doing everything I can to help bring down the western empire and to help free Palestine from the Zionist entity.

I will never forget those shaking children. Those tiny shredded bodies. Those starved, skeletal forms. The explosions followed by screams. The atrocities followed by western media silence.

I will never forget, and I will never forgive. I will never forgive our leaders. I will never forgive the western press. I will never forgive Israel. I will never forgive the mainstream US political parties. I will always want for them exactly what they wanted for the Palestinians.

No matter what happens or what they do in the future, they will always be the people who did this to Gaza. They will always be the people who inflicted this nightmare upon our species. That will always be the most significant thing about them. It will always be the single most defining characteristic about who they are as human beings.

And the same is true of all the ordinary members of the public who continued to stand with Israel long after evidence of its criminality became undeniable. They are genocide supporters, first and foremost.

If you stood on the side of Israel during the Gaza holocaust, then that is the most important thing about you, and it always will be. It doesn’t matter if you go to church on Sunday. It doesn’t matter if you are nice to your children and your pets. It doesn’t matter if you give money to charity, support local farmers, or drive an electric vehicle. The thing that matters most about you as a person is that you supported history’s first live-streamed genocide, and it always will be the thing that matters most about you.

I will keep bringing this up. Year after year. Decade after decade. I will keep rubbing everyone’s face in it. I will never tire of doing so. I will always do my part to remind the world who these people are, and what they did to Gaza.

Aaron Maté : Can US and Hamas Talk Without Israel?

Israeli airstrikes kill at least 80 as Trump talks of turning Gaza into ‘freedom zone’

At least 80 people have been killed by Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling on targets across Gaza as faltering talks on a new ceasefire continued and Donald Trump said he wanted the US to “make” the devastated territory “into a freedom zone”. Trump’s statement recalled the plan he put forward in February for the US to take control of Gaza to reconstruct it as a luxury leisure and business hub. The scheme implied the possible permanent displacement of many or all of the territory’s 2.3 million people and triggered global outrage.

In Qatar, on the third day of his Middle East tour, Trump said: “I have concepts for Gaza that I think are very good: make it a freedom zone, let the United States get involved and make it just a freedom zone. I’d be proud to have the United States have it, take it, make it a freedom zone.”

Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, rejected the idea, saying: “Gaza is an integral part of Palestinian land – it is not real estate for sale on the open market. We remain firmly committed to our land and our national cause, and we are prepared to make every sacrifice to preserve our homeland and secure our people’s future.”

There had been widespread hope that Trump’s regional visit could lead to a new pause in hostilities or a renewal of humanitarian aid to Gaza, where a tight Israeli blockade is now in its third month. Instead, the raids and bombardment over the past 48 hours have raised levels of violence in Gaza higher than for several weeks, with the death toll coming close to what was seen during the first days of Israel’s renewed offensive in Gaza after a fragile ceasefire collapsed in March. Some officials in Gaza put the number killed by Israeli attacks on Thursday as high as 120.

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Is Trump Making Pacts With Devils?

Even Once Reluctant Scholars Now Agree on Israel's Gaza Assault: It's a Genocide

Only a tiny number of progressive Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. have used the word "genocide" to describe Israel's relentless bombardment of Gaza, and the U.S. public divided, with less than 40% of Americans saying last year that the term described the Israel Defense Forces' bombing of hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and other civilian infrastructure.

But for seven leading international experts on genocide, the question is not controversial—even for those who previously rejected the label.

The seven experts were interviewed Wednesday by NRC, a newspaper in the Netherlands, and were unequivocal: Not only have they all come to believe—some earlier than others—that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, but the vast majority of their peers in academia concur.

"Can I name someone whose work I respect who doesn't consider it genocide?" said Raz Segal, an Israeli genocide researcher at Stockton University in New Jersey. "No."

Uğur Ümit Üngör, a professor at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, added, "I don't know them."

The interview was published the day before Nakba Day, the 77th anniversary of Palestinians' forced expulsion from their lands when Israel was established, and as the death toll in Gaza reached 53,010. At least 15,000 of those killed have been children, NRC reported.

When it comes to defining the last 19 months in Gaza as a genocide, reported the newspaper, "even cautious voices have changed."

Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman of Open University of Israel "opposed the genocide label" until Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government flouted the International Court of Justice's January 2024 order to prevent genocide by allowing emergency aid into Gaza and halting top officials "incendiary language on Palestinians." Israeli leaders have called Palestinians "human animals" and "Amalek"—an ancient enemy in the Hebrew Bible who Israelites were commanded to exterminate.

Lederman also began to see his government as genocidal after the Israel Defense Forces seized control of the Rafah crossing last year, cutting off the only humanitarian aid route as international experts warned famine was imminent, and as analysts warned the true death toll in Gaza could ultimately be close to 200,000.

"For me personally, the combination of this and the continued destruction of Gaza made the turn from harsh criticism of the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza and warnings that we are getting close to that place, to the perception that the cumulative effect of what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocidal in every sense," said Lederman on the social media platform X on Thursday. "I think the second half of 2024 is the point at which a consensus emerged among genocide researchers (as well as the human rights community) that this was genocide. Those who may have still had doubts—I estimate that they have dissipated following Israel's actions since the cease-fire was broken."

Since March, when Israel reimposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid and broke a temporary cease-fire, nearly 3,000 Palestinians have been killed in bombings, and nearly 250,000 people are now facing "extreme deprivation of food," according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.

Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, told NRC that Israel's deliberate blockade on "food, water, shelter, and sanitation" convinced her the Netanyahu government was carrying out a genocide, while Segal pointed to "openly genocidal statements" by Israeli leaders.

"But for all it is about the sum of what would apply separately as 'ordinary' war crimes," NRC reported. "The picture as a whole makes it a genocide. That is how the term is meant, says [British professor Martin] Shaw: 'holistic.'"

"Apart from social debate, genocide is also the subject of science," reads the article. "And that field of research, genocide studies, does not see it as a yes/no question, but as a process. Not a light switch, but a 'dimmer,' in the words of professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Uğur Ümit Üngör."

NRC noted that the Western media and political debates have been consumed with "misunderstandings and simplifications."

Those who continue defending Israel's actions insist that "it is a military war to destroy Hamas, there is no clear eradication plan, not all Gazans have been killed, it does not look like the Holocaust, the judge has not yet ruled."

As historian Rutger Bregman said on X Thursday, the scholars interviews by NRC make clear: "Genocide is a process, it's not a binary switch. And it's not about matching the Holocaust."

Genocide is not just another war crime. It’s the “crime of crimes” — the deliberate attempt to destroy a people.

That’s what’s happening in Gaza, say the world’s top genocide experts.

— Rutger Bregman (@rcbregman) May 15, 2025

Segal, who is Jewish, told NRC that he is "regularly accused of antisemitism" for speaking out against Israel.

"A German authority in the field that wants to remain anonymous calls the subject 'poisoned' in his country," reported NRC. "You are, he says, called directly [antisemitic] if you mention 'possible genocide.' If these acts are subjected to a country other than Israel, he says, all Germans would immediately sound the alarm and speak of genocidal violence, as happened with the Russian massacre in the Ukrainian city of Botzja. But now, he says, it remains silent."

Dirk Moses, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research, said that portions of the field of research are "in crisis" if experts don't "combat the artificial distinction between [genocide] and military targets" and continue to defend Israel's actions.

"Then parts of the field of research are actually dead," he said. "Not only conceptually incoherent, but complicit."

"They Want to Silence Me": Columbia Student Mohsen Mahdawi on ICE Jail, Palestine, Buddhism & More

Militant Zionists Spur Arrest of Pro-Palestine Student, Judge Rules

A U.S. federal court in Massachusetts has ruled that the detention of a former student who expressed pro-Palestine views was unconstitutional and that it was a punitive measure triggered almost solely by a complaint from the Zionist militant group Betar. Late last week, Judge Angel Kelley wrote in her decision that a former student at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), detained unlawfully by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), be released, providing the first court admission that a Zionist extremist groups is working with U.S. authorities to violate free speech rights.

Judge Kelley wrote that the government’s “pursuit of [the former student’s] detention seems to have been almost exclusively triggered by Betar Worldwide.”

The former student in question is Efe Ercelik, a Turkish national who entered the U.S. on an F-1 student visa. After a physical altercation with a Jewish student during a protest in late 2023, the American corporate media and pro-Israel groups pointed to his case as evidence of rampant attacks against Jewish students on campus. However, the narrative originally propagated around Ercelik’s case fell apart under further scrutiny.

On April 8, the Betar Worldwide group, which has a history of support for terrorism, posted a screenshot of a profile made of Ercelik by the infamous Canary Mission, known for doxing [or publicly exposing] pro-Palestine university students, writing that they had submitted his name for deportation. According to a 31-page court document released in the case, the former student’s name was indeed submitted to the authorities. Within 24 hours, the deputy assistant secretary of state for visa services then sent a memo to ICE. On April 10, the Department of Homeland Security issued an administrative warrant for Ercelik’s arrest.

A week later, ICE agents showed up at the former student’s home demanding that he surrender himself for arrest. Yet, when the agents were asked to present a warrant, they stated they didn’t have one. That is when they began issuing threats to Ercelik, telling him that if he “declined to surrender himself to those officers’ custody, regardless of their lack of a warrant, they would ensure that Petitioner will be charged with a federal hate crime and spend many years in federal prison.” According to the court’s ruling, Ercelik’s detention was carried out in reaction to his political beliefs, which are protected under the First Amendment, and was “almost exclusively triggered” by the Betar group. The judge in the case, Angel Kelley, wrote in her decision that the incident “rises to the level of near absurdity.”

NYU withholds diploma of student who condemned Israel in graduation speech

New York University is withholding a student’s diploma after he condemned Israel’s deadly war on Gaza during his graduation ceremony speech. On Wednesday, Logan Rozos, an undergraduate student speaker from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, delivered his commencement speech in which he said: “The only thing that is appropriate to say in this time and to a group this large is a recognition of the atrocities currently happening in Palestine.”

Rozos told the crowd that “as I search my heart today in addressing you all”, it is his “moral and political commitments [that] guide me” into condemning Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which has killed at least 53,000 Palestinians over the last year and a half.

NYU University Gallatin Student Chair Logan Rozo,

"I've been freaking out a lot about this speech, honestly, and as I search my heart today in addressing you, all my moral and political commitments guide me to say that the only thing that is appropriate to say in this time and… pic.twitter.com/yJIQw9sBE8

— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) May 15, 2025

Rozos’s anti-war speech was met with widespread cheers and applause from students across the auditorium. Some attendees booed Rozos, with one person appearing to yell “bullshit!” from the crowd.

Following Rozos’s speech, NYU released a statement saying that it “strongly denounces the choice by a student at the Gallatin School’s graduation today … to misuse his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views”.

“He lied about the speech he was going to deliver and violated the commitment he made to comply with our rules. The university is withholding his diploma while we pursue disciplinary actions. NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks and that this moment was stolen by someone who abused a privilege that was conferred upon him,” the university added.

Istanbul Plus June 2024 terms or military solution

Zelenskyy sends team for peace talks but says Russia ‘not serious enough’

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sent a delegation to Istanbul for peace talks with Russia, paving the way for the first direct negotiations between the two countries since March 2022 – although Washington has warned that no breakthrough is likely unless Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin agree to meet. The talks are set to begin on Friday and Zelenskyy said that Kyiv would focus on pushing for an immediate 30-day ceasefire.

Speaking at a press conference in the Turkish capital, Ankara, after a meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Zelenskyy said he had decided to dispatch a delegation even though Russia had sent a lower-level team, in order to signal to Trump that Ukraine remains firmly committed to seeking an end to the war.

“Unfortunately, [the Russians] are not serious enough about the negotiations … Out of respect for President Trump and Erdoğan, I have decided to send our delegation to Istanbul now,” Zelenskyy said, adding that the delegation would be headed by his defence minister, Rustem Umerov.

Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, are expected to be in Istanbul on Friday, though it remains unclear what role they will play. ... Rubio told reporters late on Thursday: “I think it’s abundantly clear that the only way we’re going to have a breakthrough here is between President Trump and President Putin.” He said any meeting between the two would depend on progress this week.

Trump announces more than $200bn of deals between US and UAE

Donald Trump has announced deals totaling more than $200bn between the United States and the United Arab Emirates, including a $14.5bn commitment among Boeing, GE Aerospace and Etihad Airways, as he pledged to strengthen ties between the US and the Gulf state during a multiday trip to the Middle East.

The White House said on Thursday that Boeing and GE had received a commitment from Etihad Airways to invest $14.5bn to buy 28 US-made Boeing 787 and 777X aircraft powered by GE engines.

“With the inclusion of the next-generation 777X in its fleet plan, the investment deepens the longstanding commercial aviation partnership between the UAE and the United States, fueling American manufacturing, driving exports,” the White House said.

Antonoaldo Neves, the CEO of Etihad, said last month that the airline planned to add 20 to 22 new planes to its fleet of roughly 100 aircraft this year, as it aims to expand to more than 170 planes by 2030 and boost Abu Dhabi’s economic diversification strategy.

Not a bad summary of the issue (more at the link for the curious):

Stephen Miller is wrong: the president can’t just suspend habeas corpus

The writ of habeas corpus is much older than the US constitution. That writ, which enables people detained by the government to challenge their detention in court, has been regarded as an essential bulwark of liberty in the English-speaking world since the 15th century. In this country, Alexander Hamilton said the writ of habeas corpus provides “greater security to liberty and republicanism” than any other provision in the constitution. And in his first inaugural address, President Thomas Jefferson called the protections provided by habeas corpus one of the “essential principles of our Government”.

But you would never know that from what Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, said on Friday. Talking to reporters outside the White House, Miller reported that the administration was “actively looking at” the possibility of suspending the writ of habeas corpus for people who are in the country illegally. What Miller said suggests he is either ignorant about the constitution or he just doesn’t care. Either way, the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus is vested in Congress, not the president.

Miller’s comments should be a wake-up call for Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, and John Thune, the Republican majority leader in the Senate. By defending Congress’s prerogatives, the Republican leaders could defuse another brewing constitutional crisis – and act in line with what the founders of the American republic would want.

Miller’s remarks come after a string of defeats in federal courts over the arbitrary way Trump and his colleagues have handled what they see as the crisis of illegal immigration. And now Miller seems to think that the president can unilaterally strip those people of a right guaranteed to everyone in the government’s custody, regardless of their citizenship status.

Wisconsin judge pleads not guilty to helping man evade immigration agents

A Wisconsin judge pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges that she helped a man who is in the country illegally evade US immigration authorities looking to arrest him in her courtroom. The Milwaukee county circuit judge Hannah Dugan entered the plea during an arraignment in federal court, an early step in the criminal justice process. Defendants routinely plead not guilty at this point to give their attorneys time to investigate and to preserve their right to a trial. ...

Her attorneys have insisted she is innocent. They filed a motion on Wednesday to dismiss the case, saying she was acting in her official capacity as a judge and therefore is immune to prosecution. They also maintain the federal government violated Wisconsin’s state sovereignty by disrupting a state courtroom and prosecuting a state judge. ...

A former federal prosecutor in Wisconsin, John Vaudreuil, said the Trump administration wanted to make an example out of Dugan.

The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, or the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, are probably making the decisions on how to proceed rather than the local US attorney in Milwaukee, making it less likely prosecutors will reduce the charges against Dugan in a deal, he said.

Her attorneys will probably try to push the case to a jury trial, Vaudreuil said, because they know that “people feel very strongly about the way the president and administration is conducting immigration policy”.

Trump administration threatens groups that distributed federal aid for migrants

The Trump administration is accusing some state authorities and non-profits of in effect smuggling or harboring migrants after they provided food and shelter for such people – even though the services were funded through federal government programs and those being helped had already been processed and released by immigration officials.

The administration has also withheld funds it owes to service providers, which spent up front to support vulnerable families recently arrived in the US, on the good faith agreement that, as is usual practice, they would be paid back by Washington.

The nation’s Shelter and Services Program (SSP) – administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) – was created with the explicit purpose to financially support service providers that were struggling to welcome migrants and asylum seekers who had been released from federal immigration custody.

Yet in an ominous recent letter, SSP funding recipients were told that the Trump administration was pausing further payments amid “significant concerns” that government money had gone toward institutions “engaged in or facilitating illegal activities”, with allusions to serious crimes such as transporting undocumented immigrants and shielding them from detection.

The then interim Fema administrator, Cameron Hamilton, gave no evidence to support his agency’s sweeping allegations. Hamilton has since been fired. But he had told SSP grantees they had until mid-April to produce the names, contact information and any related documents for the migrants they had served, while warning that they would need to formally attest to not having knowledge of their personnel or contractors committing immigration-related crimes.

White Afrikaner brought to US by Trump administration has history of antisemitic posts

One of the white Afrikaners brought into the US as refugees by the Trump administration this week has a history of antisemitic social media posts, despite the White House using alleged antisemitism as a rationale for deporting pro-Palestinian protesters.

Charl Kleinhaus posted on X in 2023 that “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group.” In another post last fall, he shared a rightwing, nationalist YouTube video that was later removed, titled: “‘We’ll shoot ILLEGAL Immigrants!’ – Poland’s Illegal Islamic immigrant solution,” with clapping emojis.

A number of Kleinhaus’s posts also promote the conspiracy theory that white people in South Africa are being particularly persecuted.

Kleinhaus confirmed to several media outlets, including the Bulwark and New York Times that he was the owner of the account that contained antisemitic and racist posts, though he insisted to the Times that he was not antisemitic and claimed to have written a post in error while on medication.

The Trump administration has engaged in a systematic campaign to arrest and attempt to deport pro-Palestinian activists in recent months, claiming that they are engaging in antisemitism. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said last month it will begin screening immigrants’ social media activity for antisemitism, using it “as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests”. Kleinhaus, however, was recently granted refugee status by the US government, along with 58 other white South Africans, and landed this week at Washington Dulles international airport.

Supreme Court Hears Birthright Citizenship Case That Could Also Sharply Reduce Judicial Power

Supreme court wary of Trump’s bid to restrict US birthright citizenship

US supreme court justices on Thursday took issue with Donald Trump’s attempt to sidestep the constitution to limit birthright citizenship, a case that, while technically about immigration, could reshape presidential power and the role of federal courts. The trio of cases before the court stem from the president’s January executive order that would deny US citizenship to babies born on American soil if their parents aren’t citizens or permanent residents. The plan is likely to be ultimately struck down, as it directly contradicts the 14th amendment, which grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States”.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said early in the arguments that Trump’s executive order violates four supreme court precedents, while D John Sauer, US solicitor general arguing on behalf of the administration, said that Trump’s order was “protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship”.

But Trump’s legal team isn’t asking the supreme court to rule on whether his policy is constitutional, and very little of the arguments focused on the immigration issues at the heart of Trump’s order. Instead, they are challenging whether lower court judges should be able to block presidential orders nationwide – a move that could overall weaken judicial checks on executive power.

Three federal judges have blocked the policy nationwide, including Deborah Boardman, a US district judge who ruled that “no court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation”. Justice Elena Kagan pointed out that the government has lost every case about Trump’s birthright citizenship order, and questioned why the administration decided to appeal to the supreme court.

But the justice department argues the “nationwide injunctions” unfairly tie the president’s hands. “These injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the Trump administration,” the department wrote in a March filing. The administration is asking for the scope of the injunctions to be narrowed, so they only apply to the people, organizations or states that sued. If Trump prevails, his administration could potentially enforce his desired citizenship policy in parts of the country where specific courts haven’t blocked it – creating different citizenship rules in different states while legal challenges continue.

Republican push to cut green tax credits would raise utility bills, new data shows

As House Republicans propose taking a sledgehammer to the green tax credits in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, new data shows the loss of those incentives could lower some Americans’ household income by more than $1,000 a year due to increased utility bills and job losses.

Though Donald Trump has called climate spending a “waste” of money, the data – published by the industry group Clean Energy Buyers Association (Ceba) on Thursday – provides evidence that rescinding them would actually increase expenses for ordinary Americans in red and blue districts alike. The rollback would increase the price of electricity and gas, the report found. And it would lead to job losses and “economic slowdown”, it says.

“Americans voted to combat the cost-of-living crisis in the 2024 election,” said Rich Powell, CEO of Ceba. “Now is the time for Congress to incentivize private investment in more sources of low-cost, reliable energy that fuels economic growth and jobs, helps the United States secure energy dominance and independence, and decreases energy costs nationwide.” ...

If the rollbacks proceed as proposed, the new study found, at least 19 states would see the cost of energy increase for both consumers and industry between 2026 to 2032. (More states would probably see similar impacts, but the authors did not examine all 50 “because of the turnaround time for research”, Ceba said).

New Jersey is the state expected to see the biggest economic losses if the clean energy investment and production credits are repealed, the authors found. There, the authors found the rollback could increase household gas and utility bills by 2.9% and 13.3% respectively. The repeal would also trigger the loss of 22,180 jobs, they found. All told, households across the state would see a stunning $1,040 average loss in annual household income and a $3.24bn decrease in state GDP, the authors wrote.

‘No one wants a building that kills birds’: why cities are turning off the lights

The wren’s legs were tucked delicately underneath its diminutive body, slumped on its side as if asleep. If it wasn’t lying on the bare concrete of a Texas street, there would be few clues that it had endured a crunching, violent death. The bird had flown headfirst into the Bank of America building, a 72-storey modernist skyscraper in the heart of Dallas. Its corpse was catalogued by volunteers who seek to document the toll of birds that strike the glass, metal and concrete structures festooned with bewildering lights that form the skylines of our cities.

It’s estimated that around a billion birds die across the US each year in this way, one of the leading drivers of an alarming slump in numbers. ... The buildings of Dallas, along with those of other Texan cities, are particularly lethal obstacles because they sit on the central flyway, a major migratory route taken by birds as they traverse North and South America. It’s thought as many as one in three birds migrating through the US each spring pass through Texas. ...

For birds travelling from darker forests or grasslands, the sudden dazzle of lights and walls of glass found in cities can be a death trap. On maps charting US light pollution, Dallas is a burning beacon, sloshing light up and out of its buildings into the skies rather than focusing it on where it is needed. Most birds are nocturnal migrants, hardwired to navigate by the moon and stars, and the artificial replacements to these wayfinders, plus the reflections in glass, particularly of nearby trees that birds would aim for, cause many to become disoriented and crash into buildings. ...

Light pollution has been present since the lightbulb was invented but it’s only in the past 20 years that glaring, intrusive light has started to routinely obscure the stars and imperil birds flying at night, according to Teznie Pugh, superintendent of the University of Texas’s McDonald Observatory. “It’s become a major concern,” Pugh says. “Each generation, we are basically halving the number of stars you’re able to see at night.” Globally, light pollution has increased by about 10% a year since 2011, a study released in 2023 found. But there has been some progress through a rethink of excess lighting, which is often costly as well as harmful, and the advance of bird-friendly glass, which incorporates dots or stripes to warn birds of an impending obstacle. ...

“Nobody wants to be the building that kills tonnes of birds and a lot of times it a simple solution such as to turn off your lights or use a curtain,” says Mei Ling Liu, a Lights Out organiser at the Texas Conservation Alliance. Progress is complicated by ingrained habits of construction and lighting, exacerbated by LED lights, which are worse for birds and insects but are cheaper and more efficient. Bird-friendly glass also costs more than standard versions. “It’s a challenge,” adds Liu. “When it comes to light pollution, it’s not a single building issue, it’s an entire city. And Dallas is still very bright.”

Also of Interest

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

We are human rights lawyers. Our new report is clear: Israel perpetrates apartheid

The Bogus Habeas-Corpus Argument

Hocus Pocus, There Goes Habeas Corpus

The Unifying Goal Of Right & Center Elites

Trump-GOP Tax Bill a Gift to 'Predatory Landlords' That Will Worsen Already Dire Housing Crisis

UnitedHealth Group shares plunge after report of Medicare fraud inquiry

Dead woman being forced to give birth in Georgia

h/t linda:

US lifts sanctions on Russia-linked international oil project

A Little Night Music

Chuck Berry - You Can't Catch Me

Chuck Berry - Let's Boogie

Chuck Berry - Blue On Blue

Chuck Berry - Come On

Chuck Berry - House Of Blue Lights

Chuck Berry - Jaguar And The Thunderbird

Chuck Berry - Roll Over Beethoven

Chuck Berry - Reelin' And Rockin'

Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode

Chuck Berry Live Rocking Horse at BBC Theatre 1972