Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues musician Jimmy Johnson. Enjoy!

"We used to have a War Office, but now we have a Ministry of Defence, nuclear bombs are now described as deterrents, innocent civilians killed in war are now described as collateral damage and military incompetence leading to US bombers killing British soldiers is cosily described as friendly fire. Those who are in favour of peace are described as mavericks and troublemakers, whereas the real militants are those who want the war."

-- Tony Benn

News and Opinion

Worth a full read:

Civilian Deaths in U.S. Wars Are Skyrocketing Under Trump. It May Not Be Impeachable, but It’s a Crime.

After nearly three years in office, President Donald Trump may have finally gone too far. His boneheaded attempt to enmesh another member of America’s gilded class into legal trouble with the help of a foreign country has awakened the full moral outrage of his political rivals. They are out for blood and, at long last, they may get it. “The president must be held accountable,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a stern address announcing an impeachment inquiry. “No one is above the law.” ... And yet there are even more consequential reasons why Trump should be the object of our moral outrage. Not least among them are his central role in the violent deaths of thousands of innocent people.

Since his emergence as a political figure, Trump has promised that if he ever attained power, he would use the U.S. military to inflict a massive bloodletting on others, including noncombatants. Unlike other campaign promises, Trump has delivered on this one. Since taking office, he has presided over skyrocketing rates of civilian casualties in America’s many foreign conflicts. Beneath the hue and cry of the impeachment announcement, more people are dying in wars that are being waged as Trump promised, with more brutality than ever. ...

In the post-9/11 era, the U.S. military has made a point of not publicizing the civilian death tolls from its operations. But studies by independent researchers and nongovernmental organizations conservatively put the number of civilians killed in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan into the hundreds of thousands. The real figures are likely even higher. Trump, it is worth noting, is not the only one responsible for these deaths. The wars began long before he came into office, after all. But under his watch, and with his assent, they have been waged with more brutality and less apparent regard for innocent life. ... At the very least, Trump has strongly signaled that he has no problem with killing civilians and will not give anyone under his command a hard time for carrying out such killings. Trump has been willing to vocally defend those who do find themselves accused of war crimes, while punishing those who investigate them. It is no surprise that death tolls have skyrocketed on his watch and that military campaigns, many of which can be characterized as “wars of choice,” are being waged more brutally. There is little political pressure for it to be otherwise.

Does this matter? Do the extremely violent deaths of innocent people — wedding guests and farmers in distant countries — factor into the moral calculus we use to judge Trump as being fit or unfit for office? The American public seems only dimly interested in the ramped-up killings that have taken place on his watch. The whole thing has become routine. The Jewish historian Raul Hilberg once observed the banality of bureaucratic killing in a different time and place: Germany during the 1940s. “Most bureaucrats composed memoranda, drew up blueprints, talked on the telephone, and participated in conferences,” Hilberg wrote about the society that collectively helped carry out a genocide. “They could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desks.” ...

If Trump is going to be impeached, don’t fool yourself that what he’s allegedly done to Hunter Biden is the worst crime he committed while in office.

'Unbelievable': Snowden Calls Out Media for Failing to Press US Politicians on Inconsistent Support of Whistleblowers

Exiled National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden declared on Twitter Wednesday it is "unbelievable that in a moment where politicians are making daily media statements about 'supporting whistleblowers,' the media is not pressing them on the case of Daniel Hale."

Hale, a 31-year-old former government intelligence analyst, "is being prosecuted RIGHT NOW for blowing the whistle on enormously controversial drone programs," Snowden wrote. In May, Hale was charged under the Espionage Act for leaking classified information to a journalist widely believed to be The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill.

Snowden's comments came as U.S. politicians are speaking out about the importance of protecting the anonymity of the intelligence community whistleblower whose complaint about President Donald Trump's July phone call with the Ukrainian president prompted House Democrats' official impeachment inquiry into Trump.

Unbelievable that in a moment where politicians are making daily media statements about "supporting whistleblowers," the media is not pressing them on the case of Daniel Hale, who is being prosecuted RIGHT NOW for blowing the whistle on enormously controversial drone programs. https://t.co/hOvc4zErT1

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 2, 2019

Snowden, on Twitter, linked to The Washington Post's report from Tuesday night on a new federal court filing in which the U.S. Department of Justice argued that Hale engaged in "thievery, not protected speech," and thus cannot challenge the Espionage Act charges on First Amendment grounds.

Defense attorneys for Hale "argued last month that the law was designed to deal with spies, not leakers, and that the prosecution runs afoul of the First Amendment by chilling newsgathering and implicating the reporter who received the information," the Post noted. That argument could resurface if WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange—who also faces espionage charges in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia—is ever extradited to the United States.

Pelosi and Schiff Warn White House: Stonewalling Is a Sign of Guilt

House Democrats warned the Trump administration that any moves to block witnesses would be taken as obstruction of justice and used in their impeachment proceedings.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) fired back at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Trump, warning them not to try to block witnesses from testifying to Congress.

“If they are going to prevent witnesses from coming forward from testifying… that will create an adverse inference that those allegations are in fact correct,” Schiff warned during a press conference with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) Wednesday morning.

Schiff said any attempts to “stonewall” Congress “will be considered further evidence of obstruction of justice.”

Report suggests whistleblower colluded with intel committee chief

Trump announces record campaign haul amid impeachment inquiry

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee raised $125m in the third quarter of 2019, his campaign announced, an amount it credited, at least in part, to the looming threat of impeachment.

In total the re-election effort has raised $308m so far this year, Trump’s campaign said, and has over $156m in the bank.

The haul comfortably outmatches Trump’s Democratic rivals, some of whom released their own fundraising totals on Tuesday.

“President Trump has built a juggernaut of a campaign, raising record amounts of money at a record pace,” said Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager. In the same week that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, announced the impeachment inquiry, Parscale said the campaign had received “50,000” new donations over two days.

Trump and the RNC’s year-so-far total of $308m is more than double the amount Barack Obama had raised at the same point in 2011 – when he was running for a second term.

Makes you wonder if, during and after the Trump administration any foreign leader will want to talk to a U.S. president "confidentially."

Echoes of the Nixon tapes? The transcripts that could doom Trump

What did the president say and when did he say it? Donald Trump’s politically catastrophic phone call with the leader of Ukraine, sufficient to prompt an impeachment inquiry, might just be the tip of an iceberg that could doom his presidency. ...

It raised questions: how many more compromising conversations have there been? Will the transcripts inevitably leak out with the help of more whistleblowers? And could their combined effect be enough to persuade Senate Republicans it is time to dump Trump, just as an incriminating tape led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon?

“I think the conversations between Trump and world leaders stored in the White House server are critical, and could very well seal his fate,” said Chris Whipple, author The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency. “A single conversation, recorded in black and white by a notetaker, has already been a game-changer. Trump’s mafia-style shakedown of the president of Ukraine has moved the needle dramatically. If there are other, similarly damning conversations to be found in the White House server, impeachment could gain critical mass in a hurry. And even this Senate might convict when confronted with that kind of evidence: Facts are stubborn things.” ...

According to CNN, the president’s phone calls with Putin and the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman so alarmed White House officials that aides took “remarkable steps to keep from becoming public”. This included storing reconstructed transcripts of the calls on “a highly classified computer system” normally intended for closely guarded government secrets.

Last week the Washington Post reported that in 2017, Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office that he was “unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people.” ...

Adam Schiff, the chair of the House intelligence committee, told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday: “If those conversations with Putin or with other world leaders are sequestered in that same electronic file that is meant for covert action, not meant for this, if there’s an effort to hide those and cover those up, yes, we’re determined to find out.”

Trump Spent His Day Yelling About Impeachment

Congressional Democrats made a somber case for impeachment Wednesday. President Trump responded with a tirade in the Oval Office, including a joke about a jockstrap, and a fever dream of a press conference. “They’ve been trying to impeach me since the day I got elected, and you know what? They failed,” Trump yelled from the Oval Office. At a press conference later in the day with the president of Finland, Trump repeated his claim that he’s a “very stable genius." ...

Trump fired back on Wednesday and accused Schiff, without evidence, of helping to write the whistleblower’s report. The president apparently based that accusation on a report from the New York Times that published right before his press conference and indicated that Schiff’s staff had met with the whistleblower before they filed their complaint. He also tweeted that the “Do Nothing Democrats” were “wasting everyone’s time and energy on BULLSHIT.”

The Do Nothing Democrats should be focused on building up our Country, not wasting everyone’s time and energy on BULLSHIT, which is what they have been doing ever since I got overwhelmingly elected in 2016, 223-306. Get a better candidate this time, you’ll need it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2019

What a bunch of f*cking cowards! Apparently, there are a lot of Nancy Pelosis out there who believe that justice should not be pursued for its own sake, but rather, only when it confers political advantage.

A Third of Voters Who Oppose Impeachment Are Worried About Backlash for Democrats, New Poll Suggests

Last week, after the revelation of a phone call with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. But many of the details are yet to be sorted out: Which of the six investigations into Trump currently being conducted by House committees should impeachment include? And will impeachment proceedings, which are likely to pass the House but fail in the Republican-held Senate, end up backfiring on the Democrats?

A new YouGov Blue poll for the Progressive Change Institute, the nonprofit polling arm of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, lends insight into both of these crucial questions. The poll, released Wednesday morning, found that other polls undercount support for Democrats moving forward on an impeachment inquiry. It also revealed that a third of voters who oppose impeachment actually agree that Trump committed high crimes, but are concerned that it would hurt Democrats politically. And a majority of the voters who support an impeachment inquiry said Democrats should proceed “boldly and decisively,” with all members voting within the next month.

Overall, the poll suggests that voters are roughly split, with 49 percent supporting impeachment and 43 percent opposing it. This dovetails with recent Monmouth University and Quinnipiac polls, which show strengthening support for impeachment. But the YouGov poll shows that those opposed to impeachment may be concerned about political ramifications for Democrats.

Out of the 43 percent of voters who oppose impeachment, 65 percent believe that Trump “did not commit high crimes and misdemeanors and the voters should decide in 2020 whether he stays in office,” while 35 percent say Trump “did commit high crimes and misdemeanors, but Democrats will hurt themselves politically if they proceed on impeachment.”

EU reacts to Johnson's last-ditch Brexit offer: "There are gaps in the proposal"

EU parliament: Boris Johnson Brexit plan not remotely acceptable

The European parliament has told Boris Johnson that his proposals for the Irish border do not “even remotely” amount to an acceptable deal for the EU, in comments echoed by Ireland’s prime minister.

The committee of MEPs representing the parliament’s views on Brexit said the prime minister’s proposals could not form the basis for an agreement, describing them as a “last-minute” effort. The European parliament will have a veto on any withdrawal agreement.

“Safeguarding peace and stability on the island of Ireland, protection of citizens and EU’s legal order has to be the main focus of any deal,” it said in a statement. “The UK proposals do not match even remotely what was agreed as a sufficient compromise in the backstop.”

"What we have before us is a rehashed version of previously rejected proposals," says Corbyn

Yes, Boris Johnson Is Trying to Suspend Parliament... Again

Boris Johnson was accused of lying to the queen when he illegally suspended Parliament last month. But that hasn’t scared him off coming back for a second shot.

This time, though, Parliament will be suspended for a much shorter period, ending its current session on the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 8, before resuming the following Monday.

The government says the move is necessary to deliver the Queen’s Speech — the traditional procedure marking the beginning of a new session of Parliament, in which the queen outlines the government’s legislative agenda for the new session. ...

Johnson said the Queen’s Speech would outline the government’s plans for domestic issues: the national health service, education, crime, and the economy.

Dismay in Brussels as Boris Johnson finally reveals Brexit plan

Boris Johnson appears to be fighting a losing battle to avoid Britain staying in the European Union beyond 31 October after Michel Barnier privately gave a scathing analysis of the prime minister’s new plan for the Irish border, describing it as a trap. The European commission also refused to go into the secretive and intensive “tunnel” talks with the UK’s negotiators before a crunch summit on 17 October from which the UK had hoped to deliver a breakthrough deal.

Despite concerted attempts to avoid publicly trashing the UK proposals, there was dismay behind the scenes in Brussels after Johnson tabled his first concrete proposal for replacing the Irish backstop. The prime minister had set out the outline of the government’s offer in a speech to Tory party faithful in Manchester that also laid down the battle lines for a general election. On Wednesday night, he was hopeful a parliamentary majority could be assembled to back it.

Johnson’s plan involves Northern Ireland leaving the EU’s customs union at the end of transition along with the rest of the UK, necessitating checks and controls on the island of Ireland. Northern Ireland would also stay aligned with EU standards on goods if Stormont agreed by December 2020, the end of the transition period, and then in a vote every four years.

But the UK has also requested that both sides commit at treaty level “never to conduct checks at the border” even if Stormont vetoes the arrangements laid out in the new 44-page Irish protocol. Barnier said that this commitment would prevent Brussels from protecting its internal market if the Northern Ireland assembly blocked the arrangement in 2020 or at a later date.

“The EU would then be trapped with no backstop to preserve the single market after Brexit,” he warned, according to someone present in the room. ... It is understood that the European parliament’s Brexit steering group will say on Thursday that MEPs will not vote in support of the deal proposed by the UK government.

Keiser Report: Make Recessions Great Again

Family Farms, Ag Advocates Hit Back After Sec Perdue Says Small Dairy Farms Destined to Die

Furious family farmers flamed Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue Wednesday after comments he made on the future of the dairy business that cast doubt on the future of small farms during a stop in Wisconsin Tuesday.

"In America, the big get bigger and the small go out," said Perdue. "I don't think in America we, for any small business, we have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability."

The secretary added that in his view the industry was leaving smaller producers behind.

"It's very difficult on an economy of scale with the capital needs and all the environmental regulations and everything else today to survive milking 40, 50, or 60, or even 100 cows," Perdue said.

Perdue made the remarks to reporters at the World Dairy Expo in Madison. The setting, as The Associated Press pointed out, was apt for the secretary's somewhat ruthless comments:

Wisconsin, which touts itself as America's Dairyland on its license plates, has lost 551 dairy farms in 2019 after losing 638 in 2018 and 465 in 2017, according to data from the state Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection. The Legislature's finance committee voted unanimously last month to spend an additional $200,000 to help struggling farmers deal with depression and mental health problems.

"Small farmers were, again, surprised by Agriculture Secretary Perdue's callousness when he casually told them that small farms would probably not survive," Jim Goodman, board president of the National Family Farm Coalition, told Common Dreams. "Five years of plunging farm prices, increasing bankruptcies, and climbing suicide rates were not discussed by Perdue. His message to them was basically, stop whining, your demise is inevitable." ...

At Esquire, Charlie Pierce wrote that Perdue was telling a truth that is seldom uttered:

It takes a rare fella to say so plainly that America is essentially a monopoly culture, and that the ultimate goal of a free market is to achieve the absolute minimal amount of actual competition—especially to an audience of people whose livelihoods are being destroyed by those very dynamics.

Farming advocates pushed back on what they saw as Perdue's claim that Big Ag is unstoppable.

"There is NOTHING inevitable about factory farms," tweeted land organizer Johanna Rupprecht. "There is NOTHING inevitable about the big getting bigger and the small getting pushed out. These things have happened because policy choices have been made that not just allowed but heavily subsidized and promoted them."

Warnings That Millions More Could Go Hungry as Trump Pushes $4.5 Billion in Food Benefit Cuts

In its latest potentially devastating attack on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Trump administration on Tuesday unveiled a proposal that would slash food stamps benefits by $4.5 billion over five years, a move analysts warned would increase hunger for millions of low-income families.

The new plan, announced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), would cut food benefits for nearly 20 percent of the millions of households that use SNAP to afford groceries.

HuffPost's Arthur Delaney outlined the administration's latest rule, which he noted is the USDA's "third proposed cut to SNAP benefits in the past year":

Federal law allows households to deduct shelter and utility costs that exceed 50 percent of their net income. By taking the deduction, households can qualify for a bigger benefit. States are allowed to set standard utility allowances to avoid the hassle of figuring out individual households' specific costs.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is proposing a more uniform national standard, taking the matter out of states' hands—a similar strategy employed in the two previous proposals to trim SNAP.

Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), said in a series of tweets Tuesday that "the Trump administration's latest proposal to cut SNAP... would leave millions of people, including struggling families, seniors, and people with disabilities, with less help putting food on the table."

"While some households would see a small increase in benefits under the proposal, nearly 1/5 of SNAP households would experience an average monthly benefit cut of $30 per month," Dean tweeted. "That can be days or weeks worth of groceries." ...

The USDA's proposed rule, which is expected to be submitted to the Federal Register this week, comes days after the end of the public comment period for the Trump administration's plan to kick three million people off food stamps—a move that would also strip free school lunches from hundreds of thousands of children.

As Man Dies in ICE Custody, California Moves to Ban For-Profit Prisons, Including Immigrant Jails

Trump administration to expand DNA collection at border and give data to FBI

The Trump administration is planning to expand the collection of DNA from migrants who cross US borders, and to include the information in a vast criminal database operated by the FBI.

The effort is separate from and much broader than the rapid DNA testing done on families at the US-Mexico border to help detect adults falsely posing as parents. Not much else is known yet about the increased testing, including its purpose and whether it would apply to children crossing alone or to asylum seekers.

Two senior homeland security officials, speaking Wednesday to reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing effort, said the Department of Justice was crafting new regulations and details were being discussed in a working group, but it is not known when the plan would be implemented. ...

The practice would allow the government to amass a trove of biometric data on migrants, raising major privacy concerns and questions over whether such data should be compelled even when a person is not suspected of a crime other than crossing the border illegally. “It’s not surprising, given this administration’s fixation on villainizing folks at the border, but it reaches beyond them,” said Vera Eidelman, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. DNA also contains identifying information on their families, too.

Eidelman said it changed the purpose of DNA collection from one of criminal investigation to population surveillance.

Krystal: Don't worry, Bernie's got plenty of heart

Sen. Susan Collins Feted as “Hero of Kavanaugh Confirmation” at High-Dollar California Fundraiser

Just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Sen. Susan Collins will be marking the occasion at a California fundraiser, where she is being feted as the “hero of the Kavanaugh confirmation,” according to an invitation obtained by The Intercept and Documented.

On Wednesday, October 2, the Lincoln Women’s Leadership Committee will host Collins at Orange County’s private Pacific Club for an invitation-only lunch and reception to benefit her reelection. Tickets for a private reception beforehand are $500, and seats at the head table during lunch start at $1,000. The committee is part of the Lincoln Club of Orange County, founded in 1962 as an alliance of wealthy Republican donors in Orange County. Lincoln Club Executive Director Seth Morrison said the event is closed to press.

According to data published by the Center for Responsive Politics, 96 percent of the cash raised by the Collins campaign this cycle has been from out of state. She has received $162,000 from donors in Maine, but raised more than three times as much ($504,000) from donors in California, and in New York ($573,000).

Demand Justice Targets Democratic Sen. Chris Coons For Voting in Favor of Trump Judicial Nominees

A number of Senate Democrats are angry at judicial advocacy group Demand Justice for going after the chamber's members for voting in favor of President Donald Trump's unprecedented slew of federal judges, but the organization's leader isn't backing down.

"We think that the idea of doing horse trading with this administration is not worth it," Demand Justice executive director Brian Fallon told Politico Wednesday.

Fallon is under fire from Democratic senators who feel that Demand Justice's September ad buy in Delaware targeting Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat, is over the line. Coons has supported a number of Trump nominees, including, Demand Justice said, some whose support of Brown v. Board of Education is in doubt.

"That was way out of line," complained Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

But it's in keeping with the group's mission, as Politico explained:

Demand Justice's message on judges is simple: Democrats should reject all Trump's judges. Fallon argues that Republicans blocked President Barack Obama's judicial nominees and that Democrats should take a page from their playbook. Like the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, Demand Justice uses ads to pressure Democratic senators on their voting records.

The criticism isn't deterring Fallon and Demand Justice, however.

"We plan to invest in Delaware a lot more heavily in the coming months, assuming Chris Coons continues voting for Trump judges," Fallon said. "If that's a record he's proud of and feels like he can defend then he has nothing to worry about from our ads."

Ro Khanna Debunks Tulsi/Modi Controversy

There's a lot of information in the article, here are some illustrative bits, but it's really worth a full read to get the details. They are quite damning and demonstrate the government's sometimes brutal, sometimes pernicious and pervasive repression of average citizens who band together to promote a common interest in a habitable environment.

Anti-terror center helped police track environmental activists

A federally sponsored anti-terrorism fusion center in Oregon assisted a taskforce monitoring protest groups organizing against a fossil fuel infrastructure project in the state, according to documents obtained by the Guardian. The Oregon Titan Fusion Center – part of a network set up to monitor terrorist activities – disseminated information gathered by that taskforce, and shared information provided by private security attached to the gas project with some of the task force members.

Observers, including the American Civil Liberties Union, argue these efforts break Oregon law.

Previously, the Guardian revealed the existence of the South-western Oregon Joint Task Force (SWOJTF), a group spearheaded by the Coos county sheriff’s office (CCSO), and its surveillance of those opposing the Jordan Cove energy project: a $10bn proposed liquid natural gas project that would include a new export terminal in Coos Bay, Oregon. The sheriff’s office passed on information harvested from social media accounts and emails to a network of local, state and federal police agencies. In addition to monitoring non-violent protests by Jordan Cove opponents, the SWOJTF has also tracked individuals’ attendance at regulatory hearings and routine campaign emails circulated by grassroots groups such as Southern Oregon Rising Tide, Rogue Climate and 350 Eugene.

Chuck Cogburn, who is currently an analyst with the Oregon Titan Fusion Center, has been among the regular recipients of SWOJTF emails, records obtained by the Guardian via open records requests show. On 8 November 2018, Cogburn, who until 2015 also served as the director of the fusion center, responded to an email circulated by the CCSO deputy Bryan Valencia on a pipeline protest at a Medford Chamber of Commerce meeting, by telling Valencia he will “put this out as a SAR”, which fusion centers define as a “suspicious activity report”. ...

In fact, the fusion center appears to have played a key role in setting up the southern Oregon taskforce. In an April 2017 letter to Oregon legislators supporting a boost in Fusion Center funding, the Coos county sheriff, Craig Zanni, wrote that “[t]he Oregon Titan Fusion Center has provided leadership and guidance that is facilitating the formulation of the Southwestern Oregon Joint Task Force.” Zanni wrote in the same letter that the taskforce would “be instrumental in combating the extremist agenda in Southern Oregon”.

Trump vs. California: In Blow to Climate, U.S. Revokes State’s Stricter Auto Emissions Standards

EPA cites San Francisco for 'water pollution', fulfilling Trump's threat

The Trump administration issued an environmental notice of violation to San Francisco on Wednesday, fulfilling Donald Trump’s threat to cite the city over an inaccurate claim that linked water pollution with the city’s homeless crisis.

Trump said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would issue a notice because the city allowed needles and waste from its homeless population to flow from the sewer system into the ocean – an allegation city officials disputed. In a letter Wednesday, the EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, accused the city of improperly discharging waste into the bay, but avoided mentioning Trump’s comments directly.

The letter states that “substantial volumes of raw and partially treated sewage” at times flow across beaches, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The city attorney Dennis Herrera responded to Wednesday’s notice by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request to the EPA “for records related to these unwarranted attacks on San Francisco”.

“These attacks on San Francisco are a politically motivated ploy,” Herrera said in a statement. “The Trump administration is ignoring facts and misusing the EPA to attack people it disagrees with.”

Scientists hope to breed sheep that emit less greenhouse gases

Scientists are working to breed sheep that produce less greenhouse gases in order to reduce their impact on the environment. The Grass to Gas initiative will combine international scientific and industry expertise to measure two major factors affecting the environmental consequences of the livestock – feed efficiency and methane emissions.

Its goal is to develop ways to identify animals with a lower impact, which can then be selected for breeding programmes.

Nicola Lambe, a sheep geneticist at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), said: “The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is a global issue requiring a transnational and transdisciplinary approach. “The project aims to produce tools to measure, or accurately predict, feed efficiency and methane emissions from both individual animals and sheep systems, which will provide the international industry with the means to breed, feed and manage sheep with reduced environmental impact as part of genetic improvement initiatives.

“It will also contribute towards addressing the argument about the effect of eating meat on global warming, with sheep making use of land often unsuitable for other agricultural production, except conifers – at least in the UK.”

Also of Interest

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

Intercepted podcast: We’ve Got Impeachment

Democrats exclude Trump’s fascist anti-immigrant policies from impeachment inquiry

Trump Tweet Calling Impeachment Inquiry a 'Coup' Heightens Fears of Refusal to Leave Office

Harris spokesman calls out Gabbard over pushback on call to suspend Trump Twitter account

Rumblings of Recession Get Louder

JPMorgan Chase Has a Pattern of Criminality; Now Wall Street Is Pointing to the Bank as a Cause of the Fed’s Emergency Loans

Wealth Identity Politics: Billionaires Acting Like A Persecuted Minority Is Peak Capitalism

Stagnant politics, graft and slow recovery fuel new Iraqi unrest

Ukraine Holds More Surprises for Biden

To Counter Missouri's Attacks on Abortion Care, Planned Parenthood Opens 'Mega-Clinic' in Neighboring Illinois

The Phony Liberalism of Bill Maher

Why Israel Is Struggling to Find a Way Out of Its Political Deadlock

British spy in IRA and 20 others could be charged with Troubles-era crimes

'War for survival': Brazil’s Amazon tribes despair as land raids surge under Bolsonaro

The Implementation Flaw in Warren’s Wealth Tax

A Little Night Music

Jimmy Johnson - You Don't Know What Love Is

The Jimmy Johnson Blues Band - Your time to cry

Jimmy Johnson and His Band w/Hank Alexander - Don't Answer The Door

Jimmy Johnson Blues Band - As The Years Go Passing By

Jimmy Johnson Band - It Serves Me Right To Suffer

Jimmy Johnson - High Heel Sneakers

Jimmy Johnson - Cold Cold Feeling

Jimmy Johnson - I Need Some Easy Money

Jimmy Johnson and Dave Specter - Feel So Bad

Jimmy Johnson - The Twelve Bars Blues

Bonus:

2019 Chicago Blues Festival - June 7 in Millennium Park