Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues harmonica player George "Harmonica" Smith. Enjoy!

“It was strange to listen to slick young Nazis along Fifth Avenue haranguing small gatherings from little mahogany pulpits. One spiel went as follows: "The philosophy of Hitler is a profound and thoughtful study of this industrial age, in which there is little room for the middleman or Jew."

A woman interrupted. "What kind of talk is that!" she exclaimed. "This is America. Where do you think you are?"

The young man, an obsequious, good-looking type, smiled blandly. "I'm in the United States and I happen to be an American citizen," he said smoothly.

"Well," she said, "I'm an American citizen, and a Jew, and if I were a man I'd knock your block off!"

One or two endorsed the lady's threat, but most of them stood apathetically silent. A policeman standing by quieted the woman. I came away astonished, hardly believing my ears.”

-- Charlie Chaplin

News and Opinion

Democratic Corporate Fascism vs the Trump Kind

The weakness of the Left In the United States is so extreme that the ruling class has to invent a “menace” to the prevailing oligarchic order: the Russians, whose phantom agents are said to wage a twilight struggle to undermine public faith in U.S. institutions. The U.S. Left is so pitifully small, so patently incapable of disrupting the rule of the rich, that it has lost all usefulness as a scapegoat for the failures and crimes of capitalism. Since no one believes that U.S. leftists have either the will or capacity to challenge the corporate regime, the Russians have to fill the role of internal as well as external enemy -- a daunting task on a meager Facebook budget of only $100,000. With the real U.S. left having shrunk to near-invisibility, the capitalist pseudo-left -- all of them Democrats -- pretends that socialism has already arrived in America in the form of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Comrade Bernie Sanders tells us that [big “D”] “democratic socialism” will bloom triumphant with passage of Medicare for All, on the home front, and by combating the “New Authoritarian Axis” of Russia, China and assorted Trump-like regimes around the world. Sanders believes that U.S. empire is compatible with his very minimalist version of socialism, which neither requires nor desires the overthrow of the moneyed classes. ...

Trump’s explicit racism was upsetting to many Republican big wigs’ corporate sensibilities, but that wasn’t the deal-breaker that caused the intra-capitalist crisis. The GOP had been the “White Man’s Party” since 1968. Trump’s explicit white supremacism was only a difference in degree. What set establishment Republicans to flight and nearly destroyed the corporate duopoly, was Trump’s campaign rhetoric opposing U.S. regime change wars and corporate trade deals that facilitated the free flow of money and jobs around the globe. The bulk of the ruling class, along with its national security and corporate media servants, fled into Hillary Clinton’s big nasty campaign tent, and have plotted to hog-tie or remove Trump, ever since. Trump has since abandoned his opposition to regime change and corporate trade deals. ... Trump seems destined to join previous Republican and Democratic administrations in pursuit of endless austerity and war – which marks both Trump and his corporate Democratic adversaries as fascists.

Endless austerity and war is how the corporate regime strips all democratic character from late stage capitalist societies like ours, and reorganizes the world economy to serve plutocracy’s purposes. The U.S. empire, not the territorial United States, is multinational capital’s home. Corporate imperatives dictate the global race to the bottom. The job of the two duopoly parties in the U.S. -- and of the bourgeois parties in the rest of the “West” and Japan – is to blunt the people’s resistance to the increasingly oppressive measures of capitalism in crisis and decline. The imperial “home” countries’ populations must also be made to acquiesce in, if not cheer, the steady drumbeat of war against the resistance to imperial aggression, now centered in Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua -- even though every tightening of the imperial knot means more misery for all those who have been drafted into the race to the bottom.

In the U.S., the hegemony of capital is all but complete. That’s why all of our “news” comes from five or six corporations -- and most of it is fake. Alone in the world, the U.S. has two parties of the ruling class, and no other parties that effectively contend for power. It is therefore, definitively, a corporate dictatorship.

Warnings of More 'War and Unilateral Aggression' as Pompeo and Bolton Launch Joint Attack on Global Cooperation

Amid mounting concerns about possible war with Iran after the Trump administration ditched a decades-old bilateral treaty in response to an International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on Wednesday that U.S. sanctions violate it, National Security Adviser John Bolton announced a review of all international agreements that could lead to more binding decisions by the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.

Bolton also revealed that President Donald Trump "has decided that the United States will withdraw from the optional protocol on dispute resolution to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations," which gives the ICJ authority to hear diplomatic disputes. As motivation for the withdrawal, he pointed to "a case brought by the so-called state of Palestine" challenging Trump's widely condemned decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem.

.@AmbJohnBolton announces that he is "announcing that the president has decided that the United States will withdraw from the optional protocol to dispute resolution to the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations."

The drums of war can be heard in the distance. pic.twitter.com/5Qcj29HQvK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 3, 2018

While Bolton, a longtime warmonger, insisted that "the United States remains a party to the underlying Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations," critics quickly raised alarm about what the developments could mean for the future of U.S. diplomacy, especially with Iran and the Palestinian Authority. "Bolton is basically announcing that the U.S. is becoming a rogue state," tweeted journalist Aaron Rupar.

"John Bolton and the Trump administration are turning us away from international accountability and cooperation and towards war and unilateral aggression," concluded Win Without War.

John Pilger talks MSM landscape & Assange, Syria & US sanctions wars (Going Underground)

Facebook faces $1.6bn fine and formal investigation over massive data breach

The Irish Data Protection Commission has opened a formal investigation into a data breach that affected nearly 50m Facebook accounts, which could result in a fine of up to $1.63bn. The breach, which was discovered by Facebook engineers on Tuesday 24 September, gave hackers the ability to take over users’ accounts. It was patched on Thursday, the company said.

“The investigation will examine Facebook’s compliance with its obligation under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure the security and safeguarding of the personal data it processes,” the commission said in a statement on Wednesday.

The commission regulates Facebook’s adherence to GDPR, a European law that strengthens the privacy protections of individuals and introduces harsh penalties for companies that fail to protect user data.

Shocking! I am shocked to hear that AG Beauregard Sessions and DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen lied! Shocked, I tell you.

“Zero Tolerance” Pushed Asylum-Seekers to Cross the Border Illegally, DHS Report Confirms

Appearing before a group of concerned faith leaders in mid-June, Attorney General Jeff Sessions offered words of reassurance. For weeks, the national media had focused its attention on Sessions’s “zero tolerance” initiative, a border enforcement strategy, which by that point had separated thousands of migrant children — including babies and toddlers — from their parents. “Please note, church friends, that if the adults go to one of our many ports of entry to claim asylum, they are not prosecuted and the family stays intact pending the legal process,” Sessions said. Four days later, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, offered more of the same at a White House press conference: “DHS is not separating families legitimately seeking asylum at ports of entry. If an adult enters at a port of entry and claims asylum, they will not face prosecution for illegal entry. They have not committed a crime by coming to the port of entry.”

Immigration attorneys and journalists on the border responded forcefully, arguing that the nation’s ports had become increasingly locked down with Donald Trump’s election, and that the problem had worsened with the onset of “zero tolerance.” Now, nearly four months later, a report from Nielsen’s own department indicates the advocates and reporters were right, and that the secretary and the attorney general were lying.

According to the Office of the Inspector General at DHS, “While the Zero Tolerance Policy was in effect, government officials — including the DHS Secretary and the Attorney General — publicly encouraged asylum seeking adults to enter the United States legally through a port of entry to avoid prosecution and separation from their accompanying children. However, at the same time, [Customs and Border Protection] was regulating the flow of asylum-seekers at ports of entry through ‘metering,’ a practice CBP has utilized at least as far back as 2016 to regulate the flow of individuals at ports of entry.”

“Although DHS asserts that the Zero Tolerance Policy and metering at ports of entry are distinct issues, a CBP official reported that the backlogs created by these competing directives likely resulted in additional illegal border crossings,” the report, published Tuesday, went on to say. It added that “OIG saw evidence that limiting the volume of asylum-seekers entering at ports of entry leads some aliens who would otherwise seek legal entry into the United States to cross the border illegally. According to one Border Patrol supervisor, the Border Patrol sees an increase in illegal entries when aliens are metered at ports of entry.” In other words, while insisting that there would be no consequences for asylum-seekers who tried to enter the U.S. the “right” way, the administration was closing off that possibility and forcing people to cross illegally.

Citing Trump’s Racism, a Federal Judge Restores Protections for Immigrants Fleeing Wars and Disasters

On October 3, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Chen issued a preliminary injunction that prohibits the administration from stripping temporary protected status from immigrants who fled wars and natural disasters in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Sudan between 1997 and 2010 to seek refuge in the U.S. The injunction will allow these immigrants to remain in the country legally and with work authorization until the lawsuit challenging the administration’s temporary protected status terminations is resolved in the courts. With the government almost certain to appeal the decision, and with the liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals likely to uphold it, this ultimately leaves the fate of temporary protected status in the hands of the Supreme Court. The futures of temporary protected status-holders and their families thus hang on the outcome of the confirmation battle over Judge Brett Kavanaugh, or a replacement nominee. For the time being, however, this ruling affords them a temporary reprieve. ...

The court ruled that there is ample evidence that the administration’s termination decisions were motivated by President Donald Trump’s racism. Trump has famously referred to Mexican immigrants as “rapists;” called for a “shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”; claimed that 15,000 recent Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS”; contended that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts”; and, in a discussion about temporary protected status, wondered why the U.S. was admitting immigrants from “shithole countries” instead of places like Norway. Chen pointed to these examples as “evidence that President Trump harbors an animus against non-white, non-European aliens.”

Trump’s openly displayed racial prejudices, the court concluded, may have influenced former Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke and current Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to terminate temporary protected status for the four poor, nonwhite countries regardless of whether the conditions in those countries justified it. Following their lead, agency staffers appear to have suppressed, obscured, and cherry-picked data in their reviews of country conditions in order to conform to this “pre-ordained result desired by the White House.”

Lift Us Up: Meet the Activists on the Front Lines of the Battle for Educational Justice in America

Missouri reduced to just one abortion clinic as new regulations take effect

Missouri now has just one clinic providing abortions, after the only other clinic in the state that performs the procedure failed to adhere to new state requirements. Federal appeals court judges ruled last month that Missouri can enforce a requirement that doctors must have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals before they can perform abortions. The judges issued a mandate on Monday for that rule to officially take effect.

The Columbia Planned Parenthood clinic was unable to secure physician privileges to comply with the requirement, so it cancelled abortions scheduled for Wednesday, which would have been the first since the mandate was issued, the Planned Parenthood Great Plains spokeswoman, Emily Miller, said. The clinic continues to provide other healthcare services.

“We are unable to provide abortion services now, so we’ve been working with patients who were on the schedule for today for abortion appointments to let them know what their alternatives are,” Miller said.

Women seeking abortions in Missouri can go to Planned Parenthood’s St Louis – which is now the only abortion facility in the state of 6.1 million people – or travel to neighboring states, she said.

Freedom Rider: The Kavanaugh Farce

The Supreme Court nomination process is often reduced to drama and its importance reduced to irrelevancy. That is the way Democrats like Barack Obama and John Kerry acted when they were senators. They declined to use their power to filibuster and scuttle the right wing nominations they claimed were so antithetical to their beliefs. But thanks to them and other Democrats the Supreme Court is now firmly in the hands of Republican ideologues and protestations about Brett Kavanaugh are little more than kabuki theater. The Kavanaugh nomination has as its backdrop accusations of sexual assault going back decades. This important issue is now treated as an opportunity for Democratic Party grandstanding. Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perezlet the cat out of the bag himself. When pressed by a reporter he admitted that the DNC wouldn’t withhold assistance to Democratic Party senators who voted to confirm Kavanaugh. ...

The Republicans have also outdone themselves in providing theatrics. They send attack dogs like Lindsay Graham to make their base happy but then send Jeff Flake to play good cop and request a flimsy FBI investigation.

Democrats routinely keep leftists in line by invoking the federal judiciary. Anyone who wants peace, a protected social safety net or anything else the Democrats don’t care about is told to think about the Supreme Court and keep voting for the party that never fights for them. Democrats are the cause of most of our problems and finger pointing about lifetime appointments is just another ruse to silence anyone who is paying attention to their treachery. ...

The Kavanaugh circus is proof that neither party is concerned about constitutional protections. When Kavanaugh helped George W. Bush legalize torture the Democrats were silent. They took a dive then and they are continuing their tradition of going along to get along. Meanwhile the so-called resistance perform pathetic grandstanding of their own, which continues the worst of Washington’s evil doing. They may tell women to black out their social media profiles, or walk off their jobs or take part in some other symbolic act. If they were at all serious they would protest all of the rotten institutions, including the Democrats who put the federal judiciary securely in Republican hands.

If Kavanaugh didn’t exist the Democrats would have to invent him. He is the perfect target for their faux outrage and creates a smoke screen for their people to rally against without asking hard questions about how their party has been brought to irrelevance.

Senate receives FBI report on Kavanaugh sexual misconduct claims

Brett Kavanaugh: key Republicans express satisfaction with FBI report

Two key Republicans whose support for Brett Kavanaugh hinges on an FBI report into allegations of sexual misconduct against him have expressed satisfaction with its scope and findings, boosting Kavanaugh’s chances of being confirmed to the US supreme court. The confidential FBI report about allegations that Kavanaugh sexually abused women three decades ago was made available for senators to view on Thursday morning.

“It appears to be a very thorough investigation,” said Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine. Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican of Arizona, whose last-minute revolt at a vote last week triggered the supplemental FBI background check into the allegations, said: “We’ve seen no additional corroborating information.”

Both senators are seen as critical swing votes for the hardline conservative judge’s nomination to America’s highest bench. They have not said how they intend to vote at a crucial Senate ballot on his confirmation expected on Friday. ...

On Thursday, the Senate judiciary committee chair, Chuck Grassley, said the FBI report “found no hint of misconduct” but Democrats criticised the investigation, implying that it was narrow in scope to protect Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee. “Having received a briefing on all of the documents, I disagree with Senator Grassley’s statement that there was no hint of misconduct,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer told reporters. He did not elaborate, citing confidentiality constraints.

Reports are emerging of crippling shortages of whitewash products in the Washington D.C. area.

FBI background check of Kavanaugh appears to have been highly curtailed

The FBI background check of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh appeared to remain curtailed in its scope, opening up the possibility that the bureau would again face criticism for what some will view as a lackluster investigation. Although complete details of the findings have yet to be released, the inquiry seems to have focused mostly on an allegation by Christine Blasey Ford, a research psychologist in California, who alleges Kavanaugh assaulted her decades ago at a party in Maryland, when both were in high school. ...

In an interview on CNN on Thursday, White House spokesman Raj Shah said the FBI had contacted 10 people and interviewed nine of them.

The investigation was always unlikely to prove whether Kavanaugh is guilty of sexual misconduct decades ago. But the inquiry’s limited scope — which was dictated by the White House, along with a Friday deadline — is likely to exacerbate the partisan tension surrounding Kavanaugh’s nomination. Even before the investigation ended, several people who said they had information that could be useful said they ended up mired in bureaucracy when they tried to get in touch with the FBI. Democrats also cried foul aboutwhat they considered inappropriate parameters that the White House seemed to be imposing on the bureau.

President Trump has insisted publicly that he was not curtailing the inquiry. But privately, the White House restricted the FBI from delving deeply into Kavanaugh’s drinking in high school and college and exploring whether he lied to Congress about his alcohol use, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Some of those involved in the case complained that the bureau did not follow leads that were offered to it.

The FBI didn’t look into whether Kavanaugh lied under oath about blacking out, report says

The United States’ top investigative body reportedly won’t deliver details on “boofing,” playing the “devil’s triangle,” or whether President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee ever blacked out while drinking with his elite prep school posse. ... During his Senate testimony last week, Kavanaugh repeatedly said that while he liked beer (and still likes beer to this day), he never once blacked out and certainly never assaulted Ford — or anyone else, as two other women have accused him — while under the influence. His former classmates at Yale, however, have since come out in droves to refresh his memory. ...

If the report concluded that Kavanaugh did lie about his drinking to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that would call his credibility into question and, in turn, his assurance that he never assaulted Ford. On top of that, lying under oath is a crime.

The FBI, however, wasn’t interested in interviewing Kavanaugh’s former classmates, the New Yorker reported. Deborah Ramirez, who accused Kavanaugh of exposing himself to her during a drunken party at Yale, told the New Yorker, “I feel like I’m being silenced.” Several witnesses told the magazine that agents never contacted them about the alleged incident, despite attempts to reach out to the bureau themselves.

Kavanaugh Pal, Mark Judge, Erases His Creepy Social Media History

Increasingly, the much-aligned U.S. media appears to be doing the job that the FBI failed to do in its first six background checks of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The FBI’s seventh background check isn’t looking much better either, thus far. According to reporting at NBC, even Kerry Berchem, a law-partner at the 900+ lawyer firm, Akin Gump, couldn’t get the FBI to respond to evidence she offered suggesting the possibility of witness tampering by Kavanaugh and/or his team. Akin Gump’s roster of legal luminaries includes multiple former U.S. attorneys and former district attorneys.

There is also growing suspicions that there is a coordinated coverup taking place involving the key, corroborating witness, Mark Judge. The Senate Judiciary Committee refused to subpoena Judge to testify at the September 27 Kavanaugh hearing; Judge has obtained a high-priced criminal defense attorney with ties to the George W. Bush administration in which Kavanaugh worked; he has deleted his entire history of social media posts which include really creepy photos of young girls lying spread eagle on a bed looking drugged. Fortunately for the public, various bloggers and media outlets have archived the videos or taken screen shots of them before Judge took them down. CNN asked Judge’s attorney, Barbara Van Gelder, about those videos yesterday. She had this to say: “Mr. Judge took down his YouTube site several weeks ago. Someone has inappropriately uploaded old Mark Judge videos without Mark Judge’s knowledge or consent. We will be reporting this matter to YouTube and we request that you do not republish these unauthorized videos.” ...

In point of fact, a lot of the YouTube videos are not that old, ranging from 10 months ago to a few years ago. The New York Times has not succumbed to the threat from Van Gelder. It made its own YouTube video about Mark Judge’s history and included photos of the young women from Judge’s videos. If Kavanaugh was looking for a credible character witness to offer up to the current FBI investigation, it’s definitely not going to be Judge if the FBI takes the time to look at his objectification of young women looking dazed and spread-eagle on a bed or in a bathtub. The women appear to be in their teens or early twenties while Judge would have been in his early fifties.

The Internet Archive Publishes Brett Kavanaugh’s 1983 Yearbook, a Key Document in Nomination Battle

As scrutiny of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s high school years intensifies amid accusations of sexual assault, much has been written about a series of allusive references to alcohol and girls that Kavanaugh and his classmates made in their 1983 yearbook at Georgetown Preparatory School. Now, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital archive, has published the “Cupola” yearbook — only a few pages of which had been made public before. ...

Before today, only some of the yearbook pages — like Kavanaugh’s and that of his close friend Mark Judge — were published by a small number of news organizations, including The Intercept and the New York Times. “By providing access to the 1983 Georgetown Prep yearbook, the Internet Archive is serving its mission as a library, helping people more fully understand the context of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court,” said Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, which provided a statement to The Intercept to explain the decision to publish the yearbook (which is unredacted, but not a complete copy — some pages relating to faculty and lower classes are missing).

Kavanaugh has sought to downplay the yearbook’s relevance to his nomination, denouncing the public’s interest in it as “absurd.” But journalists and politicians have suggested the yearbook paints a more frank picture of Kavanaugh’s high school years than his testimony, or even his calendars, do. ...

The Intercept found that more than three dozen Georgetown Prep alumni who signed a letter in support of Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Senate Judiciary Committee also listed themselves in the yearbook as partaking in some of Kavanaugh’s “extracurriculars,” like the 100 kegs challenge. While not on Kavanaugh’s senior page, references among some in his circle of friends to a “Ridge Klux Klan” and “Killer Q’s” have also raised questions, many of which remain unanswered.

An excellent article detailing what our dark corporate overlords are expecting from Justice Rapey McPerjurer. Worth a full read, here's an excerpt from the intro:

Corporate Front Groups Lobby to Confirm Brett Kavanaugh

Business groups with interests before the U.S. Supreme Court have orchestrated a multifaceted campaign to pressure the Senate to swiftly confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the nation’s highest court. The advocacy reaches across the influence economy of Washington, D.C., with the largest corporate lobbying groups and billionaires working in concert with Republican operatives to elevate Kavanaugh to a lifetime posting atop the judiciary. Few businesses, however, have stamped their names on the effort. Most major corporations and wealthy donors are instead using 501(c) nonprofit groups that do not require donor transparency to air upward of $15 million in reported advertising spending in order to convince the public to support Kavanaugh’s nomination. Other conservative groups contributing to the ad war have not disclosed how much they are spending, likely bringing the total much higher.

Among the groups publicly campaigning for Kavanaugh to be confirmed are the giants of pro-business lobbying — organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity. Lesser-known, business-funded political groups, such as the Republican Attorneys General Association, are also spearheading campaigns. Meanwhile, a host of industry groups — funded by many of the same corporate interests that fund the larger lobbying organizations — are eagerly waiting for Kavanaugh to be elevated and rule on cases that will affect their businesses.

While the particular funders of pro-Kavanaugh campaigns are obscured, the goals of the groups behind the effort are far from hidden. The interests backing Kavanaugh are hoping that his confirmation will tilt the court and undercut potentially dozens of government policies on clean elections, environmental regulations, bank regulations, and predatory lending, in addition to weakening organized labor.

Worth a full read, if you can stand to be disgusted by the brutality of the dark corporate overlords' thugs:

Standing Rock activist faces prison after officer shot him in the face

Marcus Mitchell lay facedown on the snowy North Dakota prairie, blood pouring through the gaping wound on the left side of his face. It was just past midnight on 19 January 2017, and a Morton county sheriff’s deputy had just shot the 21-year-old indigenous activist with a bean bag pellet amid a demonstration near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation against the Dakota Access pipeline. The lead pellet entered Mitchell’s left eye socket, shattering the orbital wall of his eye and his cheekbone, and ripping open a flap of skin nearly to his left ear. Paramedics brought Mitchell to the Sanford medical center in Bismarck, North Dakota, where hospital personnel removed the lead pellet from his face. But the harrowing ordeal was only beginning.

Law enforcement officers and hospital staff concealed Mitchell’s whereabouts from family members and supporters, who spent a frantic day and a half searching for him, multiple witnesses say. When a group of family members and legal workers finally discovered him on the hospital’s fourth floor, he was shackled to a gurney.

More than 18 months later, Mitchell, who is Dine’ (Navajo), is being prosecuted in relation to the incident, even as the police officers involved appear to have faced no repercussions. He faces class A misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass and obstruction of a government function, which carry a collective maximum sentence of two years in prison and a $6,000 fine. His trial is scheduled for 8 November in Mandan, North Dakota.

Mitchell has permanently lost vision in his left eye and partially lost hearing in his left ear. He can no longer feel or taste in parts of his face. His cervical spine was also damaged, leading to extreme bruising of the discs and nerves in the back of his head. As police officers kneeled atop him, torquing his arms behind his back to place him in handcuffs, he says he felt like he was drowning in his own blood. ...

Mitchell’s trial is among the final ones scheduled in relation to the DAPL project. The prosecution alleges that Mitchell trespassed on a bridge when it was closed to the public and “obstructed law enforcement” as it was attempting to clear people from the bridge. Despite the trauma of his experience, Mitchell says the sacrifices he has made are worth it to stand up for the earth and for indigenous self-determination. “I don’t want my grandchildren to live in a world that’s barren and dead,” Mitchell says. “I want them to live in a world that’s fertile and full of water. I don’t want to tell my grandchildren that I did nothing.”

US plan to genetically alter crops via insects feared to be biological war plan

Government-backed researchers in America are aiming to use virus-carrying insects to genetically engineer crops – raising fears the technology could be used for biological weapons. A new article in the journal Science explores the shadowy program funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). The program aims to disperse infectious, genetically modified viruses that have been engineered to alter the chromosomes of crops – using insects to spread the viruses to the plants.

Researchers have received more than $27m in contracts to pursue the genetic engineering scheme, in a program dubbed Insect Allies. The agency describes the research as a way to improve crop security: bugs like aphids, leafhoppers and whiteflies will be used to spread a virus to plants including corn and tomatoes, which will then impart beneficial genes making the plants resistant to disease or drought.

But in the Science article, an international team of scientists and lawyers warn that the technology could be put to more nefarious purposes, including military applications. “It is our opinion that the knowledge to be gained from this program appears very limited in its capacity to enhance US agriculture or respond to natural emergencies,” they write. “As a result, the program may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery.”

If true, that would violate the international Biological Weapons Convention, say the authors, who include Guy Reeves, a biologist and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, and Silja Voeneky, co-director of the Institute for Public Law at the University of Freiburg.

Scientists at universities including Ohio State, Penn State, the University of California, Davis and many others are working on the research. The program is the first of its kind. Experiments have been conducted only in sealed greenhouses and labs, not in the open.

Also of Interest

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

Chicago Will Burn if Laquan McDonald’s Killer Walks

Taibbi: Chatting With Bernie Sanders About a Looming Financial Crisis

One Man Could End World Hunger, but He Won’t

Berkeley Police Posted Mugshots Of Activists To ‘Create Counter-Narrative’ Of Protests Against Far-Right

Brett Kavanaugh Also Lied About His Rulings on the Environment

Don't thank Bezos for giving Amazon workers a much-needed raise

How To Make A Solid, Customized News Stream That Isn’t Manipulated By Silicon Valley

While Nestlé extracts millions of litres from their land, residents have no drinking water

The aftermath of Hurricane Florence - in pictures

A Little Night Music

George "Harmonica" Smith & Chicago Blues Band - Key To The Highway

George "Harmonica" Smith - Mississippi River Blues

George "Harmonica" Smith - Help Me

Little George Smith - Blues In The Dark

George Smith – No Time For Jive

Little George Smith - Blues Stay Away

George 'Harmonica' Smith - Last Night (Tribute To Little Walter)

Little George Smith - Rocking

George "Harmonica" Smith & Chicago Blues Band - Tell Me Mama

Harmonica George - Get in the kitchen and burn