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"The emotional security and political stability in this country entitle us to be a nuclear power."

-- Anthony Mason

News and Opinion

Experts warn Joe Biden supplying nuclear submarines to Australia threatens US security

There is growing pressure on the new Aukus partners to scrap plans to use weapons-grade uranium on submarines. A group of former US officials and experts has written to the US president, Joe Biden, warning the deal could threaten US national security by encouraging hostile nations to obtain highly enriched uranium (HEU).

At the same time, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull says if Australia does buy the submarine reactors without a domestic nuclear industry – and therefore the nuclear expertise – it will be “more plug and pray” than “plug and play”.

The former Nato deputy secretary general Rose Gottemoeller has called on Australia to make a new deal with France to use their uranium, which is not weapons grade. That would heal the rift with France and ease nuclear proliferation fears, she said. In the letter to Biden, the seven signatories called on him to commit to using low-enriched uranium (LEU), which is what the French use in their submarine program.

“The Aukus deal to supply Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines fuelled with weapons-grade uranium could have serious negative impacts on the global nuclear non-proliferation regime and thereby on US national security,” wrote the group, which includes former White House officials.

At the heart of their concern is that if Australia, as a non-nuclear country, gets HEU then other countries would use that example to justify their own acquisition of the material. Iranian officials intimated to the UN that, like Australia, they might want HEU for naval purposes.

US nuclear-powered submarine hits submerged object in South China Sea

A nuclear powered US navy attack submarine has struck an object while submerged in international waters in the South China Sea, officials have said.

Eleven sailors were hurt – two suffered moderate injuries and the rest had minor scrapes and bruises, officials said. All were treated on the sub.

In a brief statement on Thursday that provided few details of the incident, which happened five days ago, US Pacific Fleet said the USS Connecticut remained in a “safe and stable condition”, that there were no life-threatening injuries and the sub was still fully operational.

The Seawolf-class submarine’s nuclear propulsion plant was not affected, it added.

“The extent of damage to the remainder of the submarine is being assessed,” the statement said, adding that the incident will be investigated.

Key US Witness Against Assange Arrested in Iceland

A key U.S. witness in the conspiracy to commit computer intrusion charge against imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange who earlier this year admitted to fabricating evidence he gave to the FBI has been arrested in Iceland, according to a report in the Icelandic newsmagazine Stundin. Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson was arrested in Reykjavík on Sept. 24 and put in Iceland’s highest security prison under a “rarely invoked” law that allows police in Iceland to detain someone considered to be in the middle of crime spree, Stundin reported.

Thordarson “was brought before a judge after police requested indefinite detention intended to halt an ongoing crime spree. The judge apparently agreed that Thordarson’s repeated, blatant and ongoing offences against the law put him at high risk for continued re-offending,” Stundin said. Thordarson admitted in an interview with Stundin last month that he was engaged in ongoing criminal activity.

It is not clear if Thordarson recanting his testimony is related to his recent arrest. In his September interview Thordarson said the FBI promised not to reveal to Icelandic authorities any crimes he committed in Iceland in exchange for his cooperation. ... But Thordarson also said if he lied to the FBI the immunity deal would be off.

Canada invited Chelsea Manning to country just so she could be thrown out

Canadian government lawyers recently invited US whistleblower Chelsea Manning to travel to a hearing in Montreal – so that border agents could then physically remove her from the country. The bizarre request, which was eventually denied by an adjudicator, was made ahead of an immigration hearing set to begin on Thursday for Manning, whose previous attempts to enter Canada have been denied. ...

Manning’s lawyers have fiercely contested the ban on her entering Canada, arguing that an attempt by the country’s federal government to block “one of the most well-known whistleblowers in modern history” from entering the country would offend constitutional and press freedoms.

The hearing is expected to last two days, with a judgment issued in the coming weeks.

Abu Zubaydah Was Tortured for Years at CIA Black Sites. Biden Is Trying to Keep the Abuse Secret.

‘We have failed Yemen’: UN human rights council ends war crime probe

Bahrain, Russia and other members of the UN human rights council have pushed through a vote to shut down the body’s war crimes investigations in Yemen, in a stinging defeat for western states who sought to keep the mission going. Members narrowly voted to reject a resolution led by the Netherlands to give the independent investigators another two years to monitor atrocities in Yemen’s conflict.

It marked the first time in the council’s 15-year history that a resolution was defeated.

The independent investigators have said in the past that potential war crimes have been committed by all sides in the seven-year conflict that has pitted a Saudi-led coalition against Iran-allied Houthi rebels.

More than 100,000 people have been killed and 4 million have been displaced, activist groups say.

The Dutch ambassador, Peter Bekker, said the vote was a major setback. “I cannot help but feel that this council has failed the people of Yemen,” he told delegates.

Secret group of US military trainers has been in Taiwan for at least a year

The US has been secretly maintaining a small contingent of military trainers in Taiwan for at least a year, according to a new report, the latest sign of the rising stakes in US-China rivalry.

About two dozen US special forces soldiers and an unspecified number of marines are now training Taiwanese forces, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The trainers were first sent to Taiwan by the Trump administration but their presence had not been reported until now.

The report came as President Tsai Ing-wen said on Friday that Taiwan will “do whatever it takes to defend its freedom and democratic way of life”.

US troops have not been permanently based on the island since 1979, when Washington established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.

China’s foreign ministry issued a statement urging the US to stop military aid to Taiwan. “China will take all necessary steps to protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the statement said.

Poland 'fundamentally challenging' legal order of EU

Polish court rules EU laws incompatible with its constitution

Poland’s constitutional tribunal has ruled that some EU laws are in conflict with the country’s constitution, taking a major step towards a “legal Polexit” with far-reaching consequences for Warsaw’s funding and future relations with the bloc. The tribunal, whose legitimacy is contested after multiple appointments of judges loyal to the ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, said some provisions of EU treaties and EU court rulings clashed with Poland’s highest law, adding that EU institutions “act beyond the scope of their competences”. ...

In a strongly-worded initial reaction, the European Commission said the decision on Thursday raised “serious concerns”. It reaffirmed that “EU law has primacy over national law, including constitutional provisions”. The commission added that rulings by the European court of justice are “binding on all member state’s authorities, including national courts”, and said it would “not hesitate to make use of its powers under the treaties to safeguard the uniform application and integrity of union law”.

Despite opinion polls showing more than 80% of Poles back EU membership, Poland’s PiS-led government is embroiled in a lengthening and increasingly acrimonious series of disputes with the 27-member bloc on questions ranging from judicial reforms and media freedoms to LGBT rights. The Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, brought the case in March, arguing Brussels has no right to interfere with the judicial systems of EU member states and the government’s reforms were needed to remove communist-era influences. ...

The primacy of European laws over national ones is a key tenet of European integration and Polish opposition politicians have repeatedly said challenging it jeopardises Poland’s long-term future in the EU and also the stability of the bloc itself.

Are US spies behind Pandora Papers? And shady Facebook 'whistleblower' wants more censorship

European parliament approves tougher rules on offshore wealth

Members of the European parliament have voted for tighter rules on the super-rich who move their wealth offshore, in a resounding vote that reflects widespread anger and exasperation in the wake of the Pandora papers revelations. Although the European parliament’s resolution does not bind EU member states who wield decision-making power on taxation, it puts wind in the sails of reformers, who say transparency changes introduced in the last decade have not gone far enough.

One of the parliament’s main targets is reforming the EU’s code of conduct on business taxation, a process led by a little-known group of government officials, which is meant to ensure tax policies of EU member states avoid a race to the bottom. Since 2017, the group has also been responsible for drawing up the EU blacklist of tax havens, which currently consists of nine jurisdictions outside the bloc.

French socialist MEP, Aurore Lalucq, who drafted the resolution, said the code of conduct needed to become “a sharp weapon in the fight against tax avoidance and evasion” and proposed a revised code called Fatal, the framework on aggressive tax arrangements and low-rates.

Under her proposal, jurisdictions with very low or zero tax rates would be automatically classed as tax havens. EU ministers were heavily criticised on Tuesday when they removed three jurisdictions from the bloc’s blacklist on tax havens, including one (the British overseas territory of Anguilla) with a zero tax rate.

David Sirota: Sackler Family Seeks Get Out Of Jail FREE Card, Recruits POWERFUL Corporate Lobbyists

CBO Shows How to Cut $1 Trillion From Pentagon

Progressive foreign policy experts on Thursday pointed to a new Congressional Budget Office report that concludes it is possible to slash a trillion dollars in military spending over the coming decade without reducing force effectiveness as further proof that the United States can and should prioritize investments in tackling pandemics, inequality, and the climate crisis. ...

Asked to "examine the effects on U.S. forces of a substantially smaller defense budget," the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said it "created three broad options to illustrate the range of strategies that the United States could pursue under a budget that would be cut gradually by a total of $1 trillion, or 14%, between 2022 and 2031."

In all three options, the CBO slashed only full-time active forces, while leaving the less expensive reserves at their current levels. While acknowledging that "none of the plans are without risk," the study concludes that the Pentagon can reduce spending without sacrificing security.

According to the report:

In all three of CBO's options, units would be staffed, trained, and equipped at the same levels as they are today—there would simply be fewer units or a different combination of units. CBO did not explore approaches that would create what is called a hollow force or tiered readiness strategy, in which units are manned, equipped, or trained to lower levels than are needed to be fully operational. CBO chose to retain fully staffed units because, though personnel are expensive, partially staffed units would not be able to execute their missions, reducing the value of the U.S. threat to strike against an adversary.

William D. Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, said in a statement that the new CBO report "is an extremely timely reminder that it is possible to provide a robust defense of the United States and its allies for considerably less money than is being contemplated by either Congress or the Biden administration."

Hartung argued that "at a time when Congress is seeking to add $24 billion to a Pentagon budget proposal that far exceeds spending at the peak of the Korean or Vietnam wars, the CBO analysis offers an opportunity to step back and take a closer look at how much is actually necessary to protect the U.S. and its allies."

"At a time when the greatest risks to our lives and livelihoods are not military in nature," Hartung continued, "saving a trillion dollars that could be devoted to preventing pandemics, addressing climate change, or reducing racial and economic injustice is no small matter."

Senate approves short-term deal to raise debt ceiling and avert economic crisis

The US Senate has approved a deal to extend the government’s borrowing authority into December. The compromise between Republican and Democratic leaders would temporarily avert an unprecedented federal default that experts say would have devastated the economy.

With a 50-48 vote, senators agreed to increase the borrowing limit by $480bn, sufficient to prevent the US government from defaulting by keeping debt payments up until 3 December.

The bill will now go to the House for a vote and is expected to pass.

The deal has edged Washington back from a perilous standoff over lifting the nation’s borrowing cap, with Democratic senators accepting an offer from the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell. But the agreement does not do much to resolve larger disputes between the two parties.

McConnell made the offer a day earlier, just before Republicans were prepared to block longer-term legislation to suspend the debt limit and as Joe Biden and business leaders voiced their concerns that a default would disrupt government payments to millions of people and throw the country into recession.

Kellogg’s workers on why they’re striking

About 1,400 Kellogg’s workers at four US plants have gone on strike after their current union contracts expired and amid accusations that the cereal giant is offshoring jobs. The workers, represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), produce cereals for brands, including Rice Krispies, Fruit Loops, Frosted Flakes and Raisin Bran, at plants in Michigan, Tennessee, Nebraska and Pennsylvania.

Trevor Bidelman, president of BCTGM Local3G and a fourth-generation employee at the Kellogg’s plant in Battle Creek, Michigan, explained workers are on strike against a proposed two-tier system for current and new employees proposed by Kellogg’s. Bidelman said Kellogg’s wants to not offer pensions to new employees, remove cost of living provisions, and make changes in holiday pay and vacations. “We’re fighting for our future,” said Bidelman. “We made it very clear from the onset of negotiations that this was not something we’ll be able to accept.”

Shortly before the strike, Kellogg’s announced plans to cut 212 jobs at the Battle Creek, Michigan, plant over the next two years, including 174 positions represented by the union. The plant currently employs about 390 workers. Kellogg’s cited plans to streamline efforts and relocate cereal production to other facilities in North America as reasons for the job cuts.

“This is after just one year ago, we were hailed as heroes, as we worked through the pandemic, seven days a week, 16 hours a day. Now apparently, we are no longer heroes. Very quickly you can go from hero to zero,” added Bidelman. “We don’t have weekends, really. We just work seven days a week, sometimes 100 to 130 days in a row. For 28 days the machines run then rest three days for cleaning. They don’t even treat us as well as they do their machinery.”

The union took issue with Kellogg’s threatening to outsource jobs from the US to Mexico if workers refuse to accept their proposals. “The company continues to threaten to send additional jobs to Mexico if workers do not accept outrageous proposals that take away protections that workers have had for decades,” said the BCTGM president, Anthony Shelton, in a statement announcing the strikes.

Federal Judge Blocks Texas Abortion Ban, Blasts “Offensive Deprivation of Such an Important Right”

AT&T funds rightwing channel One America News, Reuters reveals

AT&T, the nation’s largest telecom provider, has been discovered to be a crucial cog in the operation of One America News, the rightwing news channel which has seen a rise in its viewership through its promotion of unfounded claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump.

A Reuters investigation revealed that AT&T has been the source of 90% of OAN’s revenue since the news channel was launched in 2013. AT&T disputed the report, claiming that their partnership with DirecTV merely “carried” the channel.

Robert Herring Sr, founder and CEO of OAN, which shares a large overlap of viewers with Fox News, said in 2019 during a deposition that the channel was the brainchild of AT&T executives.

“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” he said at the time, according to Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

AT&T provided millions of dollars in funds to OAN, with the company offering Herring $250m for the network, according to the report.

House Capitol attack panel subpoenas key planners of ‘Stop the Steal’ rally

The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack on Thursday issued new subpoenas to allies of Donald Trump as well as the organization affiliated with the “Stop the Steal” rally that deteriorated into the 6 January insurrection. The third tranche of subpoenas reflects the select committee’s overarching focus on the extent of Trump White House involvement in planning the Capitol attack, as they target entities connected to top executive branch officials and members of Congress.

House select committee investigators issued subpoenas compelling documents and testimony to Ali Alexander, a far-right activist who emerged as the chief architect of the “Stop the Steal” rally, and Nathan Martin, who was connected to permit applications for the rally. The subpoena letters noted Alexander made repeated references to the use of violence on 6 January, and claimed to have communicated with the White House and members of Congress about plans to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win. ...

The select committee also authorized a subpoena for Stop the Steal LLC, the corporation behind the rally. The subpoena letter demanded that the registered custodian of records for the group produce documents and appear for a closed-door deposition later this month.

The new subpoenas come a day after the Guardian first reported that Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, strategist Steve Bannon and defense department aide Kash Patel would resist the orders under instruction from Trump. House investigators had issued the subpoenas to the Trump aides with the threat of criminal prosecution for non-compliance, warning that the penalty for resisting the orders would be far graver under the Biden administration than during the Trump presidency.

Biden to restore Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante monuments

Joe Biden will expand two sprawling national monuments in Utah that were downsized significantly under Donald Trump, the state’s governor said on Thursday. The move marks a victory for environmental advocates and indigenous leaders who had fought for years to restore protections for the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments.

Bears Ears and the Grand Staircase-Escalante cover vast expanses of southern Utah where red rocks reveal petroglyphs and cliff dwellings and distinctive twin buttes bulge from a grassy valley. The Trump administration had cut Bears Ears, on lands considered sacred to Indigenous peoples, by 85% and slashed Grand Staircase-Escalante by nearly half. ...

Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, expressed disappointment in the administration’s decision over the monuments, which have been at the center of a long-running public lands tug-of-war between presidential administrations. The governor noted he had offered to work with the administration on a legislative solution. ...

Cox’s statement did not include specifics on how much of the monuments will be restored, and the White House and the US interior department declined immediate comment. An official announcement from Joe Biden is expected soon.

The Amazon rainforest is losing 200,000 acres a day. Soon it will be too late

Shortly before his 44th birthday, in December 1988, the Brazilian rubber tapper and environmental activist Chico Mendes predicted he would not live until Christmas. “At first,” he said, “I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.” Mendes had received death threats for years. The threats escalated when an aggressive rancher laid claim to a nearby forest reserve, where he intended to burn and level trees to create pasture for cattle. The rancher hired gunmen to prowl around Mendes’s neighborhood. Mendes publicly opposed the rancher, and continued to advocate for the human rights of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin, saying Brazil must save the most biodiverse forest in the world. Destroy it, he said, and we, the human race, will end up destroying ourselves.

Three days before Christmas, 1988, Mendes was shot dead by the rancher’s son. ...

Since Mendes’s murder, nearly 1 million sq km of the Amazon, an area roughly the size of Texas and New Mexico combined, have been destroyed, primarily in Brazil, but also in Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guyana. That equates to an average of some 200,000 acres every day, or 40 football fields per minute. In Brazil alone, home to the greatest expanse of forest, the rate of loss has increased by more than 30%. The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis.

Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded by pastureland will lose species in a process biogeographers call “ecosystem decay.”

In short, the Amazon is dying. Entire genetic libraries and symphonies of species – trees, birds, reptiles, insects and more, eons in the making, fine-tuned by natural selection – are being wiped out to make room for methane-belching cows. ... Robert Walker, a quantitative geographer at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American studies, has said that unless something unprecedented happens, he predicts that the greatest rain forest on earth will be wiped out by 2064.

Fast track to disaster? Brazil’s Grain Train plan raises fears for Amazon

The Final Countdown blared from speakers and the crowd broke into applause as one of Jair Bolsonaro’s top lieutenants strode into the Amazon auditorium with glad tidings of a railroad to the future. “The ‘Grain Train’ is going to happen,” Brazil’s infrastructure minister, Tarcísio de Freitas, told the hundreds of mostly male spectators who had flocked there in a caravan of high-end SUVs.

To the assembled members of Brazil’s agribusiness elite – among them several of the president’s most militant supporters – the “Ferrogrão” (Grain Train) is a long-held dream: an almost 1,000km railway that, if built, will link Brazil’s soya-growing heartlands with the northern ports that send their beans east to Asia.

“It’s fabulous. The region will explode,” celebrated Adenir da Silva, one of the excitable locals who had come to welcome Bolsonaro’s minister to Sinop, the agricultural boomtown where the planned railroad would begin. Behind him a crane had hoisted an enormous Brazil flag into the morning sky in honour of the VIP visitor.

To opponents, however, the R$25.2bn ($4.6bn/£3.4bn) project is a nightmare: yet another nail in the coffin of the world’s largest tropical rainforest and the indigenous populations who lived there long before Brazil was “discovered” by the Portuguese in 1500. ...

The Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) coalition, which claims the Grain Train will cause an “environmental and humanitarian catastrophe” comparable to the construction of the Trans-Amazonian highway in the 1970s and the more recent Belo Monte megadam.

Also of Interest

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

People Don't Become Homeless. This Cruel Society Makes Them Homeless.

‘This Is a Battle Between What People Need & What Money Wants.’ How’s That Going to End?

Assange’s Father: ‘They Just Want to Murder Him’

CIA Creates New Mission Center That Will Focus Solely on China

How The 'China is a Threat' Fake News Cycle Works

How The Structure Of The World Economy Made Shortages Inevitable

Indigenous Environmental Defenders Shut Down Peruvian Crude Oil Pipeline

The moon was volcanically active for longer than we thought, analysis of lunar rocks suggests

AOC & the Justice Dems donate $13 million to Democrat establishment consulting firm | Niko House

Prof. Wolff: China & the Fracturing of the American West

A Little Night Music

Paul Butterfield - In My Own Dream

Paul Butterfield Blues Band - East-West

Paul Butterfield Blues Band - Mystery Train

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band - Last hope's gone

Paul Butterfield Blues Band - Lovin' Cup

Paul Butterfield - Hot Tomato/I'm Going Home

Paul Butterfield Walter Horton - Have A Good Time

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band - One More Mile

Paul Butterfield Blues Band - Look Over Yonders Wall

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band - Fillmore West FM 1966-1969