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This evening's music features New Orleans jazz composer, bandleader and cornet player King Oliver. Enjoy!

“To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight - it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil - but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you chose, you elected, is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about.”

-- Matt Taibbi

News and Opinion

An excellent election wrap-up, worth a read:

Was This Really The Most Important Mid-Term Election of Our Lives? Maybe Not.

For an occasion so momentous, not much has changed. ... Democratic party leaders are uniformly war Democrats, devoted to the bombing of several countries, to maintaining US fleets in every ocean, over 800 US military bases in a hundred plus countries, and to keep spending more on the military than the next nine or ten countries combined. Although a good hundred Democrats in the 115th Congress have signed on to a watered down version of Medicare For All, Democratic leaders are not committed to educate the public so Democrats can use this to win in 2020, and nobody expects Nancy Pelosi and the gang to support debt forgiveness for student loans, free college tuition, rent control, a living wage tied to actual prices, reining in the frackers and oil companies, or laws that would enable workers to organize unions and protect themselves. All these are things Democratic voters want, but Democratic leaders in the new 116th Congress do not.

Existing Democrats did not just overwhelmingly approve Trump’s record military budget proposal, they heaped upon it an additional amount greater than the entire amount spent by Russia while American communities are cutting and closing public schools, libraries and community hospitals and privatizing infrastructure from crumbling roads and bridges to the Post Office and the Veterans Administration. The new Democratic House leaders are expected to be Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, both 78 years old, and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, age 79. Pelosi is in that spot because she raised $129 million for Democrats in the 2016 cycle. American legislative leaders like Pelosi in the federal Congress and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams who headed Democrats in the Georgia state House rise and fall on their ability as rainmakers, bringing in investments — I mean donations from wealthy corporate interests and individual donors, many of whom the law allows to remain anonymous. It is these big donor Democrats to whom Democratic party leaders are loyal, not to those who merely vote for Democrats. ...

In the real world, the phrase “we’ll hold their feet to the fire” is a powerful metaphor. Wouldn’t it be lovely to strap your shoeless alderman, your water commissioner, your school board member, your state senator or your member of Congress to some kind of table and crank the hot coals closer an inch at a time under searching inquiry about this or that piece of the peoples business? But it’s a fantasy, the system has never worked that way. In the real world politicians are entrepreneurs, subject only to their own consciences and political table manners. Rather than propagating the feet to the fire fantasy we’re better off looking at the factual, the actual history of the Democrats about to lead the the House in the 116th Congress. The last time Nancy’s crew got control of the House was the 2006 election. Leading Democrats like Detroit’s John Conyers had crisscrossed the country howling for the impeachment of Cheney and Bush. Conyers’ 40 years seniority made him the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, with the power to call impeachment hearings. The red button was on his desk. But he wouldn’t push it. Conyers’ weak and cowardly excuse was “what would Fox News say?” That’s not wishful thinking, like “feet to the fire.” It’s the real history of the real Democrats who just won the House. ...

Candidates and parties in the election just past were chosen by moneyed elites. Corporate media disciplined its pollsters, reporters editorial boards and commentators to keep discussion of privatization and poverty at home and empire abroad off the table. Millions of Democrat and independent leaning voters were struck from the rolls or prevented from taking part, and federal judges have affirmed that US voters have no right to verifiable audits of elections. The president really is a racist demagogue who wants to lock up hundreds of thousands of immigrants today, and maybe Americans tomorrow. No joke. Fascist mobs, encouraged by the NRA and smiled upon by local cops are becoming more common. ... So yeah, elections are important and all. But anybody who tells you dancing to this crooked music is what our ancestors fought and died for is talking nonsense. Elections and voting are frequently not the most important things happening in the struggle for human liberation. And this was probably not the Most Crucial Election of All Times.

Former V.P. Candidate On Media Censorship w/ Ajamu Baraka

Nancy Pelosi Wants to Find “Common Ground” With Donald Trump. But Her Job Right Now Is to Fight Fascism.

She just doesn’t get it. “We will strive for bipartisanship, with fairness on all sides,” announced Nancy Pelosi on the night of November 6. “We must try” to find “common ground” with President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, she told a rally in Washington, D.C. as victory after victory in the midterms confirmed a new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, adding: “ We’ll have a bipartisan marketplace of ideas that makes our democracy strong.”

My heart sank as I listened to her speak. Did she really believe this platitudinous nonsense? And if so, where has she been the past two years? In a coma? ...

Has Pelosi really not been paying attention as the GOP, led by Trump, has mounted an assault on everything from voting rights to racial equality to planet Earth itself? And if she has, why then the continuing obsession with “bipartisanship”? “Politics is not a parlor game where good manners always win out,” wrote left-wing activist and co-founder of Data for Progress, Sean McElwee, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. “It involves questions of power and privilege, which cannot be solved merely with bipartisan brunches.”

Let's be clear: American democracy is in crisis. America’s minorities are, literally, under fire. If the dishonest, racist, corrupt, anti-democratic Donald Trump isn’t worthy of impeachment, then who is? Pelosi should take a pause from her ongoing media tour and listen to the recent discussion that my colleague Jeremy Scahill hosted on his podcast, Intercepted, with NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Fascist Modernities” and an expert on Benito Mussolini, and Yale University philosopher Jason Stanley, author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.”

“I think right now, we are heading towards, more and more, a one-party state,” Stanley said, explaining Trump’s use of “classic fascist tactics.” Ben-Ghiat said she believed that “we are heading toward … a militarized authoritarian surveillance state,” and “we’re in the middle of a battle for the survival of democracy.” Got that? A battle for the survival of democracy. Yet the leader of the Democrats in the House wants to talk infrastructure spending and prescription drugs. Her counterpart in the Senate is busy making noise about the size of seats on airplanes. They both seem unable to rise to the occasion; unwilling to recognize the existential danger that Trump poses to the republic.

After Years of Repression, Iraq’s Climate Threatens New Miseries

Iraq’s climate stresses are worsening, raising the prospect of a hotter, drier future for a country which has already seen widespread devastation. It’s been invaded and bombed, had a third of its territory taken over by terrorist groups, hundreds of thousands have been killed and much of its infrastructure has been destroyed. Now Iraq and its 39 million people are facing the hazards of climate change; a prolonged drought and soaring temperatures earlier this year ruined crops. Swathes of land in what was, in ancient times, one of the richest agricultural regions on Earth are drying up and turning into desert.

A recent report by the Expert Working Group on Climate-related Security Risks – made up of academics including members of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) – paints a stark picture of what’s happening in Iraq. “Climate change is currently manifesting itself in prolonged heat waves, erratic precipitation, higher than average temperatures and increased disaster intensity”, says the report. ...

Reductions in rainfall and other climate-related events are only one part of what is a disaster unfolding in one of the most diverse and ecologically rich areas in the Middle East. Misuse of upriver water resources by the Baghdad government and dams constructed across the Iraqi border, in Iran and Turkey, are severely reducing water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates. As water levels have plummeted, salinity has increased dramatically, particularly in the south of the country, due to evaporation and saltwater intrusion from the Gulf. Often, because of salinity and pollution, there is little or no drinkable tap water in Basra, a city of more than 2 million.

'Appalling' Khashoggi audio shocked Saudi intelligence – Erdogan

Audio evidence related to the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi contains appalling details of the crime, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said, as he continues to pile pressure on the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

Erdogan’s latest intervention came as the New York Times reported that a member of the Saudi hit team dispatched to Istanbul to kill Khashoggi told one of his superiors by phone to “tell your boss” the operation was accomplished, an apparent reference to Prince Mohammed, and a Turkish newspaper published x-ray images of the team’s luggage, which included defibrillators and syringes.

The audio recordings shocked a Saudi intelligence official, Erdogan told reporters on his return to Ankara on Monday night from first world war commemorations in France, where he said the killing was discussed with his US, French and German counterparts. “We played the recordings regarding this murder to everyone who wanted them from us. Our intelligence organisation did not hide anything. We played them to all who wanted them including the Saudis, the USA, France, Canada, Germany, Britain,” he said. “The recordings are really appalling. Indeed, when the Saudi intelligence officer listened to the recordings he was so shocked he said: ‘This one must have taken heroin, only someone who takes heroin would do this’.”

Erdogan said Turkey was “waiting patiently” for Prince Mohammed, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, to shed more light on the circumstances surrounding Khashoggi’s death.

Pentagon launched new classified operation to support Saudi coalition in Yemen

Even as the humanitarian crisis precipitated by Saudi Arabia’s more-than-three-year war in Yemen has deepened, the Pentagon earlier this year launched a new classified operation to support the kingdom’s military operations there, according to a Defense Department document that appears to have been posted online inadvertently.

The existence of the new classified operation, code-named Yukon Journey, was partially revealed in a Defense Department inspector general report posted online earlier this month, which noted that “the Secretary of Defense designated three new named contingency operations: Operation Yukon Journey, and operations in Northwest Africa and East Africa.”

The three operations, which focus on al-Qaida and ISIS, are classified, the report notes, and the Pentagon has not publicly disclosed their location beyond saying they are in the Middle East and Africa. But another document posted earlier this year on a Pentagon-affiliated website identifies Yukon Journey as a Central Command operation supporting the “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Partner Nations in Yemen.”

The existence of a classified operation in Yemen raises the possibility that even as the Pentagon scales back unclassified operations, such as refueling Saudi-led coalition aircraft, covert support, to include possible U.S. special forces on the ground, could continue. The document, marked for official use only, was posted on the All Partners Access Network, an unclassified website the Defense Department uses to share information with NGOs and humanitarian organizations.

Total Deaths in Yemen Top More Than 100,000

An NGO responsible for reporting on war deaths in Yemen has acknowledged that it has underestimated the casualties in the three-year-old conflict by at least five to one. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project had originally estimated that about 10,000 people had been killed in the war in Yemen, roughly the same number reported by the World Health Organization. WHO surveys are regularly cited as estimates of war deaths in Yemen by UN agencies and the world’s media. But ACLED now estimates the true number of people killed in Yemen is probably between 70,000 and 80,000.

ACLED’s estimates do not include the thousands of Yemenis who have died from the war’s indirect consequences, such as starvation and preventable diseases like diphtheria and cholera. UNICEF reported in December 2016 that a child was dying every 10 minutes in Yemen, and the humanitarian crisis has only worsened since then. At that rate the total of all deaths caused directly and indirectly by the war must by now be more than one hundred thousand.

Another NGO, the Yemen Data Project, revealed in September 2016 that at least a third of Saudi-led airstrikes, many of which involve U.S.-built and (until Friday U.S.-refueled warplanes) using U.S.-made bombs, were hitting hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, and other civilian targets. This has left at least half the hospitals and health facilities in Yemen damaged or destroyed, according to the Yemen Data Project, leaving them hardly able to treat the casualties of the war or serve their communities, let alone to compile meaningful figures for the WHO’s surveys. Even comprehensive surveys of fully functioning hospitals would capture only a fraction of the violent deaths in a war-torn country like Yemen, where most of those killed in the war do not die in hospitals. And yet the UN and the world’s media have continued to cite the WHO surveys as reliable estimates of the total number of people killed in Yemen. ...

Epidemiologists recently used some of the same techniques to estimate that about 3,000 people died as a result of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Studies in war-ravaged Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have been widely cited by Western political leaders and the Western media with no hint of controversy. Some of the same public health experts who had worked in Rwanda and Congo used the same methods to estimate how many people had been killed as a result of the U.S. and U.K.’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. In two studies they published in the Lancet medical journal in 2004 and 2006, they found that about 600,000 people had been killed in the first three years of war and occupation.

Broad acceptance of these results would have been politically disastrous for the U.S. and UK governments. ... The British Defence Ministry’s chief scientific advisor described the Lancet studies’ design as “robust” and their methods as “close to best practice,” and British officials admitted privately that they were “likely to be right.“ The U.S. and UK governments nonetheless launched a concerted campaign to discredit them. ... The world still waits for that kind of genuine accounting of the true human cost of the Saudi-U.S. war in Yemen and, indeed, of all America’s post-9/11 wars.

Gaza Is Already Unlivable: A Response to Israel’s Deadly Airstrikes Targeting TV Station & Homes

Israel Denounced for 'Cowardly' Attack After Late-Night Raid and Bombing of Gaza Kills 7 Palestinians

Just hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted—despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary—that he wants to "avoid" military conflict with the Palestinians, a unit of Israeli soldiers flagrantly violated a ceasefire agreement Sunday night by invading the occupied Gaza Strip and killing at least seven Palestinians before fleeing under the cover of airstrikes.

According to Al Jazeera, an Israeli special forces team entered Gaza late Sunday in a civilian vehicle and proceeded to shoot and kill one Hamas commander in what Gaza officials denounced as an assassination and a "cowardly" escalation of tensions. Six more Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were later killed after a firefight, which prompted the Israeli unit to call in airstrikes for cover to escape. One Palestinian witness said Gaza was slammed with as many as 40 airstrikes in less than an hour as the Israeli team fled the besieged Gaza Strip, which is in the midst of a severe humanitarian crisis due to decades of brutal Israeli occupation.

"Imagine if Palestinians crossed into Israel and killed [seven] Israelis, all hell would break loose but Palestinians are expected to just accept this," Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, wrote on Twitter. Israel insisted that its Sunday night raid and severe escalation was nothing more than an intelligence mission gone awry—an explanation that was rejected by Palestinians and described by one commentator as "deeply embarrassing."

"Whatever it was, it's a reminder that Israel goes in and out of Gaza as it pleases. We all know what happens to Palestinians who as much as go near the fence," noted Israeli-American journalist Mairav Zonszein, alluding to the Israeli military's indiscriminate massacre of Palestinian protestors along the border fence separating Israel and the occupied Gaza Strip.

Trump to award Sheldon Adelson’s wife Miriam highest civilian honor

The White House on Saturday announced upcoming recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor awarded in the US, and among the recipients is Miriam Adelson, wife of business magnate and Trump backer Sheldon Adelson. ...

The Adelsons have made numerous and significant contributions to Trump and to Republicans. CNN noted that in the recent midterm elections the couple donated at least $112 million to Republican candidates.

Acting AG Matt Whitaker Scrutinized over His Radical Judicial Beliefs & Past Dirty Work for GOP

Mueller seeking more details on Nigel Farage, key Russia inquiry target says

Robert Mueller is seeking more information about Nigel Farage for his investigation into Russian interference in US politics, according to a target of the inquiry who expects to be criminally charged. Jerome Corsi, a conservative author, said prosecutors working for Mueller questioned him about Farage, the key campaigner behind Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, two weeks ago in Washington.

Corsi said investigators for the special counsel also pressed him for information on Ted Malloch, a London-based American academic with ties to Farage, who informally advised Donald Trump and was interviewed by FBI agents earlier this year. “They asked about both Nigel and Ted Malloch, I can affirm that they did,” Corsi told the Guardian on Tuesday. “But I’m really not going into detail because I respect the special counsel and the legal process.”

Mueller’s interest in Farage comes amid questions in the UK about whether Russia attempted to influence the June 2016 vote to leave the European Union, and Brexit’s most vocal political supporters. A spokesman for Farage said of Corsi’s allegations: “This is ill-informed, intentionally malicious gossip and wholly untrue.” Andy Wigmore, a spokesman for the pro-Brexit Leave campaign, said Farage had not been contacted by Mueller’s team. Malloch’s publisher, Nick Magliato, said Malloch’s lawyer instructed the academic, who is in London, not to comment. ...

Farage has consistently denied any involvement with Russia and has mocked reports that he was facing legal scrutiny. Farage forged close ties with the Trump campaign and White House through his close friendship and association with Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart editor and White House strategist. The Guardian first reported in June last year that Farage was a “person of interest” in the Russia investigation.

Woodward: No Evidence Of Trump Russia Collusion

FBI data shows sharp rise in US hate crimes

The FBI says hate crimes reports were up about 17% in 2017, marking a rise for the third year in a row, even though violent crime in America fell slightly overall. Crimes of antisemitism led the spike. An annual report from the US federal government released on Tuesday shows there were more than 7,100 reported hate crimes last year. There were increases in attacks motivated by racial bias, religious bias and because of a victim’s sexual orientation. The report shows there was a nearly 23% increase in religion-based hate crimes. There was a 37% spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes.

The acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, said the report is a “call to action”. He said the offenses were “despicable violations of our core values as Americans”.

The FBI said although the number of attacks has increased, so has the number of law enforcement agencies reporting hate crime data.

Hillary Will Run Again! Says Ex-Adviser Mark Penn

Richard Ojeda, West Virginia Lawmaker Who Backed Teachers Strikes, Will Run for President

Richard Ojeda is running for president. Ojeda, a West Virginia state senator and retired U.S. Army major, lost his congressional bid in the state’s 3rd District on Tuesday, but saw the largest swing of Trump voters toward Democrats in any district around the country — overperforming 2016 by more than 35 points. Still, in a district that Donald Trump carried by 49 points, Ojeda, who rose to prominence because of his support for a teachers strike in West Virginia, lost by 12 points.

Ojeda’s case for his candidacy is straightforward: The Democratic Party has gotten away from its roots, and he has a unique ability to win over a white, black, and brown working-class coalition by arguing from a place of authority that Trump is a populist fraud. He’s launching his campaign with an anti-corruption focus that draws a contrast with Trump’s inability to “drain the swamp.”

His authority — and one of his greatest liabilities — would come, in part, from his own previous support of Trump in the 2016 general election. After backing Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary, Ojeda refused to support Hillary Clinton, seeing her as an embodiment of the party’s drift toward the elite. “I have been a Democrat ever since I registered to vote, and I’ll stay a Democrat, but that’s because of what the Democratic Party was supposed to be,” he told The Intercept. “The reason why the Democratic Party fell from grace is because they become nothing more than elitist. That was it. Goldman Sachs, that’s who they were. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party that fights for the working class, and that’s exactly what I do. I will stand with unions wholeheartedly, and that’s the problem: the Democratic Party wants to say that, but their actions do not mirror that.”

Ojeda turned on Trump early in his term, concluding that the president’s interest in improving the lives of working people like those Ojeda grew up with in West Virginia, or served with in the military, was fake. Now, he wants to break the spell Trump still holds on half the country.

Keiser Report: Short term pain, long term gain

Rick Scott has 5 ongoing lawsuits in his Senate run. Now, he’s the one getting sued.

As part of his attempt to break into the U.S. Senate, Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott has filed five lawsuits against county election officials. But now, he’s the one getting sued.

A large group of Florida voters and organizations filed a lawsuit against Scott on Monday for illegal abuse of power and conflicts of interest in the electoral process. As the current governor, Scott, for example, appointed Florida’s secretary of state, who oversees counting votes. Scott also sits on the Florida board which certifies elections and appoints its members. “Defendant Scott’s efforts to use the authority of his office to advance his campaign and his political party have been extreme,” according to the lawsuit from the coalition, which includes Protect Democracy, the League of Women Voters of Florida and Common Cause Florida.

“Defendant Scott has already issued his authority to influence and frustrate the high stakes vote-counting process, and the powers of his office give him the opportunity to continue to misuse his authority,” the suit continued. ...

If the state court approves the coalition’s lawsuit, Scott will remain in the race for Senate but will have his lawsuits dismissed. Results of the election are slated to be finalized on Nov. 20.

Trump claims 'honest vote' not possible in Florida as counties rush to recount

The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2018

Tensions are rising in Florida as counties rush to conduct a recount in crucial races for governor and Senate, an effort already marred by mishaps and lawsuits.

Florida’s 67 counties face a deadline of Thursday to complete their recounts. Half started counting at the weekend, with drama in Broward and Palm Beach counties, which both have large populations of Democratic voters and histories of election mishaps. Other counties were set to start recounting on Monday. Unofficial results showed DeSantis, a Republican former US representative, led the Democratic Tallahassee mayor, Andrew Gillum, by 0.41% in the governor’s race. In the Senate race, outgoing Republican governor Rick Scott led the incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson by 0.14%. ...

In Broward county, the recount was delayed for hours on Sunday because of glitches with a tabulation machine. The Republican party slammed Broward’s supervisor of elections, Brenda Snipes, for what it claimed was “incompetence and gross mismanagement”. Scott sued the Broward supervisor, asking for a court order mandating law enforcement officials impound all voting machines, tabulation machines and ballots when they are not being used in the recount. The lawsuit charged that Snipes has repeatedly failed to calculate the number of ballots left to be counted and to report results regularly as the law requires.

Broward officials also said they accidentally counted 22 absentee ballots that had been rejected. They had no way of fixing the problem, because the invalid ballots were mixed in with 205 legal ballots. In Palm Beach county, the supervisor of elections said her department would not be able to meet Thursday’s deadline.

On Monday morning, circuit chief judge Jack Tuter said he had seen no evidence of wrongdoing in the vote-counting in Broward and urged all sides to “ramp down the rhetoric”. Tuter also described a need to reassure citizens that the integrity of the Florida recount was being protected, and urged lawyers for Scott and others representing the Republican and Democratic parties and their candidates and the Broward elections office to agree on minor additions to security, including the provision of three more law enforcement officers to keep an eye on the count.

Scientists: Wind, Drought Worsen Fires, Not Bad Management

Both nature and humans share blame for California’s devastating wildfires, but forest management did not play a major role, despite President Donald Trump’s claims, fire scientists say. Nature provides the dangerous winds that have whipped the fires, and human-caused climate change over the long haul is killing and drying the shrubs and trees that provide the fuel, experts say. “Natural factors and human-caused global warming effects fatally collude” in these fires, said wildfire expert Kristen Thornicke of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Multiple reasons explain the fires’ severity, but “forest management wasn’t one of them,” University of Utah fire scientist Philip Dennison said. ... “It’s not about forest management. These aren’t forests,” he said.

The dean of the University of Michigan’s environmental school, Jonathan Overpeck, said Western fires are getting bigger and more severe. He said it “is much less due to bad management and is instead the result of our baking of our forests, woodlands and grasslands with ever-worsening climate change.” Wildfires have become more devastating because of the extreme weather swings from global warming, fire scientists said. The average number of U.S. acres burned by wildfires has doubled over the level from 30 years ago.

As of Monday, more than 13,200 square miles (34,200 square kilometers) have burned. That’s more than a third higher than the 10-year average. From 1983 to 1999, the United States didn’t reach 10,000 square miles burned annually. Since then, 11 of 19 years have had more than 10,000 square miles burned, including this year. In 2006, 2015 and 2017, more than 15,000 square miles burned.

Climate Scientist Who Fled CA Wildfire: We’re Going to Keep Paying Price If We Ignore Climate Change

California fires: what is happening and is climate change to blame?

Large wildfires require a cocktail of conditions, such as favourable wind speed and direction, fuel, terrain and, of course, ignition, which can be as simple as a trailer throwing up sparks by scraping on a road. Broadly speaking, however, climate change is making conditions more favourable for wildfires in the American west. Of the 20 largest wildfires in California’s recorded history, 15 have occurred since 2000, at a time when forests have become drier and warmer.

Since 1970, temperatures in the west have increased by about double the global average, lengthening the western wildfire season by several months and drying out large tracts of forests, making them more fire-prone.

“Climate change is increasing the vulnerability of many forests to ecosystem changes and tree mortality through fire, insect infestations, drought and disease outbreaks,” a major climate assessment by the US government states.

“Given strong relationships between climate and fire, even when modified by land use and management such as fuel treatments, projected climate changes suggest that western forests in the United States will be increasingly affected by large and intense fires that occur more frequently,” the report adds, noting that fire suppression techniques have also heightened the risk.

Judge Blocks Keystone XL Pipeline In Blow To Trump

'The Political System Is Failing Us': British Energy Dept Blockaded to Protest Climate Inaction and Fracking

Kicking off a week of peaceful protests that will culminate in a mass demonstration at London's Parliament Square on Saturday, activists blockaded the United Kingdom's energy department on Monday to raise alarm about the government's support for fracking and, more broadly, "its criminal inaction on the climate emergency and ecological crisis." Activists with Extinction Rebellion and Christian Climate Action as well as reporters shared updates on social media from outside the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) as some protesters glued themselves to the entrance.

Organizers of the actions leading up to Saturday's Rebellion Day demand that "the U.K. government immediately declares a climate and ecological emergency; reduces to zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025; and creates a citizens' assembly to oversee these changes." They are also calling for an end to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which recently resumed in the country after a seven-year ban.

Despite warnings from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the international community should urgently stop burning fossil fuels that drive global warming and work to remove greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere to avert a planet-wide climate catastrophe, the U.K. government currently plans to reach "net zero" emissions by 2050.

"The IPCC report in October gave us six to 12 years, and this is known to be a conservative report. If we don't respond with a war-style effort now we are all fucked, all of us. My heart is breaking and I've got to do something, and I'm putting my life on hold," Bell Selkie, a 48-year-old farmer from Wales who glued her hand to the door of BEIS, told the Guardian.

Heatwaves can 'wipe out' male insect fertility

Heatwaves severely damage the fertility of male beetles and consecutive hot spells leave them virtually sterilised, according to research.

Global warming is making heatwaves more common and wildlife is being annihilated, and the study may reveal a way in which these two trends are linked. The scientists behind the findings said there could also be some relevance for humans: the sperm counts of western men have halved in the last 40 years.

Researchers studied beetles because their 400,000 species represent about a quarter of all known species. Insect populations are plunging worldwide as temperatures rise, falling by about 80% in 30 years in Puerto Rico’s rainforest and by 75% in German nature reserves. Insects are such an integral part of life, as pollinators and prey, that scientists say their decline could lead to “ecological Armageddon”. Little is known about the precise causes of the decline, though climate change, habitat destruction and global use of pesticides are considered probable factors.

The research, published in the Nature Communications journal, found that exposing beetles to a five-day heatwave in the laboratory reduced sperm production by three-quarters; females were unaffected.

Also of Interest

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

Chris Hedges: Crucifying Julian Assange

I Watched Joe Biden Give An Award To George W Bush So You Don’t Have To

Google’s “Smart City of Surveillance” Faces New Resistance in Toronto

Training Kids to Kill at Ukrainian Nationalist Camp

Canada's salmon hold the key to saving its killer whales

Backed by Ocasio-Cortez, Youth Climate Activists Arrested in Pelosi's Office Demanding Democrats Embrace 'Green New Deal'

'Evacuation fatigue': danger after people flee wildfires five times in two years

A Little Night Music

King Oliver - Jackass Blues

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band - Krooked Blues

King Oliver with Louis Armstrong - Southern Stomps

King Oliver's Jazz Band - Too Late

King Oliver and his Dixie Syncopators - Dead Man Blues

King Oliver & The Savannah Syncopators - Wa Wa Wa

King Oliver and His Dixie Syncopators - Doctor Jazz

Louis Armstrong & King Oliver - Chimes Blues

Joe "King" Oliver - Dipper Mouth Blues