The Evening Blues - 11-5-24

Submitted by joe shikspack on Tue, 11/05/2024 - 3:00pm

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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Georgia Tom Dorsey

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features delta blues piano player Georgia Tom Dorsey. Enjoy!

^{Georgia Tom ( Thomas A. Dorsey ) - Maybe It's The Blues}

"The truth is that a vast restructuring of our society is needed if remedies are to become available to the average person. Without that restructuring the good will that holds society together will be slowly dissipated... It is that sense of futility which permeates the present series of protests and dissents. Where there is a persistent sense of futility, there is violence; and that is where we are today."

-- William O. Douglas

News and Opinion

Gaza Tells Us Who We Are

Some days it’s hard to say which is more horrific: the Gaza genocide itself, or the moral decay throughout our society which makes it possible.

I mean, the atrocities in Gaza have a couple million victims. If you add up the populations of the US, Europe, Canada and Australia, you’ve got around a billion people living in a dystopia whose collective conscience is so warped and twisted that they’d allow their governments to support a live-streamed genocide in full view of the entire world. A billion people who are so morally bankrupt that they find it tolerable for such a nightmare to be inflicted upon their fellow human beings right in front of them.

This has been especially pronounced during the heat of a US presidential race, with tens of millions of voters falling all over themselves to cognitively sweep Gaza under the carpet so they can throw their support behind one of the two mainstream candidates who’ve both pledged to support the Zionist state which is perpetrating this genocide. At best they see Israel’s crimes as an annoying side issue which the left keeps disrupting their Kamala parties about, and at worst they support Israel’s actions entirely.

What a pointless, meaningless, soulless way to live. What a betrayal of truth, and of our own humanity. How could anyone possibly find satisfaction in that kind of zombie-like existence? Mindlessly shuffling along to the beat of the status quo, devouring human flesh because it’s more comfortable than the cognitive dissonance which would come with divorcing the power-serving worldview you’ve been indoctrinated from birth into espousing.

I was listening to an interview with a doctor who worked in Gaza during the genocide and he discussed the time many months ago when the IDF forced the evacuation of a hospital and left four premature babies to die in their incubators after assuring the staff they’d be taken care of. Their tiny bodies were found decomposing weeks later after Israeli forces cleared out of the area.

How did that one incident, just by itself, not stop the world? How did it not stop us all in our tracks and force us to re-evaluate everything that led to this point? It wasn’t a secret that those four babies died; it was in the mainstream news. It was right there, right in front of us, and we did nothing.

Such atrocities have been happening on a daily basis for thirteen months now, and still nothing.

We’ve got to live like this. We’ve got to live in this genocidal dystopia, surrounded by shambling sleepwalkers covered in human blood. Our lives here in the west are far, far more comfortable than the lives of people in Gaza, but they are also far less truthful, and far less capable of nourishing the human spirit.

We marinate in lies and psychopathy, watch lies and psychopathy, eat drink sleep and breathe lies and psychopathy. Our minds are full of garbage and our hearts are full of shit, and we are wading around up to our ankles in the blood, sweat and tears of the global south. This festering sore of a civilization is the only soil in which the western-backed genocide in Gaza could take root.

The people in Gaza have to suffer the consequences of who we are and what we have become, but we have to live with who we are and what we have become. We’re killing their babies and leaving them to rot, but we’re the ones who have to live with the corpses of rotting babies in our souls.

One way or another the killing in Gaza will end one day. But the forces within us which gave rise to that butchery will live on long after the sounds of the drones and explosions have ceased.

We will have to live like that. We will have to live knowing that this is who we are.

Benjamin Netanyahu fires Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has fired his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, a figure widely considered by Israel’s international allies to be a brake on the far-right elements of the country’s coalition government.

Netanyahu said in a video statement late on Tuesday that “significant gaps on handling the battle” in Gaza had emerged.

“At the height of a war, complete trust is needed between the prime minister and the defence minister … In recent months, that trust between me and the defence minister was damaged,” he said.

Israel Katz, a fellow Likud party member currently serving as foreign minister, will be Gallant’s replacement. The leader of the the centre-right New Hope, Gideon Saar, who rejoined Netanyahu’s coalition in September, will serve as foreign minister. ...

A White House spokesperson praised Gallant as an “important partner” and said the US would “continue to work collaboratively with Israel’s next minister of defence”.

LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : Does It Matter Who’s President?

Israel braces for another Iranian attack after threats from leaders in Tehran

Israel is bracing itself for another Iranian attack after a crescendo of threatening rhetoric from leaders in Iran saying the country would retaliate for Israeli missile strikes last month. Iran initially played down the impact of the 26 October Israeli strikes on its military facilities, which were in turn a response to an Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israel at the beginning of October.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave an initially ambivalent verdict on the Israeli strikes, saying that the attack “should not be exaggerated nor downplayed” while Tehran weighed a response. On Saturday, however, Khamenei delivered a clear threat. He said: “The enemies, whether the Zionist regime or the United States of America, will definitely receive a crushing response.”

Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani, the supreme leader’s chief of staff, vowed on Thursday that an Iranian response was certain and that it would be “fierce and tooth-breaking”. On the same day, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, Maj Gen Hossein Salami, said the Iranian response “will surpass all expectations”.

“Israel believed it could change the regional balance of power by launching a few missiles,” Salami said. “You have once again proven that you do not understand the Iranian people, and your calculations are completely wrong.”

The Wall Street Journal on Sunday quoted Iranian and Arab officials briefed on Tehran’s plans as saying the looming Iranian strikes would be more complex, involving more weapons and more powerful warheads than the 1 October attack, and the new barrage would come between Tuesday’s US elections and the inauguration of the next US president in January.

Matthew Hoh: Israel in Freefall? Deepening Crisis Revealed!

Erasing 'Any Sign of Life,' Israeli Demolition Teams Razing Entire Villages in Lebanon

As the death toll from Israel's 13-month assault on Lebanon passed 3,000, satellite imagery analyses published by multiple media outlets in recent days revealed that nearly a quarter of all buildings in 25 municipalities in the southern part of the Mideastern country have been destroyed or damaged in a ferocious campaign that has left entire villages in ruins.

Satellite photos examined by The Washington Post, Reuters, and the Financial Times showed vast destruction caused by Israeli bombing and controlled demolitions of towns and villages, many of whose residents are among the more than 1.2 million people forcibly displaced by the war.

"There are beautiful old homes, hundreds of years old," Meiss al-Jabal Mayor Abdulmonem Choukeir told Reuters. "Thousands of artillery shells have hit the town, hundreds of air strikes. Who knows what will still be standing at the end?"

Meiss al-Jabal native Fatima Ghoul toldThe Washington Post that "everything has been reduced to rubble" in the town of 8,000 inhabitants.
Footage circulating on social media Monday showed large portions of the village, which has been inhabited for many hundreds of years, turned to dust in a simultaneous series of demolition explosions.

Israel has detonated parts of Meiss al-Jabal, the border village where we filmed our @Channel4News report on White Phosphorus back in July. The goal then, as now, was to make the land unihabitable, impossible for people to return. This is a scorched earth policy, a violation of… https://t.co/XxZDYnBtQc

— Simona Foltyn (@SimonaFoltyn) November 4, 2024

According to the Post:

Satellite imagery from Kfar Kila shows freshly turned soil where olive groves once stood, suggesting a clearance operation by Israeli forces. Dozens of crushed buildings line the town's main road. The destruction is most intense near the Israeli border. The village centers in nearby Ayta al-Shab, Mhaibib and Ramyeh have also been decimated, the imagery reveals.

Videos published on social media show a series of controlled explosions in at least 11 villages. In a video published to X on October 22, half a dozen buildings fall in an instant after an explosion, covering the 400-year-old village of Ayta al-Shab in dust clouds and debris. In drone footage published online the next day, an Israeli flag flies over the town—now reduced to a sea of broken trees and collapsed concrete.

In one video verified by the Post, IDF troops cheer the demolition of a mosque in the village of Dharya, with one soldier exalting, "What a moment!" while others break out in religious song.

Religious and culturally important buildings are protected under international law. Scorched-earth tactics and disproportionate attacks are war crimes under international law.

"Even if civilians are not inside, those types of buildings don't lose their protection," former U.S. Department of Defense attorney Sarah Harrison told the Post.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces claimed the IDF was obliterating Lebanese towns and villages because Hezbollah—the political and paramilitary group based in Lebanon—is turning "civilian villages into fortified combat zones." Hezbollah denied the accusation.

Retired Lebanese Armed Forces Gen. Akram Kamal Srawi told the Financial Times that "there are two reasons Israel is using this detonations strategy."

The first reason, he claimed, is that the IDF is clearing the way for a possible deeper invasion of Lebanon.

"The second is that Israel has adopted a scorched earth strategy in order to wage psychological warfare on Hezbollah's base people by televising these detonations and weaken support for the group—which will never work," he added.

Israel began attacking Lebanon at almost the same time it launched its war on Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Hezbollah has fired at least hundreds of rockets and other projectiles at Israel in a sustained yet measured campaign in solidarity with Gaza, where Israel's bombing, invasion, and siege have left more than 155,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and millions more displaced, starved, and sickened in a war that the International Court of Justice is investigating for possible genocide. At least scores of Israelis have been killed or wounded by Hezbollah's cross-border attacks.

In addition to the at least 3,002 people killed by Israel's onslaught, Lebanon's Health Ministry says that more than 13,000 others have been injured. The ministry does not distinguish between Hezbollah fighters and civilians. Critics say neither does the IDF.

"We're a family of artists, my father is well-known, and our home was a known cultural home," Lebanon Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Lubnan Baalbaki told Reuters after viewing satellite images confirming the destruction of his family home.

"If you have such high-level intelligence that you can target specific military figures, then you know what's in that house," Baalbaki added. "It was an art house. We are all artists. The aim is to erase any sign of life."

US Bombers Arrive in Middle East as Part of New Deployment for Israel

US B-52 bombers arrived in the Middle East on Saturday as part of a new deployment to “defend” Israel amid speculation over whether or not Iran will respond to Israel’s October 26 attack. ...

The Pentagon announced it was beefing up its military presence in the region on Friday, saying Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the “deployment of additional ballistic missile defense destroyers, fighter squadron and tanker aircraft, and several US Air Force B-52 long-range strike bombers to the region.”

The Pentagon said the purpose of the deployment is the “protection of US citizens and forces in the Middle East, the defense of Israel, and de-escalation.” The US also recently deployed a THAAD missile defense system and about 100 troops to Israel.

UNICEF head warns everyone in Northern Gaza “is at imminent risk of dying”

Every man, woman and child who remains in northern Gaza “is at imminent risk of dying,” warned Catherine Russell, the director of the United Nations Children’s Fund, in a statement Saturday. Nearly one month ago, Israel began an assault on Northern Gaza to implement the so-called “generals’ plan” to ethnically cleanse the entirety of Northern Gaza. Virtually no food, water, or medical supplies have been allowed into the northern section of the Gaza Strip, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee.

Those who remain, estimated at approximately 100,000 people, are cut off from all necessities of life and are being systematically starved or killed by Israeli bombardment. Israel’s “generals’ plan” is being carried out with the endorsement and support of the United States, which continues to fund and arm the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The US is also sending troops to the Middle East to aid Israel’s escalating war against the populations of Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. ...

Against the backdrop of this unfolding disaster, the United States is only deepening its involvement in Israel’s rampage throughout the Middle East. Over the weekend, US Central Command (CENTCOM) head Michael Kurilla arrived in Israel to tour the deployment of US combat troops in the country, manning a US air defense battery. The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that the visit focused on “threats in the Middle East, with a focus on Iran” and that the Israeli military will “deepen its relationship with the US armed forces.”

On Saturday, US Central Command announced that B-52 bombers, capable of both delivering nuclear weapons and carrying out massive saturation bombings, have arrived in the Middle East. “B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers from Minot Air Force Base’s 5th Bomb Wing arrived in the US Central Command area of responsibility,” Central Command said. In a statement cited by the Jerusalem Post, the US Air Force said the B-52 bombers are capable of delivering “nuclear or precision-guided conventional ordnance with worldwide precision navigation capability.” It added, “In a conventional conflict, the B-52 can perform strategic attack, close-air support, air interdiction, offensive counter-air, and maritime operations.” The strategic bombers are part of a deployment of US destroyers, fighter squadrons and tankers in support of Israel’s war throughout the region.

Israel formally tells UN of intent to sever all ties with Unrwa relief agency

Israel has formally informed the United Nations of its intention to sever ties entirely with the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees in a move the country’s allies and aid workers warn will deepen the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East.

The Knesset passed two bills last week banning Unrwa from Israeli territory and prohibiting Israeli state contact with the agency on the basis of allegations that Hamas had infiltrated it.

The ban will take effect in three months but in the first step towards implementing the Knesset vote, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, sent a letter to the UN secretary general and the president of the general assembly officially withdrawing Israel from a 1967 cooperation agreement with Unrwa.

“Despite the overwhelming evidence we submitted to the UN that substantiate[s] Hamas’s infiltration of Unrwa, the UN did nothing to rectify the situation,” Danon wrote on X on Monday. An internal UN inquiry found in August that nine Unrwa employees “may have been involved” in the surprise Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October last year.

Unrwa has 13,000 employees in Gaza and is by far the biggest aid agency in the coastal strip. The UN has denied charges that the agency has been fundamentally compromised by infiltration.

Report: Trump Plans UK-Style Attack on Israel Criticism

A second Trump administration could criminalize criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as support for terrorism, along the lines of the British Terrorism Act, according to a report in Drop Site News. The report says the plan is to “break the pro-Palestinian movement in the U.S.”

“The plan, dubbed ‘Project Esther,‘ casts pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S. as members of a global conspiracy aligned with designated terrorist organizations. As part of a so-called ‘Hamas Support Network,’ these protesters receive ‘indispensable support of a vast network of activists and funders with a much more ambitious, insidious goal — the destruction of capitalism and democracy,’ Project Esther’s authors allege.

This conspiratorial framing is part of a legal strategy to suppress speech favorable to Palestinians or critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship, by employing counterterrorism laws to suppress what would otherwise be protected speech, legal experts told Drop Site News.”

The authors of the plan are part of the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Drop Site says. Former President Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 but he is a strong supporter of Israel, having moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and accepted Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, considered illegal by the U.N. Security Council.

The Washington Post reported in May that Trump told donors in New York that he would deport foreign students if they demonstrate for Palestine. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump told the donors, the Post reported.

The report in Drop Site News, written by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain, quotes an attorney at Palestine Legal as saying that

“concepts like the ‘Hamas Support Network’ or ‘Hamas Supporting Organizations,’ another term that the authors use to describe pro-Palestinian activist groups, is intended to construct a narrative justifying the use of counterterrorism and sanctions laws to suppress the First Amendment rights of individuals involved in the pro-Palestine movement …”

‘They need to make a claim that these organizations are being directed and controlled by Hamas, which they’re not,’ attorney Dylan Saba said. ‘So their claim now is that these organizations are effectively serving as a propaganda wing for designated terrorist organizations.’”

This is precisely what the British government has been doing.

North Korea tells UN it is speeding up nuclear weapons programme

North Korea’s UN envoy has said Pyongyang will accelerate a buildup of its nuclear weapons programme just days after it test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time this year at a moment of rising tensions with the west. Kim Song, North Korea’s ambassador to the UN, said during a security council meeting on Monday that Pyongyang would accelerate the programme to “counter any threat presented by hostile nuclear weapons states”.

Early on Tuesday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the North had fired several short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea east of the Korean Peninsula. Japan’s coast guard said the projectile wsa believed to be a ballistic missile, and broadcaster NHK reported it appeared to have landed outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone in the ocean.

The security council meeting was convened to address Pyongyang’s testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile on Thursday meant to demonstrate North Korea’s growing prowess at developing missiles that could deliver more powerful nuclear warheads potentially to the mainland US. ...

“The nuclear threat of United States against [North Korea] has already reached critical point in terms of its scale and danger,” Kim said. “Due to reckless moves of the United States, the potential situation is approaching the brink of war.”

During the meeting, the US accused China and Russia of “shamelessly” protecting Pyongyang at the UN from “closer scrutiny of its sanctions-violating activities”, and said Pyongyang had been “emboldened to continue advancing its unlawful ballistic missile, nuclear and WMD programmes”.

Mexico president lashes out at supreme court amid looming constitutional crisis

Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has accused the country’s supreme court of overstepping its functions and “trying to change what the people of Mexico decided” as it prepares to discuss whether to strike down parts of a transformative judicial reform. The court is expected to vote on Tuesday whether the controversial reform violates other parts of the constitution, setting up a showdown with Sheinbaum barely a month into her government.

The move would shift Mexico to a system where almost all of its judges, including the supreme court, are elected by popular vote. No other country in the world has such a system. The US elects judges at the lower level, while Bolivia elects 26 judges across its top courts. But in Mexico, thousands of positions at all levels would be put to the vote.

Proponents say the reform is needed to root out corruption in the judicial system. Opponents say it will do little to address corruption, but will hand the ruling Morena party control of the courts, while giving organised crime groups another chance to impose their candidates in elections.

“It has to be made very clear that eight justices cannot be above the people,” Sheinbaum told reporters on Monday. ...

The judicial system itself has come out strongly against the reform, with strikes and protests. Though three members of the supreme court have said they support the reform, the other eight showed their resistance by declaring they would not run in the elections scheduled for August 2025.

California sues Los Angeles suburb for temporary ban on homeless shelters

California filed a lawsuit against a Los Angeles suburb on Monday, alleging the city’s recent moratorium on homeless shelters and temporary housing violated the state’s fair housing and anti-discrimination laws.

The lawsuit is part of an ongoing effort by Governor Gavin Newsom to push back against what he sees as local resistance and defiance of state laws in the face of California’s desperate need for new housing. The crisis has prompted a surge in the homeless population in the country’s most populous state.

Norwalk, a city of 100,000 people about 15 miles (24km) south-east of Los Angeles, becomes the latest city to face legal actions from the state over housing policies. That came after the city council voted in September to extend its temporary ban on new homeless shelters and emergency housing.

City councilmembers in a recent statement said Norwalk had done its fair share to address the homeless crisis but previous state programs, including one that puts homeless people in motel rooms, had led to public safety concerns. The moratorium, which remains in effect until next year, has already blocked a plan by the county of Los Angeles in September to move homeless people into a hotel in the city.

The lawsuit filed in Los Angeles county superior court argues that the city violated half a dozen housing laws by enacting such a moratorium. It is asking the court to halt the city’s law.

Ohio ex-police officer found guilty in 2020 shooting death of Andre Hill

A former police officer was convicted of murder on Monday in the shooting of Andre Hill, a Black man who was holding a cellphone and keys when he was killed. Officer Adam Coy, who is white and served nearly 20 years with the Columbus police force, shot Hill four times in a garage nearly four years ago. Coy was fired after the shooting. He later told jurors that he thought Hill was holding a silver revolver.

“I thought I was going to die,” he testified. It was only after he rolled over Hill’s body and saw the keys that he realized there was no gun, Coy said. “I knew at that point I made a mistake,” he said. “I was horrified.”

Police body camera footage showed Hill coming out of the garage of a friend’s house holding up a cellphone in his left hand, his right hand not visible, seconds before he was fatally shot by Coy. Almost 10 minutes passed before officers at the scene began to aid Hill, who lay bleeding on the garage floor. He was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Weeks after the December 2020 shooting, the mayor forced out the police chief after a series of fatal police shootings of Black men and children. Columbus later reached a $10m settlement with Hill’s family, the largest in city history. The Columbus city council also passed Andre’s Law, which requires police officers to render immediate medical attention to an injured suspect. Prosecutors said Hill, 47, had followed the officer’s commands and was never a threat to Coy, who now faces at least 15 years in prison.

“We’re taught do what the cops tell you to do and you can survive that encounter,” Franklin county assistant prosecutor Anthony Pierson said during closing arguments. “That’s not what happened here.”

Palestinian-American: They Killed 90 of My Relatives in Gaza and Now Expect My Vote?

Third parties could take enough votes from Trump or Harris to affect election

As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump thrash it out for the presidency, there is another factor that could decide the election: the impact of third-party votes. With the race expected to be extremely close, experts say that ballots cast for Jill Stein of the Green party, Cornel West or Robert F Kennedy Jr could potentially draw enough votes away from Harris or Trump to make a difference – a worrying development for both Democrats and Republicans.

In the swing state of Michigan, in particular, dissatisfaction over Harris’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza has driven some voters towards Stein, who has been critical of Israel. In Michigan and also Wisconsin, unhappiness over Trump’s role atop the Republican party could lead to protest votes for Kennedy (despite him dropping out of the race earlier this year). Given Joe Biden’s narrow margin of victory over Trump in key states in 2020, any ballots cast elsewhere could be decisive.

“The vote right now is so close that a small amount of tipping in one direction or another could swing it,” said Bernard Tamas, a professor of political science at Valdosta State University and author of The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties: Poised for Political Revival?.

The third-party candidates most capable of winning away votes appear to be Stein and Kennedy, who, ironically, would rather not be in the election at all. Kennedy suspended his independent presidential campaign in August and endorsed Trump, but courts in Michigan and Wisconsin ruled that his name will stay on the ballot. ...

Democrats in Michigan and elsewhere are scrambling to get out their message that a vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for Trump. But Nura Sediqe, an assistant professor in American politics at Michigan State University fears that could lead to certain groups of voters being scapegoated if Harris loses the election. “The thing to keep in mind from these folks that are concerned third party is they’re trying to send policy signals to the Democrats to not have their vote taken for granted,” she said. “The reality is they’re very strategic voters: ‘I want something. Will you give it to me? No, OK, then I will move my vote elsewhere.’ It’s a rational choice they’re making. And so I think my only concern is this conception that it’s irrational. It’s very rational.”

Fetterman Admits Kamala Is SCRAMBLING After LOSING Jewish Voters!

‘STOP ATTACKING Jill Stein’ - Briahna Joy Gray and Fouad Dakwar

the evening greens

Decontamination of landfill waste leads to increase in toxic chemicals, says study

Processes intended to decontaminate noxious liquid landfill waste before it enters rivers and sewers have been found to increase the levels of some of the worst toxic chemicals, a study has shown. Landfills are well known to be a main source of PFAS forever chemicals – or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances – but the new study shows that the treatment plants designed to clean up the liquid waste can instead boost the levels of banned PFAS such as PFOA and PFOS, in some cases by as much as 1,335%. ...

Using data from an Environment Agency investigation into landfill liquid waste, which is known as leachate, Dr David Megson from Manchester Metropolitan University, who co-authored the study found “that instead of removing the banned chemicals PFOS and PFOA our treatment plants are actually creating them … likely being formed from the transformation of other PFAS within a chemical soup”.

Megson is concerned that the understanding of what is going on in the UK at landfill sites is poor and that monitoring “only looks at a few specific PFAS, so we are only getting a tiny snapshot of what is actually out there and what impact it may be having”.

The study looked at the leachate from 17 historical and operational landfills, just a fraction of the total across the country. Pippa Neill from the Ends Report, a co-author of the study, said that “with potentially hundreds of landfill operators legally allowed to discharge their treated leachate into the environment” there is an “urgent need” for more research so that PFAS can be disposed of properly.

There is also “an urgent need to ban all PFAS globally, whether through the existing Stockholm convention or a new global treaty on PFAS”, according to Dr Sara Brosché, an adviser at the International Pollutants Elimination Network. “PFOS and PFOA were known by the producers to be toxic from the beginning of their use in consumer products, and they continue to poison the environment and our bodies many years after they have been regulated. A multitude of PFAS are now in use with little or no publicly disclosed information about where they are used or their health impacts.”

Degradation of land is threat to human life, Saudi government says

The degradation of the world’s soils and landscapes is threatening human life, and must be addressed as a matter of urgency, the government of Saudi Arabia has said. Neglect of the land is wiping trillions of dollars from global economies, hampering agricultural production, disrupting water supplies, threatening children with poor nutrition, and destroying vital ecosystems, according to the country’s deputy environment minister.

Land degradation, and ways to combat the problem, will come into sharp focus at a global summit to be held in the nation’s capital, Riyadh, in December. The conference of the parties (Cop) to the UN convention on combating desertification (CCD), which takes place every two years, is often an overlooked international meeting, sparsely attended compared with the Cops on climate and on biodiversity. ...

Osama Faqeeha, deputy environment minister in the kingdom’s government, said people should not be misled by the term desertification, which could appear a narrow concern limited to arid countries. In fact, the CCD should be understood to cover all of the globe’s vulnerable lands, and efforts to rescue and protect them. “This Cop is about land degradation, land preservation and drought,” he told the Guardian, in a rare interview. “It’s very important for water security, food security, biodiversity, and human community. We need to go back to basics and remind the world of this connection we all have with the land.”

“Desertification tells us that we have not exercised good land management,” said Faqeeha, who will take a prominent role assisting the Cop president designate, the Saudi environment and water minister, Abdulrahman al-Fadley. “We need to take a comprehensive view. Land degradation is universal. More than 2bn hectares globally are degraded. Already, 55% of countries report land degradation, and there is not enough reporting … The cost of land degradation is a staggering $6tn a year.” On current trends, he warned, the amount of land affected could triple by 2050, without strong action to restore fertility and prevent land from being over-exploited.

The impacts can be felt not just on the loss of species, but also on human nutrition, he added. Children eating the same amount of food now as a few decades ago are receiving far fewer of the vital nutrients they need, because degraded soils produce food with less nutritional value.

Trump donor fined for pollution leads a fight to end methane emission penalties

A powerful US oil and gas industry lobby group has drawn up detailed plans to kill off penalties for emitting methane, a potent planet-heating gas that’s increasing at the fastest rate in decades, with this effort led by a major donor to Donald Trump whose company has just been fined for methane pollution.

Leaked internal documents from the American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC), a group of 30 oil and gas producers, outline a push to repeal a fee levied on methane emissions should the former US president win this week’s election and Republicans gain control of Congress.

The plan, coming as scientists warn that methane emissions are rising at a rate that imperils a livable climate, is being spearheaded by an AXPC board that includes the chief executive of Hilcorp, a Texas-based firm whose founder Jeff Hildebrand has, along with his wife, Melinda, been a leading donor to Trump’s election campaign, holding multiple fundraisers for the former president.

The Hildebrands have donated more than $3m, almost all to Republicans, in this election cycle amid a record glut of oil and gas industry contributions to Trump. Methane regulations are of particular interest to Hildebrand – this month, Hilcorp agreed to pay a $9.4m civil penalty for violations in its emission of methane, among pother pollutants, from its New Mexico operations.

Hilcorp was revealed in 2021 to be the US’s leading methane emitter among energy businesses, releasing nearly 50% more methane from its operations than the country’s largest fossil fuel producer, ExxonMobil, despite drilling for far less oil and gas.