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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Bill Doggett

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features r&b pianist and organist Bill Doggett. Enjoy!

^{Bill Doggett plays the blues (live 1963)}

The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.

-- E. B. White

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News and Opinion

Ukraine Is A Sacrificial Pawn On The Imperial Chessboard

The war is not going well for Kyiv, and it would be unreasonable to expect that to change. As a vastly superior military force overwhelms the US client state, reality is in the process of crashing down hard in the face of western liberals who bought into the war propaganda that the brave, sexy comedian was leading an upset victory to kick Putin’s ass out of Ukraine.

Zelensky is now raging at NATO powers for refusing to intervene militarily against Russia, apparently having previously been given the impression that the US-centralized empire might risk its very existence defending its dear friends the Ukrainians from an invasion.

“Unfortunately, today there is a complete impression that it is time to give a funeral repast for something else: security guarantees and promises, determination of alliances, values that seem to be dead for someone,” Zelensky said Friday.

“All the people who will die starting from this day will also die because of you,” Ukraine’s president added. “Because of your weakness, because of your disunity.”

It must be hard, the process of learning that you were never actually a valued partner in western civilization’s fight for freedom and democracy. That you were always just one more sacrificial pawn on the imperial chessboard.

In a new article titled “U.S. and allies quietly prepare for a Ukrainian government-in-exile and a long insurgency“, The Washington Post reports that US officials anticipate Russia will reverse its early losses and successfully drive the Zelensky regime out of the country, after which “a long, bloody insurgency” is planned against the invaders backed by billions of dollars in US funding.

The US has a history of working to draw Moscow into gruelling, costly military quagmires which monopolize its military firepower while leaching it of blood and treasure. Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of US hegemonic manifesto The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, openly bragged about having lured Russia into its own Vietnam fighting the US-backed mujahideen in Afghanistan for a decade.

Just two years ago then-US Special Representative for Syria engagement said during a video event hosted by the Hudson Institute that his job was to make Syria “a quagmire for the Russians”.

So this isn’t something new or out of the blue, and what it means is that all the self-righteous posturing by the western political/media class about the need to pour weapons into Ukraine is not really about saving Ukrainian lives (only negotiating a ceasefire can do that), but about seizing this golden opportunity to hurt Russia’s geostrategic interests as much as possible. Ukraine on its own is powerless to stop Russia from taking Kyiv no matter how many weapons are sent, but those weapons can be used to fight a “long, bloody insurgency” after that happens which costs many more lives, keeps Moscow militarily preoccupied and hemorrhaging money, and ultimately hurts Putin’s popularity at home.

The US government's strategy of creating and funding an insurgency gave birth to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then did the same with ISIS in Syria.

Now Washington is going to repeat this with bloodthirsty neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

What could possibly go wrong! https://t.co/XHUwgAmB57

— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 5, 2022

This by itself would do a great deal to advance US interests, but on top of that you’ve got the even greater benefit of manufacturing international consent for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against the entire nation of Russia, as well as killing Nord Stream 2 and rallying immense support for NATO and the imperial military/intelligence machine. The western world is now a united front against the Sauron-like menace of Vladimir Putin in much the same way it united against the threat of global terrorism after 9/11, and we’re probably only seeing the beginnings of the agendas this will be used to roll out.

We can expect these agendas to be used in an attempt to impoverish, undermine, agitate, and ultimately collapse and balkanize Russia, as the CIA and Washington swamp monsters have wanted to do since the fall of the Soviet Union. This would leave China standing alone without its nuclear superpower guard bear and much more vulnerable to imperial operations geared toward thwarting the emergence of a true multipolar world, a goal US imperialists have had in writing for three decades.

That’s a whole lot of potential benefit to the US empire just for losing Ukraine. Kind of like sacrificing a pawn to get the queen in chess.

I think a big part of why I and others wrongly underestimated the likelihood of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was that the cost-to-benefit math never made sense; on paper Moscow stands so much more to lose by this action in the long term than it stood to gain. There was also a bit of an assumption that the empire would rather Russia not take Ukraine, preferring to gradually encroach with NATO salami slicing tactics than give up a useful client state on Russia’s border, and would adjust its actions accordingly.

But chess is all about out-maneuvering your opponent to leave them nothing but bad options to choose from, and in the end leaving the king with no safe moves. The drivers of empire would have known that, as the late Justin Raimondo explained all the way back in 2014 for Antiwar, Putin could not afford to lose Ukraine to the west without losing crucial support in Russia. Combine that with increased attacks on Donbas separatists and the west’s adamant refusal to make even the most meaningless concessions like guaranteeing they wouldn’t add a nation to NATO who they had no intention of adding anyway, and you can understand if not support Putin’s drastic course of action.

No meaningful diplomatic effort is being made by Washington to end the violence. Ukrainian lives are being spent like pennies to facilitate the agenda of US planetary domination by whipping up international support for the strangulation of Russia while pouring vast fortunes into the military-industrial complex rather than taking even the tiniest step toward de-escalation, diplomacy and detente.

And it’s entirely possible that this was all planned years in advance.

Is it a coincidence that before this started we were bombarded with shrieking anti-Russia narratives for five years, all of which were initiated by secretive and unaccountable intelligence agencies and none of which have ever been substantiated with hard evidence? The discredited conspiracy theories that there was a Kremlin asset in the Oval Office had nothing to do with Ukraine. Neither did the plot hole–riddled and still completely unproven claim that Russian hackers intervened in the US election, or the baseless claim that St Petersburg trolls did the same. Neither did the claim that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill US troops in Afghanistan, which was eventually walked back by the same intelligence cartel that made it.

All these hysterical anti-Russia narratives were shoved in everyone’s face day after day, year after year, with nothing really uniting them apart from the fact that they drove up general anxiety about Russia and that they were initiated by the US intelligence cartel. Even the empty Ukrainegate scandal which led to Trump’s unsuccessful impeachment was initiated by a CIA officer who just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

And while all those shrill narratives about a Putin puppet serving as America’s commander-in-chief were being aggressively hammered into public consciousness, Trump’s actual policies toward Moscow were extremely hawkish and aggressive. Beneath the narratives about Kremlin servitude, a new cold war was being dangerously escalated.

And now, lubricated years in advance by these mass-scale anti-Russia narratives, I’ve got western liberals in my social media notifications with blue and yellow profile pictures calling me a Russian propagandist and a Kremlin shill all day, every day. Because of that mass-scale propaganda campaign, we were paced to this point all the way from where we were at a few years ago when Obama was mocking Mitt Romney for his then-outlandish Russia hawkishness.

So we’re looking at increasingly aggressive confrontations between the US power alliance and the China-Russia bloc for the foreseeable future in a struggle which has already erupted in hot war and could easily get infinitely worse. All because a few manipulators in high places convinced the US establishment that global unipolar domination would be a good thing. Many of these unipolarist empire architects were involved in the murderous and influential Project for a New American Century (PNAC), whose founding members are now providing expert punditry on what should be done about the war in Ukraine.

Michael Parenti saw this all coming long ago:

The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world. The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere — including North America — the blessings of an untrammeled global “free market.” The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.

There is a temptation to engage China to further isolate Russia. This will not work. We are in a new cold war. China and Russia are allies. They're out to get us. The west needs to understand that we're out to get them too.

— Eli Lake (@EliLake) March 3, 2022

We should not have to live this way. We should not have to see the horrors of war inflicted upon humanity with the risk of total nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads every minute of every day, all for some dopey grand chessboard maneuverings of a few sociopaths who can’t just let humanity be.

There is no good reason why nations cannot simply collaborate with each other for everyone’s benefit. There is no good reason we should accept these omnicidal games of planetary conquest as inevitable, normal, or fine. If our minds weren’t so pervasively locked down by mass-scale psychological manipulation, there is no way we would stand for this madness.

I don’t know if the US will succeed in this grand strategic confrontation to prevent the rise of a multipolar world. From where I’m sitting it depends on which side of the conflict has more tricks up their sleeve, and that could easily be the emerging China-centralized alliance of which Russia is a key player. But I do think it’s far too early for anyone to declare that the US-led world order is over and a true multipolar world has solidified.

There are many moves on the chessboard still to be played.

The US Is Not Trying High-Level Diplomacy to End the Fighting in Ukraine

On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US was ready to do what’s necessary to end the fighting in Ukraine, but that doesn’t appear to apply to high-level diplomacy.

The Pentagon said Friday that top US military leaders haven’t spoken with their Russian counterparts since Russia’s attack on Ukraine began. ...

When the Russian attack on Ukraine first happened, President Biden said he had “no plans” to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which the White House reaffirmed on Thursday.

War in Ukraine: Fresh talks between Kyiv, Moscow

An excellent article and information source. Here's a snippet of the introduction to get you started ...

How Zelensky Made Peace With Neo-Nazis

Back in October 2019, as the war in eastern Ukraine dragged on, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Zolote, a town situated firmly in the “gray zone” of Donbas, where over 14,000 had been killed, mostly on the pro-Russian side. There, the president encountered the hardened veterans of extreme right paramilitary units keeping up the fight against separatists just a few miles away. Elected on a platform of de-escalation of hostilities with Russia, Zelensky was determined to enforce the so-called Steinmeier Formula conceived by then-German Foreign Minister Walter Steinmeier which called for elections in the Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.

In a face-to-face confrontation with militants from the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who had launched a campaign to sabotage the peace initiative called “No to Capitulation,” Zelensky encountered a wall of obstinacy. With appeals for disengagement from the frontlines firmly rejected, Zelensky melted down on camera. “I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons,” Zelensky implored the fighters.

Once video of the stormy confrontation spread across Ukrainian social media channels, Zelensky became the target of an angry backlash. Andriy Biletsky, the proudly fascist Azov Battalion leader who once pledged to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen,” vowed to bring thousands of fighters to Zolote if Zelensky pressed any further. Meanwhile, a parliamentarian from the party of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko openly fantasized about Zelensky being blown to bits by a militant’s grenade.

Though Zelensky achieved a minor disengagement, the neo-Nazi paramilitaries escalated their “No Capitulation” campaign. And within months, fighting began to heat up again in Zolote, sparking a new cycle of violations of the Minsk Agreement. By this point, Azov had been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian military and its street vigilante wing, known as the National Corps, was deployed across the country under the watch of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, and alongside the National Police. In December 2021, Zelensky would be seen delivering a “Hero of Ukraine” award to a leader of the fascistic Right Sector in a ceremony in Ukraine’s parliament.

A full-scale conflict with Russia was approaching, and the distance between Zelensky and the extremist paramilitaries was closing fast. This Feb. 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukrainian territory on a stated mission to “demilitarize and denazify” the country, U.S. media embarked on a mission of its own: to deny the power of neo-Nazi paramilitaries over the country’s military and political sphere. As the U.S. government-funded National Public Radio insisted, “Putin’s language [about denazification] is offensive and factually wrong.”

In its bid to deflect from the influence of Nazism in contemporary Ukraine, U.S. media has found its most effective PR tool in the figure of Zelensky, a former TV star and comedian from a Jewish background. It is a role the actor-turned-politician has eagerly assumed. But as we will see, Zelensky has not only ceded ground to the neo-Nazis in his midst, he has entrusted them with a front line role in his country’s war against pro-Russian and Russian forces.

[Much more at the link. -js]

CrossTalk Bullhorns | Conflicting narratives

Weekend propaganda feed from The Guardian:

‘Grave concern’ as Ukraine Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant under Russian orders

Staff at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant are being told what to do by the Russian military commander who seized the site last week, in violation of international safety protocols. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) expressed “grave concern” at the situation at the six-reactor plant, the largest in Europe. The agency was told by the Ukrainian nuclear regulator that “any action of plant management – including measures related to the technical operation of the six reactor units – requires prior approval by the Russian commander”.

The IAEA director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said on Sunday that the Russian military command over the nuclear plant “contravenes one of the seven indispensable pillars of nuclear safety and security” which states that the operating staff must be able to carry out their safety and security duties and be able to make decisions “free of undue pressure”.

Russian forces shelled the Zaporizhzhia plant in the early hours of Friday morning, damaging a walkway between two of the six reactors, and starting a fire in a nearby building used for training. As a result some of the reactors were shut down and others were put on low power. The reactors themselves are well protected by a thick concrete shell, but there is concern that more vulnerable spent fuel rods could be hit, or that the power and cooling systems could be affected, potentially triggering a meltdown.

The IAEA also expressed concern that the Russian occupying force had reportedly shut down mobile phone networks and the internet connection “so that reliable information from the site cannot be obtained through the normal channels of communication”. It said communications between the plant and the Ukrainian nuclear regulator have been affected, which the IAEA said contravenes another of the nuclear safety pillars listed by Grossi, requiring “reliable communications with the regulator and others”.

Putin Says Sanctions DECLARATION OF WAR, Shifts To China

US in ‘very active discussion’ with allies to ban import of Russian oil

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the US and its allies are engaged in a “very active discussion” about banning the import of Russian oil and natural gas in a new escalation of sanctions in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine. The US and western allies have until now held off on current energy supplies from Russia, in order to avoid blowback on their own economies, where inflation is already making prices of gasoline and other goods a problem.

Earlier this week, the White House publicly rebuffed suggestions from lawmakers that the US ban Russian oil, which made up 3% of all the crude shipments that arrived in the US last year, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration. But Europe is far more dependent, with an estimated 30% of oil and 39% of gas supplies coming from Russia.

Blinken told CNN on Sunday morning that Joe Biden convened a meeting of his National Security Council on the subject the day before. “We are now talking to our European partners and allies to look in a coordinated way at the prospect of banning the import of Russian oil while making sure that there is still an appropriate supply of oil on world market,” said Blinken. “That’s a very active discussion as we speak.”

Republicans and a growing number of Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, back the idea of a Russian oil import ban, arguing that Russia’s lucrative exports fund Putin’s war effort. “I’m all for that… ban the oil coming from Russia,” Pelosi said at her weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill on Thursday. But the White House has maintained that it doesn’t want to cause domestic fuel prices to rise. “We don’t have a strategic interest in reducing the global supply of energy,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said.

Energy analysts have warned that there are limited options for maintaining oil supplies without Russian imports. OPEC Plus member countries, which include Russia, last week rejected increasing production , and global inventories of oil are low.

Bullied for food | Nationalists force Ukrainians to choose between aid or land

Sen. Lindsey Graham Calls for Russians to Assassinate Putin

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) took his hawkishness to a new level on Thursday and openly called for someone inside Russia to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?

The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.

You would be doing your country - and the world - a great service.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) March 4, 2022

Gas Prices Near ALL TIME HIGH As DC Weighs Russian Oil Ban

Pfffftttt! Pretty transparent.

US officials fly to Venezuela for talks in apparent bid to further isolate Russia

Senior US officials have flown to Venezuela for rare talks with Nicolás Maduro’s government in an apparent bid to prise the South American country away from its Russian backers after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. White House and state department negotiators met Maduro representatives in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, on Saturday in what was the first such encounter in years.

Citing anonymous US officials, the New York Times claimed the Biden administration was motivated partly by concern that Russia’s Latin American allies – which include the authoritarian regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela – could become “security threats” if the geopolitical clash with Putin escalated.

Others speculated that the US saw Venezuelan oil as a potential substitute for Russian imports were it to slap sanctions on Moscow as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves and its output is currently growing despite US sanctions imposed at the height of the 2019 attempt to topple Maduro.

Reuters said no agreement was reached at Saturday’s talks. However, some experts believe the encounter could signal a significant shift in US policy towards the country, which has been plunged into humanitarian and political crisis since Maduro took power in 2013.

Iran nuclear talks rocked by Russian demand for sanctions exemption

Russia has been accused of trying to take the Iran nuclear deal hostage as part of its wider battle with the west over Ukraine, after it threw a last-minute spanner into plans for an agreement to lift a swathe of US economic sanctions on Tehran. After months of negotiations in Vienna, a revised deal was expected to be reached within days under which US sanctions would be lifted in return for Tehran returning to full compliance with the 2015 nuclear nonproliferation deal.

But diplomatic efforts have been sent into a tailspin by Russia’s unexpected demand for written guarantees that its economic trade with Iran will be exempted from US sanctions imposed on Russia since its invasion of Ukraine. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, at the weekend cited the “avalanche of aggressive sanctions [on Russia] that the west has started spewing out”, and said: “This meant Moscow had to ask the US for guarantees first, requiring a clear answer that the new sanctions will not affect its rights under the nuclear deal.

“We requested that our US colleagues … give us written guarantees at the minimum level of the secretary of state that the current [sanctions] process launched by the US will not in any way harm our right to free, fully fledged trade and economic and investment cooperation and military-technical cooperation with Iran.”

If Lavrov’s demand is to require the US to exempt Russian-Iranian trade from sanctions, the west is almost certain to reject the demand since it would open a huge loophole in the sanctions regime. It would then be up to Moscow whether to veto the nuclear deal altogether. ...

Russia also has a short-term strategic interest in scuppering or postponing the deal. Iran produces more than 2m barrels of oil a day, and if these supplies were able to reach the markets, the upward surge in prices would be slowed.

Iran had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, but I guess that doesn't mean anything to some people.

Sept. 11 victims ask US government to seize Iran oil aboard American-owned tanker

Sept. 11 attack victims have asked the federal government to seize Iranian oil from a tanker in Asia that is American-owned.

The Associated Press reported that the victims made the request in a court filing on Thursday amid federal investigations into the involvement of the tanker, called the Suez Rajan, in the sanctioned trade of Iranian crude oil.

A million barrels of oil could be on the Suez Rajan, according to federal court filings, suggesting they were placed aboard the tanker by the National Iranian Oil Co. and the National Iranian Tanker Corp.

Sept. 11 victims are asking the government to seize the Iranian oil and sell it to fulfill a more than $3 billion judgement against Iran because of the attacks.

COLD WAR HYSTERIA: Russia, US CRACKDOWN On Media

Calls Mount to Cancel Student Debt as Biden Weighs Longer Payment Pause

After a White House official confirmed this week that President Joe Biden is considering further extending a pandemic-related pause on student loan payments, lawmakers and activists renewed calls for debt cancellation.

While payments are due to resume on May 1, White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain suggested on a popular podcast that the president may extend the pause and is still sorting out whether he will take further action on the student debt crisis.

"This is a GOOD idea!" the group Bold Progressives tweeted with a video of Klain on "Pod Save America."

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key advocate of student debt cancellation in Congress, agreed, also tweeting Klain's comments.

In response to HuffPost's reporting on Klain's remarks, Congresswoman Marie Newman (D-Ill.) said Saturday that "pausing student loan payments during Covid has allowed Americans to get by."

"We need immediate student debt relief, and deferring payments again is a great step, but we need to do more," she added.

Noting that "education is a pathway to greater opportunity and economic security, yet many Americans simply can't afford it or become crushed by student loans," Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) told Biden on Saturday that "we must cancel student debt."

Rep. Jesús "Chuy" García (D-Ill.) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) also pressured the president to take action on the issue Saturday:

Pressley and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who have been leading the fight in Congress with Schumer, participated in a Friday roundtable about how student loan debt impacts Black communities, particularly business owners, entrepreneurs, and other professionals.

Advocates of debt cancellation often argue that it is necessary to help address the racial wealth gap in the United States.

Also on Friday, the Debt Collective announced a nationally coordinated refusal to make payments if Biden refuses to step in before they resume in May.

"If President Biden resumes illegitimate student debt payments in May, we will facilitate as many student debtors as possible to safely pay $0 a month to the Department of Education," declared Debt Collective co-founder Astra Taylor.

"Whether it's filing a borrower defense or enrolling in an income-driven repayment plan, we are politicizing our refusal to pay as part of our escalation on President Biden," Taylor said. "He has the authority to cancel all federal student debt with the flick of a pen. He can end this manufactured crisis today."

Debt Collective spokesperson Braxton Brewington emphasized that "we want to be clear—a student debt strike is not intentionally defaulting on your loans, but politicizing and collectivizing your refusal to pay by using the tools the Department of Education already provides to student borrowers."

"The federal government doesn't need our student debt payments to function, and the last two years have proved that," Brewington added, "but they do need our cooperation—and they certainly won't have that."

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) expressed support for the planned strike, noting that "the road to student debt cancellation is long and hard, and a key aspect is building solidarity amongst students and graduates with debt."

"The Debt Collective's Student Debt Strike is an important campaign to help build the mass movement we need to resist and abolish student debt, and there are so many ways to support it without putting yourself in financial jeopardy," she said. "I stand with Student Debt Strikers and encourage everyone—whether you have debt or not—to join us."

Biden's New FDA Pick Is A Big Pharma Shill

Florida Republicans pass bill to ban abortion after 15 weeks

Republican lawmakers in Florida passed a bill on Thursday evening to ban abortion after 15 weeks, nine weeks earlier than is currently allowed in the state. The governor, Ron DeSantis, is expected to sign the bill, which is modeled on a Mississippi law that has become the subject of a supreme court case that could severely curtail or perhaps overturn abortion rights nationally.

“Let me be clear: there is no such thing as a reasonable ban,” said the Democratic representative Anna Eskamani, in response to the bill’s passage. “Despite impassioned pleas by Democrats to include exceptions for rape, incest and human trafficking, none were accepted by the Republican majority.” The new bill also drew rebuke from the Biden administration, which called it “extreme by any standard”.

“The right of women to make decisions about their own bodies is non-negotiable,” Vice-President Kamala Harris said in a statement. “If signed into law, Florida’s bill would violate the constitutional right to abortion that the supreme court has recognized for nearly 50 years.”

Under current federal law, women have a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy until a fetus can survive outside the womb, generally regarded as 24 weeks. That right was established in a landmark 1973 supreme court case, Roe v Wade, which invalidated dozens of state abortion bans. Until recently this meant Florida’s bill would have been almost certain to be permanently blocked by federal courts, if DeSantis did sign it.

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Outcry as North Carolina allows bear hunting in sanctuaries

A decades-long ban on bear hunting in parts of North Carolina has been overturned by the state’s wildlife resources commission, in a move that has sparked outcry from local residents and American animal rights groups. The North Carolina commission voted to allow bear hunting in three bear sanctuaries, encompassing an area of 92,500 acres of mountainous forest in the southern US state. The sanctuaries, established to protect and preserve North Carolina’s black bear population, are set to open to hunters later in 2022, despite thousands of people signing a petition against the move.

Bear hunting has been banned in North Carolina’s Panthertown-Bonas Defeat, Standing Indian and Pisgah Bear sanctuaries since 1971. The number of black bears in the state has since grown from fewer than 1,000 to about 25,000, according to the wildlife commission.

In a January public hearing, the commission said the US Forest Service, the federal agency that oversees America’s 154 national forests, had requested that hunting be allowed in the three sanctuaries “due to increased human-bear interactions”.

The commission voted in favor of the proposal in late February, in defiance of opponents who say hunting will not reduce human-bear encounters. “It will definitely not target the actual bears involved in the original complaint of ‘increased bear-human interactions’,” said Bill Lea, a North Carolina-based nature photographer and retired US Forest Service assistant district ranger.

“Instead, the plan will target many of the younger bears who have just started life on their own away from their mothers and who have not yet developed the skills to elude the packs of vicious dogs and hunters. The indiscriminate killing of bears never addresses the problem of individual bear behavior.”

Florida Panhandle wildfires force evacuation from more than a thousand homes

Veterans at a nursing home were evacuated, joining residents from more than 1,000 homes, as firefighters and emergency workers battled two massive wildfires Sunday in an area of the Florida Panhandle that was still recovering from destruction caused by a category-5 hurricane more than three years ago.

The 8,000-acre Bertha Swamp Road fire and the 841-acre Adkins Avenue fire threatened homes and forced residents of at least 1,100 houses in Bay county to flee over the weekend. The Adkins Avenue fire destroyed two structures and damaged another 12 homes late on Friday. Local emergency official said no homes were destroyed and there were no injuries on Saturday, the second day of battling the Adkins Avenue fire. On Sunday, a third fire developed, forcing the evacuation of a 120-bed, state-operated nursing home in Panama City. ...

Hurricane Michael in 2018 was directly responsible for 16 deaths and about $25bn in damage in the US, and it left behind 72m tons of destroyed trees that have provided fuel for the Bay county wildfires, according to the Florida forest service. Currently, there are nearly 150 wildfires burning more than 12,100 acres throughout Florida, and the state is only at the very beginning of its usual wildfire season.

How satellites may hold the key to the methane crisis

Last month, scientists working with data from Tropomi, a monitoring instrument onboard the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5 satellite, published some startling findings. Writing in the journal Science, the team reported that it had found about 1,800 instances of huge releases of methane (more than 25 tonnes an hour) into the atmosphere in 2019 and 2020. Two-thirds of these were from oil and gas facilities, with the leaks concentrated over the largest oil and gas basins across the world, as well as major transmission pipelines, the team said.

Launched in 2017, Tropomi has been a huge step forward for scientists researching methane, being the first instrument in space that can see plumes of methane emissions directly, says Lena Höglund-Isaksson, a methane researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. For example, the instrument led to the discovery of huge methane leaks in Turkmenistan that researchers were not aware of before, she says.

But these emissions are only the tip of the methane iceberg. “The current constellation of satellites in orbit around the planet today can see about 10% of the methane emissions of oil and gas on the planet,” says Riley Duren, chief executive of Carbon Mapper and a researcher at Arizona University, who co-wrote the paper. “The remaining 90% of these oil and gas methane emissions are below the detection limit of that satellite, but they won’t stay undetected for long.” Better detection of where the methane is coming from is becoming a global imperative. An analysis last month from the International Energy Agency found that methane emissions from oil, gas and coal are about 70% higher than what governments are officially reporting. If the world is ever going to achieve significant reductions of this gas, it needs to know where it’s coming from.

In the next few years, several new satellites with far higher resolutions are set to be launched, including MethaneSat, scheduled for launch by the US nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in early 2023, and the first two satellites from Carbon Mapper in late 2023; the latter plans to have a whole “constellation” of them in orbit by 2025. These satellites will allow an unprecedented tracking of the sources of this potent greenhouse gas and, it’s hoped, ultimately help to stop the emissions occurring in the first place.

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Also of Interest

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

Calling Russia’s Attack ‘Unprovoked’ Lets US Off the Hook

Zelensky And The Fascists: "He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk"

Russia’s Economic War Front, The New Tributary System & The Russian Kowtow

On the Cusp of an Economic Singularity

UAE’s victory over Houthis at the UN is a grave loss for Yemen

Report Details 'Unraveling' of Trump Probe That Led Prosecutors to Resign

Black-led urban farms are thriving – until they have to fight for their land

‘Consent was never given’: indigenous groups oppose restarting Guatemala nickel mine

Yellowstone at 150: a journey into the heart of America’s first national park – in pictures

SHOCK Poll Shows Public WANTS No Fly Zone

Press statements following 3rd round of Russia-Ukraine negotiations

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A Little Night Music

Bill Doggett - Honky Tonk (Parts 1 & 2)

Bill Doggett - Floyd's Guitar Blues

Bill Doggett - Ram-Bunk-Shush

Bill Doggett - After Hours

Bill Doggett - Quaker City

Bill Doggett - Big City Drag

Bill Doggett - High Heels

Bill Doggett - Slow Walk

Bill Doggett - Oops

Bill Doggett - Night Train

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