Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Texas blues and soul musician Larry Davis. Enjoy!

“The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens--and honor its own previous commitments--by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.”

-- Jimmy Carter

News and Opinion

Israel Kills Palestinians and Western Liberals Shrug. Their Humanitarianism Is a Sham.

If the concept of intervention is driven by universal human rights, why is it — from the people who identify themselves as liberal interventionists — why do we never hear a peep, a word, about intervening to protect the Palestinians?” That was the question I put to the French philosopher, author, and champion of liberal (or humanitarian) interventionism, Bernard-Henri Lévy, on my Al Jazeera English interview show “Head to Head” in 2013. The usually silver-tongued Levy struggled to answer the question. The situation in Palestine is “not the same” as in Syria and “you have not all the good on one side and all the bad on the other side,” said Levy, who once remarked in reference to the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, that he had “never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions.”

I couldn’t help but be reminded of my exchange with the man known as “BHL” this past weekend, as I watched horrific images of unarmed Palestinian protesters at the Gaza border being shot in the back by the “democratic army” of Israel. How many “moral questions” did those Israeli snipers ask themselves, I wondered, before they gunned down Gazan refugees for daring to demand a return to their homes inside the Green Line?

On Friday, the IDF shot an astonishing 773 people with live ammunition, killing 17 of them. Yet a spokesperson for the IDF bragged that Israeli troops “arrived prepared” and “everything was accurate. … We know where every bullet landed.” On Sunday, Israel’s hawkish defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, roundly rejected calls from the European Union and the United Nations for an independent inquiry into the violence and insisted that “our soldiers deserve a commendation.” To be clear, then: Israeli troops will continue to murder and maim Palestinians while the Israeli government guarantees that there will be no consequences for their actions.

So, where is the outcry from liberal interventionists across the West?

Where is the moral outrage from former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, the famously pro-intervention, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a “A Problem From Hell,” which lamented U.S. inaction in Rwanda, over the sheer number of unarmed Palestinians shot, killed, and injured in recent days? How does she have time to retweet a picture of an elephant and a lion cub, but not to make a statement about the violence in Gaza? Where is the demand from Canadian academic-turned-politician Michael Ignatieff, who was once one of the loudest voices in favor of the so-called responsibility to protect doctrine, for peacekeeping troops to be deployed to the Occupied Territories? Where are the righteously angry op-eds from Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, or Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, or David Aaronovitch of The Times of London, demanding concrete action against the human rights abusers of the IDF?

Their silence is deafening — and telling. Palestinians, it seems, have been so dehumanized that they don’t deserve a humanitarian intervention; their blood is cheap, their plight is unimportant, and, perhaps above all else, their killers are our friends.

Did I miss the call for the expulsion of Israeli diplomats as a protest against the slaughter of unarmed Palestinians?

— Ajamu Baraka (@ajamubaraka) March 31, 2018

UN fails to condemn Israel's use force on unarmed Palestinians

At Kuwait's request, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting late on Friday, to issue a statement condemning Israel's use of force against Palestinians protesting in Gaza.

The US blocked it several times, and the council failed to agree on a joint statement.

US Blocks UN Investigation into Israeli Military Killings in Gaza

New York Times sides with Israel as it kills Gaza marchers

The New York Times quickly put its spin on the Great March of Return by Palestinians in Gaza. Writing from Jerusalem, Isabel Kershner dismissed Palestinian nonviolence and emphasized a rapid descent into “chaos and bloodshed.” (Iyad Abuheweila and Ibrahim El-Mughraby contributed reporting from Gaza.) That language persisted for much of Friday before being replaced with wording about Palestinians venting “their pent-up frustration in a protest that quickly turned violent.”

Friday saw the greatest number of Palestinian fatalities in a single day at the hands of occupation forces since the end of Israel’s 2014 military assault on the Gaza Strip.

At one juncture, Kershner’s opening sentence read: “What was billed as a six-week campaign of peaceful protests in Gaza descended almost immediately into chaos and bloodshed on Friday, with health officials in the Palestinian territory saying Israeli soldiers killed 15 Palestinians in confrontations along the border fence.” She assigned no responsibility for that descent in her opening paragraph, but the second paragraph makes clear which point of view Kershner thinks her readers should believe. “Soon after the campaign began Friday morning, the Israeli military said Palestinian protesters were rioting in six places along the border, rolling burning tires and hurling stones at the fence and at Israeli soldiers beyond it.” ...

There is no reporting from the newspaper as to whether the march started as nonviolent and was pitched into violence after Israeli forces used deadly force. According to the Gaza-based human rights group Al Mezan, the first death of the day occurred around 5 am, when Israeli forces fired an artillery shell killing farmer Omar Samour in his field some 700 meters inside Gaza. ... Videos that subsequently emerged showed clear evidence of Palestinians being shot when they posed no plausible danger to anyone. In one case, a young man was shot dead a long distance from the boundary fence and as he ran away from it. ...

The New York Times, while including language about Palestinians “protesting against Israel’s longstanding blockade of the territory and in support of their claims to return to homes in what is now Israel,” generally complied in its overall framing with Israel’s desired narrative that this was a story about Palestinian violence.

As soldiers, we too were told to open fire at protesters in Gaza

I was there six years ago. It was Friday, March 30, 2012. Land Day on the border with Gaza. Demonstrations began after Friday noon prayers. A group of snipers had set up its post the previous night, while the rest of the unit stood armed with riot dispersal weapons, closer to the fence. The order was clear: if a Palestinian crosses the “buffer zone” — 300 meters from the fence inside the Gaza Strip, one may shoot at the legs of the “main inciters.”

This order, which never explained exactly how a soldier is meant to identify, isolate, and shoot a “main inciter” out of tens of thousands of demonstrators disturbed me then. It continued to disturb me this past weekend, after IDF snipers opened fire on Palestinian marchers at the Gaza border. “How can opening fire at a crowd of people be a legal order?” I asked my deputy company commander six years ago. I have yet to receive an answer.

What would have happened had these soldiers spent their entire service on the Gaza front? As soldiers who have had just finished our course, “Land Day” was the perfect opportunity for us to see some “action.” The same can likely be said about the soldiers who shot dead at least 16 protesters on Friday. Their commanders were most likely also excited.

I am certain that had we been called up to do the same thing year after year, something would have changed. After all, this situation — every year, at the same time, at the same place, with the high likelihood that a Palestinian, not an Israeli, would lose his life — makes sense only the first time around, especially in the eyes of a fresh-faced 18-year-old. ... Every year is a new one, and at the border with Gaza arrive new commanders and new soldiers — fresh blood and a leadership with short-term memory.

Sanders condemns killing of Palestinian protesters

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Saturday condemned the deaths of Palestinian protesters during demonstrations on Israel's southern border.

At least 17 Palestinians were killed by both live ammunition and rubber bullets fired by Israeli troops in Gaza after tens of thousands of Palestinians marched along the Israel-Gaza border Friday, CNN reported.

Sanders issued a statement Saturday afternoon condemning the deaths and declaring in a series of tweets that Palestinians should be free to protest without fear. "The killing of Palestinian demonstrators by Israeli forces in Gaza is tragic. It is the right of all people to protest for a better future without a violent response," the Vermont senator wrote. "Meanwhile, the situation in Gaza remains a humanitarian disaster. The U.S. must play a more positive role in ending the Gaza blockade and helping Palestinians and Israelis build a future that works for all," he added.

Sanders's remarks make him among the first U.S. politicians to speak out publicly against Friday's violence.

Porton Down experts unable to verify precise source of novichok

British scientists at the Porton Down defence research laboratory have not established that the nerve agent used to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal was made in Russia, it has emerged.

Gary Aitkenhead, the chief executive of the government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), said the poison had been identified as a military-grade novichok nerve agent, which could probably be deployed only by a nation state.

Aitkenhead said the government had reached its conclusion that Russia was responsible for the Salisbury attack by combining the laboratory’s scientific findings with information from other sources.

The UK government moved quickly to make it clear that the prime minister, Theresa May, had always been clear the assessment from Porton Down was “only one part of the intelligence picture”. The comments came hours before an extraordinary meeting in The Hague of the executive council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), called by Russia.

A Russian embassy spokesman in the UK said: “We understood from the very start that UK government statements on the nerve agent having been produced in Russia were a bluff. Now this has been confirmed by the head of the secret lab. This only proves that all political declarations on the Russian origin of the crime are nothing but assumptions not stemming from objective facts or the course of the investigation.”

German prosecutors: Catalonia’s former leader can be extradited back to Spain

German prosecutors said Tuesday Spain’s request to extradite former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont is valid, and requested a court send the fugitive separatist to Madrid to face charges of rebellion.

Prosecutors also requested that Puigdemont be kept in jail until a decision was made, due to the flight risk he posed. ...

The prosecutors’ request does not mean Puigdemont will necessarily be extradited, as the decision rests with the higher regional court of Schleswig in northern Germany. For the extradition to proceed, the court must decide that the actions that led to the warrant being issued in Spain would also be punishable under German criminal law.

While “rebellion” has not been a crime in Germany since the 1960s, prosecutors said the charge was equivalent to the German crime of high treason. In a statement, the prosecutors said Puigdemont had “implemented an unconstitutional referendum, despite the violent clashes” that would likely ensue. ...

A decision from the court is likely to take several days.

From an interview with Italy's la Repubblica. There's plenty of interesting stuff in the interview, but this seemed an interesting teaser:

Julian Assange: "I want to testify on Cambridge Analytica, but there has been political pressure

LR - You offered to appear before the UK Parliament Committee investigating the Cambridge Analytica case, can you tell us more?

JA - "I can't because I would ruin the surprise for the Parliament (he smiles). They invited me to give evidence and I was in favour of doing so, but there has been pressure on the committee. That is a political problem". ...

LR - Had you heard of Cambridge Analytica before they approached you?

JA - "No. Many people and organisations are always trying to contact WikiLeaks, and we are also trying to contact many of them, as all serious media organisations do. What we don't do, unless there is a journalistic partnership, is tell people about our upcoming publications. Cambridge Analytica is not a journalistic outlet, that's why we rejected their contact".

LR - So that was the first contact for you.

JA - "Yes. There is an organization that is much more significant than Cambridge Analytica, which is the SCL Group, of which Cambridge Analytica is part. The SCL Group does a lot of work for the UK military and intelligence sector and has been involved in numerous elections over the last 20 years, they brag in 60 countries. It is partly government, partly commercial work. There is still an important question to be resolved, which is how much of the SCL Group's activities in other countries' elections are on behalf of the UK state, or otherwise subsidized in some way by the UK state, and how many are simply field service operations for political parties in those states".

LR - If you aren't allowed to testify before the UK Parliament's Committee, will you go public with the documents?

JA - "We'll see. Having been unlawfully detained by the United Kingdom in violation of two UN rulings for nearly eight years, I am in significant conflict with the UK state and the broader establishment which runs the state. I spoke by video link at the European Parliament about the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, but at the moment it doesn't appear that the UK Parliament - the 'mother of Parliaments', as they like to call it here - has the independence of the European Parliament".

The Persecution Of Assange Proves Him Right

The online Oxford dictionary defines the word siege as a “military operation in which enemy forces surround a town or building, cutting off essential supplies, with the aim of compelling those inside to surrender.” ... This is precisely the strategy that is being employed against Julian Assange. If you try to talk about Assange being in a state of functional house arrest on any online forum you will be swiftly inundated by accounts asserting in fascinatingly uniform language that Assange is free to leave the Ecuadorian embassy whenever he wants, which just so happens to be the desire of the empire which currently has him under siege. ...

Julian Assange cannot “leave whenever he wants”. A judge with severely corrupt ties ruled in February that his arrest warrant still stands for an absurd bail-jumping charge from 2012 that Assange has already served his sentence for many times over according to the law as it is written. As soon as he sets foot outside the embassy he will most certainly be arrested, and then most certainly extradited to the US where the Trump administration is aggressively pursuing his arrest.

Chelsea Manning was tortured. CIA black sites exist. The hoards of online trolls promulgating the narrative that Assange can “leave whenever he wants” would crack like eggs under the treatment that is inflicted upon individuals who have dared to stand up to the US-centralized empire. Assange isn’t hiding from justice, he is hiding from injustice. There is no reason to believe that this draconian empire would give him a fair trial and humane treatment. He can no more “leave whenever he wants” than he could if there was a firing squad stationed outside the embassy door.

And now this same western empire has pressured Ecuador into cutting off Assange’s internet access, phone calls and visitors to its siege, with electronic jammers being placed inside the embassy to make doubly certain that he is completely cut off from the world. A whole new array of weapons have been added to the empire’s siege, and it’s getting a lot hotter in there. What all this has done, however, is prove irrefutably that Julian Assange has been right all along. The empire that he has been railing against throughout his entire time in the spotlight is every bit as depraved, oppressive and Orwellian as he has claimed, and is unquestionably deserving of his relentless assault upon it.

If you speak out against the US-centralized empire, you will be silenced. If you expose the truth about it, it will lay siege to you until you either surrender or die. Dissent is being stomped out.

From 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike to Teachers’ Strikes in OK & KY Today, Workers Demand a Voice

Teacher Strikes Are Spreading Across America With No End in Sight

One month after a teachers’ “wildcat” strike ended with a deal to hike pay for all West Virgina state employees, teacher strikes are spreading fast across the country, with no clear endgame in sight. ...

In each case, teachers are pushing Republican governors and GOP-controlled legislatures to hike their pay, saying declining real wages threaten to drive staff out of the public school system. Educators see leverage in tight private sector labor markets and inspiration in West Virginia, where strikers defied union leaders by holding out for a better deal. They’re reviving the tactics of an earlier era: In the five years that followed World War II, as teachers felt left behind amid crowded classrooms and accelerating private sector wage growth, there were around 60 teacher strikes across the U.S.—many without legal protection or official union support. ...

“Legislators who might have said, ‘Well, why not more tax cuts and let schools take care of themselves somehow,’ they’re now looking around going ‘I don’t want this to explode in my state,’ ” said Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association. For decades “schoolchildren were left to pay for those big tax cuts. That chicken has now come home to roost.” ...

All this leaves union leaders in a tough spot. Members have proved they’re not only willing to go “wildcat,” but that they may keep doing so even if the union cuts a deal. But some officials worry that prolonged strikes against conservative lawmakers who’ve already coughed up some cash will end badly for their organizations. While Oklahoma’s National Education Association affiliate is backing an indefinite walkout, the president of Oklahoma City’s American Federation of Teachers local last week announced that his union accepts the $6,000 deal as a “down payment,” and warned that if the strikers stay out of work for too long, their numbers, support from school boards, and leverage could start to dissipate.

'Double whammy': teachers strike as healthcare costs cut into earnings

A new wave of teacher strikes has highlighted a growing problem for all US workers – growing health costs which have become a “hungry tapeworm” on Americans’ wages. In the most expensive health system in the world and the only industrialized nation without universal healthcare, more than 177 million Americans get health insurance through an employer. But insurance is rarely free.

“They’ve shifted the healthcare costs and the pension costs on to employees, so employees are making less and they’re spending less,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 1.7 million members. “It’s a double whammy.” Conservative legislatures’ push to shift health and pension costs on to individual teachers means in some states, teachers take home less pay than they did five years ago.

Over the last decade, private insurance companies have increasingly demanded more “cost-sharing” from patients, a euphemism for more money out of people’s pockets. ... In 10 years, out-of-pocket costs have increased dramatically for all Americans. From 2005 to 2015, the average amount of money people have to pay themselves before insurance cover kicks in grew from $303 to $1,505. Once insurance starts paying, people are liable for another cost, called “coinsurance”. That grew from $134 to $253, on average. Overall, cost-sharing rose 66% in 10 years, according to Kaiser Family Foundation.

Thousands of angry teachers protest for better funding and salaries in Oklahoma

The return of "outside agitators..."

Sacramento sheriff said professional protesters were at the Stephon Clark vigil

Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones said that “professional protesters” flooded a weekend vigil honoring Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old unarmed black man shot and killed by Sacramento police officers.

The Sacramento community has staged days of protests over the death of Clark, whom two Sacramento police officers shot in the back 7 times on March 18, according to an independent autopsy. During a news conference Monday, Jones called the vigil on Saturday night a “peaceful, meaningful assembly with little incident” — until a Sacramento County sheriff’s police cruiser struck a 61-year-old protester. That really got the paid protesters going, according to Jones.

“Unfortunately, in many protests that have developed to this scope, there are professional protesters and professional instigators that infiltrate the protest for their own purposes, as well as participants from out of the region that inflame and antagonize the event,” Jones said on Monday. “That is what happened here, which culminated in many vehicles being struck, objects being thrown, and fires being started.” ... When a reporter asked Jones if he had any evidence that paid protesters attended the vigil, he replied, “We do have evidence, and we have seen it previously. You’ll notice the same cadre of protesters at every protest, sometimes in other states.”

Asheville cop who beat black jaywalker: “I beat the shit out of his head”

The City of Asheville released body camera footage Monday of the violent arrest of Johnnie Rush, a black man who was tased, beaten and put into a chokehold by a police officer on suspicion of jaywalking in August 2017. [see article at link for videos. - js]

The new footage, which shows the entire incident from multiple angles, shows Rush being placed in a chokehold, and the arresting officer Christopher Hickman complaining in the aftermath "I have blood all over me" and admitting that he "beat the shit out of his head."

While in the chokehold, Rush can be heard saying "I can't breathe," reminiscent of the final words of Eric Garner, who was killed by police in Staten Island, New York in 2014. ... Rush survived the incident, but Hickman is facing felony and misdemeanor assault charges, as well as a federal civil rights investigation. The incident brought renewed scrutiny to heavy-handed policing broadly, but also the Asheville Police Department which had just implemented a new use of force policy.

“What happened in these recordings is unacceptable and does not meet the standards of the Asheville Police Department, the the values of the City of Asheville, or the expectations of Asheville residents,” the city said, in a statement after releasing the tapes. “Christopher Hickman, who used dangerous and excessive force against Johnnie Rush, was quickly taken off the street, and subsequently resigned from the police department before he was terminated.”

Supreme Court shields a police officer from being sued for shooting a woman in her front yard

The Supreme Court on Monday shielded a police officer from being sued for shooting an Arizona woman in her front yard, once again making it harder to bring legal action against officers who use excessive force, even against an innocent person. With two dissents, the high court tossed out a lawsuit by a Tucson woman who was shot four times outside her home because she was seen carrying a large knife.

The ruling — which comes at a time of growing controversy over police shootings nationwide — effectively advises courts to rely more heavily on the officer's view of such incidents, rather than the victim's.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in dissent the victim did not threaten the police or a friend who was standing nearby. This "decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later," Sotomayor wrote.

Civil liberties advocates on the right and the left sharply criticized the ruling.

"Today's ruling gives yet another green light to officers who use deadly force as a tool of first resort instead of last," said Clark Neily, vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute. "It does so based on a legal doctrine — qualified immunity — that the Supreme Court invented out of whole cloth to help create a policy of near-zero accountability for law enforcement."

David Cole, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said officers who use lethal force unconstitutionally should be held accountable. "Giving a free pass to officers under these circumstances will only exacerbate the problem."

Is the Two-Party System Doomed?

Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose 2013 bestseller Capital in the 21st Century awoke upscale Americans to the shocking news that their economic system was not working for everyone, has written a new paper exposing more uncomfortable truths. Piketty's new essay, called Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right, studied electoral trends in three Western countries – France, Britain and the U.S. – dating back to the 1940s. ...

He writes that across all three countries, we've seen the evolution of the same trend. Fifty or sixty years ago, voting with the "left-wing" side (which he terms the socialist/labour/democratic parties) tended to be associated with low income and low education. Conversely, high education and high-income voters in all three countries voted right. Over the years, however, the "left-wing" has become more and more associated with higher-education voters, giving rise to what he calls a "multiple-elite" party system. According to Piketty, in 2016, for the first time – and of course some of this has to do with the unique repugnance of Donald Trump – the upper 10% of voters, sorted by income, voted Democratic. Piketty just puts numbers behind an observation that anyone covering recent American presidential elections could have made: That huge pluralities of voters on both sides of the aisle feel unrepresented and even insulted, and increasingly see both major parties as tools of the very rich. His belief is that a major reordering of the political landscape is coming. It will be based less on traditional notions of right and left, and more along the lines of what he describes as "globalists (high-education, high-income) vs. nativists (low- education, low-income)." ...

America, like pretty much everyplace else in the neoliberal world, is becoming a society split up into unequal camps. We have an extremely small group of very rich people, and a much larger group of everyone else, who may or may not be educated, but increasingly have either zero net worth, or close to it. The numbers are getting harder to ignore. American politicians for decades have done an outstanding job of keeping low-income voters from seeing their shared economic dilemmas. ... But having two parties sponsored by the same donors simply can't work in the long-term.

From Mitt Romney's idiotic tirade against "the 47%" to Hillary Clinton's recent remarks about how she won all the "dynamic" parts of America, our political leaders have consistently showed that they don't see or understand the levels of resentment out there. Papers like Piketty's are a warning that if the intellectuals in both parties don't come up with a real plan for dealing with the income disparity problem before someone smarter than Donald Trump takes it on, they're screwed. Forget nativists vs. globalists. Think poor vs. rich. Think 99 to 1. While Washington waits with bated breath for the results of the Mueller probe, it's the other mystery – how do we fix this seemingly unfixable economic system – that is keeping the rest of the country awake at night.

Keiser Report: American Gulag

The Mexican indigenous community that ran politicians out of town

All across Mexico, political billboards are springing up and candidates are hitting the streets, as campaigning starts for elections to pick a new president, renew the congress and replace hundreds of state and local officials. Everywhere, that is, except for one small corner of the violent western state of Michoacán, which has found a simple solution to the vote-buying and patronage which plague Mexican democracy. The indigenous Purépecha town of Cherán threw out all political parties after a popular uprising in 2011 – and it doesn’t want them back. ...

Much of that antipathy can be traced back to the situation in the early part of the decade, when the surrounding area was dominated by illegal loggers, who clearcut local forests and hauled out dozens of truckloads of logs each week – with the protection of a local drug cartel, and the collusion of corrupt police and local politicians. Eventually, the townspeople decided they had enough. Early on 15 April 2011, local residents ran off the loggers and blockaded the town. Then they kicked out the mayor and banished political parties, arguing that infighting was what had allowed the town to fall into crisis.

Constant intrigues in the main political grouping meant that the villagers could never come together to confront major problems – such as the illegal logging – said Pedro Chávez Sánchez, the head of the 12-member council that now governs Cherán. The council, which is renewed every three years, was formed after the 2011 uprising and eventually ruled constitutional by Mexico’s supreme court. Neighbourhood assemblies will select a new council on 1 July – the same day as the presidential election. But no ballot boxes will be installed in Cherán, meaning that anyone wanting to vote for president will have to travel to neighbouring communities.

“We can’t put a project like this at risk in order to participate” in the federal election, Chávez said. “If we let in an election like this, with polling stations and all that accompanies that, the parties are going to want to get back in here.” Political parties have occasionally attempted to campaign in the town, only to be escorted out by the local ronda – the citizen-run security force formed after the uprising. Instead of party publicity – ubiquitous in small Mexican towns and villages – walls in Cherán, are emblazoned with murals invoking the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata or denouncing political parties.

“Asshole parties,” reads one. “Cherán is not a toy.”

The Russia investigation just sent its first person to jail

The first sentence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe has been handed down.

A federal judge sentenced Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zwaan to 30 days in jail and a $20,000 fine on Tuesday after he pleaded guilty to lying to special counsel Robert Mueller and withholding documents related to the Russia investigation. While 19 people have been charged in Mueller’s probe so far, Van der Zwaan became the first to get jail time. ...

When Mueller’s investigators questioned Van der Zwaan in November 2017 about his relationship with Gates and Manafort, they caught him in a lie about the timing of his last communication with his former business associates. Van der Zwaan said his last communication with Gates was in August 2016, and his last communication with a “Person A” was in 2014. Turns out he had communicated with Gates and “Person A” in September 2016 regarding their 2012 Ukrainian lobbying work. He also withheld emails Mueller asked him to produce.

National parks to rethink plan to hike entrance fees after widespread anger

The Department of the Interior said on Tuesday that it planned to revise a controversial proposal to drastically increase entrance fees at some of the most popular national parks in the country. The interior department press secretary, Heather Swift, said the Trump administration decided to rethink its proposal after Americans flooded the National Park Service (NPS) with more than 100,000 comments, many of them sharply critical of the proposed surge pricing scheme.

In October, the interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, announced a plan to hike entrance fees as high as $70 at 17 different parks – including the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone and Glacier – during peak visitation season. Zinke justified the fee increase as a way to raise revenue and help the NPS tackle its roughly $12bn deferred maintenance backlog. “During the public comment period, the National Park Service received more than 109,000 comments on the original peak-season fee proposal,” Swift wrote in an email. “We’ve taken the public’s suggestions seriously and have amended the plan to reflect those.”

Swift would not comment on the details of the changes under consideration, writing that the plan was “still being reviewed and not yet finalized”. The Washington Post, which first reported the story on Monday, said there was fear inside the interior department that a steep fee increase might cause visitation to drop.

EPA announces easing of car and truck emissions standards

US environmental regulators announced on Monday they would ease emissions standards for cars and trucks, saying that a timeline put in place by Barack Obama was not appropriate and set standards “too high”.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it had completed a review that would affect vehicles for model years 2022-25 but it did not provide details on new standards, which it said would be forthcoming. Current regulations from the EPA require the fleet of new vehicles to get 36 miles per gallon in real-world driving by 2025. That’s about 10 miles per gallon over the existing standard.

The agency said in its decision that the regulation set under the Obama administration “presents challenges for auto manufacturers due to feasibility and practicability, raises potential concerns related to automobile safety, and results in significant additional costs on consumers, especially low-income consumers”.

The EPA, in partnership with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will work to come up with new standards.

Automakers applauded Monday’s decision, arguing that the current requirements would have cost the industry billions of dollars and raised vehicle prices due to the cost of developing the necessary technology.

Also of Interest

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

How John Bolton Wants to Destroy the Constitution to Attack North Korea

NPR Runs IDF Playbook, Spinning Killing of 17 Palestinians

A brief, unhappy history of Israeli massacres

Moscow confronts London with 14 questions on ‘fabricated’ Skripal case

What’s a Non-Racist Way to Appeal to Working-Class Whites? NYT’s Edsall Can’t Think of Any

Brazil court to rule on former president Lula's jail term

A Little Night Music

Larry Davis - Texas Flood

Larry Davis - As The Years Go Passing By

Larry Davis W/Memphis Horns - Sooner or Later

Larry Davis - (My) Little Girl

Larry Davis - Down Home Funk

Larry Davis & Memphis Horns - I'm Workin' On It

Larry Davis - Got To Be Some Changes Made

Larry Davis - Goin' Out West

Larry Davis - Angels In Houston

Larry Davis - I Tried