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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Otis Williams

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features r&b singer and founding member of the Temptations Otis Williams. Enjoy!

^{Otis Williams And The Distants - Come On}

"I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act."

-- Gautama Buddha

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News and Opinion

NATO members move toward formal alliance with Ukraine

As Ukraine’s offensive against Russian forces moves into full swing, NATO members are accelerating their efforts to initiate a formal military alliance with Ukraine or even have Ukraine join NATO. On Saturday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited Ukraine to pledge, in writing, his government’s support for Ukraine joining NATO.

Commenting on the meeting, Ihor Zhovkva, the deputy head of the Office of the Ukrainian President, wrote that Canada’s support for Ukraine’s acquisition of NATO membership “as soon as conditions allow” is “the strongest wording among all the G7 countries that are NATO members.” He added that it was “[A]nother practical step on the Euro-Atlantic path, another powerful voice in support of Ukraine and another stage of preparation for the successful holding of the Vilnius NATO Summit in July.” Zhovkva claimed that Canada was one of 20 NATO member states to agree in writing that they support Ukraine becoming a member of NATO.

Under conditions in which Ukraine is actively involved in a war with Russia, for Ukraine to join the military alliance would require NATO members to go to war with Russia.

Last month, Colonel Alexander S. Vindman, who had been an early advocate of sending US tanks and F-16s to Ukraine, endorsed an article in Foreign Affairs headlined “To Protect Europe, Let Ukraine Join NATO—Right Now,” by former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy P. Zagorodnyuk. In May, French President Emmanuel Macron said he supports a “path” for Ukraine into NATO. In April, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared, “Ukraine’s rightful place is in NATO,” adding, “All NATO allies have agreed that Ukraine will become a member.”

The flurry of diplomatic activity is meant to set the stage for the July 11-12 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, whose central focus will be the expansion of the NATO alliance with the accession of Sweden and moves to engineer a formal alliance between NATO and Ukraine. The ongoing Ukrainian offensive is timed to create the best possible circumstances for the formalization of this alliance.

Russia Regains Vremivka Ledge, Captures Leo2s Bradleys, Ukraine Begs More Arms, Blinken Talks

US Ambassador Says Ukraine Unlikely to Get Invite to Join NATO

US Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith has said that Ukraine is unlikely to receive an invitation to join NATO at the alliance’s July summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

“I think the allies now are in agreement that a proper invitation is unlikely while they’re engaged in a full-scale war,” Smith told POLITICO.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged that he doesn’t expect his country to formally join the alliance as its fighting a war with Russia, but he is threatening not to attend the Vilnius summit unless Ukraine is given a guarantee that it will receive membership after the war.

Zelensky Confirms Ukrainian Counteroffensive Has Started

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has confirmed that Ukrainian forces have started their long-awaited counteroffensive.

Throughout last week, Russia reported large Ukrainian attacks in the eastern Donbas region and in the southern Zaporizhzhia Oblast, but Ukrainian officials stayed quiet about the assaults. On Saturday, Zelensky said that “relevant counteroffensive defensive actions are taking place in Ukraine.”

Zelensky didn’t offer any details about the operations, which are being carried out with NATO equipment by NATO-trained troops.

Russia Says Ukraine Tried to Attack Russian Ship Near Major Gas Pipelines in Black Sea

Russia said on Sunday that Ukraine had made unsuccessful attempt to attack a Russian naval ship with six high-speed drone boats as the Russian vessel patrolled major natural gas pipelines in the Black Sea.

The 'Priazovye' ship was carrying out what Russia's defence ministry said was "monitoring of the situation and ensuring security along the routes of the TurkStream and Blue Stream gas pipelines in the southeastern part of the Black Sea."

Ukraine attacked in the early hours of Sunday about 300 km south-east of Sevastopol, the headquarters of Russia's Black Sea fleet on the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula, the defence ministry said.

At the time of the attack, a U.S. RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned surveillance aircraft was in the central area of the Black Sea, the defence ministry said.

Report: Saudi Crown Prince Threatened US With ‘Major Economic Consequences’

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman warned the US would suffer economic consequences if President Biden retaliated for OPEC oil cuts that were announced last fall, The Washington Post reported.

The Post report cited a document allegedly leaked to Discord by Airman Jack Teixeira, although it did not publish the document. The report said MbS claimed “he will not deal with the US administration anymore” if Biden imposed “consequences” on Riyadh over the OPEC cuts like he said he would.

The report said MbS promised “major economic consequences for Washington” if Biden retaliated, but it’s unclear if the Saudis made the threat directly to the US or if MbS’ warning was intercepted by the US spying on him.

Nations Wasted $157,000 Per Minute on Nuclear Weapons in 2022: ICAN

A new report published Monday by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons shows that the world's nine nuclear-armed countries spent more than $157,000 per minute on their atomic weaponry last year, enriching private contractors at the risk of imperiling humankind.

Combined, nuclear-armed nations spent $82.9 billion on their arsenals last year, according to ICAN. The United States was the biggest spender, dumping $43.7 billion into its already massive arsenal in 2022—more than all of the other nuclear-armed countries combined.

"The U.S. Congress allocated $16 billion for the [National Nuclear Security Administration] in 2022 to spend on weapons activities," ICAN's report notes. "In 2022, the Department of Defense requested $27.7 billion for 'nuclear modernization,' including the 'Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, B-21 Bomber, Columbia class submarine, and Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications.'"

Overall, the report shows global spending on nuclear weapons increased for the third consecutive year in 2022.

'Blatantly Violating International Law': Israel Plans West Bank Settlement Expansion

Human rights defenders on Monday blasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right apartheid government after it reportedly informed the Biden administration of plans to build thousands of new Jewish-only settler homes in the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine.

Three Israeli and U.S. officials told Axios that Israel will announce later this month its intention to build at least 4,000 homes in existing West Bank settler colonies. Over the weekend, Israeli and international media reported that Netanyahu's government would postpone plans for what's known as the E1 project due to U.S. pressure.

For two decades Israeli and international human rights experts have called the settlements—which are illegal under Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention and the International Criminal Court's (ICC) Rome Statute—part of Israel's apartheid regime. The seizure of Palestinian land in the occupied territories is also a war crime under the Rome Statute.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who opined in 2021 that all—not just most—Arabs should have been ethnically cleansed from Palestine at Israel's birth, said during a Monday press conference that "we will have big news for the settlements in the West Bank imminently."

The Biden administration has largely turned a blind eye to Israeli settlement construction and expansion but says it is strongly opposed to E1 because it would reduce the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem and further diminish faint hopes of any so-called two-state solution.

Mexico City mayor resigns in bid to become country’s first female president

Mexico City’s mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, has announced that she will step down this Friday to seek the ruling party’s presidential nomination, bidding to become the country’s first female leader in an election due to be held next year.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s leftist National Regeneration Movement (Morena) said on Sunday it would on 6 September announce the winning candidate from its internal selection process. Sheinbaum is one of the favorites.

Most opinion polls have tended to give Sheinbaum a slight advantage in the race for the nomination over her rival Marcelo Ebrard, who said he was standing down as foreign minister earlier on Monday to compete in the contest.

"Doing Journalism Is a Crime": Guatemalan Publisher José Rubén Zamora Faces 40 Years Behind Bars

The Great Bank Robbery Of 2023

The last time you checked your bank statement, did you take a moment to look at the fine print that shows the interest rate you are being paid on your deposits? If you did, you may have noticed that it still seems pretty negligible, even though you’ve seen so many headlines about the Federal Reserve hiking the interest rates that banks charge for loans. This is the Great Bank Robbery of 2023 — the yawning gap between what you are paid on your deposits and what banks are earning from other institutions when they loan out your money. It’s a caper that has quietly become a systemic upward transfer of wealth thrumming beneath the macroeconomy.

This particular heist is predicated on an asymmetry: Banks collect depositors’ money and pay them very little interest, while using depositors’ money to earn a lot more interest when the Federal Reserve raises lending rates. Banks can earn those higher yields by making high-interest loans to borrowers. They can also take advantage of the Fed’s own interest rates for interbank lending or for simply parking their excess reserves at the central bank — and those rates are not available to the general public.

This spread isn’t new — the basic business of a bank is to collect deposits, pay depositors’ some interest, and then make loans at higher interest rates, with the difference used to pay for bank services (tellers, ATM machines, etc.) and generate a fair profit from such “net interest income.” The larceny here is in the size of the gap between what banks are paying savers and what banks can earn through the Federal Reserve. ... In an $18 trillion deposit market, that means savers are missing out on hundreds of billions of dollars that are being skimmed off their nest eggs and funneled to bankers and their shareholders. It means bank statements showing almost no interest payments on your deposits, while a series of recent earnings reports show banks reaping ever-higher profits from net interest income.

Home Foreclosures SKYROCKET As Fed Keeps High Rates

WSJ Celebrates Making It Harder for Poor People to Access Food

After holding the economy hostage for months, some Republicans are going through a bit of a depressive slump. “We got rolled,” is how one Republican congressmember (Roll Call, 6/6/23) described the outcome of the debt ceiling negotiations. “It was a bad deal.”

But don’t cry too much, guys! The Wall Street Journal is here to cheer you up, and remind you that, though you didn’t get all the austerity you wanted, you did get to hurt the poor a bit. Maybe not as much as you wanted, but life’s not always fair, is it?

As the Journal’s editorial board (5/30/23) recently wrote: “One reason the deal is worth passing: The provisions on work and welfare are incremental progress the GOP can build on.”

Most centrally, the bill included an expansion of work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, aka “food stamps”) for adults without a disability or children, raising the maximum age for those subject to work requirements from 49 to 54.

The editorial’s takeaway:

A major difference between the two political parties these days is that most Democrats favor a culture of dependency. The GOP’s task, which is popular with voters, is to rebuild a culture of work. The debt-ceiling bill starts to do that, which is one reason to support it.

It’s an odd statement to make when employment for prime-age workers (those between 25 and 54) is at its highest level in more than two decades, thanks in large part to the Democrats’ decision to go big in their Covid relief package in the spring of 2021. And it’s particularly odd when you consider the utter lack of evidence for the idea that expanding work requirements for food vouchers will increase employment in any significant way.

As Shawn Fremstad has summarized for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the available evidence on the specific work requirement that is being expanded under the debt ceiling legislation

tells a relatively consistent story about its impacts. There is no question that the work test reduces access to SNAP food vouchers among vulnerable people with few resources. On employment, the best read of the evidence is that it has no impact on employment, or only a very small one.

In its 2022 analysis of the existing literature, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office similarly reported:

SNAP’s work requirement has probably boosted employment for some adult recipients without dependents but has reduced income, on average, across all recipients. Earnings increased among recipients who worked more, but far more adults stopped receiving SNAP benefits because of the work requirement.

So basically we can expect the new work requirements to definitely take food vouchers (in other words, food) away from a bunch of people—perhaps 225,000—and maybe slightly increase employment. Oh, yeah, they could also worsen physical and mental health, and increase reliance on food banks. Is that what rebuilding a culture of work looks like?

[More at the link. -js]

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Kari Lake’s vow to defend Trump with guns threatens democracy, Democrat says

The Arizona Republican Kari Lake’s vow of armed resistance over Donald Trump’s indictment for retaining classified records “threatens the very core of our democracy”, an Arizonan Democratic congressman said. Ruben Gallego is running to replace the former Democrat Kyrsten Sinema in the US Senate next year.

He said: “I know this language isn’t just hyperbole – it’s dangerous and it threatens the very core of our democracy.” ...

Lake, a TV news anchor turned far-right firebrand, lost the election for Arizona governor last year. She continues to insist without evidence her defeat was the result of fraud.

Speaking to Georgia Republicans on Friday, she said: “I have a message tonight for [US attorney general] Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith, and Joe Biden. And the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one’s for you.

“If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me.

“And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA [National Rifle Association]. That’s not a threat – that’s a public service announcement.

“We will not let you lay a finger on President Trump. Frankly, now is the time to cling to our guns and our religion.”

Biden ON TAPE Talking Bribes, Republicans Say

RFK JR Returns To Breaking Points

RFK JR DEBATES Glenn Greenwald on Support for ISRAEL

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‘My life and my home’: young people start to testify at historic US climate trial

The US’s first-ever trial in a constitutional climate lawsuit kicked off on Monday morning in a packed courtroom in Helena, Montana. The case, Held v Montana, was brought in 2020 by 16 plaintiffs between the ages of five and 22 from around the state who allege state officials violated their constitutional right to a healthy environment by enacting pro-fossil fuel policies.

In opening statements, Roger Sullivan, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, explained that climate change is fueling drought, wildfires, extreme heat and other environmental disasters throughout Montana, taking a major toll on the young plaintiffs’ health and wellbeing. There is a “scientific consensus”, he noted, that these changes can be traced back to the burning of fossil fuels.

He described how some plaintiffs have asthma that has been worsened by abundant wildfire smoke in recent years. Some love to hunt and fish but have seen stocks deteriorate. One plaintiff works as a ski instructor – a job threatened by warm winter temperatures and decreasing snowfall. And others are members of Indigenous tribes whose cultural practices are threatened by climate change-linked shifts in weather patterns, he said.

Montana is responsible for more planet-heating pollution than some countries, said Sullivan. Without urgent action, these climate consequences will only get worse.

But the state argued that Montana’s emissions are “too minuscule” to make any difference in the climate crisis. “Climate change is a global issue,” Michael D Russel, assistant attorney general, said in opening remarks for the state.

US-Montana climate change lawsuit: Activists sue state for role in global warming

Quebec fires weakened by rain as blazes in western Canada force many to flee

Overdue rains and cooler temperatures have given Quebec fire crews a chance to launch their assault on dozens of wildfires, but the reprieve for one part of Canada comes as fires in the west of the country have once again forced residents to flee their homes.

The country has been struggling with an “unprecedented” wildfire season, with nearly 450 forest fires across the country on Sunday, 220 of which were burning out of control, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

In Quebec, crews are hoping to attack dozens of blazes that have been temporarily weakened by favourable weather. “We went from a reactive mode to an offensive mode,” Quebec’s forestry minister, Maïté Blanchette Vézina, said in a weekend news conference.

But more than 14,000 residents remain under evacuation as the mix of domestic and foreign firefighters and Canadian armed forces members tackle the blazes.

The 117 wildfires across Quebec underscore the record-breaking nature of the spring fire season that has displaced tens of thousands and choked the air of more than 100 million people in eastern North America. Quebec wildfires have already scorched 740,000 hectares of boreal forest, more than 300 times the average during the spring season over the past decade.

Illegal reintroductions of rare butterflies to UK ‘a risk to other species’

“Ridiculous” illegal reintroductions of rare or extinct butterflies to new sites in Britain risk introducing disease, damage attempts to save species and jeopardise well-planned releases, conservationists have warned. Conservation scientists spoke out after black-veined whites, which fell extinct in Britain 100 years ago, reappeared on a nature reserve near Croydon.

Reintroductions of extinct species require licences from Natural England, the government’s conservation watchdog, and permission must also be sought to move rare protected butterflies to new sites.

Butterfly Conservation recently oversaw the successful reintroduction of the extinct chequered skipper to England with butterflies from Belgium but experts report “an outpouring” of unofficial releases of rare butterflies over the last five years.

Maverick breeders, heartened by public enthusiasm for rewilding and frustrated by the slow pace of restoration by mainstream conservation organisations, have released endangered marsh fritillaries and Glanville fritillaries on to dozens of new sites and also non-native species including the marbled fritillary. The breeders calculate that global heating makes Britain increasingly conducive to butterflies previously restricted to warmer countries.

“It is illegal to release an extinct species to Britain on to a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) with no disease control,” Dan Hoare, the conservation director of Butterfly Conservation, said of the return of the black-veined white. “There’s good scientific evidence that this could be not only ineffective but actively damaging. If you’re bringing in specimens from abroad you could be bringing in diseases. I would support someone being prosecuted for that.”

About 15 black-veined whites have been spotted at the London Wildlife Trust reserve of Hutchinson’s Bank, where in recent years endangered British species the Glanville fritillary, marsh fritillary and Duke of Burgundy have also suddenly appeared. Experts agree that the butterflies were highly unlikely to reach the site naturally and have been secretly put there by breeders.

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Also of Interest

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

Chris Hedges: Requiem for Our Species

And He Said To Me “We’re all going to die, and heaven knows we deserve to”

Patrick Lawrence: The Rape of Lady Justice

Ukraine SitRep: Destruction Of Its Third Army - Issues To Negotiate

Blinken’s Failed Saudi Visit

The D-Notice: Very British State Censorship

Be angry about the wildfire pollution – but be angry at the right people

DOOM LOOP: San Francisco Hotels, Malls CLOSE

Fake News Stories Everyone Fell For

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A Little Night Music

Otis Williams and The Charms - Hearts Of Stone

Otis Williams and His New Group - That’s Your Mistake

Otis Williams - Unchain My Heart

Otis Williams & The Charms - Gum Drop

Otis Williams & His Charms - The Secret

Otis Williams & his Charms - One Night Only

Otis Williams - Ain't Gonna Walk Your Dog No More

Otis Williams And The Charms - I Fall To Pieces

Otis Williams - Little Turtle Dove

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