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This evening's music features possibly the most undeservedly obscure American blues/r&b/rock n roll musicians ever, Willie Egan. Enjoy!

"Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures. ... They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities."

-- George Gerbner

News and Opinion

Swedish court rejects request to detain Julian Assange

An attempt to extradite Julian Assange to Sweden has suffered a setback after a court in Uppsala said he did not need to be detained. The ruling by the district court prevents Swedish prosecutors from applying immediately for an extradition warrant for Assange to face an allegation of rape dating back to 2010. Assange denies the accusation. ...

At the Swedish court on Monday, a judgment was read out saying that since Assange was already in a British prison he did not need to be formally detained to be questioned by Swedish prosecutors.

“As Julian Assange is currently serving a prison sentence, the investigation can proceed with the help of a European investigation order, which does not require Julian Assange’s detention (in Sweden). The court therefore does not find it proportional to detain Julian Assange,” the judgment said.

Responding to the ruling, the Swedish prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson said: “The investigation continues with interviews in Sweden. I will also issue a European investigation order in order to interview Julian Assange. No date has been set yet. We will constantly review the state of the investigation.” Before the judgment, the prosecutor confirmed that if the court granted her request she intended to issue a European arrest warrant for Assange “concerning surrender to Sweden”.

Matt Taibbi- Assange's Indictment is TERRIFYING! Would Criminalise National Security Reporting

Britain and Australia dismiss UN report that Assange has been tortured

The British and Australian governments have blithely dismissed a May 31 report by United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer, which established that WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange has been the victim of a protracted campaign of “psychological torture.” The brazen responses demonstrate the criminality of the US-led vendetta against Assange, which is proceeding in violation of due process and the fundamental tenets of international law. ...

Within hours of the report’s release, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt took to Twitter to denounce it as “wrong.” He declared that “Assange chose to hide in the embassy and was always free to leave and face justice.” Hunt demanded that the UN Special Rapporteur “allow British courts to make their judgements without his interference or inflammatory accusations.” Melzer directly replied to Hunt, correctly noting that “Mr Assange was about as ‘free to leave’” Ecuador’s London embassy “as someone sitting on a rubberboat in a sharkpool.” ...

The UN official continued: “As detailed in my formal letter to you, so far, UK courts have not shown the impartiality and objectivity required by the rule of law.” Melzer told the Guardian that Assange was convicted on British bail charges just hours after he was expelled from Ecuador’s London embassy and arrested by British Police on April 11. “Under the normal rule of law you would expect someone to be arrested and then given a couple of weeks to prepare his defence at least,” he said. Despite the minor character of the bail charges, Assange was sent to Belmarsh Prison, a maximum-security facility where individuals convicted of murder and terror offenses are often sent.

The political purpose of Hunt’s rejection of the UN findings—to facilitate Assange’s dispatch to a US prison—was made clear in comments he made to CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday. Hunt stated that if he were chosen to replace outgoing Tory Prime Minister Theresa May, he would not block Julian Assange’s extradition to the US.

Melzer’s statement was also a damning indictment of the Australian government. He told the media that Australia had been a “glaring absence” in the defence of Assange’s fundamental legal and human rights. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has maintained a lengthy silence on the WikiLeaks founder's plight, immediately shot back with a statement denying that Australia was complicit in torture and claiming that it was providing Assange with “active and high level consular assistance.” This unspecified assistance, however, has done nothing to prevent the deterioration of Assange’s health or halt the US-led attacks against him. In reality, the Liberal-National government, the Labor opposition and the entire Australian political establishment have collaborated in the US-led vendetta against Assange by refusing to defend him. Not a single representative of the government, Labor, the Greens or the official Australian media has condemned the US Espionage Act charges against Assange.

Don’t Be Fooled: Media Still Selling Out Assange

A few corporate media publications have finally come out in very half-hearted support of Julian Assange — after years of stabbing him in the back at every opportunity. These outlets, including the Guardian, The Washington Post and The New York Times, have found their voice very belatedly, only after the Trump administration revealed last week that it plans to lock Assange away for the rest of his life on espionage charges. His crime on the charge-sheet: more than a decade ago he published evidence of U.S. war crimes committed in Iraq. The journalistic “resistance” claims to be coming to Assange’s defense out of principle: if he is jailed for espionage, journalism itself will be criminalized. And they are most definitely right about that. But their sudden conversion to Assange’s cause is not really about principle – legal or journalistic. It is rooted solely in an urge for self-protection. ...

The Guardian published a mealy-mouthed commentary from its former editor Alan Rusbridger. He spent part of his short space reminding us how unlikeable Assange is — as though that had anything to do with the rights and wrongs of the Trump administration’s case and as though Assange wasn’t so vulnerable now to Washington’s ire precisely because papers like the Guardian have worked so hard to isolate and demonize him. The Washington Post, a little more honorably, gave room to Glenn Greenwald, an expert in U.S. constitutional law, to make a persuasive case for Assange based on journalistic, ethical and legal principles.

Let’s be clear, however. Both publications care nothing for Assange or the ordeal he has been through over the past nine years. Or the ordeal he faces if the U.S. gets its hands on him. ... For years the corporate media ignored the overwhelming evidence that a secret U.S. grand jury had been convened to drum up charges against Assange. They similarly ignored the reason for the physical and mental torture and financial penalties inflicted on Chelsea Manning, which were intended to extract false testimony that might make the phony espionage charges look a little plausible in court. ...

No, the reason these papers now care about Assange nine years too late is because for the first time they are specifically in the firing line too. They collaborated with him on the very matters — U.S. war crimes — he now faces extradition over. If Assange goes down as a spy for his activities as a journalist, these papers and their editors could end up in trouble too, exposed to the threat of espionage charges themselves. But in truth they won’t end up in prison — and deep down, in the recesses of their subconscious, they know it. The Trump administration isn’t stupid enough to start locking up the editors of the Anglophone world’s most venerable “liberal” media outlets. President Donald Trump is sending a message, like most of his predecessors have done. ...

These journalists and editors will feebly defend Assange’s legal rights — to the bare minimum necessary to ensure that they themselves do not end up in the dock, and so they can pretend to themselves and others that they fought for a principle. But if Assange is locked up, we can be sure they will not join him behind bars. They face no real risk of incarceration. They will simply do what they and their predecessors have always done. They will learn and adapt. They will trim their sails a little tighter, they will conceal their self-censorship more astutely, and they will become even more craven to the powerful than they already were. The fight by the Guardian, the Post and the Times is not for the principles of a more truthful society Assange committed himself to. Their fight is for their consciences, so they can sleep a little easier at night, so that they can carry on believing they are what they never were: a watchdog on power. Their fight is to uphold a lie, a lie about themselves.

Pentagon's phony Iran "evidence": New rationale for U.S. intervention?

Last week a senior Pentagon official accused Iran of having sabotaged four oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman on May 12 and of firing a rocket into Baghdad’s Green Zone on May 19. Iran executed these events, he said, either directly or through regional “proxies.” But instead of creating sensational headlines, the briefing by Vice Adm. Michael Gilday, the director of the Joint Staff, was a flop, because it was clear to reporters covering it that he could not cite a single fact to back it up. ...

The briefing raises a serious question whether National Security Adviser John Bolton intended to use the new accusation against Iran stoke a war crisis — much as Vice President Dick Cheney, in another era, used the argument that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes for a covert nuclear weapons program to justify the invasion of Iraq. A careful examination of Gilday's accusations make clear that they do not even claim to be based on any intelligence assessment. ... The circumstantial evidence thus points to John Bolton and his allies, notably Pompeo and Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, as the unacknowledged sources of the judgment. That fact is crucial to understanding their Iran strategy, because evidence clearly indicates that those policymakers have based their decisions to escalate the conflict on information provided by a highly self-interested source — the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

That Israeli intelligence warning, moreover, was part of a broader Israeli warning to the United States on alleged Iranian plans to attack U.S. troops and other U.S. and allied targets in the Middle East. On May 6, leading Israeli national security correspondent Barak David reported that warning had been given to Bolton and other senior U.S. officials in an April 15 meeting in the White House. Furthermore, those Israeli claims have been “stovepiped” directly through Bolton, who leads the U.S. team of senior national security officials in regular meetings with senior Israeli officials aimed at agreement on joint strategies on issues of policy toward Iran. Those meetings began in December 2017 with agreement on an initial “Joint Work Plan,” and include “joint preparation for different escalation scenarios in the region concerning Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.”

The implications of this arrangement for the internal U.S. politics of Iran policy are profound and dangerous. It means that intelligence analysts have been removed from the process, allowing Bolton and Pompeo to determine the validity of the intelligence warnings on Iran coming from the Israelis. That same stovepiping gives Bolton, who has long had a long reputation for cynically twisting intelligence to advance his own political aims, a crucial source of power over intelligence on Iran. The result is a gambit that appears to be just as deceptive as the creation of the false intelligence case for the invasion of Iraq and equally intended to provide a political basis for military confrontation with Iran. This time around, corporate media outlets can’t plead ignorance of the trickery as they did in 2003. Adm. Gilday's remarkable performance in ducking the demand for evidence revealed all too clearly that the alleged “intelligence” claimed by the Bolton’s team is simply a device to push the United States toward confrontation.

Mueller’s BullS**t Press Conference Reveals His Dishonesty

Manufacturing War With Russia

Despite the Robert Mueller report’s conclusion that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 presidential race, the new Cold War with Moscow shows little sign of abating. It is used to justify the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, a move that has made billions in profits for U.S. arms manufacturers. It is used to demonize domestic critics and alternative media outlets as agents of a foreign power. It is used to paper over the Democratic Party’s betrayal of the working class and the party’s subservience to corporate power. It is used to discredit détente between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. It is used to justify both the curtailment of civil liberties in the United States and U.S. interventions overseas—including in countries such as Syria and Venezuela. This new Cold War predates the Trump presidential campaign. It was manufactured over a decade ago by a war industry and intelligence community that understood that, by fueling a conflict with Russia, they could consolidate their power and increase their profits. (Seventy percent of intelligence is carried out by private corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton, which has been called the world’s most profitable spy operation.) ...

“This began long before Trump and ‘Russiagate,’ ” Stephen F. Cohen said when I interviewed him for my television show, “On Contact.” ... The accusations made repeatedly by James Clapper, the former director of the National Security Agency, and John Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, concerning the Kremlin’s supposed control of Trump and Russia’s alleged theft of our elections are deeply disturbing, Cohen said. Clapper and Brennan have described Trump as a Kremlin “asset.” Brennan called Trump’s performance at a news conference with the Russian president in Finland “nothing short of treasonous.” ... Brennan and Clapper have on numerous occasions been caught lying to the public. ... Our inability to oversee or control senior intelligence officials and their agencies, which fabricate information to push through agendas embraced by the shadow state, signals the death of democracy. Intelligence officials seemingly empowered to lie—Brennan and Clapper have been among them—ominously have in their hands instruments of surveillance, intimidation and coercion that effectively silence their critics, blunt investigations into their activities, even within the government, and make them and their agencies unaccountable. ...

“Who is behind all this? Including the Steele operation?” Cohen asked. “I prefer a good question to an orthodox answer. I’m not dogmatic. I don’t have the evidence. But all the surface information suggests that this originated with Brennan and the CIA. Long before it hit America—maybe as early as late 2015. One of the problems we have today is everybody is hitting on the FBI. Lovers who sent emails. But the FBI is a squishy organization, nobody is afraid of the FBI. It’s not what it used to be under J. Edgar Hoover. Look at James Comey, for God’s sake. He’s a patsy. Brennan and Clapper played Comey. They dumped this stuff on him. Comey couldn’t even handle Mrs. Clinton’s emails. He made a mess of everything. Who were the cunning guys? They were Brennan and Clapper. [Brennan,] the head of the CIA. Clapper, the head of the Office of [the Director of] National Intelligence, who is supposed to oversee these agencies.” ...

“The Russians began a new missile program which we learned about last year,” he said. Hypersonic missiles. Russia now has nuclear missiles that can evade and elude any missile defense system. We are in a new and more perilous point in a 50-year nuclear arms race. Putin says, ‘We’ve developed these because of what you did. We can destroy each other.’ Now is the time for a serious, new arms control agreement. What do we get? Russiagate. Russiagate is one of the greatest threats to national security. I have five listed in the book. Russia and China aren’t on there. Russiagate is number one.”

Chevron Asks Trump Administration For Venezuela Sanction Relief

Amid tightening supply of heavy oil on global markets Chevron is asking the Trump administration for sanction relief in Venezuela so it could continue doing business there, Bloomberg reports quoting sources close to the company, noting that the U.S. supermajor is currently operating under sanction waivers that expire in late July and is hoping for an extension.

Chevron, together with Venezuela’s PDVSA, operates the Petroboscan joint venture, in which it holds a 39-percent stake. Like PDVSA’s other JVs, Petroboscan suffered production outages earlier this year after a series of blackouts hit Venezuela. The country’s total oil production has fallen sharply—averaging 768,000 bpd in April—and it will fall by another 300,000-400,000 bpd if Washington refuses to extend Chevron’s and others’ sanction waivers, according to an energy analyst who spoke to Bloomberg. ...

As one of the few major suppliers of heavy crude, Venezuela has become the main contributor to a shortage of this sort of crude that has seen many refineries—including ones in Asia and the U.S. Gulf Coast—take a hit on margins. The tightening supply of heavy crude also saw some heavy grades trade at a premium to lighter crudes in a reversal of the traditional price differences, which are in favor of light crude.

Keiser Report: Trash Wars and Not So Progressive Walls

Amazon Offered Job to Pentagon Official Involved With $10 Billion Contract It Sought

In a federal lawsuit, the tech giant Oracle has provided new details to support its accusation that Amazon secretly negotiated a job offer with a then-Department of Defense official who helped shape the procurement process for a massive federal contract for which Amazon was a key bidder. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are now the two finalists to win the highly contested $10 billion contract for what is known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. The deal, one of the largest federal contracts in U.S. history, would pay one company to provide cloud computing services in support of Defense Department operations around the world.

But the contract has been hotly contested since the department began soliciting proposals last year. Two of Amazon’s competitors, IBM and Oracle, filed complaints with the Government Accountability Office saying that the winner-take-all process unfairly favored Amazon, which is seen as an industry leader in cloud computing. When its claim was rejected, Oracle sued the government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Since the court battle began in 2018, Oracle has aggressively lodged conflict-of-interest accusations involving a former DOD official named Deap Ubhi, who left the department in 2017 to take a job at Amazon. In a court motion filed on Friday, Oracle alleged that while Ubhi worked on the preliminary research for the JEDI program in the late summer and fall of 2017, he was also engaged in a secret job negotiation with Amazon for months, complete with salary discussions, offers of signing bonuses, and lucrative stock options.

The motion further alleges that Ubhi did not recuse himself from the JEDI program until weeks after verbally accepting a job offer from Amazon and that he continued to receive information about Amazon’s competitors and participate in meetings about technical requirements, despite a government regulation that forbids such conflicts of interest. “Neither Ubhi nor [Amazon Web Services] disclosed the employment discussions or job offer to DOD — not when the employment discussions started, not when the informal job offer occurred, not when the formal offer occurred, and not even when Ubhi accepted the offer,” Oracle’s motion reads.

Ubhi is a venture capitalist and technology entrepreneur who worked for Amazon before his time in government. He took a job working on a Defense Department initiative aimed at collaborating with Silicon Valley to modernize the Pentagon’s information technology systems. After working as part of a four-person team to help shape the Pentagon JEDI procurement process, he left the department and returned to Amazon in November 2017.

Germany’s Angela Merkel Is in Big Trouble Again

Angela Merkel's fragile coalition government was thrown into fresh uncertainty Sunday by the sudden resignation of the leader of its junior coalition partner, the Social Democrats.

The shock departure of Andrea Nahles, the first woman leader of the center-left SPD, has fueled speculation her eventual replacement could pull the party out of its coalition agreement with Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The collapse of the coalition could sink the government at the helm of Europe’s political and economic giant, and potentially hasten Merkel's departure from the world stage.

Nahles said she would step down because she has lost her party’s backing in the wake of the SPD’s disastrous showing in the European parliamentary elections in May. ... The so-called “grand coalition” between the two parties has proven unpopular with many within the SPD, who argue it has cost the party its political identity and seen it hemorrhage support. The SPD, which propped up the previous Merkel administration in a grand coalition since 2013, only reluctantly renewed the arrangement in 2018 as a matter of last resort after the CDU’s attempts to form a coalition with other parties collapsed.

Since that government formed, many on the SPD’s left flank have called for the party to pull out of the coalition.

Trump baby balloon makes reappearance at London protests

Donald Trump Welcomed to the U.K. With Video of Boris Johnson Calling Him “Unfit” for Office

Washington and Westminster politics seemed to merge on Monday, as Donald Trump arrived in London for a state visit — tweeting insults from Air Force One at the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan — just as Boris Johnson, described by the American president as “a friend of mine,” officially launched his campaign to become the country’s new prime minister. Before his trip, Trump had warm words for Johnson in an interview with The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid. Asked if he would look forward to working with a Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Trump suggested that he would, in part because “he has been very positive about me.”

Those comments suggest that Trump has forgotten or just never heard that Johnson had, in fact, denounced him as “clearly out of his mind” in late 2015, when the then-candidate for the American presidency first called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Hey @realDonaldTrump, you just endorsed your Brexit buddy @BorisJohnson but he said some VERY NASTY things about you and he doesn’t want you to know. So we projected his words onto Big Ben. Watch with the SOUND ON #TrumpUKVisit pic.twitter.com/etUb6tk9eX

— Led By Donkeys (@ByDonkeys) June 3, 2019

Trump, whose working visit to the U.K. last year brought tens of thousands of protesters to the streets — a feat protest organizers hope to replicate on Tuesday — also told The Sun that a formal endorsement from him would undoubtedly be “great” for Johnson. “I am really loved in the U.K.” Trump insisted, despite clear evidence to the contrary. In fact, given how broadly unpopular Trump is in the U.K., the video of Johnson denouncing him in 2015 could help the English politician, who would like to remind voters that he was a relative moderate on social issues before lurching to the right to appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment during and after the 2016 Brexit campaign.

'We weren't expecting anything substantive' from Trump visit

Tech monopoly? Congress increases antitrust scrutiny on Facebook, Google, Amazon

Congress is launching a bipartisan investigation into digital markets and the tech industry, looking into giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon for “competition problems” and “anti-competitive conduct”.

“The open internet has delivered enormous benefits to Americans, including a surge of economic opportunity, massive investment, and new pathways for education online,” House judiciary chairman Jerrold Nadler said in a statement. “But there is growing evidence that a handful of gatekeepers have come to capture control over key arteries of online commerce, content, and communications.”

In addition to “documenting competition problems” and looking into “anti-competitive conduct,” the committee will assess “whether existing antitrust laws, competition policies and current enforcement levels are adequate to address these issues,” lawmakers said in a joint statement.

The announcement comes as US regulators, too, are moving to tighten scrutiny over the tech giants. Earlier on Monday, US tech stocks dropped after reports that US antitrust officials were preparing to investigate companies such as Apple, Facebook and Google parent Alphabet. Under an agreement with the US justice department, officials from the Federal Trade Commission are reportedly preparing to investigate any practices at Facebook that may harm competition in the digital market.

Separately, Reuters reported that the justice department had taken jurisdiction for a potential investigation of Apple, as part of a broader review of whether technology giants use their size to act in an anti-competitive manner. And last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the department of justice was looking into opening an anti-trust investigation into practices at Google.

Damning Canadian Inquiry Calls Murder and Disappearance of Indigenous Women & Girls Genocide

Canada must not ignore Indigenous 'genocide', landmark report warns

Canadians can no longer turn a blind eye to the “genocide” of Indigenous peoples in the country, a landmark report on missing and murdered women has concluded. Indigenous communities across the country have for decades attempted to convey the depth and scope of a tragedy that has haunted thousands of families.

As many as 4,000 Indigenous women and girls are believed to have been killed or gone missing in Canada over the past 30 years – although the true number of victims is unlikely ever to be known.

On Monday the findings of a three-year inquiry were released at a solemn ceremony in Quebec, attended by victims’ families, survivors, Indigenous leaders and senior government officials. ... The inquiry’s final report, a 1,200-page catalogue of historical and contemporary injustices, concludes that decades of policy and state indifference amounted to genocide against Indigenous peoples. ...

Commission members conceded that the term “genocide” is likely to provoke controversy in the country but said they carefully examined the United Nations definition of the term – as well as its original intent from the 1940s. “Genocide is the sum of the social practices, assumptions, and actions detailed within this report,” they wrote.

Democratic Divide: The New Progressives in the Party at Odds with the Establishment

#NoMiddleGround Goes Viral as Sanders Backers Say Democrats Can't Afford to Compromise on Medicare for All, Reproductive Rights, and Bold Climate Agenda

Inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders's speech at the California Democratic Convention in California—in which the 2020 contender took a thinly veiled shot at fellow White House hopeful Joe Biden's centrist policy approach—progressives made the Twitter hashtag #NoMiddleGround go viral on Sunday in an effort to make clear that there can be no compromises when it comes to confronting the global climate crisis, providing healthcare to all as a right, and battling inequality.

"We have got to make it clear that when the future of the planet is at stake, there is no 'middle ground,'" Sanders said, in a clear reference to Biden's reported middle-of-the-road climate agenda. "We will take on the fossil fuel industry and transform our energy system."

"When it comes to healthcare, there is no middle ground," Sanders continued. "When it comes to abortion, there is no middle ground. When it comes to mass shootings and the fact that 40,000 people were killed last year with guns, no middle ground."

There is no “middle ground” compromise with Donald Trump and the GOP. pic.twitter.com/EKu13ktjyc

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 2, 2019

Sanders's remarks demanding an unabashedly bold progressive agenda were also applauded at the California Democratic Party Convention in San Francisco, where the Vermont senator received a standing ovation while calls for moderation by Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and former Rep. John Delaney were panned by many in the crowd.

Joe Biden Plans “Progressive” Trade Rollout to Attack Trump On Tariffs

Former Vice President Joe Biden has cast himself throughout his political career as a working-class hero, but that narrative will be tested when he’s challenged from both the left and the right on the key economic issue of 2020: trade. Already, President Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden’s most formidable primary challenger so far, have indicated they believe Biden is vulnerable to attacks on his trade record, particularly his support for trade agreements like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. ...

The United States has lost more than 4.5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA went into effect in 1994, and while economists are split on the cause of these losses, revisiting trade deals like NAFTA to bring back manufacturing jobs became a signature issue of both Trump and Sanders' campaigns in 2016. “Americans are still skeptical of globalization, and the Rust Belt is still suffering from deindustrialization and is still made up of swing states in the presidential election,” said Jeffry Frieden, a Harvard University government professor who has studied the rise of populism in the Midwest. “Given those facts, I think that trade is still likely to be a pivotal issue in the 2020 election, which confronts Democrats with a dilemma.”

Biden is focusing his presidential campaign on the Midwest, in hopes of winning back the states that swung red in 2016. There, he’ll have to find a narrative on trade that doesn’t alienate the progressive wing of his party and explains his past support for NAFTA.

Flint water crisis: authorities seize governor’s state-owned electronic devices

Authorities investigating Flint’s water crisis have used search warrants to seize from storage the state-owned mobile devices of former Governor Rick Snyder and 65 other current or former officials, the Associated Press has learned. The warrants were sought two weeks ago by the attorney general’s office and signed by a Flint judge, according to documents the AP obtained through public-records requests.

The Solicitor general, Fadwa Hammoud, and Wayne county prosecutor Kym Worthy, who is helping with the investigation, confirmed they executed a series of search warrants related to the criminal investigation of Flint’s lead-contaminated water in 2014-15 and an outbreak of legionnaires’ disease. They declined to comment further. ...

The warrants came after Hammoud this year reported that boxes of records were discovered in the basement of a state building, including phone extractions and a “trove” of other materials stored on hard drives that allegedly had not been turned over in response to subpoenas.

Flood was ousted as special prosecutor in April after leading the three-year investigation that led to charges against current or former government officials, including two members of Snyder’s cabinet. Nobody in Snyder’s office has been charged. Hammoud accused Flood of mishandling the production of records and other evidence collected from state agencies.

Climate crisis seriously damaging human health, report finds

A report by experts from 27 national science academies has set out the widespread damage global heating is already causing to people’s health and the increasingly serious impacts expected in future. Scorching heatwaves and floods will claim more victims as extreme weather increases but there are serious indirect effects too, from spreading mosquito-borne diseases to worsening mental health.

“There are impacts occurring now [and], over the coming century, climate change has to be ranked as one of the most serious threats to health,” said Prof Sir Andrew Haines, a co-chair of the report for the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (Easac). ... Extreme weather such as heatwaves, floods and droughts have direct short-term impacts but also affect people in the longer term. “Mental health effects include post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, substance abuse and depression,” the report said.

The scientists were also concerned by the effect of extreme weather on food production, with studies showing a 5-25% cut in staple crop yields across the Mediterranean region in coming decades. ... The report anticipates the spread of infectious diseases in Europe as temperatures rise and increase the range of mosquitoes that transmit dengue fever and ticks that cause Lyme disease. Food poisoning could also rise, as salmonella bacteria thrived in warmer conditions, the report said. It even found research suggesting antibiotic resistance in E coli increases in hotter conditions.

“We are exposing the whole of the world population to changes in climate, and this is clearly very concerning as we are moving to some extent into uncharted territory,” said Haines, professor of environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

'So much land under so much water': extreme flooding is drowning parts of the midwest

Weeks of flooding is drowning large parts of the midwest, wrecking communities and turning farms into inland seas. On top of that, a near record number of tornadoes has whipped through the region, smashing homes and claiming nearly 40 lives so far. All of this comes after the wettest 12 months in the US since records began. Storms and near record rainfall have caused the region’s three major rivers to flood, inundating communities from Nebraska to Michigan and Illinois to Oklahoma, driving tens of thousands in to shelters, shutting businesses and closing interstate highways.

Waters that used to surge and recede have stayed around, swamping millions of acres of farmland and devastating the planting season. The amount of land farmers are being prevented from sowing by the water is estimated to be as much as double the previous record of 3m acres of corn, set in 2013. The worst-hit states include Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Indiana. In Nebraska, where farmers are already grappling with the effects of Donald Trump’s trade war with China, which has killed off a good part of the soybean trade, flooding is estimated to have destroyed $1bn-worth of crops and livestock.

In Iowa, bordered on either side by America’s two greatest rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri, entire towns have been engulfed and some may never revive. At the weekend, levees failed on three rivers, flooding homes and forcing the evacuation of thousands in Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas. In other places, authorities raced to shore up protections against surging waters. Burlington was the latest city in Iowa to be swamped after its floodwalls failed and river water poured into downtown following three days of intense rain. The Mississippi has been in flood for 80 days with little sign of returning to normal anytime soon. ...

Corn production is expected to be way below the agriculture department’s prediction earlier this year of a bumper crop. As it is, less than half of the typical acreage has been planted so far, with Indiana at one-fifth of normal levels. ... Kansas has harvested just 22% of soybean acreage so far this year compared with 63% at this time in 2018. Last year, the National Climate Assessment warned of heavier rains, along with droughts and hotter summers, causing “substantial damages” to midwestern agriculture.

'Forever chemicals' found in seafood, meats and chocolate cake, FDA says

Significant levels of chemicals linked to an array of health problems have been found in seafood, meats and chocolate cake sold in stores to US consumers, the Food and Drug Administration has found. The levels in nearly half of the meat and fish tested by researchers were at least double the federal advisory level for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, a group of more than 4,700 synthetic chemicals used for a variety of industrial purposes.

Meanwhile, the FDA report found much higher levels in the chocolate cake, the Associated Press reported, with PFAS levels of more than 250 times the federal guidelines.

PFAS have been in production since the second world war and are most widely used to make non-stick cookware, food packaging, carpets, couches, pizza boxes and firefighting foam. The ubiquity of PFAS means they are found in virtually all Americans’ blood, as well as in the drinking water of about 16 million people in the US.

Public health groups have criticized the Trump administration for not acting more quickly to phase out the use of PFAS, with high levels of the chemicals on US military bases causing heightened concern and lawsuits in parts of the country. Exposure to high levels of PFAS has been linked to cancers, liver problems, low birth weight and other issues.

Also of Interest

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

Lawsuit Over Ferguson’s 'Debtors Prison' Drags On

Mike Pompeo Destroys Jared Kushner's 'Deal of the Century'

Palestinian cities are ghost towns between settlements, on Google Maps

'It’s a miracle': Helsinki's radical solution to homelessness

Climate Change Is Coming for Your Scotch

Why Joe Biden Was Afraid to Face California’s Democratic Party

Trump Meets British Humor

A Little Night Music

Willie Egan - Rock & Roll Fever

Willie Egan - Sad, Sad Feeling

Willie Egan - What A Shame

Willie Egan - Willie's Blues (Outtake)

Willie Egan - Whipped Cream

Willie Egan - Wear Your Black Dress

Willie Egan - Oh Baby

Lloyd (Rowe) and Willie (Egan) - Don't Know Where She Went

Two Crows & The Diggers (Willie Egan) - Poison Ivy

Willie Egan - Potato Stomp

Willie Egan - You Must Be Foolin'

Willie Egan - Wow Wow