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This evening's music features New Orleans singer, songwriter and female impersonator Bobby Marchan. Enjoy!

"Why are we proud? We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend--or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it."

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

News and Opinion

At Historic Habeas Corpus Hearing, Guantanamo's 'Dangerous Experiment in Indefinite Detention' Challenged

Lawyers representing a group of men held for over a decade without charge at Guantánamo asked a federal court on Wednesday to provide judicial intervention to stop the men's arbitrary and unlawful imprisonment—continued detention, the legal team says, that is fueled by President Donald Trump's "executive hubris and raw animus."

"Our dangerous experiment in indefinite detention, after 16 years, has run its course," said Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), who argued before Judge Thomas Hogan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

CCR, human rights organization Reprieve, and other counsel filed on January 11—the offshore prison's 16th anniversary—a challenge to the men's indefinite detention. The habeas corpus motion (pdf) references the "devastating psychological and physiological consequences" and "conditions devised to break human beings" the men continue to experience. In addition to violating the constitutional right to due process, the motion argues:

[Trump's] defiant policy exceeds his authority under the 2001 Authorization for "Use of Military Force ("AUMF"), which permits detention only for the narrow purpose of preventing the return of detainees to the battlefield. Instead, the policy is a symbolic, indifferentiated assertion of this president's expectation of absolute executive authority and a rejection of the policy framework that has governed Guantánamo detentions for years. Not least, it is a demonstration of his antipathy to ward this prisoner population, all foreign-born Muslim men, and toward Muslims more broadly, of the kind courts have properly rejected in recent months.

"The government says my detention is legal because of the indefinite war against terrorism. When terrorism ends, the war will end. So, never," said 43-year-old Sharqawi Al Hajj, a Yemeni who's been detained without charge since 2002. His is among the separate 8 motions Judge Hogan heard. ...

According to a press statement from Reprieve, Judge Hogan asked U.S. Justice Department attorney Ronald Wiltsie if the AUMF justification would allow the government to detain the men for 116 years. "Yes," Wiltsie said. "We are still engaged with the same battle foes in the same battle space."

Trump claims victory at Nato summit after fresh row over defence spending

Donald Trump has claimed victory at the Nato summit, saying progress had been made on defence spending only hours after throwing the Brussels meeting into disarray with fresh attacks on European allies. Asked whether he had threatened to pull out of Nato, the US president did not directly deny it. He told a surprise press conference before he was scheduled to leave that he only told people he would be “extremely unhappy” if spending was not increased.

Trump claimed he could pull the US out of Nato without the approval of Congress. “I think I probably can but that’s unnecessary,” he said.

He said the alliance members had agreed to reach spending 2% of GDP on defence faster than previously planned and claimed financial commitments would increase beyond that in future. But other delegations and Nato officials contradicted Trump, saying he had secured no significant concessions and their defence spending plans remained basically the same as they had been before the summit.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, denied Trump’s claim that Nato powers agreed to increase defence spending beyond previous targets.

Katrina vanden Heuvel on NATO Military Spending & Avoiding Cold War Nuclear Catastrophe with Russia

Trump’s Criticism of NATO Ignores the Real Questions

Despite Trump’s confrontational bluster, he joined other NATO leaders in signing off on their previously drafted summit declaration, including measures to upgrade alliance readiness and capabilities in Europe, create new NATO commands in Germany and the United States, promote cybersecurity, and train security forces in Iraq. The declaration includes a plan by U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis for NATO to assemble 30 land battalions, 30 air squadrons and 30 combat vessels capable of deploying in 30 days or less by the year 2020, to defend against a supposed threat from Russia. Moscow sees the plan instead as an offensive provocation.

Despite Trump agreeing to all this, his anti-NATO rhetoric is having a political effect, and not just on the mood of rattled Europeans. In the U.S., support for the NATO alliance among Republicans fell five percentage points in the last year to only 47 percent. In contrast, 78 percent of registered Democrats, reflecting the mirror-image polarization of American politics, now support NATO, a gain of 20 percentage points in one year.

Trump’s attacks on NATO—full of misinformation and distortions—have distracted critical attention from legitimate issues about the alliance. What is its mission in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union? Quite apart from the question of cost sharing, does it advance U.S. security and political interests? Could it be replaced without jeopardizing democracies on both sides of the Atlantic? In the wake of Trump’s attacks, defenders of NATO have tried to educate Americans about its value. (One writer for The Daily Beast associated the alliance with “the greatest achievement of American history.”) What’s most notable, however, is how unconvincing these defenses are.

The New York Times, for example, declares that NATO’s worthy “new purpose” in the post-9/11 era has been “helping the United States fight terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa and elsewhere.” These interventions outside of NATO territory have all been violations of Article 6 of NATO’s charter, which only authorizes military activity inside member states. Quite forgotten are previous editorials condemning “deluded thinking about what could be accomplished” if NATO committed more troops to Afghanistan after more than 16 years of war, acknowledging that “the Iraq war was unnecessary, costly and damaging on every level,” and lamenting the many costs of “America’s Forever Wars” in Africa and other theaters since 2001. From those perspectives, NATO’s support for reckless U.S. interventions abroad should be considered a bug to be erased, not a feature to boast about. And that’s without even considering the disastrous fallout from NATO’s mendacious attacks on Libya, which left that country a failed state, drove jihadists into Syria, unleashed terrorism in Western Europe, and produced a tidal wave of refugees that put the future of the Europe Union at risk.

The intellectual poverty behind support for NATO suggests that bureaucratic and special interests (think defense contractors) have had more to do with the alliance’s survival after 1989 than legitimate security threats.

NATO Shields U.S. From Its Military Adventures

Germans want Donald Trump to pull US troops out of Germany, poll finds

Germans would actually welcome the withdrawal of American troops stationed in their country, a new poll has found – as Donald Trump threatens to pull the plug on military support. The finding comes on the first day of a Nato summit in which the US president is urging Europe to spend more on defence if it wants to continue to receive American military protection. But far from being seen as a threat, a YouGov poll for the dpa news agency found that more Germans would welcome the departure of the 35,000-strong American force than would oppose it.

42 per cent said they supported withdrawal while just 37 per cent wanted the soldiers to stay, with 21 per cent undecided. Last month the US media reported that the US government was in the process of assessing the cost of keeping troops in Germany ahead of a possible withdrawal, citing Pentagon sources. But the policy of actually pulling out of the country has not actually reached the negotiating table in his week’s Brussels summit and is not expected to be discussed as a possibility – for now. ...

The same poll also found significant opposition to militarism in general in the country. Just 15 per cent of all Germans agree with Angela Merkel that the country should increase its military spending to 2 per cent of GDP by 2024, with 36 per cent saying the country's already spends too much on its military.

Protests planned as Trump lands in UK

UK welcomes Trump-Putin meeting, says it must address Russian 'malign activity'

British Prime Minister Theresa May will on Wednesday welcome a summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, but say that it must be used to cut the risk of confrontation and address Russian “malign activity”.

Trump is due to meet Putin on Monday, a meeting which has raised eyebrows among Western allies because it comes days after the U.S. leader attended a NATO summit aimed at bolstering Europe’s defense against what it calls Russian aggression.

May’s spokesman, speaking to reporters ahead of a dinner for NATO leaders on Wednesday, said the prime minister was planning to highlight Kremlin-linked cyber attacks and the use of a Soviet-era nerve agent on British soil.

U.S. warns of sanctions risk for firms invested in Russian pipeline

Washington repeated a warning on Wednesday to Western firms invested in Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany that they were at risk of sanctions, and said Moscow was using the project to divide Europe. ...

U.S. President Donald Trump accused Germany on Wednesday of being a “captive” of Russia due to its energy reliance and its support for the plan to double capacity of the Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea to Germany, bypassing traditional routes through Ukraine.

Silicon Valley is funding the future of warfare

When you think of the companies that profit off of war, you typically think of domestic defense contractors like Boeing, that consistently rake in money from U.S. conflict abroad. However, the modern military industrial complex has a new, ugly, tech-bro face. As reported by Mark Harris for The Guardian, two different Silicon Valley startups specializing in unpiloted vehicles—Kitty Hawk and Joby Aviation—received $1 million and $970,000 last year in order to develop unpiloted, one-person, electric planes for military purposes. The money came from the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental division (DIUx), the Pentagon’s middleman that provides contracts to companies whose tech products could have military promise. According to Harris, the funding was not disclosed at the time that it was awarded. ...

Products like unpiloted taxi planes are rarely presented as having any military potential. Consider the promotional video for the Kitty Hawk Cora: it quite explicitly frames its product as having civilian potential and nothing else.

Similarly, Joby Aviation raised $100 million last year from companies like Intel, Toyota, and JetBlue. Little information was publicly available about the fundraising effort, aside from the fact that the money would be used to fund flight tests. However, we know now that DIUx was also one of the firms that bankrolled Joby Aviation last year, and we have basically no information about the specific possible uses of its air taxis.

These companies have presented themselves to the public using very rosy rhetoric of personal, individual empowerment, of giving people the freedom to move at a lower environmental cost than commercial planes (which, as an industry, is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions). Supposedly, they want to improve lives. But the integrity of that language falls short when they’re being developed for military applications that are kept from the public, and whose specifics remain undisclosed.

[See article for info about other tech corps that DoD's DIUx has contracts with. -js]

Hacker Selling Pentagon’s Killer Drone Manual on Dark Web for $150, Cheap

A sensitive training manual for the U.S. military’s lethal MQ-9 Reaper UAV was put up for sale on an underground marketplace last month, after a hacker plucked it from an Air Force captain’s home network using a default password.

But despite an asking price of only $150, nobody was interested. “I’ve been personally investigating the dark web for almost 15 years, and this is the first time I’ve uncovered documents of this nature,” says Andrei Barysevich, director of advanced collection at Recorded Future. “This type of document would typically be stolen by nation-state hackers. They wouldn’t be offering it on the dark web, and certainly not for $150.” Developed by General Atomics, the $64 million MQ-9 Reaper is the heavily-armed follow-on to the Predator drone, capable of dropping laser-guided bombs and Hellfire missiles on a target from an altitude of 50 thousand feet. In its unarmed configuration it’s been used by DHS for border surveillance and NASA for weather studies. The stolen Reaper training manual was titled “MQ-9A Reaper Block 5 (UHK97000-15) RPAMaintenance Event 1 Delta Training.” It was unclassified, but the cover bore a lengthy admonishment on safe handling.

Barysevich says he spotted the manual for sale on a dark web forum in early June. Posing as a potential buyer, he struck up a conversation with the seller, who turned out to be part of a small hacking crew based in South America that specializes in low-hanging fruit. Armed with some rudimentary knowledge and an Internet-of-things search engine called Shodan, the hackers learned to exploit a feature in some Netgear home routers that allow a user to attach an external USB drive and load it up with documents, videos or music that they want to share across their home network. An extra option called the “Personal FTP Server” also makes the files accessible over the public Internet, so the user can fetch them from work or while traveling. If the user switches the Personal FTP Server option on, and doesn’t explicitly set a password for the server, all their shared files are left wide open to anybody who logs in as “anonymous,” with no password required — a mistake evidently made by the Air Force captain.

Mark Weisbrot: Trump’s Threats to Invade Venezuela Are Part of U.S. Strategy of Regime Change

In Wake of AMLO Victory, US Media Fear Chavismo and Hope for ‘Business-Friendly’ Change

Neoliberal capitalist dogma pervades mainstream media. A case in point is coverage of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s resounding victory in Mexico’s presidential election. Referring to the president-elect by his commonly used acronym, the New York Times’ Azam Ahmed and Paulina Villegas (7/1/18) claimed that:

one of AMLO’s biggest challenges will be to convince foreign investors that Mexico will remain open for business. If he fails to convince the markets that he is committed to continuity, or makes abrupt changes to the current economic policy, the country could find itself struggling to achieve even the modest growth of prior administrations.

The neoliberal capitalist catechism also manifests itself by maligning those who have challenged its doctrines with any degree of success. This is evident in coverage of AMLO’s win that considers the commonplace comparison between him and the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. When corporate media outlets examine this analogy, they do so on the assumption that it will be bad for Mexico if López Obrador adopts policies similar to Chávez’s.

A New York Times editorial (7/2/18) asked whether López Obrador was like Chávez or Trump or both, and concludes that “unlike Mr. Chávez and Mr. Trump, the president-elect is a lifelong politician with firm faith in democracy.” The accusation that Chávez was undemocratic is false. Every election he won was certified free and fair. When Chávez was president, the Venezuelan government launched a program called Barrio Adentro (“Inside the Neighborhood”), designed to foster mass political participation and improve public health, that proved to be “especially popular with the poorer sections of the society” (Globalizations, 1/3/13).

Ahmed and Semple write that “for as long as Mr. López Obrador has been running for president, accusations that he will sink the economy have chased him. He was likened in the news media to Hugo Chávez, the former socialist leader of Venezuela,” a comparison that the authors describe as “overblown.” Ahmed and Semple take for granted that Chavez “[sunk] the economy,” but when Chávez was leader, Venezuela’s rates of poverty, inequality, illiteracy, child mortality and malnutrition sharply declined. If that’s what it means to “sink the economy,” one could be forgiven for hoping AMLO’s nautical skills are in line with Chávez’s.

Keiser Report: Headlines + Private immigration prisons’ profits

'Return our kids': mother sues US on behalf of hundreds of separated families

Yolany Padilla has a simple demand. A 24-year-old mother, she spirited her young son out of Honduras only to lose him at the US-Mexico border to American immigration officials. Now she, as the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the federal government, hopes to stand in for hundreds of other asylum-seeking parents separated from their children at the border. “It is time to return our kids,” Padilla said through an interpreter.

Released from federal detention on Friday, Padilla and her attorneys are pushing US immigration officials to move forward in reuniting her family and those of other parents caught up in the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, which saw thousands of immigrant children taken from their parents at the border. Speaking in Seattle, Padilla said she hadn’t seen her son, Jelsin, since the day after her arrest in May.

Jelsin spends weekdays at a youth center and nights and weekends with a foster family Padilla knows nothing of. He doesn’t understand why he can’t be with his mother. ... “What they are doing is terrible,” Padilla said through an interpreter. “I just hope the other mothers who are detained will be liberated soon.” For Padilla, holdup is largely bureaucratic and, as her attorneys describe it, needlessly cruel.

Parents like Padilla are being forced through a system of background checks and identity verifications designed to protect children who arrive in the United States without parents, her attorney Leta Sanchez said following a press conference. Immigration officials have a photo taken of Padilla and Jelsin hours after they were detained. Sanchez said she had been told it may take up to 60 days for the checks to be completed. ...

Padilla’s attorneys claim the government has violated their due process rights as well as federal law related to the treatment of asylum seekers. Requests for comment made to the Department of Homeland Security were not immediately returned.

California malls are sharing license plate data with Ice-linked surveillance firm

California shopping centers are sending data from license plate readers to a private surveillance technology company that partners with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), according to a new report.

The revelation comes at a time of increasing scrutiny of tech firms and private companies that build tools and provide services for the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive immigration policy. A new research paper this week has also exposed the ways in which prison companies appear to be influencing immigration policy and profiting from expanding partnerships with Ice.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation found that Irvine Company, a real estate developer that operates dozens of malls throughout California, has been conducting vehicle license plate reader surveillance for Vigilant Solutions, a firm that maintains databases and works with law enforcement. The automated license plate recognition technology allows cameras to capture images of plates and link them to GPS locations. ...

Earlier this year, US officials confirmed that Ice had developed a contract with Vigilant that would give immigration authorities access to the company’s vast database during investigations, sparking privacy concerns and protests. Vigilant has refused to comment on its relationship with Ice.

Robot workers will lead to surge in slavery in south-east Asia, report finds

Robots will slash millions of jobs and create an upswing in trafficking and slavery across south-east Asia, research claims.

In a report launched on Thursday, supply-chain analyst firm Verisk Maplecroft predicts that the rise in robot manufacturing will have a knock-on effect that results not only in lost livelihoods but in a spike in slavery and labour abuses in brand supply chains.

Earlier this year, the UN International Labour Organisation predicted that 56% of workers in south Asia’s key manufacturing hubs in Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam could lose their jobs over the next two decades due to automation.

“There has been a lot of discussion about the impact of robot automation on jobs but less on the resulting human rights abuses that are likely to follow,” said Dr Alex Channer, analyst at Verisk Maplecroft.

“We know that in a couple of decades, robot manufacturing will replace many low-skill jobs. Displaced workers without the skills or capacity to adapt will have to compete for a rapidly diminishing supply of low-paid work in potentially exploitative conditions. This will lead to increased risks of slavery and trafficking across a region already vulnerable to these kind of abuses.”

Emmett Till: US reopens investigation into killing, citing new information

The US federal government has reopened its investigation into the death of Emmett Till, the black teenager whose brutal killing in Mississippi shocked the world and helped inspire the civil rights movement more than 60 years ago. The justice department told Congress in a report in March it is reinvestigating Till’s slaying in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 after receiving “new information”. The case was closed in 2007, with authorities saying the suspects were dead; a state grand jury did not file any new charges.

Deborah Watts, a cousin of Till, said she was unaware the case had been reopened until contacted by the Associated Press on Wednesday. The federal report, sent annually to lawmakers under a law that bears Till’s name, does not indicate what the new information might be.

But it was issued in late March following the publication last year of The Blood of Emmett Till, a book that says a key figure in the case acknowledged lying about events preceding the killing of the 14-year-old youth from Chicago. The book, by Timothy B Tyson, quotes a white woman, Carolyn Donham, as acknowledging during a 2008 interview that she was not truthful when she testified that Till grabbed her, whistled and made sexual advances at a store in 1955.

Brett Kavanaugh, Who Has Ruled Against Campaign Finance Regulations, Could Bring an Avalanche of Big Money to Elections

In recent years, the Supreme Court has swiftly remade the landscape of American politics, gutting 1960s-era civil rights laws restricting voter suppression, sharply weakening labor unions, and deregulating the campaign finance system to allow for wealthy individuals and corporations to exercise greater influence over elected representatives. With President Donald Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, that influence is poised to grow.

Kavanaugh’s appellate court decisions and public comments suggest that he will accelerate the trend toward a political system dominated by wealthy elites — often operating in the shadows, without any form of disclosure.

In the minds of conservative legal strategists, the First Amendment’s protections for free speech can be harnessed to justify virtually any intervention in politics. This expansive view of free speech has been used to oppose or undo any campaign finance regulation, any rule enhancing the political strength of organized labor, any requirement for donor disclosure, or any prohibition on the transfer of billions of dollars into the political system.

In decision after decision, Kavanaugh has embraced this theory and wielded the First Amendment as a cudgel to unravel decades of laws designed to ensure that ordinary Americans are not squeezed out of the electoral process by organized economic power. At a March 2016 event at the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative Washington think tank, Kavanaugh was asked point-blank if he believes that “money spent during campaigns does represent speech, and therefore deserves First Amendment protection.” His answer: “Absolutely.”

Democrats Are Plotting A “Coup”! Says Tucker Carlson

As 'Petulant' Democratic Elites Howl in Protest, DNC Panel Gives Plan to Gut Power of Superdelegates Final Approval

In the face of fervent opposition from Democratic elites who "think their vote is more important" than the will of the party's base, the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) Rules and Bylaws arm cleared a major hurdle in the fight to curtail the power of superdelegates on Wednesday by approving a plan that would end their ability to cast votes for the presidential candidate on the first ballot at the party's convention. ...

While the plan to gut the influence of superdelegates—who have been free since 1984 to put their weight behind any candidate no matter how the public voted—has received broad support from Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as an important first step toward making the party's process more "open and transparent," establishment figures who stand to lose power if the plan is implemented are staging a last-minute "revolt" to block the rule change.

As investigative reporter Alex Kotch noted in a Twitter thread on Wednesday, at least two of the Democratic insiders who are clinging desperately to their undue influence as superdelegates happen to be corporate lobbyists—a fact that Politico neglected to mention in its reporting on the party elites' "longshot bid to block the measure."

"They don't realize it but they're proving the point of Sanders and everyone else who's opposed to superdelegates," Kotch writes. "Many prioritize corporate interests over those of everyday people and thus automatically support the less progressive candidate."

Here’s a more apt headline: “Petulant elites throwing tantrum at prospect of their votes not being 10,000x more powerful than regular peasant votes.” https://t.co/oUlaXY9jLt

— The Humanist Report (@HumanistReport) July 11, 2018

GOP-Controlled House Passes Bill to Eviscerate Nation's Marine Ecosystems, Fisheries

Conservations, scientists, and members of fishing communities and industry expressed outrage and disappointment after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday that experts warn will set the nation's fishing industry back decades by eviscerating protections that have made U.S. fisheries more sustainable and undermining the health of marine ecosystems as well as the communities that live off the ocean. With a final vote of 222 to 193, the bill known as H.R. 200—officially titled the Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act—was passed along party lines, with just nine Democrats voting in favor and just 15 Republicans voting against. See the full rollcall vote here.

The problem with the legislation, say people like Martin Hayden, vice president for policy and legislation at Earthjustice, is that the bill does the very opposite of what its name suggests. "Recovering depleted fisheries under H.R. 200 would be like fishing for sardines with a whale-sized hole in the net," Hayden warned. If the bill becomes law, he added, it "would reverse decades of bipartisan progress towards preventing overfishing and rebuilding fish populations, harming the health of our marine ecosystems and the coastal communities who depend on them."

The GOP-controlled House passed the bill despite letters (pdf) of opposition from over 500 U.S. businesses and individuals, including 14 restaurant and seafood companies, 12 aquariums, over 350 chefs, 200 scientists, over 50 dive shops, and multiple recreational fishing groups.

Today, the House passed H.R. 200, a bill which would undermine US fisheries management and reverse progress, and would be damaging for seabirds like Atlantic Puffins. Audubon urges the Senate to reject this bill. #KeepOceansFishy https://t.co/il2mLeQ0Yc

— Audubon Society (@audubonsociety) July 12, 2018

"In the last 40 years," said Whitney Webber, campaign director for the conservation group Oceana, following Wednesday's vote, "the Magnuson-Stevens Act has helped the United States become a global leader in fisheries management. The MSA, she added, "has succeeded in reversing overfishing and bringing back fisheries abundance in the U.S. However, H.R. 200 would undo the significant progress we've made over the past several decades for the health of America's fisheries and fishermen. This bill would weaken science-based conservation of U.S. fish populations, decrease accountability, and increase the risk of overfishing by removing annual catch limits for many species."

Heatwave seems to make manmade climate change real for Americans

The warm temperatures that have scorched much of the US appear to be influencing Americans’ acceptance of climate science, with a new poll finding a record level of public confidence that the world is warming due to human activity. A long-running survey of American attitudes to climate change has found that 73% of people now think there is solid evidence of global warming. A further 60% believe that this warming is due, at least in some part, to human influences.

Both of these findings are record highs in a twice-yearly survey that has been conducted by the University of Michigan and Muhlenberg College since 2008. The latest poll was conducted during May, which was hotter than any May recorded in the contiguous US in 124 years of record keeping, according to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, eclipsing the 1930s during the Dust Bowl era.

“There’s lots of evidence that contemporary weather is a contributing factor to belief in climate change,” said Chris Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion. “But there are other factors. People are telling us they are experiencing a climate that isn’t what they remember in the past and the evidence itself, such as declining polar ice, is having an effect. Americans are moving to a lot more confident space on this.”

But there remains a yawning ideological divide when it comes to climate change in the US. The survey found that while 90% of Democrats accept there is solid evidence of climate change, only 50% of Republicans feel the same.

Standing Rock activist accused of firing at police gets nearly five years in prison

A Denver woman accused of shooting at officers during protests in North Dakota against the Dakota Access oil pipeline has been sentenced to four years and nine months in federal prison. Red Fawn Fallis, 39, was accused of firing a handgun three times while resisting arrest on 27 October 2016. No one was hurt. Fallis, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, denied intentionally trying to injure anyone and claimed not to remember firing the gun after being tackled by police.

She pleaded guilty on 22 January to civil disorder and illegal possession of a gun by a convicted felon. She has a 2003 conviction in Colorado for being an accessory to a felony crime. Court records show she was accused of driving a car for a man who shot and wounded another man. Prosecutors in the pipeline case agreed to drop a count of discharge of a firearm during a felony crime of violence and to recommend a sentence of no more than seven years in prison. The defense asked for no more than two and a half years. ...

Fallis’s attorneys said the decision not to take the case to trial was based on anti-activist sentiment in the area and unsuccessful attempts to have Hovland order the prosecution to turn over more information, including details about an FBI informant Fallis alleges seduced her and owned the gun. ...

Fallis’s arrest was one of 761 that authorities made in southern North Dakota during the height of protests in 2016 and 2017. At times, thousands of pipeline opponents gathered in the region to protest against the $3.8bn project to move North Dakota oil to Illinois, but the effort did not stop the project.

Also of Interest

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

Intercepted: A Judicial Coup, the Carceral State, and the War Against Us All

Encarnación Bail Romero’s Story Is a Harrowing Reminder of the Stakes for Separated Migrant Families

Health Care Blunder Reveals Michigan Candidate for Governor’s “Progressive” Branding is False Advertising

I Yearn for a Society in Which Civility Rules, But These Are Not Civil Times

A Little Night Music

Bobby Marchan - I Got A Thing Going On

Bobby Marchan - There is Something On Your Mind (Parts 1 & 2)

Bobby Marchan - Shake Your Tambourine

Bobby Marchan - Quit My Job

Bobby Marchan - What Can I Do

Bobby Marchan & Willie Dixon - My Days Are Coming

Bobby Marchan - Don't Take Your Love From Me

Bobby Marchan - You Can't Stop Her

Bobby Marchan - You Won't Do Right

Bobby Marchan - Chickee Wah-Wah

Bobby Marchan - I Gotta Sit Down And Cry

Bobby Marchan & the Tick Tocks - Snoopin' and Accusin'

Huey Piano Smith (Bobby Marchan & Gerri Hall) - Psycho

Bobby Marchan - That's The Way It Goes

Bobby Marchan & the Clowns - Rockin' Behind the Iron Curtain