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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Frankie Lee Sims

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Texas blues guitarist Frankie Lee Sims. Enjoy!

^{Frankie Lee Sims - Lucy Mae Blues}

"Within the existing neoliberal historical conjuncture, there is a merging of violence and governance and the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy."

-- Henry Giroux

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News and Opinion

De-Normalize Israel

Basically we’ve got two choices: we either aggressively denormalize Israel or we watch our society become more and more Israeli.

We either collectively reject Israel, or we watch western militaries fuse inseparably with the IDF.

We either turn support for Israel into political campaign poison, or we watch politicians obliterate our right to criticize Israel while backing increasingly evil Israeli military agendas.

We either ferociously oppose our government’s involvement in middle eastern wars, or we watch Israeli leaders grow more and more ecstatic as more and more western blood and treasure flows into the war machine.

We either normalize viewing Israel as a freakish abomination, or we sit passively watching authoritarian Zionist operations like Palantir get inseparably interwoven into every level of western power institutions.

We either stand together to oppose Israel for the racist apartheid state that it is, or we watch our Muslim neighbors suffer increasing discrimination and abuse at home while our governments help massacre our Muslim brothers and sisters using high-tech war machinery abroad.

The west’s growing collective rejection of Israel is the growth of the western conscience. The burgeoning pro-Palestine movement. The disgust with the Iran war. Young people’s cultural cringe around all things Israeli. The increasingly unapologetic eye-rolling every time “antisemitism” is used as an excuse to shut down criticism of Israel. These are signs that we are growing morally healthier.

That’s a good thing. The more we unite around a red hot “NO” to Israel and Zionism, the harder it will be for those in power to normalize the increasing Israelification of our society.

Col Doug Macgregor: IRAN WAR - The Worst Reality in the History of Mankind

Pentagon reports more than 600 Iran war casualties in quiet database update

The Pentagon updated its official war casualty database over the weekend, adding more than 140 wounded service members. The Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) also introduced a new casualty category labeled “Overseas Operations” for personnel killed and wounded “starting July 7”. According to the updated database, the official toll for the earlier phase of the US-Iran war, known as Operation Epic Fury, now stands at 14 service members killed and more than 400 wounded in action.

These figures have been the point of contention after the Pentagon previously reduced the totals from 18 deaths and 482 wounded that had been recorded just days earlier. The dispute comes after the collapse of the ceasefire with Iran and the resumption of near-daily airstrikes beginning on 6 July. Analysts and officials have questioned whether casualties from the renewed fighting should be counted separately from Operation Epic Fury, a move that would be unprecedented.

The Trump administration is seeking to classify the renewed military campaign as separate from Operation Epic Fury, the US military’s official name for the Iran conflict. The change is tied to the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires the president to end military operations within 60 days unless Congress authorizes an extension. The Trump administration has argued that the April ceasefire with Iran paused the clock on 1 May for the conflict’s initial period. The separate casualty count beginning on 7 July follows that interpretation.

Larry Johnson: Yemen Shatters Saudi Naval Siege – Iran Leaves Trump With Zero Room to Maneuver

US pauses Iran attacks for second night after Trump advised to halt bombing

The US has paused strikes on Iran for a second night as top military officials advised Donald Trump to halt his bombing campaign, and diplomatic negotiations have continued to avoid a return to all-out war.

Trump is said to be weighing up diplomatic and military options in the nearly five-month-old conflict, with Benjamin Netanyahu expected to visit the White House on Tuesday. The Israeli prime minister is a vocal critic of Washington’s negotiations with Iranian leaders and has pressed for the US to continue its strikes against Iran. Netanyahu is under considerable political pressure to show that his military campaigns against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon have yielded results before elections scheduled for October.

Tehran said on Sunday it would pause what it called “retaliatory” attacks against US allies in the region. “These [US] attacks continued until two nights ago, but over the past two nights the Americans have stopped their attacks,” said the army spokesperson Mohammad Akraminia. “Our strategy has essentially been retaliatory, we have also halted our retaliatory operations.”

Senior officials in the Trump administration are reported to have told the president about dwindling munitions stockpiles that could hamper a sustained military campaign in the region. Axios reported on Sunday that Adm Bradley Cooper, the top US military commander in the region, had told Trump the US military campaign had reached the limits of its effectiveness.

The message was said to affect Trump’s decision to hold strikes on Iran for the first time in nearly two weeks. Cooper told Trump the US had nearly exhausted the list of targets that it had developed to attack in Iran, and without a return to major combat operations there was little point in continuing the bombing campaign, the news website reported.

Larry Johnson : Trump TACO Again !

Iran Warns It Will Expand Attacks in the Region If the US Restarts Airstrikes

An Iranian military official said on Sunday that Iran would expand its attacks in the region if the US restarts airstrikes against the Islamic Republic, which have been halted for two days following 13 consecutive nights of the US bombing the country.

“I believe that if the Americans once again fall for the Zionists’ deception, or move in line with them, and insist on continuing the war, particularly through airstrikes, geographically this will expand further,” said Iranian army spokesman Mohammad Akraminia, according to AFP.

US officials have framed the pause in strikes on Iran as a way to give room for diplomacy, but it’s unclear if any negotiations are taking place at all, and the renewed US bombing campaign made talks with the US even more politically fraught than before. While the strikes have halted for the moment, they could restart at any time, and the US continues enforcing a blockade on Iranian ports.

Top General BEGS Trump To Stop Bombing Iran

Lebanese Army Accuses Israel of Violating Ceasefire, Firing on Their Position

The Lebanon “pilot zones” project finally got underway last week, following substantial delays and multiple rounds of negotiations. The Lebanese Army now says their deployment into those villages, as required by the deal, is being prevented by Israeli violations of the ceasefire.

The Lebanese military after its own few days of limiting access to those areas, is trying to both deploy into the zones and to bring some of the villagers back to what were once their homes. They report that Israeli forces are continuing attacks around the area, blocking the civilians’ return, and in fact are causing so much danger it’s precluding a lot of the Lebanese military from even getting to the pilot zone they’re meant to occupy.

To make matters much worse for the future of the area, Israeli forces have also burned the ancient olive trees and other agricultural land that was the basis for the Markaba people’s living. Like most of southern Lebanon, this area was substantially reliant on agriculture before the invasion. What will be left by the time the Markabans are allowed back, assuming they ever are, is an open question.

Zelensky PUSHES WORLD WAR After Iran Strike

Smotrich Demands More West Bank Ethnic Cleansing After Deadly Palestinian Resistance

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday announced actions to tighten and accelerate the illegal occupation and colonization of the West Bank after a Palestinian defending his village from rampaging settlers fatally shot two Israelis—whose companions killed four Palestinians in response—while other members of Netanyahu’s government called for more ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

Residents of Tell—located 3 miles southwest of Nablus and less than 2 miles from the illegal Israeli settlement of Havat Gilad—said settlers attacked homes on the outskirts of the town at around 8:30 on Friday morning.

According to The Times of Israel, a group of several dozen settlers invaded the village under the pretense of going on a hike. However, as the newspaper noted, Tell is located in an area of the occupied West Bank that is off limits to Israelis unless they obtain permission from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which the military said they did not do.

Local Palestinian leader Essam Saifi told Reuters that settlers attacked the eastern ⁠part of Tell and tried to break into ⁠homes there. When residents emerged to confront the settlers, the intruders opened fire on them before leaving.

Backed by IDF troops, the settlers returned around half an hour later. Video recorded by one of the settlers shows an Israeli firing his gun in the air while his companions, who included minors, shout threats while other settlers stormed local residents’ land. A Palestinian man snatched a long gun from a member of the Havat Gilad local security squad and shot him and an IDF major, mortally wounding both men.

Israelis returned fire, killing four Palestinians, including the shooter, and wounding four others. IDF commandos later raided a hospital in Nablus and seized two of the wounded Palestinians.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that “this massacre represents a renewed image of the ongoing Nakba to which our Palestinian people are subjected,” a reference to the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine by Zionist forces during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

The ministry also condemned “the misleading narratives promoted by the Israeli occupation authorities... in a systematic attempt to turn the executioner into the victim, and to cover up the crimes of murder, field executions, massacres, and grave violations committed by the occupation forces and settler militias against the Palestinian people.”

IDF troops subsequently locked down Tell and Nablus while deploying five additional companies to the area and canceling soldiers’ weekend furloughs in preparation for imminent “extensive counterterrorism operational activity in the sector.”

Responding to the incident as well as two separate stabbings of Israelis in the West Bank on Thursday, Netanyahu convened a security consultation, which resulted in a joint statement with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announcing a tightening of the occupation and acceleration of the colonization of Palestine—both already illegal under international law.

The statement said Israel will demolish the family home of the Palestinian who shot the two Israelis, confiscate arms and revoke work permits of Palestinians in “villages acting as terrorist hubs,” reinforce IDF units throughout the occupied territories, expedite the “legalization of farm outposts” and establish new ones, and increase apartheid checkpoints and road separations.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich responded to the incident by calling for the destruction and “evacuation”—a term widely viewed as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing—of local Palestinians “for their own protection.”

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Israel Close to Collapse

Netanyahu accuses Mamdani of ‘fomenting hate’ in calls for PM’s arrest

Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, is “fomenting hate” by calling the Israeli prime minister a war criminal who should be arrested over Israel’s war in Gaza if he visits the city for the United Nations general assembly.

Netanyahu said he intends to be in New York in September to address the annual UN gathering of world leaders, despite the mayor’s suggestion that he is not welcome. Mamdani said on Wednesday that while New York City does not have legal authority to execute an arrest warrant issued by the world’s top war crimes court, he encouraged the federal government to do so.

“He’s supposed to be the mayor of all New Yorkers – Jews, Christians, Muslims, everyone,” Netanyahu said on the Fox News channel’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. “But he’s trying to turn one group against the other.”

Throughout his 2025 mayoral election campaign, Mamdani said he would seek to order the city’s police to execute the ICC’s arrest warrant over Netanyahu’s role in the war in Gaza. “I want to be equally clear, Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large,” he said in his video message on Wednesday.

He told New Yorkers that he understood their frustration and that expressions of protest is something the city would “always respect”.

Russian FAB Bombs Shatter Odessa; More Kiev Strikes Top Kiev Officials Killed; Russia Says NO Truce

New Jersey governor signs law banning surveillance pricing

New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill recently signed a new law prohibiting businesses from using shoppers’ personal information to charge different prices for identical products, making her state the third in the US to ban the practice.

The Fair Price Protection Act passed by New Jersey’s legislature seeks to protect consumers from surveillance pricing, in which retailers can use data including online activity, location and purchasing history to arbitrarily change prices for individual shoppers.

“New Jersey families are already feeling the pressure of higher costs,” Sherrill said in a statement after signing the law. “The last thing they need is companies secretly using their personal data to charge them more than someone else for the exact same product.

“If businesses want to compete, they should do so by offering better prices, not by finding new ways to squeeze shoppers. This law puts New Jersey shoppers first by protecting their privacy and ensuring fairness in pricing.”

New Jersey’s Fair Price Protection Act follows similar measures in Maryland and Connecticut, which have both banned surveillance pricing. Meanwhile, a similar bill awaiting a signature from Governor Kathy Hochul in New York would ban personalized price manipulation.

Lawsuit Challenges Trump’s Illegal Spying and Retaliation Targeting ICE Monitors

A coalition of privacy and civil liberties advocates filed a federal lawsuit Friday accusing the Trump administration of secretly collecting and keeping personal information about people who monitor US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, arguing that the practice violates federal privacy law and threatens constitutionally protected speech and association.

The lawsuit—filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia—was brought by individuals and advocacy groups represented by Democracy Forward.

The plaintiffs—the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and legal observers Nicole Cleland, Jacquelyn Ivey, and Anna Walker—argued that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other federal agencies created and maintained databases of people who observed, documented, or protested immigration enforcement activities without providing notification or safeguards, as required under the Privacy Act of 1974.

That law was passed after the exposure of illegal government surveillance, including longtime former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO program, under which the FBI, in addition to conducting unlawful spying, funded and armed murderous far-right militants to terrorize anti-Vietnam War protesters, anti-nuclear weapons activists, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leftists.

“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions,” Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “That is exactly the kind of government surveillance Congress sought to prevent when it enacted the Privacy Act after some of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history.”

The lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of collecting the names, photographs, vehicle information and license plate numbers, social media accounts, and other identifying information about legal observers, volunteers, journalists, clergy, and community members engaged in First Amendment-protected activities during the government’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.

“When the Department of Homeland Security dramatically ratcheted up its immigration enforcement, people across the country—of all ages and backgrounds—did what anyone is supposed to do when they disagree with government action: They exercised their First Amendment rights,” the suit states. “They peacefully protested. And, as matters here, they observed and recorded how law enforcement agents acted in public.”

“In response, DHS decided to record the Americans who were peacefully observing its agents, adopting a secret Protester Surveillance Policy enabling its agents to first collect records on Americans engaging in First Amendment exercise and then maintain them in DHS systems, where they can be used to retaliate against those Americans,” the complaint continues.

“Beginning sometime in 2025, DHS deployed a dragnet of drones, bodycams, face-scanning apps, license plate scanners, and camera phones to, as one memo instructed, ‘capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form,’” the document notes.

“DHS agents have not been shy about gathering this information or its purpose,” the plaintiffs contended. “In Maine, DHS agents told multiple observers that they were being added to a database of ‘domestic terrorists.’ In Chicago, agents routinely used facial irecognition scans on members of the public.”

“In Minneapolis, observers simply watching agents on public streets have been led by those agents to their own houses, despite never having interacted with an agent—a practice so common that it has been named ‘being driven home by ICE,’” the suit says. “And across the country, DHS agents have approached observers and addressed them by their full names, even though those observers never identified themselves to the agents or showed them any form of identification.”

“As a result of its Protester Surveillance Policy, DHS has recorded and retaliated against each individual plaintiff,” the filing alleges. “It’s bad enough that DHS publicly collected information on Americans engaged in lawful First Amendment exercise. But worse, DHS also decided to maintain the information in one or more of its systems, enabling it to later retaliate against observers and protestors—including by canceling Trusted Traveler status,” which includes Transportation Security Administration Pre-Check and Global Entry.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the DHS surveillance policy unlawful, end it, and ban the agency from continuing to collect and keep records of individuals’ protected First Amendment activities.

“Now more than ever, those of us who have the privilege to speak out have a responsibility to defend the rights of everyone in our communities,” Walker said in a statement. “When people are punished for exercising their First Amendment rights, we begin losing the democratic principles that protect all of us. Every American should be alarmed by retaliatory action against one’s free speech.”

Cleland said: “I believe government accountability starts with transparency. People should be free to peacefully observe and document what their government does in public without worrying they’ll be tracked or retaliated against. This case is about protecting that right for everyone.”

EPIC deputy director John Davisson warned, “When our government compiles secret dossiers on everyday people for exercising their constitutional rights, it sends a chilling message: If you speak up, watch your back.”

“If every protest, every recording, every act of dissent opens us up to surveillance and retribution, privacy and free speech are at risk of collapse,” he added. “But the laws of this nation don’t permit that, and we won’t either.”

Venezuelan men sue aviation firms who flew them to notorious Salvadorian jail

Venezuelan men sent last year to a notorious Salvadorian terrorism prison by the Trump administration are suing the US aviation companies that transported them there. A lawsuit filed this week in federal court in Washington DC accuses the companies CSI Aviation and GlobalX of violating the Venezuelans’ civil rights, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence and other violations, for their role in flying the three planes that took the men to El Salvador.

CSI and GlobalX “went to great lengths” to undertake the “rendition flights” to El Salvador, “in concert with the US government, in flagrant violation of US and international law”, the lawsuit reads. Last year, in March, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men held in US immigration custody to El Salvador, where they were detained for four months in a maximum security terrorism prison and tortured.

The lawsuit accuses CSI and GlobalX of deliberately transporting the men to El Salvador, despite a federal judge ordering the flights to return and despite knowing they would probably be tortured inside the country’s Terrorism Confinement Center (known as “Cecot” by its acronym in Spanish). Without CSI and GlobalX’s complicity, “neither Plaintiffs nor the Class would have been rendered to CECOT”, the lawsuit reads.

The suit was filed by a team of human rights attorneys on 17 July and is being reported first by the Guardian. It is one of the latest attempts by rights groups to hold private contractors accountable for their role in alleged abuses stemming from the administration’s aggressive anti-immigrant crackdown. “Many people might not be aware of the degree to which private companies are intertwined with the human rights abuses occurring under the Trump administration through the detention and unlawful deportation schemes that are occurring,” said Anthony Enriquez, the vice-president of advocacy and litigation for the Kennedy Human Rights Center, in an interview with the Guardian. Enriquez is one of the attorneys representing the Venezuelan men.

CSI and GlobalX, which were hired by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), have “enjoyed unprecedented financial profits from the scheme”, while the Venezuelans “continue to experience severe emotional suffering from the humiliation, terror, and cruelty that they endured”, the lawsuit says.

Trump ‘border czar’ says ICE officer in Maine killing should not have cleared vetting

Tom Homan, the Trump administration “border czar”, on Sunday said he did not believe the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer at the center of a recent fatal shooting in Maine “should have ever cleared vetting”. Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, Homan was asked by host Dana Bash about the officer’s eligibility to serve following reports that two of his ex-wives had accused him of abuse.

“Should someone with those issues be an ICE agent?” Bash asked. “No, if those … are facts … I don’t think he should ever have cleared vetting,” Homan replied. Homan also said part of an ongoing investigation into the 13 July shooting death Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero is determining “how … did the vetting process fail”.

“When they hire somebody, they put them through a vetting process and look at all that stuff. So I know, based on that information – that’s part of the ongoing investigation,” Homan said. “How … did the vetting process fail? Was that information not available? Did they not know?” He added: “So there’s a separate administrative investigation on what happened here. Did we have that information? Did we not have that information? But the vetting process … if that was factual, he would have an almost impossible time to pass vetting.”

Since the shooting, two of Brouillette’s ex-wives have publicly described alleged abuse during their relationships with him. One, Lucinda Brouillette, alleged her ex-husband engaged in a “persistent pattern of abuse, intimidation, manipulation, fear and control”.

“If you were to ask me whether I believe David Brouillette is capable of this level of violence, my answer is unequivocally yes,” she said in a statement to NPR.

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Kshama Sawant: My Independent Socialist Campaign Will Defeat Adam Smith

‘30 Years of Collins. 100 Days to End It’: Maine Dems Nominate Troy Jackson for Senate

Maine Democrats on Saturday overwhelmingly nominated Troy Jackson, a former state Senate president and logger by trade, as their party’s nominee to challenge longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins in November’s high-stakes US Senate election.

“Well, thank you, Maine,” Jackson, 58, said after securing the votes of 566 of 571 delegates during Saturday’s special Democratic convention at Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. “Today we turn the page, today this becomes a general election campaign, and today we win the work of defeating Susan Collins in November.”

“For nearly 30 years, Collins has told Maine that she is ‘concerned’,” Jackson said, referring to the 73-year-old incumbent’s go-to word when President Donald Trump and Republicans attack rights and justice. “She was concerned while she rubber-stamped Trump’s Medicaid cuts and gutted our healthcare.”

“She’s concerned when she cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy,” he continued. “Concerned when she confirmed justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. And really tragically, she was concerned when she gave [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] billions to terrorize our neighbors and murder people in the streets with no accountability.”

“But concern does not lower the costs of groceries or gas,” Jackson said. “Concern does not keep our monitoring wards of rural hospitals like down in Lincoln County open. Concern does not restore all the rights that she’s taken away. Maine does not need another six years of concern. We need someone with courage. We need a fighter, and we need a senator who remembers exactly who sent them to Washington.”

“So if you’ve ever been ignored, underestimated, pushed around, or told that you have to wait your turn while the rich cut the line, I’m asking you to stand with us in this campaign,” he continued. “If you believe in your heart that healthcare is a right, stand with us. And if you believe that workers deserve power, stand with us. And if you believe our freedoms are worth defending, stand with us.”

“And if you believe that Maine deserves a senator who will fight like hell for working-class people, well, stand with us,” Jackson added. “We have a party to unite, we have a movement to build, and we have a senator to defeat.”

"Trump is WORSE for US Empire than Biden!" - Briahna Meets Fellow Accelerationist? (w/ Ashok Kumar)

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‘Not standard’ for Taylor Farms to ask White House to delay cyclospora recall, ex-FDA head says

Former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb said on Sunday that it was “not standard operating procedure” for Taylor Farms to ask the White House to intervene as the company prepared to announce a recall tied to a massive cyclospora outbreak.

Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Gottlieb was asked about a report from the Wall Street Journal that Taylor Farms contacted the White House seeking to delay a recall announcement while federal investigators were preparing to publicly link the company to the multi-state outbreak.

“I dealt with outbreaks in romaine lettuce and spinach as well, E coli in spinach and romaine lettuce. I never heard from the White House on those things, other than to have discussions to inform them of what we were doing, so that they were properly briefed and could respond to questions that they were getting,” Gottlieb said. “So it’s unusual.”

According to the Journal, representatives for Taylor Farms contacted the White House requesting more time before the government publicly linked the company to the outbreak. The report said the White House asked FDA officials to join the call, during which Taylor Farms argued that federal investigators lacked positive laboratory evidence connecting its products to the outbreak and expressed concerns that the government was overstating the company’s responsibility.

The recall associated with the cyclospora outbreak has been fraught with confusing messaging. The iceberg lettuce was initially linked to a single supplier, Taylor Farms de Mexico, which issued a voluntary recall. However, the FDA issued an update last week: lettuce that was not part of the recall had tested positive for cyclospora. But a day later, the FDA deleted that line and said the test was a false positive. The recall still existed, the FDA insisted, despite an enigmatic statement from the supplier.

‘Stunning Admission’: Trump Admin Targeted Democrats by Canceling Clean Energy Grants

President Donald Trump’s administration has admitted in court that it chose to cancel certain grants for clean energy projects because they were set to benefit Democratic-voting states.

The New York Times reported on Friday that attorneys representing the US Department of Energy (DOE) acknowledged in court documents filed earlier this month that decisions about canceling grants were based “solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.”

The Times described this as a “stunning admission” that “offered an unvarnished glimpse into the way President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing, and infrastructure aid in his second term.”

According to the Times, the DOE last year recommended canceling more than 600 grants awarded for energy projects under former President Joe Biden’s administration.

However, the White House Office of Management and Budget only made 284 of the recommended cuts while leaving the rest of the grants in place.

After a group of California researchers challenged the terminated grants in a lawsuit, the DOE acknowledged that “with one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

The DOE also admitted that there was no “programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor” to justify the cuts.

In a social media post, New York Times reporter Tony Romm noted that the DOE made these admissions “as part of a process meant to avoid discovery” and “perhaps spare it from sharing more damaging records” in its possession.

Jennifer Victory, political scientist at George Mason University, described the administration’s scheme as “violations of the rule of law that would be sufficient for impeachment in any other American presidency but aren’t in this one because pathological partisan loyalty has rotted the constitutional order.”

Masked men invading and taking Amazon communities ‘hostage’ in organised crime surge, say local leaders

Indigenous leaders on the Brazilian-Peruvian border have said their communities are being “taken hostage” by organised crime groups who are running rampant across the region, destroying rainforest, building roads and trafficking drugs. Earlier this month, masked men armed with semi-automatic weapons entered homes in Apiwtxa, a village in the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous territory, intimidating people and searching for targets.

The Asháninka people, who have faced threats from intruders for decades because of their efforts to protect the forest and eject narco smugglers, say this is the worst danger they have faced, prompting an emergency delegation to Brasília this week to appeal for support from the government of the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

“Either the state steps in to provide protection, or communities will start organising to defend themselves – and that would be disastrous,” said Francisco Piyãko, the general coordinator of the Organisation of Indigenous People of the Juruá River, who is part of the delegation. “We are not facing a local conflict. We are facing the expansion of transnational criminal networks into Indigenous territories that currently represent one of the last barriers against the illegal occupation of this region of the Amazon.”

The Brazilian side of the border is in Acre state, where the forest is still relatively healthy compared with the Peruvian side, which has experienced heavy logging and violence. Acre has sometimes been a perilous area for environmental and land defenders. One of the country’s most celebrated forest campaigners, Chico Mendes, was shot dead there in 1988. After that, there was a period of relative peace in Acre, compared with other countries in the Amazon or other Brazilian states such as Pará. More recently, however, there has been a rise in tension, much of it from the outside. Isolated Indigenous communities from Peru have been increasingly crossing the border to escape confrontation with loggers and drug cartels.

The Asháninka delegation in Brasília is calling for a permanent security presence along the border to prevent the free movement of drug traffickers, illegal loggers and the illicit construction of “virus roads” that push into the forest without environmental oversight. They also want greater protection for their leaders and operations to combat organised crime in the area. The neighbouring Peruvian department of Ucayali has the widest network of illegal roads in the Peruvian Amazon, providing transport for gangs involved in environmental crime, gold, money laundering and drugs. In the past five years, coca cultivation in Ucayali has tripled.

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Also of Interest

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

Chris Hedges: Trump’s Phantom Leftwing Enemies

The Houthi blockade puts Trump in a serious bind

Araghchi Says Ukraine’s Attack on an Iranian Ship in the Caspian Sea ‘Cannot Go Unanswered’

War On Iran: – Silence Before The Storm Or Ongoing Negotiations?

Oilpocalypse Incoming

‘I Almost Cried’: Unreleased Documentary Footage Shows Lindsey Graham Celebrating Start of Iran War

This desert oasis is a biological wonderland. Trump’s border wall threatens to destroy it

‘Scandalous, irrational and irresponsible’: French beekeepers’ fury at lifting of pesticides ban

IRAN THREATENS UKRAINE AFTER SHIP ATTACKED — w/ JCPOA's Alan Eyre

Ukraine hosts genocidal bigot Laura Loomer

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A Little Night Music

Frankie Lee Sims - I'm Long, Long Gone

Frankie Lee Sims - Yeh, Baby!

Frankie Lee Sims - Walking with Frankie

Frankie Lee Sims - Married Woman

Frankie Lee Sims - Home Again Blues

Frankie Lee Sims - What Will Lucy Mae Do

Frankie Lee Sims - Hey Little Girl

Frankie Lee Sims - Well Goodbye Baby

Frankie Lee Sims - She Likes To Boogie Real Low

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