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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Johnny Fuller

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features west coast blues singer Johnny Fuller. Enjoy!

^{Johnny Fuller - Haunted House}

"We’re hurtling toward extinction via climate collapse or nuclear armageddon and these assholes have us arguing about masks and cancel culture."

-- Caitlin Johnstone

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News and Opinion

Much more detail at the link.

Oil giants help fund powerful police groups in top US cities

Big corporations accused of driving environmental and health inequalities in black and brown communities through toxic and climate-changing pollution are also funding powerful police groups in major US cities, according to a new investigation. Some of America’s largest oil and gas companies, private utilities, and financial institutions that bankroll fossil fuels also back police foundations – opaque private entities that raise money to pay for training, weapons, equipment, and surveillance technology for departments across the US.

The investigation by the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit corporate and government accountability research institute, and its research database project LittleSis, details how police foundations in cities such as Seattle, Chicago, Washington, New Orleans and Salt Lake City are partially funded by household names such as Chevron, Shell and Wells Fargo.

Police foundations are industry groups that provide substantial funds to local departments, yet, as nonprofits, avoid much public scrutiny.

The investigation details how firms linked to fossil fuels also sponsor events and galas that celebrate the police, while some have senior staff serving as directors of police foundations. The report portrays the fossil fuel industry as a common enemy in the struggle for racial and environmental justice. “Many powerful companies that drive environmental injustice are also backers of the same police departments that tyrannize the very communities these corporate actors pollute,” it states.

'These are his people': inside the elite border patrol unit Trump sent to Portland

In January 2011, James Tomsheck, then a top internal affairs investigator inside US Customs and Border Protection, attended a meeting of about 100 senior CBP leaders in a hotel in Irvington, Virginia. Amid the sanitized splendor of the hotel ballroom, he vividly recalls hearing the nation’s then highest-ranking border patrol agent, David Aguilar, laying out his vision for the future. Border patrol, the former CBP deputy commissioner said, was to become the “marine corps of the US federal law enforcement community”. Another leading CBP figure remarked that border agents were not required to adhere to the same constitutional restraints on the use of force as other law enforcers. “We are not cops,” he said.

Fast forward to this month, when Tomsheck absorbed with mounting foreboding the images of federal officers – led by border patrol agents – wielding teargas and flash bangs against protesters in Portland, Oregon. As news circulated of demonstrators being shot in the face with “less lethal” munitions, and of unidentified masked agents in camouflage strong-arming civilians into unmarked vans, the nightmare scenario Tomsheck had heard expressed by his bosses almost a decade ago – of border patrol becoming a nationwide militarized force operating outside constitutional constraints – was becoming real. ...

That Trump should have selected the US border patrol as the lead agency in his new reality-TV bid to seize control of civilian streets is especially alarming to those who are familiar with the agency’s track record. The most comprehensive tally of its fatal abuses, recorded by the Southern Border Community Coalition, has found at least 111 people have died as the result of an encounter with a border agent since 2010. ...

More concerning still is that the federal officers deployed in Portland, ostensibly to protect federal property, were spearheaded by an elite unit, the border patrol tactical unit. Better known as Bortac, it is a quasi-militarised outfit equivalent to the Navy Seals. ...

Jenn Budd spent six years working as a senior border patrol agent until 2001 when she blew the whistle on a station chief who was himself smuggling drugs. She was offered promotion in exchange for her silence on the subject, but resigned in disgust. In her years as an agent she got to know Bortac well. She remembers them as the “biggest guys, like the jocks in a football team. They live in tight groups like the Navy Seals, spending their time in military-style training.” In Budd’s experience, Bortac agents are among “the most violent and racist in all law enforcement”.

Much more detail at the link.

Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years

Donald Trump has made warnings about the threat of antifa and “far-left fascism” a central part of his re-election campaign. But in reality leftwing attacks have left far fewer people dead than violence by rightwing extremists, new research indicates, and antifa activists have not been linked to a single murder in decades.

A new database of nearly 900 politically motivated attacks and plots in the United States since 1994 includes just one attack staged by an anti-fascist that led to fatalities. In that case, the single person killed was the perpetrator.

Over the same time period, American white supremacists and other rightwing extremists have carried out attacks that left at least 329 victims dead, according to the database. More broadly, the database lists 21 victims killed in leftwing attacks since 2010 , and 117 victims of rightwing attacks in that same period – nearly six times as much. Attacks inspired by the Islamic State and similar jihadist groups, in contrast, killed 95 people since 2010, slightly fewer than rightwing extremists, according to the data set. More than half of these victims died in a a single attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016.

The database was assembled by researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a centrist thinktank, and reviewed by the Guardian. ...

Most of the deadly extremist attacks the CSIS researchers categorized as “leftwing” were killings of police officers by black men, many of them US military veterans, who described acting out of anger or retribution for police killings of black Americans. ... Some of the gunmen who killed police had connections to black nationalist groups, which extremism researchers at CSIS and elsewhere said they typically categorize as leftwing, largely because in the 1960s, influential black nationalist groups like the Black Panther party were anti-capitalist and considered part of the New Left. Making that categorization is less straightforward today, some researchers acknowledge, since some prominent black nationalist organizations express homophobic, misogynistic and antisemitic views, values that set them in opposition to the current American left.

ProPublica posts NYPD records, bypassing judge's blockade

Days after a federal judge paused the public release of New York City police disciplinary records, a news website has published a database containing complaint information for thousands of officers. ProPublica posted the database Sunday, explaining in a note to readers that it isn't obligated to comply with Judge Katherine Polk Failla's temporary restraining order because it is not a party to a union lawsuit challenging the release of such records.

Deputy Managing Editor Eric Umansky said ProPublica requested the information from the city’s police watchdog agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, soon after last month's repeal of state law that for decades had prevented the disclosure of disciplinary records.

Unions representing police officers and other public safety workers sued the city on July 15 to block Mayor Bill de Blasio from making good on a pledge to start posting misconduct complaints on a government website. The unions argue that allowing the public to see unproven or false complaints could sully officers’ reputations and compromise their safety.

A state judge who first handled the case had issued a narrower restraining order that temporarily blocked the public disclosure of records concerning unsubstantiated and non-finalized allegations or settlement agreements. ProPublica said it excluded allegations that investigators deemed unfounded from the material it published. In all, the searchable database contains 12,056 complaints against 3,996 active NYPD officers.

UK 'Russia report' fear-mongers about meddling yet finds no evidence

US attorney general may be using Assange case for political ends, court told

The US attorney general, William Barr, may be using Julian Assange’s extradition case in the UK for political ends, the WikiLeaks founder’s defence team alleged during a court hearing at which he appeared by video link from prison for the first time in months. It was a fact that Donald Trump had described the defence case as “a plot by the Democrats”, Edward Fitzgerald QC told the hearing at Westminster magistrates court.

Fitzgerald said a new superseding US indictment, produced months after the start of attempts in the UK to secure his extradition, had been “sprung” on his defence team. The indictment, which had not yet been formally laid before the court, supersedes previous indictments brought in February and which related to 2010 and 2011.

A US grand jury had previously indicted Assange on 18 charges – 17 of which fall under the Espionage Act – around conspiracy to receive, obtaining and disclosing classified diplomatic and military documents. The details in the new indictment – publicised last month by the US Department of Justice – focus on conferences in 2009 in the Netherlands and Malaysia at which US prosecutors say Assange tried to recruit hackers who could find classified information, including in relation to a “most wanted leaks” list posted on the WikiLeaks website. ...

Outside the court, the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Kristinn Hrafnsson, said: “The ‘new’ superseding indictment actually contains nothing new. All the alleged events have been known to the prosecution for years. “It contains no new charges. What’s really happening here is that despite its decade-long head-start, the prosecution are still unable to build a coherent and credible case. So they’ve scrapped their previous two indictments and gone for a third try.”

A Vaccine by November? Science Journalist in Vaccine Trial Casts Doubt on Rosy U.S. Projections

The World Recorded 1 Million New Coronavirus Cases in Just 4 Days

The acceleration of the pandemic is being driven primarily by hotspots like the U.S., Brazil, and India, but public health experts are also concerned about spikes in cases in countries that previously appeared to have the spread of COVID-19 under control.

In the past 24 hours, both the U.S. and Brazil have reported 55,000 new infections while India has topped 50,000 infections in one day for the first time. But fresh spikes in places like China, Australia, and Europe point to the extreme difficulty of keeping coronavirus under control.

Here it is: GOP plan on unemployment insurance, confirming our reporting this morning

Cuts $600/week benefit to $200/week -- in October, replace $200/week w/ 70% replacement of lost wages

States can request a waiver if cannot make the switch pic.twitter.com/uAQnIRH3WP

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) July 27, 2020

.@BetseyStevenson on how child care crisis will distort the economy for a generation — “....we gave less to the childcare sector than we gave to one single airline, Delta.” https://t.co/9YGQ5mrwtk pic.twitter.com/CyCggfS3h9

— Jacqueline Alemany (@JaxAlemany) July 26, 2020

Sen. Warren Demands Eviction Moratorium as New Reporting Sheds Light on Nation's Stark Housing Inequality

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday called for an extension of a federal evictions moratorium and expanded unemployment benefits in response to new reporting spotlighting Americans' divergent housing realities as a result of the nation's deepening inequality triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.

The headline on the Washington Post's Monday story puts the disparity in clear terms: "2020 Is the Summer of Booming Home Sales—And Evictions."

"Americans with money in the bank are buying bigger homes, while renters increasingly worry about eviction," wrote the Post's Heather Long. ...

According to national data released last week, nearly 12.6 million people were unable to pay their rent last month, and over 9.3 million say they have "no confidence" they will be able to pay rent next month.

"Evictions are widely expected to spike soon," wrote Long. ...

"Millions of families can't afford rent or other basic necessities," he said. "They are begging for relief that, for many, just isn't coming."

August rent is due in a few days, and formal assurances from federal lawmakers that the federal eviction moratorium will continue have yet to be announced.

Here's how the eviction crisis will impact each state. https://t.co/Yl5aDvu2Ar pic.twitter.com/1v2DjrS4sy

— CNBC (@CNBC) July 27, 2020

Krystal and Saagar: GOP Plan Unveiled, Millions Face Homelessness, Andrew Yang's Dire Warning

As US Eviction Crisis Looms, Remember That Poverty Is Weaponized By The Elite

CNBC News reports that Americans are looking at the possibility of up to 40 million evictions in the coming months as unemployment payments expire and a federal moratorium on evictions runs out.

“On Friday, the federal moratorium on evictions in properties with federally backed mortgages and for tenants who receive government-assisted housing expired.” CNBC reports. “The Urban Institute estimated that provision covered nearly 30% of the country’s rental units.”

“It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen,” National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel coordinator John Pollock told CNBC, adding that there were 2.3 million evictions in the entirety of 2016 and that “There could be that many evictions in August.”

While ordinary Americans are worried about being evicted from their homes by the tens of millions, the nation’s billionaires are warning the nation of the dangers of communism. After recently drawing fire for repeatedly cheerleading last year’s vicious fascist coup of Bolivia’s leftist government, billionaire Elon Musk is now tweeting anti-Marx memes and warning that leftists are “losing the middle”.

I suppose we could take it as an encouraging sign that plutocrats are with increasing frequency feeling the need to go out and personally yell at the unwashed masses who are being slowly crushed to death by end-stage metastatic neoliberalism for their insufficient submissiveness to the capitalism god. They used to just have their PR people do it, so they must be at least a little nervous.

This is America. This is what America is designed to be. The head of a vast, globe-spanning empire needs its rank-and-file citizens to be poor, powerless, busy and brainwashed at all times, because a lot of power and money rides on keeping the riff raff away from the gears of the imperial machine.

I have traveled through the US, the parts that everyone ignores and Hollywood doesn’t show you, and I have traveled through many countries which are widely considered impoverished. It often surprises Americans when I say this, but the USA is largely a third-world country blanketed in first-world narrative. The way so many of them live compared to the bare minimum standard of living in other wealthy countries is absolutely breathtaking.

And this is entirely by design.

I talk about establishment narrative control a lot here, and it’s important to remember that poverty in and of itself can also be a form of narrative control. If you keep a populace impoverished, toiling and constantly terrified of the possibility of losing everything due to a single turn of bad luck or ill health, you ensure that they won’t have the time and psychological spaciousness needed to sit down and examine, for example, why their elections never change anything, or what their nation is doing to other nations.

You also ensure that a critical mass of them will never be able to afford political influence. In a nation where you’re literally incapable of influencing government policy and behavior unless you have a certain amount of wealth at your disposal, depriving the populace of their ability to pool their money toward electing a government which combats income and wealth inequality. The donor class are the only ones who get a say.

In a nation where money equals power and power is relative, you necessarily get a ruling plutocratic class which needs to keep everyone else poor in order to maintain their rule. If everyone is king then nobody is king, so if money makes you king in your society then you necessarily have to actively deprive the majority of money.

This is why I’m always dismissive of theories which insist that you can let the wealthy keep all their wealth and also provide enough for everybody. No you can’t, because the wealthy have a vested interest in keeping everyone from having enough, and they use their wealth as a weapon to enact that agenda in the form of political influence, monopolistic tyranny, and mass media narrative control.

They use their wealth as a weapon. They use poverty as a weapon.

As long as human behavior remains driven by the pursuit of profit, we will continue to see steadily rising amounts of war, ecocide, oppression, exploitation and mass-scale manipulation, because those things are profitable and/or protect the interests of those reaping the profits. We will never, ever profit our way out of any of those problems. The pursuit of profit will only ever make more of them.

The wealthy are only wealthy because they found some clever way to insert themselves as unnecessary middlemen between consumers and the labor, skill, and/or talent which creates the actual thing the consumers are paying for, and skimmed most of the money off for themselves. That’s all “profit” ever is in large-scale corporate operations: it’s the money that parasitic middlemen were able to steal from the real talent and move into their own bank accounts.

This will never create a healthy and harmonious world. It will only ever create more suffering and dysfunction. Something better is needed.

WaPo Reporter: Corporate Friendly Dems May CAVE To GOP On Unemployment

Krystal Ball: GOP Clings To Myth Of Scarcity Even When It Spells DOOM

White House brands teachers “essential workers” to force reopening of schools

Under conditions in which the coronavirus pandemic is raging out of control, the Trump administration is escalating its homicidal campaign to reopen schools across the US, which is guaranteed to spike infection rates even further. At a press conference Friday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany branded teachers “essential workers” akin to meatpackers, one of the sections of the working class most devastated by the pandemic. McEnany declared that “schools are essential places of business … our teachers are essential personnel.” She added, “Our meatpackers were meatpacking because they were essential workers. … And we believe our teachers are essential.”

The comparison between teachers and meatpacking workers is highly significant and must be taken as a sharp warning by teachers and all education workers. Since the start of the pandemic, meat processing plants have seen among the highest rates of infections and deaths of any industry in the US. In late April, following a series of walkouts and job actions over unsafe conditions, which forced the closure of 22 plants across the country, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act and deemed meatpacking plants “critical infrastructure,” requiring them to stay open. As a result, the number of cases and deaths have tripled, with well over 30,000 workers infected and more than 100 killed by the virus.

In drawing this comparison, the White House is putting teachers on notice that they intend to carry out the same dictatorial measures should there be organized strikes or mobilizations to prevent the reopening of schools. ... For the financial oligarchy, reopening the schools is a linchpin in the broader campaign to “reopen the economy,” which in essence is the drive to extract ever-greater surplus value from the working class in order to pay for the mountains of debt accumulated through the bailout of Wall Street in the CARES Act.

With high rates of absenteeism in auto factories and other workplaces due to the lack of childcare, schools are “essential workplaces” to herd workers back into their workplaces so the ruling class can resume the extraction of profits. The lowering or cutting off of the $600 a week federal addition to state unemployment benefits is similarly aimed at forcing workers back to work, regardless of the dangers they face. The number of new COVID-19 cases across the US has been continually on the rise since early June, after states lifted their final social distancing restrictions and reopened the majority of businesses. Record numbers of new cases have been repeatedly set in recent weeks, with Friday seeing a record 78,000 new cases. The number of daily new deaths has also steadily risen, reaching over 1,100 four times last week. ...

Opposition to the reopening of schools continues to mount among parents and educators, with an Associated Press-NORC poll released last week finding that fully 77 percent of Americans are opposed to the resumption of in-person learning. Forty-six percent believe that major adjustments are needed before schools reopen, and 31 percent insist that schools should not open at all. Eighty percent of those surveyed were extremely or somewhat concerned that reopening schools would produce a surge in cases in their community.

California investigates Amazon's treatment of workers during pandemic

Amazon is under investigation in California for failing to protect its warehouse employees from the new coronavirus. California’s attorney general Xavier Becerra, the Division of Occupational Safety and Health, and the San Francisco department of public health “have all opened investigations into Amazon’s practices” around the pandemic, San Francisco superior court judge Ethan Schulman wrote in a court filing on Monday. ...

The online retailer is accused of putting workers at “needless risk” by having them share equipment, such as freezer suits, and not allowing extra time in order to respect social distancing, the filing said. The filing originates from a case brought by Chiyomi Brent, a worker at Amazon’s San Francisco fulfillment center.

Schulman on Monday refused to issue a preliminary injunction that would have closed the warehouse Brent works at until more precautions are taken. He said Brent had failed to show immediate harm was possible and that three government bodies investigating Amazon were better suited to handle her concerns. ... The attorney general’s office told the court last week that its statewide Amazon investigation, which dates back to at least May, also is ongoing.

As millions of Americans sheltered in place in early 2020, Amazon saw orders for home goods skyrocket, fueled by customers who were no longer shopping at brick and mortar stores. Meanwhile, workers fulfilling these orders say they lacked adequate protection from coronavirus infections. In April, Amazon was accused of firing three critics of the company’s pandemic response and workers participated in a nationwide sick-out. The workers claimed Amazon failed to provide enough face masks for workers, did not implement regular temperature checks at warehouses as it promised, and has refused to give workers paid sick leave.

Sen. Tom Cotton Says Founding Fathers Saw Slavery as a 'Necessary Evil'

Sen. Tom Cotton, in his quest to block schools from using federal money to teach the New York Times’ 1619 Project, said that slavery was once viewed by the Founding Fathers as a “necessary evil.”

“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country,” the Arkansas Republican told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the Times’ 2019 special issue, which focuses on slavery’s impacts on health, capitalism, and politics. “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”

The 1619 project’s Pulitzer Prize-winning creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, criticized Cotton’s description of slavery being a “necessary evil” on Twitter Sunday afternoon, and continued Monday morning, writing that her project’s curriculum is meant to supplement — not replace — U.S. history. ...

The Republican fervor reached new heights last week when Cotton introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, which would block federal funds from being used to teach or support the 1619 Project in K-12 schools, except any funds that go toward low-income or disabled students. And, if schools choose to teach the project anyway, their teachers will also become ineligible for federal professional-development grants, according to a news release.

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Rep. Lori Trahan Lied About Campaign Funds. The House Ethics Committee Cleared Her Anyway.

Last December, the independent Office of Congressional Ethics released a report concluding that there was “substantial reason” to believe that freshman Rep. Lori Trahan had broken campaign finance laws in the final days of her tight Democratic primary in Massachusetts. OCE then kicked it over to the House Ethics Committee, which is run by a bipartisan panel of Trahan’s colleagues. They’ve now concluded their own investigation, with a starkly different finding: Trahan was cleared — despite not having cooperated with the OCE investigation nor providing key documentation to support her claims.

In 2018, Trahan faced a hotly competitive primary for Massachusetts’ 3rd Congressional District, in the Boston suburbs, which she ultimately won by just 155 votes. In the final days of the campaign, Trahan had deposited $300,000 into her coffers that was classified as a personal loan, which she used to launch a TV blitz that, given the narrow margin, most likely swung the election.

By the time Trahan filed a personal financial statement, her records suggested that she did not have enough assets to have been able to make the loan to her campaign, as revealed by a Boston Globe investigation. Where, then, had the money come from?

Trahan’s critics floated the possibility that her wealthy husband’s companies had financed her last-minute surge, a charge that Trahan called not just preposterous, but sexist. She was asked about the money at a town hall last March, in the wake of the Globe report. “The suggestion that I did not have the personal resources to make that loan to my campaign is just inaccurate,” she said. “There’s a lot of narratives you want to change when you are taking on a run like this, and you’re going back to Congress as one of those 131 women, and that’s one of them, right? That women can start successful businesses, they can earn income, they can have affordable day care, they can get paid the same as men who are doing the same job, and they can make a loan that they can afford to their campaign.” She said that when her next financial disclosure in spring 2019 was revealed, everything would be cleared up. ...

It is now clear that Trahan was lying. What was ultimately revealed, after a series of corrections made by Trahan and $400,000 in legal advice, was that her husband had shifted assets out of companies he owned into a joint checking account which was then quickly deposited into Trahan’s congressional campaign. That’s not what Trahan’s critics are claiming — that is now her own story. Yet, earlier this month, the Ethics Committee cleared Trahan by finding that, while the loan had indeed been made out of funds from her husband’s companies, doing so was legal because a prenuptial agreement stipulated that such funds were joint marital property. Trahan’s financial disclosure, however, lists all of the assets her husband used to make the loan as “SP,” for spouse, rather than “JT,” for joint, as she lists other joint property.

She's right https://t.co/sPurva4IG6

— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) July 27, 2020

Krystal and Saagar: Nina Turner Says Voting For Joe Like Eating ‘Bowl Of Sh*t,’ DNC Platform Set

360+ DNC Delegates Vow to Oppose Democratic Platform If It Doesn't Support Medicare for All

More than 360 delegates to the Democratic National Convention have signed a petition vowing to vote against the 2020 party platform if it does not include a plank supporting Medicare for All, a policy solution one progressive delegate described as "a red line for a humane society."

The petition, led by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) from Nevada's DNC delegation, says the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted "the need to separate healthcare from employment" and ensure that healthcare is guaranteed to all as "a basic human right, not a luxury."

Judith Whitmer, a Sanders delegate and chair of the convention's Nevada delegation, told Politico Monday that while a majority of petition signatories are Sanders delegates, some of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden's delegates have also taken the pledge. The largely virtual Democratic convention is scheduled to begin on August 17.

"This pandemic has shown us that our private health insurance system does not work for the American people," Whitmer said. "Millions of people have lost their jobs and their healthcare at the same time. There's people leaving the hospital now with millions of dollars in medical bills. What are we going to do about that?"

Advocacy group Families USA estimated earlier this month that at least 5.4 million Americans lost their health insurance between February and May, the largest three-month spike in uninsurance on record. Major private insurance companies, meanwhile, have seen their profits soar amid the deadly pandemic.

A draft version (pdf) of the 2020 Democratic platform released last week mentions Medicare for All once but does not endorse the proposal, which has grown in popularity among Americans since the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S. in March. The Democratic Platform Committee, a panel of 180 delegates, is expected to begin considering the draft and offering amendments on Monday before the document is advanced to the full convention for a vote.

"Generations of Democrats have been united in the fight for universal healthcare," the draft reads. "We are proud our party welcomes advocates who want to build on and strengthen the Affordable Care Act and those who support a Medicare for All approach; all are critical to ensuring that healthcare is a human right."

Throughout the 2020 Democratic primary race, Biden repeatedly attacked Medicare for All with right-wing talking points and pushed a public-option alternative that would leave millions of Americans uninsured. In an interview with Medicare for All advocate Ady Barkan earlier this month, Biden reiterated his opposition to single-payer and said he supports preserving a role for the private insurance industry.

Norman Solomon, national director of progressive advocacy group RootsAction.org and a Sanders delegate from California, told Politico that "Democrats who understand the profound need for Medicare for All don't want a pat on the head," referring to the draft of the Democratic platform.

"We want a genuine political commitment to healthcare as a human right," said Solomon. "Biden hasn't gotten there."

Matt Taibbi: Did Hillary REALLY Lose Because Of Sexism

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California's only known wolf pack produces new litter of pups

The only known wolf family in California has produced a new litter of pups, its fourth, building on a gradual recovery of the species in the US west. The Lassen pack apparently lost its original father, a wolf not spotted since June last year. But a new male has joined the pack, resulting in the new litter of eight pups. There are now at least 14 wolves in the pack, including prior litters.

The family is only the second confirmed wolf pack in California in the past 100 years, and was first identified in 2017. Wolves have been hunted since white settlers moved into western states but endangered species laws and conservation efforts have helped a slow recovery.

Alarm over discovery of hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels near Galápagos Islands

Ecuador has sounded the alarm after its navy discovered a huge fishing fleet of mostly Chinese-flagged vessels some 200 miles from the Galápagos Islands, the archipelago which inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. About 260 ships are currently in international waters just outside a 188-mile wide exclusive economic zone around the island, but their presence has already raised the prospect of serious damage to the delicate marine ecosystem, said former environment minister Yolanda Kakabadse.

“This fleet’s size and aggressiveness against marine species is a big threat to the balance of species in the Galápagos,” she told the Guardian.

Kakabadse and an ex-mayor of Quito, Roque Sevilla, were on Monday put in charge of designing a “protection strategy” for the islands, which lie 563 miles west of the South American mainland.

Chinese fishing vessels come every year to the seas around the Galápagos, which were declared a Unesco world heritage site in 1978, but this year’s fleet is one of the largest seen in recent years. Sevilla said that diplomatic efforts would be made to request the withdrawal of the Chinese fishing fleet. “Unchecked Chinese fishing just on the edge of the protected zone is ruining Ecuador’s efforts to protect marine life in the Galápagos,” he said.

How the global climate fight could be lost if Trump is re-elected

It was a balmy June day in 2017 when Donald Trump took to the lectern in the White House Rose Garden to announce the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, the only comprehensive global pact to tackle the spiraling crisis. Todd Stern, who was the US’s chief negotiator when the deal was sealed in Paris in 2015, forced himself to watch the speech. “I found it sickening, it was mendacious from start to finish,” said Stern. “I was furious … because here we have this really important thing and here’s this joker who doesn’t understand anything he’s talking about. It was a fraud.”

The terms of the accord mean no country can leave before November this year, so due to a quirk of timing, the US will officially exit the Paris deal on 4 November – 100 days from now and just one day after the 2020 presidential election. The completion of Stern’s misery, and possibly any realistic hopes of averting disastrous climate change, rests heavily upon the outcome of the election, which will pit Trump against former vice-president Joe Biden, who has vowed to rejoin the climate agreement.

The lifetime of the Paris agreement, signed in a wave of optimism in 2015, has seen the five hottest years ever recorded on Earth, unprecedented wildfires torching towns from California to Australia, record heatwaves baking Europe and India and temperatures briefly bursting beyond 100F (38C) in the Arctic.

These sort of impacts could be a mere appetizer, scientists warn, given they have been fueled by levels of global heating that are on track to triple, or worse, by the end of the century without drastic remedial action. The faltering global effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and head off further calamity hinges, in significant part, on whether the US decides to re-enter the fray. “The choice of Biden or Trump in the White House is huge, not just for the US but for the world generally to deal with climate change,” said Stern. “If Biden wins, November 4 is a blip, like a bad dream is over. If Trump wins, he seals the deal. The US becomes a non-player and the goals of Paris become very, very difficult. Without the US in the long term, they certainly aren’t realistic.” ...

But even with an engaged Biden administration that is somehow able to get Congress to agree to a $2tn plan to shift the US on to renewable energy, the challenge is immense. The world has dithered on cutting emissions for so long that only an unprecedented, rapid overhaul of the way we travel, generate energy and eat will keep humanity within the bounds of safety outlined in Paris. The world will have to slash emissions by more than 7% a year this decade to have any hope of meeting the 1.5C target, according to the United Nations. This annual cut will be achievable this year only through the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic, which shuttered much of the global economy. A more sustainable path to decarbonization will need to be immediately identified and implemented.

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Also of Interest

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

Tom Cotton Thinks Slavery Was a “Necessary” Evil. Here Are Some Others.

The birth of a militia: how an armed group polices Black Lives Matter protests

American Social Collapse Is Far Closer Than Most Will Admit

The Pentagon Has a New Process for Paying for Civilian Deaths — but Is Still Slow to Acknowledge Them

US Military Flies Record Number of Planes Near China’s Coast in July

Yankee McYeehaw: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Did Trump Bomb Syria on False Grounds?

Revelations by a former police spy upend the official story blaming Iran for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires

Killing Democracy in America

More willful blindness by the media on spying by Obama administration

How the Child Care Crisis Will Distort the Economy for a Generation

David Dayen’s New Book Exposes the Dirty Hands of Wall Street Driving Monopoly Power in U.S.

New Zealand claims world first in setting standards for government use of algorithms

EU Reluctantly Aids Southern Europe—With Strings Attached

Pressured by Climate Activist Groups, Deutsche Bank Ditches Drilling in the Arctic

Keiser Report | The Passing Fad Called ‘Fiat’ $$$

No Paper Trail: Migrant Children Secretly Held in Hampton Inn Hotels Before Expulsion from U.S

Why is the Trump administration holding unaccompanied migrant children in "black sites"?

Krystal and Saagar: BOMBSHELL Report Reveals Amazon Anti-Competitive Tactics, Bezos On Capitol Hill

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A Little Night Music

Johnny Fuller - Strange Land

Johnny Fuller & The Phillip Walker Band - l Míss You So

Johnny Fuller - Hard Times

Johnny Fuller - Roughest Place In Town

Johnny Fuller & His Band - First Stage Of The Blues

Johnny Fuller - Sister Jenny

Johnny Fuller - Train Train Blues

Johnny Fuller - Prowling Blues

Johnny Fuller - You Got Me Whistlin

Johnny Fuller - Don't Slam That Door

Johnny Fuller - She's Too Much

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