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"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people."

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

News and Opinion

Israel admits to Gaza raid that killed children

Israeli defence officials have confirmed that an Israeli raid on a Gaza cemetery killed five Palestinian children during its assault in early August, according to a new report, contradicting previous statements senior military officials made to local media.

Several defence sources told the Haaretz newspaper that an army inquiry into the August 7 attack concluded the five children – Jamil Najm al-Deen Naijm, aged 4; Jamil Ihab Najim, 13; Mohammad Nijm, 17; Hamed Nijm, 17; and Nazmi Abu Karsh, 15, were killed by an Israeli air attack on the Al-Faluja Cemetery next to the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.

In the aftermath of that attack, which came during a three-day Israeli assault on the besieged enclave from August 6 to August 8, several senior Israeli officers told Haaretz the deaths were likely caused by an off-course Islamic Jihad rocket.

Israel Shutters Palestinian HUMAN RIGHTS Groups After IDF Admits To Killing 5 Children

Uproar after Mahmoud Abbas in Berlin accuses Israel of ’50 Holocausts’

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts”, at a joint press conference with Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in Berlin, drawing condemnation from Germany and Israel.

At the end of his state visit to Germany’s chancellory on Tuesday night, Abbas was asked by a German journalist whether he planned to apologise for the deadly attack by Palestinian militants on Israeli citizens at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the 50th anniversary of which is on 5 September.

The militant group Black September, which killed 11 Israeli athletes and one German police officer during the hostage-taking, was linked to Abbas’s Fatah party at the time.

“If we want to dig further into the past, yes, please, I have 50 massacres that were committed by Israel,” the Palestinian leader said at the end of the press conference. “Fifty massacres, 50 Holocausts, and to this day, every day, we have dead people killed by the [Israeli Defence Forces], by the Israeli army.”

Scholz, who had criticised Abbas for describing Israel as perpetuating an “apartheid system” earlier on in the press conference, did not immediately respond verbally to the Holocaust comparison but shook the Palestinian president’s hand after his spokesperson announced the end of the question-and-answer session. Scholz condemned the remarks on Wednesday morning.

Russia Pressures Ukraine on All Fronts. West Increasingly Pessimistic on Kiev's Prospects

Explosions Hit Russian Arms Depot in Crimea, Moscow Blames ‘Sabotage’

A blast hit a Russian ammunition depot in the northern Dzhankoi district of Crimea on Tuesday, injuring two people, in an incident the Russian Defense Ministry described as an act of “sabotage.”

“On the morning of August 16, as a result of an act of sabotage, a military warehouse near Dzhankoi was damaged,” the Russian Defense Ministry said, according to the Russian news agency Tass. Russian authorities said that a fire broke out at the depot, causing the ammunition to detonate.

A senior Ukrainian official speaking on the condition of anonymity to The Washington Post said the blast was a Ukrainian special forces operation. Last week, Ukrainian officials speaking to the media made similar claims about a blast at a Russian airfield in Crimea, an incident Moscow downplayed and insisted was the result of an accident.

Another Russian military base in Crimea rocked by major explosions

Exactly one week after six blasts devastated Russia’s Saki airbase in northern Crimea, a series of major blasts rocked another military base in a neighboring region of the Black Sea peninsula which was annexed by Russia in March 2014, following the US-backed far-right coup in Kiev. While the Kremlin has tried to downplay last week’s explosions, Ukraine claimed that 60 people were killed and 100 wounded. Satellite images appeared to show that at least 7 Russian fighter jets of the type Su-24 and Su-34 were destroyed and two severely damaged. This would amount to the largest loss for Russia’s aviation in a single day since World War II.

The latest blasts occurred at around 6:15 a.m. local time on Tuesday, and hit a military base and electrical substation near the villages Maiskoe and Dzhankoiskoe. A major ammunition depot exploded, local energy supplies were disrupted, and residential buildings were damaged. Parts of the local railway network, which reportedly transports military equipment to Russian troops fighting in Ukraine, were also damaged and the railway had to stop service for most of Tuesday. According to local authorities, over 3,000 people were evacuated, more than 10 times the number of official evacuees after last week’s explosions. A state of emergency was proclaimed across northern Crimea and a safety zone with a radius of 5 kilometers (3 miles) was established around the site of the blasts. Officials indicated that only two people were wounded.

As was the case in last week’s incident, the Kremlin insists that the reason for the blasts were acts of “sabotage,” refusing to acknowledge Ukrainian involvement. Seemingly contradicting the Kremlin’s version of events, Vladimir Konstantinov, a leader of the ruling United Russia party and head of the State Council of Crimea, wrote on his Telegram channel: “one thing is already clear: an agency of the terrorist Kiev regime has received the signal to become activated, and, since it is unable to engage in large actions, they try to do small mischief.” Konstantinov called for strikes on the “decision-making centers” as the “most effective and timely measure.”

While Ukraine has not officially taken responsibility for the blasts, leading Kiev officials all but admitted, gloatingly, that Ukraine was behind them. Minutes after news of the blasts broke, Andriy Yermak, the main advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, provocatively tweeted, “The Ukrainian Armed Forces continue the filigree ‘demilitarization’ operation to fully rid our land of Russian invaders. Our soldiers are the best sponsors of a good mood. Crimea is Ukraine.” In a clear hint that more attacks are to come, Ukraine’s Zelensky wrote on his Telegram channel Tuesday evening that Ukrainians should stay away from Russian military bases in Crimea and East Ukraine. ...

The apparent strikes by Ukraine on Crimea are only the most extreme in a number of dangerous escalations of the imperialist proxy war against Russia on Ukrainian territory. Fighting still continues around the Zaporozhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, with both Ukraine and Russia accusing each other of shelling the site. Experts have been warning for weeks of the potential of a major nuclear disaster, but the Ukrainian government has reportedly refused to let officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency enter the site other than by crossing the front lines. ...

The war in Ukraine, the bloodiest conflict in Europe in generations, is estimated to have already left tens of thousands of soldiers dead on both sides, and has caused over 5,000 civilian deaths and turned 12 million Ukranians into refugees. However, the imperialist powers, above all the US and Britain, have continued to pump billions of dollars in weapons and ammunition into the Ukrainian army, which includes large fascist battalions and paramilitary units. Their aim is to bleed Russia dry and turn the war into a basis for a profound economic and political destabilization and, eventually, the carve-up of Russia itself.

"Brazil on Fire": Lula Launches Campaign to Unseat Bolsonaro & End His Authoritarian Rule

Advocates Welcome Temporary Block on South Carolina's 6-Week Abortion Ban

Reproductive freedom advocates welcomed a Wednesday decision by the South Carolina Supreme Court temporarily blocking the state's six-week abortion ban while justices consider a legal challenge to the contested law.

All five sitting justices on the state's highest court signed Wednesday's injunction, which allows South Carolina clinics to offer abortion services up to 20 weeks of pregnancy—the previous legal limit before Republican-led state lawmakers passed the six-week ban last year—while a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, Greenville Women's Clinic, and two physicians is litigated.

Planned Parenthood operates the only abortion clinics in South Carolina and does not perform the procedure after the first trimester, or about 14 weeks, according to the Greenville News.

The South Carolina justices wrote that although the U.S. Supreme Court voided the constitutional right to abortion in June's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling, "at this preliminary stage, we are unable to determine with finality the constitutionality of the [six-week ban] under our state's constitutional prohibition against unreasonable invasions of privacy."

Mississippi Town's Black Residents 'Terrorized' by Racist Police Seek DOJ Probe

Black residents of Lexington, Mississippi are calling for a U.S. Justice Department probe of systemic racism in the town as they filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the municipality, its police department, and current and former police officials, including an ex-chief fired for racist boasts about shooting a fleeing man 119 times.

The lawsuit—which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi—accuses the "deeply segregated" town of Lexington, the Lexington Police Department (LPD), former police Chief Sam Dobbins, and interim Chief Charles Henderson of subjecting Black residents to a pattern of excessive force, intimidation, and false arrests. More than 200 Black residents have complained about violations of their First, Fourth, and 14th Amendment rights. ...

The suit, which notes that 23 LPD officers have resigned over the past year, alleges that "the culture of Lexington is corrupt" and that "the city is in a sense under its own martial law with Black citizens held hostage to the police, afraid to leave their homes."

"The targeting, harassment, and corruption run so deep that most community members are afraid to speak to civil rights attorneys and activists out of fear of retaliation," the document states. "Many of those who do talk do so only in the shelter of their homes or outside the city altogether. One woman even relocated her entire family to Memphis to escape LPD's targeting and harassment." ...

Lexington is a small, impoverished Delta town of around 1,800 residents in Holmes County about an hour's drive north of Jackson. The town—which is 85% Black—has long suffered racist violence and a culture of impunity, including the 1946 lynching of Leon McAtee, whose murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury after 10 minutes of deliberation despite a confession by one of the killers.

Police Lied to Search Breonna Taylor’s Home

The March 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor, which caused widespread protest around the country, was the result of police lies to obtain a warrant and racist police violence after officers forced their way into her apartment. On Aug. 4, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the federal grand jury indictments of four Louisville Metro Police officers involved in the raid that resulted in Taylor’s death.

Three of the officers were accused of violating Taylor’s Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure by lying to secure a no-knock warrant. The officers who sought the warrant “knew that the affidavit used to obtain the warrant to search Taylor’s home contained information that was false, misleading, and out-of-date; that the affidavit omitted material information; and that the officers lacked probable cause for the search,” the indictment reads.

One of the defendants tried to get another officer to lie and say he had previously told him that a drug dealer (Taylor’s ex-boyfriend) had used her apartment to receive packages. An officer apparently broke the ubiquitous police code of silence and revealed to prosecutors that his fellow officer asked him to lie. A judge issued a no-knock warrant based on the officers’ misrepresentations. The warrant specified that they did not have to knock and identify themselves as police before entering the apartment.

This case has widely been characterized as a “no-knock” warrant incident. But before police actually conducted the search, the court issued another warrant that required them to knock and announce their presence. The issue that led to their indictment is that the police officers lied to get the warrant. ...

Louisville Sgt. Kyle Meany and Detectives Joshua Jaynes and Kelly Hanna Goodlett were charged with making or adopting false statements in the affidavit to obtain the search warrant. Jaynes and Goodlett were accused of conspiring to falsify the affidavit. Hankison was charged with depriving Taylor, her boyfriend and neighbors of their Fourth Amendment rights by firing 10 bullets into a bedroom and living room. The only officer to be charged in state court, Hankison was acquitted of wanton endangerment of neighbors.

Two Pennsylvania judges ordered to pay $200m to kids-for-cash scandal victims

Two Pennsylvania judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200m to hundreds who fell victim to their crimes. US district judge Christopher Conner awarded $106m in compensatory damages and $100m in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges, writing the plaintiffs are “the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions”.

In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8m in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of children would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care.

Ciavarella ordered children as young as eight to detention, many of them first-time offenders convicted of petty theft and other minor crimes. The judge often ordered youths he had found legally delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to say goodbye to their families. ...

Ciavarella is serving a 28-year prison sentence. Conahan, who was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison, was released to home confinement in 2020, with six years left on his sentence, because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Are RUSSIAGATE Docs At Heart Of FBI Trump Raid?

Eeeee-yuck!!!

Liz Cheney considers run for president after Republican primary defeat

Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney has announced she is considering her own run for the White House in an all-out effort to prevent Donald Trump from winning another term as US president. Cheney decisively lost her Republican primary race on Tuesday night and will lose her seat in the US Congress.

The Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman beat Cheney by almost 40 points as Wyoming voters took revenge for her voting to impeach Trump and for focusing on her role on the January 6 House select committee. ...

Cheney was asked on NBC’s Today show on Wednesday morning whether she was thinking of running for president. She did not respond to the question directly but, when pressed a second time, admitted she was. “It’s something I’m thinking about, and I’ll make a decision in the coming months,” she said.

On Tuesday night she said she would “do whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office”. After her loss to Hageman by almost 60,000 votes was confirmed, aides revealed the former House number three planned to set up her own political action committee.

“In coming weeks, Liz will be launching an organization to educate the American people about the ongoing threat to our republic, and to mobilize a unified effort to oppose any Donald Trump campaign for president,” Cheney spokesperson Jeremy Adler told Politico Playbook.

Liz Cheney Loses Primary & DEMOCRATS Have A Sad

Florida Republicans targeted Black voters, justice department says in filing

Florida Republicans intentionally targeted Black voters when they enacted new voting restrictions last year, the justice department said in a court filing on Wednesday.

The department told a federal appellate court that a lower court had correctly evaluated claims of racial discrimination when it came to Florida’s new law. In March, US District Judge Mark Walker blocked new restrictions on the availability of absentee ballot drop boxes, regulations for third party voter registration groups, and a ban on providing food and water to people standing in line to vote. The US court of appeals for the 11th circuit paused that ruling earlier this year while it considers an appeal from Florida officials.

The justice department’s allegation of racial discrimination is significant because the agency carefully chooses when to get involved in voting dispute litigations filed by private plaintiffs, and the department’s voice carries significant credibility in court. After going largely quiet under Donald Trump, the justice department’s voting section has filed challenges to voting laws in Georgia, Texas and Arizona, in addition to filing several briefs in other voting disputes.

An argument in support of a finding of racial discrimination offers a significant legal boost to challengers of the case, though the challenge to the law faces an uphill battle at the deeply-conservative 11th circuit. ...

“The district court’s core factual findings are that, in the face of surging turnout in the 2020 election, the Florida Legislature responded by enacting provisions that impose disparate burdens on Black voters,” DoJ lawyers wrote in their brief. “Which were chosen precisely because of those burdens to secure a partisan advantage. The court’s findings of discriminatory intent are a permissible view of the record based on the entirety of the evidence.”

Federal Court Strikes Down Ruling That Blocked Biden's Drilling Moratorium

Climate justice advocates on Wednesday applauded a federal appeals court decision striking down a 2021 ruling which had blocked the Biden administration's moratorium on oil and gas drilling lease sales—and paved the way for the largest lease auction in U.S. history last year.

Wednesday's ruling by Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in Louisiana could allow the administration to reinstate the moratorium President Joe Biden introduced shortly after taking office in January 2021.

In June 2021, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, who was appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump, ruled that Congress had to approve the leasing moratorium and that the pause carried "a substantial threat of irreparable injury" to states where fossil fuel drilling takes place.

When the Biden administration restarted lease sales, the U.S. Department of Interior said it was doing so because it had to comply with Doughty's temporary injunction, even though lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) advised Biden that Doughty's ruling "does not compel Interior to take the actions specified by plaintiffs, let alone on the urgent timeline specified in plaintiffs' contempt motion."

According to the DOJ and environmental lawyers, the June 2021 decision did not require the administration to sell fossil fuel leases on federal lands, as it attempted to do with 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico last November. Less than two million acres sold and the sale was later invalidated by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia due to a flawed climate impact analysis.

On Wednesday, Higginbotham ruled that the June 2021 ruling "was too vague to be valid," according to The Washington Post.

Golden eagles face double threat as US wind turbines add to climate crisis peril

The rush to build wind farms to combat climate change is colliding with preservation of one of the US west’s most spectacular predators, the golden eagle – as the species teeters on the edge of decline. Ground zero in the conflict is Wyoming, a stronghold for golden eagles that soar on 7ft wings and a favored location for wind farms. As wind turbines proliferate, scientists say deaths from collisions could drive down golden eagle numbers considered stable at best.

Yet the climate crisis looms as a potentially greater threat. Rising temperatures are projected to reduce golden eagle breeding ranges by more than 40% later this century, according to a National Audubon Society analysis. That leaves golden eagles doubly vulnerable, to the shifting climate and to the wind energy promoted as a solution to that warming world. ...

Turbine blades hundreds of feet long are among myriad threats to golden eagles, which are routinely shot, poisoned by lead, hit by vehicles and electrocuted on power lines. ...

Despite the deaths, scientists such as Bryan Bedrosian, conservation director at the Teton raptor center in Wilson, Wyoming say more turbines are needed to fight climate change. He and colleague Charles Preston are finding ways wind companies can reduce or offset eagle deaths, such as building in areas less frequented by the birds, improving habitat elsewhere or retrofitting power poles to make them less perilous when eagles land.

Children born near fracking wells more at risk for leukemia – study

Young children living near fracking wells at birth are up to three times more likely to later develop leukemia, a new peer-reviewed study conducted by the Yale School of Public Health finds.

The alarming report, published on Wednesday in the Environmental Health Perspectives journal, looked at over 400 cases of acute lymphoblastic leukemia out of a sample of about 2,500 Pennsylvania children ages two to seven. The form of leukemia is the most common type of cancer in children, and though the survival rate is high, it frequently leads to other health problems later in life, like cognitive disabilities and heart disease. ...

More than 10,000 fracking wells were drilled in Pennsylvania between 2002 and 2017, and about one-third are located within 2km (a little over a mile) of a residential groundwater well, the study states.

The study found the risk is highest for those living within 2km of a fracking site, and who were exposed in utero. The data accounted for other factors that could influence cancer risk. ...

Though mounting evidence suggests a connection between exposure to fracking pollution and health problems, few studies have examined the connection between exposure and childhood cancer. The Yale study is the largest to examine health impacts on children, and the first to use a novel metric that measures exposure to contaminated drinking water and distance to a well. It fills a significant data gap, the authors say.

California urges residents to cut power use as searing heatwave grips US west

California has urged residents to cut power use as a searing heatwave settles over the state and stretches power supplies to a breaking point, in the latest sign of extreme weather conditions in the US west. Temperatures in the most populous state are forecast to climb to well above 100F (38C) during the afternoon.

To prevent power outages, state officials asked residents and businesses to turn off lights and appliances and preset their thermostats to 78F (26C), especially during the critical hours between 4 and 9pm local time when demand typically peaks and solar power generation beings to ebb. ...

California’s grid operator made similar power usage requests during the summers and falls over the last two years, when the region experienced several bouts of record-breaking hot weather. Power systems withstood heat waves in 2021 but rolling blackouts for two days in August 2020 left about 400,000 households without power.

On Wednesday, the California grid operator projected power demand would peak at 44,919 megawatts (MW), the highest since September 2020 when usage hit 47,236 MW. One megawatt can power around 1,000 US homes on a typical day, but only about half that on a hot summer day. ...

The heat on Wednesday is also raising the risk of wildfires. The Wishon fire, a 350-acre blaze in the Sequoia national forest, was 35% contained.

Also of Interest

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

Estonia to Cancel Visas of More Than 50,000 Russians - Finland will slash Russian visas by 90%

US Carries Out ICBM Test It Delayed Over China Drills

China’s US Ambassador Says US Has ‘Gone Too Far’ Over Taiwan

Joe Biden’s Senseless Economic Strangulation of Afghanistan

Turkey Trades Heavy Shelling With Syrian Kurds

Germany to Keep Three Nuclear Plants Going Past Old Shut-Down Date to Alleviate Energy Crunch

Inflation at 10%? This is class war – and it was years in the making

Trump Derangement Syndrome Returns

Covering Up Slavery in the Birth of the US

The lost river: Mexicans fight for mighty waterway taken by the US

Ancient megalodon shark could eat a whale in a few bites, research suggests

Krystal Ball: Biden Backs BOSSES as Rail Strike Looms

Briahna Joy Gray: Liberal MISINFORMATION Ruined Dems, Biden's Credibility On Covid

(Alexander Mercouris) Putin, Shoigu Pitch Russia as Main Opponent of Globalisation.

Putin takes on Globalists (Duran Livestream)

A Little Night Music

Big Maybelle - Ramblin' Blues

Big Maybelle - My Country Man

Big Maybelle - One Monkey Don´t Stop No Show

Big Maybelle - 96 Tears

Big Maybelle - Pitiful

Big Maybelle - That's A Pretty Good Love

Big Maybelle - I'm Getting ' Long Alright

Big Maybelle - I've Got A Feelin'

Big Maybelle - Goin’ Home Baby

Big Maybelle - I've Got A Feeling