News Articles | January 17, 2022

Afghanistan, China, Climate Change, covid 19, drug war, free trade, Global Warming, homeless, Politics, pollution, poor, poverty, strike, student debt, Trump, Uncategorized, virus, voting, War

As the Biden administration considers changes to Trump-era nuclear policy, 60 national and regional organizations released a statement this week calling for the elimination of 400 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that are “now armed and on hair-trigger alert in the United States.”

“Intercontinental ballistic missiles are uniquely dangerous, greatly increasing the chances that a false alarm or miscalculation will result in nuclear war,” the statement reads. “There is no more important step the United States could take to reduce the chances of a global nuclear holocaust than to eliminate its ICBMs.” READ MORE

As Afghanistan faces a dire humanitarian crisis, we look at how more Afghans may die from U.S. sanctions than at the hands of the Taliban. The U.S.’s attempts to block support for the new de facto government have prevented vital funding from flowing to the nation’s civil servants, particularly in education and the health sector. Dr. Paul Spiegel says conditions in the hospitals he visited in Kabul as part of a World Health Organization emergency team are rapidly deteriorating, and he describes the lack of heat and basic amenities as winter descended. “There’s been a drought. There’s food insecurity. And all of this has been exacerbated due to this economic crisis and due to lack of the U.N. and NGOs being able to pay people in the field,” says Spiegel. “What we see now is that it’s not the Taliban that is holding us back. It is the sanctions,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. READ MORE

During the pandemic’s first year, schools across the country lost track of more than 400,000 homeless students.

As schools reopened their doors for in-person learning this year, the number of students identified as homeless began to creep back up.

But, with the end of the federal eviction moratorium, there are fears that the problem is worse than it appears on the surface. And that more children are disconnected from two anchors in their lives — school and home.

“With the disruptions that we saw last year, and now new disruptions, we’re concerned that whatever schools are observing is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on homeless education. READ MORE

This interview with Chuck Mertz on “This is Hell!” builds on my Truthout essay, “Amid Apocalyptic Cynicism, Let’s Embrace Radical Hope in the New Year.” It comments on the deeply held sense of cynicism that has been growing in the United States in the aftermath of a right-wing counterrevolution that emerged against the democratizing movements that erupted in the 1960s. This was a reactionary movement that set the stage for dismantling the welfare state, defining government as the enemy of the market, and the market as being synonymous with democracy itself. Prior to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the ideological foundation of the counterrevolution was defined in the 1970s by the Powell Memo and the Trilateral Commission, both of which lauded neoliberal capitalism and disdained movements for social change and racial justice as symptomatic of an “an excess of democracy.” I also talk about how, thanks to the Trump era, the U.S. is in the grip of a different element of the counterrevolution, one that not only attacks the welfare state, but also incorporates a fascist politics rooted in a discourse of white supremacy and a politics of disposability. READ MORE

Apair of legally sanctioned overdose prevention centers — in which people can use illicit drugs under medical supervision — began taking clients in New York City in late November, potentially opening the door for similar facilities in other cities. The announcement has been a rare bright spot in the increasingly terrifying media coverage of the overdose crisis. The prevention centers are a hopeful step toward addressing the crisis, but they are not a panacea. Even if more centers are established beyond New York, experts warn that overdose prevention centers alone cannot stem the staggering tide of death. READ MORE

For six months at the tail end of two tumultuous years, parents received direct payments — no strings attached — of as much as $300 per child in their bank accounts. By many accounts, that money delivered long-awaited relief for 61 million children, dropping rates of poverty and hunger.

This week will mark the first time since July that parents will go without a monthly payment.

The expanded child tax credit fell short of some of its biggest promises: It didn’t quite cut the child poverty rate in half, and millions of the most vulnerable families were still left out of receiving money. The full potential of the credit hinged on extending the new benefits permanently, advocates say — it was never expected to cut child poverty in just six months. READ MORE

"We are not in this for a moment, but for a movement," said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. "Our deadline is victory."

Don't call it a day of action.

On June 18, the Poor People's Campaign and its partners in organized labor, the civil rights movement, and religious communities are planning to mobilize their members and allies from across the U.S. to Washington, D.C. for what they hope will be the "largest mass assembly of poor people and low-wage workers in this nation's history."

But Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, cautioned against viewing the impending "massive, nonviolent" march on the nation's capital as a singular event, one whose energy and demands will fade as soon as that June Saturday ends. READ MORE

"We have been talking about this for too long with no action," says the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. "This is a moment that we cannot let slip by."

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal stressed Thursday that the stakes couldn't be higher for U.S. democracy as House and Senate Democrats pushed ahead with their last-ditch effort to pass voting rights legislation in the face of relentless GOP opposition.

"Our democracy doesn't survive without this," Japayal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CDC), said during a morning press call with fellow lawmakers from the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, and the House Democratic Caucus. READ MORE

A conversation with economist Marshall Steinbaum.

Economist Marshall Steinbaum recently appeared on my radio show The Zero Hour to discuss the economic and ethical issues surrounding student debt cancellation. Steinbaum, a Senior Fellow in Higher Education Finance at the Jain Family Institute and a professor at the University of Utah, is one of the authors of a seminal 2018 study from the Levy Economics Institute on the macroeconomic impact of student debt.  As pressure grows for a solution, Steinbaum discussed with me both the economics and the ethics of student debt. The following selections from the interview have been lightly edited for clarity. READ MORE

The passage of the Build Back Better Act would expand the new workforce "exponentially," said one climate action campaigner.

A new program launched by the Biden administration on Friday will hire 1,000 Americans to help expand the country's clean energy infrastructure, a step the White House says is "critical to achieving the president's goal of 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035."

Workers in the Clean Energy Corps will work in areas including engineering, physical science, legislative affairs, and contract management and will work on large-scale projects including the administration's Building a Better Grid initiative.

That project, using funds allocated by the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which passed last year, will deploy new transmission lines to send solar and wind power to communities across the country and make the energy grid more "safe, reliable, and resilient" to extreme weather events. READ MORE

"There is mounting evidence from the courts and in particular from juries that the public is taking the climate crisis... far more seriously than government and business."

Jurors on Friday unanimously acquitted three Extinction Rebellion activists who were on trial for blocking a train in London to demand an adequate response to the life-threatening climate emergency.

Reverend Sue Parfitt, 79; Father Martin Newell, 54; and former university lecturer Phil Kingston, 85, were all found not guilty of violating the Malicious Damages Act.

None of the three denied stopping a Docklands Light Railway (DLR) train at Shadwell Station just before 7:00 a.m. on October 17, 2019. Kingston super-glued his hand to the side of the train while Parfitt and Newell climbed on top, resulting in a 77-minute disruption during morning rush hour. READ MORE

Of course the next question is: what kind of antichrist is he?

A listener called into my program yesterday and asked, "Is Donald Trump the Antichrist?"

I passed on drawing a conclusion, but then the lines lit up with a steady stream of people over the next few hours offering their "proofs" that Trump was, in fact, the Evil One come to ravage the Earth. That first caller clearly hit a nerve.

It's a fascinating question, however, whether put literally or metaphorically.

Asking the question literally requires a belief in the actual reality of a Son-of-God Christ figure and of an Antichrist opponent of nearly equal but opposite power. This sort of thing fills the Bible, and I'll get to that in a moment.

But first consider the question from the secular perspective, which argues these two terms represent, at their core, metaphors for the embodiment of good and evil. READ MORE

As Congress debates voting rights and investing in the people, it’s important to understand the dark forces that underlie the increasingly reactionary and authoritarian politics on the rise in this country.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu

The world lost a great moral leader this Christmas when Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away at the age of 90. I had the honor of meeting him a few times as a child. I was raised by a family dedicated to doing the work of justice, grounded in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and also sacred texts and traditions. We hosted the archbishop on several occasions when he visited Milwaukee — both before the end of apartheid and after South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed in 1996. READ MORE

"The cruelty of these documented crimes against humanity is abhorrent, yet no one has or will ever face serious charges," the Minnesota Democrat wrote of torture inflicted on Guantanamo detainees. "That has to change."

Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar wrote in a new op-ed that Tuesday—the 20th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. offshore prison at the Guantánamo Bay naval base—should be "a day to reflect, and to act" and urged younger Americans to heap pressure on President Joe Biden to finally close the facility

While "Congress has acted to frustrate rather than facilitate closing Guantánamo," at least most of the work to shutter the prison can be done by Biden, Omar (D-Minn.) argued in her op-ed at Teen Vogue. READ MORE

Continued talks are necessary, a coalition told the president, to prevent any action that would "risk spiraling into a potentially catastrophic war between the world's two leading nuclear powers."

Ahead of highly anticipated talks scheduled to begin Monday, a diverse coalition of organizations sent a letter to the White House urging U.S. President Joe Biden to "engage diplomatically" with Russia to prevent an armed confrontation resulting from rising tensions involving Ukraine.

"Continuing engagement is necessary to avert a military conflict that will harm the interests of the United States, harm innocent civilians in Ukraine, and risk spiraling into a potentially catastrophic war between the world's two leading nuclear powers," says the Saturday letter from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Just Foreign Policy, and 13 other groups. READ MORE

"This is an almost wholly man-made crisis," said one critic of the U.S. government's policy.

Progressive U.S. lawmakers and human rights advocates are urging the Biden administration to immediately lift economic sanctions on Afghanistan that are fueling a humanitarian disaster and as famine threatens millions in the war-torn nation.

"Aid groups have predicted that if current U.S. economic policy toward Afghanistan continues, there could be more civilian deaths this year than there were in 20 years of war," the Congressional Progressive Caucus tweeted Sunday. "The Biden administration can, and must, act now."

The Taliban seized control of the country in August following the U.S. military's withdrawal after two decades of a military occupation that enriched weapons makers but did little to benefit the Afghan people. Following its defeat, the U.S. then imposed new sanctions the Taliban government, while the World Bank and IMF froze crucial assets. READ MORE

The analysis comes as a new survey shows a growing number of Americans are "alarmed" about the climate emergency.

Amid rising public alarm about human-caused global heating, U.S. government scientists announced Thursday that 2021 was the sixth hottest year since records began in 1880.

Separate but similar analyses from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reached the same conclusion, mostly aligning with the European Union's Copernicus, which recently ranked 2021 fifth warmest.

Both NASA and NOAA noted that the average global temperature last year was about 1.5°C above the 20th-century figures used by each agency.

"Science leaves no room for doubt: Climate change is the existential threat of our time," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement. READ MORE

As stated by CarbonBrief“The year so far has been one of extremes, featuring record-shattering heatwaves, wildfires and flooding, as well as the warmest-ever northern-hemisphere summer – June, July and August – in the global land-surface record.”

Whereas climate negotiations mostly focus on possible reductions in emissions, the cumulative buildup of greenhouse gases is determining the future of the terrestrial climate. According to NASA “Once it’s (CO₂) added to the atmosphere, it hangs around, for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years".

Other estimates are much longer. Because of the longevity of CO₂ and other greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, a decrease in carbon emissions, while essential, is not sufficient to reduce CO₂ levels in the atmosphere in time. READ MORE

Last year was the warmest on record for the heat content of the world’s oceans. Ocean heat content (OHC) has increased by around 417 zettajoules – a billion trillion joules – since the 1940s. The heat increase in 2021 alone compared to 2020 – about 14 zettajoules – is around 23 times more than the total energy used by everyone on Earth in 2019 (the latest year in which global primary energy statistics are available).

Human-emitted greenhouse gases trap extra heat in the atmosphere. While some of this warms the Earth’s surface, the vast majority – around of 93% – goes into the oceans. About two thirds of this accumulates in the top 700 metres, but some also ends up in the deep oceans. Annual OHC estimates between 1950 and present for both the upper 700m and 700m-2000m depths of the ocean are shown in the figure below. READ MORE

"Most companies and financial institutions with the greatest ability to halt deforestation are doing little or nothing."

A new report published Thursday details how some of the world's biggest corporations and banks are exacerbating the global climate emergency by fueling the destruction of the world's tropical rainforests.

Forest 500, a project of Global Canopy, asserts that "500 companies and financial institutions have the power to transform cattle, timber, soy, and palm oil supply chains." But according to the group's latest annual assessment, those firms that are well-positioned to eliminate deforestation and related human rights abuses are failing to do so.

Titled A Climate Wake-Up, the analysis finds that 72% of the 350 largest producers of palm oil, soy, beef, leather, timber, pulp, and paper "do not have a deforestation commitment for all of the forest-risk commodities in their supply chains." One-third of the companies "have no deforestation commitments at all," and none have a "comprehensive approach to human rights." READ MORE

"It's not enough to go back to the Obama-era status quo."

While praising President Joe Biden for taking steps Monday to reverse a Trump administration policy that opened up millions of acres in the Western Arctic for oil drilling, environmental justice advocates argued that only a comprehensive federal ban on new fossil fuel leasing can adequately protect public lands and waters and stave off the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

The U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) said Monday in a statement that it intends to revert management of the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPR-A) to the Obama administration's 2013 plan which would protect roughly half of the reserve, "while including certain more protective lease stipulations and operating procedures for threatened and endangered species," as outlined in a 2020 environmental impact statement. READ MORE

The world’s oceans in 2021 witnessed the hottest temperatures in recorded history. (Source: Lijing Cheng, et al, Another Record: Ocean Warming Continues Through 2021 Despite La Niña Conditions, Advanced in Atmospheric Sciences, January 11, 2022)

According to the Ocean Conservancy: “From the beginning of industrialization until today, the ocean has absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat from human-caused global warming and about one-third of our carbon emissions. But we are now seeing the devastating effects of that heat and carbon dioxide.”

This brings into focus big questions about the overall condition of the ecosystems of the planet. The oceans, by far the biggest, cover more than 70% of the planet. As readily seen from outer space, the oceans are the essence of the planet. READ MORE

"Nurses are enraged that, for our government and our employers, it's all about what's good for business, not what's good for public health."

Nurses dismayed by the federal government's floundering pandemic response capped off a day of strikes and demonstrations Thursday with a candlelight vigil outside the White House, where healthcare workers gathered to commemorate colleagues who have lost their lives to Covid-19.

The nurses attending the event, organized by National Nurses United (NNU), set out 481 candles to represent the 481 registered nurses known to have died of Covid-19 in the United States, which has the highest coronavirus death toll in the world. Overall, nearly 5,000 U.S. healthcare workers have died from the coronavirus.

"Unfortunately this is the third event or fourth event that we've had recognizing nurses who have died," said Julia Truelove, a Washington, D.C. nurse and NNU member. "And we chose candles to represent that those were lights in their communities and their families, and those lights have not gone out, but just to remember the good they did in their communities." READ MORE

The strike began a day after a report showed 14% of Kroger workers have experienced homelessness in the past year.

On the heels of a new report showing significant financial insecurity, including homelessness, among workers at Kroger grocery stores, more than 8,000 of the chain's employees in Colorado went on strike Wednesday to demand fair wages and better healthcare benefits.

Amid a recent wave of successful strikes at companies including John Deere and Kellogg's, the work stoppage is taking place at nearly 80 King Sooper grocery stores, which are owned by the Kroger Company, across the Denver metropolitan area. According to the Colorado Sun, 10 additional stores in Colorado Springs could also go on strike in the coming weeks.

The workers' union, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, rejected the company's "best and final offer" on Tuesday, saying the $84 billion company did not offer enough for employees to afford basic necessities. READ MORE

"Facebook has bulldozed competition to dominate the market," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren. "We need to break up Big Tech and hold Facebook accountable for any violations of antitrust law."

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Federal Trade Commission's revised antitrust lawsuit against Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, can move forward—a potentially significant blow to the social media empire, which sought to have the case dismissed.

In an amended complaint filed last August, the FTC provided additional data and stronger details to back up its allegations that Facebook has maintained a monopoly on social networking services for the past decade by "illegally acquiring innovative competitors and burying successful app developers."

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg—who in June dismissed the FTC's first antitrust complaint against Facebook, calling it "legally insufficient"—wrote in Tuesday's ruling that the evidence in the agency's second filing is "far more robust and detailed than before." READ MORE

"We're old enough to remember a whole month ago when both Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin voted to make an exception to the filibuster for the debt ceiling," Public Citizen sardonically noted.

As conservative U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin on Thursday joined his right-wing Democratic colleague Kyrsten Sinema in announcing his opposition to abolishing the Senate filibuster, progressive observers excoriated the pair—who recently supported a filibuster carve-out to raise the debt ceiling—for obstructing their party's landmark voting rights legislation.

Manchin (W.Va.) followed his Arizona colleague in voicing support for protecting the filibuster, which racial justice campaigners call a "Jim Crow relic" because it has been used so many times to block voting and civil rights legislation.

Mother Jones senior reporter Ari Berman noted that Republican-led states "have passed new voter suppression laws, gerrymandered maps, and election subversion bills through simple majority, party-line votes, yet Sinema and Manchin demand [a] bipartisan supermajority to protect voting rights." READ MORE

A couple of years ago I was having a discussion with a guy in his thirties about legal marijuana. Vermont had finally changed its laws and the weed was legal in that fine state. Possession of small amounts had been decriminalized for a while and most police agencies were under instructions to ignore adults in possession of those amounts. Still, it is nice to know that I can grow a couple of plants without the fear of getting busted.

Speaking of getting busted, when I told this fellow that I had done a total of around forty days in jail for marijuana in the 1970s and early 1980s, he didn’t believe me. At first, he thought I must have been moving some serious weight and that I got off easy because I was white and had a decent lawyer. When I explained that no, I was thrown in jail for an ounce of weed or less every time and had a public defender, he shook his head in disbelief. When I told him there were probably thousands of people sitting in prison for marijuana doing long stretches, he could not believe it. READ MORE

Are anti-vaccine propagandists really being censored?

That’s the claim RFK Jr. and his raucous admirers make as they point out the lawyer-turned anti-vaccine crusader was kicked off of Instagram and has yet to appear on MSNBC or snag a seat on a late night show. But last I checked his new anti-Fauci book has thus far sold over 500,000 copies. Censorship sells, I guess.

While RFK Jr. may be blacklisted from MSNBC and other outlets (news flash, so are we), he recently dropped in on the Jimmy Dore comedy hour to cook up a stew of gibberish, with a dash of falsehoods that went unchallenged by Dore, who appears to be more than happy to cash in on all of this anti-vax paranoia. READ MORE

We have two good examples of economic systems and individual scientific workers doing what they do that offer a good illustration of why the US is so screwed up, and why it doesn’t have to be that way.

The first is the extraordinary new Webb telescope heading rapidly towards its parking orbit at the Lagrange point 2.2 where its telescope, reportedly 100 times more powerful than the already extraordinary orbiting Hubble telescope, will be able to show images of early galaxies formed only a short time after the Big Bang.

That telescope, which has had to go through over 300 automated or remotely controlled steps — in order — to open up from its fetal position crammed inside the oversized faring of a European-built Ariane rocket — was designed and built by scientists and engineers working on salary and launched by a rocket designed and built by a government agency. READ MORE

The national debate on free trade is one where honesty has no place. The purpose of our trade agreements, which were not free trade, was to reduce the pay of manufacturing workers, and non-college educated workers more generally, to the benefit of more highly educated workers and corporations. This was the predicted (by standard economics) and actual result.

We made our manufacturing workers compete with low-paid workers in China and elsewhere in the developing world. This led to a massive loss of manufacturing jobs as the trade deficit exploded. The hit to workers in manufacturing was so large that the historic wage premium in the industry has largely disappeared. READ MORE

The word “encirclement” does not appear in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed into law by President Joe Biden on December 27th, or in other recent administration statements about its foreign and military policies. Nor does that classic Cold War era term “containment” ever come up. Still, America’s top leaders have reached a consensus on a strategy to encircle and contain the latest great power, China, with hostile military alliances, thereby thwarting its rise to full superpower status.

The gigantic 2022 defense bill — passed with overwhelming support from both parties — provides a detailed blueprint for surrounding China with a potentially suffocating network of U.S. bases, military forces, and increasingly militarized partner states. The goal is to enable Washington to barricade that country’s military inside its own territory and potentially cripple its economy in any future crisis. For China’s leaders, who surely can’t tolerate being encircled in such a fashion, it’s an open invitation to… well, there’s no point in not being blunt… fight their way out of confinement. READ MORE

How the annual Robin Sage special forces guerrilla warfare training session feels different in the age of lockdowns, quarantines, and compulsory vaccinations.

While the U.S. government has labeled far-right extremists the number one domestic terror threat, as popular television shows, celebrities, and video games echo such sentiments, it is no wonder conservatives are feeling anxious hearing stories of military drills conducted against simulated rebel ‘freedom fighters’ on U.S. soil.

The annual Robin Sage special forces training exercises have put American conservatives on edge, as trust in law enforcement and government agencies hit record lows among the country’s Republican voters. After numerous high-profile incidents of federal and state misconduct in the 2020 election, as well as the continued nationwide January 6 manhunt of conservatives, any remaining trust in the federal government is fleeting fast among the country’s MAGA constituency.

Robin Sage is a two-week special forces exercise wherein military participants are dropped into realistic guerilla warfare situations on U.S. soil, where resistance fighters, militias, and civilian combatants are both trained and fought. To bring a level of realism to the exercise, civilian volunteers throughout the state of North Carolina participate as role-players in the military exercise. READ MORE

Minutes after their bombshell exposé of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s crimes, Project Veritas was banned by Twitter in an effort to hide the incriminating evidence from the public.

On Monday evening, minutes before the Twitter ban, Project Veritas released never before seen military documents detailing the origins of Covid-19, gain-of-function research, vaccines, potential treatments, and the government’s effort to hide everything from the public.

The newly U.S. military documents prove that Dr. Fauci lied under oath.

Thegatewaypundit.com reports: Fauci has repeatedly testified under oath to Congress that the US government was never involved in gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

Via Project Veritas:

  • Military documents state that EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018 seeking funding to conduct gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. The proposal, named Project Defuse, was rejected by DARPA over safety concerns and the notion that it violates the gain of function research moratorium.
  • The main report regarding the EcoHealth Alliance proposal leaked on the internet a couple of months ago, it has remained unverified until now. Project Veritas has obtained a separate report to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, written by U.S. Marine Corp Major, Joseph Murphy, a former DARPA Fellow.
  • “The proposal does not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research,” a direct quote from the DARPA rejection letter.
  • Project Veritas reached out to DARPA for comment regarding the hidden documents and spoke with the Chief of Communications, Jared Adams, who said, “It doesn’t sound normal to me,” when asked about the way the documents were buried.

READ MORE - Watch

In a drastic pivot from typical denunciations of false flag operations as conspiratorial nonsense that don’t exist outside the demented imagination of Alex Jones, the US political/media class is proclaiming with one voice that Russia is currently orchestrating just such an operation to justify an invasion of Ukraine.

“As part of its plans, Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday. “We have information that indicates Russia has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine.”

“Without getting into too much detail, we do have information that indicates that Russia is already working actively to create a pretext for a potential invasion, for a move on Ukraine,” Pentagon Spokesperson John Kirby told the press on Friday. “In fact, we have information that they’ve pre-positioned a group of operatives, to conduct what we call a false flag operation, an operation designed to look like an attack on them or their people, or Russian speaking people in Ukraine, as an excuse to go in.” READ MORE

Seems like almost every day now the mass media are blaring about the need for speech on the internet to be controlled or restricted in some way. Today they’re running stories about Joe Rogan and Covid misinformation; tomorrow it will be something else.

The reasons for the need to control online speech change from day to day, but the demand for that control remains a constant. Some days it’s a need to protect the citizenry from online disinformation campaigns by foreign governments. Sometimes it’s the need to guarantee election security. Sometimes it’s the need to eliminate domestic extremism and conspiracy theories. Sometimes it’s Covid misinformation. The problems change, but the solution is always the same: increased regulation of speech by monopolistic online platforms in steadily increasing coordination with the US government. READ MORE

GR Editor’s Note .

Let us put this in historical perspective: the commemoration of the War to End All Wars  acknowledges that 15 million lives were lost in the course of World War I (1914-18).

The loss of life in the second World War (1939-1945) was on a much large scale, when compared to World War I: 60 million lives both military and civilian were lost during World War II. (Four times those killed during World War I).

The largest WWII casualties  were China and the Soviet Union, 26 million in the Soviet Union,  China estimates its losses at approximately 20 million deaths.

Ironically, these two countries (allies of the US during WWII) which lost a large share of their population during WWII are now under the Biden-Harris administration categorized as “enemies of America”, which are threatening the Western World.

NATO-US Forces are at Russia’s Doorstep. A so-called “preemptive war” against China and Russia is currently contemplated. 

Germany and Austria lost approximately 8 million people during WWII, Japan lost more than 2.5 million people. The US and Britain respectively lost more than 400,000 lives. 

This carefully researched article by James A. Lucas  documents the more than 20 million lives lost resulting from US led wars, military coups and intelligence ops carried out in the wake of what is euphemistically called the “post-war era” (1945- ).

The extensive loss of life in Lebanon,  Syria, Yemen and Libya is not included in this study.

Continuous US led warfare (1945- ): there was no “post-war era.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, Martin Luther King Day, January 17, 2022

***

After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by an accelerated “war on terrorism.”

But we must continue our efforts to develop understanding and compassion in the world. Hopefully, this article will assist in doing that by addressing the question “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” This theme is developed in this report which contains an estimated numbers of such deaths in 37 nations as well as brief explanations of why the U.S. is considered culpable. READ MORE

From Minnesota to the Northwest Territories, researchers are studying dramatic changes in the vast northern forests: thawing permafrost, drowned trees, methane releases, increased wildfires, and the slow transformation of these forests from carbon sinks to carbon emitters.

Asign hanging above the door of a giant open-top glass chamber in a remote part of Minnesota’s Marcell Experimental Forest explains why so many scientists from around the world have worked hard to get a piece of this boreal woodland. “Welcome to the Future” the sign reads, and that is literally what researchers get when they come to do research at Marcell.

The experiment — a collaboration between the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory — features 10 open-top glass chambers. Each is 30 feet high, 40 feet in diameter, and designed — by controlling temperature and CO2 levels — to mimic what will happen to boreal peatlands under various global warming scenarios. They range from no change to a very realistic increase of 4 degrees F, to 7 degrees F, and even to a frightening 12 degrees F and higher. READ MORE

2021 was the fifth-hottest year on record and close to 1.2 degrees C (2.1 degrees F) warmer than the preindustrial average, according to an analysis from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The last seven years were the hottest ever “by a clear margin,” the analysis found, thanks to rising concentrations of greenhouse gasses, which hit new highs last year.

“2021 was yet another year of extreme temperatures with the hottest summer in Europe, heatwaves in the Mediterranean, not to mention the unprecedented high temperatures in North America,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. “These events are a stark reminder of the need to change our ways, take decisive and effective steps toward a sustainable society and work towards reducing net carbon emissions.” READ MORE

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