Israel strikes heart of Beirut, killing six
www.reuters.com

... Israel bombed central Beirut in the early hours of Thursday, killing at least six people, after its forces suffered their deadliest day on the Lebanese front in a year of clashes against Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah.

Israel said it conducted a precise air strike on Beirut. Reuters witnesses reported hearing a massive blast, and a security source said it targeted a building in central Beirut's Bachoura neighbourhood close to parliament, the nearest Israeli strikes have come to Lebanon's seat of government.

At least six people were killed and seven wounded, Lebanese health officials said. A photo being circulated on Lebanese WhatsApp groups, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed a heavily damaged building with its first floor on fire.

Three missiles also hit the southern suburb of Dahiyeh, where Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed last week, and loud explosions were heard, Lebanese security officials said. The southern suburbs came under more than a dozen Israeli strikes on Wednesday. ...

Blotto - I Wanna Be A Lifeguard (1980)
www.youtube.com

Lyrics excerpt ...
genius.com

...
Selling shoes
Another loser working in a shopping mall
9 to 5
A slave driver telling me "Get on the ball!"
A crowded store
I kneel before them
Misery beyond compare
Sweaty socks
A lady boxer
What's she got against fresh air?
I want an ocean and some sunscreen lotion
Take me to the beach with a thousand pretty girls in reach

CHORUS
I, I, I wanna be a lifeguard (help, help, help, help)
I, I, I wanna guard your life
I, I, I wanna be a lifeguard (lifeguard, lifeguard)
Hardly any clothes (lifeguard)
Sand between my toes (lifeguard)
...

Yeah, they don't write lyrics like that anymore. :)

Project 2025: what does the rightwing blueprint say about abortion? (August 2024)
www.theguardian.com

... Project 2025, the wishlist for a Trump 2.0 administration drawn up by the influential thinktank the Heritage Foundation, proposes mobilizing an array of government agencies to curb access to abortion " up to and including a national ban on abortion pills that would affect even states that protect abortion rights.

Backed by more than 100 conservative organizations, the 922-page Project 2025 has become notorious in recent weeks as Kamala Harris has started bringing it up at rallies. Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from its many proposals, claiming he doesn't know anything about Project 2025 and has "no idea who is behind it" " even though his administration's officials wrote chunks of it. While the director of the blueprint stepped down last week, a move that the Trump campaign celebrated and that leaves its future operations unclear, the policy ideas endure and closely align with Trump's platform.

"The Dobbs decision [overturning Roe v Wade] is just the beginning," Project 2025 reads. "Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America."

Project 2025 takes direct aim at abortion pills, indicates that fetuses should have legal rights, and seeks to expand "surveillance" of abortion while eliminating government support for the procedure. In its architects' view, abortion is not healthcare and should never be treated as such.

"Project 2025's whole-of-government approach to dismantling reproductive rights by weaponizing federal agencies and consolidating executive branch power is unprecedented " and goes against most Americans' wishes," said Caroline Ciccone, president of the watchdog group Accountable.US, which has been studying the plan.

Here are some of the proposals that could rewrite abortion access in the US: ...

Jeff Flake
en.wikipedia.org

... Born in Snowflake, Arizona, Flake attended Brigham Young University, from which he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in international relations, and later his Master of Arts degree in political science.

In the early 1980s, he became a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in South Africa, where he learned to speak Afrikaans.

After returning to the United States, Flake served as executive director of the Goldwater Institute, before being elected as a Republican to the House of Representatives from Arizona's 1st congressional district in 2001.

He served as the representative for the 1st district until renumbering following the 2000 census redefined the district to be Arizona's 6th congressional district, which he then represented until he entered the Senate in 2013.

Flake sought the Republican nomination for the 2012 Senate election after incumbent Jon Kyl announced his retirement. He defeated Democratic candidate and former United States Surgeon General Richard Carmona in the general election.

Flake was one of the bipartisan "Gang of Eight" U.S. senators who pushed an immigration reform bill through the Senate in 2013. He is known as a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump, but generally voted in line with Trump's positions. ...

Russia One Step Closer' to Year-Round Sailing in Melting Arctic (2021)
www.themoscowtimes.com

... A powerful Russian icebreaker has crossed the Northern Sea Route for the first time at this time of year as ice coverage shrinks in the rapidly melting Arctic.

The liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker Christophe de Margerie made it through the Chukchi Sea and into the Bering Strait on Saturday, Jan. 16, after 10 days in thick sea ice.

"It is a historical day for the development of the Northern Sea Route and national shipping," Transport Minister Vitaly Savelyev said Monday.

He said the voyage, which shows the shipping route can be used for an extra one to two months every year, is "a step toward year-round commercial shipments on the route." ...

Climate change in the Arctic is a wake-up call for the Global South
dialogue.earth

... n September 1846, the British expeditionary ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror became stranded in the Canadian Arctic while navigating the Northwest Passage, a shipping corridor between Europe and Asia. Eventually frozen in on all sides, the crew hoped to break free of the ice the following summer, but it did not retreat one iota. Every crew member eventually perished.

One hundred and seventy years later, Crystal Cruises made history by sailing a large cruise liner through the Northwest Passage for the first time.

Arctic melting has become widespread and is intensifying every year. As stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2019, the extent of Arctic sea ice is steadily declining as the years pass by, with the most significant contractions (typically reached every September) unprecedented during the past 1,000 years at least. The glaciers of Greenland, the largest ice mass in the Northern Hemisphere, have lost a third of their volume since 1978.

So, why does the accelerated thaw of an inhospitable and distant place, where the night lasts six months, and to which most people will probably never go, matter?

The simplest answer is what happens in the north also affects the south. Climate change in the Arctic carries planetary risks. ...

Trump's probation officials meeting was cordial, routine: Sources (June 2024)
abcnews.go.com

... Former President Donald Trump's interview Monday with New York City probation officials lasted just under a half-hour, sources familiar with it told ABC News.

Trump participated in the interview remotely from Mar-a-Lago.

His defense attorney, Todd Blanche, was with him. Unlike most defendants, Trump was given permission to be accompanied by counsel.

The sources described the interview as cordial and routine. Trump was not asked anything surprising.

The New York City Probation Department will now prepare a report for Judge Juan Merchan ahead of Trump's July 11 sentencing on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The report is supposed to include, among other things, Trump's description of his crime, whether he expressed remorse and any statements he wished to make about why he did it. ...

Iranian missile strike on Israel shows capability for greater scale, complexity
www.reuters.com

... The Iranian ballistic missile attack against Israel on Tuesday was larger, more complex and involved more advanced weapons than the strikes in April, experts say, putting greater stress on missile defences and allowing more warheads to get through.

Although debris from the more than 180 missiles is still being collected and analysed, experts say the latest attacks appear to have used Iran's Fattah-1 and Kheybarshekan missiles, both of which have a reported range of about 1,400 kilometres (870 miles).

Iran has said both missiles have manoeuvring warheads, which can make defence more difficult, and use solid fuel, meaning they can be launched with little warning.

"Shorter launch prep means those missiles arrive all at once to further stress the defence," said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California.

"The (warheads) can manoeuvre a bit to complicate interceptor allocation, and manoeuvring means they can strike with better accuracy to actually hit targets after they are through."

Some Fattah-1 missiles were used in the April strike, which was largely defeated by U.S. and Israeli missile defences. But most were liquid-fuelled Emad ballistic missiles, which had a reported failure rate of 50%, Lewis said, and only enough accuracy to hit a target more than 1 km in diameter.

By contrast, Iran has said its more advanced ballistic missiles have a "circular error probable" of about 20 metres, meaning half of all the missiles fired at a target will land within 20 metres of it. They are "Iran's most advanced ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel", said Fabian Hinz, research associate for defence and military affairs at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). ...

American Dams Weren't Built for Today's Climate-Charged Rain and Floods
www.bnnbloomberg.ca

... As flooding hammered Appalachia in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, residents became intimately familiar with a new norm in the US's post-storm script: dams at imminent risk of failing.

Officials last week said multiple dams were on the brink, including Tennessee's Nolichucky Dam and North Carolina's Walters and Lake Lure dams. People in nearby communities were ordered to evacuate.

Ultimately, the dams held. But the close calls highlighted the stress on the nation's dams, many of which are more than half a century old and none of which were designed for the higher levels of precipitation brought on by climate change.

A lot of the dams "are absolutely performing a useful function for communities, whether helping to hold the water for irrigation or hydropower," said Tom Kiernan, president and chief executive officer of American Rivers, an environmental nonprofit. But many others, he said, "are outdated, unsafe, abandoned." ...

A look at some new CT laws taking effect on Oct. 1
ctmirror.org

... Police officers' body cameras

Currently, Connecticut police officers are required to activate body cameras during on-duty interactions with the public but can choose to deactivate the camera if they believe doing so could interfere with an investigation.

The new law requires the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection and the Police Officer Standards and Training Council to update their guidelines on body-worn camera equipment to outline the circumstances under which an officer cannot stop recording. ...

Kicking the can down the road, or a real solution?

Irish Immigrant Stereotypes and American Racism
picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu

... "The Most Recently Discovered Wild Beast" (1881) is one of a series of nineteenth-century images portraying the Irish as violent and subhuman. In the U.S. survey I use images of this sort when examining the history of anti-immigrant prejudice and its relationship to American racism.

Native-born Americans criticized Irish immigrants for their poverty and manners, their supposed laziness and lack of discipline, their public drinking style, their catholic religion, and their capacity for criminality and collective violence. in both words and pictures, critics of the Irish measured character by perceived physical appearance.

Political cartoons such as the "Wild Beast" offered an exaggerated version of these complaints. The Irish-American "Dynamite Skunk," clad in patriotic stars and stripes, has diabolical ears and feet and he sports an extraordinary tail. around his waist he is wearing an "infernal machine," a terrorist bomb that was usually disguised as a harmless everyday object, in this case a book. in the cage next to him, sketched in outline, is a second beast.

The Wild Beast image is especially interesting because it places American history in a transatlantic framework. the cartoon comes from a British satirical magazine called Judy and is part of a transatlantic discourse of anti-Irish prejudice. It captures a significant moment in Irish and Irish-American history known as the "New Departure," which briefly united the main elements of Irish social and political protest in a powerful transatlantic coalition.
The United States was home to some of the leading Irish nationalists and social reformers, including Patrick Ford, the editor of the Irish World, a radical New York newspaper subtitled "An American Advocate of Indiscriminate Murder" in this image. Irish extremism, as the British saw it, was "Bred in the United States."

Although the Wild Beast is an Irish-American, he is being held captive in Britain, as indicated by the figure of the policeman. The central action involves a girl held aloft to present the beast with a "Concession to Violence." she represents the "Irish Land Bill," a reform measure designed to defuse social tensions in Ireland. The nursemaid holding her aloft turns out to be Prime Minister William Gladstone, the chief supporter of the bill.

Gladstone's appeasement of violence, the cartoon suggests, will only intensify Irish extremism. two figures in the image embody the loyal and moderate Irish " the woman in the background who addresses the beast in a typically Irish idiom ("Bad luck to ye! You murderin' thief") and the man to her left, brandishing a shillelagh. But Gladstone, his face set in stolid determination, is oblivious to his surroundings. And the policeman is so self-enamored that he has closed his eyes. British officialdom remains blissfully unaware of the consequences of making concessions to violence. Meanwhile, the Irishman to the right adds a sinister dimension to the proceedings. ...

Trump barred from Colorado primary ballot for role in US Capitol attack
www.reuters.com

... Former President Donald Trump is disqualified from serving as U.S. president and cannot appear on the primary ballot in Colorado because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters, the state's top court ruled Tuesday.

The historic 4-3 ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court, likely to be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court, makes Trump the first presidential candidate deemed ineligible for the White House under a rarely used constitutional provision that bars officials who have engaged in "insurrection or rebellion" from holding office. ...

Trump blasts DOJ for 'election interference,' calls Jack Smith case a 'scam' after judge unseals key filing
www.foxnews.com

... During an election year, DOJ often holds off on major actions during the 60 days leading up to Election Day ...

Trump Claims Jack Smith Couldn't File Updated Indictment Before Election -- Here's Why That's False
www.forbes.com

... Former President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that Special Counsel Jack Smith shouldn't be allowed to file an updated indictment against him in his federal election case so soon before the election, citing the Justice Department's "60-day rule""but that rule doesn't apply here, particularly as Smith brought the indictment long enough before the election. ...

--- The DOJ has long had an informal rule in place advising prosecutors not to take big steps in investigations"like bringing new indictments"within 60 days of an election if it could impact the results at all, which stems from a DOJ statute saying, "Federal prosecutors and agents may never select the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election."

- - - Legal experts argue that only applies to new investigations, however, and does not apply when a case is already in court, as the case is then out of the DOJ's hands and up to the judiciary to decide. ...