However it’s no longer good enough when BP is the biggest controler of solar energy in the country.
“Personally, as the new Labor Government backed by the Greens and Teal Independents proceeds with the 43% climate target laws and invests heavily in renewables. I hold out hope that the new Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek who has just rejected a new mega coal mine proposal for Clive Palmer in North Qld that horrendous developments like the Toondah Harbour PDA will also be rejected as well. I for see a better horizon forward on environmental policy making.”
Political life in America is already a bad trip for many. What could the Biden Admin be planning for?
President Joe Biden’s administration “anticipates” that regulators will approve MDMA and psilocybin within the next two years for designated breakthrough therapies for PTSD and depression respectively. The administration is “exploring the prospect of establishing a federal task force to monitor” the emerging psychedelic treatment ecosystem, according to the letter sent by assistant secretary for mental health and substance use Miriam Delphin-Rittmon to Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa.
Right-wing media celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on Friday, ending the constitutional right to abortion almost 50 years after it had been recognized. The ruling was the culmination of a decadeslong project on the right and was celebrated across conservative media outlets and on Twitter.
Reinforcing US hegemonyOn the campaign trail, Biden pledged that as president he would make the Saudi kingdom a “pariah” for the killing of Khashoggi. He also said he would not sell more weapons to Saudi Arabia.But it appears that the benefits of thawing of relations outweigh such promises.The unnamed senior White House official who briefed media said that while the administration imposed the so-called “Khashoggi ban” on more than 70 Saudi individuals and entities, rekindling ties is critical.“While we recalibrate relations, we’re not seeking to rupture relations, because Saudi Arabia has been a strategic partner of the United States for eight decades,” the official said Tuesday.Saudi Arabia is also the United States’ largest arms customer, accounting for a quarter of US weapons sold world
If Russia were persecuting a whistleblower like Julian Assange, the US would rightly condemn it as authoritarian abuse. But because that persecution is backed by the US, the mainstream media and American politicians are fine with it.
When will the NRA and gun manufacturers be declared the Sacklers of their industries? America is exceptional. Exceptional in the number of mass shootings, the lack of gun control, and the incarceration of its people in the land they call free. It truly is the world leader in the worst of every possible way imaginable and does absolutely nothing to arrest the carnage.
At least 18 children and three adults have died in the latest mass shooting to hit the United States.
Biden, recently returned from his trip to Asia, delivered a statement in the White House in which he could hardly contain his anger over an epidemic of massacres in America.
“As a nation, we have to ask: When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name are we going to do what we know in our gut needs to be done?”
“We have to act,” he said and suggested reinstating the assault weapons ban and other “common sense gun laws”.
Australia is at a critical point. A government that would cling to power to impose unpopular policy threatens the very nature of our democracy.
It is common to refer to countries that were “consolidated democracies” as corroding to “illiberal democracies”. Hungary is the most notable example. If, however, the term “competitive authoritarianism” is employed to describe regimes instead, it becomes clear that the danger for Australia is just as strong as it is for the USA and the UK, as well as for Hungary.
“Last Tuesday, total U.S. wind generation exceeded 2,000 GWh, making wind the second largest producer of electricity in the United States after natural gas for that 24-hour period. Did a quick look at EIA’s numbers going back to 2018. Don’t think that’s ever happened before.” Storrow notes that wind power in the US has occasionally bested coal, but not both coal and nuclear.
For sixty years, the United States’ blockade against Cuba has worked to hinder the island’s development and prevent it from trading even with third countries. It’s time Washington stopped its cruel punishment of its smaller neighbor.
After Congress lifted a ban on crude exports in late 2015, oil and gas production in the Permian Basin soared while domestic consumption remained flat—leading to a massive build-out of pipelines and other infrastructure that culminated in the U.S. “flooding global markets” with fossil fuels at the expense of humanity, in general, and vulnerable Gulf Coast communities already overburdened by pollution, in particular.
Sweden’s International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance finds this year that the United States of America has joined the ranks of “backsliding democracies,” joining India, Brazil, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia.
The US will have 300 gigawatts of wind and solar by the end of 2022. We also have about 100 gigawatts of hydroelectric power. That is 400 gigawatts. If we can get enough battery storage to make full use of the sun and of strong winds, that would amount to a third of the 1200 gigawatts of electricity generation capacity in the US.
NEW YORK (AP) — New York prosecutors investigating former President Donald Trump’s business dealings have convened a new grand jury to hear evidence in the probe as the previous panel’s term was set to run out, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press Thursday.
On the eve of it’s 48th anniversary, documents just declassified by the Australian National Archives show the extent to which the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) worked closely with the CIA in the lead-up to the Coup-d’état in Chile in September 1973. Story by Peter Kornbluh and Clinton Fernandes. The Australian Government’s obsession with secrecy has a long history. As The New York Times wrote two years ago, “no other developed democracy holds as tight to its secrets.” Just how deep this culture of secrecy goes, is being tested by Professor Clinton Fernandes who has been petitioning for the release of intelligence records on clandestine activity in Chile at the behest of the CIA to overthrow Salvador Allende. In short, 50 years ago, the documents show that the Australian Government set up an intelligence station in Santiago at the behest of the CIA, spied on Allende and conducted covert operations, and then played a role as a liaison between the CIA and Pinochet.
The drone strike that hit Khwaja Burgha, a working-class residential neighborhood in Kabul, was said to have killed numerous members of the Ahmadi family, with the youngest alleged victim being a 2-year-old girl. Morgue footage shared on social media showed the burned bodies of several children, as well as photos of the victims before their deaths. One of the dead, according to members of the Ahmadi family who spoke to reporters, was a former Afghan military officer who had served as a contractor for U.S. forces, as well as a worker at a charity organization. Join Our Newsletter Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. I’m in “The Americans said the airstrike killed Daesh members,” a neighbor of the family angrily told reporters after the strike, referring to the Islamic State. “Where is Daesh here? Were these children Daesh?”
If we’re serious about stopping impending climate disaster, we have no choice but to radically rein in one of the world’s worst polluters: the US military.
In more and more of the country Amazon acts like an employer in a company town, sucking up whole communities and shaping public goods and services to fit its profit-making needs.
Australia’s PM is caught between Biden and his Coalition partner while the country suffers. Watch the salesman promise what he can’t or wont deliver.
The importance of having a U.S. leader like Joe Biden, who has come to believe in the necessity of drastically cutting the emission of greenhouse gases, was demonstrated Wednesday when Japan announced that it was doubling its proposed cuts to carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. This according to Reuters.
Union mine workers in Alabama are taking part in a historic strike, the first of its kind in four decades, accusing Warrior Met Coal of first exploiting its workers and now inspiring violence against them on the picket line. Freelance journalists are on the ground and local news has been covering the story from the start — yet more than three months into the strike, the historic labor action has not received so much as a single mention from CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC, according to a new analysis from Media Matters.
The highest standard of torture in the world has been shown and set by the USA
The UK’s High Court has granted the US government permission to appeal a decision that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange cannot be sent to the United States to face espionage charges. The judicial office said on Wednesday that the appeal had been granted and the case would be listed for a High Court hearing. No date has been set.
Joe Biden is still bombing Iraq in 2021, and Iraq is still supporting the Palestinians, and refused to join Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in recognizing Israel. Iraq is now so firmly an ally of Iran that its leaders have to do photo ops with Arab leaders to try to escape the perception that Baghdad is too tightly linked to Tehran. Neoconservative fail.
The leftist Democratic Socialists of America, which helped congressional star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez get elected in 2018, looks to be a big political player again in New York City’s 2021 municipal elections. The group has not yet endorsed anyone for mayor – the top prize in New York’s June 22 Democratic primaries. But all 51 city council seats are up for grabs this year, and the DSA has members running for six of them – including Queens public defender Tiffany Cabán and Brooklyn tenant activist Michael Hollingsworth. With two state senators and five representatives out of 213 lawmakers, the New York State Legislature already has the country’s largest DSA legislative caucus. These Democrats share a leftist platform that includes guaranteeing housing as a human right and ending mass incarceration The DSA has upended local politics in this Democratic stronghold, and its wins extend well beyond New York – into Virginia, Nevada and beyond. How did socialism jump from the fringes of American politics into its very center?
In other words, in fiscal year 2021, it appears that migrants are continuing to enter the United States in the same numbers as in fiscal year 2019 — plus the pent-up demand from people who would have come in fiscal year 2020, but for the pandemic. That’s visible in the first figure, earlier, in which the blue trend line for the five months of data available for fiscal year 2021 (October, November, December, January and February) neatly reflects the trend line for fiscal year 2019 — plus the difference between fiscal year 2020 and fiscal year 2019.
The wealthiest 1% of Americans fail to report more than 20% of their income to the IRS, and some of those ultra-rich people use “sophisticated evasion technologies” and criminal tactics to avoid paying their full share, according to a new analysis by researchers at the IRS and economists. The analysis estimated that the top 1% of households fail to report 21% of their income. Nearly a third of that is through sophisticated schemes that random IRS audits fail to detect. The trend is even starker among the top 0.1% of earners, whose unreported income may be twice as high as the IRS estimates.
This is now a business driven industry and not a defense of values for the USA
“The map raises a number of questions. Why is the United States militarily active in so many countries? Are these operations meeting the stated U.S. goals of reducing violence against Americans?”
The US Justice Department has appealed a British judge’s ruling that prevents Wikileaks founder Julian Assange being extradited to the United States to face espionage charges.
A new bombshell emerged: the Trump Administration unfounded accusation of China for spreading the ‘Wuhan virus’ worldwide. It did not matter that such infamy had been questioned by both Japanese and Chinese reports. A report from a Japanese TV station which suspected some of the 14,000 Americans died of influenza may have unknowingly contracted the COVID-19 went viral on Chinese social media, stoking fears and speculations in China that the new virus may have originated in the United States. The report, by TV Asahi Corporation of Japan, suggested that the United States government may have failed to grasp how rampant the virus had gone on the United States soil. (Japanese TV report sparks speculations in China that COVID-19 may have originated in US, Global Times, February 23, 2020).
Nor did the presence of suspected similar cases had occurred in Italy in late 2019 and elsewhere, as will be seen.
On 12 March 2020, in a statement to the House Oversight Committee of the United States Congress the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert R. Redfield candidly admitted that: yes, some cases diagnosed as seasonal flu could have been COVID-19.
As to exactly when that occurred, in October?, in November?, he could not be precise.
China’s Foreign Ministry reacted to Dr. Redfield’s statements intimating that the virus could have originated in the United States.
Trump’s coup plot has been treated by many in the media as the last gasp of a deranged political despot, but we are told that American democracy remains strong and that a new day is dawning. Had the news been coming from almost anywhere else in the world the headlines might have been different. We would have been reading about a “failed state”.
Opponents of the $2,000 survival checks claim they’re poorly targeted. That’s nonsense. They would help the working class and poor far more than the rich.
Trump Built a Wall to Lock Latin American Politics into the USA
When America faces a leader with totalitarian impulses who thinks he can will his way into another term, it is also facing its greatest democratic crisis in decades. The passage of time always heals wounds, including political wounds. But what can be done to revive public trust in elections in the meantime is not just an open-ended question. Democracy’s fragile skin has been stretched as never before, when tens of millions of voters say that they don’t trust the results from the best-run election in years.
The number of COVID-19 patients being treated in hospitals across the United States has reached 90,000 after nearly doubling in the past month, just as holiday gatherings are expected to propel the next wave of infections.
So much for “we stand alone” stance insisted by Morrison. Broadsides coming from America suggest otherwise. (ODT)
Senior United States Senator Marco Rubio has lashed the Chinese government for its “economic coercion” against Australia, saying it is important for a global alliance of democracies to speak up in support of Canberra. The intervention from the former Republican presidential candidate followed a sharp escalation in rhetoric from Beijing as it doubled down on its claim that the Morrison government is solely to blame for deteriorating relations between China and Australia.
WHEN JOE HOCKEY, former cigar-chomping Australian Treasurer in Tony Abbott’s government and Australian ambassador to the USA between January 2016 and January 2020, made it clear that he agreed with his golfing buddy Donald Trump that fraud “for sure” characterised Democratic Party voting and that “there’s plenty of good reason to have litigation, I mean it is a complete dog’s breakfast right across the country,” he did more than jump into the unaerated, putrid goldfish bowl. He inadvertently shone a light on the real nature of the relationship between the current Australian Government and the Trump White House, a relationship which exposed the Australian Government as a kind of ex-officio branch of the Trump Republican Party.
After Congress lifted a ban on crude exports in late 2015, oil and gas production in the Permian Basin soared while domestic consumption remained flat—leading to a massive build-out of pipelines and other infrastructure that culminated in the U.S. “flooding global markets” with fossil fuels at the expense of humanity, in general, and vulnerable Gulf Coast communities already overburdened by pollution, in particular.
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