04 March 20
Lauren Gambino, Oliver Laughland and Joan E. Greve, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Bernie Sanders won the crucial state of California where 415 delegates - more than any other state in the Democratic primary - were up for grabs."
Excerpt: "Bernie Sanders won the crucial state of California where 415 delegates - more than any other state in the Democratic primary - were up for grabs."
Shahid Buttar. (photo: Shahid Buttar for Congress)
Nancy Pelosi to Receive First Genuine Left-Wing Challenge in 30 Years
Lee Fang, The Intercept
Fang writes: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will face spirited challenge from activist and attorney Shahid Buttar in the November general election."
Lee Fang, The Intercept
Fang writes: "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will face spirited challenge from activist and attorney Shahid Buttar in the November general election."
ouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi will face spirited challenge from activist and attorney Shahid Buttar in the November general election.
Buttar represents a unique, if unlikely challenge to Pelosi, the most powerful elected Democrat in the country and 33-year incumbent for San Francisco’s congressional seat. On Tuesday, Pelosi took 72.5 percent of the vote in California’s 12th Congressional District. Under the state’s unique primary system — where the top-two vote-getters in the primary make it to the general election, even if they belong to the same party — Buttar’s 12.7 percent was enough to get him on the November ballot.
Buttar is a constitutional lawyer who has dedicated his career on reining in American militarism and advancing causes relating to social justice. As a part-time DJ, Buttar may appear at face value as just another reflexive left-wing activist, but he is well-credentialed with a track record in advocacy and community organizing. A graduate of Stanford Law School, Buttar worked on court cases litigating marriage equality and defending the civil liberties of Muslims facing FBI surveillance, and has challenged the constitutionality of the USA PATRIOT Act.
Currently on leave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Buttar has waged an insurgent effort, campaigning on a promise to ensure that Pelosi faces bonafide electoral opposition from the left for the first time in modern history. The seemingly quixotic bid has given Buttar the opportunity to elevate genuine concerns with Pelosi’s style of leadership, including her compromise bill on drug pricing, which would only impact a few select pharmaceutical products, her support for President Donald Trump’s increased spending on the Pentagon, and what Buttar describes as a failure to fight for federal financing to alleviate the housing crisis in San Francisco and other cities.
Pelosi, once a stalwart ally of the House Progressive Caucus, has moderated her positions over the years as she has ascended the leadership ranks. Last month, she appeared with Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, one of the most Trump-supporting, right-wing Democrats in Congress, to shore up support for him as he faces a challenge from progressive Jessica Cisneros.
The unlikely challenge to Pelosi is made possible by Proposition 14, a state constitution change originally opposed by Pelosi that shifted the state to a nonpartisan blanket primary. The referendum, passed in 2010, takes party affiliation away from the primary process, allowing the two candidates with the most support on primary day to advance to the general election.
In 2018, Buttar made his first bid for Congress, coming up only 1,174 votes short from making the top two. That year, Pelosi faced a nominal Republican candidate, as she has done in almost every election.
This year will be different.
“Pelosi knows that voters are dissatisfied, and before the primary began campaigning in San Francisco for the first time in 30 years,” said Jasper Wilde, campaign manager for the Buttar campaign, in a statement to The Intercept.
“Shahid going 1-1 against Nancy will shine a spotlight on precisely how little she has done for the district in the midst of a housing crisis, an opioid crisis, and an out-of-control cost of living. The election will also reveal her role in exacerbating these issues, that remain at the forefront of voters minds both today and in November.”
A grocery store in Kirkland, Wash., is cleaned out. The city northeast of Seattle has been hard hit by the coronavirus. (photo: Jovelle Tamayo/WP)
Our Lack of Paid Sick Leave Will Make the Coronavirus Worse
Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post
Ingraham writes: "The United States is one of the few wealthy democracies in the world that does not mandate paid sick leave. As a result, roughly 25 percent of American workers have none, leaving many with little choice but to go to work while ill, transmitting infections to co-workers, customers and anyone they might meet on the street or in a crowded subway car."
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Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post
Ingraham writes: "The United States is one of the few wealthy democracies in the world that does not mandate paid sick leave. As a result, roughly 25 percent of American workers have none, leaving many with little choice but to go to work while ill, transmitting infections to co-workers, customers and anyone they might meet on the street or in a crowded subway car."
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Activists on both sides of the abortion issue demonstrate in front of the US Supreme Court during the 47th annual March for Life on January 24, 2020, in Washington, DC. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
The Supreme Court Case That Could Transform Abortion in America
Anna North, Vox
North writes: "As with most high-profile abortion cases in recent years, the main plaintiff in June Medical Services v. Russo is an abortion clinic."
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Anna North, Vox
North writes: "As with most high-profile abortion cases in recent years, the main plaintiff in June Medical Services v. Russo is an abortion clinic."
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The New York Times Building. (photo: ERCO)
Trump Keeps Suing Newspapers Over Opinions He Doesn't Like
David Uberti, VICE
Uberti writes: "President Trump still seems to be pretty touchy about any suggestion of Russian election interference - so much so that his reelection campaign is suing a newspaper for libel for the second time in a week."
David Uberti, VICE
Uberti writes: "President Trump still seems to be pretty touchy about any suggestion of Russian election interference - so much so that his reelection campaign is suing a newspaper for libel for the second time in a week."
This time it's about a pair of op-eds from last summer.
resident Trump still seems to be pretty touchy about any suggestion of Russian election interference — so much so that his reelection campaign is suing a newspaper for libel for the second time in a week.
After years of bark-but-no-bite whining about critical media coverage, Trump’s campaign filed a complaint against The Washington Post Tuesday over a pair of opinion pieces from last June that warned Trump could invite more election meddling in 2020. Last week they sued the New York Times.
To prove defamation of a public figure, you have to clear an extremely high legal bar. But Trump’s lawyers — including one who helped vaporize Gawker Media — argue that the Post hit that bar with the two clearly labeled and caveated blog posts.
“The complaint alleges The Post was aware of the falsity at the time it published them, but did so for the intentional purpose of hurting the campaign, while misleading its own readers in the process,” campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis said in a statement.
It’s the second time in a week the president’s camp has taken aim at a news outlet for opinions he doesn’t like. The campaign similarly sued The New York Times for a largely forgotten op-ed suggesting that Trump effectively colluded with Russia, if not criminally, in 2016.
Tuesday’s complaint, filed in part by the notorious media attorney Charles Harder, likewise centers on narrow and literal interpretations of the Post columns.
Trump’s lawyers first take issue with a June 2019 blog from Greg Sargent, a liberal opinion writer, highlighting how Trump has signaled his openness to foreign interference in 2020. They zero in on a line saying that special counsel Robert Mueller concluded “Trump and/or his campaign...tried to conspire with” the Kremlin.
It’s an apparent reference to shady communications between the Trump campaign and Russian nationals that included the infamous July 2016 meeting in Trump Tower. But the lawsuit leaves out the very next line in Sargent’s column. “Yet Mueller did not find sufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy,” he wrote.
The Trump lawyers’ reading of a June 2019 blog by Paul Waldman, who also leans left, is similarly fishy. It underscores a hypothetical question about the president’s reelection chances.
“The 2020 election will obviously be distinct in all kinds of ways we can’t yet anticipate,” Waldman wrote. “For instance, who knows what sort of aid Russia and North Korea will give to the Trump campaign, now that he has invited them to offer their assistance?”
The lawsuit further argued that the Post had a “malicious motive” in framing the arguments because it tends to endorse Democrats and employs liberal writers like Waldman and Sargent.
“It’s disappointing to see the president’s campaign committee resorting to these types of tactics and we will vigorously defend this case,” Kris Coratti, a spokesperson for the Post, said in a statement.
Jonathan Peters, a media law professor at the University of Georgia, told VICE News in an email that while statements of opinion are not exempt from libel law, the Supreme Court has established broad protections for such speech provided that readers understand the context. "All of which is to say," he added, "this is not a winning suit, but it's of a piece with Trump's efforts to attack and delegitimize the press as an institution."
That might be the point: Even if these lawsuits don’t move forward, they’ve already generated positive coverage in right-wing media and could excite the president’s base.
Relatives and friends place flowers at Berta Cáceres's grave in La Esperanza, Honduras, on March 3, 2018. (photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images)
Honduras Demands Full Justice After Murder of Berta Caceres
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Four years after the shooting death of Honduran environmentalist Berta Caceres on March 2, 2016, the intellectual authors of the crime remain unpunished, the popular and indigenous organizations in the country said on Monday."
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teleSUR
Excerpt: "Four years after the shooting death of Honduran environmentalist Berta Caceres on March 2, 2016, the intellectual authors of the crime remain unpunished, the popular and indigenous organizations in the country said on Monday."
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Coral blooms in the abyssal depths of Australia's southern coast. (photo: ROV SuBastian/SOI)
'Gardens and Graveyards' of Coral Discovered in Hidden Canyons off Australia's Coast
Brandon Specktor, Live Science
Specktor writes: "The South Australian coast is surrounded by a labyrinth of underwater canyons, many of them still unexplored."
Brandon Specktor, Live Science
Specktor writes: "The South Australian coast is surrounded by a labyrinth of underwater canyons, many of them still unexplored."
Scientists are interested in these submarine crannies because they sit on the front lines of oceanic climate change
he South Australian coast is surrounded by a labyrinth of underwater canyons, many of them still unexplored. Last week, an international team of researchers (and their underwater robot companion) completed a survey of three such canyons, uncovering a hidden world of both thriving coral gardens and ash-white coral graveyards.
According to the expedition members, the fate of these hidden ecosystems, which sit in the immediate path of the increasingly warm water flowing out of Antarctica's Southern Ocean, could be a preview of how farther-flung ocean life will react to ongoing global warming.
"This has global implications given these waters originate from around Antarctica [and] feed all of the major oceans and regulate our climate system," expedition member Malcolm McCulloch, of the University of Western Australia, said in a statement.
In their recent voyage, McCulloch and his colleagues aboard the research vessel R/V Falkor (named for the luck dragon of "NeverEnding Story" fame) explored the depths of three canyons on the South Australia coast — Bremer, Leeuwin and Perth canyons — descending for the first time into each area's abyssal zone, or the dark depths roughly 2.5 miles (4,000 meters) below the surface.
Beyond the obvious reason for such exploration, scientists are interested in these submarine crannies because they sit on the front lines of oceanic climate change. Facing the Southern Ocean — the ocean that surrounds Antarctica and connects the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans with its clockwise-flowing current — these canyons are some of the first ecosystems on Earth to encounter the warming waters surging out of Antarctica's ocean.
Thanks to a mechanism called the Antarctic convergence (in which cold water flowing north clashes with warmer, south-flowing water), the currents leaving the Southern Ocean are remarkably rich in nutrients. That makes the submarine canyons of South Australia a hotspot for migrating animals. Bremer Canyon, for example, is home to the Southern Hemisphere's largest seasonal gathering of killer whales and often hosts traveling sharks, dolphins, squids and birds, the researchers said.
During their latest expedition, the crew of the Falkor learned that these canyons are bustling with life deep underwater. Each spot hosted lush gardens of coral, rich with marine life and bursting with color. However, each canyon (especially Leeuwin) also contained extensive pockets of dead and fossilized coral. According to the researchers, these corals bear the record of both recent, anthropogenic ocean warming, as well as longer-term changes to the world's climate. It's not clear yet what killed the coral in a given canyon, but researchers will begin answering that question as soon as Falkor returns to land.
This voyage was funded by the nonprofit Schmidt Ocean Institute, and the team's newest research has yet to appear in a peer-reviewed journal.
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