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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
John Hudson, National Security Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan:
This is a mistake on Biden’s part, and history is going to condemn him for this. However, I will still vote for him because I believe this U.S. election is not Democrats vs Republicans, instead, it is democracy against racist christofascism authoritarianism. I understand the geopolitical thinking that has led Biden to doing this: The U.S. has to support Israel, because otherwise Iran and terrorism will turn the Middle East into Muslim authoritarianism, just as it has done in Afghanistan, another American failure. But nothing justifies genocide. Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, in my opinion, should be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity. What surprises me is that the Israelis have not risen up to force an election and vote Netanyahu out of office. I believe what Israel is doing is going to damage the way that country is viewed for generations, as well as strongly enhancing anti-semitism throughout the world.
Smoke billows after an Israeli strike in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Wednesday. Credit: Said Khatib / AFP / Getty
The Biden administration in recent days quietly authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel despite Washington’s concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza that could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, according to Pentagon and State Department officials familiar with the matter. The 2,000 pound bombs have been linked to previous mass-casualty events throughout Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. These officials, like some others, spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because recent authorizations have not been disclosed publicly.
The development underscores that while rifts have emerged between the United States and Israel over the war’s conduct, the Biden administration views weapons transfers as off-limits when considering how to influence the actions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We have continued to support Israel’s right to defend […]
In my view American corporate media, with a few exceptions, either does not understand what is going on in this election or has chosen their usual approach. That is, treating the election like a sports event between two teams playing an ethical game instead of competently recognizing that this is an election between continuing as a democracy or becoming a pseudo-democracy like Hungary ruled by a fascist authoritarian and a group of oligarchs who support him. This article makes this point.
Candace Owens on the set of her show Candace on April 12, 2022. Jason Davis/Getty Images
Two of the biggest stories in the American media at this moment are about staffing choices: former Republican National Committee chair Ronna Romney McDaniel’s hiring and swift firing from NBC, and popular commentator Candace Owens’s departure from the conservative Daily Wire (best known as the home for Ben Shapiro’s mega-popular podcast).
While different in details, both stories are essentially about the same question: How can media organizations responsibly handle an increasingly radical conservative movement?
In McDaniel’s case, the issue was election denial. After her hiring was announced, NBC staff revolted — noting her vocal defense of Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election while running the RNC. Some top talent, like Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, revolted on air — leading NBC to part ways with McDaniel before she really got started.
As polar ice has melted and moved mass towards the Equator, it has slowed Earth’s rotation. Credit: Alessandro Dahan / Getty
Climate change is starting to alter how humans keep time.
An analysis1 published in Nature on 27 March has predicted that melting ice caps are slowing Earth’s rotation to such an extent that the next leap second — the mechanism used since 1972 to reconcile official time from atomic clocks with that based on Earth’s unstable speed of rotation — will be delayed by three years.
“Enough ice has melted to move sea level enough that we can actually see the rate of the Earth’s rotation has been affected,” says Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and author of the study.
According to his analysis, global warming will push back the need for another leap second from 2026 to 2029. Leap seconds cause so much havoc for computing that scientists have voted to get rid of them, but not until 2035. Researchers are especially dreading the next leap second, because, for […]
REESE DUNKLIN, RYAN J. FOLEY, JEFF MARTIN, JENNIFER MCDERMOTT, HOLBROOK MOHR and JOHN SEEWER, Reporters - Associated Press
Stephan:
The police and sheriffs in the United States are the most poorly trained law enforcement officers in the democracies of the developed world. In those other countries you have to be a college graduate, and you train for up three years. In the U.S. all you need is a high school degree — a GED will usually be enough — and the average for training is three months. There is no other democracy in the world where the police kill as many people as the American police and sheriffs do. And in no other democracy is law enforcement murder held to such a low accountability. In fact, as this article describes, law enforcement in the U.S. doesn’t even keep public records about these killings properly.
In this image from video provided by a family friend, Taylor Ware is restrained by law enforcement and emergency medical personnel at a highway rest stop in Dale, Ind., on Aug. 25, 2019. Credit: Pauline Engel / AP
Carl Grant, a Vietnam veteran with dementia, wandered out of a hospital room to charge a cellphone he imagined he had. When he wouldn’t sit still, the police officer escorting Grant body-slammed him, ricocheting the patient’s head off the floor.
Taylor Ware, a former Marine and aspiring college student, walked the grassy grounds of an interstate rest stop trying to shake the voices in his head. After Ware ran from an officer, he was attacked by a police dog, jolted by a stun gun, pinned on the ground and injected with a sedative.
And Donald Ivy Jr., a former three-sport athlete, left an ATM alone one night when officers sized him up as suspicious and tried to detain him. Ivy took off, and police tackled and shocked him with a stun gun, belted him with batons and held him facedown.
Each man was unarmed. Each was not a threat to public safety. […]
I agree with this article and it enrages me that the genocide being conducted by fascist Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli’s Trump, is being made possible with American weapons that are fast-tracked to the Israeli armed forces.
Smoke billows in the vicinity of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on March 23, 2024, following an Israeli bombardment. Credit: AFP / Getty
There are “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel is “committing the crime of genocide against the Palestinians as a group in Gaza,” the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories has said.
Francesca Albanese made the remarks Wednesday following the submission of her latest report called “Anatomy of a Genocide” to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday.
Speaking at a press conference, Albanese said: “Israel has committed three acts of genocide with a requisite intent: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Israel said it “utterly rejects” the report, which it said “brings shame” on the Human Rights Council.
It is “no surprise, that the premise of this report is that the creation of the Jewish State in 1948 was an act of ‘settler colonialism,’ and genocide is an ‘inherent part’ of that act,” the Permanent […]
I feel sorry for people living in Florida. They voted into office a fascist governor and legislature and now they are living with the consequences of that decision. If you compare the social outcome data of Red and Blue states it is screamingly obvious that Republicans — now TCPs — always do an inferior job of creating social wellbeing for the people of their state. You would think it was obvious, but obviously, it isn’t because Americans keep voting for these buffoons. Nowhere is this clearer than in Florida, as this article makes pathetically clear.
Fascist failed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty
In Florida, the effects of climate change are hard to ignore, no matter your politics. It’s the hottest state — Miami spent a record 46 days above a heat index of 100 degrees last summer — and many homes and businesses are clustered along beachfront areas threatened by rising seas and hurricanes. The Republican-led legislature has responded with more than $640 million for resilience projects to adapt to coastal threats.
But the same politicians don’t seem ready to acknowledge the root cause of these problems. A bill awaiting signature from Governor Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January, would ban offshore wind energy, relax regulations on natural gas pipelines, and delete the majority of mentions of climate change from existing state laws.
“Florida is on the front lines of the warming climate crisis, and the fact that we’re going to erase that sends the wrong message,” said Yoca Arditi-Rocha, the executive director of the CLEO Institute, a climate education and advocacy nonprofit in Florida. “It sends the message, […]
Here is some good news from Switzerland that has the potential to make a very good impact on rail power in the U.S.
As testing in the US nears completion, Stadler’s Flirt H2 passenger train has taken to the track to set a distance record of 2,803 km on a single tank of hydrogen Credit: Stadler Rail
A hydrogen fuel-cell passenger train developed by Swiss rail vehicle maker Stadler Rail has achieved a new Guinness World Record, traveling for almost two days around the clock for a distance of 1,741.7 miles.
Efforts to clean up dirty trains are already well underway, with heavy investment in electrifying networks around the world as well as rolling out battery-electric locomotives such as the FLXDrive, the Blues train and the Flirt Akku.
That last example is made by Stadler Rail AG, and managed to achieve a Guinness World Record in 2021 for the longest per-charge battery-only journey of 224 km (~140 miles), on a route between Berlin and Warnemünde during a freezing local winter – not bad for a train that was designed with an operational per-charge range of 80 km.
Not all rail networks can support electrification and that battery range just won’t be enough for long-haul transportation of goods or people. That’s where hydrogen could come in, […]
Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley, Staff Writers - RollingStone
Stephan:
The Trump Christofascist Party (TCP) is now openly and actively trying to rig the election in November because they fear that Trump will not win the necessary votes if we have a free and fair election, so they are trying to build a pseudo-election procedure like Russia or Hungary. It seems the Democrats are finally waking up to this, and trying to block it. So that is good news.
Criminal Trump and President Biden Credit: Win McNamee & Nathan Howard / Getty
For years, Donald Trump has made it abundantlyclear that if he doesn’t win the2024 presidential election, he is willing to cheat and steal it. Since President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, according to sources with intimate knowledge of the situation, Biden and his inner circle have been drawing up meticulous plans and creating a large legal network focused on wargaming a close election finish, in which the former president and Republican Party launch a scorched-earth, Big Lie–fueled crusade.
Long before Trump began leading in battleground-state polling — and years before he was a declared 2024 candidate — the ex-president and many of his influential allies were already busy plotting ways to tilt the election in his favor. These yearslong efforts, conducted both secretly and out in the open, have already yielded tangible results for Trump and the conservative electiondenier movement. These wide-ranging operations have alarmed the Democratic Party elite, who aren’t just worried about Biden’s sagging poll numbers. Numerous Democratic lawmakers, operatives, Biden campaign advisers, and administration officials tell Rolling Stone that if the president does ultimately beat Trump this November, the election will […]
