IMPORTANT READS

LABOR VIEW - Amazon founder and Richest Man in the World Jeff Bezos got shot into space on his very own rocket on July 20, two weeks after retiring and handing off the company to a successor, Andy Jassy, who previously ran Amazon web services. 

CLIMATE CHANGE - Wildfires, heatwaves, hurricanes and droughts: the deadly impacts of climate change are becoming more intense and devastating.

NEVER ENDING WARS - We should have abolished war after World War II. That war was so lethal and so destructive, even before the dropping of the atomic bombs, that had people understood that there is a real alternative to deadly violent conflict, humanity might have taken another path.

THE CITY - Rowing events on Monday have been rescheduled to accommodate Typhoon Nepartak, which formed Friday night to the southeast of Japan, is expected to make landfall in mainland Japan by Tuesday with Tokyo in the forecast cone.  

Rep. Ilhan Omar—the first Somali-American elected to Congress and an outspoken critic of U.S. militarism—on Friday sent a letter to President Joe Biden questioning his rationale behind its first drone strike in Somalia earlier this week,

July 27, 2021 marks the 68^th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice Agreement, a battlefield truce that temporarily halted combat during the Korean War.

EDD NEWS-Desperate times call for desperate measures.

WORKFORCE WATCH-If the Senate passes, and President Biden signs, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, U.S. growers and labor contractors will benefit, but most farmworkers will not.

SPACE TRAVEL-Mere minutes after touching the edge of space, Jeff Bezos and his fellow Blue Origin crewmates stood back on Earth, shaking champagne at the throng of cameras pointed their way with grins wide enough to see from … well, space.

NUCLEAR STRATEGY-Let’s dance at the border! 

The Washington Post on Tuesday revealed that three presidents, 10 prime ministers, and a king are among the more than 50,000 individuals whose phone numbers appeared on a leaked list of potential targets of Pegasus,

VIEW FROM HERE-Previously, we noted how the CDC Director Rochelle Lewinsky’s announcement that Vaxed People Need Not Wear Masks sabotaged President’s Biden’s objective to unite the center of the nation by July 4, 2021.

CLIMATE WATCH-Climate scientists on Friday were stunned by the intensity of flooding in Germany and Belgium that killed at least 120 people and damaged tens of thousands of homes, with experts saying they did not expect such extreme weather to result from the human-caused climate crisis as rapidly as it has.

DACA WATCH-Immigrant rights advocates on Friday called for the immediate codification of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program into law after a federal judge in Texas blocked new DACA permit approvals in a ruling asserting that former President Barack Obama exceeded his authority when he implemented the policy that has protected hundreds of thousands of so-called Dreamers from deportation.

MIGRATION ECONOMICS-Earlier this month, a Honduran court found David Castillo, a U.S.-trained former Army intelligence officer and the head of an internationally financed hydroelectric company, guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres.

WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS-Over the last week, I have been watching the Taliban sweep across the map of northern Afghanistan, capturing places that I first visited in 2001 at the beginning of the US-backed war.

COMMENTARY-Imagine a nation so reactionary and racist that “Black Lives Matter” is considered a “radical slogan” inside its borders.

AFGHAN WITHDRAWAL--A Taliban judge is promising that Sharia law will be reinstated in Afghanistan after coalition forces have left the country and the brutal Islamic force regains power.

IMMIGRATION POLITICS-Last month, attorneys from the Department of Justice joined with counsel for the private prison corporation, the GEO Group, to present Oral Arguments supporting private immigration detention in California. 

CONNECTING CALIFORNIA-The attempted recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom has many geographic roots. Its original proponent was a sheriff’s deputy from Yolo County.

EASTSIDER-By all accounts, this was a really bad (as in ill-conceived and poorly executed) war, and yet we have been there for 20 years without “winning” anything.