Global

Two of the last four commercial nuclear power plants under construction in the United States—both of them at the V.C. Summer site in South Carolina—have been cancelled. A decision on the remaining two, which are in Georgia, will be made in August.

“DING DONG, Summer is dead,” says Glenn Carroll, one of a core group of safe energy activists who have labored for decades to rid the southeast of these last four reactor projects.

No longer will we have to explain to our less superhero-obsessed friends why Spider-Man doesn’t do things with the Avengers in the movies even though he’s a Marvel character. After his appearance in Captain America: Civil War, we finally have the first collaboration between Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios in an attempt to help Sony make a Spider-Man movie that’s not awful. And – surprise surprise! – Spider-Man: Homecoming is actually pretty good.

Homecoming benefits quite a lot from being part of the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe. Spider-Man works best in a setting filled with other superheroes. There have been entire comic series based on him teaming up with other characters because friendly, chatty Peter Parker plays off them so well. So while Iron Man stops short of stealing the show, his constant involvement in the background gives everything else a context that the previous Spider-Man movies have lacked.

Something extraordinary has happened in Washington. President Donald Trump has made it clear, in no uncertain terms and with no effort to disguise his duplicity, that he will claim that Tehran is cheating on the nuclear deal by October—the facts be damned. In short, the fix is in. Trump will refuse to accept that Iran is in compliance and thereby set the stage for a military confrontation. His advisors have even been kind enough to explain how they will go about this. Rarely has a sinister plan to destroy an arms control agreement and pave the way for war been so openly telegraphed.

Existence is Resistance: The Palestine Museum of Natural History with Dr.
Mazin Qumsiyeh  https://youtu.be/IZFSTAZ4_jw

Palestinian Ecoactivism with Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh https://youtu.be/PHRFPbyiioE

THREE ACTIONS

Jewish voice for peace ACTION: Five nonviolent activists were forbidden
from boarding a plane from Washington to Israel - and neither the airline
(Lufthansa) or the Israeli government will explain why or show us
documentation. We are activists for equality, justice, and dignity for all
people of Israel/Palestine. Join us in asking Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer
to explain why we can’t go there.

If war were moral, legal, defensive, beneficial to the spread of freedom, and inexpensive, we would be obliged to make abolishing it our top priority solely because of the destruction that war and preparations for war do as the leading polluters of our natural environment.

Angst, fear and loathing are the overwhelming emotions six months into the disastrous Trump presidency. Just exactly who, or what, do we have at the helm of the United States Ship of State, and the little red button that could end life as we know it?            

This month’s Free Press cover depicts a Trump regime floundering in rough sea waters, with the Don confident, but clueless.

The planet and its leaders are watching in horror as the ship appears to be capsizing. Trump and his fools enrich themselves, all the while gleefully decimating domestic social programs, dooming the environment and destroying our nation’s relationships around the world.

Charles Wince, the artist, is asking: just who is steering this ship of fools?

A buffoon? A bully? An oft-bankrupt billionaire businessman? A Benito Mussolini in the making?

Simply put, what we have is an international criminal hell-bent on continuing his crime spree within and without his corrupt administration. Making the world safe for oligarchy.

To read Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantanamo is to run your mind along the contours of hell. 

The next step, if you’re an American, is to embrace it. Claim it. This is who we are: We are the proprietors of a cluster of human cages and a Kafkaesque maze of legal insanity. This torture center is still open. Men (“forever prisoners”) are still being held there, their imprisonment purporting to keep us safe. 

The book, by Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir — two Algerian men arrested in Bosnia in 2001 and wrongly accused of being terrorists — allows us to imagine ourselves at Guantanamo, this outpost of the Endless War. 

Yes, I’m going to tell you what’s missing from this film without watching the film. Trump has, as promised, made me so sick of winning that I really could enjoy watching a defeat film, but I think I’ll pass. If I’m wrong about what’s missing from it (I mean one of the many things that are, no doubt, missing from it), I promise that I will eat an entire plan for victory in Afghanistan annually for the next decade.

One of the oddest things about World War II is how it has been marketed as a humanitarian war since the moment it ended.

One reason this is odd is that several times the number of people killed in German concentration camps were killed outside of them in the war (at least 50 million worldwide vs. 9 million killed in the camps). And the majority of those people were civilians. So a war against killing people in camps would be a very strange way to understand World War II, unless killing many more people can be made an acceptable means of opposing killing people. The scale of the killing, wounding, and destroying made WWII the single worst thing humanity has ever done to itself in any short space of time.

In the corporate war against renewable energy, a single Ohio regulation stands out.

It is a simple clause slipped into the state budget without open discussion, floor debate, or public hearings.

The restriction is costing Ohio billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

The regulation demands that wind turbines sited in the Buckeye State be at least 1,125 feet from the blade tip to the nearest property line, about 1300 feet total—nearly a quarter-mile.

Human beings are now waging war against life itself as we continue to
destroy not just individual lives, local populations and entire species
in vast numbers but also destroy the ecological systems that make life
on Earth possible.

By doing this we are now accelerating the sixth mass extinction event in
Earth's history and virtually eliminating any prospect of human
survival.

In a recently published scientific study 'Biological annihilation via
the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population
losses and declines'
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/05/1704949114 the authors
Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo document the
accelerating nature of this problem.

'Earth's sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when