ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE for HAITI

Veterans For Peace Says: NO WAR on VENEZUELA! Veterans Condemn Trump’s Murder of South American Fishermen

Riverside Park

Juan Cole: As Israelis Blockade Food to Gaza, 9,000 Children have been Admitted for Acute Malnutrition The death of the 17-year-old Palestinian youth, Mohammed Assaf, from northern Gaza, as a result of the famine and humanitarian crisis in the Strip. | Wikimedia Commons By Juan Cole / Informed Comme…

The War on Vietnam Ended 50 Years Ago and the U.S. Desperately Needs More Action on Agent Orange Congress Should mark the 50th anniversary by passing new legislation addressing the impact of Agent Orange.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times has resigned after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president, a journalism trade publication reported Wednesday.

Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review in an interview that she resigned because the Times was remaining silent on the contest in “dangerous times.”

“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza said. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

In a post on the social media platform X that did not directly mention the resignation, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong said the board was asked to do a factual analysis of the policies of Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump during their time at the White House.

Additionally, “The board was asked to provide (its) understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years,” he wrote. “In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being president for the next four years.”

Soon-Shiong, who bought the paper in 2018, said the board “chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”

Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review that the board had intended to endorse Harris and she had drafted the outline of a proposed editorial.

A LA Times spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

The LA Times Guild Unit Council & Bargaining Committee said it was “deeply concerned about our owner’s decision to block a planned endorsement in the presidential race.”

“We are even more concerned that he is now unfairly assigning blame to Editorial Board members for his decision not to endorse,” the guild said in a statement. “We are still pressing for answers from newsroom management on behalf of our members.”

Trump’s campaign jumped on Garza’s departure, saying the state’s largest newspaper had declined to endorse the Democratic ticket after backing Harris in her previous races for U.S. Senate and state attorney general.

Her exit comes about 10 months after then-Executive Editor Kevin Merida left the paper in what was called a “mutually agreed” upon departure. At the time, the news organization said it had fallen well short of its digital subscriber goals and needed a revenue boost to sustain the newsroom and its digital operations.

Los Angeles Times editor resigns after newspaper withholds presidential endorsement A journalism trade publication is reporting that the editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times has resigned.

Aid groups warn Israel is wiping northern Gaza off the map, and the Biden administration is threatening to cut military assistance to Israel — but not for at least 30 days. This comes as the U.S. has continued to arm Israel despite findings by its own experts at USAID and the State Department that Israel has routinely impeded delivery of food and medicine to Gaza. We speak with Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned last October over the push to increase arms sales to Israel. He and Tariq Habash, who resigned in protest from the Education Department, have launched a lobbying organization and a political action committee called A New Policy to push for a new approach on Israel/Palestine amid what Paul calls a “deep-rooted and very entrenched” pro-Israel consensus in U.S. politics.

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NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh in New York, with Amy Goodman in Washington, D.C.

“Northern Gaza is being wiped off the map.” That’s the warning from Oxfam and 35 other humanitarian groups who say Israel’s siege on northern Gaza has reached a, quote, “horrifying level of atrocity.”

Earlier today, Israel’s military bombed an UNRWA school in Jabaliya housing hundreds of displaced Palestinian families. Al Jazeera reports the death toll from the attack has climbed to 25, with many children among the dead.MORE AT https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/17/a_new_policy_us_middle_east

Ex-State Dept. Official: Israel Is Starving Gaza Now Aid groups warn Israel is wiping northern Gaza off the map, and the Biden administration is threatening to cut military assistance to Israel — but not for at least 30 days. This comes as the U.S. has continued to arm Israel despite findings by its own experts at USAID and the State Department that...

Former guerillas were accused of 1989 killing, but supporters say government wants to intimidate activists =Agence-France Presse in Sensuntepeque= Six former guerrillas, whose trial for a civil war-era murder was criticised by fellow environmentalists as politicised, have been acquitted by a court in El Salvador.

Prosecutors had sought up to 36 years in prison for the former rebels of the hard-left Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.

But the judges acquitted them “due to the statute of limitations” and ordered their immediate release, the defence lawyer Carolina Herrador said after the hearing in the city of Sensuntepeque. The court upheld arrest warrants for two other fugitive suspects, Herrador said.

Prosecutors accused the eight former guerrillas, who were arrested in January 2023, of killing a woman in 1989 because they suspected she was an army informant. Five of them had also been part of an environmental campaign for a ban on metal mining that was introduced in 2017, which activists fear the president, Nayib Bukele, wants to reverse.

“We never had any doubt about our innocence. Today we have come out with our heads held high. We were not mistaken about our innocence,” Pedro Rivas, one of the environmentalists, said. Supporters outside the court shouted “Freedom!” and greeted the activists with hugs.

The United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders and other experts expressed concern in a letter to Bukele’s government after the 2023 arrests that the case was an attempt to intimidate environmentalists.

The activists’ supporters argued that the speed of the trial contrasted with the lack of an investigation into massacres the military has been accused of carrying out during the 1979-1992 civil war.

Environmentalists acquitted after contentious murder trial in El Salvador Former guerillas were accused of 1989 killing, but supporters say government wants to intimidate activists

The LNG Facility In Puerto Rico That Could Become A Full-On Nightmare
Gas disasters are the rise, and an import terminal in densely populated San Juan is operating without federal permits.
By Alexander C. Kaufmanv and Hermes Ayala Guzmán

CATAÑO, Puerto Rico — Just before the rain began one afternoon in July, Lissette Avilés Ríos went looking for the best spot along the shoreline to see the ship she feared might bring fiery death.

The nun hopped in her SUV and drove from her convent in this coastal neighborhood on the opposite side of San Juan Bay from scenic Viejo San Juan, past dockyards and down streets where gray pipelines stacked as high as the rooftops hemmed in some houses on two sides. Pulling into a vacant lot on the water, she got out, approached the edge and pulled back the feathery needles of a white pine just barely clinging to the eroding shore.

The letters etched along the red-painted hull of the tanker ship spelled out the cargo: LNG, for liquefied natural gas.

The Coral Encanto arrived in San Juan Bay late one night in January 2023 — months before the United States emerged as the world’s top exporter of methane gas superchilled into a dense liquid form for easier transportation and sold overseas as a fuel that’s generally cleaner-burning than coal or petroleum and more dependable than solar panels and wind turbines.

The ship never left. The semipermanently moored vessel serves as the floating storage unit for a terminal that the energy company now in charge of Puerto Rico’s power plants uses to import LNG. On a summer afternoon, another tanker, the Avenir Accolade, sidled up beside the Coral Encanto, unloading a fresh shipment of the fuel.

To Avilés, it’s a ticking time bomb.

In June 2022, one of the nation’s largest LNG export terminals on the Texas Gulf Coast exploded, sending an orange ball of fire into the sky with a vapor-cloud blast so powerful, two lifeguards at nearby Quintana Beach were blown off their chairs and a toddler fell and bloodied his face on a rock. Federal pipeline safety regulators later released a heavily redacted consultant’s report that blamed inadequate testing and procedures, identifying what experts saw as a growing risk at a time when the U.S. economy was becoming increasingly reliant on burning, liquefying, shipping and selling natural gas.

“There are very serious and unique risks for LNG above and beyond other forms of transporting hydrocarbons due to its high pressure and density,” said Hailey Duncan, a policy adviser at the watchdog group Pipeline Safety Trust. “These risks are especially concerning when a facility is placed near people.”

The Texas LNG terminal’s emergency plan was not “adequate,” environmentalists and community activists complained after the accident.

At least the facility had a federally approved emergency plan.

Here in Puerto Rico, a politically connected natural gas company from New York turned a tanker into a makeshift LNG port in the center of a hurricane-prone metropolis — and, perhaps counterintuitively, insisted to regulators that the improvised import terminal actually meant the whole operation should be free to skip the usual federal safety steps.

New Fortress Energy built its LNG terminal without the required federal permits. Federal regulators later ordered the company to retroactively go through the permitting process, but exempted the project from holding public hearings and allowed the facility to continue operating in the meantime without an approved emergency response plan.

Despite eased requirements, New Fortress has yet to submit a finalized emergency plan and has repeatedly warned investors it may not be able to secure approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Last month, the company said its heavily redacted draft proposal was still under review by local emergency authorities. An updated version is due by the end of November.

In the meantime, however, New Fortress is looking to bring in bigger vessels with even larger shipments of gas, despite a warning in September from the U.S. Coast Guard that the company is bringing in boats too large for San Juan Bay.

New Fortress did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The saga highlights Puerto Rico’s haphazard transition away from petroleum, and illustrates the degree to which voters have been cut out of decisions that lock an already impoverished and deeply indebted island into an energy system that depends on regular imports of a globally traded, planet-heating fuel that’s prone to price shocks.

“It really seems like Puerto Rico is being exploited by New Fortress,” said Cathy Kunkel, an energy researcher based in San Juan who works for the watchdog Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “This is very transparently a push for more natural gas.”
‘Regulatory Gaps’ Haunt All Sides More at .....

A Ship Floating In Puerto Rico Could Become A Full-On Nightmare Gas disasters are the rise, and an import terminal in densely populated San Juan is operating without federal permits.

Scores of families sheltering outside Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital say they have survived a string of Israeli strikes on the compound and feel trapped with nowhere to go. Palestinians in the courtyard of Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah, central Gaza, after the deadly attack on Monday. Credit...Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press By Bilal Shbair and Erika Solomon = This was not the first time that displaced Gazans camping on the grounds of Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital awoke to Israeli strikes on the place where they were trying to find safety. But Monday’s strike overshadowed any they had survived before: flames jumping from tent to tent, shrieks of agony and bodies so charred they were unrecognizable.

“It is like living inside a recurring nightmare. Every time we sleep, we wake up to this same scenario of tents struck, people screaming,” said Mahmoud Wadi, a 20-year-old whose extended family had been living on the hospital grounds for months.

Mr. Wadi said this was the seventh strike on the hospital his family had witnessed since setting up a tent outside the facility. This time, instead of awakening in a daze to the sight of smoke rising from one spot in the camp, the heat of flames was everywhere, he said. He saw bodies “scorched and black, like giant lumps of coal.”

The Wadi family is one of scores of families that have set up camp in the parking lot of the compound, hoping that international laws prohibiting attacks on hospitals made the area a safe place to shelter. Instead, these families say, they have survived repeated strikes on the hospital. The latest attack, shortly after 1 a.m. on Monday, triggered a fire that set the camp ablaze.

The Israeli military said in a statement posted to social media that it had been targeting a Hamas command center located near the hospital. The fire that erupted afterward was likely caused by secondary explosions, it said.

Survivors interviewed amid the smoldering remains of the camp told The New York Times that the fast-moving fire had been fueled by the explosions of families’ cooking gas canisters and flames that fed off their plastic tents.

“The most difficult scene you can experience is seeing your neighbors burning alive and not being able to do anything to rescue them,” said Abed Musleh, a 25-year-old who fled northern Gaza and was sheltering in a tent in the parking lot with his wife, two children, and his four sisters. He estimated the fire burned at least 30 tents. Residents scrambled to find any buckets not burned in the blaze to try and help rescuers put out the fire.

The Palestinian health authority said four people died and over a dozen were injured, but that the death toll would likely rise. Later ,,,,

Oct. 14, 2024

Survivors of Gaza Hospital Blaze Say They Are Living a ‘Recurring Nightmare’ (Gift Article) Scores of families sheltering outside Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital say they have survived a string of Israeli strikes on the compound and feel trapped with nowhere to go.