Justice

The corporate media have been bashing the Cuban government in response to the recent protests in Cuba, while President Joe Biden claims, “We stand with the Cuban people.” But they ignore or minimize the leading cause of economic suffering in Cuba: the U.S.’s illegal and punishing economic blockade that Biden has left in place. Every U.S. president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has maintained the blockade against Cuba. Although former President Barack Obama was constrained by the 1996 Helms-Burton Act from completely lifting the blockade — which is now exclusively within the power of Congress — he took several steps to ease its effects on the Cuban people.

“If matters continue as they are,” I wrote on July 6 about vaccinations and the Delta variant of COVID, “a bright new line will be drawn between ‘Two Americas’: The Vaccinated vs. the Unvaccinated.” The Wall Street Journal this morning would seem to agree: “The Delta variant is hardening a divide between people who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 and those who aren’t, prompting hospitals to brace for new case surges and health authorities to redouble vaccination efforts. Now the most common strain in the U.S., Delta is spreading as public life resumes at restaurants, sporting events and other public settings across the country.”

The remains of nine Indigenous children were buried by the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota after being transferred back from the former Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where the children were forcibly sent over 140 years ago. Carlisle was the first government boarding school off reservation land, and it set the standard for other schools with its motto, “Kill the Indian,

With billionaire Jeff Bezos set to take flight into space Tuesday aboard an unpiloted Blue Origin rocket, the humanitarian group Oxfam International blasted the world’s richest man as the avatar of a system that allows a handful of people accumulate enough wealth to flee the planet amid widespread suffering on an increasingly polluted, warming, and pandemic-ravaged Earth. “We’ve now reached stratospheric inequality,” Oxfam’s Deepak Xavier said in a statement Monday. “Billionaires burning into space, away from a world of pandemic, climate change, and starvation.”

NSO Group, a private Israeli firm that sells surveillance technology to governments worldwide, insists that its Pegasus spyware is used only to “investigate terrorism and crime.” Leaked data, however, reveals that the company’s hacking tool “has been used to facilitate human rights violations around the world on a massive scale.” That’s according to an investigative report published Sunday by the Pegasus Project, a media consortium of more than 80 journalists from 17 news outlets in 10 countries. The collaborative endeavor was coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media nonprofit, with technical assistance from Amnesty International, which conducted “cutting-edge forensic tests” on smartphones to identify traces of the military-grade spyware.

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. His company was building a dam that threatened the traditional lands and water sources of the Indigenous Lenca people. For years, Cáceres and her organization, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, or COPINH, had led the struggle to halt that project. It turned out, however, that Cáceres’s international recognition — she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 — couldn’t protect her from becoming one of the dozens of Latin American Indigenous and environmental activists killed annually.

Turning Point USA, the conservative student organization led by Charlie Kirk, kicks off its summer “Student Action Summit” on Saturday morning in Tampa. But the group now faces faces a battle to ward off white nationalists who hope to infiltrate the gathering, whose headliners include Donald Trump Jr. and former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Far-right youth activist Nicholas Fuentes hopes to lead a group of his white nationalist supporters, known as the “groyper army,” into the Tampa conference, despite TPUSA organizers’ attempts to ban Fuentes and his followers After Fuentes’ attempts to derail or disrupt the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event last weekend in Dallas, TPUSA staffers have begun to connect the dots on “groypers” who had previously been invited to the Tampa conference, and are informing them they’re not welcome.

The time has come for Democrats in Congress to debate the future of the fossil fuel industry as they write sweeping climate legislation that could define President Joe Biden’s legacy. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), a conservative Democrat and a key vote in the Senate, drew a line in the sand this week, telling fellow Democrats and media outlets that eliminating fossil fuels is off the table. Instead of phasing out fossil fuels and investing heavily in cleaner energy sources such as wind and solar, Manchin and his allies in the Senate are pushing a plan to invest billions of federal tax dollars into nuclear energy and controversial technologies such as “carbon capture” that would allow industrial polluters to continue extracting and burning fossil fuels for years to come.

Professor Akwugo EmejuluBlack Female Professors Forum “Britain demands that I give up my back talk and ‘know my place,’” sociologist Akwugo Emejulu tells me. “I’ve been told to shut up, directly or indirectly, more times than you would imagine. But how could I when there’s so much to be said, plainly and without artifice?” In her work, Emejulu — a Black feminist scholar at the University of Warwick in England — provides us with an unfiltered look at the racism and oppression faced by Black British women across significant domains of unequal employment, housing and health care, especially within the context of COVID-19. She documents how Black women’s suffering is exponentially increased relative to such crises as austerity in the U.K. And Emejulu also discusses the shared global dimensions of anti-Black racism vis-à-vis Black women.

Jennifer Weisselberg, the former daughter-in-law to the Trump Organization’s Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg, reportedly told investigators last month that she and her now-ex-husband had received perks in lieu of compensation from the company, a promise that was made to the couple directly by former President Donald Trump himself, years before he ran for office. The comments from Jennifer Weisselberg, first reported on by The Daily Beast, would implicate Trump in a tax-avoidance scheme by his company to compensate workers without having to pay taxes on their incomes. Weisselberg, who has spoken to investigators on multiple occasions, reportedly gave statements on June 25 to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the New York State Attorney General’s office, who asked whether Trump was involved in the maneuver to avoid paying taxes. Weisselberg answered that he was.