Citing ‘ethnic cleansing,’ U.K. bars imports from Israeli West Bank settlements: Numerous other European countries immediately pledged support for the effort, which prompted warnings from the United States. - "In a joint statement Tuesday, the foreign ministers of Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden framed the trade ban and sanctions as a bid to salvage hopes for a two-state solution, with Israel and a Palestinian state as autonomous neighbors. While acknowledging Israel’s right to defend itself after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas fighters from Gaza, they called for immediate action by Israeli officials to control settler violence in the West Bank."
The War for the Rio Grande - "Before the river makes it even twenty miles from its headwaters, it’s pooled behind an earthen dam, into the Rio Grande Reservoir. This reservoir, like all the others along the river, was built for agriculture; in this case, it allowed growers in Colorado to plant thousands of hectares of alfalfa, hay, and potatoes. Much of the alfalfa harvested in the U.S. is shipped overseas to support massive cattle herds in countries including Japan and Saudi Arabia.
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"Hydrologists say rivers have memory—when they’re full, they stay full; once they’re dry, they stay dry. The same is true of reservoirs. When bodies of water diminish, the lack of cool depths accelerates rates of evaporation, and salts and sediment build up.
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"The consensus among growers in Texas was that Mexico was the true villain. Over the past three decades, agricultural water use has decreased in every American state that the Rio Grande touches. There’s one place where it has gone up.
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"Yet he also knew there was plenty of blame to go around. In 2024 he and other lobbyists pushed the federal government to complete a study of tributary health on the American side of the border, where Texas rivers like the Pecos and Devils empty into the Rio Grande. Preliminary data from the study found that the amount of water flowing into Amistad and Falcon from U.S. sources had collapsed by a stunning 33 percent."
Mexico says US agents killed in crash weren't permitted to operate there [ed. note: from April]
Oil executives just accidentally exposed the industry’s greatest weakness: To keep drilling, Big Oil needs permission to dump treated fracking wastewater into rivers and onto cropland. We don’t have to give it to them. - "Republican state Senator Tan Parker was even more blunt. If they didn’t approve permits to dump treated fracking wastewater onto crops and into rivers, he said, 'we’re going to find ourselves in two or three years with a gun to our head.'
"Without meaning to, Parker had just told his opponents exactly where to apply pressure."
Why Doesn’t the US Tax Its Big Corporations More?: The Myth of “Global Tax Competitiveness” - "Corporate tax is not just a business cost to be minimized but a necessity for funding the essential public goods that are the prerequisite of an attractive investment climate."
The IRS slashed its staff. One result? More taxes going uncollected
The DSA’s Problem Isn’t ‘Media Training’: Authoritarian extremists are speaking for American socialists, and a lot of people don’t like what they say. - "The idea that the DSA's troubles on prime-time television are a technical matter solvable by the right training is surely comforting, but it is also wrong. The group has a bigger problem: It is led by unpractical extremists whose views are a far cry from those that its electorally successful figures, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, espouse.
"This disconnect is partly explained by a sharp division within the DSA. One wing engages in mass politics and includes AOC, Mamdani, and other socialists committed to democratic principles. The other wing is sectarian and extremist: It evinces little commitment to democracy and includes open admirers of Hamas, the Iranian regime, and historical dictators such as Mao Zedong. If the interviews with the DSA's co-chairs were embarrassing, that's a result not of a lackluster media performance but of the actual positions the group has embraced.
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"This pro-left-authoritarian orientation explains why DSA electoral observers shamefully reported no fraud when they were dispatched to monitor the electoral sham organized by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2024. Those results were so bogus that even the left-wing governments of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay couldn't accept them. Yet at a DSA session on the subject, a pro-Maduro organization's assessment that Venezuela's electoral system was 'one of the very best in the world' was presented as fact, as was the false claim that Venezuela's main opposition candidates were 'fascist.'"
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