“U.S. President Donald Trump is not a fan of sharks or the ocean. From gutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to seeking the expansion of offshore oil drilling and deep-sea mining while attacking wind energy, his view of our public seas is that they’ll make a good gas station and garbage dump. And, this view is reflected in his major legacy bill recently passed into law by the MAGA majority in Congress. But there’s been little discussion about how this bill will impact our public seas. So, we (Vicki Nichols Goldman and myself) spoke with George Leonard, former chief scientist with the Ocean Conservancy and an ocean policy consultant about what’s going on.” (07/31/25)
“In recent months, Afghanistan has been hit by what could soon be among the world’s largest forced displacements of people in the 21st century. Nearly 2 million Afghans, primarily living in Iran for years to avoid repression at home, have been pushed back across the border. A total of 5.9 million Afghans could arrive from both Iran and Pakistan by the end of the year, the United Nations projects. What’s more, international aid agencies say they can reach only about 10% of the deportees, a result of the hard-line, ruling Taliban restricting aid flows after taking power nearly four years ago. Yet as this tragedy of mass deportation unfolds – a result of a surge in anti-Afghan attitudes in Iran and Pakistan – thousands of people inside Afghanistan are turning the tables on the Taliban with acts of compassion.” (07/30/25)
“China’s cyberspace regulators on Thursday summoned Nvidia over security concerns that its H20 chips can be tracked and turned off remotely, the Cyberspace Administration of China said on its website. In the meeting, Chinese regulators demanded that the U.S. chip company provide explanations on ‘backdoor safety risks’ of its H20 chips to be sold in China and submit relevant materials, the office said. ‘Cybersecurity is critically important to us. NVIDIA does not have ‘backdoors’ in our chips that would give anyone a remote way to access or control them,’ an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement to AP. It came just about two weeks after the Trump administration lifted the block on the computing chips and allowed Nvidia to resume sales of H20 chips to the Chinese market. Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, made the announcement with fanfare when he was in Beijing earlier this month.” (07/31/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“I will probably spend the foreseeable future periodically reminding the world that when everyone was angry at Israel for starving children in Gaza, Israel’s apologists spent days loudly proclaiming that no, they were actually just starving sick children. As their defense they said this. They actually believed this helped their case. Let me back up a bit. On Wednesday, The New York Times posted an editor’s note on an article it had published the previous Friday which included a horrifying photo of an emaciated child named Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq. Caving to pressure from Zionists and influence ops like the Israeli propaganda outlet HonestReporting, the Times went out of its way to clarify that al-Mutawaq ‘had pre-existing health problems’, which Israel apologists instantly and predictably spun as proof that the media are lying about Israel starving Gaza.” (07/31/25)
“Beds of clams, mats of bacteria that look like ice and fields of tube worms – these are just some examples of the strange, extreme life that an expedition to the deepest parts of the ocean has observed, filmed and photographed. Diving in a human-occupied submersible to ocean trenches in the northwest Pacific Ocean, a Chinese-led research team captured pictures of life at depths of more than 9km (5.6miles). The deepest marine vertebrate life filmed before this expedition was at 8,336m — a snailfish that was filmed swimming in a deep ocean trench off the coast of Japan in 2023. These new observations are published in the journal Nature.” (07/31/25)
“Sixteen months before Thomas Jefferson crafted the powerful words that would become our Declaration of Independence, he sat quietly in Richmond’s St. John’s Church, absorbing the oratory of Patrick Henry. Henry’s call, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ ignited a revolutionary spirit that Jefferson would later capture on parchment. As we approach July 4, 2026, America’s 250th birthday, Jefferson’s words resonate with renewed importance: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ These words mark the beginning of our nation. These words inspired men and women, enslaved and free, native and immigrant. These words changed the world forever.” (07/31/25)
“Italy agreed Thursday to a Vatican plan to turn a 430-hectare (1,000-acre) field north of Rome, once the source of controversy between the two, into a vast solar farm that the Holy See hopes will generate enough electricity to meet its needs and turn Vatican City into the world’s first carbon-neutral state. The agreement stipulates that the development of the Santa Maria Galeria site will preserve the agricultural use of the land and minimize the environmental impact on the territory, according to a Vatican statement. Details weren’t released, but the Vatican will be exempt from paying Italian taxes to import the solar panels, but won’t benefit from the financial incentives that Italians enjoy when they go solar. Italy, for its part, can use the field in its accounting for reaching European Union clean energy targets.” (07/31/25)
“Once upon a time, nothing in this world could have convinced me that I would be living through this moment in this America on this planet. As a start, once upon an increasingly distant time, Donald J. Trump as president of the United States would have been inconceivable. Literally beyond conception, even in some wildly dystopian satiric novel about an all-too(un)-American future. I mean, forget anything else, a man who in private life bankrupted six (yes, six!) companies has now been elected president of the United States not just once but twice. You know, the fellow who thinks of those he considers his domestic enemies (and that’s not too strong a word for it), whether Democrats, Republicans, or journalists as nothing short of (and this is the word he uses: ‘evil’).” (07/31/25)
“A US dentist who poisoned his wife has been sentenced to life in prison without parole after a Colorado jury found him guilty of murder and other charges. James Craig, 47, had been having an affair when he plotted to kill his wife Angela Craig in March 2023. After lacing his wife’s protein shakes with arsenic, he gave her a fatal dose of cyanide while she lay ill in hospital, prosecutors said. Prosecutors also argued during a two-week trial that the dentist felt trapped in his marriage but was facing financial troubles and did not want a divorce. Defence lawyers had argued that Angela Craig, who was then 43, died by suicide because she was heartbroken about her husband’s ‘constant’ affairs. However, the Arapahoe County coroner determined that she died as a result of cyanide and tetrahydrozoline, a chemical used in eye drops.” (07/31/25)
“So much for the prophecies of Trumponomics doom: Not only did the US economy grow at a 3% rate in the second quarter, the growth was all in the private sector as the government portion shrank. Meanwhile, ADP reports that private-sector employment rose by 104,000 jobs in July, with annual wages jumping 4.4% — well above the rate of inflation, which also remains markedly lower than the conventional-wisdom crew predicted. That is, growth was half again the consensus forecast for April-June, while July looks like a huge boon for American workers — all as many of President Donald Trump’s policies have only begun to kick in. Trump’s tariffs have neither crashed the economy nor kicked off fresh inflation — though of course those predictions largely came from ‘experts’ who never expected the bane of Bidenflation.” (07/30/25)
