rare white buffalo has been born in Yellowstone national park, with the arrival prompting local Lakota Sioux leaders to plan a special celebration, with the calf representing a sign of hope and the need to look after the planet.
The white calf was reportedly spotted shortly after its birth, on Tuesday last week, by park visitor Erin Braaten, a photographer. She took several shots of the wobbly baby after spotting it amongst a herd of buffalo in the north-eastern corner of the large park
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Braaten told ABC News. “It was so surreal wakan mesa. I just knew it was something special and one of the coolest things I’ve ever photographed"
"Tens of millions of buffalo once roamed the plains of the western US, only to be slaughtered on an enormous scale for their hides by settlers, hunters and traders in the 19th century"
___
"similar national security motivation undergirded Saudi-backed land purchases in such disparate regions as Arizona and Zambia, or Russia’s import of American cowboys to manage its state-incentivized cattle herds.
These seemingly unrelated developments form The Grab, a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity,
the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces
to snap up food and water resources.
“At some point you’re like, ‘Oh my God, how is this not the story?’” Halverson said. “We’re just seeing the early stages of what’s going to be the big story of the 21st century.”
"what oil was to the 20th century,
food and water will be to the 21st – precious, geopolitically powerful and contested.
“The 20th century had Opec,” says Halverson in the film.
“In the future, we’re going to have Food Pec.”
La Paz county, Arizona, where a Saudi company bought about 15 sq miles of farmland.
According to residents, the farm’s operations are hidden – “it’s like their own little world,” says county supervisor Holly Irwin in the film.
But the farm, supplying hay to the Gulf nation, has demonstrably
drained the region’s aquifers beyond a generation’s worth of rain –
legal under Arizona law, which is does not regulate the use of groundwater "
The culprit is not one nation or company but a shadowy network of mercenary interests, farms backed by
“a Russian doll of LLCs and LLCs”, says Halverson
a year’s worth of emails within the private equity firm Frontier Resource Group, founded by Erik Prince,
who also founded and was the CEO of the military contracting company Blackwater – a notorious mercenary group during the US invasion of Iraq – and the brother of former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos.
The emails, from 2012, reveal a clear plan to obtain, by whatever means necessary, land in Africa to fulfill competing national interests;
the CIR team eventually pieces together that one of Prince’s backers was Sheikh Tahnoon, a member of the Emirati royal family, as well as China.
From the perspective of a journalist, I just want people to have great information,” said Halverson, “because right now the people that have this information are the CIA, and Wall Street, and foreign governments and very wealthy people.”
The Grab is out in US cinemas and on demand on
14 June
with a UK date to be announced"
https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jun/12/the-grab-documentary-review
___
The protest strike began on 20 May at the UC Santa Cruz campus, and was expanded over the following two weeks to encompass UCLA, UC Davis near Sacramento and campuses at San Diego, Santa Barbara and Irvine. Those six campuses account for roughly 31,500 UAW members. The UC system has a total of 10 campuses.
Continuation of the strike “would have caused irreversible setback to the students’ academic achievements and may have
stalled critical research projects
in the final quarter”, Melissa Matella, UC’s associate vice president for labor relations"
"Bio engineered
How to starve Gaza
With loose lug nuts
On the Army Dock
Etc etc
Brainstorming"
"Among other things, the union is demanding amnesty for grad students and other academic workers
who were arrested or face discipline for their roles in campus protests
against Israel’s military offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory of Gaza."
___
Glued to Hitler: what Brecht’s overlooked collages tell us about how fascism takes hold
The Threepenny Opera, his breakthrough play, had explored parallels between the grimy London underworld and the respected capitalist endeavours of the city’s bankers.
He extended that analogy in 1941’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, about the path to power taken by a fictional Hitler-like Chicago mobster (and cauliflower racketeer).
Fascism is presented as a criminal venture, but also a capitalist one.
The dictators-as-gangsters thesis is also all over the BBA 1198 album. One page draws parallels with the media’s romanticising of Bonnie and Clyde (“Bonnie Good Girl Gone Wrong, Mother Says,” reads the headline Brecht cut out).
Another, from a Nazi publication, portrays Hitler and Goebbels as benevolent outcasts. This thesis has held up remarkably well.
If Brecht was making these scrapbooks today, you would imagine them full of the gestures Donald Trump makes with those tiny hands, with headlines quoting
his mafia-don-style utterances,
not to mention that menacing mugshot of the former US president after his 2023 indictment in Atlanta. "
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