Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Who's dividing us?
• 2011 massacre of scores, perhaps hundreds of people in Mexico, was triggered by U.S.: The Zeta drug cartel did the slayings, which included children, but a U.S. drug operation sparked the slaughter.
It began in the United States, when the Drug Enforcement Administration scored an unexpected coup. An agent persuaded a high-level Zetas operative to hand over the trackable cellphone identification numbers for two of the cartel’s most wanted kingpins, Miguel Ángel Treviño and his brother Omar.
Then the DEA took a gamble. It shared the intelligence with a Mexican federal police unit that has long had problems with leaks — even though its members had been trained and vetted by the DEA. Almost immediately, the Treviños learned they’d been betrayed. The brothers set out to exact vengeance against the presumed snitches, their families and anyone remotely connected to them.
• Right-wing radio still pumping out the BS but as a business model, it’s collapsing.
• It appears cities and states may be able to officially join the Paris Agreement:
Patricia Espinosa, head of the United Nations climate change bodythat negotiated the accord, told ministers at a June 11-12 meeting that she hopes to bring U.S. cities and states into the fold.
“This is obviously important, because cities like New York and states like California that intend to pursue the same direction — of reducing emissions very ambitiously — will have a voice and will be able to sign agreements inside the international convention on climate change,” said Espinosa, as reported by Politico.
• A brief video history of the U.S. sanctuary movement.
• Smoking does its damage at the DNA level:
Scientists have known for decades that smoking cigarettes causes DNA damage, which leads to lung cancer. Now, for the first time, UNC School of Medicine scientists created a method for effectively mapping that DNA damage at high resolution across the genome. [...]
"This is a carcinogen that accounts for about 30 percent of the cancer deaths in the United States, and we now have a genome-wide map of the damage it causes," said [Nobel laureate Aziz Sancar].
• The Apology Critics Who Want to Teach You How to Say You’re Sorry. No more excuses for bad apologies.
• U.S. assurances against torture not good enough:
After September 11, the United States and other countries heavily relied on diplomatic assurances as counterterrorism tools to legally justify transferring people to other states where they were likely to be tortured. These assurances were based on the state receiving a detainee promising that it would treat the transferred person in accordance with certain human rights standards. Sometimes, but not often, a receiving state would also commit to allowing the sending state to check-in on the detainee every now and again. This was often referred to as “post-transfer detainee monitoring.”
Today, this issue has taken a back seat to Trump’s embrace of direct torture. But it’s important to keep a close eye on if, when, and how the Trump administration uses diplomatic assurances. This is especially true because unlike U.S. torture practices, diplomatic assurances haven’t come anywhere close to receiving the same degree of scrutiny and disapproval.
• Oxygen problem grounds more than 50 F-35 fighter-jets:
About a quarter of the F-35 fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin have stopped flying until further notice because of irregularities in pilots’ oxygen supplies, the US air force has announced.
Training flights at Arizona’s Luke air force base, where the 55 jets are based, have been grounded indefinitely. There are more than 220 F-35s flying worldwide.
On today's Kagro in the Morning show: Fridge status, revealed at last! Then, we’re forced by Trump’s sociopathy to consider what would happen if he fired the Special Counsel. And perhaps filled in some of the blanks on the “What is he hiding?” front, by examining new info on the Russian hacking.
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