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Alex Lawson: Senate Nearing Critical Stage of Negotiating Historic Medicare Expansion; James Early: Cuba’s Economic Crisis Provokes Protests and U.S. Threats; Rob Ritchie: Ranked Choice Voting Passes Major Test in New York City Primary; Bob Nixon: This Week’s Under-reported News Summary.

Locating the source of racist bias and violence in “American communities,” with no mention of powerful politicians or powerful media, is a neat way to sidestep the role of systemic, structural racism, and imply that bias or “hate” is an individual, emotional issue, rather than one we can and should address together, across community, as a society. Add in media’s frequent prescription of law enforcement as the primary response, and you have what a large number of Asian Americans are calling a problem presenting itself as a solution, and not a way forward that actually makes them safer.

Brazil's Amazon rain forests have been widely recognized by climate scientists as a major carbon-absorber. However, with Brazil's hard-right industrialization program in high gear, those forests are being destroyed and replaced with vast open fields of chemical-based agriculture. Skidmore University Professor Kristofer Covey explains. The next question: when (if not already) will we reach the "tipping point"?

Comedy is often that teaspoon of sugar that helps the medicine go down. It can speak truth, it can educate, it can convince while making people laugh, often at themselves. It has enormous power of persuasion. This week we feature two amazing women Comediennes discussing the power of comedy as resistance, as a mechanism for change, as a way to speak truth, perhaps with a little sugar to make that truth go down. Noam Shuster is an Israeli who grew up in a unique village that is equally part Israeli and part Palestinian which shaped her as a resister. Mayoon Zayid is Palestinian/American, who spent her summers in Palestine with her grandparents where she nurtured her strong Palestinian identity. This forum was sponsored by the Foundation for Middle East peace. Foundation President, Laura Friedman, and Rebecca Abou Chedid join the conversation.

Hale was named as the source of several documents that revealed grave government wrong-doing, much related to the Obama administration’s expansion of the drone war and other counterterrorism programs that lacked adequate oversight and have brought about as yet unknown numbers of civilian deaths abroad. One document published in the Intercept in 2014 revealed that most of the individuals in the government’s terror suspect database had no affiliation with any terror group.

People in the US should demand that the government abandon the economic blockade and allow Cuban citizens and their government to address and resolve their own internal disputes within the frameworks and protocols established by the community of nations that overwhelmingly vote against the blockade.

Lab leak (NOT animal-to-human transmission) has finally been scientifically proven. The "smoking gun" is the virus itself! Its genetic structure reveals all. Professors Richard Muller and Steven Quay explain this in thorough detail, along with five other methods.