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Dean Baker: Corporate Media’s Dishonest Coverage of Inflation Blames Biden; Jamal Abdi: Talks to Restore Iran Nuclear Deal Face Hostile Israel and GOP; Nancy Alderman: Growth of Recreational Wood Burning Poses Risk to Human Health; Bob Nixon: This Week’s Under-reported News Summary.

When Xiomara Castro won a historic victory in Honduras last month—the country’s first woman president, winning with the most votes in history, in a decisive rebuke to the many-years dominant National Party ...

Luis Angel Reyes Savalza, an immigration attorney, himself undocumented and who was arrested for demanding the release of people in state prisons and immigration jails, calling the situation really alarming, rips the Democratic Party for 35 years of failed promises, and now excluding a path to citizenship from the Budget Reconciliation Bill and leaving 11 million undocumented immigrants at risk of deportation.

The Arctic is a land of ice and snow. Except with climate change, that is tipping toward more rain than snow. This is a shocking development with very big impacts, and of course, it is coming faster than anyone expected. Younger listeners will live to see the new wetter Arctic. Michelle McCrystall is a Canadian Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. She is with the Centre for Earth Observation Science, at the University of Manitoba. Michelle is lead author of the new study “New climate models reveal faster and larger increases in Arctic precipitation than previously projected”. It was published November 30, 2021 in the journal Nature Communications.

"At this time of year we traditionally reflect upon our blessings and forgive those who have trespassed against us. But we’ve been trying that for millennia, and the results have been unsatisfactory. So let’s discard the accumulated wisdom of all humanity’s spiritual traditions and focus our mental energy instead on how much we dislike various awful people around us. Merry Christmas."

Hixson’s forthcoming book, Architects of Repression: How Israel and its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy, published by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in 2021, followed up a previous study entitled Israel’s Armor:The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2019). These richly researched studies have established Hixson as a leading expert on the Israel lobby ...

The most important battle for press freedom of our time is how Hedges frames the fight we are engaged in. Yet who would know from the dismal news coverage of Washington's more than 10 year campaign to get its hands on Julian. The illegitimate state, now but agent of global corporations is out to crush anyone who tells the truth and has the documentation to back up their exposure of Washington's criminality and war crimes. Washington is set on destroying Julian, psychologically and or physically since it would be sticky to drone him, an act which Wikileaks has revealed it is quite capable of. Text of Hedges comments: https://scheerpost.com/2021/06/11/chris-hedges-julian-assange-and-the-collapse-of-the-rule-of-law/ .

With every new climate-induced disaster, we hear from politicians and government officials that “nobody expected it.” Samantha Montano calls BS on that tired refrain. Montano, our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, is a professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy and the author of Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis. If we are to relieve suffering, Montano says, we must focus larger portions of our resources on disaster management and learn how to better mitigate all but certain future disasters. She makes it clear that planning agencies like FEMA, first responders like firefighters, and disaster cleanup technologists will be far more important in surviving the consequences of climate change than splashy international summits like COP26.

[Repeated from last week.] We’re all going to die. Our guest, Helen Caldicott, is founder and president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, founder of Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament, Co-Leader of the 1980 Nuclear Freeze Voter Initiative Campaign, founder of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute (now called Beyond Nuclear), founder of the Helen Caldicott Foundation, and initiator of the movement against French atmospheric tests in Australia and New Zealand. Her website is at http://HelenCaldicott.com She is also a member of the Advisory Board of World BEYOND War and will be hosting an online book club with her book Sleepwalking to Armageddon that you can sign up for at http://worldbeyondwar.org/bookclubs .