WZBC 90.3 FM Newton

Nicolai Petro: Rhetoric Over Ukraine Heats Up as Cracks Appear in NATO Alliance; Marge Baker: Biden Set to Fulfill His Historic Pledge to Nominate a Black Woman to Supreme Court; Russell Chisholm: Mountain Valley Pipeline Opponents Buoyed as Federal Court Vacates Critical Permits; Bob Nixon: This Week’s Under-reported News Summary.

A New York Times opinion piece by editorial board member Jesse Wegman says that debunking Republicans’ baseless, self-serving claims of voter fraud “was always a fool’s game,” because “the professional vote-fraud crusaders are not in the fact business.” The suggestion seems to be that even addressing such claims is “giving them oxygen.” (We rejected the 2nd part of this posting, on cryptocurrency, because of the seriously opaque diction of the show's "expert.")

In this special episode of 9/11 Free Fall, Angle and Walter join Steele to critique a recent presentation on the World Trade Center building failures by Najib Abboud, a managing principal at the engineering consulting firm Thornton Tomasetti. Before his former company, Weidlinger Associates, merged with Thornton Tomasetti in 2015, Abboud led Weidlinger’s studies into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 as part of the litigation efforts of developer Larry Silverstein. In this presentation, Abboud puts forth Weidlinger’s theory that the Twin Towers collapsed due to heat-induced failure of the core columns. This theory differs significantly from NIST’s theory that the perimeter columns failed first, as a result of being pulled inward by heat-induced sagging of the floor trusses.

Emma Dabiri converses with David Wengrow. The British Library held a celebration of ideas in the book by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They said: The Dawn of Everything challenges our assumptions about the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy and slavery and, in doing this … offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom and new ways of organizing society. David Wengrow co-authored the book with the late David Graeber.

We have been hearing more and more lately about the so-called shifting Palestinian narrative. Today, three speakers from the Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Shabaka, explore the depth and breadth of the process and the meaning of the shifting narrative in the era of Intersectionality.

United States plans to weaken Russia by imposing punishing sanctions and bringing world condemnation on Moscow depend on Washington’s hysteria about a Russian invasion of Ukraine actually coming true. ...

Tremblay and Gagnon are concerned about, and rebut, the horribly distorted misinformation and war promotion found now on all mainstream media, including NPR. Community Church of Boston ran this event. The full 2-hour video, which includes music, lots of chatter, and Q&A, is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LHEzynXfOc .

The George W. Bush administration used the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to launch his so-called “Global War on Terror.” Under the guise of fighting terrorism, Bush illegally invaded two countries, instituted an unlawful dragnet of Arab men and boys in the United States, and opened a sinister prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in January 2002. Nearly 800 men and boys were sent to Guantanamo, where many of them were subjected to torture and cruel treatment, and held indefinitely – many without charges, in violation of US and international law. Much of this mistreatment was documented in the “Guantanamo Files,” 779 secret files published in 2011 by WikiLeaks. It was documented as well in the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The 6,700-page report remains secret but the 499-page executive summary was published in 2014. By locating the prison in Cuba, Bush sought to preclude any judicial review of the detention of the detainees. ...