July 1 Update: France's Coming Police Riot; Agricultural Traders Warn of 'Food Wars'; Air Freight Emissions; LA Newsroom Catches Calif. AG Red-Handed; Israel's War on Journalism; AZ Prosecutors Mull Charges for Big Oil Over 400+ Heat Deaths

A partially collapsed bridge in Cevio, Switzlerand, where torrential rains and meltwater from a partially collapsed glacier unleashed torrents of water on numerous communities over the weekend.

Oh it's bad. It's definitely worse than you thought. Forget for a moment about the Neo-Nixonian Supreme Court effectively declaring presidents to be above the law for any 'official act' committed in office (killing your own Attorney General, ordering members of Congress to be held without charge, slaughtering civilians at home or abroad), or Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National's resounding victory in the first round of France's parliamentary elections on Sunday.

It's the pelting rains that have inundated more than 300,000 square kilometers (that's right) of China's Yangtze River Basin at the rate of over 100 millimeters per hour, and both sides of the Alps, causing massive damage in Zermatt yet again, and Piedmont on the Italian side. It's the unprecedented category 3 Hurricane Beryl passing over the West Indies right now, the earliest storm of its strength ever recorded in the Atlantic. Climate change is here, it's accelerating, and while some governments are making real progress towards a post-fossil fuels economy, there is too much inaction and too much magical thinking by Neo-Fascist parties that seem to be finding traction with head-in-the-sand polices.

All quiet on the Western Front over here for now: several pieces on a slow boil right now, including a forthcoming subscribers-only post I've had in my back packet for some time. Summer got off to a helter-skelter start without even figuring in the simultaneous European/South American championships, and July won't see a letup. I'm going to write a bit on Oakland's own metastasizing corruption scandal later this week: there's far too much to this to devote to a mere paragraph or two.

Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-With an extreme right power grab looking ever more likely in France with every passing day, it's imperative to understand precisely how Marine Le Pen's Neo-Fascist party plans to govern. Border security and policing have been key planks of the RN's successful appeal to 'La France Profonde' (the equivalent phrase is 'Flyover Country' in the United States), and Mediapart dives into the likely changes an RN government would make to French law enforcement: pre-emptive detention, a free pass to proscribed Far Right extremists like the GUD (see last week's update) and carte blanche to racially profile. That's what can happen with a centralized national police apparatus, which has long been drifting towards open sympathy and collaboration with white supremacists and Neo-Fascists. Plus ca change...

-Energy, water and food security are three essential prongs to a stable country, region and world. The rapidly heating climate, shifting rainfall patterns and disruptions to commodity supply caused by conflict (for instance, Russia's invasion of Ukraine caused massive disruption in the world's wheat supply) are leading to greater competition for foodstuffs. Analysts have been sounding the alarm bell about the increased potential for 'food wars,' with one major trader claiming last month that protectionist food policies aimed at shoring up domestic supplies have triggered serious price inflation. However, this disruption is expected to be a blip compared to the expected decrease in crop yields if the current trajectory of increased carbon emissions does not change.

-Since 2019, air freight emissions have risen by a quarter thanks to a surge in demand for consumer goods during the Covid-19 pandemic, a drop-off in passenger flights that once hauled surplus cargo in their holds, and the inexorable rise of e-commerce. Your pet food deliveries have a serious footprint: please shop locally and at brick-and-mortar stores whenever you're able.

-As I've noted previously, more journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 2023 by the Israeli military than the well (and rightly) publicized murders of Mexican reporters since that country's War On Drugs went into overdrive back in 2006. Hundreds of American reporters from outlets around the country condemned this state of affairs last Fall, many of whom were promptly disciplined by their newsroom leaders for showing solidarity with their Palestinian colleagues. Last week, the Paris-based newsroom Forbidden Stories, which spearheaded 2022's groundbreaking Pegasus Project about Israeli surveillance contractor NSO Group, ran a joint investigation with a dozen other newsrooms detailing the Israeli military's systematic targeting of reporters with lethal force, to ensure they can control not only the public narrative about the genocide in Gaza, but also which images are even produced about the conflict.

-In an auspicious act that raised eyebrows throughout California earlier this Spring, Attorney General Rob Bonta brought felony charges against a key deputy of Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon for allegedly including confidential personnel records of sheriff's deputies in the LADA's database of law enforcement officials with serious credibility or misconduct issues that could impact the veracity of their court testimony. The Los Angeles Public Press intervened in court to unseal the affidavit for Diana Teran's arrest, which appears to undermine the California Attorney General's case against her: at least two of the LASD deputies disclosed their own personnel histories in lawsuits filed roughly a decade ago. There's far more to this case than meets the eye: disgraced former LA Sheriff Alex Villanueva filed the initial complaint against Teran in apparent retaliation for her work on a separate oversight agency examining LASD's 'checkered' past (deputy gangs, anyone?), and he appears to have made some key allies in the California Department of Justice.

-Some intriguing headlines out of Arizona: Maricopa County prosecutors are mulling over legal theories that might result in criminal charges for oil companies. The Guardian obtained a memorandum from the prosecutor's office regarding liability for last summer's blistering heat wave in Phoenix, when a record 403 people died as a direct result of the 31-day stretch when the temperature exceeded 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Can't stick your head in the stand when it'll scald you skin right off, eh?

BOOK - July means its time for beach reads: either the meaty, attention consuming nonfiction tomes that you've put off until sun, sand and vacation mean you'll have the time to concentrate, or novels which provide the sort of distraction and escape that make time off worthwhile. Jean-Patrick Manchette's compact thriller Nada (1972) ticked that latter box for me: the saga of a post-1968 hard left militant cell seeking to reignite the political fervor of their golden years by kidnapping the American ambassador.

It's fast, cynical, wonderfully translated and textured enough to come away with a solid understanding of the Spanish Civil War's legacy in France, the frustrations of recently radicalized French youth, the strains of Anarchism that swirled around the Situationists and other contemporary hard-left European movements of the epoch, and the dead-ender syndrome that characterized the European student left's trajectory in the 1970s.

FILM - 'Silence of the Lambs' was not the first film to introduce the character of psychotic, macabre cannibal Hannibal Lecter to the world. That honor goes to Michael Mann's atmospheric - and bewilderingly underappreciated - classic Manhunter (1986), starring William Petersen as a tortured former FBI profiler who comes out of retirement to track down another serial killer known as the 'tooth fairy.'

Arguably Petersen's best performance of the decade, Manhunter also serves as an art project of sorts, with the ever-present 'synthwave' soundtrack dictating the emotional mood and Mann's filter-heavy cinematography highlighting the best tendencies of a director then on top of the world, with the ubiquitous Miami Vice series dominating network television and providing an audition platform of sorts for several actors who appeared in this film.

MUSIC - Some weeks, I don't listen to much music aside from the radio for sheer background noise. That's been the case recently, but I did catch an excellent podcast examining the highly questionable use of facial recognition technology by German podcasters and the 'open source investigations' nonprofit Bellingcat (journalists? something else? you be the judge) to track down Danielle Klette, a fugitive, sexagenarian member of the defunct Red Army Fraktione in Berlin this February. Should reporters use facial recognition software in their own work? Did Klette pose an actual threat to public safety that warranted the use of questionable and invasive technology to track her down and tear apart her new life for a past she'd left behind decades ago? The BBC's Assignment podcast probes these issues thoroughly, in addition to questions about whether German authorities should have access to technology that is in use widely throughout the world - and approriately reviled