Drusas

With Ukrainian grain again blockaded, the Global South is at the mercy of Moscow’s grain diplomacy.

African leaders have long been reluctant to criticize Russia and now that President Vladimir Putin has killed off a deal to allow Ukraine to export grain, they know they are more dependent than ever on Moscow’s largesse to feed millions of people at risk of going hungry.

Having canceled the pact on Monday, Moscow unleashed four nights of attacks on the Ukrainian ports of Odesa and Chornomorsk — two vital export facilities — damaging the infrastructure of global and Ukrainian traders and destroying 60,000 tons of grain. In the latest assault, on Thursday night, a barrage of Kalibr missiles hit the granaries of an agricultural enterprise in Odesa.

“The decision by Russia to exit the Black Sea Grain Initiative is a stab [in] the back,” tweeted Abraham Korir Sing'Oei, a senior foreign ministry official from Kenya, one of the African countries that has received donations of Russian fertilizer in recent months.

The resulting rise in global food prices “disproportionately impacts countries in the Horn of Africa already impacted by drought,” he added.

Sing'Oei's was a solitary voice, however. Rather than reproaching Moscow, African leaders have remained largely silent as they prepare to attend a summit hosted by Putin in St Petersburg next week. This follows an African mission led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last month to Kyiv and St Petersburg in a bid to broker peace.

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For three years, Patrick Braxton says he has experienced harassment and intimidation after becoming the first Black mayor in Newbern, Alabama.

NEWBERN, Ala. — There’s a power struggle in Newbern, Alabama, and the rural town’s first Black mayor is at war with the previous administration who he says locked him out of Town Hall.

After years of racist harassment and intimidation, Patrick Braxton is fed up, and in a federal civil rights lawsuit he is accusing town officials of conspiring to deny his civil rights and his position because of his race.

“When I first became mayor, [a white woman told me] the town was not ready for a Black mayor,” Braxton recalls.

The town is 85% Black, and 29% of Black people here live below the poverty line.

“What did she mean by the town wasn’t ready for a Black mayor? They, meaning white people?” Capital B asked.

“Yes. No change,” Braxton says.

Decades removed from a seemingly Jim Crow South, white people continue to thwart Black political progress by refusing to allow them to govern themselves or participate in the country’s democracy, several residents told Capital B. While litigation may take months or years to resolve, Braxton and community members are working to organize voter education, registration, and transportation ahead of the 2024 general election.

But the tension has been brewing for years.

Two years ago, Braxton says he was the only volunteer firefighter in his department to respond to a tree fire near a Black person’s home in the town of 275 people. As Braxton, 57, actively worked to put out the fire, he says, one of his white colleagues tried to take the keys to his fire truck to keep him from using it.

In another incident, Braxton, who was off duty at the time, overheard an emergency dispatch call for a Black woman experiencing a heart attack. He drove to the fire station to retrieve the automated external defibrillator, or AED machine, but the locks were changed, so he couldn’t get into the facility. He raced back to his house, grabbed his personal machine, and drove over to the house, but he didn’t make it in time to save her. Braxton wasn’t able to gain access to the building or equipment until the Hale County Emergency Management Agency director intervened, the lawsuit said.

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Characterized by vast expanses of dunes and sparsely vegetated plains, Western Sahara is a predominantly desert and arid territory. The United Nations categorizes

it as a non-self-governing territory, essentially a remnant of a former colony.

But underneath its soil lies abundant reserves of phosphate — a vital component in fertilizer production, which became a strategically important commodity following the war in Ukraine. The territory also has rich fishing waters along its coastline on the Atlantic Ocean.

Morocco considers Western Sahara an integral part of its territory and has maintained de facto control over most of the region for decades. However, most countries — and the United Nations — have refused to endorse Morocco's claim.

Along with the UN General Assembly, several international courts including the International Court of Justice
have ruled that colonialization in Western Sahara is still pending and Morocco's efforts to annex it are illegal.

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Judge Aileen Cannon said she would issue a ruling later after appearing skeptical of arguments from both sides

The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents case signaled that she could delay the trial until 2024, appearing inclined to find that the matter was sufficiently complex after hearing arguments from prosecutors and the former president’s lawyers on Tuesday.
Donald Trump in Bedminster, New Jersey, on 13 June.
Trump says he received target letter in federal January 6 investigation
Read more

The US district court judge Aileen Cannon did not rule from the bench on a timetable during the roughly two-hour pre-trial conference at the courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida, and concluded the hearing by saying she would enter a written order at a later date.

Prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the documents case and the investigation into Trump’s efforts to obstruct the transfer of power, had asked Cannon last week to reject Trump’s suggestion to postpone the trial until after the 2024 election.

The dueling requests from Trump and the justice department present an early test for Cannon, a Trump appointee who is under heightened scrutiny for issuing favorable rulings to the former president during the criminal investigation, before they were overturned on appeal.

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Officers working for Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative have been ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande, and have been told not to give water to asylum seekers even in extreme heat, according to an email from a Department of Public Safety trooper who described the actions as “inhumane.”

The July 3 account, reviewed by Hearst Newspapers, discloses several previously unreported incidents the trooper witnessed in Eagle Pass, where the state of Texas has strung miles of razor wire and deployed a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande.

According to the email, a pregnant woman having a miscarriage was found late last month caught in the wire, doubled over in pain. A four-year-old girl passed out from heat exhaustion after she tried to go through it and was pushed back by Texas National Guard soldiers. A teenager broke his leg trying to navigate the water around the wire and had to be carried by his father.

The email, which the trooper sent to a superior, suggests that Texas has set “traps” of razor wire-wrapped barrels in parts of the river with high water and low visibility. And it says the wire has increased the risk of drownings by forcing migrants into deeper stretches of the river.

The trooper called for a series of rigorous policy changes to improve safety for migrants, including removing the barrels and revoking the directive on withholding water.

“Due to the extreme heat, the order to not give people water needs to be immediately reversed as well,” the trooper wrote, later adding: “I believe we have stepped over a line into the inhumane.”

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At Joint Base Lewis-McChord's air show just outside of Tacoma, Washington, this past weekend, onlookers and families saw tactical military jets, high-performance sports cars and risqué models dancing on stage in skintight red, white and blue bikinis, part of what organizers described as a "way to thank the Puget Sound community."

The first few times I saw "+18", I didn't even know what it meant because it was backwards and the threads weren't particularly NSFW.

When I click (on mobile) on the kbin logo, it used to pull up information about the magazine/community, which had options such as subscribing and blocking. Now it just brings me to kbin.social.

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