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13 October 19
Andy Borowitz | Nation Shocked That Giuliani Has Associates
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "After learning that two of Rudy Giuliani's associates had been charged with federal campaign-finance crimes, millions of Americans expressed their stunned disbelief that Giuliani had associates."
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Secretary of the Army, Mark T. Esper, visits the Security Forces Assistance Brigade at Tactical Base Gamberi in Afghanistan to receive operational updates and visit with SFAB and service members June 27, 2018. (photo: Defense News)
ALSO SEE: Hundreds of ISIS Allies Flee Detention
in Northern Syria as US Prepares Full Withdrawal
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "After learning that two of Rudy Giuliani's associates had been charged with federal campaign-finance crimes, millions of Americans expressed their stunned disbelief that Giuliani had associates."
READ MORE
Secretary of the Army, Mark T. Esper, visits the Security Forces Assistance Brigade at Tactical Base Gamberi in Afghanistan to receive operational updates and visit with SFAB and service members June 27, 2018. (photo: Defense News)
ALSO SEE: Hundreds of ISIS Allies Flee Detention
in Northern Syria as US Prepares Full Withdrawal
Trump Orders Withdrawal of US Forces From Northern Syria, Days After Pentagon Downplays Possibility
Dan Lamothe and Liz Sly, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "President Trump has ordered a withdrawal of virtually all U.S. forces from northern Syria in the face of a Turkish military offensive targeting Kurdish fighters in the region, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said Sunday, after days of assurances from the Pentagon that the United States was not 'abandoning' its partners in the campaign against the Islamic State."
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Thomas Winn. (image: Daily Beast)
Dan Lamothe and Liz Sly, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "President Trump has ordered a withdrawal of virtually all U.S. forces from northern Syria in the face of a Turkish military offensive targeting Kurdish fighters in the region, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said Sunday, after days of assurances from the Pentagon that the United States was not 'abandoning' its partners in the campaign against the Islamic State."
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Thomas Winn. (image: Daily Beast)
Victims Furious That Molester Masseur Thomas Winne Gets 120 Days in Sneak Plea
Emily Shugerman, The Daily Beast
Shugerman writes: "At her first meeting with prosecutors in Little Rock, Arkansas, Kayla Browning says she was told the man she accused of sexual assault could be the next Larry Nassar."
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Emily Shugerman, The Daily Beast
Shugerman writes: "At her first meeting with prosecutors in Little Rock, Arkansas, Kayla Browning says she was told the man she accused of sexual assault could be the next Larry Nassar."
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Workers at the plant cross the street during a 7 a.m. shift change on February 13. (photo: In These Times)
Treated Like Meat: Women in Meatpacking Say eToo
Lauren Kaori Gurley, In These Times
Gurley writes: "Ten of the 12 said they had either experienced, witnessed or were aware of line supervisors perpetuating a toxic culture of harassment, including sexual comments, unwanted touching, coercion, retaliation or favoritism."
Lauren Kaori Gurley, In These Times
Gurley writes: "Ten of the 12 said they had either experienced, witnessed or were aware of line supervisors perpetuating a toxic culture of harassment, including sexual comments, unwanted touching, coercion, retaliation or favoritism."
EXCERPTS:
Founded in Virginia in 1936, Smithfield came to dominate the pork industry in the 1990s by mimicking what Tyson Foods did to the chicken industry in the 1980s. Smithfield bought up competitors and streamlined its production lines, driving small hog farmers out of business, writes journalist Christopher Leonard in The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business. Smithfield similarly devastated small hog farms in Mexico, according to Chad Broughton’s Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas and a Tale of Two Cities. Between 1990 and 2005, Smithfield grew by 1,200 percent.
By the 1990s, the face of pork-packing in the United States had already shifted from the northern union strongholds of Milwaukee and Chicago (famously depicted in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle) to the Southeast, where wages remained low and anti-union sentiment ran deep among conservative lawmakers. (North Carolina and South Carolina are tied for the lowest unionization rate in the country, at 2.7 percent.) In the mid-1990s, meatpacking companies actively recruited peasants in Veracruz, Mexico, driven off their land following the passage of NAFTA, to work without visas in North Carolina. Hundreds of migrants from Veracruz found work in Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant, according to a 2012 report in The Nation.
In 1993, Tar Heel workers launched a union campaign often described as one of the bitterest in modern U.S. history. Police in riot gear lined the entrance of the plant during a failed 1997 union election. Smithfield made “conscious efforts to pit African-American workers against Latinos and undocumented workers against those with legal status” to derail the drive, according to a Tufts University policy brief. (Smithfield’s Lombardo says that the company does not knowingly employ undocumented workers and “would never ‘pit’ any of our workers against one another.”) In 2008—after 15 years and two failed attempts—Smithfield workers in Tar Heel voted to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).
A recent policy victory for the pork industry could turn up the pressure even more. In September, Trump’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) ruled to entirely eliminate line speed limits on hog processing lines. The rule will also cut 40% of government safety inspectors, allowing them to be replaced with company employees.
Bathroom breaks are a point of tension between workers and supervisors. In October 2018, a video of a Smithfield worker unzipping his pants and peeing on the production line in Virginia went viral, sending the internet into brief outrage over Smithfield’s health standards. Anna, the shop steward, says Smithfield asks line workers at the Tar Heel plant to request bathroom breaks 30 minutes in advance. “Since we’re in production, time is money,” she says. “It’s ridiculous. How am I supposed to know if I need to go to the bathroom in 30 minutes?”
Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) Party, speaks at a PiS election rally on the last day of campaigning on October 11, 2019 in Chełm, Poland. (photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Polish Liberals Embraced Austerity - and the Nationalist Right Is Benefiting
Adrien Beauduin, Jacobin
Beauduin writes: "This Sunday's election promises a landslide for Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) Party, bolstered by four years of popular welfare measures and nationalist-conservative rhetoric. Polls indicate that the right-populist party will take between 40 and 45 percent of the vote - up from 37.5 percent in 2015."
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Adrien Beauduin, Jacobin
Beauduin writes: "This Sunday's election promises a landslide for Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) Party, bolstered by four years of popular welfare measures and nationalist-conservative rhetoric. Polls indicate that the right-populist party will take between 40 and 45 percent of the vote - up from 37.5 percent in 2015."
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Riot police fire tear gas and live ammo at protesters. (photo: Reuters)
Ecuador: Nation on Military Lockdown
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The Ecuadorean government under President Lenin Moreno has handed over all security controls across the country to the military and National Police until 3:00 p.m. Sunday. At that time, the state security forces or the president can decide for how long the national state of exception will last."
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teleSUR
Excerpt: "The Ecuadorean government under President Lenin Moreno has handed over all security controls across the country to the military and National Police until 3:00 p.m. Sunday. At that time, the state security forces or the president can decide for how long the national state of exception will last."
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A plastic bottle recycling plant in Santiago, Chile. Importing recycled plastic from Latin America could help meet European demand. (photo: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images)
War on Plastic Waste Faces Setback as Cost of Recycled Material Soars
Jillian Ambrose, Guardian UK
Ambrose writes: "The battle to reduce Europe's plastic waste could become a quarter of a billion dollars more expensive every year as the cost of recycled plastic soars."
Jillian Ambrose, Guardian UK
Ambrose writes: "The battle to reduce Europe's plastic waste could become a quarter of a billion dollars more expensive every year as the cost of recycled plastic soars."
EXCERPTS:
A report from S&P Global Platts, a commodity market specialist, revealed that recycled plastic now costs an extra $72 (£57) a tonne compared with newly made plastic.
According to the analysts this trend is driven in part by the growing demand to include recycled plastics in new products. Meanwhile, new plastic is becoming cheaper to make due to a flood of petrochemicals production from the US driven by the shale gas boom.
Coca-Cola’s European business plans to cut the amount of virgin plastic used in its soft drink bottles to 50% within the next two years, and will change the colour of its Sprite bottles from green to clear to make sure 100% of its bottles can be reused.
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