Show notes
Agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will conduct raids on Sunday to round up thousands of undocumented migrants around the country who have existing deportation orders. According to the New York Times, the raids are expected to take place in 10 major cities, will last for several days, and will likely include collateral deportations, that is, undocumented migrants who are not the targets of the raids, but who happen to be caught up in them.
Multiple media outlets are reporting today that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps speedboats approached a British oil tanker in the Straits of Hormuz yesterday, several days after UK marines boarded and seized an Iranian tanker. Mazda Majidi, an author, journalist and anti-war activist, joins the show.
Pacific Gas & Electric Corporation, or PG&E, provides California with its electricity using electrical towers that were almost all built between 1900 and 1960. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company knew for years that its ancient towers could fail and cause massive fires. That’s exactly what happened last year, when a century-old transmission line failed and sparked a wildfire that killed 85 people. Now documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the company knew that 49 of the towers that failed during the fire should be been replaced entirely. Brian and John speak with Sputnik news analyst Nicole Roussell.
A regular Thursday segment deals with the ongoing militarization of space. As the US continues to withdraw from international arms treaties, will the weaponization and militarization of space bring the world closer to catastrophe? Brian and John speak with Prof. Karl Grossman, a full professor of journalism at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury and the host of a nationally aired television program focused on environmental, energy, and space issues.
A new study in the journal Science argues that 900 million hectares of land around the world, roughly the size of the United States, is suitable for reforestation, which could capture two-thirds of man-made carbon emissions. Such reforestation would have no impact on land already used for agriculture and would effectively store 205 billion tons of carbon, two thirds of the 300 billion tons released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution. Jean-Francois Bastin, the primary author of the study, an ecologist and geographer, and a post-doctoral fellow at The Crowther Lab, joins Brian and John.
Venezuela and Honduras are in states of turmoil, thanks in great part to US intervention. In Venezuela, Washington has made no secret that it actively supports a coup against President Nicolas Maduro. And in Honduras, where there is a long history of US meddling, both the Obama and Trump Administrations have opposed democratic elections and reforms and have supported military strongmen. Anya Parampil, a journalist for The Grayzone who just returned from Honduras where she interviewed former President Manuel Zelaya, who was overthrown in the 2009 military coup, joins the show.
Thursday’s weekly series “Criminal Injustice” is about the most egregious conduct of our courts and prosecutors and how justice is denied to so many people in this country. Paul Wright, the founder and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center and editor of Prison Legal News (PLN), and Kevin Gosztola, a writer for Shadowproof.com and co-host of the podcast Unauthorized Disclosure, join the show.
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