it won't be approved and ready in time to matter but the science was cool

The COB-backed blockades were widely supported by trade unions and social movements. Participants included the Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (FSTMB), the coca growers (the Six Federations of the Trópico of Cochabamba), the Bartolina Sisa women’s federation, the Tupac Katari peasants’ federation, and the trade union Confederation of Intercultural Communities of Bolivia (CSCIB). These forces have a history of mass mobilizations against neoliberal governments, such as the historic 2003 Gas War and the 2000 water wars in Cochabamba. Following the first few days of blockades, on August 6 the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) was forced to open talks with the social movements regarding the final date of the elections. After a tense night of negotiations on August 8, which involved the COB, the TSE and both houses of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, no agreement was reached. The electoral court continues to rebuff any attempts to move the election closer to the original September 6 date. The following day, an attempt by the Áñez regime to convene a national political dialogue ended in a humiliating failure, as not only Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), but practically all political forces boycotted the meeting, except for her own “Together” (Juntos) alliance and two minor right-wing parties. More promisingly, it seems that under Huarachi’s leadership, the COB has now returned to its historic roots of fighting for democracy and against military dictatorship. Indeed, while the COB is now firmly standing against the coup regime’s bid to delay elections, even a few months ago its stand was far less robust. With the coup regime seeking to avoid a test at the polls, the coming developments will test the power of Bolivian social movements — and their willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with Morales and his allies.

Several Jewish advocacy groups are opposing President Donald Trump's nominee to become the US ambassador to Germany in light of his incendiary comments, including some unearthed by CNN's KFile, about Germany, the Holocaust and Jewish groups.

A Russian photographer snuck into the world’s only nuclear-capable, ground-effect vehicle and captured rare images of its interior.

“My wife says to drop it because any conversation will look racial in nature.”

A Republican running for Congress in Connecticut’s 2nd District abruptly dropped his bid on the day of the primary following his arrest on domestic violence charges. Thomas Gilmer, 29, of Madison was arrested by Wethersfield police late Monday and posted $5,000 bail. He was arraigned Tuesday in Superior Court in New Britain on charges of first-degree unlawful restraint and second-degree strangulation.

News broke on Tuesday that Kamala Harris was ending her run for president. While there are a number of reasons her candidacy was not successful, chief among them was her decision to brand herself a “progressive prosecutor.” She was not, at least not by today’s standards.   The Achilles heel for the Harris campaign has been a perceived lack of authenticity. There is no better example of the gap between public presentation and historical record than her mischaracterization of who she was and what she did from 2004-2015, when she was San Francisco’s district attorney and then California’s attorney general. In truth, Harris’s record reveals that she is a centrist on criminal justice. Had she run on that record or reckoned with it—including acknowledging the harm her status-quo policies inflicted—the outcome might have been different.    It is understandable that Harris would want to claim the progressive prosecutor label—it is trending nationally now. It signals to voters that a candidate will break from the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past. In the last five years, reform-minded candidates across the country have run and won top prosecutor posts on a message of ending money bail, refusing to prosecute low level drug crimes, and vows to prosecute police officers who shoot unarmed civilians—who are almost always black and brown men. Harris positioned herself as the original “progressive prosecutor.” She was first elected as San Francisco’s top prosecutor in 2004. As district attorney, she pledged to never impose the death penalty, defying the city’s police department and Democratic leaders who were clamoring for the execution of a 21-year-old who killed an undercover police officer. She later wrote a book called “Smart on Crime” that urged officials to abandon the “tough on crime” policies of the past and instead favor rehabilitation over punishment. By the standards of the time, claiming a “smart on crime” mantle was lonely territory for an elected prosecutor. But Harris fell behind the curve over the past fifteen years, as the nation’s sense of the scope and moral urgency of needed reforms to the criminal legal system—and especially to the role of elected prosecutor—shifted dramatically. The shift revealed that Harris’s brand of “progressive prosecution” was really just “slightly less-awful prosecution”—a politics, and set of policies, that still meant being complicit in securing America’s position as the world’s leading jailer. As attorney general, she weaponized technicalities to keep wrongfully convicted people behind bars rather than allow them new trials with competent counsel and prosecutors willing to play fair. One of them, Kevin Cooper, is on death row. Another, George Gage, will die in prison without intervention from the governor. In both cases, Harris had the power to change the outcome. She could have demanded DNA testing in Cooper’s case. She refused. She could have conceded Gage’s conviction was based on the prosecutor’s decision to suppress evidence that devastated the credibility of the sole witness against him. She didn’t. 

The truth was far more mundane. A few protesters among the many thousands appear to have burned a single Bible — and possibly a second — for kindling to start a bigger fire. None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care. Yet in the rush to paint all the protesters as Bible-burning zealots, few of the politicians or commentators who weighed in on the incident took the time to look into the story’s veracity, or to figure out that it had originated with a Kremlin-backed video news agency. And now, days later, the Portland Bible burnings appear to be one of the first viral Russian disinformation hits of the 2020 presidential campaign. The video was first tweeted by an account that lists two cities — Oklahoma City and Abu Dhabi — as its users’ location and has only a few dozen followers. It was soon after deleted. But before it disappeared, the tweet was picked up by a Malaysian named Ian Miles Cheong who has amassed a large Twitter following by playing a right-wing American raconteur on social media.

I believe that people can evolve but I don’t believe that Harris has or will.  For the past decade, I have worked with transgender people in prison, jail, and other sites of detention. Through this work, I was taught that there is no justice in a legal system built on chattel slavery, indigenous genocide, and the legacies of those foundational frameworks. Prisons cannot be reformed out of white supremacy nor can the legal system be expected to transform racism and anti-Blackness. I personally do not believe in prisons and I will never trust prosecutors whose job it is to send people to cages.  As a white person who grew up with class privilege, I had no contact with or understanding of the criminal legal system. I believed in government because I was the intended beneficiary of our government. I received the benefit of an elite public education and inherited the sense that justice came through law. I have no idea what it was like for Kamala Harris to grow up as Kamala Harris and I cannot pretend to know what set of constraints, ambitions, and needs led to her various personal and professional decisions. What I do know is how her actions have impacted people and work that I care about. What I do know is that one chooses to become a prosecutor. Responding to those who defend Harris by suggesting she “had” to become a prosecutor, African-American studies professor and writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explains, “If your job requires that you destroy the lives of young black and brown people, then maybe you need to reevaluate your life choices or do your job differently.” As a prosecutor, Harris’s work has been as an arm of the state fighting to lock people in cages and defending policies that destroyed lives and communities. Now attempting to position herself as a criminal legal system reformer and an ally to the LGBTQ+ community, Harris seeks to rewrite her past rather than own it. 

Kamala Harris, who has made her prosecutorial record a centerpiece of her presidential bid, said she now has misgivings about a California law she championed that punished parents of habitually truant schoolchildren. Speaking on the liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” Sen. Harris said the arrests and, in some cases, jail sentences of parents in multiple California counties were an “unintended consequence” of the statewide law, which built on her tough-on-truancy approach as San Francisco district attorney. The interview, released on Wednesday, marks the first sign of remorse from Harris about the anti-truancy effort, a signature cause throughout her career that she had steadfastly defended on the campaign trail. Her contrition reflects the difficult politics of running in a Democratic presidential primary as a career prosecutor at a time of widespread discontent within the party about racial disparities in law enforcement.

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has selected Kamala Harris as his running mate. Follow here for the latest.

So here is one surreal reality from the Bay Area food scene during month five of the shelter-in-place Apocalypse: Chefs who used to work at top-rated restaurants (including ones with Michelin stars) are now delivering home-cooked meals, from their kitchen to yours. The expertly prepared food arrives in unpretentious paper bags, delivered by a chef with or without children in tow, or else can be picked up curbside near the chef’s apartment. Nosh spoke with three East Bay chef-led businesses. They all started out very organically, experimenting and selling to friends and neighbors first. As they began to scale up while the pandemic dragged on, they started advertising on Nextdoor or Instagram. A few weeks into the experiment, two of the three East Bay hustles have posted very basic websites and one still relies on Instagram only. That would be Broke Ass Cooks in West Oakland, because they are… well… broke.

The merger between AT&T and Time Warner into another monolithic media megacorporation has seen a massive wave of layoffs targeted primarily at Warner Bros. this week. One area hit hardest overnight was DC Entertainment, with reports of huge swathes of staff at both DC Comics and DC Universe laid off. The Hollywood Reporter has word that a shocking third of DC Comics’ editorial staff were part of Monday’s roughly 600 layoffs at WarnerMedia, including editors such as Brian Cunningham, Mark Doyle, and Andy Khouri, the latter of which formed a major part of DC’s complete rebranding and organization of its comics output in the establishment of the Black Label line a few years ago. Senior members of DC’s editorial operations were also not spared. THR notes that senior VP of publishing strategy and support services Hank Kanalz, VP of marketing and creative services Jonah Weiland (the founder of comics journalism site Comic Book Resources, who had only joined DC in 2019), and VP global publishing initiatives and digital strategy Bobbie Chase, who has helped spearhead DC Comics’ hugely successful push into YA and kids-focused graphic novels in recent years, were all let go. Editor in Chief Bob Harras—who has faced scrutiny for years (along with others) for his alleged protection of employees like accused sexual harasser Eddie Berganza and admitted sexual harasser Scott Lobdell—was another major departure as part of the layoffs. However, Jim Lee, DC’s chief commercial officer, remains in place. Comicbook.com reports that AT&T, for reasons inexplicably unknown, is looking to bring in a general manager “from the world of esports” to replace this lost editorial talent, indicating a grim prospect for the publisher, even as it continues to mine its decades of work for new film and TV properties.

In a recently published study, the researchers unveiled a simple method to evaluate the effectiveness of various types of masks, analyzing more than a dozen different facial coverings ranging from hospital-grade N95 respirators to bandanas. Of the 14 masks and other coverings tested, the study found that some easily accessible cotton cloth masks are about as effective as standard surgical masks, while popular alternatives such as neck gaiters made of thin, stretchy material may be worse than not wearing a mask at all.

Gov. Brian Kemp on Monday ruled out ordering public school systems to impose mask mandates for returning students and teachers, echoing his preference that local education officials decide whether to require face coverings to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Dubai:  Lebanon's Prime Minister Hassan Diab, submitted his resignation on Monday to Lebanese president Micheal Aoun since a deadly blast blamed on state negligence ripped through the capital.

YouTube terminated the account used by white nationalist hate group VDARE for violating the site’s policies against hate speech, a YouTube spokesperson told Right Wing Watch. ​This time last year, VDARE was suspended and reinstated on the platform, but a YouTube spokesperson told RWW that this suspension is permanent. “A false-positive review resulted in the prior termination and reinstatement,” a YouTube spokesperson told RWW. According to YouTube, VDARE’s account “VDARE TV” violated its policies by alleging that members of groups protected by the site’s policies were innately inferior to others and by linking to hateful content off-platform, among other violations. “We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies. After updating our guidelines to better address supremacist content, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies,” a YouTube spokesperson​ told RWW via email.

BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): So we're going to play a little bit of the video and then I'm going to read you some of the lyrics to WAP, which stands for a thing. I can't say most of the words in this song, I mean I can pronounce them, but if I say them out loud then we will be banned by the FCC. So here is a little bit of this video.  ... Here are some of the lyrics. You ready? "Whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. Hold up. I said certified freak, seven days a week. Wet ass p-word make that pull-out game weak. Yeah you f-ing with some wet ass p-word." P-word is female genitalia.

Thousands of fans gathered in Sturgis, South Dakota at the weekend to watch Smash Mouth in concert despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Outgoing New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said he would be "surprised" if the newspaper still offered a print edition in 20 years, adding that he's skeptical if advertising will ever return to pre-pandemic levels. “I believe the Times will definitely be printed for another 10 years and quite possibly another 15 years — maybe even slightly more than that,” Thompson told CNBC’s "A View from the Top" on Monday. “I would be very surprised if it’s printed in 20 years’ time.” Last week, the Times said its digital revenue exceeded print revenue for the first time in the second quarter amid the pandemic. The publication generated $185.5 million in revenue for digital subscriptions and ads, while print revenue taking in $175.4 million, per a quarterly earnings report, with Thompson calling it a "key milestone" at the time. Overall, print revenue was down 50 percent when compared to the same quarter last year.