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Early in the morning on July 4th, as torrential rains battered central Texas, the dangers of flash floods became imminent. In Kerr County, the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet within 45 minutes, leading to the deaths of 106 people. As the catastrophic deluge swept throughout the region, the death toll climbed to at least 132.

Later that day, President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. The law gutted public food and healthcare safety nets, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, while also codifying massive tax breaks for wealthier individuals and major corporations. The devastation in Texas, then, became the first major disaster to expose the grave effects of Trump’s extensive disinvestment from disaster resilience programs — and his administration’s newest food and hunger policies.

Charitable groups such as food banks and pantries typically serve as frontline distributors of food and water in a time of a crisis, working in tandem with other responding national and global relief organizations and government agencies. Now, though, because of the policy and funding decisions enacted by the Trump administration over the last six months, the primary food banks that are responding to the needs of residents throughout central Texas have less food to distribute.

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(Left) Powerlines above the Columbia River move electricity from the Bonneville Dam to customers across the region in Hood River County, Oregon, on Thursday, July 25, 2024. (Right) Portrait of Farley Eaglespeaker, a member of the Nez Perce Tribe, sitting atop a fishing scaffold along the Columbia River, in Cascade Locks, Oregon on Tuesday, July 23, 2024. (Jordan Gale/Oregon Capital Chronicle)

It is a common phrase in treaties between the U.S. government and Indigenous American tribes: “Each tribe or band shall have the right to possess, occupy and use the reserve allotted to it, as long as the grass shall grow and the waters run, and the reserves shall be their own property like their horses and cattle.”

But as Angie Debo pointed out in her 1940 book “And Still the Waters Run,” grass still grows, waters still run and all the treaties have been broken by the federal government for mining, grazing, land for settlers and other reasons. Tribes are protected people under federal law even though they are sovereign nations within the United States.

Now, the Trump administration continues that federal tradition by breaking yet another treaty, this one between the feds, four Indigenous tribes and the states of Washington and Oregon. The 2023 agreement to restore fish runs is being revoked so corporations can generate electricity in the Columbia Basin. Prior to the agreement, salmon, steelhead and other native fish were being killed by hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River

For the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs this is not a minor inconvenience. Fishing – especially salmon – is a sacred right, a duty for the tribe to protect the fish which feeds the people. Removing the fish protections from the damns erases a major part of the tribe’s identity and culture.

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Indigenous Australians living on a string of climate-threatened islands have lost a landmark court case to hold the government responsible for lacklustre emissions targets, dealing a blow to Indigenous rights in the country.

Australia’s Federal Court ruled on Tuesday that the government was not obliged to shield the Torres Strait Islands from the effects of climate change

“The applicants have not succeeded in making their primary case in negligence. The Commonwealth did not and does not owe Torres Strait Islanders the duty of care alleged by the applicants in support of their primary case,” Justice Michael Wigney was quoted by SBS news outlet as saying in his ruling.

Scattered through the warm waters off Australia’s northernmost tip, the sparsely populated Torres Strait Islands are threatened by seas rising much faster than the global average.

Torres Strait elders have spent the past four years fighting through the courts to prove the government failed to protect them through meaningful climate action.

“I thought that the decision would be in our favour, and I’m in shock,” said Torres Strait Islander Paul Kabai, who helped to bring the case.

“What do any of us say to our families now?”

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A new peer-reviewed scientific study suggests logging practices in Ontario are unsustainable and out of line with the province’s own strategy for sustainably managing forests.

It’s no surprise to David Flood, a registered professional forester, who has long thought Ontario was permitting too many trees to be cut down.

Flood is from Matachewan First Nation in northeastern Ontario, home to much of the province’s boreal forest. There, Flood’s community has watched as forests became smaller and more sparse over time, threatening the natural habitat for caribou and martens, two species that rely on mature forests for their habitat.

Flood is the general manager for Wahkohtowin Development, a decade-old social enterprise held by three First Nations — Chapleau Cree, Missanabie Cree and Brunswick House — to strengthen Indigenous participation in forest and land management across their territories.

“We’ve felt for a long time that there is overconsumption going on,” Flood said in an interview with The Narwhal.

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Frantz Fanon, born on this day in 1925, was a West Indian Pan-Africanist philosopher and Algerian revolutionary most known for his text The Wretched of the Earth.

Fanon was born to an affluent family on the Caribbean island of Martinique, then a French colony which is still under French control today. As a teenager, he was taught by communist anti-colonial thinker Aimé Césaire (1913 - 2008).

Fanon was exposed to much European racism during World War II. After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, a Nazi government was set up in Martinique by French collaborators, whom he describedas taking off their masks and behaving like "authentic racists".

Fighting for the Allied forces, Fanon also observed European women liberated by black soldiers preferring to dance with fascist Italian prisoners rather than fraternize with their liberators.

While completing a residency in psychiatry in France completing, Fanon wrote and published his first book, "Black Skin, White Masks" (1952), an analysis of the negative psychological effects of colonial subjugation upon black people.

Following the outbreak of the Algerian revolution in November 1954, Fanon joined the Front de Libération Nationale, a nationalist Algerian party. Working at a French hospital in Algeria, Fanon became responsible for treating the psychological distress of the French troops who carried out torture to suppress anti-colonial resistance, as well as their Algerian victims.

While organizing for Algerian independence in Ghana, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia that would ultimately kill him. He spent the last year of his life writing his most famous work, "The Wretched of the Earth" (French: Les Damnés de la Terre). The text provides a psychiatric analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonization and examines the possibilities of anti-colonial liberation

Following a trip to the Soviet Union to treat his leukemia, Fanon came to the U.S. in 1961 for further treatment in a visit arranged by the CIA. Fanon died in Bethesda, Maryland on December 6th, 1961 under the name of "Ibrahim Fanon", a Libyan nom de guerre he had assumed in order to enter a hospital after being wounded during a mission for the Algerian National Liberation Front.

"In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself."

Biography :fanon:

The Wretched of the Earth PDF

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I am a man boiling with rage.

Yesterday, I went with my son to watch the new Superman movie. Superman! The ultimate superhero, a character created by two Jewish immigrants, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, in the 1930s. The character is supposed to represent hope, justice, and light.

The actor playing Superman? Jewish. The studios? Owned by Jews.

Even the character of Superman himself, symbolically and historically, is considered to have Jewish roots. A refugee sent from crisis and war to save a better world, created to empower the Jews who returned from the Holocaust.

And what did the pathetic progressives in Hollywood do? They trampled all over this. Instead of presenting a character who defends the weak and fights for justice, they turned it into a disgusting political caricature, where Israel (under a different name) is portrayed as a fascist state, a warmonger, and a close ally of the U.S., which supplies advanced weaponry to fight "poor and miserable farmers (the good Palestinians) with pitchforks and stones."

And Superman? He comes to save them from bloodthirsty Israel. This is literally a film of incitement against us.

I sat there, next to my son, watching how the film had one purpose: to brainwash the world. They took the ultimate childhood hero, who was supposed to represent absolute good, and turned him into a one-sided, distorted, superficial propaganda tool. They ruined my childhood, they ruined the experience for me, but not only for me, they ruined it for the next generation.

Because my son, with his innocent eyes, asks me: “Dad, why is Superman against Israel? Isn’t he Jewish?”

So let's talk about hypocrisy.

About how the progressive Jewish studio owners, who hate Israel, hide behind this movie, sitting in their luxurious homes in California, feeling safe in their ivory towers. Aside from having a bar mitzvah for their dog, they have no connection to Judaism and choose to disconnect from the homeland that was founded on the ruins of the people who behaved like them in Europe in the 1930s.

It will come back to them like a boomerang. No matter how much they decorate their houses for Christmas, they will pay the price because history always repeats itself.

They are turning Israelis into the "bad guys," the Palestinians into the "good guys," and missiles and terrorism into the "struggle of freedom fighters." This is their coffin nail as they align with the politically correct studios of Walt Disney.

So yes, I am offended. I am angry. I am disgusted. They are cowards.

And I will tell you here, clearly: The liberal Jews in America are the main contributors to anti-Semitism in the U.S. They, and the push for progressivism in America, the takeover of communication and financial power, and the use of tools to brainwash our children in order to spread your distorted nonsense.

Take your hands off Superman because those who believe in goodness, justice, family, and identity are we — you, your god, is money. Nothing more. You’re nothing but zeros! There is no greater enemy to an Israeli than the progressive American Jew.

The 1964 Harlem Riot was one of a number of race-based uprisings/ protests that took place in multiple cities across the United States during the 1960s. As elsewhere Harlem blacks reacted to racial discrimination, segregation, police brutality and social injustices that dominated their lives. They resorted to violence to express their disgust with the system.

Ironically the Harlem Riot occurred just two weeks after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. The act, which outlawing discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, and nationality, was the most sweeping measure ever adopted by the nation to guarantee racial justice. The irony lies in the fact that while the Civil Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate against a U.S. citizen based on race or color, the discriminatory socioeconomic systems and structures long in place in the nation did not change with this new law.

The Harlem uprising began on July 16, 1964 when 15-year-old James Powell was shot and killed by white off-duty police Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan. The Harlem community was infuriated by the murder which it viewed as an unnecessary example of police brutality. Many Harlemites were convinced that Officer Gilligan, a war veteran and experienced police officer, could have found a way to arrest and subdue Powell without using deadly force.

The first two days following the shooting saw peaceful protesting in Harlem and other areas of New York City, New York. However, on July 18, some of the protesters went to the Harlem Police Station, calling for the resignation or termination of Officer Gilligan. Police officers were on guard outside the building, and as tensions grew, some in the crowd began throwing bricks, bottles, and rocks at the officers who waded into the crowd using their nightsticks. When word of the confrontation spread rioting ensued first in Harlem and then spread into Bedford-Stuyvesant, the black and Puerto Rican section of Brooklyn.

The race riot in the two boroughs of New York City lasted six days. It included breaking windows, looting, vandalism, and setting a variety of local businesses on fire. When the rebellion ended on July 22, one black resident was killed. There were more than 100 injuries, 450 arrests, and around $1 million in property damage.

The Harlem uprising was the beginning of a series of violent confrontations with police in more than a dozen cities throughout the North including Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the New Jersey cities of Jersey City, Paterson, and Elizabeth; as well as Chicago (Dixmoor) Illinois, making it the most violent in terms of urban rioting since 1919. These rebellions as well as civil rights protests mainly in the South, helped designate the summer of 1964 as the Long, Hot Summer.

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The burned soil spits out tails of smoke through the thick layer of black ash covering its surface, stretching from the stone crosses dotting the tombs of the village cemetery to the ancient walls of a 4th-century Byzantine church. Israeli settlers were here last Monday, July 7, inside the urban perimeter of the village. They left their mark by setting fire to the surroundings of the historic Church of al-Khader (Saint George), the most sacred site for the people of the village.

Situated northeast of Ramallah, the town of Taybeh is the last remaining predominantly Christian village in Palestine in the occupied West Bank. The attack on the Palestinian village sets a deadly precedent for its residents, but they were not surprised. This eventuality has been decades in the making, ever since Taybeh began to lose its lands to Israeli land grabs and settlement expansion.

The expulsion of these Bedouin communities from vast swathes of their pastures has been coupled with Israel’s confiscation of these towns’ lands, transforming the lives of Bedouins and villagers alike.

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In 2007 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, commonly referred to as UNDRIP, after watering down the declaration drafted in 1994 by Indigenous nations globally into a version that could be acceptable to European-style Westphalian states, including settler colonial states like Canada. For the Indigenous writers, the original declaration was to be a legal basis for Indigenous sovereignty against the colonial power of nation states. But for UN member states UNDRIP was a stop-gap, meant to fill the silence of the UN’s 1946 Universal Declaration of Human Rights about the specific rights of Indigenous peoples. The most forceful sections of the version of the declaration passed in 2007 bear the marks of its original creators, recognizing Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination and the principle of free, prior and informed consent.

In 2016, well into the era of reconciliation, the Liberal government declared support for the spirit of UNDRIP. By December 2020, Prime Minister Trudeau introduced Bill C-15, known as “CANDRIP,” which proposes to implement UNDRIP with Canada’s settler colonial characteristics.

Indigenous critics of CANDRIP argue that Bill C-15 does not actually put the UN Declaration into law, but instead uses it to undermine nation to nation relations between Canada and Indigenous nations, and in doing so undermines Indigenous sovereign rights by subordinating Indigenous rights to a Canadian constitutional framework.

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On this day in 1822, revolutionary Denmark Vesey planned a slave revolt to take place in South Carolina, intending for thousands of slaves to kill their masters and sail to Haiti; instead, he was betrayed by slaves and executed.

Denmark Vesey (c. 1767 - 1822) was a literate, skilled carpenter and community leader among in Charleston, South Carolina. Likely born into slavery in St. Thomas, Vesey was enslaved by Captain Joseph Vesey in Bermuda.

At the age of 32, he won a lottery and bought his freedom, but was unable to buy the freedom of his wife and children. In 1818 he co-founded an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) congregation in the city, which enjoyed the support of local white clergy. The church attracted 1,848 members, making it the second-largest AME congregation in the nation.

Vesey reportedly began planning the insurrection to take place on Bastille Day, July 14th, 1822, a date notable for its association with the French Revolution, whose victors had abolished slavery in Saint-Domingue.

News of the plan was said to be spread among thousands of black people throughout Charleston and for tens of miles through plantations along the Carolina coast. Two slaves opposed to Vesey's scheme, George Wilson and Joe LaRoche, gave the first specific testimony about a coming uprising to Charleston officials, saying an uprising was planned for July 14th.

In June, Vesey was formally accused of being the leader in "the rising". He was convicted and quickly executed on July 2nd.

In the aftermath of Vesey's and others' convictions, authorities blamed "black religion" for contributing to the uprising, noting Vesey's role in the AME church.

The reverend of the church was driven out of the state. Charleston officials ordered the large congregation to be dispersed and the church building to be razed. No black church officially met in Charleston until after the Civil War.

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BOGOTA, Colombia — Ecuador’s parliament has approved a new law on protected areas that has drawn sharp criticism from Indigenous groups, legal experts and environmental advocates who say it threatens Indigenous land rights and violates both national and international protections.

The law, which passed on Thursday in the 151-seat National Assembly with 80-23 votes in favor, with the remaining lawmakers absent during the vote, allows private entities, including foreign companies, to participate in managing conservation zones.

Government officials have defended the measure, arguing that it will strengthen oversight of protected lands, help improve park security, promote ecotourism and combat illegal mining without allowing extractive activity.

Critics say it could lead to displacement, increased resource extraction and the rollback of hard-won environmental and Indigenous protections enshrined in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution.

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