UnderpantsWeevil

On Sept. 1, Texas is slated to open its new business courts, a brand-new legal system backed by Big Oil — and several of the court’s main judges have in the past represented fossil fuel companies as lawyers, The Lever has found.

The judges were hand-picked over the last two months by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a major recipient of oil industry cash — and many can be quickly replaced if they hand down decisions he opposes, a judicial design that he championed.

The courts consist of 11 regional business courts and a new statewide court of appeals to hear appellate litigation, which are expected to have immediate impacts on environmental cases in the state. As Public Health Watch, an independent investigative news organization, reported last month, a suite of cases involving state environmental authorities will now be transferred from a generally liberal appeals court to the state’s new Fifteenth Court of Appeals, created to oversee the business courts.

There, these cases will be decided by a panel of conservative judges historically friendly to industry — particularly oil and gas interests, a powerful force in Texas.

The contract between Boeing and the International Association of Machinists is due to expire at 11:59 pm PT on September 12. Without a new contract, the workers who build its planes in Washington state are set to start the first strike at the company in 16 years. And right now, the chances of a deal don’t look good, according to the head of the union local.

“We’re far apart is on all the main issues — wages, health care, retirement, time off,” Jon Holden, president of IAM District 751, told CNN this past week. “We continue to work through that, but it’s been a tough slog to get through.”

It’s just the latest in a series of serious and high-profile problems at a company that has dealt with fatal crashes traced to a design flaw in its best-selling jet, accusations that it put profits and production speed ahead of quality and safety, tanking aircraft sales, an agreement to plead guilty to criminal charges that it deceived regulators, and massive financial losses covered by soaring levels of debt.

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The company said that wages for IAM members have increased 60% over the last 10 years due to general wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments and incentive pay. But the union is still angry over the earlier concessions. It is also seeking improved time off and also better job guarantees so it won’t be faced once again with the threat of losing work to nonunion plants.

“We cannot go through another period where a year or two from now where our jobs are threatened,” Holden said,

Numerous unions, including the Teamsters at UPS and the United Auto Workers union at GM, Ford and Stellantis, won double-digit wage increases in recent union deals. But in those and many other cases, they were negotiating with companies making record profits and with plenty of resources to satisfy union demands.

By contrast, the problems at Boeing have resulted in $33.3 billion in core operating losses over the course of the last five years, forcing the company to go deeply into debt. It is in danger of having that debt downgraded to junk bond status, but Holden insists that the union still has leverage in these talks.

China has positioned itself as the main car supplier in Mexico, with exports reaching $4.6 billion in 2023, according to data from Mexico's Secretariat of Economy.

The Chinese automaker BYD surpassed Honda and Nissan to position itself as the seventh largest automaker in the world by number of units sold during the April to June quarter. This growth was driven by increased demand for its affordable electric vehicles, according to data from automakers and research firm MarkLines.

The company's new vehicle sales rose 40 percent year over year to 980,000 units in the quarter—the same quarter wherein most major automakers, including Toyota and Volkswagen, experienced a decline in sales. Much of BYD's growth is attributed to its overseas sales, which nearly tripled in the past year to 105,000 units. Now BYD is considering locating its new auto plant in three Mexican states: Durango, Jalisco, and Nuevo Leon.

Foreign investment would be an economic boost for Mexico. The company has claimed that a plant there would create about 10,000 jobs. A Tesla competitor, BYD markets its Dolphin Mini model in Mexico for about 398,800 pesos—about $21,300 dollars—a little more than half the price of the cheapest Tesla model.

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That tariff-free access is part of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (T-MEC), an updated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement that, as of 2018, eliminated tariffs on many products traded between the North American countries. Under the treaty, if a foreign automotive company that manufactures vehicles in Canada or Mexico can demonstrate that the materials used are locally sourced, its products can be exported to the United States virtually duty-free.

MAGA strikes again

The pushback from the right has relied heavily on anti-trans rhetoric, a line of attack that internal polling shows has proven persuasive to voters in battleground House districts, three people who have reviewed the data told POLITICO. They were granted anonymity to discuss the inside information.

Without a well-funded campaign to defend and bolster the equality amendment, deep blue New York could reject a referendum in support of abortion rights — with dire national political implications for Democrats.

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In addition to cementing protections for reproductive health care and LGBTQ+ rights in the state constitution: It includes language also meant to bolster rights based on age. On LGBTQ+ protection it specifies: sexual orientation, gender, gender expression and gender identity.

Republican candidates for the House and state Legislature warn the amendment would lead to trans people playing in women’s sports or weaken statutory rape laws — claims supporters of the amendment have said are false and amount to fearmongering.

GOP candidates running statewide on an anti-abortion platform have not been successful, but their approach to the amendment is different. And Democrats competing in battleground House seats acknowledge that unanswered attacks against it could be effective.

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One Democratic consultant who has reviewed internal polling found voters in battleground House districts are susceptible to the argument that the amendment would harm kids. Voters generally support abortion rights and the rights of LGBTQ+ people, the polling found.

“But if you add in the far-right talking points about this — boys competing in girls’ sports — support erodes quickly, and in these swing districts it can dampen the enthusiasm for the candidates who are running on a support position,” said one Democrat who reviewed the data and was granted anonymity to speak frankly about the internal polling.

Deciding the equipment vendor is a dastardly Chinese threat, successive US governments have struck it with multiple sanctions that would have finished off a lesser company. Yet Huawei, after a difficult few years of shapeshifting, looks almost rejuvenated.

Its performance is entirely at odds with that of Ericsson and Nokia, its traditional rivals, and not what anyone would have expected a few years ago, when Donald Trump – orc leader, from Huawei's perspective – landed the first damaging blows. Last week, it reported a 34.3% year-over-year increase in revenues for the first six months of the year, to 417.5 billion Chinese yuan (US$53.1 billion), building on the 9.6% growth it reported for 2023. Defying expectations, profitability has rebounded. Huawei's net profit margin surged from just 5.5% in 2022 to 12.3% last year before hitting 13.2% for the recent first half.

The main purported goal of sanctions was to impede Huawei in the market for 5G network equipment, the stated fear being that its products could include Chinese government malware for surveillance or worse. Yet their main impact was on Huawei's handset business. Generating 54% of Huawei's revenues in 2020, it was cut off by US legislation from both Google software and cutting-edge chips, far more important to smartphones than they are to network products. Revenues halved in 2021 with the sale of Honor, a handicapped smartphone unit, and they fell another 12% in 2022.

But last year they rose 17% and a continued revival probably explains most of Huawei's sales growth so far this year. A new handset called the Mate 60 Pro has proven a big hit in China. Teardowns have horrified US hawks by apparently revealing 7-nanometer chips, presumed to have no longer been available to Huawei. The received wisdom was that a chipmaker would need a technology called extreme ultra-violet (EUV) lithography to produce them. ASML of the Netherlands enjoys an EUV monopoly and Dutch authorities have prohibited sales to Chinese foundries. Nor, thanks to US sanctions, can Huawei buy EUV-made chips from Taiwan's TSMC or South Korea's Samsung.

The workaround, say experts, has been an older technology called deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography combined with a technique called multiple patterning. It is thought to be inefficient, even unprofitable, producing much lower yields, the percentage of functional chips derived from a single wafer. When SMIC, the Chinese foundry used by Huawei, saw its gross margin shrivel 6.4 percentage points for the recent second quarter, to 13.9%, and its cost of sales spike 31.5%, to more than $1.6 billion, some analysts blamed efforts to produce 7-nanometer chips with DUV technology. Profitable or not, it seems to have worked.

The Secretary General of Israel's national workers union, the Histadrut, announced a general strike to protest against the Netanyahu government and called for an immediate hostage-release and ceasefire in Gaza deal. The strike will begin on Monday morning.

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The workers union decision came several hours after the IDF announced it recovered the bodies of six hostages from Rafah in southern Gaza.

• The Israeli National Forensic Institute examined the bodies and said in a statement that the hostages were murdered in the last 48 to 72 hours and were shot from close range.
• Israeli officials said at least three of the hostages who were killed were supposed to be released in the first phase of the hostage-release and ceasefire deal that is currently being negotiated, if an agreement would have been reached.
• The general strike will begin on Monday at 6:00 a.m. local time and Ben Gurion International Airport will shut down at 8:00 a.m. local time.
• Many of the country's largest private sector companies announced they will join the strike.

The new survey, part of a report published on Thursday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), shows that the majority of Muslim-American voters have decided against voting for either Republican candidate Donald Trump or the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.

Twenty-nine percent of those Muslim voters polled said they were planning to cast their votes for Stein, leader of the Green Party who has made ending Israel's war on Gaza and its occupation of the West Bank a key policy priority.

"We're grateful for the strong support of Muslim voters who share with us an ironclad determination to end genocide in Gaza, as well as the endless wars in the Middle East, and the discrimination and injustice faced by our Muslim neighbours, immigrants and refugees," Stein said in a statement provided to Middle East Eye.

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The poll also showed that around 11 percent of Muslim voters surveyed are planning to vote for Donald Trump, while four percent are choosing third-party candidate Cornel West and 16 percent are still undecided.

The survey consisted of responses from more than 1,000 registered Muslim voters and was conducted after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week. The survey is part of a larger Cair report chronicling the political attitudes of Muslim voters. This report included an additional survey that polled 2,850 Muslim voters between May and July, prior to Biden dropping out of the race.

The Africa Center is an academic institution within the U.S. Department of Defense

On the morning of November 19, 2005, a squad of Marines was travelling in four Humvees down a road in the town of Haditha, Iraq, when their convoy hit an I.E.D. The blast killed one Marine, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and injured two others. What followed would spark one of the largest war-crime investigations in the history of the United States.

During the next several hours, Marines killed twenty-four Iraqi men, women, and children. Near the site of the explosion, they shot five men who had been driving to a college in Baghdad. They entered three nearby homes and killed nearly everyone inside. The youngest victim was a three-year-old girl. The oldest was a seventy-six-year-old man. The Marines would later claim that they were fighting insurgents that day, but the dead were all civilians.

After the killing was over, two other Marines set off to document the aftermath. Lance Corporal Ryan Briones brought his Olympus digital camera. Lance Corporal Andrew Wright had a red Sharpie marker.

Briones and Wright went from site to site, marking bodies with numbers and then photographing them. Other Marines, including one who worked in intelligence, also photographed the scene. By the time they were done, they had made a collection of photographs that would be the most powerful evidence against their fellow-Marines.

In 2020, our reporting team at the In the Dark podcast filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Navy, seeking records that included the photos. We thought that the photos would help us reconstruct what happened that day—and why the military had dropped murder charges against the Marines involved. The Navy released nothing in response. We then sued the Navy, the Marine Corps, and U.S. Central Command to force them to turn over the photos and other records related to the Haditha killings. We anticipated that the government would claim that the release of the photos would harm the surviving family members of the dead. Military prosecutors had already made this argument after the trial of the final accused Marine.

While we were fighting with the military to get the photos, a colleague and I travelled to Iraq to meet with family members of the victims of the killings. They recounted what had happened on November 19, 2005, and their efforts to seek justice, all of which had failed. “I believe this is our duty to tell the truth,” Khalid Salman Raseef, a lawyer who lost fifteen members of his family that day, told me. Another man, Khalid Jamal, was fourteen when his father and his uncles were killed. He told me that he’d spent years wondering what happened in his family members’ final moments. “Did they die like brave men? Were they scared?” he said. “I want to know the details.”

We asked the two men if they would help us obtain the photos of their dead family members. They agreed, and we entered into an unusual collaboration—an American journalist and two Iraqi men whose family members had been killed, working together to pry loose the military’s secrets.

I worked with the lawyers representing us in our lawsuits against the military to draft a form that the surviving family members could sign, indicating that they wanted us to have the photos. Raseef and Jamal offered to take the form to the other family members.

The two men went house to house in Haditha, explaining our reporting and what we were trying to do.

At one house, Jamal told the father of one of the men who was killed while trying to get to Baghdad, “Of course, I am one of you.” Jamal asked him to sign the form, saying, “Things that happened in the massacre will be exposed.” The father, Hameed Fleh Hassan, told him, “The drowning man will cling to the straw. . . . We sign. We sign. I will sign it twice, not once.”

Raseef and Jamal collected seventeen signatures. Our attorney filed the form in court as part of our lawsuit. In March, more than four years after our initial FOIA request, the military relented, and gave us the photos.

The New Yorker has decided to publish a selection of these photos, with the permission of the surviving family members of those depicted, to reveal the horror of a killing that the military chose not to punish.

The photos are graphic. They show men, women, and young children in defenseless positions, many of them shot in the head at relatively close range.