Exciting news this week!!! Ashley Strickland (CNN) reports:
A planet-hunting instrument has captured the first confirmed image of a newborn planet that's still forming in our galaxy.
To
the right of the black circle at the center of the image, the round
bright planet can be seen within the disk of gas and dust around the
young dwarf star PDS 70. Of course,
the center isn't naturally this dark. Instead, the researchers used a
coronagraph to block the bright light of the star in order to look at
the disk and the planet.
How incredible is that? This is the first time a planet has been seen while it’s being created so that’s really something.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Madeline Albright is responsible for criminal sanctions that killed over 500,000 children in #Iraq. She told “60 minutes” it was “worth the cost.” She considered the #Baath govt to be #fascist. This kind of “#antifascism” is not Progressive.
Mad Maddie Albright is the one who should come with a warning label. Her actions should have resulted in a mass shunning. Instead, she's allowed to pose as a humanitarian and someone worth listening to.
People like Maddie destroy the world and then stand around as though they have done something worthy of applause. Booing is too kind for the likes of Maddie.
Returning to the topic of the drought in Iraq, Philip Issa (AP) reports:
Iraq has banned its farmers from planting summer
crops this year as the country grapples with a crippling water shortage
that shows few signs of abating.
Citing high
temperatures and insufficient rains, Dhafer Abdalla, an adviser to
Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources, told The Associated Press that the
country has only enough water to irrigate half its farmland this summer.
But
farmers fault the government for failing to modernize how it manages
water and irrigation, and they blame neighboring Turkey for stopping up
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers behind dams it wants to keep building.
A water shortage in the summer? It's been a 118 degrees Fahrenheit day for Iraq today. And they suffer a water shortage.
The water issue is not a new one. So why didn't Hayder al-Abadi do anything over the last four years as prime minister to address the issue? Last February, some were sure that a hard summer would be avoidable due to some heavy rains that had fallen. Now that notion is so outrageous that we'll be kind and not name the non-Iraqi outlets that pimped that lie.
The big lie, of course, is that voting helps Iraq. Over and over, Iraq's prime ministers do nothing. The problems are known. They are identified. Then four years fly by and nothing has been done. Over and over this happens. Starting to grasp why so few bothered to vote last May?
How does this happen?
As Patrick Cockburn observes, this is a human-made drought.
It did not happen overnight.
Nor was it a surprise.
In other news, Margaret Griffis (ANTIWAR.COM) notes, "Unidentified gunmen killed a top aide to Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr at his home in Najaf. Shawqi Hadad was also a commander of Saraya al-Ashura, one of the Shi’ite militias."
Moqtada's bloc came in first in the May elections. Partial recounts are currently taking place. Apparently, there are no real changes because Kirkuk is the only thing anyone's pointing to.
And any issue with Kirkuk's votes would not be a surprise. They were questioned the day of the election by the governor of Kirkuk who imposed a curfew and called for a manual recount.
So the partial recount appears to be producing no real changes.
Which means the politicians will have less excuses for foot dragging. We're now nearing two months since the election and still no government has been formed.
Lastly . . .
US Iraq war veteran: ‘To prevent veterans’ suicide, US should stop waging wars across the globe’ on.rt.com/995t
Check out the RT article.
