Logging companies clear-cut Canadian forests in the 1980s, and replaced them with a monoculture of highly flammable black spruce. Those appear to have been the cause of many of the unquenchable giant wildfires of this year.

House Speaker McCarthy, in thrall to Republican lunatic extremists who are willing to sabotage anything and everything to any helpful government policies they can get their hands on, is desperately trying to remain in the office of speaker by obeying their impossible demands.

The result of this is that he is losing what little shreds of honor and political respect remain to him. How foolish that is. If he resigns now and consigns the lunatics to hell, he may be unable to remain as speaker but he will salvage some respectability.

The lunatics of SCROTUS will look for another Republican willing to dangle on their strings to be a puppet "speaker". But the rest of the Republicans might decide to make a deal with Democrats on a bipartisan House leadership that would adopt compromise policies. I expect that sooner or later they will decide to climb out of the lunatics' vice.

Canada reports evidence directly tying Indian diplomats to the murder of Sikh separatist living in Canada under asylum.

The Brazilian supreme court rejected a right-wing attempt to deny indigenous groups' claims to ancestral lands from which they had already been kicked out before 1988.

1988 is not long ago. I think this decision is correct when an indigenous group was kicked out a few decades before 1988. But I worry that it could extend too far: it could result in evicting non-indigenous farmers from land that they have farmed for generations, replacing one wave of dispossessed with another. Situations like that call for compromise.

I wonder what other limits there are in the law regarding how many decades it takes for non-indigenous farmers' title to be valid.

Illegal gold miners should never get valid title.

US citizens: call on the DOJ to investigate attacks on Stop Cop City activists.