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"National isolation breeds national neurosis."

-- Hubert H. Humphrey

News and Opinion

An Isolated US Backs Israeli Atrocities in Gaza

On Friday, October 27, the nations of the world voted in the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 120 to 14, for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza. The resolution was sponsored by the government of sometime U.S. ally King Abdullah of Jordan.

Israel’s UN Ambassador responded with utter disdain, accusing those who voted in favor of the “ridiculous resolution” of supporting "the defense of Nazi terrorists" over Israel. In Gaza, Israel’s response to the global call for a truce was to escalate its bombing and expand its ground invasion.

The U.S. corporate media have not helped Americans understand how isolated our government is in its unconditional support and resupply of weapons for Israel’s genocidal military campaign, which has killed over 8,000 Palestinians, 30% of them women and 40% of them children, while destroying hospitals, apartment buildings, streets and schools, and turning Gaza into nothing short of hell on Earth for the bereaved survivors. According to Save the Children, Israel has killed more children in Gaza in three weeks than have been killed in all global conflicts since 2019.

The UN vote makes it clear how diplomatically isolated Israel and the United States are. The mere 12 countries that sided with Israel and the U.S. in the General Assembly were 4 from eastern Europe (Austria, Croatia, Czechia, and Hungary); 2 from Latin America (Guatemala and Paraguay); and 6 small island nations in the Pacific.

Not a single country from western Europe, Africa, the mainland of Asia, the Caribbean or the Middle East voted with the U.S. and Israel. The countries that voted for a truce included many traditional U.S. allies (France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, New Zealand), while other U.S. allies like the U.K., Germany, Canada and Japan were among the 45 countries that abstained.

Israel and the United States are not only diplomatically isolated, but their governments are out of touch with their own people. As Israel prepared to launch its ground invasion of Gaza, a Maariv poll of Israelis found that public support for an immediate large-scale ground offensive of Gaza had fallen from 65% on October 17th to only 29% a week later.

Israelis, like the rest of the world, are watching the horrors of the massacre in Gaza, and have realized that their government has no real plan beyond massive, indiscriminate violence for its stated goal of destroying Hamas, which may well be unachievable no matter how many Israeli soldiers, prisoners captured on October 7 and Palestinian civilians it is ready to sacrifice.

In the United States, a Data for Progress poll, published on October 20, found that 66% of Americans wanted their government to “call for a ceasefire and a deescalation of violence in Gaza,” and to “leverage its close diplomatic relationship with Israel to prevent further violence and civilian deaths.”

Support was across party lines, but, for a Democratic administration and Democratic members of Congress, the 80% of Democrats who agreed with the poll’s statement should have been a wake-up call. Evidently they slept through the alarm, as Congress passed a bill promising unconditional military support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza by 412 votes to 10 on October 24, a green light for the anticipated escalation that followed.

By October 30, only 18 members of Congress had signed the resolution introduced by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) calling for an “immediate de-escalation and ceasefire.” The new Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has pledged that the first piece of binding legislation he will put to the floor is one to spend $14 billion to resupply Israel with weapons, a bill that is likely to sail through with overwhelming support from both parties.

The impotence of the U.S. government to contain the chaos its policies have unleashed can hardly be exaggerated. The U.S. embassy in Beirut has posted a message to all U.S. citizens to leave Lebanon immediately. It says, “You should have a plan of action for crisis situations that does not rely on U.S. government assistance,” and tells them they will have to sign a promissory note to reimburse the U.S. government if it helps to evacuate them.

So the results of the U.S. government’s massive investments in the power to kill and destroy have left it unable to protect or help its own citizens around the world. It instead directs them to a State Department web page titled “What the Department of State Can and Can’t Do in a Crisis.”

The current international isolation of the United States stands in sharp contrast to the way that Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020 was welcomed around the world. Biden promised a new era of U.S. diplomacy, an end to U.S. wars in the Middle East, and renewed international cooperation on the most serious problems facing the world.

Instead, his policies are the worst of all worlds, continuing Trump’s ratcheting up of military spending and his illegal sanctions against Iran, Cuba, and a dozen other countries, while shifting Trump’s Cold War with Russia and China into overdrive, and now fueling and escalating catastrophic proxy wars in Ukraine and Palestine.

But alternatives to American “leadership” are finally emerging. The UN Security Council is immobilized by self-serving U.S. and Russian vetoes, and exclusive rich boys’ clubs like the G7 and the World Economic Forum have only further entrenched neocolonialism and inequality. But now the world is turning to more representative fora like the UN General Assembly, the G20, G77, BRICS and regional groupings like the African Union, ASEAN and CELAC to more honestly debate our common problems and find new ways to solve them.

As the world comes together to build a post-neocolonial, multipolar world, U.S. propaganda is losing its power to shape the way people look at each new crisis. Israeli and U.S. officials, including Biden, have done their best to cast doubt on the death toll in Gaza, but these numbers are meticulously documented by Palestinian health authorities and accepted by the World Health Organization, UN agencies, and independent NGOs that work there.

U.S. officials and media are more inclined to listen to Israeli officials than Palestinian ones, but this only increases U.S. isolation by making it complicit in Israeli propaganda, both in fact and in the eyes of people and governments around the world.

King Abdullah of Jordan, President Sisi of Egypt, and Palestinian leader Abu Mazen canceled a meeting with Biden after Israel apparently killed hundreds of people with what appeared to be an air-burst bomb, as they sheltered at the Anglican Church’s Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. Biden validated Abdullah, Sisi and Abu Mazen’s decision by doing exactly as they feared and publicly claiming that “the other team” was responsible for the hospital bombing.

While Palestinian officials have identified over 8,000 people killed in Gaza, Israeli officials have so far only identified 933 of the 1,300 or 1,400 people they say were killed in the Palestinian attack on October 7th.

The Ha’aretz newspaper in Israel has a web page with photos, names, ages and some personal details of the people killed in Israel who have been identified. At the prompting of the Israeli military, many Western politicians and media have painted the Palestinian attack as a massacre of civilians, so it may come as a surprise to see that at least 361 of the 933 dead so far identified were in fact soldiers, police, and security officers.

But Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian fighters also killed hundreds of civilians on October 7, as surely as Israel’s air strikes have killed thousands of civilians in Gaza. The prisoners they took back to Gaza also included both soldiers and civilians.

Ha’aretz’s records also raise questions about another story that has been widely repeated by Western media and politicians, including President Biden, which is that Israeli soldiers found 40 dead babies who had been decapitated by Hamas. There are 7 children below the age of 10 among the 572 civilian dead identified in Ha’aretz, but the youngest was 4 years old, not a baby. As with all these questions, we don’t know the answers, but we should be skeptical of unverified atrocity claims, especially since Israel has lied about previous war crimes and resisted independent, international investigations of them.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union left the United States with no rival to act as a check on its leaders’ unbridled and often unrealistic ambitions for global power, the U.S. has squandered a historic chance to build a peaceful, just, and sustainable country, with shared prosperity for us and our neighbors around the world.

Our leaders’ illusion of military superiority has been a poison pill that has undermined every aspect of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy. It has led them down a dead end from where they can no longer imagine alternatives to fighting and killing or arming their proxies to fight and kill, even as the consequences of these policies have become so deadly and destabilizing that they undermine the position of the United States in the world and leave it increasingly isolated.

Apart from the United States, the world is remarkably united behind the goal of ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967. The United States should stop fueling the occupation with an endless supply of weapons, and stop diplomatically shielding Israel from international efforts to end the occupation. Since the United States has utterly failed in its role as a mediator and honest broker between Israel and Palestine, acting instead as a party to the conflict on Israel’s side, it must now step aside to allow real mediators to take on that role.

Israel Grinding Gaza Offensive, Biden Doubts Grow, No Plan

South American countries recall ambassadors and cut ties with Israel over war with Hamas

A number of South American countries have registered diplomatic protests against Israel, in response to its latest conflict with Hamas, with Bolivia’s leftwing government cutting ties entirely and attributing its decision to alleged war crimes and human rights abuses being committed in the Gaza Strip.

The decision by Bolivia was announced at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon by María Nela Prada, a minister in President Luis Arce’s administration. “We demand an end to the attacks on the Gaza Strip which have so far claimed thousands of civilian lives and caused the forced displacement of Palestinians,” the minister told reporters in her country’s de facto capital, La Paz.

Hours later, the governments of Chile and Colombia recalled their ambassadors from Israel, while Brazil’s president criticised the continued airstrikes on Gaza.

Bolivia’s deputy foreign minister, Freddy Mamani Machaca, said the decision represented “a repudiation and condemnation of the aggressive and disproportionate Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip and its threat to international peace and security”. ...

Colombia’s leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, said on Tuesday he had recalled his ambassador over Israel’s “massacre of the Palestinian people”. ... Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, also announced he had recalled his country’s ambassador in Tel Aviv to discuss the “unacceptable violations of international humanitarian law” he said Israel was committing in Gaza.

“Genocide”: Top U.N. Official Craig Mokhiber Resigns, Denounces Israeli Assault on Gaza

Top UN official in New York steps down citing ‘genocide’ of Palestinian civilians

The director of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights has left his post, protesting that the UN is “failing” in its duty to prevent what he categorizes as genocide of Palestinian civilians in Gaza under Israeli bombardment and citing the US, UK and much of Europe as “wholly complicit in the horrific assault”.

Craig Mokhiber wrote on 28 October to the UN high commissioner in Geneva, Volker Turk, saying: “This will be my last communication to you” in his role in New York. Mokhiber, who was stepping down having reached retirement age, wrote: “Once again we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes and the organization we serve appears powerless to stop it.” He said that the UN had failed to prevent previous genocides against the Tutsis in Rwanda, Muslims in Bosnia, the Yazidi in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Rohingya in Myanmar and wrote: “High Commissioner we are failing again.

“The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist colonial settler ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs … leaves no room for doubt.” Mokhiber added: “This is text book case of genocide” and said the US, UK and much of Europe were not only “refusing to meet their treaty obligations” under the Geneva Conventions but were also arming Israel’s assault and providing political and diplomatic cover for it. ...

“We must support the establishment of a single, democratic secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews,” he wrote, adding: “and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land.”

This should be front page news in mainstream media. But it probably won’t even warrant mention in this climate. Crazy. https://t.co/WzWfq6bhjE

— Dr. Omar Suleiman (@omarsuleiman504) October 31, 2023

Blinken JEERED As A WAR CRIMINAL, Protestors DEMAND Ceasefire During Senate Hearing

We Are Ruled By Sociopaths And Morons

The response to the Gaza crisis from western leaders and media outlets and celebrities shows very clearly that we really are led by the least among us. The least wise. The least intelligent. The least compassionate. The least insightful. We are ruled by sociopaths and morons. ...

We’re being told that Israel needs to wage a relentless bombing campaign which is killing civilians by the thousands in order to eliminate Hamas, because Hamas must be destroyed to achieve a lasting peace. Every part of this is transparently false.

Firstly the premise that Hamas must be eliminated to achieve peace is fallacious; peace can be achieved by eliminating the abuses and righting the wrongs which gave rise to Hamas in the first place. There’s no rational reason to believe Hamas would continue to exist in its current iteration or keep waging violent resistance if the theft and injustice from 1948 onward were rolled back, refugees had the right to return, apartheid abuses were ended, and people were no longer kept in a giant concentration camp where they are deprived of basic human needs.

Secondly the premise that you can bomb people into accepting an abusive status quo is self-evidently absurd. Even if Israel kills every single member of Hamas, there will be hundreds of thousands of survivors of this onslaught who see the depravity of Israel and refuse to accept it. You think all these orphaned boys and all these men who saw their loved ones ripped apart by military explosives are just going to be cool with the status quo from here on out? Of course not.

And Israel knows this, which is why its preferred solution is to kick all survivors of this onslaught out of Gaza and into refugee camps in the Sinai Peninsula. It knows that nothing it’s doing will actually work and it refuses to make the reparations that will work, so its only other option is the elimination of Gazans one way or the other. Ethnic cleansing and mass displacement is not “peace” by any stretch of the imagination, but it might allow Israel to keep its abusive status quo intact.

Those are Israel’s only real options for sustainable stability: either right all the wrongs which led to this, or go the opposite direction and inflict far more wrongs to answer the Palestinian question once and for all. It’s pretty clear watching all this that Israel has opted for the latter.

"Horrific": Resident of Jabaliya Refugee Camp Speaks Out After Israeli Airstrikes Kill Over 50

Dozens killed after Israeli airstrikes on Gaza refugee camp

Israeli airstrikes have destroyed apartment blocks and killed dozens of people at a refugee camp in northern Gaza on the 25th day of a conflict that the United Nations said has become a “graveyard” for children.

At least six airstrikes hit residential areas in the Jabalia refugee camp on Gaza City’s outskirts on Tuesday, killing more than 50 people and injuring about 150 people, Hamas officials said.

Video footage showed at least 47 bodies pulled out of the rubble and rescue teams searching for survivors amid twisted metal and two huge craters. The Hamas-run health ministry called the attack a “heinous” massacre.

The Israeli military said it had targeted the camp to kill Ibrahim Biari – a key Hamas commander linked to the group’s 7 October attack on Israel who, it said, had taken over civilian buildings in Gaza City with his fighters.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, reiterated his call for an immediate ceasefire and urged all sides to respect international humanitarian law. He said: “I condemn the killing of civilians in Gaza and I am dismayed by reports that two-thirds of those who have been killed are women and children.” Bombardments have killed at least 8,525 Palestinians, including 3,542 children, according to Hamas health ministry figures issued before the strikes on Jabalia.

“We Need To DESTROY Gaza” – Fmr Israeli Ambassador To Italy

‘A new Nakba’: settler violence forces Palestinians out of West Bank villages

Life in Zanuta, a Palestinian village atop a windy ridge in the desolate south Hebron hills, deep in the occupied West Bank, has never been easy. The community are mostly herders who raise goats and sheep through the barren landscape’s scorching summers and freezing winters, and who have steadfastly refused to leave their homes despite the mounting difficulties posed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers on one hand and radical Israeli settlers on the other.

But after weeks of intense settler violence in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, Zanuta’s 150 residents have made a collective decision to leave. Armed settlers – some in reservist army uniforms, some covering their faces – have begun breaking into their homes at night, beating up adults, destroying and stealing belongings, and terrifying the children.

After decades of a desperate fight to cling on to their land, the community has decided they have lost.

On Monday, men and women cried as they dismantled their homes and haphazardly packed solar panels, animal feed and personal belongings on to pickup trucks. The noise of the demolition drowned out the bleating from the animal pens and threw up dust and debris that tore at the eyes and throat.

“It is a new Nakba,” said Issa Ahmad Baghdad, 71, referring to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 after the creation of Israel. “My family are going to Rafat. But we don’t know anyone there. We don’t know what to tell the children.”

So, the Biden zionists want us to pay to make a mess and then pay in blood and treasure to clean it up. No thanks!

White House in discussions with Israel on deploying US troops to Gaza

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the United States and Israeli governments are in active discussions regarding the deployment of US troops to Gaza to act as an occupying force after Israel’s planned crushing of the Palestinian resistance.

“The US and Israel are exploring options for the future of the Gaza Strip, including the possibility of a multinational force that may involve American troops,” Bloomberg reported.

The moves were “impelled by a sense of urgency to come up with a plan for the future of Gaza now that a ground invasion has begun,” Bloomberg stated.

Bloomberg’s report underscores the degree to which the United States is not merely a passive supporter, but an active participant in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians.

The report gives details of a cryptic comment made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken before the Senate Appropriations Committee. He said, “We can’t have a reversion to the status quo with Hamas running Gaza.”

Blinken added, “We also can’t have—and the Israelis start with this proposition themselves—Israel running or controlling Gaza. Between those shoals are a variety of possible permutations that we’re looking at very closely now, as are other countries.”

CNN's WOLF BLITZER Is STUNNED After IDF Admits To Bombing Civilians In Jabaliya Refugee Camp: Rising

Israel Told US ‘Mass Civilian Casualties’ Were Acceptable Price of Gaza Campaign

During conversations with Israeli officials, it became clear to the Biden administration that Israel believed “mass civilian casualties” were an acceptable price of the bombing campaign in Gaza, The New York Times reported on Monday.

The Times report said that Israeli officials referred to US and allied bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan during World War II that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The reference includes the US fire bombings of Japanese cities, which killed around 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in one night in 1945, as well as the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Israel’s plans for mass slaughter in Gaza and the growing child death toll have not impacted US support. The Times report focused on how the Biden administration is paying lip service to the idea of limiting civilian casualties, but it acknowledged they’re not telling Israel what to do, only asking questions.

'Abu Ghraib 2.0': IDF Torture Videos Spark Renewed Calls to End US Military Aid to Israel

Human rights defenders on Tuesday renewed calls for the U.S. government to end American complicity in Israel's "horrific war crimes" after the publication of videos purportedly recorded and shared by Israeli soldiers showing the torture and dehumanization of Palestinian men, some of them naked, in the illegally occupied West Bank.

U.S.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) were among the groups that condemned the videos, which show armed and uniformed Israeli troops and possibly settlers beating, kicking, stomping, and dragging bound, blindfolded, and naked Palestinian men, forcing them to shout "long live Israel," and draping them in the Israeli flag.

"The footage of Israeli soldiers torturing Palestinian men in the West Bank is horrific," JVP said on social media. "The Israeli military has brutally abused Palestinian prisoners for decades. As the Israeli military wages a genocidal war in Gaza, its soldiers are no longer hiding this abuse from the public."

@POTUS @SecBlinken this is on you.

Should we expect the standard comment from @PressSec about how Israel has a right to defend itself in the West Bank, where Hamas doesn’t govern, by carrying out torture tactics on random Palestinian farmers and students? https://t.co/E1Elg7rzyu

— Dr. Omar Suleiman (@omarsuleiman504) October 31, 2023

"Torture and humiliation [are] a tool of all repressive regimes to punish and destroy the spirit [of] anyone who challenges their oppression," the group continued. "It's no surprise then, that the same government that tortured Iraqis in Abu Ghraib is funding the same tactics on Palestinians. This is disgusting."

The U.S. gives Israel around $4 billion in annual military aid. Last week, President Joe Biden asked Congress to authorize an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel as it ramps up its war on Gaza in the wake of this month's Hamas-led surprise attacks that killed more than 1,400 Israelis and others, with the death toll since rising to over 1,500, according to state broadcaster Kan. Around 200 Israelis and others were taken hostage by Gaza-based militants.

CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement that "enough is enough. President Biden must end our nation's complicity in [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu's increasingly genocidal campaign of violence against Palestinian civilians in both Gaza and the West Bank."

"Every new massacre that the Israeli government commits further stains our nation's reputation and refutes the claim that our nation supports human rights," Awad added. "If our leaders truly do view Palestinians as human beings worthy of life and freedom, we must stop this madness."

Awad's comments came on the same day that Israeli bombardment of the Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza's largest, killed and wounded at least scores and possibly hundreds of Palestinians.

The Gaza Health Ministry said Tuesday that 8,525 people, including 2,187 women and 3,542 children, have been killed, and over 21,000 others wounded, by Israeli forces since they began bombarding Gaza on October 7.

At least 124 Palestinians have also been killed and over 2,000 injured in attacks by Israeli troops and settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since then, a situation U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called "totally unacceptable."

"Israel must take measures to protect Palestinians from such attacks and to hold accountable any settlers who carry out attacks, as well as any members of the Israeli Defense Forces (sic) who stand by or fail to intervene when these attacks occur," Sullivan said on Sunday.

The newly published torture videos follow reports earlier this month of Israeli soldiers and settlers torturing a group of Palestinian men in the central West Bank village of Wadi al-Seeq on October 12. According to the victims, they were beaten, stripped, urinated on, and sexually assaulted.

"All the monstrous, inhumane, or immoral means of interrogation you could think of were used against us. You would have thought we were at Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib," one of the men, 46-year-old Mohammad Matar (known as Abu Hassan), told+972 Magazine, referring to the notorious U.S. military prisons in Cuba and Iraq, two of the numerous American facilities were detainees were tortured—sometimes to death.

"They had our hands tied behind our backs, our eyes covered, our faces in the ground," Abu Hassan said. "They stepped on our heads and said: 'Eat! Eat the sheep shit!"

"They jumped on our backs intending to paralyze us, to break the spinal cord," he added. "They also tried to hit us on our genitals to mutilate us, 30 to 40 times. They kept taking turns to hit us."

An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson told +972 Magazine that "the manner in which the arrest was carried out and the conduct of the forces in the field was contrary to what was expected of soldiers and commanders in the IDF."

"After the initial investigation, a decision was made to dismiss the commander of the unit that carried out the arrest," the spokesperson added. "In the circumstances of the matter and in view of the seriousness of the suspicions, it was decided to open an investigation by the military police."

On Monday, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) sounded the alarm on what it called "colonial violence and ethnic cleansing" in Masafer Yatta, a collection of 19 hamlets in the southern West Bank where the Israeli government in 2022 ordered the expulsion of 2,000 Palestinians to make way for an Israeli military training facility.

According to ISM:

Settler militias are terrorizing Palestinians by invading their villages during pogroms, armed with assault rifles, often wearing Israeli army uniforms and accompanied by Israeli soldiers. Palestinians and ISM activists have reported and documented cases of settlers beating up Palestinian residents, including women, children, and the elderly; settlers and soldiers shooting towards Palestinian houses... destroying water pumps and electric grids, uprooting trees, and taking up Palestinian fields, planting Israeli flags on Palestinian land and houses, and even forcing Palestinians to sing pro-Israel chants and to wave an Israeli flag while holding them at gunpoint and filming them.

ISM also said that on Sunday, "settlers and soldiers invaded the village of Susyia and threatened residents that if they don't leave within 24 hours, they will be back and start killing Palestinians in the village."

"A similar threat to residents of the village of Khirbet Zanuta has already resulted in the community leaving the land in order to save their families," the group added

The Times of Israel reported Tuesday that Israeli settlers torched a home in the Masafer Yatta village of Khirbet Asfi al-Tahta.

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has reported the ethnic cleansing of at least scores of Palestinian families from their homes and farms in Area C, the Israel-designated West Bank occupation zone completely administered by Israel.

"While all eyes are on Gaza... the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank could intensify further," Israeli international law and human rights professor Neve Gordon wrote for the London Review of Books blog Monday, "with Israeli forces pushing Palestinians out of their homes and possibly across international borders."

Russia makes 80 arrests after antisemitic rioting at Dagestan airport

Russia has detained more than 80 people in connection with the antisemitic rioting on Sunday in which hundreds of young men stormed an international airport in Dagestan to stop Jews from disembarking from a flight from Tel Aviv.

Five people have received jail sentences of six to 10 days for petty hooliganism, and federal investigators said they had opened a criminal case for mass rioting, which carries a maximum sentence of eight to 15 years in prison. It is not clear whether anyone has been charged in that case yet.

The riots, which observers have compared to a tsarist-era pogrom, stood out for a lack of police response as the mob took control of the airfield and main terminal while riot police stood by. Clashes broke out later on Sunday evening, injuring dozens of people including two police officers.

Police have now launched a delayed crackdown on the rioters, accompanied by fiery statements pinning blame on shadowy enemies from abroad. Video published on Tuesday showed riot police in helmets making an arrest in downtown Makhachkala, while a regional governor said the tempo of arrests would increase. ...

Yusup Umamov, the mayor of Makhachkala, portrayed the rioting as a social issue, saying most of the protesters were 20 to 24 years old, and calling them “our future … our children, who are our responsibility to educate and take care of”. He said: “I call on my fellow Dagestanis and Makhachkala residents to … talk to young people and explain to them that … sympathy and compassion [for the Palestinians] should not become a reason for the persecution of people on religious and national grounds.”

Democrats plan to subpoena Leonard Leo over perks to supreme court justices

Senate Democrats plan to subpoena Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow and conservative activist Leonard Leo to quiz them about their roles in organizing and paying for lavish perks for justices on the hard-right wing of the US supreme court. The announcement by Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee came on Monday amid a storm of controversy that has blown up in recent months about conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito not only accepting but also not disclosing free travel and other luxury favors provided or facilitated by influential public figures.

The supreme court is now being pressed to adopt an ethics code – a move that has been publicly endorsed by three of the nine justices amid the rows about ethical controversies, including the risks of outside influence corrupting the court. The committee could act as soon as next week to authorize Illinois senator Dick Durbin, the panel’s chairman, to issue subpoenas to Crow, Leo and another wealthy donor, Robin Arkley II.

Crow has been identified as a benefactor of associate justice Clarence Thomas for more than two decades, paying for nearly annual vacations, purchasing from Thomas and others the Georgia home in which the justice’s mother still lives, and helping pay for the private schooling for a relative.

Leo, an executive of the Federalist Society, the powerful Washington-based conservative and libertarian advocacy group, worked with former US president Donald Trump to move the court and the rest of the federal judiciary to the right by nominating ultra-conservative judges. And Arkley helped arrange and pay for a private jet trip to Alaska for Justice Alito in 2008.

Deforestation has big impact on regional temperatures, study of Brazilian Amazon shows

Deforestation has a far greater impact on regional temperatures than previously believed, according to a new study of the Brazilian Amazon that shows agricultural businesses would be among the biggest beneficiaries of forest conservation. The research has important political implications because farmers in Amazonian states have, until now, led the way in forest destruction on the assumption that they will make money by clearing more land.

The new research highlights the other side of the picture. It shows the agricultural heartland of Mato Grosso, where crops are already suffering from drought and extreme heat, would be just over half a degree celsius hotter by 2050 if deforestation continued at the rapid rate of recent years.

The paper, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrated Amazon deforestation causes warming at distances up to 60 miles (100km) away. The greater the forest clearance, the higher the temperature. This is in addition to the wider climate impact of global heating.

Dominick Spracklen of the University of Leeds said the average tree had a cooling effect equivalent to two to three 2.5kW air conditioners working at full power every hour of every day. This works through evapotranspiration, which he said was very similar to the sweat humans produce to lower body temperature. He said the effect spread wider than anyone had realised.

“We always thought this might be happening, but the extent is bigger than I would have thought,” he said. “More and more, we are demonstrating the big benefits the forests bring to surrounding regions. For farmers, they bring cooler air and more rainfall. Hopefully putting numbers on these benefits will help to persuade a broader set of people to protect forest areas.”

Banks pumped more than $150bn in to companies running ‘carbon bomb’ projects in 2022

Banks pumped more than $150bn last year into companies whose giant “carbon bomb” projects could destroy the last chance of stopping the planet heating to dangerous levels, the Guardian can reveal.

The carbon bombs – 425 extraction projects that can each pump more than one gigaton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – cumulatively hold enough coal, oil and gas to burn through the rapidly dwindling carbon budget four times over. Between 2016 and 2022, banks mainly in the US, China and Europe gave $1.8tn in financing to the companies running them, new research shows.

The climate rhetoric did not match up with what was happening on the books, said Shruti Shukla, an energy campaigner at the National Resources Defense Council, which was not involved in the investigation. “We need to rapidly decline our production of fossil fuels and support for fossil fuels, whether that’s regulatory or financial.” ...

Between 2016 and 2022, the research shows, banks in the US alone were responsible for more than half a trillion dollars of finance to companies planning or operating carbon bombs. The single biggest financier was JPMorgan Chase, providing more than $141bn, followed by Citi, with $119bn, and Bank of America, with $92bn. Wells Fargo was the seventh-biggest financier, with $62bn.

Also in the top 10 were three Chinese banks – ICBC, Bank of China and Industrial Bank (China) – and three European ones – BNP Paribas, HSBC and Barclays. The bulk of the money they provided was general corporate financing to operators, rather than direct loans for projects to dig up fossil fuels. In 2022, direct and indirect financing of carbon bombs came to an estimated $161bn.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Israeli Apologists’ Apartheid Coda

Amnesty: Israel's Illegal Use of White Phosphorus in Lebanon a Possible 'War Crime'

Pitching Military Aid to Israel as a US Jobs Booster Is Grotesque

Israel’s Long-Held Plan to Drive Gaza’s People Into Sinai Is Now Within Reach

Disease rife in Gaza Unrwa schools sheltering thousands

What Gives Israel the Right to Annihilate Gaza?

The War Is Lost - Zelenski Will Leave - The White House Has Failed

Scott Ritter: John Kirby v. Russian Military

US regime change activist named Web Summit CEO after founder forced out for condemning Israeli ‘war crimes’

US labor movement faces big obstacles despite surge in strikes and union wins

Notes On The Structure Of American Imperial Collapse (State of the World 2023, #1)

Pittsburgh in ‘extreme embrace’ with fossil fuel lobbyists, research finds

Michelangelo’s secret sketches under church in Florence open to public

Hamas Official: We Will REPEAT Oct 7 Terror 'AGAIN & AGAIN' Until We 'END ALL OF ISRAEL'

Netanyahu's 'PSYCHOTIC' Tweet Deleted As GROWING COALITION of Israelis Push To DUMP PM

Israeli Settler Violence EXPLODES In West Bank

A Little Night Music

Slim Harpo - The Hippy Song

Slim Harpo - Dynamite

Slim Harpo - I've Been A Good Thing For You

Slim Harpo - Boogie Chillun

Slim Harpo - You Can't Make It

Slim Harpo - The Music's Hot

Slim Harpo - My Baby She's Got It

Slim Harpo - Tip On In

Slim Harpo - Te Ni Nee Ni Nu

Slim Harpo - Shake Your Hips