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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Eddie Burns

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Detroit blues singer, songwriter, guitarist and harmonica player, Eddie Burns. Enjoy!

^{Eddie Burns - She Keeps Me Guessing}

"Peace cannot be achieved except after the cessation of military escalation and the economic and financial siege."

-- Yasser Arafat

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News and Opinion

Israel and Hezbollah edge closer to war as drone hits key Israeli command base

Israel and Hezbollah edged closer towards full scale war on Tuesday, as the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group launched explosive drones at a key Israeli command base, declaring the attack part of its response to recent high-level Israeli assassinations in Lebanon.

Hezbollah announced it had launched “a number of explosive attack drones” at the Israeli northern military command base in Safed, the first time it has targeted the site.

As air raid sirens sounded across northern Israel on Tuesday, Israeli aircraft, drones and artillery struck multiple targets inside southern Lebanon, including a strike on a car during the funeral of a senior commander in the group’s elite Radwan force who had been killed the day before.

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati – a Sunni businessman and politician who describes himself as “liberal” and is not part of Hezbollah – said that while his country was open to negotiations, it was being threatened with war.

“We seek permanent stability and call for a lasting peaceful solution,” said Mikati. “But in return we receive warnings through international envoys about a war on Lebanon,” he added, in reference to reported threats from Israel passed through foreign diplomats. “The position I repeat to these delegates is: do you support the idea of destruction? Is what is happening in Gaza acceptable?”

A database of 500+ genocidal statements by Israeli officials. This is one of several initiatives to document Israel's genocidal intent in Gaza. Journalists, researchers, legal experts, Western politicians - please take note. https://t.co/hXWfnBH98S

— Nicola Pratt (@ncpratt) January 9, 2024

ICJ Lawyer: Israel WILL LOSE Genocide Case

The US-Israeli war on journalists

On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) murdered two Al Jazeera reporters, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya, in a targeted airstrike on their vehicle while they were returning from a reporting assignment. Hamza was the eldest son of Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh, whose wife, two other children and infant grandson were murdered in an October IDF airstrike on their home. In December, another targeted drone strike injured Wael and killed his camera operator near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.

The systematic and deliberate massacre of al-Dahdouh’s family and the repeated efforts to kill him are part of a deliberate Israeli policy of murdering journalists. As of Sunday, the number of journalists killed by Israel over the past three months stood at 109, a figure that grew to 111 by Monday with the murder of two more journalists: Abdullah Breis and Mohammad Abu Dayer.

Israel’s aim is to prevent the world from learning of the crimes it is inflicting every single day upon the Palestinian people by systematically murdering and intimidating the press. Journalists operating in Gaza have extensively documented Israel’s campaign of genocide, which has killed over 30,000 people in just three months, has displaced 90 percent of Gaza’s population, and has destroyed 70 percent of its civilian infrastructure.

Israel operates as a criminal regime, functioning outside of international law as a sort of Murder Incorporated. Its bloody crimes are made possible by the arms, funding and political backing provided by the United States and other imperialist powers.

On the day of Hamza’s murder, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked whether the Biden administration condemns Israel’s policy of deliberately targeting journalists. Blinken refused to condemn the policy. ... On October 25, Axios reported that Blinken asked the prime minister of Qatar to “turn down the volume on Al Jazeera’s coverage because it is full of anti-Israel incitement.” Israel responded to these comments by systematically murdering Al Jazeera correspondents and their families in Gaza. Just three days after Axios reported Blinken’s statement, on October 28, Israel carried out the strike on al-Dahdouh’s home that killed his wife, two children and infant grandson.

The question immediately arises: Where does Washington’s collaboration in Israel’s murder of journalists lead? If the United States declares that there are “no red lines” for Israel’s crimes, will the US allow the Israeli regime to kill its political opponents and critical journalists on its own territory? And if the US endorses these actions by Israel, what is to prevent the US government and military from targeting their own political opponents?

Israel walks back 'terrorist' claims in killing of Wael Dahdouh's journalist son

The Israeli army has backtracked on claims that it had killed a "terrorist" when it struck a car carrying journalists Hamza Wael Dahdouh and Mustafa Abu Thuraya in the southern city of Rafah on Sunday.

During questioning over the incident by NBC News reporters, Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari described the incident, in which both journalists were killed, as "unfortunate".

Hagari claimed the army targeted their vehicle due to their alleged use of a drone. "And using a drone in a war zone, it's a problem. It looks like the terrorists," Hagari said, adding that the military was investigating the incident and that "will provide the data".

Mohammed Moawad, Al Jazeera's managing editor, told NBC News that Thuraya was a drone operator for the network and had been filming the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike. He added that he was not flying the drone as they drove back to Rafah.

Following the strike on Dahdouh and Thuraya, Israel had claimed that an aircraft "identified and struck a terrorist who operated an aircraft in a way that put IDF forces at risk".

Max Blumenthal & Aaron Mate TURN TABLES On Washington Post Propagandist!

IDF Is Using Hunger as a Weapon of War, Says Israeli Rights Group B'Tselem

Israel Worried Ahead of World Court Genocide Case

For nearly three months, Israel has enjoyed virtual impunity for its atrocious crimes against the Palestinian people. That changed on Dec. 29 when South Africa, a state party to the Genocide Convention, filed an 84-page application in the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. ...

Israel is mounting a full-court press to prevent an ICJ finding that it’s committing genocide in Gaza. On Jan. 4, the Israeli Foreign Ministry instructed its embassies to pressure politicians and diplomats in their host countries to make statements opposing South Africa’s case at the ICJ.

Israel and its chief patron, the United States, understand the magnitude of South Africa’s ICJ application, and they are livid. Israel usually thumbs its nose at international institutions, but it is taking South Africa’s case seriously. In 2021, when the International Criminal Court launched an investigation into Israel’s alleged war crimes in Gaza, Israel firmly rejected the legitimacy of the probe.

“Israel generally doesn’t participate in such proceedings,” Professor Eliav Lieblich, an international law expert at Tel Aviv University, told Haaretz.

“But this isn’t a UN inquiry commission or the International Criminal Court in the Hague, whose authority Israel rejects. It’s the International Court of Justice, which derives its powers from a treaty Israel joined, so it can’t reject it on the usual grounds of lack of authority. It’s also a body with international prestige.”

A Jan. 4 cable from the Israeli Foreign Ministry says that Israel’s “strategic goal” is that the ICJ reject South Africa’s request for an injunction to suspend Israel’s military action in Gaza, refuse to find that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and rule that Israel is complying with international law. ... The cable instructs Israeli embassies to urge diplomats and politicians at the highest levels “to publicly acknowledge that Israel is working [together with international actors] to increase the humanitarian aid to Gaza, as well as to minimize damage to civilians, while acting in self defense after the horrible October 7th attack by a genocidal terrorist organization.”

Phil Giraldi: South Africa v. Israel: How Serious?

Israeli Defense Minister Tells Blinken the Bombardment of Gaza’s Khan Younis Is Intensifying

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday that Israel’s attack on the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis is intensifying.

One purpose of Blinken’s visit was to push Israeli officials to reduce the intensity of the onslaught on Gaza. Israel has said it’s scaling down operations in north Gaza but focusing on central and southern portions of the Strip, where most of Gaza’s Palestinian population is located. ...

Axios [...] reported that the only tangible thing Blinken achieved while in Israel was an agreement from Israel to allow UN officials to visit north Gaza to evaluate conditions for a future return of the around one million Palestinians who were forced to leave the area. But Israeli officials are saying Palestinians cannot return to the north until a new hostage deal is reached, and Israel recently killed one of Hamas’s negotiators who was based in Beirut, making that prospect much less likely.

'Unimaginable situation' in Gaza as 600 patients and staff expelled from Al-Aqsa Hospital

Six hundred patients and medical staff have been forced to leave the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza's Deir al-Balah, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and UN, following an Israeli evacuation order.

The orders, which were reported by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, came amid an influx of injured people arriving at the medical centre.

Al-Aqsa Hospital is the last remaining hospital in operation in Central Gaza, with recent evacuation notices by Israeli forces seeing an exodus of medical staff from.

According to WHO official Sean Casey who had visited the hospital on Sunday, the hospital was operating with "30 percent of the staff that it had just a few days ago".

Casey added that the hospital was receiving "hundreds of casualties every day in a small emergency department".

Russia’s Intensified Airstrikes are Depleting Ukraine’s Air Defenses

Ukraine’s air defenses are being depleted by Russia’s intensified missile and drone attacks as Western military aid for Ukraine is drying up.

“Intense Russian air attacks force us to use a corresponding amount of air defense means,” Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said on Monday, according to The Associated Press. “That’s why we need more of them, as Russia keeps increasing its (air) attack capabilities.”

Russia has stepped up strikes across Ukraine, and Ukrainian forces have been launching more attacks inside Russian territory, including a recent missile strike on Russia’s Belgorod Oblast that killed 25 people. After the Belgorod strike, Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to increase attacks even more.

In 41 US States, Richest 1% Pay Lower Tax Rates Than Everyone Else

Nearly every state and local tax system in the U.S. is fueling the nation's inequality crisis by forcing lower- and middle-class families to contribute a larger share of their incomes than their rich counterparts, according to a new study published Tuesday.

Titled Who Pays?, the analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) examines in detail the tax systems of all 50 U.S. states, including the rates paid by different income segments.

In 41 states, ITEP found, the richest 1% are taxed at a lower rate than any other income group. Forty-six states tax the top 1% at a lower rate than middle-income families.

"When you ask people what they think a fair tax code looks like, almost nobody says we should have the richest pay the least," said ITEP research director Carl Davis. "And yet when we look around the country, the vast majority of states have tax systems that do just that."

"There's an alarming gap here between what the public wants and what state lawmakers have delivered," Davis added.

On average, the lowest-income 20% of taxpayers face a state and local tax rate nearly 60% higher than the top 1% of households.

In 41 states, high-income families are taxed at lower rates than everyone else.https://t.co/uqcXxiClf9 pic.twitter.com/2yCR1QETQV

— ITEP (@iteptweets) January 9, 2024

In recent years, dozens of states across the U.S. have launched what the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently called a "tax-cutting spree," permanently slashing tax rates for corporations and the wealthy during a pandemic that saw billionaire wealth skyrocket and company profits soar.

A report released last week, as Common Dreams reported, showed ultra-rich Americans are currently sitting on $8.5 trillion in untaxed assets.

Will US spending deal be enough to avert government shutdown?

Congressional leaders reached an agreement on overall spending levels to fund the federal government in 2024, a significant step toward averting a shutdown later this month. But political divisions on immigration and other domestic priorities could stall its progress. The deal is separate from bipartisan Senate negotiations that would pair new border security measures with additional funding for Israel and Ukraine. That proposal was expected to be released as early as this week, but a senator involved in the talks said on Monday that the timeline was “doubtful”.

Congressional leaders agreed on a “topline” figure to finance the federal government in fiscal year 2024: $1.59tn. In a letter to colleagues over the weekend, Johnson said the spending levels include $886bn for the military and $704bn for non-defense spending. ...

Congressional negotiators are now up against a tight deadline to write and pass 12 individual appropriations bills, an unlikely feat given the timeframe. Funding for roughly one-fifth of the government expires on 19 January, while the rest of the government remains funded until 2 February. Alternative options include a continuing resolution, known as a CR, or an all-in-one omnibus bill, both of which conservatives find unpalatable.

According to ITEP's new study, tax systems in just six states—California, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont—and the District of Columbia are progressive, helping to reduce the chasm between rich taxpayers and other residents.

Massachusetts, which has one of the more equitable tax systems in the nation, collected $1.5 billion in revenue last year thanks to its recently enacted millionaires tax, a measure that improved the state's ranking by 10 spots in ITEP's Tax Inequality Index. Minnesota has also ramped up its taxes on the rich over the past several years while expanding benefits for lower-income families, ITEP's study observes.

Law protecting women seeking emergency abortions is target in US supreme court case

Mylissa Farmer’s pregnancy was doomed. But no one would help her end it. Over the course of a few days in August 2022, Farmer visited two hospitals in Missouri and Kansas, where doctors agreed that because the 41-year-old’s water had broken just 18 weeks into her pregnancy, there was no chance that she would give birth to a healthy baby. Continuing the pregnancy could risk Farmer’s health and life – yet the doctors could not act.

Weeks earlier, the US supreme court had overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the national right to abortion. It was, legal counsel at one hospital determined, “too risky in this heated political environment to intervene”, according to legal filings.

In immense pain and anguish, Farmer ultimately traveled several hours to Illinois, where abortion is legal. There, doctors were able to end her pregnancy. Farmer’s account is detailed in a legal complaint she filed against the hospitals, arguing that they broke a federal law that requires hospitals to treat patients in medical emergencies. In a first-of-its-kind investigation, the US government sided with Farmer and declared that the two hospitals had broken the law.

The future of the government’s ability to invoke that law to protect women seeking emergency abortions is now in question. The law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala), is at the heart of the US supreme court’s latest blockbuster abortion case, which comes out of Idaho.

On Friday evening, the supreme court announced it would hear oral arguments in a case involving Emtala. Under the law, which dates back to 1986, hospitals that receive federal Medicare dollars – the vast majority of hospitals in the US – must stabilize people in emergencies, regardless of their ability to pay. The Biden administration has argued that the law protects access to emergency abortions, while abortion foes contend that it does not.

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Wow, this Trump lawfare is just the gift that keeps on giving:

SHOCKING REPORT: Georgia DA Willis' CORRUPT AFFAIR with Trump Prosecutor: Rising Reacts

Judges skeptical of Trump’s presidential immunity arguments in election interference case

A federal appeals court on Tuesday signaled it would reject Donald Trump’s arguments that he cannot be criminally prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results because it involved actions he took while president, questioning such an expansive view of executive power. The three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the DC circuit expressed particular skepticism with the position that he had absolute immunity from prosecution as Trump, attending in person, looked on.

“I think it is paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed allows him to violate criminal law,” the circuit judge Karen Henderson, a George HW Bush appointee, told Trump’s lawyer John Sauer during the roughly 90-minute hearing in Washington.

Last year, Trump filed a motion to dismiss the federal indictment brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, which charged the former president with seeking to reverse the 2020 election, including by advancing fake slates of electors and obstructing Congress on 6 January 2021. The motion was rejected by the trial judge, prompting Trump to appeal to the DC circuit. The special counsel sought to bypass the potentially lengthy appeals process by asking the US supreme court to directly intervene, but the nation’s highest court returned the case to the appeals court.

Trump’s lawyer John Sauer received a cold response at the DC circuit and was even forced into conceding that presidents did not in fact have absolute immunity, after he acknowledged that presidents who were convicted in impeachment trials could be prosecuted.

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Power companies paid civil rights leaders in the US south. They became loyal industry advocates

Former Florida state representative Joe Gibbons sat in the library of the Faith Community church in Greensboro, North Carolina, trying to convince its pastor to quit promoting rooftop solar. With a lobbyist’s charms Gibbons told the Rev Nelson Johnson that rooftop solar, which allows customers to generate their own renewable electricity, was bad for people of color. Gibbons argued that it created an imbalance in which those without solar panels end up subsidizing those who have them, Johnson recalled in an interview with Floodlight.

Johnson, a civil rights stalwart who was stabbed by a member of the Ku Klux Klan in 1979, had trouble believing him. “It felt like he was an employee of Duke,” Johnson said of Gibbons, referencing his state’s power company.

At the time Gibbons met Johnson in 2015, Duke Energy was opposing a state bill that would have allowed anyone to install solar panels and sell electricity directly to consumers. Johnson was at the center of a legal battle over just such a third-party solar project planned for his church. ...

Johnson wasn’t the only Black leader Gibbons pitched, according to recordings of his public statements. More than two dozen Black civil rights leaders in the south-east have been high-value targets in power companies’ battle for market dominance, courted and at times even co-opted by the industry, according to an investigation by Floodlight and Capital B.

The multibillion-dollar power companies use Black support to divert attention from the environmental harms that spew from their fossil fuel plants, the investigation found, harms which disproportionately fall on Black communities. One civil rights leader received power company cash as he built support for its attempted takeover of a smaller municipal utility in Florida. Another fought state oversight in Alabama that could have lowered electric bills and federal oversight that could have restricted emissions and pollution from coal-burning power plants. ...

Gibbons’s 2015 conversation with Johnson was part of a broader campaign implemented by the trade group EEI to slow technologies such as rooftop solar.

Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe

The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.

The vast majority (over 99%) of the 281,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days following the 7 October Hamas attack can be attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers in the UK and US.

According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal.

The analysis, which is yet to be peer reviewed, includes CO2 from aircraft missions, tanks and fuel from other vehicles, as well as emissions generated by making and exploding the bombs, artillery and rockets. It does not include other planet-warming gases such as methane. Almost half the total CO2 emissions were down to US cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel.

Hamas rockets fired into Israel during the same period generated about 713 tonnes of CO2, which is equivalent to approximately 300 tonnes of coal – underscoring the asymmetry of each side’s war machinery. ...

“This study is only a snapshot of the larger military boot print of war … a partial picture of the massive carbon emissions and wider toxic pollutants that will remain long after the fighting is over,” said Benjamin Neimark, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), and co-author of the research published on Tuesday on Social Science Research Network.

2023 smashes record for world’s hottest year by huge margin

2023 “smashed” the record for the hottest year by a huge margin, providing “dramatic testimony” of how much warmer and more dangerous today’s climate is from the cooler one in which human civilisation developed.

The planet was 1.48C hotter in 2023 compared with the period before the mass burning of fossil fuels ignited the climate crisis. The figure is very close to the 1.5C temperature target set by countries in Paris in 2015, although the global temperature would need to be consistently above 1.5C for the target to be considered broken.

Scientists at the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) said it was likely the 1.5C mark will be passed for the first time in the next 12 months. The average temperature in 2023 was 0.17C higher than in 2016, the previous record year, marking a very large increase in climate terms. The primary cause of this increased global heating was continued record emissions of carbon dioxide, assisted by the return of the natural climate phenomenon El Niño.

The high temperatures drove heatwaves, floods and wildfires, damaging lives and livelihoods across the world. Analysis showed some extreme weather, such as heatwaves in Europe and the US, would have been virtually impossible without human-caused global heating.

The CCCS data also showed that 2023 was the first year on record when every day was at least 1C warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial record. Almost half the days were 1.5C hotter and, for the first time, two days were more than 2C hotter. The higher temperatures increased from June, with September’s heat so far above previous averages that one scientist called it “gobsmackingly bananas”.

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Also of Interest

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

Palestine SitRep: Sanitizing Language While The War Escalates

This Genocide Is Being Live-Streamed. We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know.

Biden Says He's a Zionist. Poll Shows Most Americans Hardly Even Know What That Means

South Africa's Genocide Case Against Israel Should Be a Rallying Cry to the World

Spark That Lit the Fire: Untold Story of Oct 7 Attacks

Odds of US Bank Failures Rise with Office Space Loan Losses, Fed Interest Rate Mismanagement

Poland police arrest fugitive MPs as tensions rise between new and old governments

Lula vows to win ‘war’ against illegal miners invading Indigenous lands

Sperm whales live in culturally distinct clans, research finds

Why I Resigned: Tariq Habash Is First Biden Appointee to Quit over U.S.-Backed Israeli War on Gaza

INCOHERENT Biden AVOIDS Ceasefire Question, Lloyd Austin Story BAFFLES Media

Hunter Biden CRASHES Contempt Hearing, Nancy Mace UNLEASHES On POTUS' SON: 'No Balls'

Bill Clinton WITNESSED Epstein Sex Abuse On Island, Giuffre Claims In UNSEALED 2016 Deposition

SECRET TUNNELS: Cops CLASH At NYC Synagogue

Israel Critics PURGED From Twitter In Ban Wave

Gonzalo Lira Sr., 'Free my son'

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A Little Night Music

Eddie Burns - Treat Me Like I Treat You

Eddie Burns - Hard Hearted Woman

Eddie Burns - Where Did You Stay Last Night

Eddie Burns - Mean And Evil

Eddie Burns - Dont'cha leave me baby

Eddie Burns (Big Ed) - Biscuit Baking Mama

Eddie Burns - Orange Driver

Eddie Burns - The Thing to Do

Eddie Burns - I Am Leaving

Eddie Burns - Hello Miss Jessie Lee

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