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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Otis Clay

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago soul singer Otis Clay. Enjoy!

^{Otis Clay - Leave Me And My Woman Alone}

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

-- Isaac Asimov

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News and Opinion

Worth a full read:

Chris Hedges: The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse

Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.

In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous. ...

The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought. It believes the key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the HuffPost reported. It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of Hezbollah. These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.

The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends a diplomatic pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability is stupefying. Israel’s genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.

The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less what the Biden White House dreams up. Israel has no intention of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7.

Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the Middle East.

Patrick Lawrence: This Is Not Another ‘Phoney War’

Amid the tit-for-tats along Israel’s border with Lebanon over the past few weeks, the Houthis’ shelling of Red Sea traffic and repeated assertions that the U.S. does not want to widen the Gaza crisis into a regional war, I started thinking of that twilit interim in 1939–1940 known in history as “the phony war.” Has the world entered another such passage—another war we do not want to think is a war but is a war we do not want to see?

That question seems far away now, an intellectual flinch. America, mindlessly loyal to the frothing dog known as Israel, has wandered into another war the way our president wanders away from podiums and off television news programs while the cameras are still rolling. This is a 21st century war, replete with attacks, denials, proxies and indirection, and with no formal declaration. But we may as well declare it ourselves so we understand our moment properly. America is once more at war.

The U.S. had for weeks refrained from responding to the Houthis, who, in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza, have since November staged dozens of drone and missile attacks on commercial ships sailing through the Red Sea. These now include U.S. and British vessels and a U.S. warship. The Biden regime’s stated concern was that it did not want to risk sparking a conflict that would spread through the region and, in particular, provoke the Islamic Republic. The Pentagon, in the role of lumbering giant, also acknowledged that there was little U.S. forces could do to stop the Houthis’ operations.

The weeks of restraint, so uncharacteristic of the Biden White House, ended last Thursday, when the U.S. and a handful of its clients hit more than two dozen Houthi targets—military bases, airports, weapons dumps—in Yemen. Air and naval units struck the Houthis again last Friday, and the world suddenly sat up straight. Here is part of a news analysis The New York Times published Friday evening:

With the American-led strike on nearly 30 sites in Yemen on Thursday and a smaller strike the next day, there is no longer a question of whether there will be a regional conflict. It has already begun. The biggest questions now are the conflict’s intensity and whether it can be contained.

This is exactly the outcome no one wanted, presumably including Iran.

Among the reporters bylined on this piece was David Sanger, a longtime Washington correspondent who is, to keep this polite, very close to the national- security state and faithfully reflects its perspectives. I certainly sat up straight on reading these paragraphs. They struck me as the Biden regime’s first admission, an early warning, that war was on the way. “I will not hesitate,” President Biden had said by the time Sanger et al. published, “to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary.” Indeed, U.S. attacks on Houthi targets are now something close to routine. On Tuesday the Pentagon announced that Navy SEAL commandos had raided an Iranian vessel bound for Yemen and seized missile components from its cargo.

As of Monday evening (East Coast time, Tuesday morning in the Middle East), Biden and his policy people have exactly what they have insisted they do not want but which Israel probably does. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the IRGC, launched at least 11 ballistic missiles into northern Iraq and Syria, where all sorts of U.S. proxies, including the Islamic State, are active. I do not think there is any longer any stepping back from the reality that the U.S. is now in a regional war involving Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.

Alastair Crooke: Netanyahu: Ploy or Reversion?

Jeremy Scahill: Biden's TWO-FACED Support of Israeli Genocide Facilitated by MSM

UN chief decries ‘unacceptable’ scale of Gaza deaths as 25,000 reported killed

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has killed 25,000 Palestinians, the health ministry in the territory has announced, as the UN chief described the scale of civilian killings as “heartbreaking and utterly unacceptable”. Most of the casualties were women and children, the ministry said, and thousands more bodies were likely to remain uncounted under rubble across Gaza.

Speaking at a global summit in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, denounced Israel’s three-month assault. “Israel’s military operations have spread mass destruction and killed civilians on a scale unprecedented during my time as secretary general,” Guterres said at the opening of the G77+China, a coalition of 135 developing countries.

“This is heartbreaking and utterly unacceptable. The Middle East is a tinderbox. We must do all we can to prevent conflict from igniting across the region.”

Israeli forces are advancing into southern parts of Gaza crowded with those who have fled combat elsewhere. At least a million displaced people are believed to have sought refuge in the small town of Rafah on the border with Egypt, where they are living in makeshift camps, UN-run shelters and private apartments.

Thick plumes of smoke billowed above the main southern city of Khan Younis on Sunday morning as the Israeli army said it had “eliminated a number of terrorists” there.

Balochistan; Pakistan-Iran strikes. Saudi Arabia prepares Gaza peace plan

Al Jazeera documents more mass summary executions by Israeli troops

With each passing day, there is growing evidence that Israeli troops are functioning as mobile mass execution parties in Gaza. On Thursday, Al Jazeera published video interviews of residents of an apartment building in Gaza City, where residents said Israeli troops systematically tortured and executed 15 men.

Heba Selem, a witness, stated: “They stripped them of their clothes except for their boxers and forced them to lay on their stomachs on the floor. They started to execute the men on the floor. They didn’t leave anyone. I swear to God, they turned the entire place into a bloodbath. “It’s a day you can’t forget, I can’t forget it.” Her husband was killed during the execution.

“After they tortured my husband in front of us and they broke his jaw, and beat up his face, they beat him until his arms were bleeding. They stripped all the men, tortured them, and humiliated them, then executed them. That all happened while we watched.”

Al Jazeera quoted William Schabas, professor of international law at Middlesex University, as saying the footage would constitute evidence of war crimes at the International Criminal Court. “I should add that it’s not really important to demonstrate that they’re civilians. Summary executions even of fighters, even of combatants is a war crime,” he told the news outlet. In a subsequent interview, Muhammad Shehada, chief of programs and communications of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, told Al Jazeera that there is a pattern of “systematic” killing in Gaza.

“In at least 13 of field executions, we corroborated that it was arbitrary on the part of the Israeli forces,” he said, adding: “We believe that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] has dropped restraint in its conduct in Gaza, enabling soldiers to confidently conduct these atrocities, without fear of accountability, which is why we’re seeing them in multiple neighborhoods and parts of the Gaza Strip.”

A Palestinian family in Gaza says they witnessed the summary execution of 15 men when Israeli soldiers raided their apartment last month. pic.twitter.com/JAhbcXNYO1

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) January 18, 2024

Gaza activist tells of beating and abuse in Israeli detention

The Gaza-based human rights activist Ayman Lubbad has not seen his wife and three children for more than a month, since he was ordered to strip to his underwear in the street outside his home, then driven away with other Palestinian men for a week of abuse and detention.

He was tortured and humiliated, he said, giving one of various accounts of recent Israeli abuse of Palestinians in detention; at least six have died, and one autopsy report showed serious injuries, Haaretz newspaper reported.

Hundreds of Gaza residents detained in Israel’s military campaign have faced torture methods including electric shocks, cigarette and lighter burns, stress positions and deprivation of sleep, food and toilet facilities, investigations by Reuters and +972 magazine found.

The Israel Defense Forces have said all allegations of improper conduct in detention facilities are thoroughly investigated, and that suspects strip-searched for security reasons during arrest should be allowed to dress again before being taken into custody.

When Lubbad was released without charge, it was in Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, while his family are still at their home in northern Beit Lahia. The Israeli military separate them, Palestinians are not allowed to move north through the strip and his family don’t want to risk the dangerous journey south through an active war zone, he told the Guardian in an interview.

New Film Examines American Jews’ Growing Rejection of Israel’s Occupation

US insists it’s trying to get aid into Gaza as UN warns millions ‘at risk of famine’

The US claims it is working “relentlessly” to get humanitarian aid into Gaza amid UN warnings that the territory’s 2.2 million people are “highly food insecure and at risk of famine”. Antony Blinken, speaking at Davos this week, called the situation in Gaza “gut-wrenching”. But the US secretary of state was unable to secure any major new gains on increasing the amount of assistance entering the territory during his recent visit to Israel, even as leaders of international organizations advocate for urgent access.

United Nations special rapporteurs said this week that “every single person in Gaza is hungry” and that “Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people”. Israeli inspections have slowed the aid entering the territory, which is receiving just a tiny fraction of what experts say is needed.

After months of backroom advocacy with Israel to increase the flow of food and humanitarian items through the south of Gaza, the US is “focused on trying to see what we can do to increase the volume and the speed with which those trucks are getting in”, according to the White House spokesperson John Kirby.

Israel has allowed just under 8,500 trucks to enter Gaza through the two southern crossings over the past 85 days, according to the UN’s monitoring – an average of 100 trucks a day. Aid groups say 500 trucks a day are needed at minimum. “Everyone understands the need for inspections, but things like antibiotics or tent poles or sleeping bags with zippers are causing delay and rejection, and then the whole trucks – not just the items in question – are turned away,” Tom Hart, the CEO of the humanitarian group InterAction, said. ...

The Biden administration credited its pressure on Israel for what has got into Gaza so far. “Despite the fact that what’s getting in isn’t sufficient to the needs right now, it is the United States that got anything in, in the first place,” Matt Miller, the state department spokesperson, has said.

'Our goal is to stop the genocide': Houthi spokesman meets The Grayzone

US Prepares for Open-Ended War Against the Houthis in Yemen

US officials told The Washington Post on Saturday that the Biden administration is planning for a “sustained military campaign” against the Houthis in Yemen even as over a week of near-daily bombing has done nothing to deter the group and has only dramatically escalated the situation.

The officials could not put any timeline on how long the conflict will last, only saying they don’t expect it to drag on for “years,” like the US wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. The report said the officials acknowledged they can not identify an “end date or provide an estimate for when the Yemenis’ military capability will be adequately diminished.”

Some US officials are worried the plans for an open-ended conflict against the Houthis will shatter the fragile truce between warring factions in Yemen, which includes a US-backed Saudi/UAE-led coalition. So far, Riyadh has urged restraint and distanced itself from the US’s anti-Houthi operations.

Palace intrigue in Ukraine

Ukrainian shelling of Donetsk shopping area kills dozens

At least 25 people have been killed after Ukrainian forces shelled a busy suburban shopping area in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, according to local officials. Alexei Kulemzin, the city’s Russian-installed mayor, said Ukrainian artillery had fired on a bustling district where shops and a market are located. Denis Pushilin, the Russian-appointed head of the Donetsk region, said emergency services were working at the scene, adding that a further 20 people, including two children, had been injured in the strike on the suburb of Tekstilshchik.

Pushilin said the area had been hit by 155mm and 152mm calibre shells fired from the direction of Kurakhove and Krasnohorivka to the west. Local authorities have declared Monday a day of mourning.

Reuters photographs and video taken at the scene showed people crying, some of whom said they had lost relatives, and bodies lying in the snow near one of the city’s markets. Shattered shopfronts and broken glass could be seen in videos shared by Russian state media, along with what appeared to be bodies lying on the ground nearby.

A local resident called Tatiana said she had heard an incoming projectile overhead, and had hidden under her market stall. “I saw smoke, people screamed, a woman was crying,” she told a local media outlet. “Where is there anything military here? It’s just a market,” another resident told the same outlet. “This is one of the strongest blows in recent times.”

Russia’s foreign ministry denounced the strike, saying “security threats and acts of terrorism should not be committed from the territory of Ukraine”. In a statement, it added: “These terrorist attacks by the Kyiv regime clearly demonstrate its lack of political will towards achieving peace and the settlement of this conflict by diplomatic means.”

Davos Elites WHINE About Loss of Control Over the Media, ‘WE OWNED THE NEWS’ Admits WSJ EIC

Ohio Pastor Charged for Opening Church to Homeless People in Freezing Weather

Outrage spread Friday after the story about a pastor in Ohio who was arrested and charged for opening his church to homeless people when extreme cold weather struck his town gained national attention.

Chris Avell, the pastor of an evangelical church called Dad's Place in Bryan, Ohio, pleaded not guilty last Thursday to charges that he broke 18 restrictions in zoning code when he gave shelter to people who might otherwise have frozen to death.

Avell garnered the attention of the Bryan City Zoning Commission last winter, when he invited unhoused people to stay in his church to avoid the cold and snow.

In November, officials told him Dad's Place could no longer house the homeless because it lacks bedrooms. The building is zoned as a central business, and Ohio law prohibits residential use, including sleeping and eating, in first-floor buildings within business districts.

According to James Causey, a columnist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Avell ignored the commission's orders and again opened Dad's Place to the homeless earlier this winter, until police arrived at the church during a New Year's Eve service and issued the violations.

"Many of these people have been rejected by their families and cast aside by their communities. So, if the church isn't willing to lay down its life for them, then who will? This is what we're called to do," Avell toldFox News.

Dad's Place is located next to a homeless shelter, but overcrowding at the facility led Avell to begin offering space to unhoused people. "We have put in things people can use, like a shower and a small ability to do laundry," the pastor toldThe Village Reporter in Bryan. "Some who found this to be a home for them have stuck around."

Ashton Pittman, editor of the Mississippi Free Press, said Avell's story was a rare example in the U.S. of "actual religious persecution of a Christian by the state."

Julian Assange’s Last Chance To Avoid Extradition! w/ Stella Assange

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Ron DeSantis drops out of Republican presidential race

Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, has ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed Donald Trump.

“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” he said in a statement posted on X. “He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”

DeSantis’s withdrawal in the days ahead of the New Hampshire primary follows a disappointing result in the Iowa caucus, where he finished second place but trailed Donald Trump by a large margin. In New Hampshire, his numbers were far behind former South Carolina governor Haley and Trump.

Historian Rick Perlstein on Trump’s Grip on the GOP

Biden abortion ad marks campaign shift to emphasize reproductive rights

The Biden re-election campaign rolled out a new campaign ad Sunday, signaling a shift in emphasis to reproductive rights that the White House hopes will carry and define Democrats through the 2024 election cycle. The campaign ad, titled Forced, is designed to tie Donald Trump directly to the abortion issue almost 18 months after his nominees to the supreme court helped to overturn a constitutional right to abortion enshrined in Roe v Wade, which would have turned 51 this week.

Dr Austin Dennard, a Texas OB-GYN and mother of three tells the camera her story about traveling out of her state to terminate her pregnancy after learning her fetus had a fatal condition, calling her situation “every woman’s worst nightmare”. In Texas, she said, her choice “was completely taken away and that’s because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v Wade”. ...

Vice-President Kamala Harris is now being placed to the forefront of the administration’s messaging on reproductive rights, a position Biden has said he is not “big on” because of his Catholic faith, though he believes the landmark 1973 decision “got it right”.

BIDEN IN TROUBLE? Rival SURGES In Primary

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Largest known deep-sea coral reef mapped off US Atlantic coast

Scientists have mapped the largest known deep-sea coral reef, stretching hundreds of miles off the US Atlantic coast. While researchers have known since the 1960s that coral is present off the Atlantic, the reef’s size remained a mystery until new underwater mapping technology made it possible to construct 3D images of the ocean floor.

The largest yet known deep-sea coral reef “has been right under our noses, waiting to be discovered”, said Derek Sowers, an oceanographer at the non-profit Ocean Exploration Trust. ...

The reef extends for about 310 miles (500km) from Florida to South Carolina and at some points reaches 68 miles (110km) wide. The total area is nearly three times the size of Yellowstone national park. ...

The reef was found at depths ranging from 655 feet to 3,280 feet (200 to 1,000 meters), where sunlight doesn’t penetrate. Unlike tropical coral reefs, where photosynthesis is important for growth, coral this far down must filter food particles out of the water for energy.

Deep coral reefs provide habitat for sharks, swordfish, sea stars, octopuses, shrimp and many other kinds of fish, the scientists said.

Frontline Fishers Force Early End to New Orleans Gas Conference

Frontline fishers and environmental justice advocates forced the meeting of the Americas Energy Summit in New Orleans to end two hours early on Friday, as they protested what the buildout of liquefied natural gas infrastructure is doing to Gulf Coast ecosystems and livelihoods.

Fishers and shrimpers from southwest Louisiana say that new LNG export terminals are destroying habitat for marine life while the tankers make it unsafe for them to take their boats out in the areas where fishing is still possible. The destruction is taking place in the port of Cameron, which once saw the biggest catch of any fishing area in the U.S.

"We want our oystering back. We want our shrimp back. We want our dredges back. We want LNG to leave us alone," Cameron fisherman Solomon Williams Jr. said in a statement. "With all the oil and all the stuff they're dumping in the water, it's just killing every oyster we can get. Makes it so we can't sell our shrimp."

The protest was part of the growing movement against LNG export infrastructure, which is both harming the health and environment of Gulf Coast residents and risks worsening the climate crisis: Just one of the more than 20 proposed new LNG terminals, Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass 2, would release 20 times the lifetime emissions of the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. Activists have also planned a sit-in at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., from February 6-8 to demand the agency stop approving new LNG export terminals.

The Americas Energy Summit is one of the largest international meetings of executives involved in the exporting of natural gas. More than 40 impacted fishers brought their boats to New Orleans to park them outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, where the meeting was being held. After a march from Jackson Square, the fishers revved their engines to disrupt the meeting. One attendee said the disruption forced the meeting to conclude at 11 am ET, two hours earlier than scheduled.

"They going to run us out of the channel and if they run us out of the channel then it's over," Phillip Dyson Sr., a fisherman who attended the protest with his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, said in a statement. "We fight for them. We fight for my grandson. Been a fighter all my life. I ain't going to stop now. So long as I got breathe I'm going to fight for my kids. They are the future. Fishing industry been here hundreds of years and now they're trying to stop us. I don't think it's right."

The fishers were joined by other local and national climate advocates, including Sunrise New Orleans, Permian Gulf Coast Coalition, Habitat Recovery Project, the Vessel Project, For a Better Bayou, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and actress and activist Jane Fonda.

"I thought I understood. I read the articles, I read the science, I've seen the photographs. But when you're here on the ground, seeing it with your own eyes and talking to the people... it feels like looking into the devil's eyes," Fonda said at the protest. "I've talked to people who have lost what was theirs over generations and are losing their livelihoods, the fishing, the oystering, the shrimping…"

Fonda called on the Biden administration to take action: "If President [Joe] Biden declared a climate emergency he could take money from the Pentagon and he could reinstate the crude oil export [ban]. Once the export ends, the drilling will end. They're only drilling because they can export it."

The successful action came despite interference from police, who threatened to issue tickets and tow away the six boats the fishers had originally parked in front of the convention center. Some participants agreed to move their boats, but the group was able to park two boats in front of the center and persevere in their protest.

"We're standing in the fire down there. And these people over here, the decisions that they make, for which our fishermen are paying the price. That's bullshit," Travis Dardar, who organized the fishers' trip and founded the group Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage (FISH), said in a statement."The police got us blocked here, they got us blocked there. But know that the fishermen are here and we're still going to try and give them hell."

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Also of Interest

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

Decoding Iran’s Missile & Drone Strikes

Global South Takes Israel to Court

Guardian’s ‘Hamas Mass Rape’ Story Doesn’t Add Up

Orbán Outfoxes the EU in Nationalism vs. Technocracy Fight

Brexit divergence from EU destroying UK’s vital environmental protections

Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha Decries Israel’s “Inhumane” Assault

ELITE UNIVERSITIES in SHAMBLES Over Israel-Gaza Issue, Summers Says Jews CAN'T FLOURISH At Harvard

VIDEO EXPLODES Jan 6 Pipe Bomb Official Narrative

Israel Filmed Themselves Doing This To Palestinians!

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A Little Night Music

Otis Clay - I'm Satisfied

Otis Clay - Brand New Thing

Otis Clay - Come My Dear

Otis Clay - Trying to Live My Life Without You

Otis Clay - Is It Over

Otis Clay - She's About A Mover

Otis Clay - Baby Jane

Otis Clay - Since I've Been Loving You

Otis Clay - Wild Horses

Otis Clay & The BoKeys - Got To Get Back

Otis Clay - Love Bone

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