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This evening's music features blues singer whose career started in the 1920's Sippie Wallace. Enjoy!

"Unsurprisingly, Israeli officials and their allies in Washington — including groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — have begun lobbying President Trump to bring the U.S. into the war and to join them in offensive strikes. For Trump, this must be a serious letdown. Aware of his reluctance to launch another Middle East war, the Netanyahu government had recalibrated its approach when it pressed Trump earlier in January: rather than urging the U.S. to strike Iran directly, it sought a green light for Israel to act. Through an intense lobbying campaign, Israel appears to have secured at least tacit approval from Trump for this campaign.

Just 24 hours into its war of choice with Iran, Israel was already back in Washington, knocking on Trump’s door with new demands. What began as “Give us the green light and Israel will bomb Iran for America” quickly shifted to “Hurry up, America, and bomb Iran for Israel!”"

-- Trita Parsi

News and Opinion

Stop Netanyahu Before He Gets Us All Killed

For nearly 30 years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has driven the Middle East into war and destruction. The man is a powder keg of violence. Throughout all the wars that he has championed, Netanyahu has always dreamed of the big one: to defeat and overthrow the Iranian Government. His long-sought war, just launched, might just get us all killed in a nuclear Armageddon, unless Netanyahu is stopped.

Netanyahu’s fixation on war goes back to his extremist mentors, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin. The older generation believed that Zionists should use whatever violence–wars, assassinations, terror–is needed to achieve their aims of eliminating any Palestinian claim to a homeland.

The founders of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, called for exclusive Zionist control over all of what had been British Mandatory Palestine. At the start of the British Mandate in the early 1920s, the Muslim and Christian Arabs constituted roughly 87% of the population and owned ten times more land than the Jewish population. As of 1948, the Arabs still outnumbered the Jews roughly two to one. Nonetheless, the founding charter of Likud (1977) declared that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” The now infamous chant, “from the River to the Sea,” which is characterized as anti-Semitic, turns out to be the anti-Palestinian rallying call of the Likud.

The challenge for Likud was how to pursue its maximalist aims despite their blatant illegality under international law and morality, both of which call for a two-state solution.

In 1996, Netanyahu and his American advisors devised a “Clean Break” strategy. They advocated that Israel would not withdraw from the Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 war in exchange for regional peace. Instead, Israel would reshape the Middle East to its liking. Crucially, the strategy envisioned the US as the main force to achieve these aims—waging wars in the region to dismantle governments opposed to Israel’s dominance over Palestine. The US was called upon to fight wars on Israel’s behalf.

The Clean Break strategy was effectively carried out by the US and Israel after 9/11. As NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark revealed, soon after 9/11, the US planned to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.”

The first of the wars, in early 2003, was to topple the Iraqi government. Plans for further wars were delayed as the US became mired in Iraq. Still, the US supported Sudan’s split in 2005, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and Ethiopia’s incursion into Somalia that same year. In 2011, the Obama administration launched CIA operation Timber Sycamore against Syria and, with the UK and France, overthrew Libya’s government through a 2011 bombing campaign. Today, these countries lie in ruins, and many are now embroiled in civil wars.

Netanyahu was a cheerleader of these wars of choice–either in public or behind the scenes–together with his neocon allies in the U.S. Government including Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and others.

Testifying in the U.S. Congress in 2002, Netanyahu pitched for the disastrous war in Iraq, declaring “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” He continued, “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.” He also falsely told Congress, “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons.”

The slogan to remake a “New Middle East” provides the slogan for these wars. Initially stated in 1996 through “Clean Break,” it was popularized by Secretary Condoleezza Rice in 2006. As Israel was brutally bombarded Lebanon, Rice stated:

“What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one.”

In September 2023, Netanyahu presented at UN General Assembly a map of the “New Middle East” completely erasing a Palestinian state. In September 2024, he elaborated on this plan by showing two maps: one part of the Middle East a “blessing,” and the other–including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran–a curse, as he advocated regime change in the latter countries.

Israel’s war on Iran is the final move in a decades-old strategy. We are witnessing the culmination of decades of extremist Zionist manipulation of US foreign policy.

The premise of Israel’s attack on Iran is the claim that Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Such a claim is fatuous since Iran has repeatedly called for negotiations precisely to remove the nuclear option in return for an end to the decades of US sanctions.

Since 1992, Netanyahu and his supporters have claimed that Iran will become a nuclear power “in a few years." In 1995, Israeli officials and their US backers declared a 5-year timeline. In 2003, Israel’s Director of Military Intelligence said that Iran will be a nuclear power “by the summer of 2004.” In 2005, the head of Mossad said that Iran could build the bomb in less than 3 years. In 2012, Netanyahu claimed at the United Nations that “it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.” And on and on.

This 30-year-plus pattern of shifting deadlines has marked a deliberate strategy, not a failure in prophecy. The claims are propaganda; there is always an “existential threat.” More importantly, there is Netanyahu’s phony claim that negotiations with Iran are useless.

Iran has repeatedly said that it does not want a nuclear weapon and that it has long been prepared to negotiate. In October 2003, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa forbidding the production and use of nuclear arms—a ruling later officially cited by Iran at an IAEA meeting in Vienna in August 2005 and referenced since as a religious and legal barrier to pursuing nuclear weapons.

Even for those skeptical of Iran’s intentions, Iran has consistently advocated for a negotiated agreement supported by independent international verification. In contrast, the Zionist lobby has opposed any such settlements, urging the US to maintain sanctions and reject deals that would allow strict IAEA monitoring in exchange for lifting sanctions.

In 2016, the Obama Administration, together with the UK, France, Germany, China, and Russia, reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran—a landmark agreement to strictly monitor Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Yet, under relentless pressure from Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby, President Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Predictably, when Iran responded by expanding its uranium enrichment, it was blamed for violating an agreement that the US itself had abandoned. The double-standard and propaganda is hard to miss.

On April 11, 2021, Israel’s Mossad attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz. Following the attack, on April 16, Iran announced that it would increase its uranium enrichment further, as bargaining leverage, while repeatedly appealing for renewed negotiations on a deal like the JCPOA. The Biden Administration rejected all such negotiations.

At the start of his second term, Trump agreed to open a new negotiation with Iran. Iran pledged to renounce nuclear arms and to be subject to IAEA inspections but reserved the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. The Trump Administration appeared to agree to this point but then reversed itself. Since then, there have been five rounds of negotiations, with both sides reporting progress on each occasion.

The sixth round was ostensibly to take place on Sunday, June 15. Instead, Israel launched a preemptive war on Iran on June 12. Trump confirmed that the US knew of the attack in advance, even as the administration was speaking publicly of the upcoming negotiations.

Israel’s attack was made not only in the midst of negotiations that were making progress, but days before a scheduled UN Conference on Palestine that would have advanced the cause of the two-state solution. That conference has now been postponed.

Israel’s attack on Iran now threatens to escalate to a full-fledged war that draws in the US and Europe on the side of Israel and Russia and perhaps Pakistan on the side of Iran. We could soon see several nuclear powers pitted against each other and dragging the world closer to nuclear annihilation. The Doomsday Clock is at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest to nuclear Armageddon since the clock was launched in 1947.

Over the past 30 years, Netanyahu and his US backers have destroyed or destabilized a 4,000-km swath of countries stretching across North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Western Asia. Their aim has been to block a Palestinian State by overthrowing governments supporting the Palestinian cause. The world deserves better than this extremism. More than 180 countries in the UN have called for the two-state solution and regional stability. That makes more sense than Israel bringing the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon in pursuit of its illegal and extremist aims.

Israel BLOCKS ESCAPE, Uses US Citizens As HUMAN SHIELDS

Iran's Ballistic Missiles HIT Mossad HQ, Tel Aviv PARALYZED as Trump Readies BIG War

We Must Oppose War With Iran At The Top Of Our Lungs

President Trump is reportedly returning to Washington early from a G7 summit in Canada and has told his national security council to prepare for an urgent meeting in the situation room, apparently to discuss Iran.

The US president has taken to social media to terrorize Iranian civilians, telling Tehran’s millions of inhabitants that they must immediately evacuate the city and saying “Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign.”

Weirdly, the strongest indication that Trump has made a decision to attack Iran might be a recent post on Truth Social about former Fox News darling Tucker Carlson.

“Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that,” IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” the president posted.

Carlson has been an outspoken critic of warmongering toward Iran, and was reportedly responsible for personally talking the president out of his Iran brinkmanship in the first Trump administration.

Antiwar’s Scott Horton is reporting that, according to his sources, the Trump administration has already decided to join in Israel’s war.

Capitol Hill is clearly worried that a war with Iran is imminent, with numerous lawmakers in the House and the Senate scrambling to get legislation in place that would stop the president from ordering such a war.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been speaking to the western press to argue in favor of assassinating Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. I keep thinking about the Mad King in Game of Thrones who went nuts and kept ordering everyone to be burned, until a member of his own court decided enough is enough and slit his throat.

A full-scale US war against Iran is one of the worst things that could possibly happen. Full stop. It would likely entail millions of deaths, massive worldwide economic suffering, chaos and devastation throughout the middle east unlike anything we’ve ever seen, and could easily wind up with an Israeli nuclear weapon exploding in Tehran. There is a reason even a lot of otherwise war-happy swamp monsters in Washington have resisted going down this path. I really, really hope it doesn’t happen.

If this is the direction the empire chooses to go, expect mass-scale psychological manipulation on an entirely unprecedented level to dupe the public into going along with this thing. Expect far more lies. Expect far more propaganda. Expect psyops. Maybe a false flag attack or two. It will be bad.

Don’t buy into the lies. Oppose their warmongering at the top of your lungs, with everything you’ve got. I will be doing the same.

Anyone who supports this war is an enemy of the human species.

Larry Johnson : Is Trump Afraid of Netanyahu?

Israel issues Tehran evacuation order as Iran threatens to leave nuclear weapons treaty

Israeli forces issued an evacuation order to residents of a large part of Tehran on Monday, warning them of the imminent bombing of “military infrastructure” in the area in a social media post very similar to those regularly directed at Palestinians in Gaza over the past 20 months. The post on X was from the account of the Israel Defense Forces’ Arabic spokesperson, Col Avichay Adraee, and is a further sign of the evolving nature of the Israeli campaign against Iran, which began with attacks on air defences, nuclear sites and the military chain of command, but appears to have drifted towards a war of attrition focused on Iran’s oil and gas industry and on the capital.

In another sign of the changing targets of the Israeli offensive, Iran’s state TV announced on Monday evening that it was under attack during a live transmission. The sound of an explosion could be heard, and the news presenter hurried off camera as dust and debris appeared in the studio. Cries of “Allahu Akbar” or “God is greatest” could be heard off-screen and the broadcast abruptly switched to pre-recorded programming. Live programming resumed some time later.

Adraee’s online post included a map depicting a significant area of the third district in northern Tehran shaded in red in the same manner he has presented evacuation orders for Palestinians. “Dear citizens, for your safety, please leave the described area in the 3rd district of Tehran immediately,” the message said in Farsi. “In the coming hours, the Israeli army will attack the military infrastructure of the Iranian regime in this area, as it has done in recent days in Tehran. Your presence in this area endangers your life.”

Later on Monday, US president Donald Trump urged everyone to immediately evacuate Tehran, and reiterated that Iran should have signed a nuclear deal with the United States. “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” he said in a post on Truth Social. ...

Earlier on Monday, Iran threatened to leave the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) as Israeli bombing raids entered a fourth day, underlining the conflict’s potential to trigger a broader war and Tehran’s race to construct a nuclear weapon. [Note the fnords placed in the Guardian's coverage. -js]

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Trump and War

Irony supplement:

BREAKING: The military cabinet meeting this evening will take place in the new fortified IDF headquarters beneath Ichilov Hospital, which is protected from Iranian missiles after the Defense Ministry was hit last night and is now unsafe.

Ichilov Hospital is a camouflaged… pic.twitter.com/FWZqUul3CN

— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) June 14, 2025

‘A bloodbath’: doctors describe carnage at Iran’s hospitals after Israeli strikes

The stream of wounded in Imam Khomeini hospital in Tehran had been steady since Friday. On Sunday evening it became a flood. A renewed wave of Israeli strikes on Iran’s capital overwhelmed the hospital’s emergency unit, turning it into what one doctor described as a “bloodbath”.

“It was a bloodbath. We were overwhelmed by chaos and the screams of grieving family members. Dozens upon dozens of people with life-threatening injuries, minor wounds and even bodies were brought in,” a doctor at the emergency unit of the hospital told the Guardian on Monday under condition of anonymity.

As fighting between Israel and Iran entered its fourth day, Iranian hospitals were receiving a surge of wounded people, overwhelming medical facilities and exhausted personnel. Medical staff described scenes of bloody chaos and an influx of injured people that has only seemed to grow as Israeli strikes increased in intensity.

“I’ve seen toddlers, teenagers, adults and the elderly alike. Profusely bleeding mothers were rushing in with their children injured by shrapnel,” the doctor said, adding that some parents did not realise they themselves were injured until they put their children down. They rattled off a list of injuries: metal lodged in femur bones and the soft tissues of the hip joints, internal bleeding and severe burns. Many of those wounded had been nearby when an Israeli bomb dropped, peppering them with deadly shrapnel.

Fighting began after Israel conducted hundreds of airstrikes on Iran early on Friday morning, which it said were aimed at preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Iran responded with a salvo of missiles and drones, and the violence between the two countries has escalated since.

Aaron Maté : Trump Lied, People Died

SOMETHING’S MOVING: U.S. Air Force refueling tankers just launched en masse across multiple bases; headed toward Europe.

These aren’t transport planes. These are flying gas stations for warbirds. You don’t launch this many unless you’re prepping for sustained air ops.… pic.twitter.com/xrYKNFM0tU

— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) June 16, 2025

Democratic senator proposes curbing Trump’s war powers amid Israel-Iran conflict

As Iran and Israel exchange missile attacks for a fourth day, Democrats in Washington are moving swiftly to reassert congressional authority over US military engagement in the region amid fears of American involvement in a broader conflict.

Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator of Virginia, on Monday introduced a war powers resolution that would prohibit US armed forces from taking direct action against Iran without explicit authorization from Congress or a declaration of war. The measure, like other attempts to claw back power from the executive branch, faces a steep climb in the GOP-controlled Congress, where Republicans have been mostly unwilling to challenge Donald Trump’s authority.

“I am deeply concerned that the recent escalation of hostilities between Israel and Iran could quickly pull the United States into another endless conflict,” Kaine said in a statement. “The American people have no interest in sending service members to fight another forever war in the Middle East. This resolution will ensure that if we decide to place our nation’s men and women in uniform into harm’s way, we will have a debate and vote on it in Congress.”

Later on Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who votes with Democrats, introduced a separate piece of legislation that would bar the use of federal funds for any use of military force “in or against Iran” without congressional authorization. Several progressive Democrats, including senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland joined as sponsors.

“Another war in the Middle East could cost countless lives, waste trillions more dollars and lead to even more deaths, more conflict, and more displacement,” Sanders said in a statement. “I will do everything that I can as a Senator to defend the Constitution and prevent the US from being drawn into another war.”

Iraq War 2.0: Glenn Greenwald EXPOSES Media's IRAN PSYOP

At least 37 Palestinians killed in Gaza food site shooting

At least 37 Palestinians were killed on Monday in new shootings in Gaza near food distribution centres run by private US contractors guarded by Israeli troops, local authorities said.

Witnesses blamed the shootings on Israeli troops who opened fire early in the morning as crowds of hungry Palestinians converged on two hubs managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private organisation that recently began operating in Gaza with Israeli and US support. The death toll on Monday was the highest yet reported in the near-daily shootings since the GHF began operations three weeks ago.

Health officials in Gaza said most of Monday’s victims were killed while trying to reach the GHF centre near the southern city of Rafah, which has largely been razed by the Israeli military, and close to a second GHF centre in central Gaza. It said four other people were killed elsewhere.

Two Palestinians trying to get food at the Rafah site, Heba Jouda and Mohammed Abed, told the Associated Press that Israeli forces fired on the crowds at about 4am at the Flag roundabout. The traffic circle, hundreds of metres from the GHF centre, has repeatedly been the scene of shootings.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Monday its field hospital in Gaza had received 200 patients, marking the highest number received by the facility in one mass casualty incident. On Sunday, the same hospital treated 170 people, many of whom “were wounded by gunshots, and who reported that they were trying to access a food distribution site”.

Social media overtakes TV as main source of news in US

Social media has overtaken television as a source of news in the US for the first time, according to a comprehensive analysis of media consumption confirming the rapid rise of “news influencers”.

In a watershed moment for the US media, 54% of Americans said they received news from social media, according to the research carried out after President Trump’s second inauguration. Half said they sourced news from the once all-powerful TV networks.

The accelerating global shift towards social media and video platforms is laid bare in a major study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which surveyed almost 100,000 news consumers worldwide.

It reveals a further diminishing of the influence of traditional news organisations, with more people heading to podcasters, YouTubers and TikTokers. The authors warned it is allowing populist politicians such as Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei to bypass the scrutiny of the transitional media in favour of new, online networks.

The role of news influencers, who use their personal brand to win an online following, is growing, led by the extraordinary impact of the podcaster Joe Rogan during last year’s US presidential election. One-fifth (22%) of those contacted in the US said they came across news or commentary from Rogan in the week after the presidential inauguration, including a disproportionate number of young men, a group traditional media struggles to reach.

Trump administration notches first big win in assault on higher education

The Trump administration scored its most significant legal victory in its sweeping effort to reshape American higher education when a federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by faculty groups over the government’s cuts to Columbia University’s federal funding.

The lawsuit concerned the Trump administration’s cuts to $400m worth of federal funding to Columbia on the grounds it tolerated antisemitism during pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Columbia largely accepted the government’s terms for restoring funding – in an agreement widely panned as a capitulation of its own academic freedom – several days before the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) sued the Trump administration over the cuts.

The judge in the case, Mary Kay Vyskocil of the southern district of New York, ruled that the faculty unions had no “standing” to bring the suit and had not clearly indicated how the administration had broken the law.

“It is not the role of a district court judge to direct the policies of the Executive Branch first and ask questions later,” the judge, a Trump appointee, wrote in her 30-page ruling. “Plaintiffs have not established their standing to litigate this case, let alone any violation of any law.” She seemed to accept the government’s prerogative to withhold funding and its argument that Columbia had enabled antisemitism to fester on campus. She also noted that Columbia had remained “conspicuously absent” from the case.

New rules allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veterans

Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump. The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.

Medical staff are still required to treat veterans regardless of race, color, religion and sex, and all veterans remain entitled to treatment. But individual workers are now free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not explicitly prohibited by federal law. Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated.

Doctors and other medical staff can also be barred from working at VA hospitals based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity, documents reviewed by the Guardian show. The changes also affect chiropractors, certified nurse practitioners, optometrists, podiatrists, licensed clinical social workers and speech therapists.

In making the changes, VA officials cite the president’s 30 January executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”. The primary purpose of the executive order was to strip most government protections from transgender people. The VA has since ceased providing most gender-affirming care and forbidden a long list of words, including “gender affirming” and “transgender”, from clinical settings. Medical experts said the implications of rule changes uncovered by the Guardian could be far-reaching.

Trump and other Republicans mock Democrats after Minnesota lawmaker killings

The Utah senator Mike Lee sounded like a lot of other Republican politicians after the fatal shootings of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota this weekend. “These hateful attacks have no place in Utah, Minnesota, or anywhere in America. Please join me in condemning this senseless violence, and praying for the victims and their families,” he wrote on Twitter/X.

That was from his official account. On his personal X account, he posted a series of memes concerning the attacks that left former Minnesota state house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark dead, and state senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette seriously injured.

“This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” Lee posted, along with a photo of the alleged gunman, who was arrested on Sunday. He followed that up by posting the photo and writing “Nightmare on Waltz Street”, an apparent misspelling of Tim Walz, the state’s Democratic governor who became nationally known last year as Kamala Harris’s running mate.

Such was the split screen that played out among Republicans after the Saturday morning shootings, which were the latest in a wave of political violence across the United States that has most recently seen two assassination attempts targeting Donald Trump as he campaigned for president, a flamethrower attack on a rally for Israeli hostages in Colorado and a slew of threats targeting judges who have ruled against the US president.

While many in the GOP condemned the attacks in Minnesota, others have used it as an opportunity to poke fun at their Democratic opponents, or suggest that they somehow instigated the violence. Experts warn it may be the latter statements that reach the bigger audience. “I think there’s no question that these messages are representative of the modern GOP more so than any stock thoughts and prayers tweet that a staffer puts up,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

'Planet Wreckers': 4 Rich Nations Plotting Nearly 70% of New Oil and Gas Over Next Decade

Four wealthy nations—the United States, Canada, Norway, and Australia—account for the majority of planned oil and gas expansion over the next decade, according to new data published by Oil Change International on Monday, the first day of the Bonn Climate Change Conference in Germany.

Oil Change's analysis, titled Planet Wreckers, notes that if those four Global North nations stopped their planned new oil and gas extraction, 32 billion tons of carbon pollution would stay in the ground instead of being burned and released into the atmosphere, where they fuel planetary heating. That's the equivalent of three times the annual global emissions created by burning coal.

"A handful of the world's richest nations remain intent on leading us into disaster. This is not just hypocrisy. It is a death sentence for communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis," Oil Change International global policy lead Romain Ioualalen said in a statement Monday.

"It is sickening that countries with the highest incomes and outsized historical responsibility for causing the climate crisis are planning massive oil and gas expansion with no regard for the lives and livelihoods at stake," Ioualalen added.

Florida removes record haul of invasive pythons in effort to curb population

It was a milestone moment in Florida’s 25-year war on invasive Burmese pythons: an eye-popping announcement that biologists had removed 20 tons of the slithering invaders from waters in and around the Everglades in little more than a decade, as well as shattering their previous record for a single-season haul.

The successes of the team at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida showcase the progress that has been made in efforts to reverse the snakes’ takeover of the state’s natural wilderness, even though experts concede they will probably never be completely eradicated. “Every single python that’s removed is positive for the environment,” said Mike Kirkland, python program manager at the south Florida water management district, which with its own partners has separately tracked and euthanized more than 15,650 individuals of a predatory species blamed for a calamitous decline in the Everglades’ native mammal population.

“We’re getting better and better at removing this invasive species. We’re learning more about their behavior and life history, and their non-native range here in south Florida, which is leading to more removals and hopefully innovation and novel strategies going forward. Progress is being made. Anecdotally we’re seeing some demographic shifts, and regionally, we’re seeing less larger size-class pythons in certain areas. That’s a direct result of our management efforts, and our partners’ management efforts.”

Kirkland, and other experts, say it is impossible to know how many pythons are swimming in the waters of the greater Everglades region, making it difficult to accurately gauge the impact of the removal efforts. Most estimates settle at tens of thousands, originating from a handful of snakes believed to have been dumped by pet owners in the 1990s when they grew too big.

Ant no stopping us now: insect with potent bite continues march across US

Last year, Dan Suiter, a professor of urban entomology at the University of Georgia, received at least three calls from people who had been stung by an Asian needle ant – or knew someone who had been – and went into anaphylaxis, an allergic reaction that can be life-threatening. While there is no new evidence on the continued spread of the ants in the US – detected now in 20 US states – Suiter and his colleagues are determined to raise public awareness of the risks the species poses.

Unlike fire ants, Asian needle ants are not aggressive, and Suiter said there had not been reporting on whether there has been an increase in the number of stings. Still, Suiter said, when he heard about what seemed like more people landing in the hospital after being stung, he saw it as the “tip of the iceberg”. “We just thought that the bell needed to be rung again and have this brought to people’s attention,” Suiter said of the decision by the University of Georgia to issue a recent press release on the threat posted by the invasive ants. ...

The Asian needle ant, whose scientific name is brachyponera chinensis, was first detected in the United States in 1932. “They are small, shiny, black, very sleek, almost elegant-looking,” said Joe MacGown, a semi-retired ant curator at Mississippi State University and an artist. The ants often colonize in “undisturbed forest areas where they nest under and within logs and other debris, under stones and in leaf litter”, the US Department of Agriculture reported. “They can also occur near homes and businesses under mulch, pavers, landscape timbers and other objects.” ...

Suiter encourages people who live in states where the ant is common and have a history of anaphylaxis after an insect bite to take photos of bugs on their property that they suspect could be Asian needle ants and send them to a local extension office or entomology department at a university to have them identified. Antmaps.org shows where they have been found.

Also of Interest

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

Patrick Lawrence: World’s Most Dangerous Man & His Enabler

Trump: US Forces ‘Could Get Involved’ With Israel Against Iran

Israel is not winning. Trump must not cave to new demands for help.

Does TACO Have Predictive Value? Pressures on Trump With Respect to Joining Israel in its Iran War

Vijay Prashad: The Illegal Attack on Iran

Iran-Israeli War Update

A map, a myth and a pre-Incan lagoon: the man who brought water back to a drought-ridden town

Chris Hedges: Q&A: Genocide in Gaza, Political Assassinations in America and War With Iran

A Little Night Music

Sippie Wallace With Bonnie Raitt – Women Be Wise

Sippie Wallace & Otis Spann w/ Kweskin Jug Band – Everybody Loves My Baby

Sippie Wallace – Mighty Tight Woman

Sippie Wallace - Suitcase Blues

Sippie Wallace - Have You Ever Been Down?

Sippie Wallace - Devil Dance Blues

Sippie Wallace - The Mail Train Blues

Sippie Wallace w/ Perry Bradford's Jazz Phools - Section Hand Blues

Sippie Wallace & Otis Spann w Kweskin Jug Band – Jelly Roll Blues