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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Paul Butterfield

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features harmonica player Paul Butterfield. Enjoy!

^{The Paul Butterfield Blues Band - One More Mile}

"Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?"

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

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News and Opinion

Tony Blair adds ethnic cleansing in Gaza to his list of crimes

Twenty-two years after lying about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction to justify US President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq in 2003, former UK Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair has given his imprimatur to plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza advanced by US President Donald Trump. The US/UK’s unprovoked war of aggression and the subsequent occupation of Iraq cost the lives of more than 600,000 Iraqi civilians, according to the UK medical journal The Lancet, and many estimates are higher. By April 2007, 1.9 million Iraqis were displaced within the country and over 2.2 million were refugees abroad. Once one of the most advanced Arab economies due to its oil, after the invasion Iraq’s GDP contracted by 50 percent, its currency dived, unemployment and poverty soared. ...

Last week, this unindicted war criminal went to the White House to brief Trump on proposals, initiated by Israeli businessmen and drawn up with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) and his own Tony Blair Institute (TBI), for a “post-war” Gaza. Trump gave Israel’s fascist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the green light to destroy Gaza by bombardment, starvation and disease and remove the Palestinians from the enclave and now wants to reap the spoils. ... The plan is titled, “The Great Trust: From a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally”, where “Great” is an acronym for “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation”. It is not only a massive speculative venture seeking to profit from ethnic cleansing and genocide, but a critical component of the drive by US imperialism to dominate the Middle East. ...

Accompanying Blair at the White House to discuss this plan was Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who manages billions of dollars of investment with the Gulf petro-monarchs—business interests furthered when he served as Middle East envoy during the first Trump administration. Blair and Kushner are said to have been collaborating for months on the future of Gaza following Trump’s proposal in February to take a “long-term ownership position” over Gaza, with the US moving to “take it over and develop it” as a luxury beach resort and relocate the population to a “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land” or “numerous pieces of land”. Blair has also worked with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s billionaire Middle East envoy, meeting with him at the White House in July on the same day that Netanyahu met Trump. He has held a series of meetings in Israel and the Gulf over the last few months, including with PA President Mahmoud Abbas in July. ...

While Blair’s record shows that no criminal enterprise is too much for Britain’s former prime minister, the present Labour prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is his ardent admirer, disciple and fellow war criminal. Starmer fully supports Netanyahu’s genocide of the Palestinians as part of US imperialism’s broader plans to assert its control over the resource-rich Middle East—targeting China above all—from which Britain hopes to profit. The British government supplies Israel with weaponry, conducts near daily reconnaissance flights from its base in Cyprus to provide intelligence for the Israel Defense Forces and provides political and diplomatic support for Israel at the United Nations.

COL. Douglas Macgregor : Trump and the Constitution

Sometime back in 2018, Google abandoned its motto, "Don't Be Evil." That change is certainly more than apparent now.

Google is in the middle of a six-month, $45 million contract to amplify propaganda with Netanyahu’s office. The contract describes Google as a “key entity” supporting the prime minister’s messaging.

On March 2, 2025, hours after the Israeli government announced the blockade of all food, medicine, fuel, and other humanitarian supplies from entering Gaza, lawmakers in Jerusalem demanded answers—not on the devastating human toll of such a decision, but on how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office was preparing to handle the public relations fallout. “I began with the example of the cessation of humanitarian aid—did you prepare for this thing this morning?” asked Knesset member Moshe Tur-Paz, the chair of a subcommittee on Foreign Affairs in Israel’s parliament. Avichai Edrei, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces who was asked the same question later in the hearing, assured the legislators work was underway, stating, “We could also decide to launch a digital campaign in this context, to explain that there is no hunger and present the data.”

Publicly available government contracts show that Israel’s advertising bureau, which reports to the prime minister’s office, has since embarked on a mass advertising and public messaging effort to conceal the hunger crisis. The push includes the use of American influencers widely reported on last month. It also includes a high-dollar spending spree on paid advertising, yielding tens of millions for Google, YouTube, X, Meta, and other tech platforms. “There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie,” asserted a propaganda video published by Israel’s foreign ministry to Google’s YouTube video sharing platform in late August and viewed more than 6 million times. Much of the video’s reach results from an ad placed during an ongoing and previously unreported $45 million (NIS 150 million) advertising campaign initiated between Google and Netanyahu’s office in late June. The contract—which is with both YouTube and Google's advertising campaign management platform, Display & Video 360—explicitly characterizes the ad campaign as hasbara, a Hebrew word whose meaning is somewhere between public relations and propaganda.

Records show that the Israeli government similarly spent $3 million (NIS 10 million) for an advertising campaign with X. The French and Israeli advertising platform Outbrain/Teads is also set to receive roughly $2.1 million (NIS 7 million).

The ads have aired in response to increasing global outcry over the deteriorating situation in Gaza. In August, the UN formally declared a famine in Gaza governorate, which includes Gaza City. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the leading global authority on food security, projected the threshold for famine would be crossed in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis in the coming weeks, stating "this Famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed.” The UN aid coordination office OCHA further warned on Friday of “a descent into a massive famine” in the Gaza Strip. At least 367 Palestinians, including 131 children, have died as a result of hunger and malnutrition since the war began, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

The existence of an Israeli Google ads campaign to discredit the UN’s primary aid agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, was similarly reported by WIRED last year. Hadas Maimon, head of public awareness for Israel’s diaspora ministry, stated during the March 2 Knesset hearing that, “For almost a year now, we have been leading a major campaign on the issue of UNRWA.” Other Israeli government ads on Google’s platforms accused the United Nations of “deliberate sabotage” of aid delivery into Gaza and promoted the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is backed by Israel, the U.S., and unnamed European countries. One campaign promoted prosecution of the militant group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, for debunked allegations of mass sexual violence as a result of a controversial report published by the Israeli advocacy group Dinah Project.

In response to a June report from UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese which concluded that Google had profited from the “genocide in Gaza,” the centibillionaire Google co-founder Sergey Brin reportedly described the UN as a “transparently antisemitic” organization on an internal company forum on July 5. Albanese’s criticism of Google centered around the company joining Amazon in 2021 on a major cloud computing contract with the Israeli government—including the military—known as Project Nimbus.

Prof: Omer Bartov | The REAL REASON the US, UK, and EU Have Not Recognised Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

Israeli military database indicates only a quarter of Gaza detainees are fighters

Only one in four detainees from Gaza are identified as fighters by Israel’s military intelligence, classified data indicates, with civilians making up the vast majority of Palestinians held without charge or trial in abusive prisons. Those jailed for long periods without charge or trial include medical workers, teachers, civil servants, media workers, writers, sick and disabled people and children.

Among the most egregious cases are those of an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s jailed for six weeks and of a single mother separated from her young children. When the mother was released after 53 days she found the children begging on the streets. The Sde Teiman military base at one point held so many sick, disabled and elderly Palestinians that they had their own hangar, dubbed “the geriatric pen”, a soldier serving there said.

The scale of civilian detention indicated by Israel’s own data has been revealed in an investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.

Israeli military intelligence keeps a database of more than 47,000 named individuals whom it classifies as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters. Commanders consider it the most accurate information Israel has on enemy forces, according to multiple intelligence sources. It is based on information including files captured from Hamas, updated regularly and includes names of new recruits.

In May this year the database listed 1,450 individuals in detention, whose files were marked “arrested”. That is equivalent to just one in four of all Palestinians from Gaza held in Israeli jails on suspicion of militant links since 7 October 2023. At that point in May Israel had detained 6,000 people under its “unlawful combatants” legislation, which allows indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, official data released after legal appeals showed. ... Both rights groups and Israeli soldiers have described an even smaller ratio of fighters to civilians. When photos of Palestinians stripped and shackled caused international outrage in late 2023, senior officers told Haaretz newspaper that “85 to 90 per cent” were not Hamas members.

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Is NATO Finished?

Cancer Is 1 More Weapon In Israel’s War on Gaza

A week after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, a large explosion incinerated a parking lot near the busy Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, killing more than 470 people. It was a horrifying, chaotic scene. Burnt clothing was strewn about, scorched vehicles piled atop one another, and charred buildings surrounded the impact zone. Israel claimed the blast was caused by an errant rocket fired by Palestinian extremists, but an investigation by Forensic Architecture later indicated that the missile was most likely launched from Israel, not from inside Gaza.

In those first days of the onslaught, it wasn’t yet clear that wiping out Gaza’s entire healthcare system could conceivably be part of the Israeli plan. After all, it’s well known that purposely bombing or otherwise destroying hospitals violates the Geneva Conventions and is a war crime, so there was still some hope that the explosion at Al-Ahli was accidental. And that, of course, would be the narrative that Israeli authorities would continue to push over the nearly two years of death and misery that followed.

A month into Israel’s Gaza offensive, however, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would raid the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, dismantling its dialysis center with no explanation as to why such lifesaving medical equipment would be targeted. (Not even Israel was contending that Hamas was having kidney problems.) Then, in December 2023, Al-Awda Hospital, also in northern Gaza, was hit, while at least one doctor was shot by Israeli snipers stationed outside it. As unnerving as such news stories were, the most gruesome footage released at the time came from Al-Nasr children’s hospital, where infants were found dead and decomposing in an empty ICU ward. Evacuation orders had been given and the medical staff had fled, unable to take the babies with them.

For those monitoring such events, a deadly pattern was beginning to emerge, and Israel’s excuses for its malevolent behavior were already losing credibility.

Shortly after Israel issued warnings to evacuate the Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City in mid-January 2024, its troops launched rockets at the building, destroying what remained of its functioning medical equipment. Following that attack, ever more clinics were also targeted by Israeli forces. A Jordan Field Hospital was shelled that January and again this past August. An air strike hit Yafa hospital early in December 2023. The Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis in southern Gaza was also damaged last May and again this August, when the hospital and an ambulance were struck, killing 20, including five journalists.

While human-rights groups like the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, and the Red Cross have condemned Israel for such attacks, its forces have continued to decimate medical facilities and aid sites. At the same time, Israeli authorities claimed that they were only targeting Hamas command centers and weapons storage facilities.

In early 2024, the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, first hit in October 2023 and shuttered in November of that year, was in the early stages of being demolished by IDF battalions. A video released in February by Middle East Eye showed footage of an elated Israeli soldier sharing a TikTok video of himself driving a bulldozer into that hospital, chuckling as his digger crushed a cinderblock wall. “The hospital accidentally broke,” he said. Evidence of Israel’s crimes was by then accumulating, much of it provided by the IDF itself.

When that Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital opened in 2018, it quickly became Gaza’s leading and most well-equipped cancer treatment facility. As the Covid-19 pandemic reached Gaza in 2020, all oncology operations were transferred to that hospital to free up space at other clinics, making it the only cancer center to serve Gaza’s population of more than 2 million.

“This hospital will help transform the health sector,” Palestinian Health Minister Jawad Awwad said shortly before its opening. “[It] will help people who are going through extreme difficulties.”

Little did he know that those already facing severe difficulties due to their cancer diagnoses would all too soon face full-blown catastrophe. In March 2025, what remained of the hospital would be razed, erasing all traces of Gaza’s once-promising cancer treatment.

Before October 7, 2023, the most common cancers afflicting Palestinians in Gaza were breast and colon cancer. Survival rates were, however, much lower there than in Israel, thanks to more limited medical resources and restrictions imposed by that country. From 2016 to 2019, while cases in Gaza were on the rise, there was at least hope that the hospital, funded by Turkey, would offer much-needed cancer screenings that had previously been unavailable.

“The repercussions of the current conflict on cancer care in Gaza will likely be felt for years to come,” according to a November 2023 editorial in the medical journal Cureus. “The immediate challenges of drugs, damaged infrastructure, and reduced access to specialized treatment have long-term consequences on the overall health outcomes of current patients.”

In other words, lack of medical care and worse cancer rates will not only continue to disproportionately affect Gazans compared to Israelis, but conditions will undoubtedly deteriorate significantly more. And such predictions don’t even take into account the fact that war itself causes cancer, painting an even bleaker picture of the medical future for Palestinians in Gaza. ...

The aerial photographs and satellite footage are grisly. Israel’s US-backed military machine has dropped so many bombs that entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. Gaza, by every measure, is a land of immense suffering. As Palestinian children hang on the brink of starvation, it feels strange to discuss the health effects they might face in the decades ahead, should they be fortunate enough to survive.

While data often conceals the truth, in Gaza, numbers reveal a dire reality. As of this year, nearly 70% of all roads had been destroyed, 90% of all homes damaged or completely gone, 85% of farmland affected, and 84% of healthcare facilities obliterated. To date, Israel’s relentless death machine has created at least 50 million tons of rubble, human remains, and hazardous materials—all the noxious ingredients necessary for a future cancer epidemic.

From October 2023 to April 2024, well over 70,000 tons of explosives were dropped on Gaza, which, according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, was equivalent to two nuclear bombs. While the extent and exact types of weaponry used there are not fully known, the European Parliament has accused Israel of deploying depleted uranium, which, if true, will only add to the future cancer ills of Gazans. Most bombs contain heavy metals like lead, antimony, bismuth, cobalt, and tungsten, which end up polluting the soil and groundwater, while impacting agriculture and access to clean water for years to come.

“The toxicological effects of metals and energetic materials on microorganisms, plants, and animals vary widely and can be significantly different depending on whether the exposure is acute (short term) or chronic (long term),” reads a 2021 report commissioned by the Guide to Explosive Ordnance Pollution of the Environment. “In some cases, the toxic effects may not be immediately apparent, but instead may be linked to an increased risk of cancer, or increased risk of mutation during pregnancy, which may not become evident for many years.”

Given such information, we can only begin to predict how toxic the destruction may prove to be. The homes that once stood in the Gaza Strip were mainly made of concrete and steel. Particles of dust released from such crumbled buildings can themselves cause lung, colon, and stomach cancers.

As current cancer patients die slow deaths with no access to the care they need, future patients, who will acquire cancer thanks to Israel’s genocidal mania, will no doubt meet the same fate unless there is significant intervention.

“[A]pproximately 2,700 [Gazans] in advanced stages of the disease await treatment with no hope or treatment options within the Gaza Strip under an ongoing closure of Gaza’s crossings, and the disruption of emergency medical evacuation mechanisms,” states a May 2025 report by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. “[We hold] Israel fully responsible for the deaths of hundreds of cancer patients and for deliberately obliterating any opportunities of treatment for thousands more by destroying their treatment centers and depriving them of travel. Such acts fall under the crime of genocide ongoing in the Gaza Strip.”

Israel’s methodical destruction in Gaza has taken on many forms, from bombing civilian enclaves and hospitals to withholding food, water, and medical care from those most in need. In due time, Israel will undoubtedly use the cancers it will have created as a means to an end, fully aware that Palestinians there have no way of preparing for the health crises that are coming.

Cancer, in short, will be but another weapon added to Israel’s ever-increasing arsenal.

Has Gaza made the UN irrelevant? | Jeffrey Sachs

Satellite Photos Show Major Construction at Site Tied to Israel’s Secret Nuclear Weapons Program

Satellite images show construction work on a major new facility at the nuclear site near Dimona, Israel, the location of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program, The Associated Press reported on Wednesday.

Israel is believed to have somewhere between 90 and 300 nuclear warheads, but the real figure is unknown since both Israel and the US do not officially acknowledge that the nuclear stockpiles exist. Israel is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and its secret weapons program is not subject to any international inspections. ...

The Dimona nuclear site in the Negev Desert, known formally as the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, has had a heavy water reactor operating there since the 1960s. “That heavy water reactor, experts say, provides Israel with the plutonium for its nuclear weapons as well as the isotope tritium. That isotope is used to boost and also miniaturize nuclear weapons down to fit onto missile warheads,” said AP reporter Jon Gambrell in a video report.

Gambrell said that experts and AP’s own analysis of the satellite images “show that this project could be any number of things, including, what experts say, could be a new heavy water reactor that could allow Israel to potentially build more nuclear weapons or potentially service the ones they already have.”

Arkansan GOES OFF on Governor For INVESTING IN ISRAEL While State CRUMBLES

Hegseth Doesn’t Rule Out Regime Change in Venezuela, Suggests More US Strikes on Boats Are Coming

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Wednesday didn’t rule out the possibility of the US military pursuing regime change in Venezuela and suggested more US strikes on boats in the region were coming.

Hegseth made the comments in an interview on Fox News on Wednesday morning, the day after the US bombed a boat in the Southern Caribbean that it claimed without evidence was carrying drugs, marking the first US kinetic military action in the name of combating drug trafficking, though the real purpose of the attack may be part of a new push to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. ...

Brandan P. Buck, a historian and Foreign Policy Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, told Antiwar.com that it was unlikely the Trump administration would have much success trying to combat drug trafficking with military strikes. ...

Buck also noted that it was unclear what the administration’s real goal is. “The strike also raises alarming questions about its true near- and long-term objectives. It is plausible that the Trump Administration is using the strike as a trial balloon for expanded military action against cartels throughout the region, or against the Maduro regime in Venezuela,” he said.

Trump's Attack on Venezuelan Boat Brings "Gaza Logic" to the Caribbean

Trump’s killing of 11 alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers sets a dangerous precedent

The US military’s killing of 11 alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers traveling by boat in international waters in the Caribbean is an illegal use of war powers to address what should have been a situation of law enforcement. Unless this dangerous precedent is condemned and curtailed, it will enable US authorities to summarily shoot anyone they choose by simply declaring a “war” against them.

Last month, it was reported that Donald Trump had signed a secret decree authorizing the Pentagon to use military force against certain designated Latin American drug cartels, claiming that they were “terrorist” organizations. On Tuesday, Trump wrote that on his orders the military had targeted Tren de Aragua “narcoterrorists”, accusing them of “operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro”, the Venezuelan leader, and being “responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere”.

No reported attempt was made to interdict and detain the boatload of people. The video accompanying Trump’s statement suggests that the boat was simply blown up. When asked why the boat wasn’t stopped and its occupants arrested, Trump ducked the question and suggested that the killings would force traffickers to think twice before trying to move drugs to the United States.

Under international standards for law enforcement, lethal force can be used solely as a last resort to meet an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. That rule makes sense because law-enforcement officials should ordinarily seek to arrest and prosecute criminal suspects. That is the best way to ensure they have committed the offense in question. It also respects the fact that for most crimes, the penalty upon conviction is a prison sentence, not the death penalty – let alone summary killing without trial.

There was nothing in the encounter in the Caribbean Sea that is indicative of a war. There has been no suggestion that the alleged drug traffickers were firing at US forces or otherwise engaged in what could fairly be described as combat. The US military simply blew them out the water. It wrongly applied wartime rules in what should have been a law-enforcement situation.

Rayner RESIGNS. Starmer decline accelerates

Macron says 26 nations ready to provide postwar military backing to Ukraine

Twenty-six nations have pledged to provide postwar security guarantees to Ukraine, including an international force on land and sea and in the air, Emmanuel Macron said after a summit at which European leaders sought to pin down Donald Trump on the level of support he is willing to give Kyiv.

“The day the conflict stops, the security guarantees will be deployed,” the French president told a press conference at the Élysée Palace in Paris, standing alongside Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

After the summit, Macron told reporters: “We have today 26 countries who have formally committed – some others have not yet taken a position – to deploy a ‘reassurance force’ troops in Ukraine, or be present on the ground, in the sea or in the air.”

The troops would not be deployed “on the frontline” but aim to “prevent any new major aggression”, Macron said.

Macron initially said the 26 nations – which he did not name – would deploy to Ukraine. But he later said some countries would provide guarantees while remaining outside Ukraine, for example by helping to train and equip Kyiv’s forces. He did not say how many troops would be involved in the guarantees.

Pepe Escobar : Triumph In Shanghai

Melania Trump and tech CEOs discuss saturating US schools with AI

Melania Trump has turned her attention from her “Be Best” anti-bullying campaign to the nation’s best bots for tots. The first lady welcomed some of the US’s foremost tech leaders – and a few bit players – to the East Wing of the White House on Thursday to inaugurate a taskforce on artificial intelligence and schools as part of an initiative dubbed the “Presidential AI Challenge”. The event concerned how to integrate AI into childhood education. ...

Trump took a moment to marvel at the advances of modern technology. She eschewed any dystopian visions of the future – or the present moment, when AI companies have been accused of fomenting teen mental illness and taking recent grads’ jobs. “Cars now steer themselves through our cities, robots hold steady hands in the operating room and drones are defining the future of war,” she said. “The robots are here. Our future is no longer science fiction.”

The meeting was part of an all-day slate of events to promote Donald Trump’s AI initiative. Striking a far more bellicose tone compared with the first lady’s breathless wonder, the president’s initiative text states that the US is in a “race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence” and “under President Trump, our nation will win”. Along with the first lady’s AI challenge, which invites all students and K-12 educators to use and promote AI, the government’s initiative includes a series of executive orders aimed at fostering the technology. ...

Several tech-industry watchdogs criticized Melania Trump’s White House event, saying it was dangerous to promote a technology that had pushed youth to kill themselves and engage in disordered eating and other forms of risky behavior and self-harm. This comes as the Federal Trade Commission said Thursday that it was investigating OpenAI and other AI companies for the impact their chatbots have on children’s mental health. ...

The watchdog group Demand Progress said the day’s events showed how much power the tech industry now has in Washington DC. “Honoring these self-serving, predatory executives in the first-ever event at the newly renovated Rose Garden is an obscene metaphor for who really runs this country,” said Emily Peterson-Cassin, policy director for Demand Progress. “If the administration’s top officials really cared about the people, they would stop these big tech execs from unleashing dangerously underdeveloped AI on us.”

MTG Vows To READ EPSTEIN LIST On House Floor

Washington DC sues over Trump’s deployment of the national guard

Washington DC on Thursday sued to stop Donald Trump’s deployment of national guard troops during the administration’s law enforcement intervention there. The city’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, said the hundreds of troops were essentially an “involuntary military occupation”. He argued in the federal lawsuit that the deployment was an illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

A federal judge in California recently ruled that Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles after days of protests over immigration raids in June had been illegal. The Republican administration is appealing that decision and Trump has said he is ready to order federal intervention in Chicago and Baltimore, despite staunch opposition in those Democratic-led cities. That ruling, however, does not directly apply to Washington, where the president has more control over the guard than in states.

About 2,300 troops from seven states have been deployed in the streets of the US capital since 11 August in a move that Schwalb says exceeds the president’s powers and violates the city’s autonomy, as enshrined in the Home Rule Act. Schwalb’s suit argues that the forces were placed under Pentagon command and then deputized by the US Marshals Service to perform enforcement roles “in violation of the foundational prohibition on military involvement in local law”.

It also alleges that the government is unlawfully asserting control over state militias, without formally bringing them into federal service, arguing that this amounts to a breach of the constitution and federal law. Schwalb’s filing further charges that the deployment threatens to erode trust between residents and police, stoke tensions and damage the city’s economy, namely in the restaurant and hospitality sector.

In his 52-page filing, Schwalb said the Washington deployment “run[s] roughshod over a fundamental tenet of American democracy – that the military should not be involved in domestic law enforcement”.

‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration jail can stay open, appeals court says

An appellate panel on Thursday put on hold an order to wind down operations at the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration center in the Florida Everglades, allowing its construction and operation to continue.

Last month, a federal judge in Miami ordered the closure of the Trump administration’s notorious immigration jail within 60 days, and ruled that no more detainees were to be brought to the facility while it was being wound down.

That shock ruling by district court judge Kathleen Williams built on a temporary restraining order she had issued two weeks previously, halting further construction work at the remote tented camp, which has attracted waves of criticism for harsh conditions, abuse of detainees and denial of due process as they await deportation, as well as environmental damage.

The state of Florida, which funded and built the hastily erected camp and runs it on behalf of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency, then appealed. On Thursday afternoon, a three-judge panel in Atlanta decided by a 2-1 vote to stay Williams’s order pending the outcome of Florida’s appeal, saying the ruling was in the public interest.

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New York attorney general urges court to reinstate Trump’s $500m fraud fine

New York’s attorney general has requested the state’s highest court reinstate Donald Trump’s large civil fraud penalty, appealing a lower-court decision that slashed the potential half-billion dollar penalty to nothing. Attorney general Letitia James’s office filed a notice of appeal with the state’s court of appeals, seeking to reverse the mid-level appellate division’s ruling last month that the penalty violated the US constitution’s ban on excessive fines. James, a Democrat, had previously said she would appeal.

Trump, the US president, declared “TOTAL VICTORY” after the appellate division wiped away his fine, but the five-judge panel left other punishments in place and narrowly endorsed a trial court’s finding that he committed fraud by padding his wealth on financial paperwork given to banks and insurers.

Trump, a Republican, filed his own appeal last week, asking the court of appeals to throw out those other punishments, which include a multiyear ban on him and his two eldest sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr, from holding corporate leadership positions in New York.

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Rhode Island and Connecticut sue over Trump administration’s wind farm halt

Rhode Island and Connecticut will sue the Trump administration over its decision to halt the huge Revolution Wind electricity project off the north-east coast of the US, the two announced on Thursday morning. “This kind of erratic and reckless governing is blatantly illegal, and we’re suing to stop it,” said Connecticut attorney general, William Tong, in a statement.

“If Trump’s plan is to raise families’ energy prices, cut American jobs, turbo charge climate change, and accelerate the Great Climate Insurance Crisis, he’s knocking it out of the park with his all-out attack on American offshore wind,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island senator and ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee. “Wind power is one of the fastest, safest, cheapest ways to meet rising electricity demand and cut energy prices. The only winners here are the corrupt fossil fuel donors who bankrolled Trump’s campaign.”

Located about 15 miles south of the Rhode Island coast and 32 miles south-east of the Connecticut coast, the Revolution Wind power generating project is a joint venture between Danish energy company Ørsted and German wind developer Skyborn Renewables. The project has obtained all necessary federal and state permits, and construction is 80% complete. Earlier on Thursday morning, the companies filed a separate lawsuit in the US district court for the District of Columbia, challenging the stop-work order. The companies will also request a preliminary injunction. “The stop-work order was issued without statutory authority, lacks any evidentiary basis, and is unlawful,” the court filing said.

The lawsuits come as the Trump administration has rolled out an all-out assault on offshore wind energy, instructing several agencies to draft plans to thwart the sector. That includes some agencies that are not typically involved in wind power, such as the health and human services department and defense department, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. If it comes online, the Revolution Wind project is expected to deliver enough electricity to the New England grid to power 350,000 homes, supplying 2.5% of the region’s electricity supply beginning in 2026.

Patrick Crowley, the president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, said Revolution Wind had employed more than 1,000 union members, including carpenters, electricians, iron workers and others. The stop-work order, he said, had left members of his federation “furious”. Many of those members voted for Trump, he said. “They’re very angry with the president because, from their point of view, they didn’t vote for this,” he said. “There is no reason for this project to have been shut down other than animosity towards a blue state like Rhode Island.”

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Also of Interest

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

Chris Hedges: Gaza & Fake War Reporting

Profiting From an Ethnically-Cleansed Gaza

The Alliance Among Washington, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley

Trump Floats Idea of Declaring Housing Emergency: Another Self-Sabotage Operation?

Mysterious cancer-causing fog sprayed over US neighborhoods linked to secret Army project

Noem Says Angola Chosen for Migrant Detention Because of Its 'Notorious' Violent History

Get Ready For the Return of Serious Disease

I dated Jeffrey Epstein. The files must be released

Confronting Israeli settler accused of killing unarmed Palestinian activist

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A Little Night Music

Butterfield Blues Band – Lovin‘ Cup

The Butterfield Blues Band – Walking By Myself

Paul Butterfield's Better Days – Take Your Pleasure Where You Find It

The Butterfield Blues Band – Run Out Of Time

The Butterfield Blues Band – Get Out Of My Life, Woman

Paul Butterfield's Better Days – Too Many Drivers

Butterfield Blues Band – Keep On Loving' Me Baby (Unreleased Demo)

The Butterfield Blues Band – I Got A Mind To Give Up Living

Butterfield Blues Band – Born In Chicago (Alternate Version)

Jimi Hendrix and Paul Butterfield Blues Band 1968 - "San-Ho-Zay" - Instrumental Jam

Paul Butterfield Band - Live At Rockpalast 1978

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