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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Little Smokey Smothers

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist Little Smokey Smothers. Enjoy!

^{Little Smokey Smothers - I Need Love So Bad}

"Everyone who has eyes to see can see that if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath--and the God of Nature too. If you can't see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eyes to the realities of our world."

-- Sam Harris

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News and Opinion

Israel attacks another aid flotilla days after illegal capture of the Global Sumud Flotilla

In another act of piracy in international waters, Israel’s military intercepted and seized a 145-strong crew of the nine vessel Freedom Flotilla Coalition and Thousand Madleens. The flotilla was on its way to Gaza, attempting to break Israel’s siege and deliver desperately needed food and medical supplies to the Palestinians. It left the port of San Giovanni Li Cuti in Catania, Sicily on September 27. Onboard were healthcare workers, doctors, journalists, elected officials from the Belgian, Danish, European Union, Irish, French, Spanish and US legislatures, and others.

Earlier reports indicated that elected officials aboard included Farida Amrani and, Alma Dufour, La France Insoumise deputies in the French National Assembly; Mélissa Camara, a French Greens Member of the European Parliament; Barry Heneghan, an independent MP in the Irish Parliament; Jimena González, a Spanish academic and Más Madrid deputy; Bénédicte Linard, a deputy in the Walloon Parliament in Belgium, Ellen Read, a Democratic Party Representative for Newmarket, New Hampshire; and Victoria Velasquez, a member of the Danish Parliament for the Red-Green Alliance.

The latest assault came just days after Israel intercepted and stopped the Global Sumud Flotilla. After kidnapping hundreds of people onboard—who hailed from 37 countries—the IDF treated them brutally. Among those arrested was Swedish climate activist and genocide opponent Greta Thunberg. Other prominent figures included former South African MP Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, and several European politicians from France, Spain and Scandinavian countries. The seizure of the 42-ship convoy sparked global protests.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Global Sumud Flotilla posted on X that the Freedom Flotilla/Thousand Madleen and Conscience “are now 170 nautical miles away from Gaza. They are expected to enter the Red Zone tomorrow, where the risk of interception by Israeli forces becomes imminent.” In the early hours of Wednesday morning, with the Freedom Flotilla 120 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza, organisers reported that three of its boats were under attack from the IDF. The interception involved the lead ship Conscience, which carried most of the flotilla crew (92) being attacked by a military helicopter. The IDF jammed signals on the three flotilla boats and surrounded the remaining fleet.

The Freedom Flotilla in a statement said “Gaza Sunbirds, Alaa Al-Najajr, Anas Al-Sharif, have been attacked and illegally intercepted by the Israeli military at 04:34 at 120 nautical miles (220km) from Gaza. “Sources so far indicate that the unarmed crew aboard, including doctors, journalists, and elected officials, have been abducted, as well as the vital aid worth over $110,000 USD in medicines, respiratory equipment, and nutritional supplies that were destined for Gaza’s starving hospitals. Their whereabouts remain unknown.”

Scott Ritter : Can We Trust the Israel–Hamas Deal?

Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Noura Erakan on Trump's Gaza Plan

‘First phase’ of ceasefire deal to end war in Gaza agreed by Israel and Hamas

Israel and Hamas have agreed to the “first phase” of a peace plan to pause fighting and release some hostages and prisoners held in Gaza, bringing the best hope yet of a definitive end to a bloody two-year conflict that has killed ten of thousands, destabilised much of the Middle East and prompted protests across the world.

Donald Trump announced the agreement on his Truth Social network saying all of the hostages held in Gaza would be released soon and Israel would withdraw troops to an agreed upon line as the first step to a “Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace”.

Hamas said on Thursday it had reached the agreement after talks on the proposal from the US president, confirming the deal includes an Israeli withdrawal from the enclave and a hostage-prisoner exchange.

Hamas called on Trump and guarantor states to ensure Israel fully implements the ceasefire. The group also said it would release the 20 hostages still alive as early as this weekend, with sources saying an exchange with Palestinian prisoners would happen within 72 hours of the deals signing, which is expected to be Thursday.

Worth a full watch:

Richard Wolff & Michael Hudson: Gaza Isn’t Just Israel’s War — It’s NATO’s Silent Battlefield

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Is Israel/Hamas Deal For Real?

Spanish MPs back move to enshrine in law arms embargo on Israel

Spain’s parliament has voted to enshrine in law an arms embargo on Israel that the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, introduced to end “the genocide in Gaza”. Parliament backed by 178 votes to 169 the decree announced in September by Sánchez, one of the strongest critics of Israel’s devastating two-year-old war in the Palestinian territory.

The support of the far-left party Podemos, which has four MPs, helped swing the vote the leftist minority coalition’s way after speculation about their lawmakers’ position. Podemos had previously criticised the decree, arguing it did not go far enough.

The government said it had already banned buying weapons from or selling them to Israel since the start of the war, which was sparked by the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israeli soil on 7 October 2023. But Sánchez announced last month a decree to “consolidate in law” the embargo as part of a series of measures against Israel’s offensive.

Israeli Plans EXPOSED in Unhinged Tweet | Useful Idiots

Almost 55,000 children in Gaza acutely malnourished, Lancet study estimates

Almost 55,000 children in Gaza are estimated to be acutely malnourished, far more than have so far been identified as victims of the potentially lethal condition, a study published in the Lancet, the respected international medical periodical, has revealed.

The study, published on Wednesday, and led by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa), offers a month-by-month breakdown through much of the two-year conflict, and shows for the first time a clear link between Israeli restrictions on supplies entering Gaza and levels of malnutrition among children.

Israel has repeatedly denied blame for any hunger in Gaza, saying that it allows adequate food into the territory and claiming that the humanitarian agencies there are ineffective.

Dr Akihiro Seita, the Unrwa director of health and an author of the study, said more malnourished children would die unless there was an end to hostilities and “unimpeded, competent, international humanitarian nutritional, medical, economic and social services”. The study found two years of war had led to “enormous nutritional consequences” for tens of thousands of children across Gaza.

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : US War on Iran Is Imminent!

Moscow Plans Odessa Capture; Kiev Out Of Gas After Russian Strikes; Bankrupt EU Eyes Russian Assets

Prof. John Mearsheimer : Israel After Two Years of Genocide

Senate Republicans vote against check on Trump using deadly force against cartels

Senate Republicans voted down legislation Wednesday that would have put a check on Donald Trump’s ability to use deadly military force against drug cartels after Democrats tried to counter the administration’s extraordinary assertion of presidential war powers to destroy vessels in the Caribbean.

The vote fell mostly along party lines, 48-51, with two Republicans, Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski, voting in favor and the Democrat John Fetterman voting against.

It was the first vote in Congress on Trump’s military campaign, which according to the White House has so far destroyed four vessels, killed at least 21 people and stopped narcotics from reaching the US. The war powers resolution would have required the president to seek authorization from Congress before further military strikes on the cartels.

The Trump administration has asserted that drug traffickers are armed combatants threatening the United States, creating justification to use military force. But that assertion has been met with some unease on Capitol Hill.

Some Republicans are asking the White House for more clarification on its legal justification and specifics on how the strikes are conducted, while Democrats insist they are violations of US and international law. It’s a clash that could redefine how the world’s most powerful military uses lethal force and set the tone for future global conflict.

US shutdown deadlock deepens as senators reject competing bills

The deadlock over ending the US government shutdown deepened on Wednesday, with senators once again rejecting competing bills to restart funding as Democrats and Republicans remain dug in on their demands for reopening federal agencies.

The funding lapse has forced offices, national parks and other federal government operations to close or curtail operations, while employees have been furloughed. Signs of strain have mounted in recent days in the parts of the federal government that remained operational, with staffing shortages reported at airports across the US as well as air traffic control centers. Further disruptions may come next week, when US military personnel and other federal workers who remain on the job will not receive paychecks, unless the government reopens.

When the Senate met on Wednesday afternoon, it became clear that sentiment had not shifted in the eight days since the shutdown began. For the sixth time, Democratic and Republican proposals to restart funding both failed to receive enough support to advance, and no senators changed their votes from recent days.

Democrats are demanding that any bill to fund the government be paired with an array of healthcare-centered provisions, including an extension of premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans. Those expire at the end of the year, and costs are set to rise for the plans’ roughly 20 million enrollees if they are not renewed.

Not that anybody in government gives two shits about what the American people think, but ...

Military should only be used for external threats, more than half of Americans say

More than half of Americans believe that the US government should only deploy armed troops in the event of external threats, according to a new survey.

The Reuters/Ipsos survey released on Wednesday found that 58% of Americans believe that the president should only send in armed forces to areas with external threats. Meanwhile, 25% said that they believed the US military could be used for other purposes and 18% said that they were not sure.

The survey, which comes as Donald Trump continues to send or threaten to send armed national guard troops to major American cities including Portland, Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles – much to public outrage – found that 72% of Democrats agreed with the sentiment. Notably, only a slight majority, 51%, of Republicans said that they agreed and 53% of respondents with other political affiliations said the same.

The survey also found that only 37% of all Americans believed that the president should be able to send in troops into a state even if its governor objects; 48% of responders said they disagreed and 15% said they were unsure.

Trump THREATENS Chicago Mayor, Pritzker ARREST

Trump calls for jailing of Chicago mayor and Illinois governor as national guard arrives in city

Donald Trump on Wednesday called for the imprisonment of Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s mayor, and JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, accusing them of failing to protect US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers. “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday morning. “Governor Pritzker also!”

Both Johnson and Pritzker are Democrats. Trump’s remarks come as national guard troops have begun arriving in the Chicago area at the order of the Trump administration, despite objections from Illinois officials, including Pritzker and Johnson.

“This is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested” Johnson said on Wednesday in response to Trump’s remarks. “I’m not going anywhere.” Pritzker also responded on social media, saying: “I will not back down. Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”

Kristi Noem compares antifa to MS-13, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic State

The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, on Wednesday compared antifa to MS-13, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic State, calling the loosely affiliated network of antifascist street activists “just as dangerous” as designated terrorist organizations during a White House roundtable discussion.

“They are just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TDA [Tren de Aragua], as Isis, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them, they are just as dangerous,” Noem said. “They have an agenda to destroy us, just like the other terrorists we’ve dealt with for many, many years.”

The roundtable featured rightwing social media journalists such as Andy Ngo, Nick Sortor, Katie Daviscourt and others who cover leftwing protests.

Some of the groups Noem cited – Hamas, Hezbollah and Isis – are formally designated terrorist organizations that control territory, operate military wings, maintain command structures and have carried out mass casualty attacks including bombings, kidnappings and assassinations.

Extremism experts have long described antifa, by contrast, as having no centralized leadership, formal membership or organizational structure, and it has generally been described by federal law enforcement as a decentralized movement of activists who engage in protest activity, some of which has included property destruction and street violence.

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More than 40 Trump administration picks tied directly to oil, gas and coal

Donald Trump has placed dozens of people with ties to the fossil fuel sector in his administration, including more than 40 who have directly worked for oil, gas or coal companies, according to a new analysis. The report from Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy and ethics non-profit that has been critical of the Trump administration, alongside the Revolving Door Project, a corporate watchdog, analyzed the backgrounds of nominees and appointees within the White House and eight agencies dictating energy, environmental and climate policy. That includes the Environmental Protection Agency, the interior and energy departments and others.

The analysis comes as Trump wages broad attacks on climate and energy policies and on renewable energy. The president’s so-called one big beautiful act, for instance, opened swaths of federal land to drilling and mining and enshrined the rapid phaseout of incentives for renewable energy. The administration has also launched an unprecedented assault on climate science, for instance with an energy department report on climate change that experts derided as full of misinformation. The report was created to justify the planned overturning of a key legal finding that forms the basis of virtually all US climate regulations.

“With the firehose of terrible, bad things that have happened on the environment front … it’s important to remind the public that these aren’t just actions from the amorphous, ginormous thing that is the Trump administration writ large,” said Toni Aguilar Rosenthal, report author and senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project. “It is often specific actors coming from specific moneyed interests that are carrying out this disastrous deregulatory agenda.”

The authors identified 111 employees whom they deemed “fossil fuel insiders and renewable energy opponents”. That includes 43 people who were directly employed by coal, oil or gas companies. Among them are well-known senior officials such as energy secretary Chris Wright, the former CEO of the fracking company Liberty Energy.

Illegal gold mining clears 140,000 hectares of Peruvian Amazon

An illegal gold rush has cleared 140,000 hectares of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon and is accelerating as foreign, armed groups move into the region to profit from record gold prices, according to a report.

About 540 square miles of land have been cleared for mining in the South American country since 1984, and the environmental destruction is spreading rapidly across the country, Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) and its Peruvian partner organisation, Conservación Amazónica, found.

The gold rush is also poisoning its waterways. Illegal miners use dredges – floating machines that chew up and spit out riverbeds – leaving the toxic mercury used to extract gold from sediment in their wake.

Ultra-high resolution aerial images allowed MAAP, part of Amazon Conservation, to identify dredges alongside deforestation for the first time, enabling them to identify goldminers and revealing that the environmental crisis once confined to the south of the country was creeping north. “We used to only see it in the Madre de Dios region but now we’re seeing it everywhere”, said MAAP’s director, Matt Finer.

MAAP’s aerial images show that once dense swathes of green jungle are being transformed into lifeless moonscapes of grey earth pocked with stagnant pools of green water. ... MAAP’s analysis found that 225 rivers and streams have been affected, with 989 dredges spotted in Loreto since 2017 – including 275 this year alone on the Nanay River, a tributary of the Amazon that is the lifeblood of ecosystems and dozens of Indigenous communities.

‘From reef to retail’: experts warn global marine aquarium fish trade relies heavily on wild populations

The global trade in marine aquarium fish relies heavily on fish sourced directly from wild populations, with many consumers unaware of the practice due to murky supply chains.

New research has revealed the scale of the issue, finding most marine aquarium fish sold online in the US were wild-caught, mainly from the western Pacific and Indian oceans.

Globally, about 55 million marine animals are sold each year as part of the aquarium fish trade, an industry worth US$2.15bn. The US comprises two-thirds of global demand, while Australia consistently ranks among the top 20 importers and exporters.

Analysis of 734 marine fish species sold by major US aquarium e-retailers found approximately 90% were sourced solely from wild populations, 7% were both farmed and wild caught, and only 3% were exclusively sourced through aquaculture.

Consumers purchasing aquarium fish were often unaware of where they came from, according to University of Sydney marine ecologist Dr Bing Lin, who led the research published in Conservation Biology.

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Also of Interest

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

Is Good Or Evil More Effective? The Case of America and China

Ukrainian Media About Gaps In The Frontline And Other Failures

Is the UN Charter Worth the Paper It’s Written On?

Tom Neuburger: Is the Trump Administration Out to Trigger Civil War Soon?

Stephen Miller Says ‘Quiet Part Out Loud,’ Claims Trump Has Unlimited ‘Plenary Authority’ Before Going Silent in Interview

'Absolute Joke': Big Ag Lobby Wins Again as Trump Admin 'Doubles Down' on Atrazine

A Ceasefire Deal, But Not a Peace Agreement: What Will Happen in Gaza After Hostages Are Released?

GAZA Phase One Agreement

GOLD Prices SKY HIGH As Investors Flee Central Banks

Biden’s FBI SPIED On GOP Senators Phone Calls & They’re Livid!

Candace Owens Is Preparing For HER OWN MURDER!

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A Little Night Music

Little Smokey Smothers - 43rd Street Blues

Little Smokey Smothers, Elvin Bishop - Little Red Rooster

Elvin Bishop & Little Smokey Smothers - Roll Your Moneymaker

Little Smokey Smothers - Why Are You So Mean To Me

Little ''Smokey'' Smothers - You're Gonna Miss Me

Little ''Smokey'' Smothers - In The Zone

Elvin Bishop & Little Smokey Smothers - Slow Down (Live)

Legendary Blues Band w/Little Smokey Smothers - Having A Hard Time

Little Smokey Smothers - Monkey Man

Paul Butterfield Blues Band w/Little Smokey Smothers - Got My Mojo Working, One Room Country Shack

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