---

---

The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Buddy Johnson

---

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features jazz and blues pianist and bandleader Buddy Johnson. Enjoy!

^{Buddy Johnson & Ella Johnson - Walk 'Em}

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

-- H.L. Mencken

---

News and Opinion

You Believe The Mainstream Narrative? Of Course You Do, You’re Twelve

Zohran Mamdani is outside my area of political interest and it’s none of my business who New Yorkers elect as their mayor, but the Islamophobic shrieking I’ve been seeing online in response to his campaign has been absolutely jaw-dropping. No one with mainstream political or media aspirations could ever get away with talking about the religion of a Jewish politician the way Zionists have been openly talking about Mamdani and his faith.

From what I can tell Mamdani is a just a regular guy and a fairly ordinary progressive Democrat with an extraordinarily high level of campaign talent, but these freaks are claiming he’s going to impose sharia law and start throwing gays off the Chrysler Building. It’s a degree of mass hysteria about Islam unlike anything I’ve seen since the immediate aftermath of 9/11, which any normal person will agree led to some extremely bad thinking and terrible decisions.

Some of it is arising from organic American racism and the knee-jerk rightist impulse to throw anyone to the left of Bill Clinton out of a flying helicopter, but a lot of it has nothing to do with Mamdani at all. As we’ve discussed previously, Zionists have been seizing on every opportunity to promote hatred of Muslims because it’s a lot easier than convincing people to like Israel.

To be clear, I am not speculating when I say this. Drop Site News published a report last month based on leaked documents which showed that the Israeli government had commissioned an American polling company to help it with the PR crisis caused by its genocidal atrocities, and the report found that the most effective strategy would be to foment fear of “Radical Islam” and “Jihadism”.

So this agenda is already in the waters of Zionist consciousness. The election of a Muslim to the most high-profile mayoral position in the United States provides Israel supporters with ample opportunity to stir up panic about Muslims in America on the assumption that Israel will benefit from such sentiments, since Israel is always killing Muslims. There is no argument to be made that Israel is a good nation that is inherently deserving of support, so they’re banking on circulating the belief that it’s good to drop bombs on Muslims instead.

Western politics is getting more and more diseased, and US politics is leading the way. It’s making people dumber, crazier, and more hateful, and is preventing them from seeing that the real minority that’s been causing everyone’s problems are the rich and powerful oligarchs and empire managers who rule the western power alliance. Keep ordinary members of the public hating each other and fighting each other, and they won’t start hating and fighting their actual oppressors.

LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : Why Trust Netanyahu?

The US Wants to Bury the Gaza Genocide, But the World Will Not Allow It

On October 4th, 2025, in an interview with Axios, President Donal Trump stressed that one of the main goals behind his Gaza plan was to restore Israel’s international standing. “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world,” Trump said. “Now I am gonna get all that support back.”

Under Trump’ s plan, a supposed ceasefire took effect on October 10th. But Israel only withdrew from less than half of the Gaza strip, and killed at least 93 people in the next two weeks, after killing at least that many per day for the previous two years. Israel has only allowed 15% of the humanitarian aid called for in the plan to enter Gaza, and has kept the critical Rafah crossing from Egypt into Gaza closed. The daily life-and-death struggle to find food, water, and shelter carries on unabated for two million people in Gaza.

While the reduction in the daily scale of Israel’s mass murder is obviously welcome, this is not a real ceasefire. Like previous Israeli ceasefires in Gaza, as in Lebanon, this is a one-sided ceasefire that Israel violates at will, on a daily basis, with no accountability.

This is only the first part of Trump’s plan for Gaza, and there is still no agreement on the other parts, such as the disarmament of Hamas, who provide the only government and police force in Gaza. They now have the added job of protecting their people from Israel-backed criminal gangs and death squads, some with links to ISIS, who prey on them from the Israeli-occupied areas, stealing aid supplies, assassinating local leaders, and terrorizing the population.

Hamas is obviously not going to disarm under these conditions, and previously said it would only surrender its weapons once Palestine has an internationally recognized government with its own armed forces. On the other side, Israel has not agreed to other parts of Trump’s plan, such as its withdrawal from the rest of Gaza, nor to any plan for the future of Palestine.

In the United States, where corrupt politicians and corporate media take US and Israeli lies at face value or even repeat them as statements of fact, some may believe that Trump’s plan has resolved the crisis in Palestine. The rest of the world is not so naive or easy to manipulate, but many other governments are also beholden to oligarchies that profit from trade, investment, and arms deals with Israel, even as the public in those same countries reels in shock at Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians and US-backed impunity for its crimes.

Trump’s Gaza plan, like much of his foreign policy, cynically exploits the greed and fear of political leaders and their oligarch patrons. Admitting that Israel has “lost a lot of support in the world,” he offers a shortcut back to “business as usual” for governments eager to protect—and even expand—profitable ties despite Israel’s ongoing atrocities and open contempt for international law.

In his first term, Trump brokered the “Abraham Accords,” normalization deals between Israel and Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan that included mutual recognition and expanded trade. He now has his eye on the big prize: Saudi Arabia.

But Arab-Israeli relations have long been contested. In the 1949 UN General Assembly vote on Israel’s admission, all Arab and Muslim countries except Turkiye (which abstained) voted against recognizing the state of Israel. Thirty-two mostly Arab and Muslim countries, including some of its closest neighbors, still either don’t recognize Israel or have no diplomatic relations with it.

Despite decades of hostility, Trump persuaded Israel and some of these countries to support his Gaza plan with the promise of future benefits from normalization and trade. But there is still a gaping chasm between Israel and these Arab and Muslim countries over Palestine. They say they will not recognize Israel unless Israel recognizes Palestine, with full sovereignty over East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

But the foundational basis of Netanyahu’s Likud Party is its plan for a Greater Israel, to be formed by annexing all of occupied Palestine “between the sea and the Jordan.” And on October 22, during Vice President Vance’s visit to Israel, the Knesset voted in favor of annexing the West Bank.

Trump unveiled his Gaza plan at the very end of the UN General Assembly’s annual high-level meeting in New York, where many world leaders spoke out for much stronger international action against Israel. The New York Declaration, which 142 countries voted for, was the result of a conference in July led by France and Saudi Arabia that promised “concrete, timebound, coordinated action” to enforce a ruling by the international Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2024 that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is illegal and must be ended “as quickly as possible.”

Trump’s initiative temporarily upstaged and marginalized calls for further action at the UN. But on October 22nd, the ICJ issued a new ruling strongly condemning Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, and ruling that, as an occupying power, Israel must ensure that the “basic needs” of the population are met, including food, water, fuel, shelter and medicine. The court also ruled that Israel must permit UN staff working for UNRWA to do their work in Gaza, after Israel provided no evidence to the court for its claim that UN staff were members of Hamas or took part in its October 2023 incursion into Israel.

In the wake of the ICJ decision, Norway said it would introduce a resolution in the UN General Assembly to enforce the Court’s directives, including ensuring the full amount of aid reaches Gaza. Humanitarian advocates hope that this resolution will be introduced in an Emergency Special Session under the “Uniting For Peace” option, enabling the UN to deliver the “concrete, timebound, coordinated action” it promised in July—potentially including sanctions such as an arms embargo and targeted trade and investment measures that should take effect within days if Israel continues to block aid.

Trump plainly intended his plan to close the book on Israel’s crimes—and on US complicity—and to inaugurate a new phase: normalization of the occupation and Israel’s diplomatic rehabilitation. Yet even before the ICJ condemned Israel’s starvation policy, people worldwide were already mobilizing, urging their governments not to let Israel off the hook.

In Europe, momentum for accountability continues to build. As the British parliament debates a new pensions law, an amendment has been submitted to divest local government pension funds from companies that are complicit in the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. Many local councils in the UK have already passed individual ordinances to do this, but the amendment to the pensions law would force all of them to divest the $16 billion that their pension funds still have invested in those firms.

In September, the European Union (EU) announced plans to suspend its 25-year-old free trade agreement with Israel and impose sanctions on extremist Israeli cabinet members and settler leaders. On October 20th, it “paused” these steps in response to Trump’s plan, but EU leaders immediately faced strong pushback on that decision.

Over 400 former senior diplomats and officials signed a statement that the EU must take robust action “against spoilers and extremists” who would jeopardize “the establishment of a future Palestinian state,” noting that Trump’s plan only vaguely addressed that goal. International lawyers advised EU leaders that EU policy must comply with the 2024 ICJ ruling that the Israeli occupation is illegal and must be ended as quickly as possible.

Individual European countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain, already ban imports from illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine, and Ireland is currently debating a similar trade ban in its Occupied Territories Bill, which should get a final vote by January. The original bill would only affect trade in goods, but activists want trade in services included in the ban, while powerful business interests, including US tech firms with European headquarters in Ireland, are lobbying to kill the bill altogether. It should help that Ireland’s newly elected president, Catherine Connolly, is a strong supporter of Palestine.

In stark contrast to much of the world, which is still grappling with the contradictions of Trump’s Gaza plan and Israel’s ongoing unlawful occupation, US officials are already trying to turn the page—moving to fortify and expand Washington’s military alliance with Israel.

This alliance is renewed and updated every ten years in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two governments, which would normally be negotiated in 2026, before the previous MOU expires in 2028.

There’s already a bipartisan bill in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (S.554) to initiate this process, titled “United States-Israel Defense Partnership Act of 2025,” authorizing joint projects with Israel under categories like “countering unmanned systems… anti-tunnel cooperation…(and) war reserves stockpile authority.”

Conspicuously absent from this policy review is any debate over US complicity in Gaza’s destruction—a debate that should come first and set the terms for any serious re-examination of the U.S.–Israel alliance.

On October 20th, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, released a new report titled “Gaza Genocide: a Collective Crime.” Here is the summary of her report:

The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel. Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the Palestinians, this live-streamed atrocity has been facilitated through Third States’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection and, in some cases, active participation. It has exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest. The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met and justice is upheld.

We urge all members of the Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees to read the UN report and to invite UN experts to testify at hearings on US complicity and participation in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Palestine.

To move ahead with consideration of a new MOU or any arms transfers with Israel without first conducting such a serious and objective policy review would only serve to perpetuate the endless wars that all our leaders, including President Trump, keep telling us they want to end.

Biden COVERED UP Israeli Murder Of US Journo

US Colonel Who Probed Shireen Abu Akleh’s Killing Says Biden Admin Lied About His Findings to Appease Israel

Retired US Col. Steve Gabavics went public Monday with an account he had previously only spoken about anonymously—the story of his investigation into an Israeli soldier’s killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 and the unsuccessful attempts he made to ensure the US State Department would accurately report his findings: that Abu Akleh was intentionally shot.

Gabavics previously discussed his experience investigating Abu Akleh’s killing just days after it happened in a documentary produced by Zeteo News, but he wasn’t named in the film. On Monday, he came forward publicly for the first time in an interview with the New York Times to discuss the case he said has “bothered [him] the most” of any he investigated during his 30-year military career.

In the days after Abu Akleh was fatally shot in the head while reporting on an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) raid on a refugee camp in Jenin in the West Bank in May 2022, Gabavics was assigned to lead an investigation into the killing by the Office of the United States Security Coordinator, where he was chief of staff. The State Department office coordinates with Palestinian and Israeli security officials, and was ordered by the Biden administration to review Abu Akleh’s killing.

He traveled to Jenin with three other people from the office to investigate the shooting and concluded “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the Israeli soldier who shot Abu Akleh must have known she was a journalist—and therefore required under international law to be protected from military attacks while reporting on a conflict.

They did not conclude that the soldier was specifically or deliberately targeting Abu Akleh, but they determined that:

Soldiers were aware of journalists in the area due to records of Israeli military radio traffic on the morning before the shooting;

There had been no gunfire coming from the journalists’ direction that might provoke the Israeli soldiers to shoot in self-defense;

There was an Israeli military vehicle stationed down the road from Abu Akleh, from which a sniper would have been able to see the journalists clearly; and

When Gabavics visited the scene of the shooting hours after it occurred, his colleagues wore blue vests similar to Abu Akleh’s navy-blue "Press" vest and stood where she was when she was killed while Gabavics stood where the shooter's vehicle had been; they were easily visible to Gabavics.

Gabavics told the Times that the claim that the shooting was unintentional, ultimately included in the State Department’s report, was “absurd.”

The State Department’s account of an accidental killing would mean that the “individual popped out of the truck, just was randomly shooting, and happened to have really well-aimed shots and never looked down the scope,” said Gabavics. “Which wouldn’t have happened.”

Gabavics explained the circumstances that led to the State Department announcing in July 2022 that Abu Akleh had been unintentionally killed: His superior, Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, who led the Office of the Security Coordinator at the time, disagreed with his assessment and repeatedly refused to publish a report that explained Gabavics’ findings accurately.

As Gabavics told Mehdi Hasan at Zeteo News on Monday, Fenzel told Gabavics that he had spoken to an Israeli commander, who called the shooting an accident “that was a matter of tragic circumstances.”

“So the US general takes the word of a foreign general over the word of his own officer, who he sent to investigate,” said Hasan.

Gabavics also told the Times that Fenzel threatened to fire him as the two disagreed about what the State Department report should say. He included language saying the shooting was intentional in a draft report several times, but Fenzel repeatedly deleted his additions.

He said he and the other three investigators were “flabbergasted that this is what they put out.”

Fenzel told the Times in a statement that he stands by “the integrity of our work and [remains] confident that we reached the right conclusions.”

Officials who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity said Fenzel’s office likely aimed to “preserve its working relationship with the Israeli military.”

But Gabavics told the Times that the outcome of his investigation “continued to be on my conscience nonstop,” and said he continued to clash with Fenzel over the US government’s report on Abu Akleh’s death until he retired in January.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) applauded Gabavics for “bravely coming forward and confirming what was obvious to everyone: An Israeli sniper deliberately murdered an American journalist and the Biden administration covered it up.”

“We call on President [Donald] Trump to investigate Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel and any other officials who were allegedly involved in the cover-up of Shireen Abu Akleh’s assassination,” the group said.

CAIR urged the State Department and FBI to “pursue a real investigation” into Abu Akleh’s killing. The group condemned President Joe Biden and his top foreign affairs officials, including former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and former National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk for “enabling the Israeli government’s abuses.”

“These individuals must never again serve our government,” said CAIR, “and should be fired from the prestigious roles they have secured in academia since leaving office.”

Col. Larry Wilkerson: The U.S. Is Ignoring EVERY WARNING SIGN Walking Into DISASTER

Hamas returns remains of Israeli hostage after Red Cross’s help in search

The International Committee of the Red Cross has accompanied members of Hamas inside areas of Gaza still under the control of the Israeli military to facilitate the search for the bodies of Israeli hostages, as the Palestinian militant group delivered the remains of another captive.

Under the US-brokered ceasefire, which took effect on 10 October, Hamas is required to return the remains of all Israeli hostages as soon as possible. In exchange, Israel has agreed to hand over 15 Palestinian bodies for each Israeli.

Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam brigades, said on Monday it would deliver the body of a deceased hostage at 9pm local time, Reuters reported. Israeli media confirmed the IDF was working with the Red Cross to receive the remains in the evening.

Hamas has so far returned the remains of 15 of those held captive but some of the others are believed to be in areas beyond the yellow line marking the Israeli withdrawal. If the identity of the deceased hostage delivered on Monday is confirmed, it would mean the remains of 12 hostages remain in Gaza. Hamas says it faces obstacles to locating them in the rubble left by the bombardment.

“At the request of the parties, the International Committee of the Red Cross yesterday accompanied a party to the conflict as the party searched for the remains of the deceased past the IDF-designated ‘yellow line’,” said Sarah Davies, an ICRC spokesperson. “The parties to the conflict determined the modalities of the operation and entrusted the ICRC to act as a neutral intermediary. The ICRC was not involved in those negotiations.”

Moscow Writes Off Trump; Says Macron To Send Troops Ukraine; Pokrovsk Trap Tightens; China Scolds US

Trump describes Russia’s new cruise missile test as ‘not appropriate’

Donald Trump has described Vladimir Putin’s announcement of a nuclear-powered cruise missile test as “not appropriate” amid growing tensions between Moscow and Washington. Putin said on Sunday that Russia had successfully tested its “unique” nuclear-capable Burevestnik cruise missile, which the Kremlin described as part of efforts to “ensure the country’s national security”.

When asked on Monday by reporters onboard Air Force One about Russia’s nuclear missile test, Trump said Putin should focus on ending the war with Ukraine rather than testing missiles. Trump said the US had a nuclear submarine “right off their shores” that did not need to travel such distances. “We test missiles all the time,” he added.

A day earlier, wearing military fatigues at a meeting with Russia’s top generals, Putin hailed the missile as a breakthrough. “It is truly a unique weapon, one that no other country in the world possesses,” he said, ordering preparations to build the infrastructure needed to bring the system into military service.

Russia’s chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, told Putin that the test had taken place on Tuesday, with the missile flying about 8,700 miles (14,000km) over 15 hours. Sergei Ryabkov, a close aide to Putin, told Russian media that Moscow had notified the US in advance about the planned missile test.

US diplomacy disaster. Ukraine military disaster

COL. Douglas Macgregor : Can There Be Peace With Zelensky?

Venezuela Says CIA-Linked Mercenaries Caught During ‘False-Flag Attack’

The government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said Sunday that his country’s security forces captured a group of mercenaries aligned with the US Central Intelligence Agency, less than two weeks after President Donald Trump confirmed his authorization of covert CIA action against the South American nation.

Venezuela “reports that it has captured a mercenary group with direct information from the US intelligence agency, CIA, being able to determine that a false-flag attack is underway from waters bordering Trinidad and Tobago, or from Trinidad or Venezuelan territory itself,” the Venezuelan government said in a statement.

“This planned action perfectly evokes the provocation of the Battleship Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin, which gave rise to the war against Spain to seize Cuba in 1898 and allowed the US Congress to authorize involvement in an eternal war against Vietnam in 1964, from which they emerged defeated by the Vietnamese people after facing incalculable destruction and regrettable human loss,” the statement continues.

“The government of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has renounced the sovereignty of Trinidad and Tobago to act as a military colony subordinate to US hegemonic interests, turning its territory into a US aircraft carrier for war throughout the Caribbean against Venezuela, Colombia, and all of South America,” Caracas asserted.

Confirmed statement by Venezuela: US-CIA mercenaries were caught coming from Trinidad & Tobago to infiltrate Venezuela and initiate a false flag operation.

As expected, Trinidad has positioned itself to serve as the staging ground for US intervention in the region: pic.twitter.com/dwULCHMEvc

— Tamanisha J John (@TamanishaJohn) October 27, 2025

The statement continues:

By folding to Washington’s militaristic agenda, Persad-Bissessar not only intends to attack Venezuela, a country that has always maintained a policy of energy cooperation, mutual respect, and Caribbean integration, and break our historic bonds of brotherhood; she also violates the United Nations Charter, the proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace approved by [the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States], and the principles of [the Caribbean Community], which protect all peoples of the Caribbean.

These are not defensive exercises: this is a colonial operation of military aggression that seeks to turn the Caribbean into a space for lethal violence and US imperial domination.

“Venezuela does not accept threats from any vassal government of the US. We are not intimidated by military exercises or war cries,” the statement says, adding that the country “will always defend its sovereignty, its territorial integrity, and its right to live in peace against foreign enemies and [their] vassals.”

Venezuela’s accusation came amid joint military exercises between the US and Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean Sea and follows a string of deadly US attacks on vessels the Trump administration claimed—without evidence—were transporting drugs bound for the United States. According to the Trump administration, at least 43 people have been killed in the US boat strikes in the southern Caribbean and Pacific Ocean since early last month.

Trinidad and Tobago challenged Venezuela to provide proof of the alleged false-flag operation and said the joint military operation with the United States “aims to bolster the fight against transnational crime and build resilience through training, humanitarian activities, and security cooperation.”

The Trump administration—which had already deployed an armada of warships and thousands of troops to the southern Caribbean—said Friday that it ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group off the coast of Venezuela, which possesses the world’s largest oil reserves.

The US has been meddling in Venezuelan affairs since at least the late 19th century, going back to the 1895 border dispute between Venezuela and Britain. Since then, the United States has helped install and prop up brutal dictators and assisted in the subversion of democratic movements, including by training Venezuelan forces in torture and repression at the notorious US Army School of the Americas.

In the 21st century, successive US administrations beginning with George W. Bush have tried to thwart the Bolivarian Revolution that was launched by former President Hugo Chávez and continued under Maduro. During the first Trump administration, Venezuela foiled an attempt by a group of mercenaries, including two Americans, to invade the country and topple Maduro.

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have also died as a result of US economic sanctions, according to research from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Taunting the Venezuelan president during a Sunday appearance on CBS “60 Minutes,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said, “If I was Maduro, I’d head to Russia or China right now.”

However, senior Venezuelan officials waxed defiant in the face of the latest US threat.

“Once again, the empire and its accomplices seek to bend the sovereign will of the Venezuelan people through a criminal economic siege that flagrantly violates the Charter of the United Nations and international humanitarian law,” Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil Pinto said Monday.

“These actions are not only illegal,” he added, “they are an unconventional act of war that we are determined to face and defeat in all scenarios.”

Venezuela Warns of FALSE FLAG, as US Deploys World's LARGEST WARSHIP

Rand Paul calls Trump’s military airstrikes ‘extrajudicial killings’

The Trump administration’s military airstrikes against boats off Venezuela’s coast that the White House claims were being used for drug trafficking are “extrajudicial killings”, said Rand Paul, the president’s fellow Republican and US senator from Kentucky.

Paul’s strong comments on the topic came on Sunday during an interview on Republican-friendly Fox News, three days after Donald Trump publicly claimed he “can’t imagine” federal lawmakers would have “any problem” with the strikes when asked about seeking congressional approval for them.

US forces in recent weeks have carried out at least eight strikes against boats in the Caribbean off Venezuela’s coast, killing about 40 people that the Trump administration has insisted were involved in smuggling drugs.

Speaking with Fox News Sunday anchor Shannon Bream, Paul asserted that Congress has “gotten no information” on the campaign of strikes from Trump’s administration – despite the president claiming the White House would be open to briefing the federal lawmakers about the offensive.

“No one said their name, no one said what evidence, no one said whether they’re armed, and we’ve had no evidence presented,” Paul said of the targeted boats or those on board. He argued that the Trump administration’s actions bring to mind the way China and Iran’s repressive governments have previously executed drug smugglers. “They summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public,” Paul contended in his conversation with Bream. “So it’s wrong.” ...

“I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” Trump said. “We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be – like – dead.”

LtCOL. Bill Astore : Trump and Venezuela

US debt set to soar above Italy and Greece after Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’

Donald Trump is on course to push US debt levels above those of Italy and Greece by the end of the decade after wide-ranging tax cuts and increased defence spending, according to International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts.

Illustrating the rising debt levels in Washington and efforts made by Rome and Athens to bring spending under control after the 2008 financial crash and Covid-19 pandemic, the IMF predicts the US will see its debts climb from 125% to 143% of annual income by 2030, while Italy’s will flatline at about 137%. Greece is on track to cut the ratio of debt to gross domestic product (GDP) from 146% to 130% over the same period. According to IMF data, Athens has tackled a budget overspend that raced to 210% as a proportion of GDP in 2020.

Amid tax cuts for high earners, the US is expected to run annual budget deficits of more than 7% over the next five years, while Italy is due to cut its spending shortfall this year to 2.9%, allowing it to meet a 3% limit set by Brussels a year early, in analysis first reported in the Financial Times.

Trump increased US government spending and cut federal taxes in the “big, beautiful bill”, passed by Congress in the summer, forcing the White House to rely more heavily on borrowing to fund annual spending. The US president reversed efforts under the previous Biden administration to limit the size of the US deficit, offering tax cuts that will benefit mostly middle and high income groups. He has also pledged to build a “golden dome” defence shield, which could cost almost $1tn.

Spending increases could push the budget deficit higher by $7tn a year by the time Trump is due to leave office in January 2029.

Trump purchases an election for $40 billion of your tax money.

Trump’s bailout threat may have been key to Milei’s electoral triumph in Argentina

“The dollar always talks in the end,” Donald Trump wrote in his 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal. Javier Milei’s surprise triumph in Argentina’s midterm elections – after Trump bailed him out with 40bn of them – suggests there may be some truth to that assertion.

The US president had vowed to jettison his South American ally if, as widely predicted, the radical libertarian fared badly in Sunday’s make-or-break legislative vote. “If he doesn’t win, we’re gone,” Trump declared when Argentina’s shaggy-haired president visited him in Washington earlier this month to plead for economic help.

Milei’s political woes have been building in recent months, with growing public frustration over Argentina’s sluggish economy translating into market jitters and a pasting in Buenos Aires’ provincial election in September. Trump stepped in after that humiliating result, offering a $20bn (£15bn) currency swap deal and a further $20bn in support for an economy he claimed was “dying” – although the US president indicated such “generosity” would evaporate if Milei failed to win big on Sunday.

Milei’s opponents accused Trump of flagrantly meddling in Argentina’s electoral process with his explicit message to voters. Some predicted an anti-Trump backlash, similar to the one felt in neighbouring Brazil as a result of Washington’s ham-fisted attempt to force its authorities to abandon the coup trial of the former president Jair Bolsonaro.

But on Sunday night there was scant sign of voter reprisals over Trump’s intervention. If anything, some suspected the gambit might have paid off by swaying voters’ minds.

Lawsuits against banks with Epstein ties may shed new light on financier’s crimes

For years, survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have demanded justice. For a while, it seemed like they would get it. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s ex-girlfriend, was found guilty of sex trafficking four years ago for her involvement in the late financier’s sexual abuse of teen girls – and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment.

Meanwhile, banks who had done business with Epstein, although not admitting wrongdoing, paid hundreds of millions in settlements to victims. Donald Trump even made releasing the Epstein investigative files part of his campaign platform, and doubled down on his promise to do so early this year. In the end, Trump’s justice department did not release these files, and his administration has become embroiled in reports about social ties between him and Epstein. Congressional promises to release files have lagged, due to political jockeying and justice department foot-dragging.

But two new lawsuits could shed light on Epstein’s activities amid the stalemate – regardless of their outcome. These lawsuits, filed by an anonymous plaintiff against Bank of America and the Bank of New York Mellon (BNY), allege that these financial powerhouses illicitly enabled Epstein’s sex trafficking. The suits are helmed by Sigrid S McCawley, of Boies Schiller Flexner, and Brad Edwards of Edwards Henderson, who have long represented Epstein victims. “Epstein committed these crimes by means of not only his own extraordinary wealth and power, but through access to funding and financial support from both individuals and institutions, including BNY,” one lawsuit claims. “Egregiously, BNY had a plethora of information regarding Epstein’s sex trafficking operation but chose profit over protecting the victims.”

The Bank of America suit echoes these allegations, claiming the institution “knowingly provided the financial support and the veneer of institutional legitimacy for Epstein and his co-conspirators to fuel their international sex trafficking organization under the guise of non-criminal business activities”. The suit also said Bank of America neglected to file suspicious activity reports. ...

Eric Faddis, a trial attorney, former prosecutor and founder of the Colorado law firm Varner Faddis, said companies can be liable. In this situation, “whether the banks have liability is going to hinge, in part, on what the banks knew, whether they had any knowledge of alleged abuse or criminal wrongdoing”, and somehow provided assistance to Epstein. ... “The lawsuits have the potential to reveal more information about the ongoing Epstein saga,” Faddis said. “Even though there have been sort of walls put up at every turn for folks seeking this information, when there’s a lawsuit, there’s a discovery process, and that discovery process often requires disclosure of information that was not previously public.”

Leader of top federal worker union calls for end of US government shutdown

The head of America’s largest federal workers union says it is time to end the government shutdown, now the second-longest in US history, as hundreds of thousands of employees miss another round of paychecks.

Everett Kelley, who leads the American Federation of Government Employees representing more than 800,000 workers, avoided assigning blame to either party in the Monday morning letter but said lawmakers must stop playing politics and pass a stopgap funding measure to reopen the government, its closure now eclipsing the four-week mark.

“Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight,” Kelley wrote in the statement. “Today I’m making mine: it’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures, and no gamesmanship.” NBC News first reported the letter.

A “clean” continuing resolution is a temporary spending bill that keeps the government running at current funding levels without attaching other political demands. Republicans say they have offered that in their measure, but Democrats argue the bill shortchanges key services and are using their power in the Senate to push for a deal on health insurance subsidies that expire at year’s end. ...

But the crisis extends beyond federal workers: roughly 42 million Americans who receive food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program face losing their benefits as soon as 1 November if the shutdown continues, after the US agriculture department warned states it would run out of money to pay for the program.

42 Million to Lose Food Assistance as Trump Refuses to Tap Emergency SNAP Funds

Trump’s threats against food stamps: A weapon of class war

The Trump administration’s declaration that it will allow food stamp funding to expire on November 1 unless the Democrats surrender to end the shutdown is an act of sheer cruelty. Tens of millions of Americans could go hungry during the month of Thanksgiving, while the oligarchy behind Trump celebrates record share values. Last week, the Department of Agriculture announced that it would not draw upon $6 billion in emergency reserves to continue the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the main federal food aid program.

The Trump administration is using the lives of 42 million people who rely on SNAP as political blackmail. Two-thirds of recipients are in households with children. The program was estimated to lift 3 million people out of poverty in 2023. Already, 5 percent of US households are classified as suffering from “very low food security,” a government euphemism for households forced to reduce food intake or skip meals altogether. These figures would rise dramatically if food stamp funding expires. Officials justified the decision not to use emergency funding on the bogus grounds that such a move would be “illegal” without congressional authorization.

Even if this were true, it has never stopped Trump before. It did not prevent him from redirecting $8 billion in federal funds, supplemented with a $130 million donation from a fellow billionaire, to pay soldiers to ensure their loyalty as they are deployed in US cities and as the White House prepares for war against Venezuela. That donation, as well as the $300 million gift from tech billionaires to build a new White House ballroom, expresses the erasure of any division between the oligarchy and the government.

The deliberate use of hunger as a political weapon has precedents in the most brutal regimes in history. Today, the Netanyahu government is employing starvation as a key instrument of genocide in Gaza. The Hitler-lover Trump is well aware of the Nazi regime’s “Hunger Plan,” implemented during World War II to starve tens of millions in Eastern Europe. It is no exaggeration to say that Trump is using the threat of starvation as a weapon of class war within the United States. Whatever happens in the next several days, the callous indifference now on display is unmistakable. If Trump had his way, many of the 42 million SNAP recipients—children, the elderly, the disabled—would be allowed to starve as “life unworthy of life,” to use the infamous Nazi phrase.

---

---

"SEIZE THE INSTITUTIONS": Trump's Plot to Steal the Midterms

New Yorkers sue state elections board as battle over House maps intensifies

A group of New Yorkers has filed a lawsuit against the state’s board of elections alleging that its congressional map unconstitutionally dilutes the voting power of Black and Latino residents of Staten Island. The complaint, filed Monday, is another volley in the battle between Democrats and Republicans to redraw congressional districts in a way that favors their party in advance of the midterm elections.

The suit concerns the 11th congressional district, which is represented by Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, and challenges part of the map approved by the majority Democratic New York legislature less than two years ago. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s call for Texas and other red states to redraw their maps to help the party pick up more seats in 2026, Democrats have responded by trying to do the same thing in states like California and Maryland.

Democrats in California and New York trying to counter Republican efforts could be hurt by their own efforts to prevent gerrymandering, said Michael Kang, a law professor at Northwestern University and an expert on redistricting.

David Sirota doing good work explaining the origins of what I call "The Dictatorship of the Broletariat."

David Sirota on the "Master Plan" to Legalize Corruption

---

---

‘Change course now’: humanity has missed 1.5C climate target, says UN head

Humanity has failed to limit global heating to 1.5C and must change course immediately, the secretary general of the UN has warned. In his only interview before next month’s Cop30 climate summit, António Guterres acknowledged it is now “inevitable” that humanity will overshoot the target in the Paris climate agreement, with “devastating consequences” for the world.

He urged the leaders who will gather in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém to realise that the longer they delay cutting emissions, the greater the danger of passing catastrophic “tipping points” in the Amazon, the Arctic and the oceans.

“Let’s recognise our failure,” he told the Guardian and Amazon-based news organisation Sumaúma. “The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs.

He said the priority at Cop30 was to shift direction: “It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon. We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible.”

The planet’s past 10 years have been the hottest in recorded history. Despite growing scientific alarm at the speed of global temperature increases caused by the burning of fossil fuels – oil, coal and gas – the secretary general said government commitments have come up short. Fewer than a third of the world’s nations (62 out of 197) have sent in their climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris agreement. The US under Donald Trump has abandoned the process. Europe has promised but so far failed to deliver. China, the world’s biggest emitter, has been accused of undercommitting.

Exxon sues California over climate laws, alleging free speech violations

Exxon, an oil firm consistently ranked among the world’s top contributors to global carbon emissions, is suing the state of California over two climate-focused state laws, arguing that the rules infringe upon the corporation’s right to free speech. The 2023 laws, known collectively as the California Climate Accountability Package, will require large companies doing business in the state to disclose both their planet-heating carbon emissions and their climate-related financial risks, or face annual penalties.

The laws would thereby force Exxon to “serve as a mouthpiece for ideas with which it disagrees”, says the lawsuit, filed in the US district court for the eastern district of California on Friday. ... Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, told the New York Times it was “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency”, adding that the laws “have already been upheld in court and we continue to have confidence in them.”

Exxon is asking the court to block the enforcement of the laws, which is set to begin in 2026. The company already reports emissions and climate risks voluntarily, using different methodologies, it said in the lawsuit. But the laws would force the company to adopt the state’s preferred frameworks for emissions and risk reporting, which it finds “misleading and counterproductive”, the lawsuit says.

To calculate its emissions, Exxon uses a method established by the global non-profit oil and gas industry association Ipieca, which was created in 1974 to allow a UN environmental group to interface with polluting industries. But under one of the two California laws, it would have to use a methodology known as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, developed by the research group World Resources Institute and business network World Business Council for Sustainable Development. That framework sends “the counterproductive message that large companies are uniquely responsible for climate change no matter how efficiently they satisfy societal demand for energy, goods, and services”, the lawsuit says.

The California law also requires companies to report their global emissions footprint. But Exxon argues that the rule should apply only to emissions created by company activity within California’s borders, since the a vast majority of Exxon’s business operations occur outside the state. The second 2023 California law that Exxon is challenging requires companies to disclose the threat that climate change poses to their business operations, and how they plan to address them. That would require it to speculate “about unknowable future developments”, Exxon argued.

Two crucial Florida coral species left ‘functionally extinct’ by ocean heatwave

Two of the most important coral species that made up Florida’s reef are now functionally extinct after a withering ocean heatwave caused catastrophic losses, scientists have found. The near-total collapse of the corals that once formed the backbone of reefs in Florida and the Caribbean means they can no longer play their previously crucial role in building and sustaining reef ecosystems that host a variety of marine life.

This “functional extinction” is a stage before global extinction, a threat that now looms for many coral species. Scientists this month warned that a tipping point had been reached whereby corals around the world are set to be wiped out due to global heating, which is raising heat to intolerable levels in our oceans.

“We’re running out of time,” said Ross Cunning, lead author of the new Florida study and a research biologist at Shedd Aquarium. “Extreme heatwaves are increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change, and without immediate, ambitious actions to slow ocean warming and boost coral resilience, we risk the extinction of even more corals from reefs in Florida and around the world.”

The new research, published in the Science journal, analyzed the fate of staghorn (Acropora cervicornis) and elkhorn (Acropora palmata) corals off the Florida coast following a severe marine heatwave in 2023, which raised temperatures on Florida’s fraying coral reefs to their highest levels in over 150 years. The two species are complex, reef-building corals and are named because they resemble, respectively, the antlers of stags and elks. However, researchers who conducted diver surveys of more than 52,000 colonies of the species, across 391 sites along Florida’s coast, found widespread, often devastating, losses.

Along the Florida Keys, mortality rates reached 98% and even 100%, revealing a complete annihilation of the corals. In south-east Florida, where temperatures have been cooler, mortality rates were lower, at about 38%. The two Acropora species had already suffered from decades of localized impacts in Florida, such as poor water quality coming from pollutants that wash off the land, as well as disease. But the 2023 heatwave has proved fatal for these heat-sensitive species.

---

Also of Interest

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

Trump’s Test in Gaza & Ukraine

IDF Chief on Gaza: ‘The War Is Not Yet Over’

Sitting In A Damaged Glasshouse Throwing More Stones

Are We A Week Away From An American Invasion of Venezuela?

The Oldest US Colony & the Newest War

US Conducts Third Bomber Flight Off the Coast of Venezuela

Treasury Chief Bessent Says He’s a ‘Soybean Farmer’ Who Has ‘Felt the Pain’ of Trump Tariffs

‘Cartoon Villain’ Ex-Senator Kyrsten Sinema Now Shilling for Big Tech’s Power-Sucking AI Data Centers

First banker jailed over Libor interest rate rigging to sue UBS for $400m

Candace Owens Goes RED PILLED on Elon, Peter Thiel, Tech Titans

Millions Face Soaring Health Insurance Premiums as GOP Refuses to Extend Obamacare Subsidies

AI JOB APOCALYPSE: Amazon, UPS Cut THOUSANDS Of Jobs

Charlie Kirk’s Chief Of Staff & Father Caught Blatantly LYING!

---

A Little Night Music

Buddy Johnson Orchestra - A Pretty Girl, A Cadillac & Some Money

Buddy Johnson - You'll Get Them Blues

Buddy Johnson Orchestra - Rock On!

Buddy Johnson and His Orchestra - Mush Mouth

Buddy Johnson - I Don’t Want Nobody

Buddy Johnson - Bring it home to me

Buddy Johnson And His Orchestra – No More Love

Buddy Johnson - Please Mr. Johnson

Buddy Johnson - Slide's Mambo

Buddy Johnson - Shufflin & Rollin'

---