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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features funk and soul band Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings. Enjoy!

^{Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)}

"Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss."

-- William Shakespeare

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News and Opinion

They’re Trying To Sneak Israel’s President Into Australia Without Anti-Genocide Protests

Israeli president Isaac Herzog is expected to visit Australia at the invitation of the Australian government, with anonymous sources telling the Israeli press that he’s scheduled to arrive on February 7, but so far Canberra itself has been very opaque about the time and nature of the visit. We can surmise from this that they’re currently trying to come up with a strategy for how to sneak the president into the country without the spectacle of him getting confronted by throngs of anti-genocide protesters.

Again: they’re trying to sneak the president into the country for a visit to protect him from anti-genocide protesters. Really think about what that means, and what it says about Australia as a country.

When you are doing things like this, you’re on the wrong side of history.

International social media has rediscovered video footage of the Sydney Harbour Bridge protest last year, and it is very impressive to revisit. A massive line of hundreds of thousands of people holding umbrellas and Palestinian flags in opposition to their government’s complicity in the holocaust in Gaza.

It must have left a mark, because the Israel lobby has been on the warpath frantically trying to crush our right to protest ever since. People sometimes knock the effectiveness of peaceful demonstrations, but if they didn’t make a difference tyrants wouldn’t hate them so much.

"Emperor" Trump's So-Called Board of Peace Erases Palestinians from Gaza Governance

Trump’s Gaza plan is a rebuff to Israeli extremists, but will soon be put to test

Amid the hullabaloo and self-congratulation of Donald Trump’s “board of peace” launch in Davos, his administration laid out specific plans for the short- and long-term future of Gaza, aimed at a lasting peace. The blueprint set out on Thursday was extremely ambitious. It envisages a unified Palestinian-run Gaza, which represents a rebuff to the aims of Israeli extremists, including some in the governing coalition, who have sought the deportation of Gaza’s population and the building of Israeli settlements in its place.

The plan’s success will depend largely on whether Trump and his board of peace has the determination to implement the plan, overcoming Israeli objections and obstruction – and whether a mechanism can be created inside Gaza to oversee the disarming of Hamas. A slideshow presented in Davos by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner imagined a futuristic dreamscape of gleaming apartment blocks and office towers, with neat industrial parks and residential districts – and even an airport. The territory had a slice taken off it to create a buffer zone along the Israeli border, and was treated as blank slate, ignoring the property rights of generations of Palestinians, but it was a move away from a partition between Hamas and Israeli-run halves.

The plan also spelled out more achievable promises for the next 100 days, including the restoration of basic infrastructure – including water, sewage and electric systems, hospitals and bakeries – together with a significant increase in the flow of goods entering Gaza. The critical Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt is due to open for traffic next week, for the first time since Israeli troops seized control of it in May 2024. Kushner committed the US administration to achieving those short-term goals.

The board of peace will be represented in Gaza by a “high representative”, a veteran Bulgarian and UN diplomat, Nickolay Mladenov. But the plan, as spelled out in Davos, puts much of the onus for implementation on the newly formed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a panel of Palestinian non-partisan technocrats who are supposed to run Gaza for a transition period. Its chair, the “chief commissioner” Ali Shaath, addressed the assembled world leaders in Davos by video link from Cairo, but also spoke directly to the people of Gaza, largely ignored so far in the Trump peace plan.

Shaath, an engineer and a former deputy transport minister in the Palestinian Authority, said the NCAG’s mission was “to restore order, to rebuild institutions and to recreate a future for the people of Gaza defined by opportunity and dignity under the principle of one authority, one law and one weapon”. According to documents supplied by the administration, “one weapon” means that all weapon possession in the future Gaza can be “authorised by one authority only (NCAG)”. The clause addressed a major and immediate hurdle to turning a semi-observed ceasefire into a real and lasting truce. US and Israeli officials agree there will not be further withdrawals by the Israeli army (still occupying more than half of Gaza) until Hamas disarms.

Trump’s Gaza vision challenged by former US and Palestinian negotiators

Will Bari Weiss Condemn Israel’s Killing of CBS Contributor in Gaza?

A cameraman and CBS News contributor was among three journalists killed Wednesday by Israeli forces while working in Gaza, prompting some observers to ask when—or if—Bari Weiss, the network’s pro-Israel editor-in-chief, would condemn the attack.

Anas Ghneim, Mohammed Salah Qashta, and Abdul Raouf Shaat were using a drone to record aid distribution by the Egyptian Relief Committee in al-Zahra in central Gaza when, according to eyewitness accounts, an airstrike targeted one of the group’s vehicles accompanying the journalists.

“The Israeli army criminally targeted this vehicle,” Egyptian Relief Committee spokesperson Mohammed Mansour told AFP.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed its troops “identified several suspects who operated a drone affiliated with Hamas in the central Gaza Strip, in a manner that posed a threat to their safety,” and then “struck the suspects who activated the drone.”

Israeli officials often claim—almost always without conclusive evidence—that journalists, aid workers, and other civilians it kills are Hamas “terrorists.”

CBS News said that Shaat, a 30-year-old newlywed, “worked for years as a cameraman for CBS News and other outlets.”

Among those outlets were Agence France-Presse, which issued a statement condemning the attack and remembering Shaat as a “kind-hearted colleague, with a gentle sense of humor, and as a deeply committed journalist.”

“AFP demands a full and transparent investigation into his death,” the agency said. “Far too many local journalists have been killed in Gaza over the past two years while foreign journalists remain unable to enter the territory freely.”

Shaat’s CBS News colleagues in London remembered him as a “brave journalist” who was “deeply loved by everyone who knew or worked with him.”

However, one prominent CBS figure has so far been conspicuously silent on Shaat’s killing. As of Thursday afternoon, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has said nothing publicly about the incident. Weiss is a self-described Zionist whose outlet Free Press—now a division of CBS following its acquisition by Paramount Skydance—is staunchly pro-Israel and has shown indifference toward Palestinian suffering.

For example, FP called the officially declared Gaza famine, which claimed at least hundreds of lives, a “myth” and published other reporting on Gaza that critics said fueled genocide denial.

It's odd that CBS News makes NO mention of this on their website. Why is Bari Weiss' run CBS ignoring the targeting of one of their own journalists? Curious. pic.twitter.com/FByXu36YVm

— Clayton Morris (@ClaytonMorris) January 22, 2026

Standing in stark contrast with Weiss and CBS News, media advocacy groups were quick to denounce the journalists’ killings. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate blasted what it called a “deliberate assassination” and “a war crime and a crime against humanity under international humanitarian law.”

Condemnation also came from groups including Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

“CPJ condemns Israel’s strike on a clearly marked civilian vehicle in central Gaza that killed freelance photojournalists... amid an ongoing ceasefire,” CPJ regional director Sara Qudah said in a statement. “Israel, which possesses advanced technology capable of identifying its targets, has an obligation under international law to protect journalists.”

While it is difficult to know precisely how many journalists have been killed in Gaza—where Israel bans foreign reporters from entering—CPJ says at least 208 Palestinian media workers have been killed there. RSF says the number is at least 220. The United Nations puts the figure at over 260.

Billionaire Zionist Admits How They Control Politicians!

Trump claims Nato troops ‘stayed a little off the frontlines’ in Afghanistan

Donald Trump has again disparaged America’s Nato allies, claiming that troops from allied nations “stayed a little back, a little off the frontlines” while fighting in Afghanistan in support of the US campaign against the Taliban. The only time Nato has ever invoked its mutual defence clause – stating that an attack on one member represents an attack on all – came after the terrorist attacks of September 11, when member states deployed thousands of troops to Afghanistan.

More than a thousand non-US service members were killed in the conflict, and Trump’s comments are likely to further heighten tensions between the US and its allies. As he ratchets up his grievances against Nato, of which the US is a founding member, Trump has repeatedly questioned whether the 31 other nations that make up the alliance would come to the US’s defence.

Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, Trump said he was “not sure” Nato would meet the “ultimate test” of defending the US if it were under threat. “We’ve never needed them … They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan … and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the frontlines,” he said, adding the US has been “very good to Europe and to many other countries. It has to be a two-way street.”

Those remarks follow similar comments earlier in the week, when he described the alliance as “overrated” and questioned its members’ willingness to respond to a crisis. “I know we’ll come to [Nato’s] rescue, but I just really do question whether or not they’ll come to ours,” he said before attending the World Economic Forum in Davos. ...

In the days since the president’s remarks, users on Reddit have posted pictures of veterans in combat, as well as flag draped coffins of soldiers who died “while doing nothing” for America. In one instance, a photograph shows a bridge lined with mourners in Ontario with the caption: “Welcoming home a young Canadian that was killed in Afghanistan while doing nothing for the USA.”

US Threatens Global BOND DUMPERS, Bessent Iran Currency Collapse, Gold Humiliates USD

Greenland says red lines must be respected as Trump says US will have ‘total’ access to island

Greenland has demanded its red lines on sovereignty be respected after Donald Trump claimed an agreement with Nato would give the US full and permanent access to the Arctic island, the object of an increasingly bitter months-long dispute. Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland’s prime minister, said on Thursday he did not know what was in the deal but the largely self-governing territory wanted a “peaceful dialogue” with the US, and its sovereignty was non-negotiable.

“We have some red lines … We have to respect our territorial integrity. We have to respect international law, sovereignty,” Nielsen said, adding that if Greenlanders had to choose, “we choose the Kingdom of Denmark, we choose the EU, we choose Nato”. Nielsen told a press conference in the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk: “Nobody other than Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark have the mandate to make deals or agreements about Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark without us.”

A day after backing away from his threat to use tariffs as leverage to seize Greenland, and ruling out the use of force, Trump said on Thursday that the “framework of a future deal” gave the US “total access” with “no end, no time limit”. The US president had on Wednesday hailed an “ultimate long-term deal” with Nato that he said would settle the transatlantic dispute over Greenland after weeks of rising tensions that risked the biggest breakdown in transatlantic relations in decades.

But the precise terms of the agreement apparently struck between Trump and Mark Rutte, the alliance’s secretary general, remained unclear and the Danish government also insisted there was no question of it compromising territorial integrity.

Prof. John Mearsheimer : Trump’s Greenland Gambit: Force Over Diplomacy?

From The Guardian, so dispense a grain or more of salt...

Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez assured US of cooperation before Maduro’s capture

Before the US military snatched Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, earlier this month, Delcy Rodríguez and her powerful brother pledged to cooperate with the Trump administration once the strongman was gone, four sources involved at high levels with the discussions told the Guardian. Rodríguez, who was sworn in on 5 January as acting president to replace Maduro, and her brother Jorge, the head of the national assembly, secretly assured US and Qatari officials through intermediaries ahead of time that they would welcome Maduro’s departure, according to the sources.

The communications between US officials from Delcy Rodríguez, who was then Maduro’s vice-president, began in the fall and continued after Trump and Maduro spoke in a crucial phone call in late November, the Guardian has learned, in which Trump insisted that Maduro leave Venezuela. Maduro rejected the demand. By December, one American who was involved told the Guardian that Delcy Rodríguez told the US government she was ready: “Delcy was communicating ‘Maduro needs to go.’ “She said, ‘I’ll work with whatever is the aftermath,’” another person familiar with the messages said. ...

The pledge of cooperation by Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez before the Maduro raid has not been previously reported. In October, the Miami Herald reported on abortive negotiations via Qatar, in which Delcy offered to act as a transitional government chief if Maduro stepped down. Reuters reported on Sunday that Diosdado Cabello, the powerful Venezuela interior minister, who controls police and security forces, had also been in discussions with the US at a point months before the Maduro operation.

All the sources say there was a fine distinction to the agreement by Delcy Rodríguez: while the Rodríguez family promised to assist the US once Maduro was gone, they did not agree to actively help the US to topple him. The sources insist this was not a coup engineered against Maduro by the Rodríguez siblings.

House rejects resolution that would bar Trump from sending troops to Venezuela

The US House has rejected a resolution that would have prevented Donald Trump from sending US military forces to Venezuela, after a vote on the legislation fell just short of the majority needed for passage.

The tied vote was the latest sign of House speaker Mike Johnson’s tenuous hold on the majority, as well as some of the growing pushback in the Republican-controlled Congress to the US president’s aggressions in the western hemisphere. A Senate vote on a similar resolution was also tied last week until JD Vance broke the deadlock.

To defeat the Democratic-backed resolution on Thursday, Republican leaders had to hold the vote open for more than 20 minutes while Republican congressman Wesley Hunt, who had been out of Washington all week campaigning for a Senate seat in Texas, rushed back to Capitol Hill to cast the decisive vote.

On the House floor, Democrats responded with shouts that Republican leaders were violating the chamber’s procedural rules. Two Republicans –Don Bacon of Nebraska and Thomas Massie of Kentucky – voted with all Democrats for the legislation.

The war powers resolution would have directed Trump to remove US troops from Venezuela. The Trump administration told senators last week that there are no US troops on the ground in Venezuela and committed to obtaining congressional approval before launching major military operations there. But Democrats argued that the resolution is necessary after US troops captured the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, in a surprise nighttime raid earlier this month that left Congress in the dark.

White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest

The White House posted a digitally altered image of a woman who was arrested on Thursday in a case touted by the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, to make it seem as if she was dramatically crying, a Guardian analysis of the image has found.

The woman, Nekima Levy Armstrong, also appears to have darker skin in the altered image. Armstrong was one of three people arrested on Thursday in connection to a demonstration that disrupted church services in St Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday. Demonstrators alleged that one of the pastors, David Easterwood, was the acting field director of the St Paul Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. Bondi announced the arrests on social media on Thursday morning. ...

The Guardian overlaid the White House photo with the Noem photo and found that the law enforcement agents in both pictures line up exactly, confirming they are the same image. ... Asked whether the image had been digitally altered, the White House responded by sending a post on X from Kaelan Dorr, the deputy communications director.

“YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he said.

JD Vance blames local officials ‘not cooperating’ with ICE for Minneapolis violence

JD Vance on Thursday put the onus on local officials to “turn down the temperature” in Minneapolis, where federal immigration agents in recent days have detained a five-year-old child with his father and gassed protesters throughout the city.

Flanked by federal law enforcement, the US vice-president said he spoke with immigration agents and local business leaders ahead of talking to the press, but he had not spoken with the state’s governor, Tim Walz. He said local officials could be helping ICE identify and arrest violent criminals so that the operation could be more targeted.

The US justice department issued subpoenas to a handful of state and local elected officials this week, including Walz and Jacob Frey, Minneapolis’s mayor, as part of an investigation into whether local officials were supposedly conspiring to impede federal immigration enforcement in the state. After the subpoenas, Walz said the state would not be “drawn into political theater”.

Vance said the purpose of his visit is an attempt to “tone down the temperature a little bit, reduce the chaos, but still allow us as a federal government to enforce the American immigration laws”. Vance claimed the administration isn’t trying to send a political message with the federal law enforcement presence in the state. Walz has called the Trump administration’s crackdown here a campaign of political retribution.

Democrats condemn ICE after five-year-old detained with father in US raid

Democratic lawmakers are lashing out at Immigration and Customs Enforcement after agents detained a five-year-old Minnesota boy with his father and transported them to Texas, with one congressman calling for the agency to be disbanded.

Liam Ramos was taken into custody on Tuesday as he and his father arrived home from school in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb. According to school officials, an ICE agent used the child to knock on the family’s front door to determine if anyone else was inside, before detaining father and son.

Joaquin Castro, a representative from Texas, said his office has been working to locate the boy and demand his release, but that ICE has not provided information despite acknowledging the inquiry. Castro said his office suspects Liam may have been sent to the Dilley detention center, a family detention facility about 90 minutes from San Antonio.

“Ice and the other federal agencies under Donald Trump have gotten super secretive,” Castro said in a video statement. “This is the least transparent that an administration has been in generations.” Castro said he was scheduled to visit the facility next week, and said he believes ICE “should be disbanded” and get “zero funding”.

“They’ve become reckless, they’ve become lawless,” he said, “and it’s not about immigration enforcement any more. It’s about abusing people.”

Ruben Gallego, a senator from Arizona, questioned whether the operation made Americans safer to begin with. “These are the ‘violent criminals’ Trump is going after. Liam Ramos is 5 years old. He was used as bait to knock on doors to see if anyone else was inside. Then they took him and shipped him to Texas. This is fucked up and it doesn’t make anyone safer,” he wrote on X.

Activists call for general strike in Minnesota to protest ICE activity

House approves homeland security bill despite Democrats’ opposition over ICE

House Republicans overcame widespread Democratic opposition on Thursday to approve a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, the federal agency spearheading Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. The 220-207 vote, with seven Democrats joining nearly all Republicans, came amid mounting outrage over its heavy-handed and violent tactics in Minnesota and elsewhere. ...

The House on Thursday also approved a package of three measures to fund the defense, labor, health, education, transport and housing departments through 30 September. The broader package was approved with strong bipartisan support, on a 341-88 tally. The funding measures now move to the Senate, which must act by 30 January to avoid a partial government shutdown. ...

Party leaders told a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill on Wednesday that they would vote against the homeland security funding bill, citing insufficient provisions to rein in ICE. However, they did not whip their caucus against the funding bill.

In the Senate, the outstanding funding bills are expected to be stitched together into one big package, putting pressure on Senate Democrats who want to use the measure as leverage to constrain ICE. Several Democrats have already announced their opposition, including Arizona Senator Rueben Gallego, who announced on Wednesday: “Yeah, I am not voting to give whatever ICE has become more taxpayer money. It’s no longer an immigration enforcement arm of the US government.” Still, other Democrats are unlikely to reject spending for the Defense department and other key domestic agencies.

The Democratic thumbs-down in the House came despite provisions in the bill that keeps the agency’s $10bn annual budget flat, reduces ICE enforcement and removal operations, and imposes a 5,500 reduction to its number of detention beds. The legislation also secured $20m for the “procurement, deployment, and operations of body worn cameras” to be worn by ICE agents, thanks to Democrats’ efforts. Such palliatives are unlikely to placate anger in the party over the agency’s operations in Minnesota.

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Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media

Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that threatens to undermine democracy, a high profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned.

The Nobel peace prize-winning free-speech activist Maria Ressa, and leading AI and social science researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale are among a global consortium flagging the new “disruptive threat” posed by hard-to-detect, malicious “AI swarms” infesting social media and messaging channels.

A would-be autocrat could use such swarms to persuade populations to accept cancelled elections or overturn results, they said, amid predictions the technology could be deployed at scale by the time of the US presidential election in 2028.

The warnings, published today in Science, come alongside calls for coordinated global action to counter the risk, including “swarm scanners” and watermarked content to counter AI-run misinformation campaigns. Early versions of AI-powered influence operations have been used in the 2024 elections in Taiwan, India and Indonesia. ...

“It isn’t fanciful,” said Michael Wooldridge, professor of the foundations of AI at Oxford University. “I think it is entirely plausible that bad actors will try to mobilise virtual armies of LLM-powered agents to disrupt elections and manipulate public opinion, for example targeting large numbers of individuals on social media and other electronic media. It’s technologically perfectly feasible … the technology has got progressively better and much more accessible.”

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Half the world’s 100 largest cities are in high water stress areas

Half the world’s 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 38 of these sitting in regions of “extremely high water stress”, new analysis and mapping has shown. Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown.

Watershed Investigations and the Guardian mapped cities on to stressed catchments revealing that Beijing, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi are among those facing extreme stress, while London, Bangkok and Jakarta are classed as being highly stressed. Separate analysis of Nasa satellite data, compiled by scientists at University College London, shows which of the largest 100 cities have been drying or getting wetter over two decades with places such as Chennai, Tehran and Zhengzhou showing strong drying trends and Tokyo, Lagos and Kampala showing strong wetting trends. All 100 cities and their trends can be viewed on a new interactive water security atlas.

About 1.1 billion people live in major metropolitan areas located in regions experiencing strong long-term drying, compared with about 96 million in and around cities in regions showing strong wetting trends. However, the satellite data is too coarse to show details and context at the local scale. Most of the city regions in notably wetting zones are in sub-Saharan Africa, with just Tokyo and Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic sitting elsewhere. Most of the urban centres in areas with the strongest drying signals are concentrated across Asia, particularly northern India and Pakistan.

Now in its sixth year of drought, Tehran is perilously close to “day zero” when no water will be available for its citizens, and last year the country’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said the city may have to be evacuated if the drought continues. Cape Town and Chennai have both come close to day zero and many of the world’s fastest-growing cities are situated in drying zones where they could experience future water shortages.

Japan pauses restart of world’s largest nuclear power plant one day after it went online

The restart of the world’s largest nuclear power plant was suspended in Japan on Thursday just a day after it went online for the first time in about 14 years, with the operator saying it does not know when the problem will be solved.

The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata province had been closed since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, but operations to relaunch it began on Wednesday after it received the final green light from the nuclear regulator.

However, its operator the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said on Thursday that “an alarm from the monitoring system … sounded during the reactor startup procedures”, causing it to suspend operations.

“We don’t expect this to be solved within a day or two. There is no telling at the moment how long it will take,” site superintendent Takeyuki Inagaki told a news conference. “We will for now fully focus on trying to identify the cause of what happened,” he said. Spokesperson Takashi Kobayashi told the AFP news agency that “once it became clear that it would take time, we decided to reinsert the control rods in a planned manner”, he said, adding that the reactor “is stable and there is no radioactive impact outside”.

Why Trump is worried datacenters might cost his party an election

Donald Trump is worried about datacenters. Specifically, he is concerned about their effects on an already expensive electricity market in the United States. Will Americans’ resentment of sharply rising energy costs scuttle his party’s November election ambitions? The US president’s anxiety is evident in two actions in recent weeks. On 13 January, Trump and Microsoft’s president jointly announced that the tech giant would pay more for its datacenters, paying full property taxes and accepting neither tax reductions nor electricity rate discounts in towns where it operates datacenters. ...

On 16 January, Trump and governors of states in the north-east US directed the country’s largest power grid operator to hold an emergency reliability power auction by September, per Bloomberg. The move could force tech giants to pay for the construction of new power plants by requiring them to bid on the future reliability of the electricity they plan to draw from the grid. “I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers,” Trump said.

OpenAI followed Microsoft’s lead with an announcement on 20 January. The company committed to “paying our own way on energy, so that our operations don’t increase your electricity prices”. The company is part of the Stargate collaboration between the AI industry and the Trump administration to invest $500bn in AI infrastructure.

Trump is tugging at the edges of the problem of rapidly rising electricity demand. He promised Americans he’d slash their electricity bills by half. But as the Guardian reported just after Trump and Microsoft made their joint proclamation, there’s little prospect of him delivering on that vow. At the same time that AI is increasing the demand for electricity, the administration is blocking renewable energy projects Trump calls a “scam” and a “con job” but were set to provide electricity for millions of US homes, instead pushing the expansion of drilling for gas and oil. Administration edicts to reverse the closure of ageing coal plants and to restart the overseas export of liquified natural gas could counterintuitively raise costs further for domestic consumers. Power prices play into larger concerns about the cost of living in the US, an issue that has Trump’s party on its back foot as congressional elections loom in November.

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Also of Interest

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

The Changing Face of Regime Change

Ben Jennings on Donald Trump and his ‘board of peace’ – cartoon

Israel's raids in occupied West Bank enter their fourth day

Macron: French Forces Have Boarded a Russian Oil Tanker in the Mediterranean

Trump Plotting Regime Change in Cuba by Year’s End: WSJ

Understanding the Competent Concierge: Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney

ICE War on Rights and Safety Continues With Policy of Illegal, Fourth Amendment-Violating Home Break-Ins, Detainee Homicide, and Detention and Transport of Children

Renee Good was shot three times, autopsy into Minneapolis ICE killing finds

Trump’s bold economic promises on the campaign trail have led to a policy salad

‘An environmental nuclear bomb’: documentary examines fight to save Great Salt Lake

A bid to clean up shipping industry intensified a coral bleaching event on Great Barrier Reef

‘I ain’t goin nowhere’: Gullah Geechee people fight off developers with a historic referendum

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A Little Night Music

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes?

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - Better Things

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - The Dap Dip

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - Pick It Up, Lay It in the Cut

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - Let Them Knock

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - Tell Me

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - Money

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - Stranger to My Happiness

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings live | Rockpalast | 2010

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