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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Lightnin' Hopkins

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Texas blues guitarist Lightnin' Hopkins. Enjoy!

^{Lightnin' Hopkins - It's A Sin To Be Rich, It's A Low-Down Shame To Be Poor}

“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”

-- George Orwell

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News and Opinion

The Only Worthwhile Western Culture Is That Which Opposes The Western Empire

The only worthwhile “western culture” in modern times is culture which rejects and opposes the dystopian nature of western civilization and the abuses of the western empire.

Western civilization is what’s bombing Iran. It’s what’s strangling Cuba. It’s what’s torching Lebanon. It’s what’s exterminating Palestine. It’s what stole Venezuela. It’s what’s plundering the labor and resources of the global south. It’s what’s keeping the systems in place which are killing our ecosystem and driving us closer to nuclear armageddon.

There is no sane and truthful position to have toward all this but vehement rejection.

Westerners — particularly white westerners in nations with colonialist histories like the United States and Australia — often struggle to find their cultural moorings. It can be difficult to find an authentic position from which to express art and take your stand as a personality when you feel culturally rootless and historically ungrounded. It causes a kind of dissonance with our lives that can haunt us until we die.

The best way to resolve this dissonance is to take your stand in opposition to the perverse society into which you were born. Express from the standpoint of resistance to this horrifying nightmare civilization that is fueled by human blood.

We live in a sick and intensely mind-controlled dystopia where everything is fake and stupid. Mainstream culture is a nonstop celebration of the vapid and inane. The movies glorify cops and soldiers. The music exalts capitalism, consumerism, egotism and frivolity. The products are made by wage slaves and the fuel is obtained by war. The food is designed to reap profits rather than to nourish. The news media is designed to propagandize rather than to inform.

It’s a disgusting civilization, to be honest. The more you learn about it, the more repulsive it becomes.

How could anyone relate to the human experience from inside this hellscape in a truth-based way, except by opposition? The only way to participate in “western culture” is to help create a new kind of culture which stands squarely in opposition to it.

As Terence McKenna once said, “We have to create culture. Don’t watch TV. Don’t read magazines. Don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow… Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

The only way to create culture with sincerity in this dystopia is by forcefully rejecting its fraudulence and abusiveness, and embracing revolution and resistance. To do anything else is to give tacit approval to the horrific nature of this civilization, and it will always ring a bit hollow and dissonant, because it is ignoring the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is the unacceptable depravity and deceit that’s going on all around us.

So if you want to make art, make revolutionary art. If you want to express yourself, express your defiance of the western empire. Oppose the wars. Oppose the militarism. Oppose the capitalism, the imperialism, the ecocide, the injustice, the tyranny.

That’s the only way to be authentic in an inauthentic society.

Dropsite DEBUNKS Trump Iran Negotiation Fantasies

Trump claims ‘productive’ talks with Iran but Tehran denies contact

Donald Trump has claimed there have been talks between the US and Iran over the past day in which the two sides had “major points of agreement”, appearing to avert a potentially severe escalation of the conflict. Tehran has denied the claim, in which Trump also speculated that a deal could soon be done to end the war. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson said no talks had been held with the US since the bombing campaign began 24 days ago.

Trump’s threat at the weekend to “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power stations and energy infrastructure if Tehran did not allow shipping to move freely through the strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s threat to destroy infrastructure across the Middle East in retaliation, had raised fears of a deepening conflict and global economic crisis. ...

A European official said that while there had been no direct negotiations between the two nations, Egypt, Pakistan and Gulf states were relaying messages. A Pakistani official and a second source told Reuters that direct talks on ending the war could be held in Islamabad this week. The Pakistani official said the US president, JD Vance, as well as Witkoff and Kushner, were expected to meet Iranian officials in Islamabad this week, after a call between Trump and Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir. ...

In all his comments, Trump declined to say with whom the US was speaking in Iran. “We’re dealing with the man who, I believe, is the most respected and the ‘leader’. It’s a little tough – we’ve wiped out everybody,” Trump said, stating only that the US had not talked to current supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. A senior Iranian official told Reuters the US had requested a meeting with Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, but that the supreme national security council had yet to decide on any proposed talks and Iran had yet to respond. Qalibaf himself described “fake news … used to manipulate the financial and oil markets”.

The Fars news agency, which is linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), had earlier also denied any talks, saying there were neither direct nor indirect communications with the US. Iran’s IRGC said they were launching fresh attacks on US targets, and described Trump’s words as “psychological operations” that were “worn out” and having no impact on Tehran’s fight. The Iranian state news agency Irna quoted a foreign ministry spokesperson as saying “friendly countries” had sent messages indicating that the US wanted talks to end the war but none had taken place. On Monday, after Trump’s extension of his deadline, Iranian state television put up a graphic that read: “US president backs down following Iran’s firm warning.”

Aaron Maté : Will Trump Sacrifice the Gulf States?

"Israel First": Ex-Israeli Negotiator Daniel Levy Says Netanyahu Led Trump into Illegal Iran War

‘Stop this savage being’: Iranians fear postponed Trump attack is merely disaster delayed

A wave of temporary relief, and some jubilation swept through Iran as Donald Trump announced he was postponing an attack on its energy infrastructure after he claimed to have had productive conversations with Tehran – conversations Iran promptly denied ever having directly with him or through intermediaries.

That does not mean the diplomatic track was entirely silent. Turkey, through its foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, and Oman, via its foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, who are respected in both Tehran and Washington, have been working the phones constantly. But as ever with Trump, the threat that this is only Armageddon postponed leaves Iranians forced to live on the edge, for at least the rest of the week. It also strengthens those in Iran who have been arguing that his threat to cripple Iran’s power supplies was a distraction from his main strategic goal to capture the strait of Hormuz.

Nevertheless the threat to Iran’s power supplies had been met with a mixture of defiance, anger and understandable fear as they contemplated the possibility of extended power outages, and made last-minute appeals for the rest of the world to urge Trump to hold back from what may have been an impetuous half-considered threat. One well-known Iranian reformist writer Ahmad Zeidabadi likened what could lie ahead to the post-apocalyptic novel Blindness by José Saramago in which the whole world gradually becomes blind. The normally constrained Zeidabadi described Trump’s attack as “the greatest threat posed against our country or any other country in the world throughout history”.

He said: “If electricity to 90 million people were to stop, homes and streets would be plunged into darkness, the elderly and the disabled would be trapped in residential towers and water, gas, gasoline and diesel would become scarce, followed soon by no food, no hygiene and no transportation. He went on: “If the people of America or other countries do not stop this savage being, the Middle East will instantly become an unimaginable hell and then a barren and uninhabitable land.” He described Trump as a mad individual who was nonetheless “the main decision-maker of the world’s greatest military power”. The sense that the US is in the grip of a deranged figure is quite common among Iranians.

Reza Nasri, an international lawyer with strong links to the foreign affairs ministry, warned that if Trump followed through on his promise to attack Iran’s power plants, it would not be a war crime carried out in the chaos of battle, but something premeditated and announced in advance. He claimed the lack of congressional or judicial oversight showed something was fundamentally wrong in US politics.

Seyed M. Marandi: Israel Hits Iran Energy Sites, Iran’s Next Move: Israel’s Energy & Water Systems

Pepe Escobar : How Iran is Beating Trump

Israel launches new strikes on Tehran as Trump pauses Iran energy attacks

The Israeli military said it had launched a new wave of strikes on Tehran, after Donald Trump signalled a pause in US attacks against energy infrastructure after what he said were productive talks with Iran. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said it would continue operations in line with Israeli government directives until told otherwise.

About 40 minutes after Trump said he had extended by five days his deadline to strike Iran’s power plants, describing talks with Tehran as “productive”, the IDF said on X it had “just begun another wave of strikes targeting infrastructure of the Iranian terror regime across Tehran”. The IDF told the Guardian that energy infrastructure would be spared, suggesting Israel may follow Washington in suspending any targeting of Iranian power plants and related sites.

An IDF official told the Times of Israel that the military could not comment on the US president’s announcement of negotiations with Iran, saying it was a “political echelon matter”, and stating the IDF was ‘‘operating in accordance with the directives of Israel’s political leadership and will continue to strike in Iran according to its plans until instructed otherwise”.

Al Jazeera Arabic’s correspondent in Tehran reported that the size and volume of the explosions in the Iranian capital were “unprecedented”. Israel has not recently threatened to strike such facilities, but the defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Sunday that attacks on Iran and on “the infrastructure it relies on” would significantly escalate. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on Monday said they launched a new attack on targets in Israel.

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) said in the previous 24 hours it had recorded at least 206 attacks across 15 provinces in Iran, resulting in at least four casualties (killed and injured, both civilian and military). With the killing of a child on Monday, it is estimated at least 15% of the total human casualties in Iran so far have been under the age of 18. At least six people were killed in strikes on homes in Tabriz city, according to Fars. Since US-Israeli bombs started falling on Iran, estimates of total fatalities (military and civilian) in the country have surpassed 1,500, with some rights groups reporting figures as high as 3,230 as of 21 March.

Tucker DISMANTLES Hack Journalist on Israel's "Right To Exist"

Israeli Soldiers Reportedly Torture Gaza Toddler

Israeli soldiers in Gaza allegedly tortured an 18-month-old Palestinian toddler in an effort to force a confession from his father, local and international media outlets reported Monday.

According to Al Jazeera, Karim Abu Nassar was with his father, Osama Abu Nassar, near the al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza on Saturday when they came under Israel Defense Forces fire. Eyewitnesses told Palestine TV that IDF troops ordered the man to leave the child on the ground and advance to a nearby checkpoint, where he was stripped naked and searched.

Witnesses said IDF soldiers then tortured Karim in front of his father to pressure him to confess to something. Journalist Osama Al-Kahlout interviewed the child’s mother, who said the toddler suffered a cigarette burn to one leg and a nail puncture to the other. Al-Kahlout’s video shows wounds on the child’s legs—injuries reportedly confirmed by an unspecified medical authority.

Karim was reportedly released to relatives via the International Committee of the Red Cross after 10 hours of detention. The ICRC has not issued a statement regarding the matter and rarely does so absent an investigation.

The Palestine Chronicle reported that Osama Abu Nassar remains in custody, in a system rife with torture—sometimes deadly—and other abuse.

The IDF has not commented on the alleged incident.

In the United States, the story is being amplified by prominent figures including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which issued a statement calling the accusations “revolting.”

“Israel’s use of a nail and cigarette burns to torture a 1-year-old child and force a confession from his father is a revolting moral outrage that demands immediate action from Congress,” the group said. “No child, anywhere in the world, should be subjected to such cruelty, especially with American taxpayer dollars. These actions constitute grave violations of international law and basic human decency.”

“Our nation must end its complicity in these crimes,” CAIR added. “Congress has a responsibility to ensure that American taxpayer dollars are not used to support the torture or slaughter of more children. Every lawmaker with a conscience must vote to end military aid for the out-of-control Israeli regime.”

The US has given Israel hundreds of billions of inflation-adjusted dollars in aid to Israel since the country was established in 1948, including more than $20 billion since October 2023.

A new report published by UN Palestine expert Francesca Albanese examines the “systematic use by Israel of torture against Palestinians,” finding “practices that meet the threshold for genocide” under the Genocide Convention—the basis of the ongoing International Court of Justice (ICJ) case brought by South Africa.

A summary of the report states:

Torture has become integral to the domination of and punishment inflicted on men, women, and children—both through custodial abuse and through a relentless campaign of forced displacement, mass killings, deprivation, and the destruction of all means of life to inflict long-term collective pain and suffering. A continuous, territorially pervasive regime of psychological terror is being imposed, designed to break bodies, deprive a people of their dignity, and force them from their land. This is not incidental violence. It is the architecture of settler-colonialism, built on a foundation of dehumanization and maintained by a policy of cruelty and collective torture.

Palestinian victims—including minors—and witnesses, as well as Israeli soldiers, veterans, and medical professionals have described widespread torture and other abuses including rape and sexual assault by male and female soldiers, electrocution, mauling by dogs, beatings, denial of food and water, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and exposure to loud music and temperature extremes.

At least scores of Palestinian detainees have died or been killed in Israeli custody, including one who died after allegedly being sodomized with an electric baton. Many bodies of former Palestinian prisoners returned by Israel have shown signs of torture, execution, and mutilation.

Since the Hamas-led attack of October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded at least 250,000 Palestinians, including more than 65,000 children. Israeli troops have been accused by Palestinians, Western medical volunteers, and their own colleagues of deliberately targeting children with sniper fire and executing them along with their adult relatives during massacres.

In addition to facing the ICJ genocide case, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, where they are wanted for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation.

Fate of Global South Hinges on Iran War, w/ Marxist Economist Prabhat Patnaik

GREATER ISRAEL Expands As Minister Demands Lebanon Annexation

Beelzebub Smotrich is at it again...

Israeli minister calls for annexation of southern Lebanon

Israel should extend its border with Lebanon up to the Litani ​River deep inside the country's south, Israel's finance minister said on Monday as Israeli troops bombed bridges and destroyed homes in an escalating military assault.

The comments by ‌Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich were the most explicit yet by a senior Israeli official on seizing Lebanese territory in a fight Israel says targets Iran-backed Hezbollah militants.

Smotrich ​told an Israeli radio program that the military campaign in Lebanon "needs to end with a different reality entirely, both with the Hezbollah decision but also with the change of Israel's borders."

"I say ​here definitively...in every room and in every discussion, too: the new Israeli border must be the Litani," Smotrich said.

11,000 Children Among Tens of Thousands ‘Waiting for Surgery’ in Cuba Due to US Blockade

More than 96,000 Cubans, including 11,000 children, are “waiting for surgery” due to a fuel shortage caused by the American blockade, the country’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, said on Sunday.

The numbers cited by the minister on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday were first reported earlier this month by Cuban Minister of Public Health José Ángel Portal Miranda, who explained that President Donald Trump’s policy of “energy asphyxiation,” using tariffs to threaten countries out of importing fuel to Cuba, has devastated its National Health Service.

The policy has left Cuba unable to import oil from abroad for more than three months, reducing its fuel supply by about 90% and leading to periodic blackouts and strict energy rationing.

Using the severely limited electricity at its disposal, Cuba’s health system has been forced to prioritize continuing cancer treatments and other lifesaving procedures, putting those awaiting non-urgent surgeries on the sidelines.

Last month, a specialist at a hospital in Holguín told Diario de Cuba that the surgeries canceled included “uncomplicated hernias, cataract surgeries, some non-urgent gynecological procedures, and scheduled orthopedic surgeries.”

Other healthcare professionals said that nobody was being admitted to the hospital for tests and that it was running low on basic supplies like syringes, IV tubing, and antibiotics, which could not be delivered due to fuel shortages. Most of those that have been used had to be donated by family members or purchased for exorbitant prices on the black market.

Jorge Barrera, a reporter for CBC News, spoke with patients and employees at Havana’s National Institute of Cardiology and Cardiovascular Surgery this weekend and found it to be at about half capacity, and that nonessential care has been virtually all suspended.

“Even though the health system is a point of pride for Cuba... something that they export to the rest of the world,” Barrera explained, “because of this crisis, because of the impact it’s had on the skyrocketing prices, it’s just not enough for them to make ends meet. So people are quitting... to find other ways to make money to feed their families.”

Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio:

“Yesterday we published that 96,000 Cubans are waiting for surgery as a result of lack of fuel and lack of energy, among them 11,000 children. So I would think that the American people would feel, why does our… pic.twitter.com/BCxlh0z2iy

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) March 23, 2026

Experts with the United Nations have condemned the blockade of Cuba as “a serious violation of international law.” Condemnations have grown louder over the past week as Trump said he believed he’d have “the honor of taking Cuba” after it collapsed.

De Cossio said he hoped the people of the United States would ask “Why does our government treat the whole population of Cuba this way?” and that they’d “understand that it’s not correct to treat another nation the way the US is doing simply to try to achieve political goals.”

The US blockade of Cuba is largely unpopular with the American public. A poll published last week by YouGov found that just 28% of adult US citizens said they approved of the US blocking oil shipments to the country, while 46% said they opposed it.

Asked by anchor Kristen Welker about suggestions from Trump that Cuba would collapse “on its own” without the need for the US to intervene militarily, De Cossio retorted, “What does ‘on its own’ mean when it’s being forced by the United States?”

Prior to Trump’s further measures to isolate Cuba in January, the US had placed Cuba under an economic embargo for more than 60 years, which severely hampered the country’s economic development and has cost Cuba trillions of dollars since it began, according to the UN.

“It’s a very bizarre statement, and it’s claimed by most US politicians repeatedly that Cuba will collapse on its own,” De Cossio said. “Then why does the US government need to employ so many resources, so much political capital, so many human resources to try to destroy the economy of another country? Evidently, it implies that the country does not have the characteristics to collapse on its own.”

TSA lines stretch for hours as Trump deploys ICE agents to US airports

Security lines stretched for hours on Monday at US airports where unpaid Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) screening agents refused to report for duty and ICE agents deployed by Donald Trump were reportedly seen in a dozen cities.

The president claimed over the weekend that immigration agents could help manage long lines, but in Atlanta, little immediate impact of their presence could be observed. Meanwhile, airport staff were getting creative trying to herd thousands of discontented passengers.

Lines at Hartsfield Jackson international airport had spilled out from the screening area, winding inside and out of the staging area, the baggage claim and at 9am were in a loop on the curb. People hoping to make mid-morning flights had been standing in line since before sunrise.

Screening agents from the TSA have gone unpaid while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) remains partially shut down. The budget impasse in Washington DC stems from demands by Democratic lawmakers to hold immigration enforcement agents to account after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and practices of warrantless detention and militarized raids that have raised alarms.

TSA agents missed their second paycheck on Friday. Many are not showing up for work and hundreds have reportedly quit.

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US supreme court appears poised to limit mail-in ballots ahead of midterms

The US supreme court appeared poised on Monday to curtail how mail-in ballots can be counted if they arrive after election day, which would affect laws in more than a dozen states during a midterm election year. The justices are considering Watson v Republican National Committee, a challenge over a Mississippi state law that was brought in 2024 by the Republican party. Mississippi allows mailed ballots to be counted if they arrive within five business days of election day, so long as they were postmarked by election day. Mississippi changed its laws in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fourteen states, Washington DC and three US territories have similar laws that allow for late-arriving ballots to be counted. Based on the justices’ questions, it is clear the case is not focused narrowly on Mississippi’s grace period, but on other states’ rules, which in some cases allow for a longer grace period and don’t require postmarks. Mississippi, a red state, is defending its ability to set its own procedures for elections against the challenge from the Republican party, which argues that the grace period violates federal laws that set election day for the first Tuesday of November.

But it’s not just late-arriving ballots that are counted after election night. In many states, mailed ballots arriving in the days before election day and on the day of the election are still being counted after the polls have closed. Signatures need to be verified, which takes time, and some states allow for ballots to be cured if signatures are flagged for further review.

National Republicans have struggled with mail voting, a common practice in many states, and the rules around it. Some, including Donald Trump, have called to ban mail voting fully, while other Republicans recognize that their voters use mail voting at high rates as well. Getting rid of these grace periods could inadvertently hurt Republican candidates.

The Trump administration and its allies in Congress have sought more control over elections. Trump has attempted to override state and local election laws via executive order, which has largely been blocked by the courts. He is also pushing for the Save America act, a sweeping proof of citizenship and voter ID bill.

California sheriff running for governor seizes over 650,000 ballots from 2025 election

A California sheriff who is running as a Republican for governor has seized more than 650,000 ballots from last year’s election, escalating an ongoing conflict with state officials. Chad Bianco, Riverside county’s sheriff, says he is carrying out an investigation into allegations that ballots were unlawfully cast in last year’s election that resulted in the passage of Proposition 50. The proposition redrew congressional districts to help gerrymander the state in favor of Democrats, in response to similar measures in Republican states like Texas.

Election officials and the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, have both dismissed those allegations. The discrepancy between the machine count and the final count submitted to the state is only 103 votes, according to the Riverside Record. Bianco’s investigators obtained the ballots after serving the registrar of voters with search warrants last month, he said on Friday at a press conference. A Riverside superior court judge appointed a special master to count the ballots, Bianco said.

“This investigation is simple: physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded,” Bianco said. Bianco has pushed the investigation for months, after a group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team, composed of local residents, contended that a discrepancy of 45,896 votes exists between the final vote count and handwritten records that tallied hand-counted ballots.

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California sues Trump energy department over revival of controversial oil pipeline

California attorney general Rob Bonta said he has sued the US energy department to stop it from using a cold-war era law to restart the long-disputed Sable Offshore pipeline system linking the Santa Ynez offshore platform to California refineries. US energy secretary Chris Wright earlier this month restarted the pipelines using powers granted to him by Donald Trump through an executive order that invoked the Defense Production Act to supersede state laws.

“We won’t let this outrageous federal overreach go without a fight,” Bonta said in a Monday press conference. Bonta alleged Wright’s restart order violates state law, state court orders and a settlement approved by a federal court. California is asking the court to rule that Wright’s restart order violated federal law and the US constitution, and to prohibit the energy department from relying on the order to operate the Santa Ynez platform and its pipelines.

The Santa Ynez platform was shut down due to a 2015 spill that dumped more than 100,000 gallons of crude oil into the Pacific Ocean and on to beaches near Santa Barbara. The lawsuit is the latest in a series of conflicts between Trump, who wants to supercharge domestic fossil-fuel production, and the California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who has championed his state’s ambitious climate change agenda.

US to pay almost $1bn to French energy company to kill wind project plan

As a fuel crisis triggered by the war in Iran drives up global fossil fuel prices, the Trump administration has announced it will pay French energy major TotalEnergies $1bn to kill plans to construct wind farms off the US east coast. The deal is the latest blow to the US offshore wind industry, which has faced repeated disruptions to multi-billion-dollar projects under Donald Trump. The US president has said he finds wind turbines ugly, costly and inefficient, and his administration has moved to increase domestic fossil fuel production.

In the deal announced on Monday, TotalEnergies will give up two offshore leases it had purchased off New York and North Carolina. Trump’s Department of the Interior will reimburse the company the $928m it paid for the leases under Joe Biden.

TotalEnergies has pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the country, a US interior department statement said, and will invest nearly $1bn this year in the development of four trains at the Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas, and the development of upstream conventional oil in the US Gulf and shale gas production, the statement said.

The deal comes as US-Israeli strikes on Iran have triggered the largest ever disruption to oil supply, according to the International Energy Agency, and as climate advocates say the conflict is highlighting the perils of a fossil fuel-based energy system.

Lena Moffitt, executive director of the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, called the new deal “a taxpayer-funded bribe to kill homegrown clean energy and hand the money straight to oil and gas executives”.

Earth being ‘pushed beyond its limits’ as energy imbalance reaches record high

Our home planet is struggling with a record energy imbalance, which is warming oceans to unprecedented levels, making weather more extreme and threatening health and food supplies, the World Meteorological Organization has warned. The United Nations body confirmed 2015 to 2025 were the hottest 11 years ever measured, but a still bleaker message was that the rising temperature experienced by humans on the surface was only 1% of the faster-accumulating heat in the wider Earth system.

More than 90% of that excess is absorbed by the oceans, which experienced the highest heat content in history last year. The rate of ocean warming has more than doubled over the past two decades, compared with the average over the previous 45 years. The authors of the latest annual State of the Global Climate report say this highlights the increasing vulnerability of a planet that is moving ever further out of balance as a result of human activity. The burning of oil, gas, coal and forests releases heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, which are all at their highest level in at least 800,000 years.

This disrupts the planet’s energy equilibrium. In a well-functioning system, the amount of radiation entering and leaving the Earth system is roughly similar. But a heat surplus has been accumulating since at least 1960 and has noticeably accelerated in recent years. This is tracked for the first time in the new report, which shows the Earth’s energy imbalance increased by about 11 zettajoules a year between 2005 and 2025, which is equivalent to about 18 times total human energy use. Last year it was more than double that average.

At present, humans and other life forms on the surface directly suffer only a small fraction of that energy backup because 91% is absorbed by oceans, 5% by the land, 1% warms the atmosphere, and 3% melts ice at the poles and on high mountains.

But even with only a tiny share of this extra energy, the world’s surface temperatures – which are the most commonly used measure of global heating – are climbing to alarming levels. Last year was the second- or third-hottest on record, depending on the dataset. World leaders say it is now inevitable the planet will – at least temporarily – breach the target of limiting heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels set by the Paris agreement. They say the dire consequences are already evident in faltering harvests, worsening dengue outbreaks and increasingly severe heatwaves, forest fires and storms.

Hawaii assesses damage left by worst flooding in more than 20 years

Hawaii is assessing the extensive damage left by the worst flooding the islands have seen in more than 20 years. Heavy rains and floodwater forced thousands on the North Shore of Oahu to evacuate over the weekend and triggered evacuation orders for parts of Maui. Floodwater from rains lifted houses and cars, inundated farms and swept through grocery stores on the islands, leaving behind a thick layer of mud.

The storm, one of the most significant to hit Hawaii in decades, followed extreme winter weather which struck the state last week and left the earth saturated with water. Josh Green, Hawaii’s governor, stated during a press conference on Friday that the storms had caused at least $1bn in damages.

At the height of the storm, officials were concerned the 85ft, 120-year-old Wahiawa dam could fail and potentially endanger thousands. That threat has since subsided as water levels have fallen, according to Molly Pierce, a spokesperson for Oahu’s department of emergency management. More than 200 people were rescued from the floodwaters. No deaths have been reported so far, Pierce said on Sunday afternoon.

By Sunday afternoon, the worst of the storms appeared to be over, Hawaii meteorologist Matthew Foster told the Associated Press. The weather shifted from widespread showers to scattered rain from Oahu, Maui county, to Hawaii Island. Less than 5in (13cm) of rain is expected for Hawaii Island, with between 1 to 2in in other areas.

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Also of Interest

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

Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee

War On Iran: Trump Chickens Out – Who Lobbied For War – The Energy Dominance Aim

Breaching the Iron Dome: the Iranian cluster bombs bypassing Israeli air defences

Iran War: Trump’s 48 Hour Deadline Approaches; Soldiers Fearful as Lindsey Graham Calls for Their Sacrifice; Complacency in Face of Intersecting Shortages, Like Food and Plastics

Secrets of the karst: new species found in Cambodia’s limestone caves – in pictures

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A Little Night Music

Lightnin' Hopkins - Ain't Nothin' Like Whisky

Lightnin' Hopkins & Billy Bizor - Where She Used to Lay

Lightnin' Hopkins - Black Ghost Blues

Lightnin' Hopkins - Lightnin's Boogie

Lightnin' Hopkins - Let's Pull A Party

Lightnin' Hopkins - My starter won´t start this morning

Lightnin' Hopkins - Devil Is Watching You

Lightnin' Hopkins - Mojo Hand

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