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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Bobby Marchan

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features New Orleans r&b singer Bobby Marchan. Enjoy!

^{Bobby Marchan - You Can't Stop Her}

"We no longer believe in fairy tales. But we will learn to believe in monsters."

-- Francesca Lia Block

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News and Opinion

Growing Up Means Realizing That None Of The Worst Villains Are In Prison

When we’re kids we play cops and robbers, and watch cartoons about evil criminals being stopped by virtuous crime fighters. Then when we mature we learn that all the most evil people are operating within the laws of our nation, and nobody ever sends them to jail.

Ask a child to draw a Bad Guy and they’ll probably draw a bank robber, a thief, a supervillain, or somebody breaking the law in some way, because that’s what young people are trained to believe wickedness looks like in their world.

They won’t usually draw a politician, a billionaire, a media mogul, a tech plutocrat, a warmonger, or any of the rich and powerful people who are causing the real suffering in our world. The ones who impose laws upon our society ensuring the continuation of poverty, inequality, war, oppression and tyranny. The ones destroying our ecosystem and poisoning our minds with empire propaganda.

We give kids an infantile view of the world where the villains look like bandits and the heroes look like superpowered crimefighters and GI Joe. Which in a sense is understandable — no parent wants their young child exposed to the real horrors which exist in this civilization. You wouldn’t tell a six year-old that we are ruled by psychopaths who make the most sadistic serial killers look like cuddly little Pikachus.

The problem is that far too many adults never grow out of this worldview. Post a video of police brutality online and they’ll come crawling out of the woodwork frantically defending whatever monstrous act it reveals, no matter how self-evidently damning the footage might be. Oppose the latest war propaganda narrative and they’ll come falling all over themselves in a mad scramble to tell you the government would never lie to us and the Evil Regime of the Day definitely needs to be overthrown via US airstrikes.

They never unlearned the cartoons they ingested as children. They still think the struggle of good versus evil is a struggle of lawbreakers versus law-upholders. They never learned that there are many kind and decent people in prison, and that all the most horrific abuses in history have been perfectly legal under the law of the land.

Genocides are legal under the governments who authorize them. Wars are legal under the governments who wage them. Capitalist exploitation, imperialist extraction, oligarchic corruption and ecocide for profit are all legal under the governments who pass laws making them possible.

The police never show up to arrest the men who do these things. The police show up to arrest anyone who tries to stop them.

The law doesn’t exist to protect ordinary people from the most malignant members of our society, the law exists to protect the most malignant members of society from ordinary people.

A mature understanding of the world clearly recognizes this. And it’s the exact inverse of the understanding of the world we are indoctrinated into as children.

The real villains of our world look like the powerful plutocrats and empire managers who are inflicting unfathomable suffering upon the innocent. The real heroes look like the brave revolutionaries and truth-tellers who work to dismantle the power structure that those tyrants wield against the rest of us.

Becoming a real grown up means recognizing that the monsters were never under your bed. They were standing in broad daylight wearing expensive suits and ruling the world.

Richard Wolff & Michael Hudson: Iran War Just BROKE the Global Economy & the US Empire

Trump Gives Up on Hormuz

‘Get your own oil’: Trump launches tirade against Europe for not joining Iran war

Donald Trump has launched a tirade against European countries that refused to join his war against Iran, calling out the UK and France, as transatlantic relations soured from the spiralling conflict that has wreaked havoc on the global economy. On his Truth Social website, the US president told governments worried about fuel prices to “go get your own oil” by force from the Gulf, comments that sent oil prices even higher.

Later on Tuesday, Trump said US forces would end operations in Iran “very soon,” evoking a timeline of two to three weeks as his administration pursues talks with Iranian authorities. Trump also told reporters that the responsibility for keeping the strait of Hormuz open will rest with countries that rely on it. “That’s not for us … That’ll be for whoever’s using the strait.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, announced Tuesday that Trump will give an address to the US to “provide an important update on Iran”. In a tentative sign of a more proactive European pushback to the war, it was revealed on Tuesday that France had blocked Israeli planes from flying weapons through its airspace while Italy refused last-minute permission for US bombers to land in Sicily.

Spain has already denied the US use of its bases and airspace for the war, and on Tuesday Madrid’s defence minister said the country would not “accept lectures from anyone”. The UK, meanwhile, has allowed the US to use its bases for a war its government says is illegal, but has nonetheless received public admonishment from Trump.

In his Tuesday posts, Trump said “all of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran”, should buy US oil instead. He suggested they should also “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT”. The US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, repeated the call, saying there were countries that “ought be prepared to step up on this critical waterway as well”. Plans to control the strait of Hormuz by force are widely considered high risk and unrealistic, and European countries have been working for years on plans to buy more US oil.

IRAN WAR EXPOSES THE EMPIRE’S DECLINE AS U.S. LOSES ITS STRANGLEHOLD OVER WEST ASIA | Danny Haiphong

Prof. Mohammad Marandi : FROM TEHRAN: How Iran Stays Strong

US Deploying Another Aircraft Carrier to the Middle East for Iran War

The US is deploying a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East for operations against Iran, US officials told media outlets on Tuesday, a sign that the war will continue to escalate despite President Trump’s claims that he is looking to end the conflict.

The aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush and other warships that are part of its strike group departed Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia on Tuesday and are expected to arrive in the Middle East in a few weeks. The US Navy said the strike group’s departure is part of a regularly scheduled deployment.

According to The Wall Street Journal, once the Bush arrives in the region, the US could have three carriers deployed for the Iran war for the foreseeable future, though Al Arabiya reported that the warship could replace one of the two carriers that have been involved in the conflict: the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been operating in the Arabian Sea, or the USS Gerald Ford, which is currently in Croatia after being in Crete for reparis.

Iran BOMBS Amazon, THREATENS US Tech Companies As Trump FLAILS

Attack on US radar plane at Saudi base raises concern over Iran’s capabilities

The destruction of a US E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft in an Iranian strike on a Saudi Arabian airbase has raised questions over how a critical surveillance asset was left unprotected, and how Iran was able to launch a direct strike on the plane. The plane was one of 16 operational E-3s, which first went into production in the 1960s and carry sophisticated monitoring equipment that allow them to warn of airborne threats such as missiles, as well as surveil and monitor their assigned battle space including communications, troop and equipment movements and air defence sites.

The attack that destroyed it on 27 March, while it was parked at Prince Sultan airbase, underlined once again the continuing ability of Iran to attack and accurately strike high-value targets in the region despite a month of US and Israeli air raids. Images from the scene of the attack, which also injured US servicemen and damaged several in-flight refuelling aircraft, show a direct strike on the E-3’s radar dome located near the tail, suggesting a high degree of accuracy.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Ukrainian intelligence had information that a Russian spy satellite had photographed the base three times before the attack, on 20 March, 23 March and 25 March. “We know that if they make images once, they are preparing. If they make images a second time, it’s like a simulation. The third time it means that, in one or two days, they will attack,” Zelenskyy said. Zelenskyy’s comments follow reports earlier this month that Moscow was providing intelligence to Iran on the location of US forces in the Middle East – a claim denied by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.

The E-3 aircraft was one of six that had been reportedly deployed to the Saudi Arabian base.

Aaron Maté : IDF Tortures a Baby

US-Israeli Strikes in Iran Hit Orphanage, Cancer Drug Facility, Religious Site, and More Residential Buildings

US-Israeli strikes continue to pound civilian targets in Iran, hitting an orphanage, a cancer drug facility, a religious site, and more residential buildings in recent days.

CNN reported, citing Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency, that a US or Israeli strike on Monday hit a newly built orphan charity complex in the city of Fardis, about 25 miles west of Tehran, killing at least two people and wounding five others.

According to Al Jazeera, the Iranian government said that a US-Israeli strike on Tuesday hit one of Iran’s largest pharmaceutical companies in Tehran that makes anesthetics and cancer drugs.

The Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS) reported that one of its workers was killed by a US-Israeli strike that hit the Grand Husseiniyah of Zanjan, a gathering hall for Shia Muslims that’s next to a mosque, and shared photos and videos of rescue efforts at the site of the strike and said that at least two people were pulled out of the rubble.

The IRCS also posted videos of its rescuers working in the rubble of the site of a US-Israeli strike on a residential building in Tehran.

Iran & Lebanon Are One War — Inside the ‘Axis of Resistance’ | w/ Ali Hashem

140+ TANKS DESTROYED: RESISTANCE FIGHTERS ‘BEATING THE HELL OUT OF’ ISRAEL IN LEBANON | Laith Marouf

Israel vows to occupy swathes of southern Lebanon to expand buffer zone

Israel says it will occupy swathes of south Lebanon and destroy the homes along the border to prevent the return of about 600,000 residents, prompting concerns of long-term forced displacement. The defence minister, Israel Katz, said that when fighting with Hezbollah ended, Israel would occupy the area under the Litani River, about 19 miles from the Israel-Lebanon border, as part of its so-called buffer zone inside southern Lebanon.

“At the end of the operation, the IDF would control the area up to the Litani River, including the remaining Litani bridges, while eliminating Radwan forces that infiltrated the area and destroying all weapons there,” Katz said, referring to the elite unit of the pro-Iran Hezbollah group. He added that all homes near the villages would be destroyed “in accordance with the Rafah and Beit Hanoun model in Gaza”. The Israeli military razed most homes and public infrastructure in both neighbourhoods of Gaza.

Human Rights Watch has said that similar statements by Katz in the past week could amount to forced displacement and wanton destruction, which are war crimes.

In an interview on Sunday with LBCI, an Israeli military spokesperson, Maj Doron Spielman, said that “every home in southern Lebanon, the Shiite homes, are command centres”. The immediate goal of Israel’s invasion is to push Hezbollah back from the border in order to stop the ability of the group to fire rockets into communities in northern Israel. On Sunday, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that he has instructed the military to expand the so-called buffer zone within Lebanon, though he did not specify how far. Most of Hezbollah’s rocket fire into Israel has originated from north of the Litani River and it has large weapons caches in the vast Bekaa valley.

The Lebanese army withdrew from its positions in the Christian-majority towns of Rmeish and Ain Ebl on Tuesday as Israeli troops advanced, over the protests of residents. Despite being close to the Lebanese-Israeli border, the towns had previously been mostly spared from Israeli strikes. The Lebanese army had until now remained in those villages, organising convoys of food and other supplies and facilitating the evacuation of residents who wanted to leave.

Douglas Macgregor: Iran War Destroyed NATO, Gulf States, Israel & U.S. Empire

Chatter and fear about US military draft emerge as Trump’s Iran war drags on

The United States is almost certainly not going to have a military draft to fight Iran. That hasn’t stopped the chatter, and anxiety, across the country. In recent weeks, Donald Trump has ordered a number of marines and army paratroopers to head to the Middle East, gesturing toward a possible ground war to reopen the strait of Hormuz or secure nuclear weapons material. The provocative military activity has led to speculative conversation about what it would take to invade a country twice the population and three times the territory of Iraq.

The White House has done little to end the debate. On 8 March, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, chose – seemingly offhandedly – to respond to conservative journalist Maria Bartiromo’s question about the possibility of a military draft in vague terms. “The president, as commander-in-chief, wants to continue to assess the success of this military operation. It’s not part of the current plan right now, but the president, again, wisely keeps his options on table,” Leavitt said on Fox News. “There’s no greater priority or responsibility to this president than, of course, protecting the American people and protecting our troops.”

Because her answer was not conclusive, commentary about a draft snowballed from there. News organizations like Task and Purpose, Yahoo and USA Today ran stories about how a draft would work.

Americans also noticed that the US army revised its recruiting regulations on 20 March, raising the maximum enlistment age to 42 from 35 and scrapping some prior restrictions for those convicted of marijuana possession. The changes suggested to some that the military had a recruiting problem and that it changed the standards to address that issue. But the army met its 2025 recruiting goal of 61,000 new soldiers four months early.

Shortly after the US launched attacks on Iran, the South Park writer Toby Morton launched DraftBarronTrump.com, satirizing the president’s willingness to send others into combat while his own family has assiduously avoided military service, including himself, obtaining draft deferments for bone spurs. It noted the president’s assertion that his son was “too tall” to enlist. By 2 March, the hashtag #SendBarron was trending on X and TikTok.

Charlie Kirk bullet analysis finds no conclusive link to rifle found near scene

An analysis from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive (ATF) could not conclusively connect a bullet fragment recovered during Charlie Kirk’s autopsy to the rifle found near the scene of the rightwing political activist’s killing – and the FBI is running additional tests, lawyers for Kirk’s accused murderer said in recent court filings.

In the court filings, Tyler Robinson’s defense team also asked for a delay to a preliminary hearing scheduled in May, saying they need time to review the bullet analysis as well as an enormous amount of other material that could contribute to the suspect’s defense.

The ATF’s bullet analysis report has been kept private, but attorneys have cited snippets in other public filings that say the results were inconclusive.

The success of a forensic ballistics analysis largely depends on the size and condition of the bullet fragments. Experts are looking for unique, microscopic markings that are left on a bullet as it passes through the gun’s barrel. The scratches are like fingerprints in that no two firearms make identical markings.

The defense said in its motion that it may try to use the analysis to clear Robinson of blame during the preliminary hearing while prosecutors aim to show they have enough evidence against him to proceed with a trial.

Federal judge blocks Trump order to end funding for NPR and PBS

Citing the first amendment, a federal judge on Tuesday agreed to permanently block the Trump administration from implementing a presidential directive to end federal funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), two media entities that the White House has said are counterproductive to American priorities.

The operational impact of US district judge Randolph Moss’s decision was not immediately clear – both because it will probably be appealed and because too much damage to the public-broadcasting system has already been done, both by the president and Congress.

Moss ruled that Donald Trump’s executive order to cease funding for NPR and PBS is unlawful and unenforceable. The judge said the first amendment right to free speech “does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type”.

“It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the president does not like and seeks to squelch,” wrote Moss, who was nominated to the bench by Barack Obama, a Democrat.

Last year, Trump, a Republican, said at a news conference he would “love to” defund NPR and PBS because he believed they were biased in favor of Democrats. “The message is clear: NPR and PBS need not apply for any federal benefit because the president disapproves of their ‘left wing’ coverage of the news,” Moss wrote.

US judge orders Trump to halt $400m White House ballroom project

A US judge has halted the construction of Donald Trump’s $400m White House ballroom. The US president demolished the historic East Wing of the White House last year to make way for the project.

US district judge Richard Leon in Washington granted a request for a preliminary injunction by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a non-profit organization that brought a lawsuit alleging that Trump had exceeded his authority by razing the East Wing and beginning construction without approval from Congress. The decision by Leon, an appointee of George W Bush, leaves the 90,000-sq-ft ballroom project on hold unless it receives approval from Congress.

“Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!” Leon wrote in his opinion on Tuesday. “But here is the good news. It is not too late for Congress to authorize the continued construction of the ballroom project.”

The Trump administration immediately appealed against the order. In a statement on his Truth Social platform shortly after the ruling, Trump attacked the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which he called “a radical left group of lunatics”. The ballroom is “under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World”, the president claimed.

The decision comes after months of litigation. Earlier this month, Leon had signaled his skepticism about the administration’s argument that the ballroom was an allowed “alteration” to White House grounds. “I’m struggling to see this as an ‘alteration’,” Leon said.

Seeking $56 Million, Legal Migrant Claims ICE Intentionally Sent Him ​to Salvadoran Prison

A Utah law firm said Tuesday that it plans to sue the US government for its allegedly unlawful detention and deportation of a Venezuelan immigrant who was sent to a maximum security prison in El Salvador known for its torture and abuse of inmates.

“Our client is a young Venezuelan man who came into the US legally to escape threats of violence by the Venezuelan government against his family for their opposition to the Maduro regime,” said Brent Ward, an attorney at Parker & McConkie, referring to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was kidnapped by US forces during a January invasion of his country.

Ward said that the client—identified by the pseudonym “Johnny Hernandez”—is seeking $56 million in damages and “has no criminal record either in the US or in Venezuela.”

Hernandez was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and subsequently deported to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in Tecoluca, central El Salvador, where he allegedly suffered torture and other abuse.

“The Trump administration knowingly and unlawfully locked up an innocent person for four months in a concentration camp-like prison where he suffered torture, shooting, beatings, and solitary confinement,” Ward stated. “When the US government knowingly and purposefully violates the law by detaining and deporting innocent individuals on false charges and is not held responsible, the individual rights of not just legal immigrants but all Americans are placed in jeopardy.”

“Our client suffered catastrophic injuries in CECOT from which he will never fully recover,” the lawyer said. “Failing to demand accountability now places all Americans in jeopardy in the future.”

The impending lawsuit comes as ICE proposes to literally warehouse up to 10,000 arrested immigrants in a “megacenter” in Salt Lake City, Utah. Opponents have compared the 833,000-square foot facility to a concentration camp akin to the Topaz War Relocation Center, a harsh, desolate desert prison where Japanese Americans and Japanese people living in the Western US were forcibly interned during World War II.

The case also follows last week’s filing of a lawsuit by Neiyerver Adrián León Rengel, one of the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. Like Hernandez, León Rengel—who is seeking $1.3 million in damages—was in the US legally when he was arrested by federal immigration authorities.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently said on the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation of Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and others that, of the 9,000 Salvadorans expelled from the US since the beginning of last year, “only 10.5% had a conviction in the United States for a violent or potentially violent crime.”

The Salvadoran investigative journalism outlet El Faro—which, along with its staff, has been the target of sweeping government persecution—last year published a report on CECOT, citing one former prisoner who said that inmates are “committing suicide out of desperation.”

At least one deported Salvadoran—longtime Maryland resident Kilmar Ábrego García—was wrongfully expelled due to what the Trump administration called an “administrative error.”

The Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans to CECOT under a multimillion-dollar agreement between the Trump administration and the government of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.

While Trump claimed—often without evidence—that the Venezuelan deportees were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, only about 3% of them had violent criminal convictions in the United States, and Department of Homeland Security records show that the Trump administration knew it.

In July 2025, El Salvador released 252 Venezuelans imprisoned at CECOT and sent them to Venezuela in a prisoner swap that saw Maduro’s government free 10 US citizens and permanent residents whom it jailed. Many of the repatriated Venezuelans said they suffered torture, sexual assault, severe beatings, and other abuse at CECOT.

Last December, Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Trump administration broke the law by deporting the Venezuelans without due process.

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Trump signs order to restrict mail-in ballots in probably unconstitutional move

Donald Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to compile a national voter file and to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, an unprecedented move that is probably unconstitutional.

The executive order directs the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration to compile a list of verified US citizens who can vote in every state. It also directs the United States Postal Service (USPS) to begin rule-making on a process that would require states to notify the agency of voters who intend to receive a mail-in ballot and prohibit them from receiving one unless they are on a USPS-approved list of eligible voters.

Trump repeated a series of falsehoods about voting before signing the order in the Oval Office on Tuesday, claiming that cheating with mail-in voting was “legendary”. Repeated studies and investigations have shown there is no widespread voter fraud, including fraud through mail-in voting. The president himself voted by mail earlier this month.

“There’s not a single provision in here that will withstand judicial review. This is a wholly unconstitutional EO,” said David Becker, the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a non-profit. The US constitution gives the president no authority over elections and expressly authorizes states to set election rules. Trump signed an executive order last year seeking to impose citizenship requirements on voter registration as well as mail-in voting restrictions on election rules that was struck down.

The order requires the administration to provide a verified citizenship list within 60 days of an election. But voters will probably register after that cutoff; federal law says that the earliest a state can cut off voter registration is 30 days before election day. It is unclear what would happen if an eligible voter was not included on the list. It is also unclear how the Trump administration will know which state voters live in based on DHS and SSA data. That may be why the justice department has been pressuring states to turn over their voter rolls to the federal government, including sensitive information like the last four digits of their social security number and driver’s license information. The department has not won any of the dozens of lawsuits it has filed seeking the information and has already lost three.

TMZ tracks US lawmakers vacationing amid the partial government shutdown

When US federal workers were missing paychecks and the partial government shutdown entered its seventh week, Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, was doing what any responsible lawmaker would do: riding Space Mountain and carrying a bubble wand at Disney World in Florida. Naturally, TMZ had photos of the vacationing senator on its homepage a few days later.

Graham’s Disney World excursion earned him the headline: “Living in Fantasyland as Government Shutdown Drags On.” The Senate majority leader, John Thune; the Senate majority whip, John Barrasso; and Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, also appeared in the outlet’s dispatches, with Cruz sitting as the lead story on the site.

The outlet had long covered politics but was moved to up the ante, he said in a statement, after interviewing a TSA worker who was going without pay during the shutdown. “It outraged us so much we wanted to use our platforms to show how Congress – Dems AND Republicans – have betrayed us,” Harvey Levin, TMZ’s founder and executive producer, said in a statement. “We spontaneously came up with the idea to juxtapose members of Congress on their Spring Break against federal workers who are losing their homes, their cars, their livelihoods.”

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‘God squad’ waives endangered species law to allow US drilling in Gulf of Mexico

A US government panel on Tuesday exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act (ESA), a move which critics say could doom a rare whale species and harm other marine life. The Endangered Species Committee – which had not convened in more than three decades – voted to approve the request for the ESA exemption at the request of the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth has said environmentalists’ lawsuits against the industry threatened to hobble the nation’s energy supply, while environmentalists fear drilling could kill off protected species including Rice’s whales, whooping cranes and sea turtles. Only about 51 Rice’s whales remain, and they and other wildlife are largely on the brink of extinction because of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill, which devastated the gulf when it leaked about 210m gallons.

Nicknamed the “God squad” by groups who say it can decide a species’ fate, the committee includes several Trump administration officials and is chaired by the interior secretary, Doug Burgum. Burgum, Hegseth and five other panel members unanimously voted for the exemption.

Steve Mashuda, attorney for the non-profit environmental law organization Earthjustice, criticized the move. “The Trump administration is exploiting its self-made gas crisis to get rid of protections for endangered whales and other imperiled species in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said.

“Secretary Hegseth and his extinction committee claim this will eventually cut costs for cash-strapped Americans, but gulf communities know what unrestrained drilling will really bring: devastating oil spills and the destruction of ecosystems and coastal economies. Earthjustice and our partners will go to court to stop this illegal order.”

Trump’s Iran war and drilling push show ‘dangerous volatility’ of fossil fuel era

By attacking Iran and threatening to seize its oil while taking extraordinary measures to block clean energy back in the US, Donald Trump has inadvertently highlighted the dangerous volatility of the fossil fuel era, critics say. The US and Israel’s bombardment of Iran and southern Lebanon has caused a humanitarian and environmental toll, with threats of further escalation set to add to these casualties as well as add more planet-heating emissions and destroy drinking water supplies.

Iran’s blockade of the strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil is normally transported, has threatened economies around the world as energy costs have spiked, with consumers globally paying out more than $100bn extra to fossil fuel companies since the conflict began last month. In the US, the average national cost of gasoline has risen to nearly $4 a gallon.

“It’s quite a bet the president has made on fossil fuels and as of today it isn’t going so well,” said Alice Hill, an energy and environment expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This is a very stark reminder that the green transition will have huge benefits for the long-term security of the nation. Countries that have invested in clean energy like solar and wind will be better placed and will weather this. But President Trump has rejected that approach, which just makes us more vulnerable.”

Trump has [...] sought to elongate the fossil fuel era, using incendiary language on Friday to dismiss those concerned about the environment. “The environmentalists, I mean, they are terrorists,” the president said. “They are terrorists. I call them environmental terrorists.” Trump has previously called the climate crisis a “hoax” and a “scam” and has demanded that not only the US drill for more oil and gas, but that he seize the supply coming from other oil-rich countries – Venezuela and now Iran. “To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the US say: ‘why are you doing that?’ But they’re stupid people,’” Trump told the Financial Times on Sunday.

As well as promising to not start a war with Iran, Trump vowed before the 2024 election to lower costs for Americans – a pledge that he has so far largely failed to achieve. “The president is locking us into 20th-century energy systems when we have wind and solar that could loosen the chokehold on the strait of Hormuz,” said Hill. “That retrenchment is very striking when you see oil prices soaring and no clear strategy to end the war.”

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Also of Interest

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

Iran War: Trump Threatens Destruction of Iran Electric Generation and Oil Wells Even as WSJ Reports Temporary TACO on Trying to Force Open Strait of Hormuz

UN diplomat resigns over claims of planned nuclear strike on Iran

War On Iran: It Is Cheaper To Pay For Hormuz Passage Than To Wage War

Israeli DM Says All of South Lebanon Will Be Occupied, Villages Leveled ‘In Accordance With Gaza’

Judge May Reconsider Dismissing Maduro’s Case

Washington state’s ‘historic’ millionaire tax takes aim at super-rich – will it succeed?

Why 'No Kings' Doesn't Matter

Epstein, Gates were setting up COVID…': Economist's EXPLOSIVE claims about pandemic shocks everyone

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A Little Night Music

Bobby Marchan ~ Get Down With It

Bobby Marchan - Shake Your Tambourine

Bobby Marchan - What Can I Do

Bobby Marchan - Chickee Wah-Wah

Bobby Marchan - Funny Style

Bobby Marchan - Ain't no reason for the girls to be lonely

Bobby Marchan - Snoopin and Accusin

Bobby Marchan - I've Got A Thing Going On

Bobby Marchan - There is Something On Your Mind (Parts 1 & 2)

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