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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: James Harman

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features harmonica player James Harman. Enjoy!

^{James Harman - I Got News For You}

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

-- Henry David Thoreau

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News and Opinion

It Took A Live-Streamed Genocide To Punch Through The Wall Of Western Apathy

I never asked to know what a dismembered child looks like. Israel imposed that knowledge upon me.

I never wanted to know what it looks like when military explosives blow an infant’s head off. I only know it because Israel forced me to know it.

The reason the Gaza holocaust hit westerners so hard is because it punched through the wall of our shitbrained western supremacist narcissism and our vapid mainstream culture and shook us violently awake to something real and terrifying.

All of a sudden the idea that our bombs are killing people in the middle east was no longer a vague abstraction sitting in the periphery of our awareness. It was a reality hitting us right in the guts in the middle of the day while we casually scrolled our phones, forcing us to run to the toilet to vomit up our lunch.

It made it personal. We were being kicked in the stomach over and over again by the state of Israel with the backing of our own western governments. The abuse of the Palestinians wasn’t something that was happening exclusively to the Palestinians; to a much smaller degree, it was also something that was happening to everyone who witnessed it.

Westerners aren’t accustomed to such confrontations. We are accustomed to bustling around in our mind-controlled dystopia with our first world problems and our neuroses and distractions, our attention going into treats and screens and our consumerist preferences and the petty dramas playing out in our respective social circles. Then all of a sudden we find ourselves in the bathroom puking up our sushi because our phone had just shown us the most unimaginably horrific thing we have ever seen.

And we were at all times aware that all the nausea and horror and rage and disgust we experienced when witnessing the Gaza holocaust happened because of the real material actions of real material people. The Israelis were deliberately causing as much devastation as possible to advance their longstanding goal of forcibly transferring all Palestinians out of Gaza. Our leaders were deliberately stalling and equivocating from behind their podiums to buy Israel enough time to make Gaza uninhabitable. We all understood that the waking nightmare we were witnessing was not some natural disaster that was passively occurring; it was being actively inflicted by people who were fully aware of what they were doing.

That’s the sort of thing that changes you as a person. Changes your whole worldview. Changes your politics. Changes your beliefs. The average westerner needs to do a lot of internal restructuring to truly reckon with the Gaza holocaust and all its implications.

That, I think, has been the biggest reason why the genocide of the Palestinians has gotten so much attention and sympathy. It’s because its live-streamed nature caused it to affect us in ways other acts of mass military slaughter usually don’t.

Westerners are so propaganda-addled and indoctrinated that we are largely apathetic to what our bombs are doing to human bodies on the other side of the world. It’s only when we are given some skin in the game, as in the Vietnam draft, that we start caring in any politically significant way. Gaza gave us skin in the game in the way it entered into our lives through our electronic devices and showed us things that were so jarring it left a permanent mark upon our lives.

Gaza forced us to look, and forced us to see, against all the efforts the propagandists have expended trying to keep us from noticing such things. That’s why this thing isn’t going away. People are only getting angrier and angrier. The empire has spent three years scrambling around unsuccessfully trying to get us to close our eyes again, and it keeps failing and failing and failing.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Did Trump Approve an Israeli Nuclear Strike on Iran?

Trump promises not to attack Iran before November’s US midterms

Donald Trump has promised not to attack Iran before November’s US midterm elections, outlining a pause on the protracted war he has struggled to end after almost eight months. In a Truth Social post on Thursday, the US president said Washington was “having productive discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran”, which he claimed was “in very bad condition, both Economically and Militarily”.

The strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed through before the war, was all but closed after the US and Israel struck Iran in late February. On Thursday, however, Trump suggested that oil was moving through the strait in record volumes: “22 Million Barrels, last night alone”, he claimed, “with not one barrel coming from, or going to, Iran”. The figure could not be independently verified.

“We will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd,” Trump wrote. “IRAN WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!”

Trump’s post did not say what the US would do after 3 November.

Mehdi EXPOSES the Use of the Hannibal Directive and the Western Media Cover-Up

Democratic senator says Hegseth trying to hide costs of Iran war from US public

Senator Chris Murphy said the Pentagon blocked him from a major US base in Qatar, yet saw enough damage on the US embassy in Saudi Arabia to conclude that an Iranian strike would have been deadly had it happened during the day. The Connecticut Democrat, who sits on the Senate foreign relations and appropriations committees, described the destruction he witnessed in Riyadh as “extraordinary” and much more damaging than the public has been led to believe.

“Had that attack happened during the daytime, there’s no doubt that there would have been many, many Americans killed,” he told reporters on a call after returning from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. He also accused the Pentagon of trying to prevent Congress from seeing the costs of the war first-hand, saying the Pentagon secretary, Pete Hegseth, was “determined to hide the cost and the consequences of this war from the American public”.

Two drones hit the compound in the early hours of 3 March, days after the US and Israel launched the war on 28 February, setting off a fire and sending black smoke over the district. The building was reportedly empty at the time and no injuries were reported. Saudi Arabia’s defense ministry initially described the damage as minor. But, according to Murphy, the drones caused extensive damage across several floors. The strike, he explained, hit “an area of the embassy in which there are a lot of people” and said that “part of that space is uninhabitable and will likely remain uninhabitable”. Murphy said some of it would not be repaired because the embassy is moving soon.

In Qatar, the senator visited Ras Laffan, the gas complex where Iranian drone strikes halted LNG (liquefied natural gas) production early in the war. Murphy said 17% of Qatar’s exports had been eliminated, probably for at least three years of repairs. He also said he saw just one LNG tanker in port, compared with the usual six, and about one a day leaving rather than 10.

Murphy said the Pentagon blocked him from seeing more. He said he gave notice of his visit weeks in advance and submitted a written request for access to Al Udeid air base, the largest US military installation in the region. He also said he raised it with Adm Brad Cooper, the commander of the US Central Command, who appeared surprised that military leaders had also been barred from speaking to him. On arrival, Murphy said, he was told he would not have access to the base and no contact with military leadership.

What three years of Israeli genocide have failed to destroy, with Joseph Massad

Top Huckabee Aide Covered Up Report on Killings of 9 Americans by Israeli Settlers

A top aide to Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, is being called a “traitor” following revelations that he manipulated embassy reports to portray the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a positive light, including covering up a report about nine US citizens killed by Israeli settlers and security forces in the West Bank.

Previous reporting by Responsible Statecraft has exposed how the aide, David Milstein—the stepson of right-wing radio host Mark Levin, a close friend of both President Donald Trump and Netanyahu—had instilled what State Department officials described as a culture of fear surrounding any information that portrays Israel negatively.

This included suppressing reports of massacres of Palestinian aid-seekers by Israeli soldiers at sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, removing content critical of Israel from official press statements, confronting and pushing for the firing of colleagues he viewed as insufficiently pro-Israel, and advocating for the State Department to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” a name preferred by Israelis seeking to annex the territory.

Based on discussions with 15 people who work with Milstein in Washington and Jerusalem and several internal cables and memos, The New York Times revealed on Thursday that the senior aide has gone even further than previously known.

NYT reports that a Huckabee top aide is a literal traitor, actively covering up Israeli killings of American citizens and falsifying embassy reports about Israel’s role in settler violence. https://t.co/X6W4uLrEEB

— jasper nathaniel (@infinite_jaz) October 8, 2026

In March, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and 30 other senators requested that the State Department press Israel to provide details on the cases of nine Palestinian Americans killed in the West Bank since 2022 by Israeli settlers and security forces.

One of them, 19-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam, had been fatally shot the previous month while trying to stop settlers from stealing livestock from his West Bank village.

Embassy officials compiled a report on the status of Israel’s investigations into Siyam’s killing and the eight others. According to the Times:

Its central findings suggested that, in most cases, investigations had made little progress, that some cases had been closed, and that no one had been charged in any of the killings, these officials said.

Instead of forwarding the report, Mr. Milstein argued that the embassy should send a letter saying that Israel was properly handling the investigations, two officials briefed on the discussions said.

On May 4, Paul D. Guaglianone, a State Department official, sent a letter responding to Mr. Van Hollen, saying that the embassy, which had reduced staff because of the Iran War, was focused on security cooperation with Israel and protecting Americans against Iranian attacks. (The intense fighting had wound down nearly a month earlier, after a ceasefire was struck on April 8.)

The letter, provided to the Times by Mr. Van Hollen’s office, said the embassy was working with Israel to “ensure accountability for these deaths.”

The response did not reassure Mr. Van Hollen.

“If you don’t get accountability, you endanger more American citizens,” he said in a phone interview.

The Times report comes as violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, which is often backed by Israel’s military and security forces, is at a historic high, according to the United Nations, and is drawing condemnation and sanctions from around the world.

As of September 18, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs had recorded more than 1,600 settler attacks causing Palestinian casualties or property damage this year—an average of nearly seven per day.

Just nine days before the Times investigation was published, the Senate narrowly voted down a resolution, introduced by Van Hollen, which would have compelled the State Department to produce an unclassified report on Israeli abuses in the West Bank, including the killings of the nine Palestinian Americans.

The resolution specifically requested that the department turn over all credible information it possessed on these killings within 30 days.

The Times also showed that Milstein had actively undermined Trump’s own policy. In March, as Israel approved a record number of new settlements at a time, staff members at the US Embassy in Jerusalem prepared an urgent report warning that it could be a prelude to Israel’s full annexation of the West Bank. This would fly in the face of not just international law, but also Trump’s own public position opposing a formal Israeli takeover of the occupied territory.

The Times reported that Milstein stopped the report from ever making it to Washington.

He also reportedly prevented the drafting of another report in April warning that the dramatic expansion of settlements could spark a Palestinian uprising. In another cable, Milstein praised Netanyahu for his “unprecedented new initiatives to combat” rising violence in the West Bank.

This characterization starkly diverges from a UN Human Rights Office report written in February, which found that the Israeli government and military had played a central role in facilitating settler violence—including by arming settlers, providing equipment and policing powers, participating in attacks alongside them, and routinely failing to hold perpetrators accountable.

Huckabee—an evangelical Zionist who believes Israel has a biblical right to the West Bank and openly supports Israeli settlement expansion—vehemently defended Milstein and lambasted The New York Times’ reporting.

“The NY Slimes w/ cowardly ‘anonymous sources’ did a hit piece on David Milstein,” he wrote on social media. “I personally and categorically refute the elements of your proposed ‘story’ and I’m surprised that you expect to be taken seriously with such nonsense without even one named source.”

The State Department responded to the report by telling the Times that “the entire team at State remains focused on advancing President Trump’s America First agenda.”

But critics have described Milstein’s actions as anything but “America First.”

“NYT reports that a Huckabee top aide is a literal traitor, actively covering up Israeli killings of American citizens and falsifying embassy reports about Israel’s role in settler violence,” said Jasper Nathaniel, an independent American journalist who has reported extensively on attacks against Palestinians from the West Bank.

Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said that if a Democratic Congress is elected in November, it “should investigate further how Milstein suppressed information and stonewalled congressional inquiries into the murder of American citizens, if he’s not fired by then, which obviously he should be.”

Riyadh's Airport Burns, Tankers Next /Alastair Crooke

INTEL Roundtable : Weekly Wrap : 9-OCT

Florida judge allows lawsuit against Shah of Iran’s alleged ‘chief torturer’ to move forward

The alleged “chief torturer” for the deposed Shah of Iran is a step closer to trial for human rights abuses after a Florida federal judge rejected his demand to halt a lawsuit brought by three former political prisoners. Parviz Sabeti, who was reported last year to have lived in a quiet upscale central Florida community, is accused of being the former head of Savak, the shah’s secret police and intelligence agency. The plaintiffs say they discovered his whereabouts only after a photo of Sabeti at a 2023 protest against the Iranian government was posted on social media by his daughter.

He could now be made to answer as early as next year to civil claims under the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA) that he directed and took part in the detention and torture of thousands of the shah’s political opponents in jails in Tehran and elsewhere until the Islamic revolution swept the regime from power in 1979. Sabeti has denied allegations that that he was personally involved or that Savak tortured detainees, and claimed that he “always opposed torture”.

Tuesday’s sealed order by the district court judge Gregory A Presnell rejected Sabeti’s argument that a statute of limitations on the allegations should be strictly enforced and a summary judgment issued in his favor. In August 2025, Presnell rejected a motion by Sabeti’s lawyers to dismiss the case outright, ordering the parties to conduct discovery on whether the TVPA claim was time-barred, and said he would listen to arguments about why the deadline should not be extended.

As the Guardian reported last year, Sabeti was identified as a fiercely loyal ally of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in a secret analysis by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) written in 1978, which was not released until 2018. According to the complaint, he was “widely recognized as one of the most powerful and feared men in the shah’s regime … with the authority to apprehend, interrogate and prosecute opponents throughout the country”.

The plaintiffs, Iranian men living in California aged 68 to 85, claim they were among thousands of people rounded up as perceived opponents of the shah by Savak, Iran’s notoriously brutal internal security and intelligence agency, and subjected to abuses at Sabeti’s personal direction. Among their claims made under the TVPA are that their captors used rape, electric shocks, near-drownings and forced nail extraction against political prisoners. They say they were abducted by Savak in Tehran, beaten into giving false confessions and served prison time. Claret Vargas, senior staff attorney for the Center for Justice and Accountability, an advocacy group representing the three Iranian plaintiffs, welcomed Presnell’s ruling, which she said allows the case to move forward towards discovery on the TVPA allegations against Sabeti. The court previously dismissed the state law claims.

"Socialism for the fat cats" | Yanis Varoufakis on the causes of France protests

Has the overweening greed of rentiers in Spain finally caused the sort of mass revulsion that will force the coin-op political class to act?

Can Sánchez convince Spanish voters he is their best hope for fairer housing?

Even before María del Carmen Abascal died on Wednesday night, a mere fortnight after her eviction from the Madrid flat where she had lived for most of her life, the frail 87-year-old woman had become the enduring face of Spain’s housing crisis. Her plight – and the wider issue it embodied – had led to street demonstrations, the creation of a protest camp in the middle of the Spanish capital, and spurred the socialist-led government to propose emergency measures to facilitate and protect access to housing. When rightwing and far-right parties voted down those measures in congress last week, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, responded by announcing a snap general election for the end of November.

Abascal’s death now looks set to focus even more attention on housing in the run-up to that election and, in particular, on what her lawyer has called “the shameful violence of these types of evictions and the evident impact and consequences they can have on people’s health”.

With more than 42% of Spaniards identifying access to housing as their main worry and with rents having risen by 80% over the past decade, the most pertinent question may be: why has it taken the eviction of an octogenarian and the accompanying protests to shake Spain’s political class into action? To which the answer could be that, despite years of protests against overtourism and gentrification, the tipping point had not been reached. Now, arguably, it has.

On Thursday, Spain’s state centre for sociological research published polling that showed that 76.3% of those surveyed were in favour of the state intervening in the market “as much as necessary to guarantee everyone’s access to housing”, while 79% believed housing should be prioritised as a constitutional right.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party, which voted down the measures last week, has said it is a bit late for Sánchez, who has been prime minister since 2018, to suddenly appoint himself Spain’s housing champion. “Housing has been the big failure of this government but will be the success story of the one that follows it,” he said on Monday. Feijóo, whose party is leading the polls, added: “When a prime minister has been in power for eight years, it’s hard to blame others for what he’s failed to do.” The PP has promised to address the crisis by building 200,000 homes a year, lowering taxes and cutting down on bureaucracy. However, the PP’s decision to side with the far-right Vox party and the rightwing Catalan pro-independence Junts party to fell the measures has left it looking less than committed to the issue of the day.

Gen Z vs. Macron: France's Student Rebellion Explodes

Nicolás Maduro and his wife indicted for alleged torture of US citizens

The deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been indicted for alleged conspiracy to commit torture, according to Manhattan federal court papers unsealed on Thursday. The superseding indictment was unsealed shortly before Flores appeared at court in her ongoing push for pretrial release – which was denied by Judge Alvin Hellerstein. Maduro and Flores have been jailed in New York City since early January.

They were captured by US special forces during a shocking predawn assault on Caracas and transported to New York to face “narcoterrorism”-related charges in a move that sparked widespread international outrage. Charging documents at the time alleged that Maduro spearheaded a “corrupt, illegitimate government that, for decades, has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking”.

Maduro and Flores have previously pleaded not guilty in the criminal case against them. CNN on Wednesday first reported that a new indictment was expected. The new charging document described how Maduro and his wife allegedly wielded untold horrors to suppress opposition and maintain their control. Maduro, Flores and other Venezuelan leaders “presided over a system of repression that relied on violence against political opposition, arbitrary detention, and the torture of detainees, including United States citizens”, the just-released charging document said.

Maduro and Flores, the superseding indictment alleged, “sat atop that violent power structure”. They allegedly “developed and facilitated the systems which they and their co-conspirators used corruptly to amass immense wealth and power, rewarding allies with ill-gotten funds and terrorizing perceived opponents through persecution and violence”. Flores was integral to this effort, authorities claimed, saying she “helped develop this system of repression and ordered that individuals be tortured to protect her family members’ illegal activities”. The victims of their torture included US citizens “who were believed to pose a threat” to Maduro’s power.

Trump made ‘clear’ that media ban was due to critical coverage, court told

Donald Trump continues to be the strongest witness for the media companies arguing that they were unfairly barred from the White House at his direction, a lawyer representing CNN, MS Now and Politico told a federal judge on Thursday afternoon.

The media coalition was in court asking the judge to extend the temporary restraining order (TRO) he issued on 24 September requiring the White House to lift the ban for 14 days. That temporary reprieve was scheduled to expire on Thursday, but district court judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, said he would extend it until Tuesday and that he would probably rule on a motion for a preliminary injunction by that day. That means the White House will be forced to allow journalists from CNN, MS Now and Politico to continue accessing the building until at least Tuesday.

Theodore J Boutrous, who has represented numerous media companies that have sued the Trump administration over access issues, said the president made abundantly clear in a recent interview with Time magazine that he chose to bar the three news organizations because of their critical coverage of him. (Under binding court precedent, news organizations cannot be removed from the White House for editorial or viewpoint-based reasons.)

Asked by Time for the “impetus” for the ban, Trump replied: “It’s just bad story after bad story, and when I say bad story, I can handle bad stories. I’ve got a lot of bad stories. Most of them are fake, and it’s not only CNN, and it’s not only MSDNC [sic]. It’s a lot of other people.” He made no mention of national security concerns, one of the primary reasons that has been given by government lawyers as a rationale for the ban.

“The case has gotten stronger for the plaintiffs thanks to President Trump,” Boutrous told the judge, citing what he said was “a confession of viewpoint discrimination and retaliation”. He added: “It’s really just absolutely clear … President Trump, to give him credit – he’s not hiding it.”

Christa Pike is ‘up and walking’ for first time after failed execution, lawyer says

Christa Pike is “up and walking” in hospital, her lawyer said, just more than a week after she survived two lethal injections during a botched execution in Tennessee. The recovery marks a dramatic turnaround after Pike was declared brain dead on Monday, before waking up and beginning to speak on Tuesday. Her ordeal has shocked many in the US and overseas and galvanized critics of the death penalty.

Stephen Ferrell, a lawyer on Pike’s legal team, told the BBC that she was able to walk, but remained mentally foggy. “What’s been described to me is that physically there’s quite a bit going on, that her arms are very injured and she’s not able to use them very much,” Ferrell said. “She is up and walking for the first time today, but just around the room, not very far,” he added.

Pike’s team is seeking psychological support for her, given that “clearly is necessary now”, Ferrell said. On Wednesday, Pike was described as “angry and confused” after regaining consciousness. Ferrell said of Pike’s mental state: “I think it’s kind of good and bad. Good that she is fairly with it, but she’s also somewhat foggy. She can lose her train of thought really easily and forgets where she’s going.” He said it remained to be seen whether Pike makes a full recovery. “I assume [Pike’s condition] will keep improving, but there could be some permanent damage. We don’t know that yet.”

On Wednesday Randy Spivey, another attorney for Pike, said she was unable to move her arms and has pneumonia and a blood clot. Despite her condition, Pike was still being restrained, her team said, shackled to her hospital bed by her feet and right arm.

ICE agent shoots man in New York City with five-year-old in car, mayor says

A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot a man in New York City on Thursday afternoon, according to the city’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Early reports indicated that agents had surrounded the man and a five-year-old child in his car in a residential area before firing multiple rounds, the mayor said in a statement on Thursday evening. The child was physically unharmed, according to Mamdani. The individual who was shot was conscious and taken to a hospital, the NYPD said in a brief statement.

The shooting took place at roughly 4pm in the Marble Hill neighborhood of the Bronx. The NYPD said they were not on the scene at the time of the shooting. “This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation,” Mamdani wrote in an X post. “I have called the President; when we speak I will demand that he ends all ICE enforcement actions in our city.”

Cellphone video published by the New York Times appeared to show the immediate aftermath of the shooting, with an agent in a yellow vest holding what appeared to be an assault rifle while talking on the phone. The newspaper said other witness video appeared to show several agents in the middle of the street in the aftermath, with one armed and another restraining a man on the ground.

The City Reporter, a local news outlet, said video showed chaos after the shooting, with a crowd gathered and NYPD officers appearing to carry a man into the back of a vehicle. Videos also showed bullet holes in the windshield of an SUV, NY1 reported. Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor, said in a short statement that she had been briefed on the shooting, writing: “We expect federal authorities to provide a full and transparent accounting of the circumstances surrounding this incident. New Yorkers deserve to know exactly what happened and why.”

Petey's gonna make a snuff flick.

Pentagon says execution of Fort Hood shooter will be livestreamed

Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A defense department official later confirmed the execution will be livestreamed.

In an interview with Real America’s Voice, the Pentagon secretary said the firing squad will carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas, at 1pm on Thursday, 3 December. This would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years.

“It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said.

Hasan opened fire at a medical processing center on the Texas base on 5 November 2009, killing 13 people and wounding dozens more. A military jury sentenced him to death in 2013, and he has been held at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas ever since. He exhausted his appeals last year, which cleared the way for Donald Trump to approve the sentence this week on a recommendation from Hegseth.

Investigators had found that Hasan had exchanged 18 emails with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric who was subsequently killed in a US drone strike, in the months before the attack. At his court martial, Hasan said he had acted to stop American soldiers from deploying to Afghanistan to kill fellow Muslims, before his own impending deployment. A review led by William Webster, a former FBI director, concluded that the bureau should have investigated his correspondence more thoroughly.

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Trump Gives Big Oil ‘Another Free Pass to Exploit’ the Arctic

Just over a week after a leading US Senate Democrat described President Donald Trump’s relationship with fossil fuel giants as “old-fashioned corruption, by a thuggish government and a desperate industry,” his administration on Thursday announced yet another giveaway to climate polluters who want to exploit the Arctic.

The US Department of the Interior is moving forward with a plan to allow oil and gas companies to conduct certain wintertime activities at the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska without reviews generally required by the National Environmental Policy Act—a landmark law long targeted by Trump’s Republican Party.

“In issuing this categorical exclusion, this administration is seeking to fast-track large-scale oil drilling and seismic exploration without any further environmental analysis or public input,” warned Earthjustice attorney Janet Bering. “It is cutting the public out of this decision and future decisions.”

“The administration finalized this new approach with zero public input,” Bering noted. “Combined with a similar proposal that rubber-stamps new oil production, this is a one-two punch. It’s bad policy, and it is unlawful.”

The 60-day public comment period is ongoing for the earlier proposal she cited, which is designed to streamline decision-making for construction and operation of oil and gas production sites in the same 23-million-acre Alaska reserve.

When the Interior Department unveiled that policy in early September, Earthjustice Attorney Erik Grafe declared that “what we’re seeing here is a concerted attack by the Trump administration to greenlight oil and gas drilling in the Western Arctic while ignoring the harm it will cause to these irreplaceable public lands and also the government’s obligation to protect these lands for wildlife and future generations.”

“These are large-scale, industrial activities that cause permanent damage to sensitive Arctic ecosystems, nearby communities, and the climate,” Grafe stressed. “The administration’s proposal flaunts basic environmental laws meant to protect land, wildlife, and people and allow for fully informed decision-making.”

Earthjustice is far from alone in blasting Trump’s recent attacks on the Arctic. Dan Ritzman, director of Sierra Club’s conservation campaign, condemned last month’s proposal as “another piece of the administration’s relentless effort to expand drilling across Alaska’s public lands.”

“The Western Arctic is home to caribou, migratory birds, and countless other wildlife, and decisions about its future deserve careful scrutiny—not a permitting process designed around the demands of the oil and gas industry,” Ritzman said at the time.

His colleague Mike Scott, Sierra Club’s national oil and gas campaign manager, was similarly critical of Thursday’s announcement.

“The Trump administration is handing Big Oil another free pass to exploit America’s public lands, this time by gutting environmental oversight in one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet,” said Scott. “Oil companies have already shown the risks they pose to the Western Arctic, and now this administration wants to make it even easier for them to drill without scrutiny.”

“This isn’t about lowering energy costs or helping Alaskans,” he continued—as the president drives up fuel costs with an illegal war on Iran. “It’s about doing the fossil fuel industry’s bidding at the expense of wildlife, Alaska Native communities, and our public lands. The Trump administration is putting corporate profits ahead of people and the planet, and the Western Arctic will pay the price.”

Oil companies have already shown the risks they pose to the Western Arctic.

Now Trump wants to make it even easier for them to drill without scrutiny, threatening sensitive Arctic wildlife and the communities that depend on them.

— Sierra Club (@SierraClub) October 8, 2026

Trump campaigned for a second term on a pledge to serve fossil fuel interests—even telling industry executives that he’d roll back climate policies if they poured $1 billion into his campaign. Last week, US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Committee on Environment and Public Works Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) released a report detailing how the president has delivered on that promise since returning to power last year.

“The fossil fuel industry and their allies bought their way into the Trump White House with hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations, after Trump promised fossil fuel bigwigs at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser that he’d do anything and everything they wanted, for the right price,” Whitehouse said. “Now, their minions run the government from the inside, driving up energy bills to deliver payouts to the donors that put Trump back in office.”

Indonesia accused of ‘gross negligence’ in wildfires lawsuit as haze tests region

The Indonesian government has been accused of “gross negligence” in a class action lawsuit over its handling of wildfires that have cloaked large parts of South-east Asia in a toxic haze, shuttered schools and caused a spike in respiratory illnesses. The lawsuit, filed by indigenous and civil society groups in the Indonesian part of Borneo, named President Prabowo Subianto and the governor of West Kalimantan among 10 defendants. The case seeks comprehensive recovery and rehabilitation measures that would include covering the healthcare costs of residents.

None of those named in the lawsuit attended the opening day of court in West Kalimantan’s provincial capital Pontianak on Wednesday, leading judges to adjourn the hearing until 21 October. “We feel sad and regretful about their absence … But on the other hand, we also understand that perhaps this haze condition caused them to be unable to land in Pontianak,” the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Glorio Sanen, told reporters.

Sanen said the case was “a step to address the problem” of wildfires that flare up annually in Indonesia, where they are often lit as a cheap way to clear land for oil palm planting. Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil, has been accused of not doing enough to stop the so-called “slash and burn” land clearances, although the government has vowed a crackdown and deployed the military to fight the fires.

The blazes hit a crisis point this year due to an unusually intense El Niño weather phenomenon, which has created drier-than-usual conditions, sending a putrid smog to Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, and even the Philippines.

Hurricane Isaias forecast to bring dangerous storm surge, with millions under warnings in US

Millions of people from Louisiana to Florida are under hurricane warnings on Thursday as Hurricane Isaias heads toward the US Gulf coast, with weather officials warning of dangerous storm surge, hurricane-force winds, heavy rainfall and flooding.

Isaias intensified from a tropical storm into the first hurricane of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season on Wednesday night, and has prompted state of emergency declarations in Florida, Alabama and Georgia, as well as evacuation orders and school closures in several Florida counties as officials urge residents to prepare for its arrival.

The National Weather Service (NWS) said on Thursday afternoon that Isaias, now a category 1 hurricane, has developed winds of 100mph (160km/h), increasing from 85mph (137km/h) this morning, and is expected to pass to the north of the Yucatán peninsula later in the day on Thursday, before reaching the northern Gulf coast, where it is expected to make landfall late Friday or early Saturday.

The NWS warned that Isaias was “expected to strengthen and be a strong hurricane when it approaches the northern Gulf Coast on Friday” and that it was expected to bring a “life-threatening storm surge” along parts of the northern Gulf coast. Storm surge warnings, issued when there is a “danger of life-threatening inundation from rising water moving inland from the coastline”, are already in effect from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Suwanee River in Florida. Residents in the affected areas have been urged to follow advice from local officials and evacuate if instructed to do so.

Isaias is expected to bring heavy rain to the central Gulf coast and much of the south-east from Friday into the weekend, with 3-7in of rain expected from south-eastern Louisiana to the Florida Big Bend region. The NWS warned that localized rainfall totals of up to 15in were possible, and noted that flash and urban flooding is possible, along with isolated river flooding. Isolated tornadoes could also develop on Friday night in coastal areas of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle and far south-western Georgia, the NWS said, adding that “the tornado threat will continue Saturday for eastern Alabama, Georgia and northern Florida”.

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