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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: The Meters

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features purveyors of fine New Orleans funk The Meters. Enjoy!

^{Funky Meters – Cissy strut / Soul island / You're the one medley}

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

-- Ursula K. Le Guin

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News and Opinion

ALL Art Is Political When You Live In A Genocidal Dystopia

During a speech at the Las Vegas Sphere on Saturday, Metallica frontman James Hetfield took aim at artists like Macklemore for making political statements about the genocide in Gaza during their concerts.

“I just gotta say, Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit, okay?” said Hetfield, adding, “We’re here to forget about all the outside shit, okay? Metallica’s agenda is love, energy and heavy music, baby!”

Defenders of imperial status quo apathy like Matt Taibbi are presently defending Hetfield from the backlash his comments are receiving, arguing that art exists on some kind of magical higher plane that transcends such trivial “political” concerns like whether or not genocide is bad.

I have no respect for this idea that art is somehow separable from politics. ALL art is political when you live in a genocidal dystopia, because all your expression exists in relation to our freakish civilization.

If you were on fire, any action OR inaction on your part would necessarily be happening in relationship to the urgency of your situation. If you chose to stand there strumming your guitar while the flames consumed your body, nobody would try to argue that your artistic expression in that moment was somehow separable from your failure to address your urgent need for extinguishment. Your inaction would be a self-destructive act, and your final song would have been about burning to death — whether you sang anything about fire or not.

In exactly the same way, western artists who ignore the abuses of the western empire are taking a political position and sharing a political message. They might be singing about romance, or dancing, or the Sandman, but their actual message is, “Here are those circuses you ordered, you vapid NPCs, you mindless empire automatons, you shambling zombies consuming the flesh of the third world. Distract yourselves from the burning ecosystem, from the screams of Gaza, from the suffering of the poor and the marginalized, from the AI-assisted surveillance system they are constructing all around you right this very moment. Pretend everything’s fine and capitalism is working out great for everyone. Here you go, you empty-headed human livestock, sedate yourself with some catchy rhythms while our rulers turn our world into a desert planet so a few billionaires can become trillionaires.”

I always suspected Matt Taibbi actually was a useless idiot. And now he’s come clean. Who’s more important Matt? The Mona Liza or Hind Rajab?
Matt scratches his head. Ok Matt, The Mona Liza is a painting, Hind Rajab is our sister.

— Roger Waters (@rogerwaters) October 15, 2026

Real art tells the truth, and facilitates a deeper connection with reality. It pulls us into intimacy with parts of ourselves we’d been neglecting, draws attention to aspects of the human experience we’d avoided, directs us, rebukes us, inspires us, encourages us, emboldens us and reassures us as we crawl forth on our adventure across this mysterious blue planet during our short few decades between birth and death. And in a healthy world it could do all these things without ever getting “political”, because the most urgent needs of the moment would typically just involve our feelings, our interpersonal relationships, and our struggle toward self-actualization.

But we do not live in a healthy world. We live under a tyrannical world-eating empire that is fueled by human blood and suffering. That is our reality, and your art is either real about reality or it isn’t. You’re either telling the truth about reality or you’re normalizing it.

It’s easy for the rich and the propaganda-addled to believe we are living in a healthy world where everything’s basically fine, but for everyone whose eyes are open to the reality of our situation as a species, it’s a five-alarm fire. A real artist is in tune with reality, and in this particular slice of spacetime our reality contains horrors that should be treated with the same urgency as we would have if our clothing caught fire.

Telling artists to shut up about politics is telling them to stop being artists and start being propagandists for the empire. It’s telling them, “Don’t say anything unless you have absolutely nothing worthwhile to say. Your job isn’t to incite, your job is to distract and sedate. Your job isn’t to blow on the embers of human brilliance, your job is to play the fiddle while we smooth the pillow of a dying world.”

Fuck that. Make art. Be brilliant. Fight the empire. Free Palestine.

Metallica Singer ATTACKS Pro-Palestine Artists in PATHETIC Onstage Rant

Houthi missiles strike Yemen presidential palace, killing five

Yemen’s Houthis fired missiles at the presidential palace complex in the southern city of Aden on Thursday, killing five people, the government said, as the Saudi-led coalition listed dozens of Houthi attacks on Saudi infrastructure in ⁠recent weeks. The attack was the first on Aden’s Al-Maashiq palace ⁠in the current conflict between ​the Iran-aligned Houthis and Saudi Arabia. The palace is the seat of Yemen’s Saudi-backed and internationally recognised government.

Yemen’s prime minister, Shaya al-Zindani, ⁠and cabinet members were safe following the attack, Yemeni information minister Moammar al-Eryani said. Witnesses told Reuters they heard loud booms near the palace. Yemen’s cabinet said the attack involved missiles and drones. Yemen’s health minister, Qasim Buhaibeh, said five people were killed and 16 wounded in the attack, with casualties including guards and civilian employees.

Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said its fighters had bombed what he described as ​the Saudi military operations headquarters in Aden, as part of the group’s declared policy ‌of targeting “Saudi reinforcements wherever they were located”.

Agence France-Presse reported that a Yemeni government minister said on condition of anonymity that the palace attack had hit a command centre for the Saudi-led coalition. The official added that the command centre was hit by three missiles, and the headquarters of the coalition forces at the presidential complex with two missiles, adding that there were Yemeni and Saudi casualties, without providing a specific toll.

Alastair Crooke: BREAKING: Trump Eyes Iran's Pickaxe Mountain—"We'll Knock It Out Fast"

Pentagon Plans to Withhold Report on US Massacre of Iranian Kids Until After Midterms

The Pentagon is reportedly planning to withhold until after the midterm elections the completed findings of its investigation into a devastating US strike on an elementary school in southern Iran, which killed more than 150 people—including 120 children—on the first day of President Donald Trump’s illegal and deeply unpopular war.

Bloomberg reported on Thursday that “top Pentagon officials have expressed their intention to hold off on releasing an internal report into the attack” on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab until after next month’s midterms “at the earliest.” The internal assessment is believed to have been effectively complete for months, and preliminary findings reported in early March determined that American forces hit the school with a Tomahawk missile due to “outdated” targeting information.

According to Bloomberg, Pentagon investigators “discovered that flawed intelligence, outdated imagery, and an overreliance on AI contributed to the attack,” which is regarded as one of the US military’s worst atrocities against civilians in decades. Trump brushed off the massacre in remarks to reporters in June, saying: “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”

Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), said in a statement that “the refusal to come clean about the attack on Minab is not just a shameful exercise to dodge accountability for a horrific war crime; it is actively risking these errors being repeated again.”

“As the administration has dodged accountability on Minab and [a deadly strike on a sports hall hours later], it has engaged in further attacks that may be war crimes, including the bombing of a civilian home on Qeshm Island that killed a family and the bombing of a wedding party in Kuhestak that killed five, including two children,” said Costello. “Ensuring these tragedies don’t repeat starts with accountability on Minab.”

International policy analyst Brian Finucane wrote sardonically that the Pentagon doesn’t “want to remind voters before the midterms of the mass killing of schoolchildren on the first day of Trump’s glorious war.”

Bloomberg’s reporting came as CNN published a story detailing internal US “strike plans” that include possibly dropping the so-called “mother of all bombs” on Iranian energy infrastructure.

The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB) is the largest nonnuclear bomb in the US arsenal. In 2017, Trump became the first US president to deploy the weapon, authorizing the military to drop it on Afghanistan.

Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, warned that using the bomb against Iran would risk “triggering another major escalatory spiral, potentially including Iranian attacks on critical regional energy infrastructure, with consequences for global markets and the US economy.”

“This only reinforces the fundamental problem: Trump has no viable military solution to the Iran conflict,” Toossi wrote. “Is he looking for one spectacular strike to project strength and declare victory? Or is he prepared to plunge the US into an even deeper, potentially endless war that could devastate the rest of his presidency, legacy, and the economy?”

Costello of NIAC said that “the Trump administration’s threats to commit war crimes in Iran cannot be normalized.”

“President Trump acts on many of his threats, necessitating more urgent action to bring this illegal war of choice to a definitive end,” he added.

MBS TRAPPED: The War Saudi Arabia Can't Win w/ Shireen Al-Adeimi & Annelle Sheline

Israeli Strike Burns Gaza Mother Alive in Front of Toddler, ‘Without Generating Any Headlines’

A Palestinian toddler watched, screaming in horror, as her mother was burned alive in an Israeli airstrike on their Gaza City home early Wednesday that left the wounded girl orphaned—and received almost no coverage in US corporate media.

Reem Asaad Awad was killed when an Israeli helicopter attacked her family’s apartment in the Rimal neighborhood at approximately 3:48 am local time Wednesday, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights reported.

Trapped inside the burning apartment was Awad’s daughter, Maryam Ahmed Ghanem, whose age has been reported as between 2 and 4 years old. Prominent Palestinian author Mosab Abu Toha said family friends confirmed the child was born in February 2024.

Palestinian journalist Ali al-Jaafrawi witnessed and recorded the immediate aftermath of the strike.

“She was trapped amid the flames, crying, while the intense fire and thick smoke made it really difficult for us to get inside and rescue her.”

This Palestinian journalist pulled a young girl from a burning residential building after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike. https://t.co/i2htGbecc0

— AJ+ (@ajplus) October 15, 2026

“There are children are screaming alive inside,” al-Jaafrawi is heard saying as he approached the building.

“I went up to the apartment. There were flames everywhere,” al-Jaafrawi told Al Jazeera. “I went in despite the fire and smoke and heard a little girl screaming inside. I went in, found her, and rescued her immediately. I carried her and handed her to people so they could take her to hospital.”

“I went back to rescue others and to document what happened, but I suffocated and lost consciousness because of the thick smoke,” he added. “I saw a woman on fire inside the apartment.”

Photos and video recordings show Ghanem being treated for injuries, including burns, at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which is struggling to operate after much of the facility was destroyed or damaged by Israeli forces, who besieged and raided the complex multiple times since October 2023.

Abu Toha, who saw Ghanem in the hospital, said the child “kept repeating the same heartbreaking words: ‘I want my mum. My body hurts. There was a lot of fire.’”

Ghanem—whose father, Ahmad Ghanem, was reportedly killed by Israeli forces early in their genocidal assault—has joined the ranks of the more than 56,000 Gaza children who have lost at least one of their parents in the war, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“Reem and Ahmad had waited four years to conceive Maryam,” Abu Toha wrote. “Four years of waiting and hoping to bring a child into this world. Ahmad never lived to see his daughter’s face. Reem lived long enough to watch her little girl grow for two-and-a-half years before she was burned alive in front of her. Now Maryam is an orphan, fighting to survive her horrific burns.”

Ghanem’s grandfather told Middle East Eye that the child and her mother “did nothing wrong.”

“They were sleeping quietly at night,” he said. “There was no one in the apartment except the two of them.”

Israel said it is investigating the strike, which it claimed—without providing evidence—targeted a member of Hamas.

Dismissing a nominal yearlong ceasefire during which at least 1,500 Palestinians have been killed and over 5,000 others wounded by Israeli attacks, the grandfather said that “honestly, there is no security.”

“I fear for my family,” he added. “All people are afraid, not just me. There is still assassination, war, hunger, poverty, and destruction... Nothing has changed.”

The horrific footage of the strike’s fiery aftermath evoked imagery from earlier in Israel’s onslaught, including video of a 7-year-old girl trying to escape an inferno caused by bombing that killed dozens of Palestinians—among them her mother and siblings—and a teenager photographed burning alive after Israeli forces bombed a tent encampment.

Some observers noted the almost complete absence of US media reporting on the story, with the apparent exception of CBS News, which published video of the burning apartment in a Facebook Reel.

“This little girl watched her mother be burned alive in Gaza. If she was Israeli, this image would be front-page news. But Israel can kill Palestinians in the most horrific ways without generating any headlines,” US historian, author, and political analyst Assal Rad said on social media.

“Video has been circulating all day; you can hear the little girl cry and see her engulfed in smoke,” Rad said in a separate post. “I can’t find headlines in Western media *because* the story is horrific. They want you to forget.”

Over the past 24 hours, Israeli bombs burnt a mother in Gaza in front of her daughter, and settler terrorists set fire to a mosque in the WB.

Seen any of it on your evening news? Of course not.

Now imagine the coverage if Hamas had done this to a synagogue & an Israeli mother.

— Omar Baddar (@OmarBaddar) October 14, 2026

The Washington, DC-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement calling on members of Congress “to condemn Israel for burning a Palestinian mother alive while her daughter watched in Gaza.”

“The horrific video of a little girl surrounded by fire as her mother burns to death in their home exemplifies the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” CAIR said. “We cannot comprehend how any political leader with a conscience could continue to fund the sheer cruelty of the Israeli government and the war criminals who carry out its orders.”

“Members of Congress must condemn this atrocity and demand an immediate end to all US support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza,” the group added.

The US has provided Israel with tens of billions of dollars in armed aid, as well as diplomatic cover, including repeated vetoes of a series of United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions, throughout the three-year annihilation of Gaza, which has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead or wounded.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, weighed in on the attack on Bluesky.

“I have reached the limits of my ability to put words to pure evil,” he wrote. “Once again, Israel burned another family in Gaza alive. But the image of the... daughter in the family watching the rest of her family die in the flames will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

“But,” Parsi added, “will it haunt Israel?”

Scott Ritter: Iran STRIKES First? Israel Declares EMERGENCY, Trump's MOAB Bluff BLOWS UP

Palestine book by Alana Hadid and Jenan Matari pulled from Random House before release

A book on Palestine for young readers was pulled at Penguin Random House just before its scheduled release, following editorial disputes between the publisher and the book’s Palestinian American authors over their account of Palestinian history. In November 2024, Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House, signed the book deal with Alana Hadid, a philanthropist, activist and older sister of models Bella and Gigi, and Jenan Matari, an author and communications strategist. The book was promoted for release in September this year.

The authors, both influential social media commentators, drafted a manuscript about the history of Palestine, Israeli occupation, Palestinian resistance, and the diaspora, interwoven with references to their own families’ stories of displacement. But the writers withdrew their book after objecting to edits by Random House that they said sanitized and misrepresented their views, and which they said were introduced after they thought the book had been finalized. A Random House spokesperson said the process “followed our standard bookmaking procedures”, and that the publisher ultimately supported the authors’ decision to pull the book.

Displacement and the Palestinian American Story would have been the eighth installment in Random House’s Race to the Truth series, an ongoing collection of nonfiction books for youth ages 10 to 13. The books aimed to provide the “true story of American history”, written by members of marginalized groups telling the histories of their peoples. A co-creator of the project said she objected to the treatment of Displacement and would not be pursuing future installments in the series with the publisher.

“It became clear that Penguin was never actually going to allow us just to write the book we wanted to write,” said Hadid. “It says a lot that they’re willing to tank an entire very powerful series that helps children learn history, just because of one book about Palestine.” The authors now plan to release it through Interlink Books, a Palestinian-owned US publisher.

The dispute over the book comes amid disproportionate scrutiny and censorship of work by and on behalf of Palestinians. The conflict also laid bare the wide gap between narratives around 7 October, one that could not be bridged in a book to be distributed by a mainstream publisher. “I believe it was a revolutionary book, which is why it was under so much scrutiny,” Matari said. “They continued to try to sanitize our history because they didn’t want to make certain communities uncomfortable. But decolonial history is supposed to make you uncomfortable.”

American Wapo Journalist SEVERELY BEATEN By Israeli Settlers

Online ads weaponised to deliver ‘zero-click’ spyware, researchers say

An Israeli advertising agency has been serving millions of online adverts that allow “zero-click” spyware to be used against targets, researchers at a Canadian university have said. Citizen Lab, a digital investigations research unit at the University of Toronto, said it believed dozens of devices at the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera had been compromised by spyware delivered through ads run by Discover-Tech, which describes itself as a specialised digital advertising agency.

According to Citizen Lab, Discover-Tech operates a software platform called Controlium that allows its clients to “mass-profile and deanonymise” internet users then covertly hack targets with third-party spyware. Unlike infections that rely on people interacting with links or files, the spyware requires no interaction from the victim to be installed, making it a new delivery technique, Citizen Lab says.

The infections happen without a user’s knowledge, and in a matter of seconds, according to Citizen Lab. “[The online advertising] ecosystem is being weaponised at a massive scale to profile millions of users, then silently infect targets with zero-click mercenary spyware,” the report says.

According to the report, Controlium is able to harvest a user’s identity and IP address when the user is shown a seemingly benign custom-created ad – for example, for a digital game or a telecoms service. If the user has been selected as a target for hacking, a mercenary spyware firm can then send a malicious code containing spyware to their device, the researchers say. They say that millions of users worldwide have been served ads by Discover-Tech since 2024, including in Yemen, Brazil, Mexico and Czechia.

Related work by the research group Confiant also suggests that Discover-Tech’s ads have been shown to users of the networks of government entities in Europe and the US, as well as the UN, Nato, the international criminal court and the International Atomic Energy Agency. “It’s disastrous that major ad vendors and organisations apparently were neither able to detect nor prevent the company’s malicious advertising operations for years,” said Wolfie Christl, a researcher at Citizen Lab. “The way the online advertising ecosystem works today is a security threat for states, the private sector, civil society and everyone else alike.”

RUNNING OUT OF SHIPS As Iran Sinks Daily Vessels

This moron Streeting still thinks that the Ukronazis are going to be able to maintain defense-industrial production into the future. What a maroon!

Wes Streeting urges US to back Ukraine on Washington visit after Starlink row

Wes Streeting urged the US to stand by Ukraine on his visit to the American capital and sought to cool tensions between the two countries in the wake of the Starlink row that is threatening to set back Kyiv’s war effort.

The British defence secretary, giving a speech before a meeting with his US counterpart, Pete Hegseth, argued that supporting Ukraine was in the long-term interests of Washington, and a business opportunity. Taking questions after his address, Streeting acknowledged “the challenges of recent days”, a reference to the row over the sudden decision of the US government on Monday to limit the use of Starlink by Ukraine’s military.

He said it was “a reminder of two things – one is that American support in Ukraine has been significant and it has made, I think, a real impact in the Ukrainian war effort. And we and the Ukrainians would feel the absence of that.” The second was that there was “an enormous opportunity for the US in terms of the support for Ukraine”, a reference to the future “defence-industrial relationship” between the countries.

Streeting was speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US thinktank, before meeting Hegseth amid tensions over Ukraine, Iran and the Middle East.

Speaking to the BBC after the meeting, Streeting said he had been “reassured directly” by his US counterpart that access to the vital Starlink communications system had been restored. The defence secretary said it was not yet clear to the UK why the disruption occurred, but added: “This is not the first time we’ve seen a falling out between Washington and Kyiv.”

France cannot save itself

Key US voters say economy is getting worse ahead of midterms

With the midterm elections less than three weeks away, key voting groups including independents, rural voters and even some Republicans are increasingly disenchanted with Donald Trump’s economy, according to an exclusive Harris poll for the Guardian.

The majority of those surveyed were pessimistic about the economy, with three-quarters of Americans saying they are concerned about a recession while 61% wrongly believe that the US is already experiencing one. By its typical definition, the US is not currently experiencing a recession. The poll shows growing weariness across the political spectrum over high prices.

Republicans, fighting to keep control of Congress, are losing support with independent voters, who are expected to be the deciding factor in key swing races. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of independents said the economy was worse, up from 48% who said the same in September 2024 in the heat of the 2024 presidential election.

Even within the Republican ranks, optimism has waned. In February 2025, just a few weeks after Trump was inaugurated, 39% of Republicans said the economy was getting better. By February 2026, just before the US launched attacks against Iran, that optimism was up to 49%. In the latest poll, just 28% of Republicans said the economy was getting better.

Voters say the high prices they are seeing at gas stations and grocery stores will be a key factor when they cast their votes in November. Two-thirds of those polled said that gas prices and grocery prices are their most important issues heading into the election, followed by living expenses, healthcare costs and foreign affairs.

US justice department sues California over alleged noncitizen voting

The US Department of Justice sued California on Thursday, seeking a court order to prevent the state from tabulating certain ballots cast in the midterm elections.

The suit came two days after the department made a specious demand to the state. On Tuesday, the department sent election officials in Los Angeles county a thumb drive with a handwritten password purporting to contain the names of noncitizens registered to vote. The department asked officials to confirm the citizenship of anyone on the list and set aside ballots from those whose status could not be confirmed. It gave the state 48 hours – an extremely narrow window – to take action. It did not provide details on how it came up with the names on the list. In its lawsuit, filed in federal court in the central district of California, the justice department said it had provided the state with more than 20,000 names of likely noncitizens.

The Los Angeles county clerk and recorder, Dean Logan, said his office would not review the list, in part because it didn’t consider the USB drive secure. “The Department of Justice has not provided the underlying evidence, source, or methodology supporting its assertions that individuals identified in its records are ineligible to vote,” Logan said in a statement. “We cannot withhold or refuse to count ballots based solely on unverified allegations, nor can we disregard the legal requirements governing our election – and we certainly have no authority to act on records that are outside of our jurisdiction.”

Justice department lawyers are asking the court to order the state not to count votes from those it had flagged. “This Court should enjoin California from presently tabulating vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens in the upcoming federal election until the voter’s citizenship status can be determined,” the lawsuit said. “This Court should order California (1) to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from persons identified by the Federal Government likely to be noncitizens and (2) to independently – or in collaboration with the Federal Government – verify their citizenship status (beyond relying on unverified statements of citizenship necessary to registering) before tabulating their vote-by-mail ballot.”

The Trump administration’s methodology for identifying noncitizens has come under scrutiny. Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said there could be as many as 278,000 noncitizens on the rolls in four states, including more than 190,000 in California and about 16,000 in Nevada. Officials at the DHS refused to share their methodology with Nevada election officials and later turned over just 185 names of people it had a strong belief were noncitizens. When Nevada officials investigated, they found every one of those people was a citizen.

US lawmakers unveil bill to hold Wall Street’s ‘Epstein-connected’ bosses to account

US lawmakers have unveiled a new bill to hold Wall Street’s “Epstein-connected” bosses to account for helping finance the late sex offender’s crimes. It came as top Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren condemned the UK bank Barclays for “dodging responsibility” over its failure to vet former boss Jes Staley and his ties to the once well-connected billionaire.

A bipartisan group of politicians, led by Warren and House representative Robert Garcia, are introducing a bill on Thursday known as the Epstein Wall Street Records Act. The bill follows a months-long investigation into the financier, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on child sex-trafficking charges.

If passed, the bill would force regulators including the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate “Epstein connected” financial firms and executives for potential breaches of banking, investment or illicit funding laws; and fine or even ban wrongdoers from the US financial sector.

The bill – which is also being backed by House Republican Thomas Massie – will also force regulators to publicly disclose any records relating to Epstein and his associates; and refer any potential criminal violations to the US justice department.

Warren said: “Since the big banks won’t hold themselves accountable – and the Trump administration won’t either – Congress must act to force real transparency and accountability for them and their executives who enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.”

Trump cancels plan to livestream execution after global condemnation

Donald Trump has shelved a widely condemned plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.

In a social media post on Thursday, Trump argued that broadcasting such an execution “might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan” but said that “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device”.

“He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed,” Trump added. “That said, the execution may be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if they so choose.”

Hasan, who was left paralyzed from the waist down after being shot by law enforcement officers during the shooting at Fort Hood, now uses a wheelchair.

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Paxton v Talarico: tens of millions of dollars pour into closely watched Texas Senate race

Tens of millions of dollars are pouring into Texas as Democrats stage an audacious bid to win a US Senate seat in the Republican stronghold. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is among those wading into the closely watched race as November’s midterm elections approach. In September alone, Musk gave $158m to the Senate Leadership Fund, the primary super political action committee (Pac) backing Republican Senate candidates, Axios first reported. The donation accounted for more than half of the Senate Leadership Fund’s fundraising in the third quarter.

Separately, Musk donated $10m to Lone Star Liberty Pac, the committee dedicated to supporting Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate in Texas, after Alex Latcham, the president of the Senate Leadership Fund, requested the funding. The donations came as Republicans were struggling to keep up with spending by Paxton’s Democratic opponent, James Talarico. Over the summer, Talarico released an ad painting Paxton negatively as a politician with a history of corruption.

The Texas Senate race is one of the most competitive races in the country and was expected to cost millions of dollars because it’s an expensive state to run a campaign. The Senate Leadership Fund warned, months earlier, that supporting Paxton would cost anywhere from $150m to $200m. But Donald Trump chose Paxton himself to run against Talarico. When Musk’s team and the Senate Leadership Fund analyzed polling, they found Paxton’s chances of winning dwindling, leading Musk to step in, Axios reported.

In the 2025-2026 election cycle, Musk has donated approximately $366m to federal committees, the New York Times reported earlier this week. That is significantly more than he did during the 2024 election cycle, when he gave about $290m to help Trump.

MAGA Pollster SHOCKED By Florida Blue Shift

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The hidden costs of fracking: boom in Argentina linked to trail of sickness

In Allen, a small town in Argentine Patagonia, many people living on the same street ended up falling ill. For some, it was severe migraines, nausea or skin irritation. For others, cancers, congenital abnormalities, miscarriages or stillbirth seemed to affect foetuses or children. People say it all started 13 years ago – when a well was drilled near their homes to extract gas and oil. Calle Ciega 10 [Dead-end Street 10] lies on the eastern edge of Vaca Muerta, a vital area for Argentina’s economy, home to the world’s second-largest reserve of shale gas and fourth-largest reserve of shale oil. The region has more than 2,600 active wells, including one on this small street where about 20 families live, most of them seasonal workers on fruit farms.

“There have been cases of cancer, and several women had to move away because they could not carry their pregnancies to term. They kept losing their babies. Some were born with illnesses, or died shortly after birth,” says Roxana Valverde, who has lived in the area for nearly 30 years. “Before the well, we didn’t experience these illnesses, or if we did, they were much less common.” Valverde adds that, during medical appointments, doctors say the illnesses could be caused by pollution from fracking, while acknowledging that, without in-depth studies, it is hard to establish with 100% certainty.

Vaca Muerta covers more than 11,500 sq miles and spans four Argentine provinces. Since 2012, under the government led by Cristina Kirchner, the area has been extracting gas and oil using fracking, a technique that injects water, sand and chemicals at high pressure to fracture rock and release trapped hydrocarbons. Now, under Javier Milei, the Argentine government is heavily reliant on Vaca Muerta’s gas and oil resources to help the country recover from years of economic crisis, and has opened the door to foreign companies to extract and export hydrocarbons.

Calle Ciega 10 is in the countryside, and the families living there come from low-income backgrounds. The houses are small and dilapidated. Children play and ride bikes just a few metres from the well, while workers and a crane operate nearby. According to those who live in Calle Ciega 10, the well ceased operations in 2019, but work resumed in May this year. They have repeatedly tried to file complaints, but the courts have never heard their pleas. They suspect that several incidents at the well could have contaminated a pond from which they draw water for their daily needs.

Since fracking operations began, health concerns have spread beyond Calle Ciega 10. Lef and Jorge Nawel are members of the Zonal Xawvn Ko Mapuche confederation, an organisation that brings together 14 Indigenous communities from different parts of Vaca Muerta. The Mapuche people, the largest Indigenous group in Argentina, are frequently among those most affected in the region due to the widespread construction of wells on their ancestral lands. The Nawels say that the community has seen numerous cases of miscarriage and nervous and respiratory system disorders, particularly among children. In Añelo, a small town considered the operational core of Vaca Muerta, Lorena Bravo Maripe, the ancestral leader of the Añelo Lof Campo Maripe Mapuche community with 106 members, also reports numerous health issues in her group. That includes several cancer cases – such as her mother’s breast cancer and her own cervical cancer – as well as numerous respiratory and skin ailments.

US winter is likely to be wetter and warmer, forecasters say, with more snow in the south

Winter in the United States looks like it will generally be wetter and warmer, but not necessarily snowier, according to the federal government’s seasonal outlook and other meteorologists’ forecasts. You can thank or blame El Niño.

El Niño is likely to shift weather patterns to bring more moisture, but with it higher temperatures. That should help erase persistent western drought, but it is unlikely to make northern snow-lovers happy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said on Thursday.

El Niño, the natural but temporary warming in parts of the Pacific, generally heats the globe. Although it disrupts weather conditions around the world in dramatically different ways, its effects tend to follow predictable regional patterns, especially when El Niño is strong like it is right now. That gives forecasters greater confidence in what lies ahead.

All this is on top of a US winter that has warmed about 4F (2.2C) over the past 50 years, predominantly from the human-caused climate crisis, according to Noaa.

While the weather service doesn’t make seasonal snowfall predictions, its meteorologists said much of the northern parts of the country – including the north-east, the Great Lakes, the upper midwest and the northern Rockies – should expect below-normal snowfall. The southern Rockies, parts of the south-east and the south-west may get more than they usually do.

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Also of Interest

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

Jonathan Cook: What Right Has Israel to Exist?

US Considers Using ‘Mother of All Bombs’ Against Iran

West Asia War: Riyadh Ravaged, Battles in Yemen, Iranian Mines Sink Ship

Hezbollah Confirms Explosives Seized at Lebanon Checkpoint Belonged to Them, Demands Their Return

Meet the US generals and admirals advancing Israeli policy

How Gaza changed Europe, exposing cracks that grow bigger by the week

It’s Official: Israel Will Dump the U.S. and Become ZISIS

‘Weak’ Donald Trump (Again) Fails To Assert His Powers Over Ukraine

A Billionaire Has A Psychotic Religious Break With Reality

Nicolás Maduro tells New York court new torture allegations are ‘false’

Republican Susan Collins dismisses allegations of corruption as ‘completely false’

A perfect storm: how the super El Niño is devastating the fishing industry

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A Little Night Music

The Meters – Chicken Strut

The Meters – Hey Pocky A Way

The Meters - Fire On The Bayou

The Meters – Gettin' Funkier All The Time

The Meters – Hey, Last Minute

The Meters – Cabbage Alley

The Meters – Tippi-Toes

The Meters – Here Comes the Meter Man

The Meters – Come Together

Funky Meters – Keep on marching / Love slip up on ya

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