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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Lovie Lee

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues piano player Lovie Lee. Enjoy!

^{Lovie Lee - Sweet Little Angel}

"The mass media are giving so much more attention to this past weekend’s anti-Trump protests than they ever gave the anti-genocide protests because that is their job. It’s their job to amplify opposition between the two mainstream parties while marginalizing those who oppose the crimes of both."

-- Caitlin Johnstone

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News and Opinion

Hamas Succeeded In Exposing The True Face Of The Empire

One thing October 7 did accomplish was getting Israel and its allies to show the world their true face. Getting them to stand before all of humanity to say, “If you resist us, we’ll kill your babies. We’ll deliberately shoot your kids in the head. We’ll massacre medical workers. We’ll systematically destroy all your hospitals. We’ll rape you and torture you as a matter of policy. We’ll lay siege to the entire civilian population. We’ll make your entire land uninhabitable and then we’ll kick you all out and take it for ourselves. We’ll assassinate all your journalists and block foreign journalists from entry so that nobody can see what we’re doing to you. We’ll lie about all of these things the entire time, and you’ll know we’re lying, and we’ll know you know we’re lying, and you’ll know we know you know we’re lying. And we’ll get away with it anyway, because we hold all the cards.”

Sometimes I’ll run into people who say “What did Hamas expect to happen? They had to know Israel would do this!” They say this in an effort to lay the blame for Israel’s genocidal atrocities at the feet of Hamas, as though Israel is some kind of wild animal who can’t be held accountable for its actions if someone gets too close to its mouth.

But of course Hamas knew Israel and its allies would react this way. Of course they did. They knew they were dealing with a murderous and tyrannical civilization who is capable of limitless evil and doesn’t see Palestinians as human beings. They knew it because they’d lived under it all their lives. That is the problem they were trying to address with their actions on October 7.

Palestine has single handedly unmasked the world

— Rahma (@Rahmazeinegypt) April 6, 2025

You can disagree with the decisions Hamas made on that day. You can say they should have used other means to pursue justice. You can denounce them, hate them, do the whole public ritual necessary for mainstream acceptance in western society. But one thing you can’t do is deny that Israel and its allies have been revealing their true face to the world every day since, at levels they previously were not.

It’s all fully visible now. It’s all right there on the surface. We can try to continue pretending we live in a free society that believes in truth and justice and regards all people as equal, but we’ll all know it’s a lie. What we are, first and foremost, is a civilization that will actively support history’s first live-streamed genocide. That’s the single most relevant fact about the western world at this point in history. It’s staring us right in the face every day.

October 7 certainly didn’t make life any easier for the Palestinians, but one thing it did do was take away our ability to hide from ourselves. Hamas reached thousands of miles around the world and permanently destroyed our ability to avoid the truth about the kind of dystopia we are really living in. Our rulers may succeed in eliminating the Palestinians as a people, but one thing they will never be able to do is put those blinders back on our eyes.

What has been seen cannot be unseen.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : War and Tariffs

Israel military razed Gaza perimeter land to create ‘kill zone’

Israel’s military razed huge swathes of land inside the perimeter of Gaza and ordered troops to turn the area into a “kill zone” where anybody who entered was a target, according to testimony by soldiers who carried out the plan. Israeli combatants said they were ordered to destroy homes, factories and farmland roughly 1km (0.6 miles) inside the perimeter of Gaza to make a “buffer zone”, with one describing the area as looking like Hiroshima.

The testimonies are some of the first accounts by Israeli soldiers to be published since the latest war started in October 2023 after Hamas’s attack on Israel. They were collected by Breaking the Silence, a group founded in 2004 by Israeli veterans who aim to expose the reality of the military’s grip over Palestinians. The Guardian interviewed four of the soldiers who corroborated the accounts.

Titled “The Perimeter” and published on Monday, the report said the stated purpose of the plan was to create a thick strip of land that provided a clear line of sight for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to identify and kill militants. “This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished,” it said.

Soldiers were “given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighbourhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions”, the report added. The ultimate result, however, was the creation of “a death zone of enormous proportions”, the report said. “Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety.” It stretches along the frontier with Israel, from the Mediterranean coast in the north to the strip’s south-east corner next to Egypt. ...

One of the soldiers who provided testimony to Breaking the Silence on condition of anonymity said their unit was told to shoot anyone in the perimeter area on sight. The mentality in their unit, they said, was that there was no such thing as a “civilian” and everyone who walked into the perimeter would be considered a “terrorist”. Rules on who can be killed on sight appeared to vary for different units, according to the accounts.

AMB. Charles Freeman : Donald and Bibi Need a War

Gaza paramedics shot in upper body ‘with intent to kill’, Red Crescent says

Autopsies conducted on 15 Palestinian paramedics and civil emergency responders who were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza show they were shot in the upper body with “intent to kill”, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, which is demanding an international investigation into the attack. The killings took place in the southern Gaza Strip on 23 March, days into a renewed Israeli offensive in the Hamas-ruled territory, and sparked international condemnation.

The results of the postmortems join a growing body of evidence that sharply contradicts Israel’s account of the incident, including video footage that shows the vehicles were travelling with headlights and flashing red lights that identified them, with personnel wearing hi-vis vests, at the time they were fired on.

Germany, one of Israel’s closest backers in the EU, called for an urgent investigation into the incident on Monday. “There are very significant questions about the actions of the Israeli army now,” the foreign ministry spokesperson Christian Wagner said after the video footage emerged. “An investigation and accountability of the perpetrators are urgently needed,” he said, adding that a full investigation of the incident would be “a question that ultimately affects the credibility of the Israeli constitutional state”. ...

The president of the Red Crescent in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Younis al-Khatib, told journalists in Ramallah: “There has been an autopsy of the martyrs from the Red Crescent and civil defence teams. We cannot disclose everything we know, but I will say that all the martyrs were shot in the upper part of their bodies, with the intent to kill.” He called for an international investigation into the killings, which the IDF has separately announced it was looking into.

“Why did you hide the bodies?” Khatib asked of the Israeli forces involved in the attack. “We call on the world to form an independent and impartial international commission of inquiry into the circumstances of the deliberate killing of the ambulance crews in the Gaza Strip. It is no longer sufficient to speak of respecting the international law and Geneva convention. It is now required from the international community and the UN security council to implement the necessary punishment against all who are responsible.”

Israeli strike on hospital camp used by Gaza journalists kills 10 people

An Israeli airstrike on a tent camp within a hospital complex in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis has killed 10 people, including a journalist, while seriously injuring dozens more after their encampment caught fire.

Images and video from the courtyard of Nasser hospital in Khan Younis showed people desperately attempting to extinguish the fires as it burned through a row of tents. One video showed people screaming as a bystander attempted to move a burning piece of furniture, while a journalist, later identified as Ahmed Mansour of the news outlet Palestine Today, sat upright engulfed by the blaze.

His colleague Helmi al-Faqawi was killed in the strike, while at least nine other journalists were among the wounded. Mansour received treatment for severe burns while the photographer Hassan Aslih was reportedly in a stable condition after suffering a head injury and cuts to his right hand.

The Palestinian foreign ministry in Ramallah said 10 people had been killed in the airstrike, with many more wounded. The ministry called al-Faqawi’s death an act of “extrajudicial killing,” labelling it part of growing crimes against journalists and an attempt to prevent the media from covering events on the ground.

Dozens of journalists in Gaza joined al-Faqawi’s relatives to bury the slain reporter in the hours after the attack, placing a blue flak jacket on top of the white shroud covering his body on a stretcher. His killing has brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed since October 2023 to 207, according to the Palestinian foreign ministry in the occupied West Bank.

Trump PULLS CHAIR For Bibi, Backs Troops In Gaza

Netanyahu discusses Gaza and tariffs with Trump at White House meeting

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, met with Donald Trump on Monday for the second time since the US president’s return to office, marking the first effort by a foreign leader to negotiate a deal after Trump announced sweeping tariffs last week. ... Trump said the pair had a “great discussion” but did not indicate whether he would reduce the tariffs on Israeli goods. “Maybe not,” he said. “Don’t forget we help Israel a lot. We give Israel $4bn a year. That’s a lot.” ...

Trump also announced that the US and Iran were beginning talks on Tehran’s nuclear program. “We’re having direct talks with Iran, and they’ve started. It’ll go on Saturday. We have a very big meeting, and we’ll see what can happen,” he told reporters. He warned Tehran would be “in great danger” if the talks collapse. Netanyahu expressed a cautious support for US-Iran talks but insisted Tehran must not have nuclear weapons. ...

The comments came in the Oval Office after Trump and Netanyahu held private talks. The White House canceled a joint press conference that was scheduled to take place afterward, without offering an immediate explanation. Netanyahu, announcing the last-minute meeting on Sunday, said he was visiting at the invitation of Trump to speak about efforts to release Israeli hostages from Gaza, as well as new US tariffs. ...

Netanyahu’s visit to the US comes as he faces pressure at home to return to ceasefire negotiations and secure the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza. ...

Netanyahu also claimed that Israel is committed to “enabling the people of Gaza to freely make a choice to go wherever they want”. Last week, he said Israel was “seizing territory” and intended to “divide up” the Gaza Strip by building a new security corridor, inflaming fears that Israel intends to take permanent control of the strip when the war ends.

Ten Britons accused of committing war crimes while fighting for Israel in Gaza

A war crimes complaint against 10 Britons who served with the Israeli military in Gaza is to be submitted to the Met police by one of the UK’s leading human rights lawyers. Michael Mansfield KC is one of a group of lawyers who will on Monday hand in a 240-page dossier to Scotland Yard’s war crimes unit alleging targeted killing of civilians and aid workers, including by sniper fire, and indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, including hospitals.

The report, which has been prepared by a team of UK lawyers and researchers in The Hague, also accuses suspects of coordinated attacks on protected sites including historic monuments and religious sites, and forced transfer and displacement of civilians. ...

Israel has persistently denied that its political leaders or military have committed war crimes during its assault on Gaza, in which it has killed more than 50,000 people, most of them civilians. ...

Mansfield, who is known for his work on landmark cases such as the Grenfell Tower fire, Stephen Lawrence and the Birmingham Six, said: “​If one of our nationals is committing ​an offence, we ought to be doing something about it​. Even if we can’t stop the government of foreign countries behaving badly, we can at least stop our nationals from behaving badly. “British nationals are under a legal obligation not to collude with crimes committed in Palestine. No one is above the law.”

The report, which has been submitted on behalf of the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the British-based Public Interest Law Centre (PILC), covers alleged offences committed in the territory from October 2023 to May 2024 and took six months to compile. Each of the crimes attributed to the 10 suspects, some of whom are dual nationals, amounts to a war crime or crime against humanity, according to the report. ...

Sean Summerfield, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, who helped compile the dossier, said it was based on open-source evidence and witness testimony, which together presented a “compelling” case.

Trump and Netanyahu Reaffirm Their Vision for the Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza

President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met at the White House on Monday and reaffirmed their desire for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, both claiming that there are other countries willing to take in the Palestinian population.

Trump also said it would be a “good thing” for the US to take over and control Gaza. “Well, you know how I feel about the Gaza Strip. I think it’s an incredible piece of important real estate,” he told reporters at the Oval Office. “I think it’s something we would be involved in, you know, having a peace force like the United States there, controlling and owning the Gaza Strip, would be a good thing.”

The president said that if the Palestinians are “moved around to different countries,” it would create a “freedom zone” in Gaza. “You call it the freedom zone, a free zone, a zone where people aren’t going to be killed every day,” he said.

Aaron Maté : How Bad Are Govt Threats to Speech?

US student journalists go dark fearing Trump crusade against pro-Palestinian speech

Fearing legal repercussions, online harassment and professional consequences, student journalists are retracting their names from published articles amid intensifying repression by the Trump administration targeting students perceived to be associated with the pro-Palestinian movement. ...

At Columbia University, Adam Kinder, the editor of the Columbia Political Review, said his publication has been asked to take down nearly a dozen articles and halt the publication process of over a dozen more in response to mounting pressure in recent weeks. His team has complied with those requests. “For students who disagree with the Trump administration’s stance, they fear real retaliation,” Kinder said.

At Stanford University, the Stanford Daily has also seen a surge in takedown requests in recent weeks, according to its editor, Greta Reich. “One came in, then two, then five, then 10 – it just really started piling up very quickly,” she said. The requests, she said, ranged from sources seeking anonymity to opinion writers wanting their names removed, and even demands to blur out identifying images. One former staff editor, an international student, quit entirely, according to Reich. “They didn’t want to be associated with any publication or article that could get them in trouble,” she said.

Kinder, too, has had three staff writers resign and four more go on hiatus of fear that their association with certain articles could jeopardize their safety or future career prospects. The growing risk has prompted a coalition of national student journalism organizations to issue an alert on Friday calling on student papers to reconsider longstanding editorial norms around unpublishing stories and anonymization. “What we are suggesting today stands in opposition to how many of us as journalism educators have taught and advised our students over the years,” the alert reads. “These are not easy editorial decisions, but these are not normal times.” ...

At the University of Virginia, the Cavalier Daily has historically refused takedown requests, but its editor, Naima Sawaya, acknowledged that the current climate was different. “One of our staffers, an immigrant, had to resign from our editorial board after we published pieces about Trump’s policies on universities, specifically regarding immigrants and pro-Palestine activism,” she said. The student, she said, was advised by the university’s international studies office that being publicly linked to these articles could pose risks to their visa status.

China-US Economic War Beijing Defiant; Kiev Troops Lose Retreat All Fronts, US Pulls Out Of Key Base

Markets REBOUND As Wall St BETS On Trump BLUFF

Rightwing group backed by Koch and Leo sues to stop Trump tariffs

A libertarian group that has been funded by Leonard Leo and Charles Koch has mounted a legal challenge against Donald Trump’s tariff regime, in a sign of spreading rightwing opposition to a policy that has sent international markets plummeting. The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a suit against Trump’s imposition of import tariffs on exports from China, arguing that doing so under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) – which the president has invoked to justify the duties on nearly all countries – is unlawful. ...

The alliance has tabled its action on behalf of Simplified, a Florida-based home goods company whose business is heavily reliant on imports from China. It argues that the president has exceeded his powers in invoking the IEEPA to justify tariffs.

“This statute authorizes specific emergency actions like imposing sanctions or freezing assets to protect the United States from foreign threats,” the alliance said in a statement. “It does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. In its nearly 50-year history, no other president – including President Trump in his first term – has ever tried to use the IEEPA to impose tariffs.”

The alliance also argues that power to impose tariffs lies not with a sitting president, but with Congress, and warns that those imposed by Trump could run afoul of US supreme court rulings. “His attempt to use the IEEPA this way not only violates the law as written, but it also invites application of the supreme court’s major questions doctrine, which tells courts not to discern policies of ‘vast economic and political significance’ in a law without explicit congressional authorization,” its statement said. ...

The suit argues that there is no connection between the fentanyl epidemic – which Trump has cited as a reason for invoking the emergency powers – and the tariffs. “The means of an across-the-board tariff does not fit the end of stopping an influx of opioids, and is in no sense ‘necessary’ to that stated purpose,” the complaint filed on behalf of Simplified argues. “In fact, President Trump’s own statements reveal the real reason for the China tariff, which is to reduce American trade deficits while raising federal revenue.”

“Americans Will Work Fixing Factory Robots!” – Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick

The "haves" are worried ...

Trump tariffs risk higher prices and make US recession more likely, says JP Morgan boss

The JP Morgan chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has warned that it may be “hard to reverse” the effect of Donald Trump’s tariffs, which he said would drive prices higher and make a US recession more likely. The boss of the US bank said in his annual letter to investors that while there were some “legitimate reasons” for the number of new taxes applied to goods imported into the US, there could be some serious consequences if the tariffs were maintained for too long. ...

Global stock markets suffered their third straight day of declines on Monday in reaction to Trump’s sweeping tariffs, which have prompted fears of a global trade war and a slowdown in economic growth – particularly in the US.

Dimon also said that the tariffs risked dismantling US economic alliances across the globe. “I am hoping that after negotiations, the long-term effect will have some positive benefits for the US. My most serious concern is how this will affect America’s long-term economic alliances,” Dimon said. Dimon stopped short of naming individual countries, but warned that this kind of “fragmentation” could play straight into the hands of the US’s geopolitical rivals.

The Left's 180 on Tariffs?

Alarm as Republicans in Congress back Trump and Musk’s attacks on US judges

As Donald Trump and Elon Musk widen their radical attacks on US judges who have stalled some of Trump’s executive orders and Musk’s slashing of federal agencies, they’re gaining backing from top House Republicans and other politicians, including some to whom the tech billionaire made big campaign donations.

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, and judiciary panel chairman Jim Jordan have echoed some of Trump’s attacks on judges, and a judiciary subcommittee hearing on 1 April explored “judicial overreach” and ways to curb judges who have stymied some Trump orders or Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and its draconian cuts to the federal government.

Veteran Republican consultants say the hefty campaign-spending muscle of Musk, the world’s richest person, who spent about $300m helping Trump win last year, is likely to boost many Republican candidates in 2026 races, increasing pressures on members from Trump and Musk to accelerate efforts to rein in dissident judges. “Republicans on Capitol Hill expect Musk to make a lot of donations to them in 2026,” said longtime Republican consultant Charlie Black. “But it’s likely that such donations will be coordinated with the president’s preferences.” ...

Musk has repeatedly used X, the social media platform he owns and on which he has over 200 million followers, to urge impeaching judges whose rulings he doesn’t like. “The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” he said on 25 February. Legal scholars say Trump and Musk’s radical threats of impeachment or disbarment for judicial rulings that stall or block administration moves undermine the rule of law.

“Trump and Musk are playing with fire,” said retired Massachusetts judge Nancy Gertner, who is now a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “They’re undermining bedrock constitutional principles.” She added: “You can’t shut down a court just because you disagree. The judges have done nothing wrong or inconsistent with their oaths, and nothing outside their judicial roles.”

US supreme court allows deportations under 18th century law with limits

Donald Trump may continue using a 1798 law to deport alleged gang members to Venezuela, the supreme court ruled on Monday, however it will apply certain limits. Any challenges to the wartime law, called the Alien Enemies Act, must take place in Texas, where the migrants were held, and not in Washington DC, the court said. In a 5-4 ruling, the court granted the Trump administration’s request to lift a Washington DC-based judge’s order temporarily blocking the deportations.

However, the court did not immediately address whether the administration improperly utilized the act, writing in its order instead that such a determination must be made in Texas court: “The detainees are confined in Texas, so venue is improper in the District of Columbia.” Despite siding with the administration, the court’s majority placed limits on how deportations may occur, emphasizing that judicial review is required.

Detainees “must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs,” the majority wrote. ...

In a concurrence, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the “only question” the court had considered is where judicial review of the Act should occur: “As the court stresses, the court’s disagreement with the dissenters is not over whether the detainees receive judicial review of their transfers — all nine members of the court agree that judicial review is available.”

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Poor countries say rich world betraying them over climate pledges on shipping

Poor countries have accused the rich world of “backsliding” and betrayal of their climate commitments, as they desperately tried to keep alive a long-awaited deal to cut carbon from shipping. Nations from 175 countries have gathered in London this week at the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) to hammer out the final details of a deal, more than a decade in the making, that could finally deliver a plan to decarbonise shipping over the next 25 years.

If the most ambitious proposals are realised, the agreement would also require all ships to pay a small charge based on the greenhouse gases they emit, with the proceeds going to fund climate action in poor countries. This levy is seen as a crucial source of funding for poor countries, which are seeing increasing economic devastation from extreme weather. But powerful economies, including China, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, oppose the levy, while others, including the EU, may agree to drastically water it down.

The IMO talks formally open on Monday, and are scheduled to end on Friday. They are the culmination of a series of attempts to rein in carbon from shipping, which have been going on for more than a decade. Shipping accounts for more than 2% of global emissions – roughly the same share as Japan, and set to grow further without urgent action.

Poor countries fear the negotiations are already falling apart, and that they will be the losers. Ambassador Albon Ishoda from the Marshall Islands, speaking for an alliance of Pacific and Caribbean small island states, said rich nations and large developing countries were “backsliding” on previous promises.

Gopher tortoises find new home on Florida coast after astonishing journey to flee hurricane

Dozens of gopher tortoises survived a perilous sea crossing after being swept from their homes during Hurricane Helene last summer, and are enjoying a new lease of life on a remote stretch of Florida coastline. Rangers at Fort de Soto county park near St Petersburg say that before the September storm only eight of the vulnerable species were known to be living there.

Now, after their astonishing journey, a count last month confirmed 84 active burrows, suggesting the tortoises quickly adapted to their new habitat after their enforced eviction from Egmont Key national wildlife refuge, a tiny island more than two miles west that was pummeled by the category 4 hurricane.

As well as sparking a surge of interest in the park in the form of visitors keen to catch a glimpse of the unexpected new arrivals, the tortoises are also providing benefits for some of the animals that already lived in the 1,100-acre (445-hectare) environment. “They’re a keystone species, which means they share their burrows with other species, and there’s been something like 250 different species recorded as living in gopher tortoise burrows,” said Anna Yu, a Fort De Soto ranger who has assumed responsibility for the roving reptiles’ wellbeing.

“Everybody in the ecosystem benefits from gopher tortoises being there, and we’ll hopefully see an increase in biodiversity in the park. Because we have all these new burrows, other animals are able to use them, like eastern diamondback snakes, black racers, all kinds of different reptiles".

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Also of Interest

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

Trump says US ‘having direct talks’ with Iran over nuclear deal

Taxpayers Submit UN Report Charging US Officials With Genocide in Gaza

Israel’s Innocent Oopsie-Poopsie Medical Massacre Mistake

Turkey Reinforces Syrian Air Base After Recent Israeli Attack

How Israel Misled UK During Falklands War

Hegseth Says Pentagon Will Get Its First $1 Trillion Budget

Trade War Just Crashed Crude. Demand Might Be Next

Trump To Eliminate Capital Gains

Philistines, Philistines Everywhere

Harriet Tubman webpage targeted amid Trump-led anti-DEI efforts

"What About the Capitalists?": Autoworkers in U.S., Mexico Call for Solidarity, Not Divisive Tariffs

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A Little Night Music

Lovie Lee & Carey Bell – Naptown

Lovie Lee - Flip, Flop, And Fly

Lovie Lee - Woke Up This Morning

Lovie Lee - Tell Me That You Love Me

Lovie Lee - Lovie's Boogie

Lovie Lee - The Mule

Lovie Lee - Please Give Me A Match (Old Tobacco)

Lovie Lee - Tricky Woman

Lovie Lee - She's Gone

Lovie Lee & Carey Bell – Sweet Little Girl

Lovie Lee - Iko Iko

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