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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Smokey Wilson

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Los Angeles blues guitarist Smokey Wilson. Enjoy!

^{Smokey Wilson - Standing At The Crossroads}

"I think the International Criminal Court could be a threat to American security interests, because the prosecutor of the court has enormous discretion in going after war crimes."

-- John Bolton

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News and Opinion

It’s Not About “Blood Libel”, It’s About Narrative Control

Israel is now saying it will sue The New York Times as Zionists continue their days-long freakout over the outlet’s reporting on the systemic rape of Palestinian captives in Israeli prisons.

Israel apologists aren’t shrieking about the New York Times report because they believe Israel was lied about, they’re shrieking because they’d assumed it’s the Times’ job to administer propaganda for Israel. It’s not about “blood libel”, it’s about narrative control.

We know this is true because there’s not actually any new information in Nicholas Kristof’s report; every significant point in the article had already been reported by other less-influential media outlets and human rights groups. We didn’t see this kind of outcry with all the other mountains of reports on the sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners that have been coming out over the years. We only saw it when a more influential news media outlet reported on it.

This shows that their real objection isn’t so much about the actual contents of the article as it is about the information influencing a larger number of people than the earlier reports did. It’s not about the facts, it’s about the numbers. It’s about making sure the largest possible number of westerners think nice thoughts about the state of Israel.

Everyone you see blubbering about journalistic integrity and sloppy reporting today is just admitting that they’re a propagandist. They’re admitting that it is their job to manipulate the way the public thinks about Israel, and that they believe it should be every mainstream news outlet’s job too.

And what’s so funny about this hysterical meltdown is that the New York Times actually has been wildly biased in favor of Israel. Its slanted reporting, unequal word choices and passive-language headlines have been well-documented. All that’s changed is that Israel’s abuses became so obvious and undeniable that its editors could no longer justify spiking a well-sourced report about them.

Israel propagandists are used to the New York Times carrying water for their beloved apartheid state, so they view this as not just a propaganda concern, but as a betrayal as well.

I see that virtually everybody is still mostly wrong about why Israel is bringing up the made up allegations of mass rape on October 7, and, after 2.5 years, it's a little frustrating.

So listen carefully:

This is not historical revisionism.
This is not about the Gaza…

— Alon Mizrahi (@alon_mizrahi) May 13, 2026

The rest of the tweet:

This is not about the Gaza Holocaust.
This is not general obsessive victimhood.
This is not about malagining Palestinians/Arabs.
This is prefabricated justification for planned mass atrocities.
Israel is preparing mass murder on a huge new scale.

That's why Israel is talking about October 7 again

NY Times exposes Israel's r*pe dungeons, Netanyahu threatens to sue

Israel says it will sue New York Times over article on sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, have threatened to sue the New York Times for defamation over the publication of an essay by Nicholas Kristof detailing allegations that Palestinian women, men and children have been raped and sexually abused in Israeli military detention.

“Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times,” Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs wrote in a social media post on Thursday.

“They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel ​about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and ​Israel’s valiant soldiers,” Netanyahu added in a statement to Reuters. “We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law. Truth will prevail.”

“This threat, similar to one made last year, is part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a New York Times spokesperson, said in a Thursday statement. “Any such legal claim would be without merit. “Nick has covered sexual violence for decades, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s best on-the-ground journalists in documenting and bearing witness to sexual abuse experienced by women and men in war and conflict zones,” the statement continued.

Kristof’s interviews with 14 men and women “were corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in – that includes family members and lawyers”, said Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the Times, in a statement posted on Wednesday. “Details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys and in one case, with U.N. testimony. Independent experts were consulted on the assertions in the piece throughout reporting and fact-checking.” It is not clear in which jurisdiction Israeli officials would bring the lawsuit or whether defamation claims could even be filed by a government.

World's Hottest Country Begs Communists For Deal

WE DID IT FOR ISRAEL: Trump ADMITS Reason For Iran War

Xi warns Trump of ‘clashes and even conflicts’ with US over Taiwan

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has warned of “clashes and even conflicts” with the US over Taiwan after meeting Donald Trump in Beijing. Xi’s remarks, published by China’s foreign ministry after his two-hour meeting with Trump on Thursday morning, said Taiwan was “the most important issue in China-US relations”.

China is keen to put Taiwan at the top of an agenda that risks being overshadowed by the war in Iran and disagreements over trade. Beijing wants the US to reduce its levels of support for the self-governing island, which China claims as part of its territory. Xi has made “unification” with Taiwan a core priority for his legacy and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve that aim.

Trump later said Xi had pledged not to send weapons to Iran, despite recent reports that Chinese arms manufacturers had discussed deals to supply weapons to Tehran. “He said he’s not going to give military equipment, that’s a big statement,” Trump said, adding that Xi had said it “strongly”. “But at the same time, he said you know they buy a lot of their oil there and they’d like to keep doing that. He’d like to see Hormuz strait opened.”

China has considered sending shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles called Manpads to Iran via third countries in order to mask their origin, US intelligence officials have said. China has denied the reports. The Chinese government also said the two leaders discussed the Ukraine conflict and issues on the Korean peninsula. The White House’s readout of the meeting said the two sides also discussed market access for US firms in China, and fentanyl controls, but these two issues were absent from the Chinese readout. The White House said the two countries had “agreed that the strait of Hormuz must remain open to support the free flow of energy” and that Xi had indicated China could buy more oil from the US to lessen dependence on Iran.

Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, later said the US position on Taiwan was unchanged. He told NBC News: “They always raise it on their side. We always make clear our position, and we move on to the other topics.” Discussions are not expected to focus, as they have with previous US administrations, on human rights and US-China cooperation on tackling the climate crisis. The US and China together account for nearly half of global emissions. Maya Wang, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said: “President Trump has been pretty hostile to the concept [of human rights] … it would be hard to imagine in a Trump-Xi meeting that human rights would figure meaningfully if at all in their discussions.”

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : What the Chinese Think of Trump

Trump MELTS DOWN Over Ro Khanna Fox News Hits

Iran says ships entering strait of Hormuz must cooperate after vessel seized

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said ships entering the strait of Hormuz must cooperate with the Iranian navy as reports emerged of a ship being seized outside a United Arab Emirate port and taken towards Iranian waters. The UK Maritime Trading Organisation said the docked ship was seized by “unauthorised personnel” while it was anchored off the coast of the United Arab Emirates port of Fujairah near the southern entry to the strait of Hormuz.

Araghchi, who was in India for a meeting of the Brics group of nations, described Iran as invincible and said: “In our view, the strait of Hormuz is open to all commercial ships, but they must cooperate with our naval forces.” During the meeting, he also told the UAE delegate that cooperation with Israel would not protect the Gulf state. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said he made a secret trip to the UAE at the height of the war to meet the president, a claim that has been denied by the UAE.

Araghchi told the Brics meeting: “We have not created any obstacles, it is America that has created the blockade, and I hope this situation will end with the lifting of this illegal blockade imposed by America.” He added: “As nations and governments around the world are discovering today, regional instability is a lose-lose situation for all parties, including the aggressors themselves … It should be clear to everyone now that Iran is invincible and will emerge stronger and more united whenever it is put under pressure.”

Araghchi called on Brics nations to condemn what he described as violations of international law by the US and Israel. “What was once considered unthinkable and deeply shameful is now either ignored or openly accepted in western capitals: horrific genocides, shocking violations of state sovereignty, and outright piracy on the high seas,” he said. “These crimes, and the west’s silence in the face of them, are only possible when there is a sense of impunity. This false sense of superiority and immunity must be shattered by all of us.”

A communique in support of Iran is not expected from the Brics group, not least because of the presence of the UAE.

Larry Johnson & Col. Wilkerson: China JUST Said NO to Trump! Iran’s Hammer Falls on Strait of Hormuz

Israeli nationalists chant ‘death to Arabs’ in violent Jerusalem Day march

Israeli nationalists chanted “death to the Arabs”, “may your villages burn” and “Gaza is a graveyard” in a state-sponsored march through Jerusalem to mark the anniversary of the city’s capture and annexation. The annual assertion of Jewish control over Palestinian East Jerusalem has grown more extreme in recent years, and Thursday’s event culminated with the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, unfurling an Israeli flag in front of the al-Aqsa mosque, the holiest Islamic site in the city.

Most Palestinians in the Muslim quarter of the Old City had shuttered their shops and gone home before the march began, but members of far-right radical Jewish groups who had entered scuffled with Palestinian residents still there, with both sides throwing chairs at each other, until separated by police who entered the city that afternoon in force.

“I’ve come to show all the world that this is our city. This is the Holy Land. God gave us this country and this city,” a 19-year-old marcher, Ariel Amichai, said. Asked what the intended message of the march was to Palestinians in Jerusalem, he replied: “That they must leave. This is our country. And they can’t just be here and try to stab us or kill us.” Amichai, who is from Modi’in, 43km from Jerusalem, said he believed that Jerusalem Day, marking the capture of the east side of the city in 1967, was the only day when Jews could enter the Muslim quarter through the Damascus Gate, though Israeli Jews and Palestinians use the gate on a daily basis.

Marchers were bused in from around Israel and from settlements in the occupied West Bank in a vast operation funded by the Jerusalem municipality and government ministries. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, also took part in Thursday’s march.

Iran ATTACKS Ships in Hormuz, China's Surprise STUNS Trump | Greg Stoker & Elina Xenophontos

‘Have You Investigated Those Claims’ of Civilians Killed by US in Iran? CENTCOM Chief: ‘We Have Not’

While claiming that the subject of civilian casualties is his “passion” before US lawmakers during a US Senate hearing on Thursday, the head of US Central Command was asked directly if he and his team had investigated a litany of reports about civilians being killed or maimed by US bombs in Iran. His answer? No.

Commander Adm. Brad Cooper appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee for a hearing on US Central Command (CENTCOM) and US Africa Command (AFRICOM) concerning the Trump administration’s request for $1.5 trillion in military spending authorization for 2027.

During the questioning, Cooper refuted reports that US-Israeli airstrikes have hit 22 schools in Iran and raised eyebrows for his answers regarding cuts to Pentagon programs meant to mitigate harm to noncombatants.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)—who last month led the introduction of a defeated war powers resolution aimed at stopping President Donald Trump’s “reckless” attack on Iran—pressed Cooper about US conduct in the war. She cited New York Times reporting that 22 schools and 17 healthcare facilities have been destroyed or damaged since Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the illegal war of choice on February 28.

“We have regulations. We have the law of war. We have human rights obligations. We have our own targeting requirements to avoid civilian harm and death,” Gillibrand said. “Have you been implementing all the laws that are required under current law to minimize civilian death?”

Cooper replied: "We have executed every operation consistent with the law of armed conflict. The subject of civilian casualties is a particular passion of mine. We pay attention to it."

“We follow all the procedures and have gone above and beyond to, in my case, personally warn the Iranian people of several instances during conflict where they were being potentially used as human targets,” the admiral said.

Asked by Gillibrand “how did we then bomb 22 schools,” Cooper countered that “there is no indication that we have that has been corroborated.”

The Iranian Red Crescent Society claimed last month that at least 60 students and 10 staff members were killed in US-Israeli attacks on 32 universities and 857 schools.

Pressed by the senator on “how many schools” the US has bombed, Cooper retorted that “there is one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions” used to attack Iran.

The admiral was presumably referring to the February 28 cruise missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, which killed 156 students and staff and wounded 95 others. Trump and senior administration officials initially denied responsibility for the massacre, but physical evidence, journalistic investigations, and a preliminary Pentagon probe indicate US culpability.

A skeptical Gillibrand repeated her question about 22 schools “and multiple hospitals” being bombed.

“There’s no way that we can corroborate that,” Cooper replied. “No indication of that whatsoever.”

The senator asked for clarification: “There’s no way you can corroborate, or no indication of it? Which one?”

Cooper answered, “No indication.”

“Well, the indication is what’s publicly available,” Gillibrand fired back. “There is indication. Have you investigated those claims?”

The admiral replied, “We have not.”

Gillibrand continued: “Why have you not? If this is a passion of yours, if you believe that the civilian casualties are not consistent with the law of war and not consistent with human rights obligations... why have you not investigated those allegations when they’re publicly being made on the cover of The New York Times?”

The senator then asked how Cooper has “managed the 90% cut to the personnel who are supposed to avoid civilian targets,” a reference to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s gutting of the Biden-era Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP), which laid out a series of policy steps aimed at preventing and responding to the death and injury of noncombatants.

The plan, which was implemented after US forces killed an estimated 432,000 civilians since late 2001 during the so-called War on Terror, was skeptically welcomed for its commitment to reducing harm to noncombatants. However, Hegseth said at the outset of the Iran War that US forces would not be bound by “stupid rules of engagement” and would instead prioritize “lethality.”

The Pentagon eliminated the entire civilian harm office at Joint Special Operations Command, removed related specialists from target development teams, and slashed CENTCOM’s civilian harm mitigation team from 10 people to just one full-time staffer.

Cooper told Gillibrand that he would be “happy to provide any report” on the matter.

Iranian officials and human rights groups say more than 1,700 Iranian civilians have been killed by US and Israeli attacks since February 28. US and Israeli use of artificial intelligence systems to select bombing targets exponentially faster than any person has also raised concerns regarding a lack of meaningful human oversight. One former IDF officer said AI enabled a “mass assassination factory” in Gaza, where more than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.

The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said after the exchange with Gillibrand that “Cooper’s response is woefully insufficient, denying that more than one such bombing took place, despite widespread documentation of bombings destroying protected civilian sites.”

“More than 1,700 civilians, including hundreds of children, were killed in the bombardment of Iran,” NIAC added. “Dozens of schools and hospitals were damaged and destroyed by the dropping of massive bombs in urban areas. More pressure and oversight on these war crimes is urgently needed.”

Judge Blocks Trump Sanctions on Francesca Albanese

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., temporarily blocked Trump administration sanctions targeting United Nations Palestine expert Francesca Albanese, ruling that the punitive measures violated her First Amendment rights.

“Albanese has done nothing more than speak!” wrote U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, in his 26-page decision granting a preliminary injunction against the sanctions, which U.S, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last summer.

Rubio said the sanctions, which barred the U.N. expert from entering the U.S. and banking in the country, were justified because

“Albanese has directly engaged with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel, without the consent of those two countries.”

But Leon wrote in his ruling on Wednesday that “it is undisputed that her recommendations have no binding effect on the ICC’s actions — they are nothing more than her opinion.”

[The ruling holds until the outcome of the case, which will proceed to trial, Global Sanctions reports.]

The decision came in response to a lawsuit filed in February by Albanese’s husband and her daughter, who is a U.S. citizen.

They argued the U.S. sanctions against Albanese were “effectively debanking her and making it nearly impossible to meet the needs of her daily life.”

Albanese is an Italian national who currently lives with family in Tunisia. Leon wrote in his ruling that

“while the speech at issue occurred outside the United States, defendants have responded by taking action against Albanese’s extensive connections to the United States — including Albanese’s property within the United States and her ability to maintain professional and personal connections within the United States — because of her speech.”

“Accordingly, Albanese (or plaintiffs standing in her shoes) may claim the protection of the First Amendment to challenge defendants’ actions,” the judge continued.

Albanese, who has vocally condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the countries and private corporations that have been complicit, welcomed Leon’s ruling, writing in a social media post that “the interim decision by the U.S. judge gives me respite.”

“But the battle is not over,” she added. “ICC judges and Palestinian NGOs remain sanctioned with no recourse to justice. The stakes are incredibly high.”

Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the U.S.-based Center for International Policy, called Leon’s ruling “the right decision” and said Albanese “was wrongly sanctioned for constitutionally protected speech.”

“War criminals should be held accountable for their crimes,” Williams wrote on social media. “Making it a crime to say that is what is illegal. We must not sacrifice our rights or the rule of law for Israel.”

Post China Summit, will Trump escalate Iran war?

Cuba has run out of diesel and fuel oil, energy minister says, as US blockade pushes island to brink

Protests have erupted across Havana after Cuba’s energy minister revealed that the country had completely run out of diesel and fuel oil amid a US blockade that has strangled the island of fuel. Residents took to the city’s streets late on Wednesday shouting “turn on the lights”, banging pots and pans, and setting fire to piles of rubbish to express their misery in the face of blackouts which can last 22 hours or more.

Rodolfo Alonso, a resident of the Havana neighbourhood of Playa, told Reuters, “We started banging pots to see if they would give us just three hours of electricity. That’s all we want.” Cuba is enduring the worst rolling blackouts in decades due to the US blockade.

“We have absolutely no fuel [oil] and absolutely no diesel,” the energy minister, Vicente de la O Levy, said on state media, adding that the national grid was in a “critical” state, and admitting “we have no reserves”. By 4am, the lights were back on and the protests had dissipated, leaving only a haze of smoke from the fires. But on Thursday, the situation in the country more generally remained parlous, with much of Cuba’s eastern reaches still without power.

The national grid, De la O Levy said, was operating entirely on domestic crude oil, natural gas and renewable energy, after the fuel from a Russian tanker that arrived in April had run out. Cuba has installed 1,300 megawatts of solar power over the past two years, but much of that capacity is lost to grid instability amid the fuel shortages, reducing efficiency and output, he said. While panels may have been installed, Cuba is short of the batteries that allow it to keep supplying homes through the night.

He said Cuba continued negotiations to import fuel despite the blockade, but said rising global oil and transportation prices amid the US-Israeli war with Iran were further complicating that effort. “Cuba is open to anyone that wants to sell us fuel,” he said. Few are willing to take up that offer. Neither Mexico nor Venezuela, once top suppliers of oil to Cuba, has sent fuel to the island since the US president, Donald Trump’s January 2026 executive order threatening to slap tariffs on any country shipping fuel to the communist-run nation.

Supreme court allows abortion pill mifepristone to continue to be available by mail

The US supreme court upheld nationwide access to mail-order mifepristone, an abortion medication, in a shadow-docket decision on Thursday. Louisiana sued the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in October in a bid to curtail the regulatory agency’s rules on prescribing mifepristone remotely, arguing that it interfered with the state’s ban on abortion. The fifth circuit ruled in Louisiana’s favor on 1 May, effectively banning mail-order mifepristone for the entire country. Two mifepristone manufacturers, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, filed an emergency request with the supreme court, which granted a temporary stay until at least Thursday.

In a 7-2 decision with dissents from justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the court sided against the fifth circuit, ending the ban – for now. In his dissent, Thomas called the mailing of mifepristone to patients “criminal enterprise”. He also noted that the 1873 Comstock Act, which broadly banned people from using the mail to send anything “obscene, lewd or lascivious”, including “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion”, should apply to mifepristone.

“What is at stake is the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” wrote Alito in his dissent, referencing the 2022 decision that overturned Roe v Wade and eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion. The decision came nearly a half hour after the court missed its own 5pm EST deadline.

Louisiana has no standing to challenge mail-order abortion, the court found, sending the case back to the fifth circuit. The suit is expected to return to the court on an official appeal, instead of emergency requests from drug manufacturers, in another term. Medication accounts for approximately two-thirds of abortions in the US. In large part because of mailed medication, abortion rates have stayed steady in the US despite bans in several states.

Years of research have shown that abortion medications are safe and effective. The recent legal challenges, after the Dobbs decision that upended nationwide access to abortion, have been based on politics rather than evidence, experts say. In 2023, the FDA ended a requirement to prescribe mifepristone in person, opening up remote dispensation via telehealth.

US border patrol chief resigns abruptly amid string of exits by Trump immigration officials

Mike Banks, the border patrol chief who oversaw the most aggressive militarization of the US southern border in recent history, has resigned with immediate effect. “It’s just time,” Banks told Fox News in an interview. “I feel like I got the ship back on course from the least secure, most disastrous, most chaotic border to the most secure border this country has ever seen.”

Rodney Scott, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), commissioner, said: “We thank US Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks for his decades of service to this country and congratulate him on his second retirement after returning to serve during one of the most challenging periods for border security.

The resignation comes weeks after the Washington Examiner reported that six current and former border patrol employees had accused Banks of regularly paying for sex with prostitutes during trips to Colombia and Thailand over more than a decade, and bragging about it to colleagues.

The behavior was said to have been investigated twice by CBP officials, with one inquiry reportedly ending abruptly while the former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem was in office. CBP described the matter as “closed” last month, with a spokesperson telling the Examiner the allegations “date back more than a decade and were reviewed years ago”.

Watchdog groups urge Senate to investigate Samuel Alito over oil stock conflicts

The supreme court justice Samuel Alito, who owns stock in oil companies, may be violating court ethics codes by participating in certain cases that could benefit big oil, government watchdog groups say. In a Thursday letter, a coalition of watchdog organizations called on the Senate judiciary committee to investigate Alito, the sole supreme court justice with holdings in energy companies.

“His irregular recusal practice in oil and gas industry-related cases is undermining public confidence in the impartiality of the Court,” says the letter, signed by green groups including the League of Conservation Voters and the Center for Biological Diversity, as well as progressive accountability watchdogs the Revolving Door Project and True North Research.

The high court in February agreed to take up a case brought by the oil majors Suncor Energy and Exxon – the first time the court agreed to weigh in on such a challenge. The companies asked the justices to find that federal law prevents subnational governments from filing lawsuits against oil and gas companies for the climate-warming effects of their products. The court did not say which justices supported weighing in on the petition. Alito did not recuse himself, the letter notes.

“No judge on any court, including the high court, should be allowed to hear cases where he or she have a financial stake in those cases,” said Lisa Graves, a former senior justice department official who now directs True North Research. In 2023, Alito recused himself from considering a petition brought by the same companies in the same lawsuit. That request, which would have required approval from four judges, was denied.

The justice’s most recent financial disclosure, which was filed last August and covers 2024, showed holdings in individual stock worth between $60,007 and $245,000 in ConocoPhillips, Phillips66 and five other oil and energy companies. Alito also has up to $100,000 invested in a Vanguard fund in which Exxon is the third-largest holding, the letter says. The groups say Alito has another “apparent conflict of interest”: his relationship with the Republican billionaire donor Paul Singer. Singer founded and runs the hedge fund Elliott Investment Management, which owns more than 52m shares of Suncor, which are worth more than $2.3bn.

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US southern states rush to redraw electoral maps to dilute Black voting power

US southern states are rushing to redraw congressional maps to eliminate Democratic districts and dilute the influence of Black voters in electing candidates, a bare-knuckled blitz occurring even in some states where voting in congressional primaries has begun, and prompted by the US supreme court’s decision gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Tennessee Republicans have already enacted a new map, carving up the majority-Black city of Memphis into three different congressional districts to get rid of the state’s lone Democrat in Congress. Louisiana, the state at the center of the supreme court’s Voting Rights Act decision, is on the verge of implementing a new map that would eliminate the seat of one of the state’s two Black Democrats in Congress. Alabama has successfully petitioned the US supreme court to allow it to eliminate a district currently represented by a Black Democrat. Instead, it will use a map this cycle that a court previously ruled was intentionally drawn to discriminate against Black voters.

In South Carolina, the Republican governor is reportedly poised to call a special session to draw a new congressional map to eliminate the district currently held by Jim Clyburn, the powerful Black House Democrat. Republican lawmakers had previously rejected an effort to move forward with such a plan.

Georgia and Mississippi have opted against redrawing districts ahead of midterm elections this year, though they are likely to redraw ahead of the 2028 elections. States such as Texas, Missouri, Florida and North Carolina, which already redrew their maps to add Republican districts, could also draw maps again before 2028 elections. “This is a five-alarm fire for Black representation in the south,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The [supreme] court has signaled it’s going to be a redistricting wild west, and there will be no sheriff around.”

The Congressional Black caucus, which has an all-time high 58-members, is preparing for a potential decimation of its ranks. Democrats are reportedly mulling a counteroffensive for the 2028 elections in states where they control statehouses – New York, Illinois, Maryland, Colorado, Washington and Oregon – though they face more hurdles than Republicans do to overcome state-imposed restrictions on partisan gerrymandering.

Massie SMEARED With INSANE Allegations WEEK BEFORE Primary

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Salmon farm faces new cruelty claims as Trump seeks to supersize fish farming

The Trump administration is keen to do to fish what has been done to chickens – mass-produce them on an industrial scale to accelerate the US’s output of seafood. But this “chickenification” of fish may come at a hefty cost to the environment and to the fish themselves, as a new undercover video at one of the country’s leading fish farms has highlighted. A major seafood company is again under investigation over allegations of animal abuse after a second undercover video taken at a salmon breeding farm in Maine appeared to show cruel treatment of fish and environmentally harmful practices.

The covert video taken by the Animal Outlook activist group, which it sent to the Guardian, shows staff at the Cooke Aquaculture salmon hatchery in Bingham, Maine, clubbing fish with metal poles, aiming kicks at them as they writhe on the ground and in one instance cutting into a living fish. Deformities and fungal infections were also prevalent in the fish, according to Animal Outlook.

Employees told the undercover activist that they give the fish feed contaminated by rats, have mistakenly let penned fish escape into surrounding wild waterways and that they kill thousands of fish because they have produced too many of them. “Unfortunately I don’t think the company is in it for the fish health side, they just want fish production,” one worker states on the video. The video, shot between September and December last year by an activist who worked as a hatchery technician, is the second such undercover recording taken by Animal Outlook at the same facility. In 2019, a similar video shot undercover by the group showed deformed salmon thrown into plastic containers where they suffocated. “Granted, we did a lot of stuff we weren’t supposed to fucking do,” one employee said on the latest video about the previous exposé. The staff member recounts how he was shown on the first video throwing fish like basketballs while shouting “Kobe” and how he wanted to send a horse’s tongue to the “animal activist bitch” who went undercover at the facility.

The video shows mistreatment “about bad as it gets”, said Jareb Gleckel, director of legal advocacy at Animal Outlook. “The facility has no oversight,” he added. “Seven years after the first investigation, this is a systemic issue.” The state regulator, Maine’s department of agriculture, conservation and forestry, said it had opened an investigation and interviewed Animal Outlook, which has requested animal cruelty charges be laid against Cooke. The salmon raised at Cooke’s Bingham hatchery ultimately are turned into packaged salmon sold under the brand name True North, a product that carries certification from the third-party Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) program.

In the US, the Trump administration is aiming to supersize fish farming, pointing out that while demand for seafood has grown among Americans, 80% of what’s consumed in the country comes from other countries, primarily Canada, Chile, India and Indonesia. Last month, Trump’s US Department of Agriculture launched the first national office of seafood, with the aim of sweeping aside regulations to help allow a boom in aquaculture across a number of identified “opportunity areas” covering thousands of acres off the coasts of Alaska and California and in the Gulf of Mexico.

8 Million acres of hard red wheat will be abandoned in US due to ramification of the war against Iran.

This is the lowest wheat acreage since 1919.

Keep blockading the blockade! pic.twitter.com/ps5GU9GW0R

— Ehsan Safarnejad (@Safarnejad_IR) May 14, 2026

Brazil’s Atlantic forest records lowest deforestation in 40 years

Brazil’s Atlantic forest, the country’s most threatened biome, last year recorded its lowest level of deforestation since monitoring began 40 years ago, a new report shows. The forest is Brazil’s most populous biome, and home to 80% of the population and major cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In 2025 it recorded 8,658 hectares of deforestation, marking the first time it has fallen below 10,000 hectares since 1985.

Environmentalists have welcomed the results, which they say could even lead to “zero deforestation” in the Atlantic forest within just a few years, but warned of potential risks that could reverse the downward trend of recent years. One is the recent approval of the so-called “devastation bill” in Brazil’s congress that drastically weakens environmental law.

The other is the prospect of a far-right government, opposed to environmental protection policies, returning to power in the October presidential election: Flávio Bolsonaro, the senator and son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, is tied in the polls with the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who will seek re-election.

During the elder Bolsonaro’s 2019–23 administration, his policies led to a historic surge in deforestation and a gold rush into Indigenous lands. Many scientists, environmentalists and activists fear such rampant destruction could return if his son, who has vowed to follow his father’s playbook, comes to power.

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Also of Interest

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

When will the Iran war end? The US can’t even decide when it began

Iran War: Tanker War Lite as Trump Comes Even More Unglued and Real Economy Damage Becomes More Visible

The backlash to revelations of sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners aims to raise the cost of speaking out

When Killing Becomes Commonplace

We Analyzed Thousands of News Articles: Here’s the Proof of Pro-Israel Bias in Mainstream Media

War On Iran: – U.S. Experiencing Price Increases

Ukraine's conscription crisis is getting increasingly bloody

It Doesn’t Matter What Europe’s GDP Is

85-year-old French widow caught in Trump’s immigration crackdown describes her detention

War, inflation and Trump’s tariffs have shaken the US. Why does the stock market keep going up?

No, Richard Dawkins. AI is not conscious

RIP:

Clarence Carter, US soul star who had hits with Patches and more, dies aged 90

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A Little Night Music

Smokey Wilson - You Don't Love Me

Smokey Wilson - 44 Blues

Smokey Wilson - I'm No Fool, I Know The Rule

Smokey Wilson - LouDella

Smokey Wilson - Sun Is Shining

Smokey Wilson - Killin' Floor

Smokey Wilson - The Man From Mars

Smokey Wilson - Howlin' For My Darlin'

Smokey Wilson & William Clarke - Howlin' Wolf

Smokey Wilson, William Clarke and Hollywood Fats

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