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This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist Lonnie Brooks. Enjoy!

"I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational."

-- Charlie Kirk

News and Opinion

Thoughts On The Assassination Of Charlie Kirk

American rightists have been losing their fucking minds about the Charlie Kirk assassination, bawling their eyes out and babbling about “civil war” and how ready they are to use any amount of violence to crush the “radical left”.

The president himself suggested that Kirk was a victim of “radical left political violence” and said he’ll be taking action against groups and individuals who he views as responsible for it.

“My Administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said in a speech after the assassination, adding that “radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives” and complaining that “those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.”

Farming rage . Setting the scene for something terrible pic.twitter.com/9cn0dnfuGv

— Bassem Youssef (@Byoussef) September 11, 2025

All this despite the fact that as of this writing there is no evidence whatsoever that Kirk’s killing was motivated by left-wing ideology. The assassin appears to have been able to successfully escape after the killing, so nothing is known about what their motives were. Rightists are braying for civil war and demanding sweeping new authoritarian measures to crush what passes for the political “left” in the United States these days, based on nothing but vibes and feelings.

I myself have a hard time believing the narrative that Kirk’s assassin was a blue-haired they/them Antifa ninja who had developed the skills and training necessary to shoot a high-profile individual through the jugular at 200 yards and then execute an elaborate escape plan, and yet chose to use all those abilities to murder some divisive pundit instead of Trump or somebody with real power. That doesn’t make much sense to me.

It seems a lot more likely as of this writing that Kirk was assassinated by one of the usual types of sniper assassins — someone whose job is assassinating people, or some weird, fringey right winger (I’m seeing people online say that Kirk was despised by white supremacists). There are all kinds of motives someone can have for assassinating a prominent political operative, and not all of them are ideological or personal. As things stand right now there is no evidence for any of them.

I don’t have much else to say on the subject, other than to tie it back in to the genocide in Gaza. Charlie Kirk was an enthusiastic cheerleader and propagandist for the Gaza holocaust, and the right wingers who’ve been talking about how gruesome they find the video of his assassination are accidentally confessing that they haven’t been watching the footage that’s being produced by the mass atrocity they support. If they had, someone getting shot in the throat wouldn’t feel like such a big deal to them. I saw more shocking things today before my morning coffee.

The same day Charlie Kirk was killed, at least 72 Palestinians were killed in the genocide he supported. The Palestinians killed in Gaza on that day collectively mattered at least 72 times more than Charlie Kirk, but his death received many orders of magnitude more attention from the mainstream press and from western political discourse. Westerners do not regard Palestinians as fully human.

So on this particular day I would like to express my sincere condolences to the families of everyone in Gaza who’ve been massacred by bombs and bullets every single day for the last two years with the facilitation of the US government and cheered on by wealthy Republican pundits.

I don’t believe anything positive will be gained by Charlie Kirk’s death; he was a mediocre man who will be easily replaced by the next mediocre man in the right wing punditry pecking order. But he was also a piece of shit, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise just because he’s dead now.

Charlie Kirk Feared Criticizing Israel: Strange Details of Assasination

Senators say US is complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza

Two Democratic senators claim they have reached the “inescapable conclusion” that Israel is acting on a systematic plan to destroy and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza to force locals to leave, and they say the US is complicit.

Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both members of the Senate foreign relations committee, released their findings in a report on Thursday after returning from a congressional delegation to the Middle East where, they note, the destruction goes beyond bombs and bullets. They say they also found a systematic campaign to strangle humanitarian aid, which they call “using food as a weapon of war”.

“The Netanyahu government has gone far beyond targeting Hamas to imposing collective punishment on all the people of Gaza,” Van Hollen said at a Thursday press conference. “What they’re doing, and what we witnessed, is putting those goals into action.” ...

The senators, who visited Egypt, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jordan, argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a deliberate strategy to ethnically cleanse the local population rather than collateral damage from the war against Hamas. Their report is titled The Netanyahu Government Is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. America is Complicit. The World Must Stop It. During their visit to the Egyptian-Gaza border, they observed Rafah, the southern Gaza city – once home to 270,000 Palestinians – reduced to rubble. Van Hollen described how both lawmakers climbed an outside fire escape from the Egyptian side of the border to get a clear view of the destruction.

The lawmakers also met with former Israel Defense Forces soldiers who described participating in “systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure”. Their report noted first-hand accounts of “how this was a part of an intentional pattern of using explosives to blow up whole city blocks, houses, schools and other civilian sites”. ... Both senators accused the US government of enabling the described ethnic cleansing. “We, the United States, are complicit in all of this,” Van Hollen said. “Because we’re providing taxpayer dollar support to the Netanyahu government to use weapons in Gaza.”

‘No Safe Place Left’ as Israel Moves to Ethnically Cleanse Nearly 1 Million Gazans

Israel’s US-backed campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza City has left nearly 1 million people—half of them starved by design—with nowhere to seek refuge, United Nations agencies and other humanitarian groups warned Wednesday.

“We are witnessing a dangerous escalation in Gaza City, where Israeli forces have stepped up their operations and ordered everyone to move south. This comes two weeks after famine was confirmed in the city and surrounding areas,” said the UN Humanitarian Country Team (HCT), a strategic forum of UN agency heads and over 200 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

“While Israeli authorities have unilaterally declared an area in the south as ‘humanitarian,’ it has not taken effective steps to ensure the safety of those forced to move there and neither the size nor scale of services provided is fit to support those already there, let alone new arrivals,” HCT continued.

“Nearly 1 million people are now left with no safe or viable options—neither the north nor the south offers safety,” HCT added.

One elderly woman caring for an injured 8-year-old girl who is one of tens of thousands of children orphaned by Israeli attacks told Amnesty International Wednesday that “she’s all that I have left, and I have tried everything I can to protect her.”

“We have been displaced twice just in the last week,” the woman added. “We don’t have the means to go to the south, and we are tired of being forced to relive this ordeal all over again.”

An elderly disabled woman living in a makeshift refugee camp in southern Gaza City told Amnesty that “we were displaced from Sheikh Radwan three weeks ago; my son had to carry me on his shoulders because I have no wheelchair and no transportation could reach our area.”

“Now we are ordered to evacuate again. Where do we go?” she asked. “To secure transportation to the south, you have to pay close to 4,000 shekels ($1,200) and to buy a tent, you have to pay at least 3,000 shekels and we don’t know if we’ll find any land to pitch our tent on.”

“We had already spent all our savings to survive this war, looking for food and basics,” the woman added. “Every day is like the war is starting all over again, only far worse, but we are totally depleted, we have no will or strength to carry on.”

Photos showing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—including some with donkey-drawn carts—slowly streaming southward from Gaza City evoked images from the Nakba, when more than 750,000 Arabs were ethnically cleansed from Palestine by Zionist terror militias during the establishment of modern Israel.

More than 200,000 Palestinians displaced from Gaza City amid escalating Israeli air strikes and humanitarian crises in besieged areas — in pictures https://t.co/uH1p22Ln61 pic.twitter.com/PMcmVIBHs8

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 11, 2025

The World Health Organization (WHO), a UN body, warned Wednesday that “starvation and malnutrition in Gaza are at the highest levels ever since the conflict began almost two years ago,” and that “deliberate blocking and delay of large-scale food, health, and humanitarian aid has cost many lives.”

“After 22 months of relentless conflict, over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution, and death,” the agency added. “Another 1.07 million people (54%) are in ‘emergency’ (IPC Phase 4), and 396,000 people (20%) are in ‘crisis’ (IPC Phase 3).”

WHO also cited overall casualties in Gaza—now approaching at least 65,000 deaths, mostly women and children—and 164,000 injuries, according to the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM)—and noted that “as of September 5, 2025, there have been 2,339 reported fatalities among aid-seekers near militarized distribution sites and along convoy routes since May 27.”

Oxfam International—a coalition of over 20 independent NGOs focused on alleviating poverty—echoed the UN experts, asserting that “Israel’s intent to displace around 1 million civilians, half of whom are living in famine, is impossible and illegal.”

“Displacement orders, on leaflets thrown from the sky, or posted on social media, signal grave next steps, a scene all too familiar in Gaza where every order has preceded new waves of destruction and mass casualties,” Oxfam said. “This is the latest chapter in the genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza and part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing engulfing the entire Gaza Strip, where nothing and no one has been spared.”

Devoted to destroying Gaza, Israel attacks US ally Qatar and exposes Hamas ceasefire talks as yet another ruse.

The Israeli bombing of Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar came just two days after US president Donald Trump issued what he called his “last warning” to the Palestinian group. “The Israelis have accepted my Terms,” Trump wrote on social media. “It is time for Hamas to accept as well.” Trump’s terms, outlined in a 100-word document, demanded that Hamas release all remaining captives in exchange for a 60-day ceasefire, with no guarantee of a permanent end to Israel’s mass murder rampage in Gaza. During that pause, the US proposal stated, “President Trump will guarantee that the parties negotiate in good faith until an agreement is reached.”

Trump made a similar pledge to Hamas earlier this year when he convinced to free Israeli-American soldier Edan Alexander, only to continue supporting Israel’s bombardment and starvation siege upon his release. This new overture was also in bad faith. As Hamas officials gathered to discuss Trump’s ultimatum, 10 Israeli warplanes entered Qatari airspace and bombed them. Six people were reportedly killed; Hamas claims that its senior leadership survived.

As they did with Iran back in June, Trump and his ally Benjamin Netanyahu had used the cover of negotiations for an act of aggression that sabotaged a potential agreement. Prior to the attack, the Mossad even gave the Qataris assurances that “ we will not attack on your soil.” But that was part of the ruse. The US military base in Qatar – the largest in the Middle East – can easily detect incoming attacks, but did not activate its air defenses, a sign that the Trump administration was involved. If it weren’t obvious enough, the Jerusalem Post immediately reported, citing Israeli officials, that Washington “gave the green light for the operation,” as it has for every Israeli act of violence since Oct. 7th and countless before it.

Mehdi Hasan on Death of Two-State Solution

Qatar preparing regional response to Israeli attack on Doha: Prime minister

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said Wednesday that a collective regional response is being prepared to counter Israel’s attack on Doha, stressing that consultations are underway with Arab and Islamic partners.

“There is a response that will happen from the region. This response is currently under consultation and discussion with other partners in the region,” Al Thani told CNN.

“We are hoping for something meaningful that deters Israel from continuing this bullying,” he said.

Al Thani confirmed that Doha will host an Arab-Islamic summit in the coming days to decide on measures against the Israeli assault, which targeted senior leaders of the Palestinian group Hamas who were meeting to discuss a US ceasefire proposal.

Festival axes German orchestra over concerns about Israeli conductor

A Belgian classical music festival has axed a leading German orchestra from its programme over concerns about its Israeli conductor, drawing accusations of antisemitism from Berlin. Flanders Festival Ghent announced it had cancelled a concert by the Munich Philharmonic scheduled for 18 September, citing insufficient clarity over Lahav Shani’s attitude to the Israeli government.

Shani, who is the music director of the Israel Philharmonic, was expected to lead the concert even though he does not officially take up his role as chief conductor of the German orchestra until next year. The Ghent festival, an annual event drawing about 50,000 visitors to the capital of East Flanders, said in a statement on its website on Wednesday that it had made the decision to cancel the concert “on the basis of our deepest conviction that music should be a source of connection and reconciliation”.

“Lahav Shani has spoken out in favour of peace and reconciliation several times in the past, but in the light of his role as the chief conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, we are unable to provide sufficient clarity about his attitude to the genocidal regime,” the statement said, referring to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which says the Gaza war is one of self-defence.

The festival said the cancellation was in line with calls from elsewhere in the local cultural sector “to refrain from collaboration with partners who have not distanced themselves unequivocally from that regime [the Israeli government]”. ...

The row echoes the controversy of Shani’s predecessor at the orchestra, Russia’s Valery Gergiev. Gergiev was sacked in 2022 after he failed to speak out against the invasion of Ukraine or distance himself from his close friend and supporter, Vladimir Putin.

After ‘Years of Neglected Oversight,’ House Votes to Repeal Authorization Used by Presidents to Wage ‘Forever Wars’

Almost exactly 24 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to finally repeal a pair of more than two-decade-old congressional authorizations that have allowed presidents to carry out military attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere.

In a 261-167 vote, with 49 Republicans joining all Democrats, the House passed an amendment to the next military spending bill to rescind the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in the leadup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War and 2003 War in Iraq.

The decision is a small act of resistance in Congress after what the Quincy Institute’s Adam Weinstein described in Foreign Policy magazine as “years of neglected oversight” by Congress over the “steady expansion of presidential war-making authority.”

As Weinstein explains, these AUMFs, originally meant to give presidents narrow authority to target terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and use military force against Saddam Hussein, “have been stretched far beyond their original purposes” by presidents to justify the use of unilateral military force across the Middle East.

President George W. Bush used the 2002 authorization, which empowered him to use military force against Iraq, to launch a full invasion and military occupation of the country. Bush would stretch its purview throughout the remainder of his term to apply the AUMF to any threat that could be seen as stemming from Iraq.

After Congress refused to pass a new authorization for the fight against ISIS—an offshoot of al-Qaeda—President Barack Obama used the ones passed during the War on Terror to expand US military operations in Syria. They also served as the basis of his use of drone assassinations in the Middle East and North Africa throughout his term.

During his first term, President Donald Trump used those authorizations as the legal justification to intensify the drone war and to launch attacks against Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria. He then used it to carry out the reckless assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq.

And even while calling for the repeal of the initial 2001 and 2002 authorizations, former President Joe Biden used them to continue many of the operations started by Trump.

“These AUMFs,” Weinstein said, “have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action.”

The amendment to repeal the authorizations was introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).

Meeks described the authorizations as “long obsolete,” saying they “risk abuse by administrations of either party.”

Roy described the repeal of the amendment as something “strongly opposed by the, I’ll call it, defense hawk community.” But, he said, “the AUMF was passed in ‘02 to deal with Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and that guy’s been dead... and we’re now still running under an ‘02 AUMF. That’s insane. We should repeal that.”

“For decades, presidents abused these AUMFs to send Americans to fight in forever wars in the Middle East,” said Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) shortly before voting for the amendment. “Congress must take back its war powers authority and vote to repeal these AUMFs.”

Although this House vote theoretically curbs Trump’s war-making authority, it comes attached to a bill that authorizes $893 billion worth of new war spending, which 17 Democrats joined all but four Republicans Republicans in supporting Wednesday.

The vote will also have no bearing on the question of President Donald Trump’s increasing use of military force without Congressional approval to launch unilateral strikes—including last week’s bombing of a vessel that the administration has claimed, without clear evidence, was trafficking drugs from Venezuela and strikes conducted in June against Iran, without citing any congressional authorization.

Alexander McCoy, a Marine veteran and public policy advocate at Public Citizen, said, “the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs” are “good to remove,” but pointed out that it’s “mostly the 2001 AUMF that is exploited for forever wars.”

“Not to mention, McCoy added, “we have reached a point where AUMFs almost seem irrelevant, because Congress has shown no willingness whatsoever to punish the president for just launching military actions without one, against Iran, and now apparently against Venezuela.”

In the wake of Trump’s strikes against Iran, Democrats introduced resolutions in the House and Senate aimed at requiring him to obtain Congressional approval, though Republicans and some Democratic war hawks ultimately stymied them.

However, Dylan Williams, the vice president of the Center for International Policy, argued that the repeal of the AUMF was nevertheless “a major development in the effort to finally rein in decades of unchecked use of military force by presidents of both parties.”

The vote, Williams said, required lawmakers “to show where they stand on restraining US military adventurism.”

Korean Deportations, Doha Strike: Will the Gulf States Finally Stand Up to Israel and the U.S.?

Bolsonaro sentenced to 27 years for plotting military coup in Brazil

​Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro ​has been sentenced to more than 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup​ and seeking to “annihilate” the South American country’s democracy. Justices Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha and Cristiano Zanin ruled on ​Thursday that Bolsonaro – a former paratrooper who was elected president in 2018 – was guilty of seeking to forcibly cling to power after losing the 2022 election, meaning four of the five judges involved in the trial had found Brazil’s former leader guilty.

Announcing Bolsonaro’s sentence for crimes including coup d’etat and violently attempting to abolish Brazil’s democracy on Thursday night, the supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes said: “[He tried to] annihilate the essential pillars of the democratic rule-of-law state … ​the greatest consequence ​[of which] … would have been the return of dictatorship to Brazil​.”

Delivering her decisive vote, Rocha denounced what she called an attempt to “sow the malignant seed of anti-democracy” in Brazil – but celebrated how the country’s institutions had survived and were fighting back. “Brazilian democracy was not shaken,” Rocha told a court in the capital, Brasília, warning of the spread of “the virus of authoritarianism”. ...

A fourth judge, Luiz Fux, voted to absolve Bolsonaro on Wednesday, claiming there was “absolutely no proof” the former president had been aware or part of an alleged plot to assassinate Lula and Moraes in late 2022, or had tried to stage a coup. Fux called the 8 January 2023 uprising – when hardcore Bolsonaristas ransacked the supreme court, presidential palace and congress – a “barbaric act” that had caused “damage of an Amazonian-scale”. But the judge, who also controversially argued that the court lacked jurisdiction over the case, claimed there was no proof Bolsonaro was to blame for inciting the riots.

Fux did, however, vote to convict two of Bolsonaro’s closest allies – his former defence minister, Gen Walter Braga Netto, and his former aide-de-camp, Lt Col Mauro Cid – for the crime of violently attempting to abolish Brazilian democracy. The judge concluded that the pair had helped plan and bankroll a plot to murder Moraes in order to generate social mayhem they hoped would trigger a military intervention.

Venezuela says none of 11 killed in US boat strike were Tren de Aragua members

None of the 11 people killed in a US military strike on a boat in the Caribbean last week were members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s interior minister has said, as the South American country deployed troops amid heightened tensions with the US.

The administration of Donald Trump has said the boat was transporting illegal narcotics, but has provided scant further information about the incident, even amid demands from members of the US Congress for a justification for the action.

“They openly confessed to killing 11 people,” the interior minister and ruling party head, Diosdado Cabello, said on state television. “We have done our investigations here in our country and there are the families of the disappeared people who want their relatives, and when we asked in the towns, none were from Tren de Aragua, none were drug traffickers.

“A murder has been committed against a group of citizens using lethal force,” added Cabello, questioning how the US could determine whether drugs were on the boat and why the people were not instead arrested. The Venezuelan government said after the incident that a video post by Trump of the strike was artificial intelligence.

Senator Says New Details of Venezuela Bombing Reveal ‘Trump’s Growing Lawlessness’

As new details emerged about the boat that the Trump administration bombed last week off the Venezuelan coast, legal experts and lawmakers said Wednesday that the White House’s case for carrying out the unprecedented military strike against suspected drug smugglers had grown even weaker—with new evidence showing the vessel had turned away from the US, back toward Venezuela, just before it was bombed.

Legal analysts have said in the days since the attack that killed 11 people that the bombing amounted to an extrajudicial murder, dismissing President Donald Trump’s claim that the White House has “tapes of [the victims] speaking” that proved they were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—the only “evidence” that’s been made public.

Even if the 11 people killed were members of the gang—which Trump has classified as a terrorist organization despite US intelligence agencies’ finding that Tren de Aragua is a relatively low-level gang without connections to Venezuelan government—the administration used military force to stop a suspected criminal enterprise, instead of following law enforcement procedures, experts have said.

In a video posted on social media Wednesday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said it was highly unlikely that the boat was carrying fentanyl, which killed an estimated 48,422 people in the US in 2024 and which is primary trafficked through Central America and Mexico—not Venezuela.

“His stated reason for taking the strikes to try to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, makes no sense as the centerpiece of a counternarcotics strategy,” said Murphy. “At the very same time that Trump is ordering these strikes on the boat in Venezuela, he’s cutting, gutting the programs that we use to interrupt the drug trade coming through Central America and Mexico. We have dramatically fewer resources to stop fentanyl coming to the United States while we’re taking airstrikes on a boat off the Venezeuelan coast.”

News just broke that the Venezuelan boat that Trump struck was not, in fact, headed to the U.S. with drugs.

But this story is disturbing for other reasons, and you need to know why. It's another sign of Trump's growing lawlessness. And it's bad counter-narcotics strategy. pic.twitter.com/ZwHmbzhvx5

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) September 10, 2025

The strike, said Murphy, particularly in light of the new information disclosed by US officials, is “another sign of Trump’s growing lawlessness.”

With US officials disclosing Wednesday that the boat had not been headed toward the US when it was bombed, a former military attorney told The New York Times that the new information further undermined Trump’s claim that he ordered the strike to stop a threat to US national security.

“If someone is retreating, where’s the ‘imminent threat’ then?” Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, a retired judge advocate general for the Navy, told the Times. “Where’s the ‘self-defense’? They are gone if they ever existed—which I don’t think they did.”

The people aboard the vessel had turned back after spotting US planes that had been surveilling them “for a significant period of time,” The Intercept reported. Three sources including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has expressed outrage over the strike, said the boat was attacked by at least one drone, and The Intercept reported that the victims survived an initial attack before being killed in the second one.

The strikes were conducted after the boat turned back toward the Venezuelan shore.

Officials told the Times that a 29-second video Trump released that was purported to show several clips of a speedboat racing toward the US before an explosion, left out key details of the event.

“It does not show the boat turning after the people aboard were apparently spooked by an aircraft above them, nor does it show the military making repeated strikes on the vessel even after disabling it,” the Times reported.

A high-ranking Pentagon official told The Intercept that even if the White House’s claim that the boat’s passengers were trafficking drugs is true, the strike was a “criminal attack on civilians.”

“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”

US officials have yet to share information confirming where the vessel was headed; before the administration began claiming it was headed to US shores and driven by “evil narco-terrorists trying to poison our homeland,” as one White House spokesperson said, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters the boat was likely headed to another country in the Caribbean.

US inflation rises in August as firms pass Trump tariffs cost on to consumers

Inflation rose slightly in August as companies continued to push the cost of tariffs on to consumers. The newest update to the consumer price index (CPI), which measures a basket of goods and services, showed that prices increased 2.9% over the last year – the highest since January. Core CPI, which excludes energy and food costs, stayed stable at 3.1% after going up in July.

Despite this slight uptick in inflation, Wall Street remains optimistic that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates at the central bank’s board meeting next week. The Fed is under intense pressure from Donald Trump to cut rates, but the decision looks likely to be led by fears that the US jobs market is weakening.

Investors are anticipating a quarter-point rate cut. Rates currently stand at a range of 4.25% to 5.5%.

Keir Starmer sacks Peter Mandelson over Jeffrey Epstein ties

Keir Starmer has sacked Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US over his association with Jeffrey Epstein. The Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty told MPs that Lord Mandelson had not disclosed the extent and depth of his friendship with Epstein, a convicted child sex offender, when he was appointed as the ambassador. He said No 10 had not known about emails from Mandelson to Epstein suggesting his 2008 conviction for soliciting a child for prostitution was wrongful and should be challenged.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “In light of the additional information in emails written by Peter Mandelson, the prime minister has asked the foreign secretary to withdraw him as ambassador. “The emails show that the depth and extent of Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is materially different from that known at the time of his appointment. In particular, Peter Mandelson’s suggestion that Jeffrey Epstein’s first conviction was wrongful and should be challenged is new information.

“In light of that, and mindful of the victims of Epstein’s crimes, he has been withdrawn as ambassador with immediate effect.”

Before Mandelson’s departure was announced, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, told an event that he was “completely disgusted” by messages Mandelson sent to Epstein and that his future was “a decision for the prime minister”.

Government sources said Starmer took the decision during a meeting with Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, on Thursday morning, after reviewing the new material on Mandelson’s defence of Epstein the previous night. It is understood Mandelson himself had not, until the leak, had access to the emails written in 2008 because they came from a long-deleted account.

Spanish schools to teach pupils how to cope with climate crisis disasters

Spanish children will be taught how to respond to floods, wildfires, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in a drive to help prepare them for the growing impact of the climate emergency. The plan was unveiled on Thursday after a summer of forest fires killed four people and less than a year after catastrophic floods claimed more than 220 lives in eastern parts of the country.

The aim, according to the education ministry, is to provide schools with a package that imparts “the necessary knowledge, skills, attitudes and values needed to deal with emergency situations in a safe and effective way”. As well as natural hazards and disasters, it will cover chemical, industrial and nuclear accidents and those related to the transport of dangerous materials. ...

Speaking at the scheme’s launch at a school in the east-central city of Cuenca, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said the aim was to prepare children and young people to respond as well as possible to situations “that are clearly being made worse by the climate emergency”.

Fiji ant study provides new evidence of insects’ decline on remote islands

Island-dwelling insects have not been spared the ravages of humanity that have pushed so many of their invertebrate kin into freefall around the world, new research on Fijian ant populations has found.

Hundreds of thousands of insect species have been lost over the past 150 years and it is believed the world is now losing between 1% and 2.5% a year of its remaining insect biomass – a decline so steep that many entomologists say we are living through an “insect apocalypse”. Yet long-term data for individual insect populations is sparse and patchy.

A new study in the journal Science sheds light on what is happening to insects in some of the world’s most distant places. “There is global concern about the ‘insect apocalypse’, but a lot of uncertainty and debate about what is actually happening,” said Evan Economo, an entomologist at Japan’s Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and co-author of the research. “We have a new kind of evidence of something we long suspected: that insect species endemic to remote islands are in decline.”

Economo and his colleagues analysed genomes of ant populations from the Fijian archipelago gathered in recent decades and held in museum collections. From thousands of specimens, they used scientific methods to infer whether ant populations were growing or shrinking based on variations in DNA sequences among individuals.

They found that 79% of Fiji’s endemic ant species were in decline, with impacts beginning at the time of humans’ arrival on the islands about 3,000 years ago and speeding up in the past 300 years – coinciding with European contact, global trade and the arrival of modern agriculture.

Also of Interest

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

Should You Kill or Mourn Nazis and Commies? (Charlie Kirk Edition)

When You Try To Remove A Piece Of Art And Accidentally Make It Better

The Chris Hedges Report: The Death of Holocaust Studies

Archaeologists scramble to evacuate Gaza artefacts threatened by Israeli strike

Craig Murray: Palestine Action & the Scottish Claim of Right

By bombing Doha, Israel once again undermined America's credibility and standing

After crafting quiet Florida life, Shah of Iran’s alleged ‘chief torturer’ must now face trial

Trump blamed ‘radical left’ for Charlie Kirk’s death – even as shooter’s identity remains unknown

‘It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet’: striped bass in a Canadian river are gobbling up all the salmon. Is a mass cull the answer?

Rep. Ro Khanna: “There’s Going To Be Consequences for Israel” | Useful Idiots

A Little Night Music

The Lonnie Brooks Blues Band – Don't Answer The Door

Lonnie Brooks – Wrong Number

The Lonnie Brooks Blues Band – Move Over, Little Dog

Lonnie Brooks – Crash Head On Into Love

Lonnie Brooks – Brand New Mojo Hand

Lonnie Brooks – Hard Gamblin' Woman

Lonnie Brooks – Wound Up Tight

Lonnie Brooks & Hubert Sumlin ~ Two Guitars Shuffle

Lonnie Brooks ~ Who's Making Love

Lonnie Brooks w/Johnny Winter - Lucky Last Night