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"What is really amazing, and frustrating, is mankind's habit of refusing to see the obvious and inevitable until it is there, and then muttering about unforeseen catastrophes."

-- Isaac Asimov

News and Opinion

No One Gives A Fuck About October 7

No one gives a fuck about October 7.

No one cares. They used to, but then Israel spent three years showing the world why October 7 happened in the first place. After witnessing the cruelty and savagery of the state of Israel, people get it now. Everyone understands.

After Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on the morning of October 7, there was an outpouring of love and sympathy for Israel from around the entire world. Every major landmark from the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House to the Empire State Building were illuminated blue and white in solidarity with the Israeli people. Grown men wept. Bono permanently ruined “Pride (In The Name of Love)” by changing the lyrics to “Early morning, October 7, as the sun is rising in the desert sky, Stars of David, they took your life, but they could not take your priiiiide.”

Anyone who hadn’t been following the Israel-Palestine issue very closely was on Israel’s side that day. And then the bombs started dropping.

And dropping.

And dropping.

And dropping.

And as the bombs dropped, Israel’s approval rating dropped with them.

There are only so many children you can see shredded to bits by Israeli military explosives before you start suspecting that there’s something terribly wrong with the Zionist project.

There are only so many pictures and videos you can see posted by IDF troops dressed in the underwear of dead and displaced Palestinian women before you start wondering if there’s something terribly wrong with the culture of the Israeli military.

There are only so many Israeli polls you can see published showing overwhelming support for the Gaza onslaught before you start believing there is something terribly wrong with Israeli society itself.

There are only so many mainstream humanitarian institutions who can determine that Israel is guilty of genocide before you start recognizing exactly what it is that you are looking at.

There are only so many bombed-out hospitals, so many miles of completely flattened neighborhoods, so many grizzly accounts of Palestinian prisoners being brutally raped and tortured by Israeli soldiers you can see before all the excuses, justifications and spin stop working on you.

And once the hasbara stops working, it’s just you and the unadorned reality of the situation, staring each other right in the eyes.

The propagandists and spinmeisters have been falling all over themselves trying to frame the world’s plummeting support for Israel as an epidemic of “antisemitism”, but that’s not working anymore either. Everyone knows it’s a lie. Nobody’s buying it. It just feels like they’re insulting your intelligence.

The Gaza holocaust was the single worst thing I have ever seen in my entire life. Day after day, month after month, year after bloody year staring right down the barrel of that waking nightmare changed me forever, and there is nothing in me that will ever forget the horrors I witnessed. And the world is full of people who had the exact same experience I had.

Support for Israel is never coming back. When the lights flicker on and you see that the room you’ve been standing in is full of scorpions, you’re not going to forget what you saw when the lights go out again.

All of the events which occurred after October 7 showed the world what life was like for Palestinians before October 7. Israel threw a stone into the air and spent three years crying after the stone came down on its head.

The hasbarists have been flailing all over the place trying to erase everything that happened before October 7 and to justify everything that has happened since, but their words are just words now. They have no power anymore. And now it’s just a matter of time before the world turns against Israel to right the wrongs of the past and set everything back the way it ought to be. From the river to the sea.

COL. Douglas Macgregor : How Do Washington’s Proxy Wars End?

Trump suggests Iran could ‘take out’ Los Angeles or San Diego

Leaders in California have denounced Donald Trump as “reckless” and “deranged” after the US president suggested Iran could “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego – two liberal cities in the blue state that has been a frequent target of his administration. At a rally in ruby red Nebraska on Monday night, Trump told supporters that he hoped to see a “tremendous victory” in the fast-approaching November midterm elections. He then suggested high prices due to the war with Iran were a “small price to pay for keeping the world safe – keeping our country safe”.

“They can take out a city,” Trump said in Grand Island. “Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” The crowd applauded. “It’ll be over very soon,” Trump said of the war.

The governor and the cities’ mayors quickly condemned the comments. “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego,” the California governor, Gavin Newsom, said on X. “He is deranged and dangerous.”

Let’s be clear: The President is advocating for an attack on 10+ million U.S. residents in two of America’s largest cities.

This is not normal. None of this is.

And we will continue to remind folks of that every day.

— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) October 6, 2026

Todd Gloria, the mayor of San Diego, said his city was “not collateral damage” in the president’s war. “We are not expendable. And we are never a “small price to pay,” he wrote on X “Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

The White House on Tuesday sought to downplay the remark, calling the backlash a “media freakout” and “not rooted in reality”.

Nearly 100 US Aircraft DESTROYED By Iran

Israeli Politician With Clear Path To Knesset Says It’s ‘Moral’ To Kill Babies in Gaza

Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin, the leader of Israel’s Zehut party, who has a clear path to a seat in the Knesset in the upcoming election, has said in a new interview that it would be “moral” to kill babies in Gaza.

Feiglin made headlines last year when he declared that every child and every baby in Gaza is the “enemy,” a viewpoint he doubled down on in an English-language interview that was published by The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Elsewhere in the interview, Feiglin said it was “100%” a Jewish point of view to “wipe out” Gaza, expel all the Palestinians, and annex Gaza and the West Bank. He labeled all of Gaza as the “enemy,” not just Hamas.

LEAKED CIA Assessment: Israel On Brink Of CIVIL WAR

Former UN food agency official claims he was fired for highlighting hunger in Gaza

A former senior UN food agency official has alleged he was fired last week for his work highlighting hunger in Gaza, and has launched an appeal against his dismissal. Benjamin Davis said the leadership of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had refused to renew his contract as director of its rural transformation and gender equality division because his team had published a brief on hunger in Gaza and held a seminar on the subject last year, and because he had taken part in weekly “moment of silence” vigils on FAO grounds for those killed.

The seminar on hunger in Gaza last September triggered a complaint from the Israeli mission to the FAO, which also sent a diplomat to take pictures of staff taking part a moment of silence gathering last October, according to a FAO staff report filed at the time. Davis, 62 and a Spanish-American dual citizen, left the FAO last week after 26 years of service. Video of the event shows FAO staff standing and applauding him as he left the Rome headquarters for the last time. “It’s a nice feeling that I’m not alone, that other people are behind me in this,” Davis said. “I was stopped constantly in the hallways by people, even those that I didn’t know, just to shake my hand or just to thank me or just to say that they supported me or that they were upset.”

The FAO did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment on Monday, but the organisation’s director general, Qu Dongyu, appeared to refer to Davis’s dismissal in public remarks last Tuesday, in which he threatened to fire more people for what he deemed to be political activism. “We are not going to allow you to play the game here of human rights,” said Qu, a veteran Chinese agronomist. “Of course human rights are very important, but they have a human rights agency in Geneva. If you want to take care [of human rights], go there.”

Davis said he and fellow FAO staff members had been stunned by Qu’s remarks. “Even more than the threat about firing people was just what he said about human rights. I think that really shocked people because it undermined the foundations of why we’re here basically, or why FAO is part of the United Nations and why the United Nations exists,” he said.

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Israeli settlers beat press photographer as soldiers watch in West Bank

Armed Israeli settlers beat a photographer in the presence of Israeli soldiers, hospitalising him, as he covered worsening settler violence against olive farmers in the occupied West Bank. Jaafar Ashtiyeh, a 58-year-old veteran photographer for Agence France-Presse in Palestine, was assaulted by a group of settlers, who beat him with the butts of their rifles, despite him being marked as press. He was assaulted in view of about a dozen armed Israeli soldiers.

Ashtiyeh suffered bruises to his head and torso and was taken to hospital, according to witnesses, his family and fellow journalists. His assault came amid a worsening wave of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. Every year, settlers attack Palestinian farmers trying to harvest their olives – an economic lifeline for the beleaguered Palestinian economy – with few legal consequences. This harvest season has been particularly violent as the Israeli elections approach at the end of the month.

Ashtiyeh and another AFP photographer, John Wessels, were near the northern village of Aqraba when they noticed an Israeli soldier detaining a man as local Palestinians picked olives. A quad bike suddenly raced towards the AFP journalists on top of a hill and a man on it opened live fire, with one Palestinian dropping to the ground. He was also hospitalised, with a gunshot to the foot, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

At least six other people then rushed towards the AFP journalists firing guns. As Ashtiyeh attempted to enter a car, which was clearly marked “Press”, two men jumped on him and beat him repeatedly with the butts of their rifles. A group of at least a dozen Israeli soldiers were about 500 metres away at the time of the attack, according to Wessels. “I could hear his screams,” said Wessels, who was also threatened at gunpoint. The assailants also took Ashtiyeh’s camera equipment.

Ashtiyeh, who is Palestinian, was conscious in a hospital in Nablus. He underwent X-rays which did not detect broken bones but he will remain in hospital for round-the-clock observation, his son, Zain Jaafar, said.

France just lit the fuse on Europe - Yanis Varoufakis & Wolfgang Munchau | The Econoclasts

‘This is state violence’: Paris students rage at politicians and heavy-handed policing

Before dawn on Tuesday outside the Lycée Sophie-Germain in central Paris, hundreds of teenagers dragged wheelie bins, metal barriers and shopping trolleys to build a barricade outside the front door of their secondary school. Climbing to the top of the piles of bins, pupils held banners calling for more funding and greater equality in French schools. But they were also protesting against French riot police, who have been accused by human rights groups of using disproportionate force against children in what is fast becoming the biggest youth protest movement in decades.

“Everyone hates the police,” chanted a group of 15- and 16-year-olds. At least 215 teenagers, 715 police officers and 85 teaching staff have been injured in clashes in recent days, according to the government. “We’re teenagers with wheelie bins, and the police have heavy weapons, it’s totally mismatched,” said Livia, 17, who was studying theatre at a lycée in northern Paris and did not want her real name published. “The police are extremely violent in France. This is state violence and it’s horrible seeing police allowed to target children. It’s important to remember this is institutionalised violence, it’s planned and deliberate.”

Ten investigations into possible police brutality are under way after injuries allegedly involving the use of police weapons, including one 15-year-old who lost his hand, another who lost his eye and a boy whose jaw and teeth were shattered, leaving him, as his mother said, barely able to eat with a straw in hospital. “The policing is catastrophic, people have been mutilated by weapons – one boy has lost an eye – it’s horrible,” said Lily, 17 (not her real name), who was studying social sciences in her final year of school and demonstrating for more funding in what she called a discriminatory education system that left poorer children behind.

Teenagers nearby held up cardboard signs protesting against the use of teargas and the deployment of riot police. “A state that gasses high school students is a weak state,” read one banner. “Gas rapists, not children,” said another sign in reference to calls for tougher laws against sexual violence. Another banner read: “Not here to riot.” The unprecedented protest movement that began outside one school in a low-income Paris suburb has spread across the country, taking the government by surprise.

“In more than 20 years of teaching, I’ve never seen protests this big,” said one teacher at Sophie-Germain high school who planned to join the Paris demonstration on Tuesday afternoon. “The students in central Paris have shown a great sense of solidarity with those in the Paris suburbs who face much worse conditions in their schools. There’s a feeling of solidarity and generosity between teenagers that flies in the face of the notion that we live in an era of selfishness. No one knows how long this will go on for.” Tens of thousands of students, trade unionists and parents were expected to march in support of the protests across France on Tuesday afternoon, including in Paris, Toulouse, Nice and Bordeaux, with riot police on alert.

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US justice department moves to strip citizenship of 40 naturalized citizens

Donald Trump’s justice department has moved to strip the citizenship of 40 naturalized citizens accused of crimes in what authorities describe as “the largest” such initiative over a single period during his administration.

US justice department officials on Monday announced the filing of “denaturalization actions” against more than three dozen people alleged to have committed such offenses as “acting as an agent for a foreign government, committing voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special‑needs man”.

The denaturalization requests in question were submitted in multiple federal courts between 21 August and 2 October, according to the justice department.

The federal Immigration and Nationality Act allows for naturalized US citizenship to be revoked by a federal court if the government proves that it was illegally obtained through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation.

Trump in previous months had reportedly pushed the US justice department to pursue denaturalization cases en masse. The New York Times reported in April that the justice department had identified at least 384 foreign-born US citizens whose naturalization it wanted to revoke.

US citizen alleges immigration agent in Chicago shot her from behind

A US citizen who was shot one year ago by a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent during a sweeping immigration crackdown in Chicago filed a lawsuit against the federal government on Monday, alleging the agent lied about the shooting and fired into her vehicle from behind.

Federal prosecutors initially accused Marimar Martinez, then 30, of using her vehicle to strike and box in agent Charles Exum’s sport utility vehicle on Chicago’s south-west side on 4 October 2025 during what the Trump administration named Operation Midway Blitz. Exum then exited his car and opened fire, leaving Martinez with seven gunshot wounds.

In the month after the shooting, prosecutors filed to dismiss the charges in a dramatic reversal of the closely watched case in the US’s third largest city. Martinez’s lawyers said on Monday that they commissioned an expert to analyze bullet trajectories and her injuries – and determined Exum wasn’t in the path of her car when he opened fire. They said he had walked several feet toward her car, contrary to statements he made to the FBI, and fired off five shots in less than a second, the last from the rear side of her vehicle.

“Charles Exum told the FBI agent on that day, within hours of the shooting, that Marimar was driving her car directly at him, that he shot her five times through the windshield, and that he ceased firing once he was no longer in the path of the vehicle,” one of her attorneys, Chris Parente, said. “Those are three objective lies that you’ll see here today.” Parente said there were only three bullet holes in Martinez’s windshield on the right passenger side, which indicated she wasn’t driving toward the agent. He said the fourth shot was fired through the front passenger side window, adding another bullet hole in the back of Martinez’s car seat showed the agent fired the fifth shot from behind her.

“In what world can a US law enforcement officer stand behind a car and fire his Glock service weapon through the rear passenger window at a young woman who’s crouched over the steering wheel?” Parente said. The CBP said in a statement to the Associated Press responding to the suit that Exum had been placed on administrative leave.

Trump announces $6.6bn defense shipyard owned by top Republican donor’s firm

Donald Trump on Tuesday announced the opening of a new $6.6bn shipbuilding factory in Baltimore, partly funded by the US government but owned by Anduril Industries, a politically connected defense company.

Trump’s appearance at a currently unused shipyard in Sparrows Point is a boost to Anduril, whose founder, Palmer Luckey, is a major GOP campaign fundraiser. Luckey has hosted campaign fundraisers for at least 20 Republican politicians, including Trump, the Guardian reported in August. He has given $5.9m to Republican causes since 2017.

Last week, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, named Luckey, an outspoken supporter of autonomous warfare, as an adviser to the Pentagon’s recently launched “Project Meridian”, which is tasked to study the future of warfare. At the event in Maryland, Trump called Luckey “a friend of mine” and a “brilliant guy”. Luckey was not at the event.

Anduril’s shipyard project is funded partly by $2.9bn from the US navy, along with $3.7bn project in private funding. Officials said the new factory, to be called “Arsenal Two”, will build torpedo tubes and other sections of Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines.

The acting navy secretary, Hung Cao, called the plant a “partnership between the navy and Anduril that breaks through bureaucratic red tape”. He paid Anduril extraordinary praise, in spite of the company’s lack of a history in submarine-building. In a bizarre warning to adversaries, Cao said: “Piss us off [and] we’ll sneak into your country in the middle of the night and snatch you and your wife while you sleep in your beds.”

Trump says he is weighing suspension of federal gas tax

Donald Trump said on Tuesday his administration was considering suspending the federal gasoline tax, a sign the president is noticing voter anger over fuel costs a month before the midterm elections.

Any suspension would require an act of Congress. The president cannot unilaterally suspend the federal tax.

The federal tax is 18.4¢ a gallon on gasoline and 24.4¢ on diesel. Dropping it would cut about 4% from the price of a gallon of regular. The tax also brings in more than $23bn a year for highways and public transit.

Centrist Dem and Aipac multi-million dollar recipient trying to find new populist positions:

Democratic US Senator Calls Establishment-Controlled Democratic Party ‘A Failed Enterprise’

A Democratic senator who has long been associated with the party’s establishment is now conceding that its old approach to doing politics has failed.

In an interview with David Sirota of The Lever published on Tuesday, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) described “the establishment Democratic Party” as “a failed enterprise.”

“It is so hard to lose two general elections to [President] Donald Trump, in political terms, to imagine a worse failure than losing two national elections to Donald Trump,” he said. “And yet the establishment Democratic Party did, and I think of it as a failed party.”

What’s newsy is Bennet slamming the establishment faction that twice lost to Trump.

Hes a moderate-coded Dem, which means the call is now coming from inside the house — a devastating repudiation of the Neera Tanden/DC faction that destroyed the party. https://t.co/ZZrER0CSz0

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) October 6, 2026

Bennet added that nobody “should feel an obligation to defend the party as it existed in the form that lost to Donald Trump.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Sirota asked Bennet about how his political thinking had changed over the past 18 years as a US senator and why he no longer believes the politics of the status quo are tenable.

“There’s something fundamentally wrong with the nature of our capitalist system that is delivering these outsize gains for the people at the very top at the expense of everybody else in the economy,” Bennet said. “So I guess, from that vantage point, I think I’ve changed.”

Bennet also chided fellow Democrats who are trying to force Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates to leave the party for being “too extreme.”

“I think that’s a huge mistake,” he said. “Look: We don’t have to agree on everything. We don’t, and by the way, that shouldn’t be the cost of admission to the Democratic Party or to America.”

Bennet added that the goal of policymaking shouldn’t be to “come to some moderate view of the world,” but “to unleash the imagination of the American people to solve their own problem. And that’s what they did 100 years ago in the last Progressive Era, and I think that’s what they’re going to do again.”

Veteran conservative lawyer quits Trump’s interior department and warns of ‘assault on the rule of law’

An 18-year veteran of the US Department of the Interior has resigned in protest from the sprawling federal agency, denouncing “a deeply troubling assault on the rule of the law” that took place at the department under Donald Trump. John Murdock, an attorney and self-described conservative Christian, began working for the agency’s legal office in 2002. In his resignation letter, first sent to his supervisor earlier this year and obtained exclusively by the Guardian and Public Domain, Murdock cites “glaring legal flaws” he witnessed within the agency during the course of the Trump administration, as well as concerns over offshore oil and gas drilling, the aggressive push to expand fossil fuels and the flouting of environmental regulation.

“We are headed in the wrong direction,” wrote Murdock, who officially stepped down on 30 September. In his resignation letter, Murdock said he grew especially concerned about the actions of a top official at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, an interior department agency that oversees offshore oil and gas drilling. His decision to resign in protest stemmed, in particular, from an incident that occurred last December, when Matt Giacona, the acting director of BOEM, appeared on stage at a gathering in New Orleans to announce the results of an oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico. The lease sale received bids from 30 companies, including BP, Chevron and Shell, totaling more than $370m. During his speech, Giacona extolled the Trump administration’s pro-drilling agenda. He then claimed that the administration was “upholding the highest environmental standards”.

The lease sale in question, however, has been mired in legal controversy. Environmental groups and other critics contend the Trump administration explicitly bypassed numerous federal environmental laws, including provisions of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), while carrying out the sale. Known as BBG1, the lease sale was mandated by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In a memo published shortly before the sale took place, BOEM’s Giacona, in coordination with the interior department’s legal office, determined that NEPA, a key provision of the ESA, and several other environmental safeguards “are not applicable at the lease sale stage of” BBG1 and similar sales. Environmental groups quickly filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the administration’s actions.

“The Trump administration has no basis for exempting these massive drilling lease sales from the bedrock laws that Congress passed decades ago after destructive oil spills off our coasts,” said George Torgun, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, one of the environmental groups involved in the ongoing lawsuits against BBG1 and similar lease sales. “This illegal action is a payback to oil and gas drillers. Gulf communities – and the marine ecosystems that we all depend on – will pay the price.” The administration pushed back on such arguments in a legal filing earlier this year. Because the lease sale was mandated by Congress, the agency says it did not have “sufficient discretion to alter the scope or terms of the lease sale in ways that could affect environmental outcomes”.

When Murdock heard Giacona claim that the administration was upholding the highest environmental standards, he decided he needed to resign. “I felt an ethical obligation to highlight the glaring legal flaws I saw,” he wrote of his actions leading up to his resignation.

New Zealand greenhouse gas levels hit record highs threatening catastrophic glacier melts

New Zealand could be hit with more frequent and intense heatwaves and catastrophic glacier melts in the near future, as greenhouse gas levels hit record highs, a new report about the nation’s climate has revealed. Released on Wednesday, the Our Atmosphere and Climate 2026 report shows New Zealand is experiencing mounting climate pressures, which will have wide-reaching implications for the environment, native species and communities.

“The signal is just becoming clearer … there are multiple indicators that are showing increased warming and the likelihood of climate change,” Dr Alison Collins, chief science adviser for the ministry for cities, environment, regions and transport (Mcert) told the Guardian.

New Zealand’s annual average temperature has risen by 1.36C since records began in 1909, and seven of the 10 warmest years on record occurred in the last decade, the report said. “Whilst it sounds like a small amount … it is a significant baseline shift that’s having ramifications through nature, through our communities, and through businesses and industry,” Collins said.

The report finds that as the climate heats, glaciers are shrinking. New Zealand has roughly 3000 glaciers, and they have shrunk in volume from 56 cubic kilometres in 1997 to 30 cubic kilometres in 2023, the report said. Modelling of glacier retreat shows a high risk of further decline on the horizon. Under the “low climate scenario” – which assumes low emissions – glaciers will very likely lose between 14 and 86% of their volume by 2100. Under the “high climate scenario”, that figure rises to between 69 and 100% of their volume.

Greenhouse gases have increased to record levels in New Zealand’s atmosphere, the report shows. There was a 30% increase in carbon dioxide since monitoring began in New Zealand in 1972. Methane levels had also slightly increased in 2025 to their highest concentration ever. “That additional heat is showing up in rising temperatures, warming oceans, rising seas, shifting rainfall patterns and more intense extremes,” the report said.

Also of Interest

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

Beyond UN Rhetoric on Gaza

Yemeni armed forces advance in Taiz amid heavy clashes with Saudi-backed troops

Reuters Reports Gulf Oil Exports Reached 80% of Pre-War Level as Standard Chartered Shows Bigger Hit to Hormuz Transits, Shift to Other Routes

Riot police fire teargas as 250,000 take part in schools protests across France

AI Investments Lack Returns – Whatever They Do Is Hard To Measure

Whistleblower suit alleges Trump ordered FBI investigation on LA anti-ICE protesters

A Little Night Music

Skip James – Hard Luck Child

Skip James - I'm So Glad

Skip James- Illinois Blues

Skip James- 22-20 Blues

Skip James - Hard time killin' floor blues

Skip James - Special Rider Blues

Skip James- Cypress Grove Blues

Skip James - Dry Spell Blues, Pt. 1

Skip James - All Night Long