Liberal Blogosphere

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:20:04 +0000

'Chainsaw-wielding': Insiders reveal secret DOGE team lurks behind Trump duds

Kathleen Culliton
July 19, 2026

RAW STORY

Elon Musk displays a chainsaw given to him by President of Argentina Javier Milei during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, U.S., February 20, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Elon Musk's notorious Department of Government Efficiency is alive and well and hiding inside a Trump administration outfit producing some of his bigger duds, according to a new Washington Post report.

DOGE allies have remained within the National Design Studio, the outfit designed by the White House to pump out government websites and "brand initiatives," inside sources told the Post.

"Two people close to DOGE, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said the design outfit, led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, serves as the spiritual successor to its work," the Post reported Saturday.

"With about 100 people and weekly meetings focused on efforts such as TrumpRx and the design of the new food pyramid, they represent an evolution of the DOGE mission, but a significant culling of its mandate."

The National Design Studio's mandate mirrors that of DOGE, which promised tech upgrades that would provide better services at lower costs, the Post notes.

But just this week TrumpRX was subjected to a scathing takedown as analysts revealed it had failed in its promise to lower costs by offering fewer than 12% of the more than 800 brand-name drugs made by participating pharmaceutical companies.

"Most of these companies are doing this for a small number of products and in a limited setting," Dr. Ben Rome, a health policy researcher, told NPR. "They're not engaging to do this on a large scale."

And, late last year, experts warned the National Design Studio was creating government websites that could leave gaping security holes despite their sleek appearance.

“The sites coming out of the National Design Studio might look slick at first glance — if not to everyone’s taste — but if the office’s early projects are a tell, pushing this aesthetic at a large scale could risk breaking federal disability laws and compromising the security of Americans’ personal data,” experts told NOTUS in December.

The Washington Post also reports the scaled down DOGE hasn't been able to meet its own deadlines on the redesign of the federal retirement online portal.

"Although the young technologists had hoped to be done with the project in a few months, it took them longer than expected," the Post reported.

Their work represents "a far cry from Musk’s chainsaw-wielding approach" with Gebbia pitching President Donald Trump on “design" and "aesthetics," according to the report.

Outside the studio, DOGE also maintains a presence.

"There 'are still an exceptional number that remain today and are more quietly operating behind the scenes,' said one staffer at the Transportation Department, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution," the Post reported.

"At the General Services Administration, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who at one point led Technology Transformation Services, has not left, even though he no longer appears to have any official job at the agency and is listed as a special government employee, according to a GSA employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter."

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 19:04:33 +0000

The Not-So-Secret Israeli Strategy: This is the Real Gaza Plan

Ramzy Baroud

July 17, 2026

Here is the bottom line: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of leaving Gaza, either before Israel’s general elections—likely to be held in October—or after. Conceding an inch from the roughly 70 percent of the territory his army currently occupies in Gaza will be considered a weakness by the majority of Israeli voters and would result in an open revolt within his extremist coalition.

He has made his intentions clear time and again. Recent statements by Israel’s political leadership have only reinforced that reality, with officials insisting that Israel must maintain indefinite military dominance over the Strip and explicitly rejecting any framework that requires a full withdrawal of troops. To Netanyahu, the military footprint in Gaza is a permanent fixture, not a temporary bargaining chip.

We Have Been There Before: The US-Iran MOU and the Algiers Accords

Sasan Fayazmanesh

July 17, 2026
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“The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.”
“Iran and the United States … will immediately select a mutually agreeable central bank … to act … as depositary of the escrow and security funds.”
“Commencing upon completion of the requisite escrow arrangements with the Central Bank, the United States will bring about the transfer to the Central Bank of all gold bullion which is owned by Iran.”
“Commencing with the adherence by Iran and the United States to this declaration… the United States will arrange… for the transfer to Iran of all Iranian properties which are located in the United States and abroad.”
“If any dispute arises between the parties as to whether the United States has fulfilled any obligation … Iran may submit the dispute to binding arbitration by the tribunal established by, and in accordance with the provisions of, the claims settlement agreement.”

If you think the above declarations are related to the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between Iran and the US on June 17, 2026, think again. Thes

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:37:02 +0000

UTAH

The Long War on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase

Erik Molvar

How decades of attacks on Utah’s national monuments culminated in Trump’s latest attempt to erase them.

In southern Utah, two crown-jewel landscapes have been the subject of a political tug-of-war spanning the past 25 years. On one end of the rope, Tribes, conservation groups, and the recreating public have sought – and gotten – expanded protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. Pulling the other end, the livestock industry, mining corporations, and Big Oil have joined forces with anti-regulation local governments to push to maximize the lands available for extractive use and minimize the protections.

This week, the Trump administration sided with the industrial interests and anti-environmental local governments to slash the two National Monuments by 90 percent, pulling the figurative rope back over to the side of exploitation.

The lands of southern Utah were wrested from the stewardship of multiple Indigenous tribes by EuroAmerican colonization, starting with Father Escalante in 1776. The modern battle over these lands started in 1996, when President Bill Clinton signed a proclamation establishing Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, recognizing “a geologic treasure of clearly exposed stratigraphy and structures.” “The monument,” Clinton proclaimed, “contains significant portions of a vast geologic stairway, named the Grand Staircase by pioneering geologist Clarence Dutton, which rises 5,500 feet to the rim of Bryce Canyon in an unbroken sequence of great cliffs and plateaus.” It contains paleontological features like fossils and dinosaur trackways, and cultural sites including Indigenous sites, Mormon pioneer sites, and the Old Paria townsite (a movie set, it turns out). The new Monument spanned 1.7 million acres of public land that are the traditional homelands of the Paiute, Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute, Navajo, and Zuni peoples.

A local history recounts some of the environmental battles that have ensued since Clinton’s proclamation. Andalex Resources, Inc. held claims to potentially-lucrative coal reserves in Smokey Hollow on the Kaiparowitz Plateau, and they scrapped their plans for a strip mine after the Monument was designated. There was controversy around oil and gas drilling by Conoco on state lands within the Monument boundary. And local counties tried to create new roads within the Monument using the obscure Reserve Statute 2477 to establish that livestock trails should be reclassified as county roads. Meanwhile, Grand Canyon Trust began to buy out grazing leases in the Escalante Canyons from ranchers who wanted to retire them because the allotments were too remote, too treacherous, too full of poisonous plants, and too troublesome to be worth continuing their cattle operations.

In 1997, the Utah Association of Counties filed a lawsuit, and Mountain States Legal Foundation filed a companion suit (represented by William Perry Pendley, who later would be appointed interim BLM Director during the first Trump administration), to overturn Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. They argued that the century-old Antiquities Act was unconstitutional, that the National Monument was larger than the minimum area necessary to protect the objects of scientific and cultural interest for which it had been designated, and even that the proclamation violated the Wilderness Act by establishing de facto wilderness. They lost on all counts, with a decisive ruling from the District Court in 2004. It stated,

The Proclamation of which plaintiffs complain speaks in detail of the Monument’s natural and archeological resources and indicates that the designated area is the smallest consistent with the protection of those resources. The language of the Proclamation clearly indicates that the President considered the principles that Congress required him to consider: he used his discretion in designating objects of scientific or historic value, and used his discretion in setting aside the smallest area necessary to protect those objects.

Mountain States Legal Foundation appealed (the counties did not), but was found to lack standing to bring forward a legal challenge, and its case was dismissed.

The dust did not remain settled for long. In 2013, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) kicked off the Utah Public Lands Initiative (UPLI), a process in which environmental and conservation interests were forced to collaborate with industrial interests, in an effort to put the fate of public lands conservation under “local control.” This process culminated in a bill that proposed to designate a modest Bears Ears National Conservation Area, spanning 857,603 acres. The UPLI bill was deemed by tribes and conservation groups to give away too much public land to industrial interests, so it never gained traction in Congress and ultimately died.

In 2015, five local Tribes – the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, Zuni, and Ute Mountain Ute – abandoned the UPLI proposal and authored the original proposal to protect a National Monument at Bears Ears to protect the abundant cliff dwellings and other archaeological sites, inspiring slot canyons and buttes, and native ecosystems of the Bears Ears area. Conservation groups advocated in support of the Tribes’ proposal, which encompassed potential wilderness like the Grand Gulch Primitive Area, and landmarks like Valley of the Gods, Comb Ridge, Cedar Mesa, and the Bears Ears themselves (a pair of buttes that can be seen from afar, rising from the flanks of the Abajo Mountains). The Tribal proposal was a natural complement to other protected lands in the region, including Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Parks, as well as tribally-managed Monument Valley immediately to the south on the Navajo reservation.

Environmental threats began to these lands began to mount, with proposals for uranium mining and oil and gas drilling adding to the chronic degradation of livestock grazing on the fragile biological soil crusts of Cedar Mesa and the surrounding canyon country.

The Obama administration sought to solve the problem while appeasing local anti-conservationists, and instead of designating all of the Bears Ears Tribal proposal, he created a smaller, 1.35 million acre Bears Ears National Monument that lopped off half a million acres to assuage concerns from local governments. Among the lands excluded were Wilson Mesa, the eastern slopes of the Abajo Mountains, and the lands between Red Canyon and White Canyon. But he did add Tribal co-management, a key aspect that the Indigenous governments were seeking. While many were privately disappointed that the resulting National Monument was smaller than it should have been, it was widely celebrated by both Tribes and conservation groups (including WWP) as a major achievement.

The anti-conservation local governments, unsatisfied with the half a million acres that got pulled out of the National Monument at their request, cried foul. But they were powerless to overcome President Obama’s Monument proclamation.

In the spring of 2017, newly-elected President Trump sent Ryan Zinke, his Secretary of Interior, to Bears Ears on a listening tour of the Bears Ears region. He wasn’t a very good listener. In fact, when was asked by an Indigenous representative why he refused a meeting with the Bears Ears Intertribal Council, he scolded, “Be nice. Don’t be rude.”

This slap in the face of Indigenous interests was the prelude to an even bigger slap in the face: President Trump’s December 2017 proclamation slashing the size of Bears Ears from 1.35 million acres to 121,096 acres in two isolated units. He tried to put a veneer of Indigenous legitimacy on his rescission by renaming Bears Ears the Shash Jáa National Monument. No one was fooled. Gone was Indigenous co-management, replaced by an advisory committee where white representatives would outnumber Tribal ones. Trump’s proclamation also reopened the Grand Canyon Trust’s grazing allotments in the Escalante Canyons to livestock grazing.

The rope was tugged back In 2021, when President Joe Biden issued two new proclamations for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, restoring the original Obama Monuments and adding 13,000 additional acres that were added during the Trump recission. Biden’s Interior developed Monument Management Plans.

Then in 2026, a Congressional Review Act bid to overturn the Management Plan by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. John Curtis (R-UT) failed as the clock ran out before the resolution could come to the floor. This was a radical move, because the Congressional Review Act overturns not just the federal rule (in this case, a management plan) in question, but also permanently blocks any “substantially similar” rule from ever taking effect in the future. If the CRA had eviscerated the monument plans, the monuments could have been left unmanaged.

And then, last week, the latest pull back over to the side of extraction. According to Trump’s own Fact Sheet on the recent rescission, “One Proclamation reduces the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from approximately 1.87 million acres to approximately 181,500 acres. Another Proclamation reduces the size of the Bears Ears National Monument from approximately 1.36 million acres to approximately 121,100 acres.” Everything else in his Fact Sheet is pure fiction. It’s not “rightsizing” and doesn’t “reduce these monuments to appropriate sizes.” It slashes protections across 90 percent of the public lands that were designated, leaving the majority of the “objects of historic or scientific interest” for which Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante were designated, completely unprotected. Cliff dwellings. Pictograph panels. Dinosaur tracks. Ancient fossils. An entire staircase of exposed sedimentary layers marching down toward the Grand Canyon, telling the story of eons of geologic creation that took hundreds of millions of years to complete.

The new Monument Proclamations for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase wave away these historically and scientifically important objects by arbitrarily reclassifying them as “generic features and landscapes” or having “relative commonness” throughout the region. If one President protects cliff dwellings and pictograph panels and geologic features as significant, can a later President declare them insignificant? And how do we reconcile this wholesale dismissal of sacred sites?

Under the Antiquities Act, the President “is hereby authorized, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” as National Monuments. Congress did not give the President authority to subtract from National Monuments in any way. Nor did Congress grant a sitting President the authority to second-guess the decisions of a previous President that objects deemed significant from a scientific or cultural perspective and decide that they have suddenly become insignificant. In legal parlance, yesterday’s monument proclamations are an action deemed ultra vires, or “beyond the powers” of the President under the Antiquities Act. Congress makes the law, Presidents sign the law, and future Presidents are required to follow the law.

But this new Trump proclamation goes even farther, promoting extractive uses within the tattered fragments of the remaining National Monuments, stating that the “Secretaries shall endeavor to authorize traditional land uses within the Monument, such as grazing, recreation, timber management, public access, and infrastructure development, to the greatest extent possible….” (Emphasis added.) It directs federal officials to “consider livestock grazing to constitute a traditional cultural place (TCP) and shall consider how proposed activities will impact that TCP….” That’s another backhanded swipe at the Tribes: The acronym TCP actually stands for Traditional Cultural Property, which refers to tribally-identified cultural sites that are given federal protection under the National Historic Preservation Act.

For more than a century, Presidents have proclaimed national monuments, many of them across very large acreages. Theodore Roosevelt was the first, setting the precedents that still apply today. Roosevelt proclaimed 808,120 acres of public land as Grand Canyon National Monument, to protect “an object of unusual scientific interest, being the greatest eroded canyon in the United States.” He wasn’t trying to appease anybody. This, after the local publication, Williams Sun editorialized that an 1895 congressional bill to protect the Grand Canyon was a “fiendish and diabolical scheme” drawn up by lawmakers “suckled by a sow and raised by an idiot,” and protesting that “the fate of Arizona depends exclusively upon the development of her mineral resources.” Sound familiar? The rhetoric coming out of Utah anti-environmentalists echoes these warped sentiments.

One year after designating the Grand Canyon NM (which later became a National Park), Roosevelt designated Mount Olympus National Monument, encompassing 610,560 acres to protect “numerous glaciers” and “the summer range and breeding grounds of the Olympic elk.” Both the Grand Canyon and Mount Olympus grew to be crown jewels of our National Park System, and economic engines of regional prosperity.

Trump isn’t half the president of Theodore Roosevelt. Not even a tiny fraction. You can tell by the size of his Monuments.

For the Grand Canyon, monument opponents filed a lawsuit, in a case called Cameron v. United States, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court affirmed that the Grand Canyon is an object of scientific interest and affirmed Roosevelt’s expansive National Monument designation.

So when President Trump trots out the tired old argument that Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante were not “confined to ‘the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected,’” and asserts an “overreach and abuse of the Antiquities Act,” he’s contradicting a century of applicable precedent for the statute.

The Tribes have been swift to weigh in. The Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition stated that this latest Bears Ears proclamation “weakens protections for a living cultural landscape and sacred ancestral homeland that has been cared for by Indigenous peoples since time immemorial.” Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition Coordinator Autumn Gillard, a Southern Paiute, stated of that monument proclamation, “Today’s action is a direct strike against the federal government’s duty to consult with Tribes. It also profoundly disrespects our intergenerational Traditional Knowledge by destroying a framework for Tribal co-stewardship over our ancestral lands in which we invested years of effort. Today’s action cannot stand.”

Trump’s Bears Ears proclamation is seven times smaller than the UPLI legislation that was sponsored by Rob Bishop, the most famously anti-environmental Member of Congress – out of 571 in Congress – at the time. Congratulations, Mr. President, you have won the race to the bottom. We’ll see you in court.

Erik Molvar is a wildlife biologist and is Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting and restoring watersheds and wildlife on western public lands.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:24:55 +0000

‘The dismissal of Fedorov is not the main issue. The future of Ukraine is’

Statement by Vitaliy Dudin, Sotsialnyi Rukh

Saturday 18 July 2026, by Vitaliy Dudin

The reshuffle in the Ukrainian government has triggered heated debates. Many discuss personalities: whether Mykhailo Fedorov was an effective minister, whether he became too influential, or whether President Zelenskyy seeks to eliminate potential rivals. [1]

These questions may be politically relevant. But they miss the deeper issue.

The real question is what kind of state Ukraine is becoming under the pressure of a long war.

Sotsialnyi Rukh has consistently criticized Fedorov’s neoliberal agenda. His vision of the “digital state” has too often meant deregulation, outsourcing and weakening labour protections while celebrating Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurship. Workers have every reason to remain critical of this model.

Yet opposing neoliberalism does not mean supporting the growing political influence of the military command.

Reports suggesting that the Commander-in-Chief played a decisive role in determining the composition of the civilian government should concern everyone committed to democracy. Military leaders are accountable for military operations. Civilian governments must remain accountable to society.

The strategic debate goes far beyond one minister.

Ukraine faces two competing approaches to a long war.

One approach seeks to compensate for Russia’s numerical superiority through ever larger mobilization, tighter centralization and procurement concentrated among a limited number of large defence producers.

The other seeks to compensate for Ukraine’s demographic disadvantage through technological innovation, distributed production, competition between developers, rapid adaptation and extensive use of drones, robotics and digital systems.

For Ukraine, this is not simply a question of military doctrine.

Russia can afford enormous human losses. Ukraine cannot.

Every experienced soldier is also a worker, engineer, teacher, doctor or parent whose knowledge will be indispensable for rebuilding the country after the war. A successful defence strategy must therefore maximize Ukraine’s technological advantages while minimizing unnecessary human losses.

This is not only a military necessity. It is a social necessity.

At the same time, technological modernization cannot become another excuse for neoliberal restructuring. The defence sector must serve society rather than private monopolies. Innovation should strengthen public capacity, decent working conditions and democratic accountability—not enrich a new generation of oligarchs or foreign investors.

Ukraine needs both democracy and innovation.

It needs civilian control over the armed forces.

It needs technological modernization without neoliberal dogma.

And it needs a strategy that defends not only the state’s borders, but also the people who will have to rebuild the country once the war is over.

The future of Ukraine will not be decided by choosing between competing factions of the political elite. It will be decided by whether the country can defend itself while preserving the democratic and social foundations worth defending.

18 July 2026

Source: Ukraine Solidarity.

https://www.ukraine-solidarity.eu/3a183e5aef908009b644da492696173f]

Attached documents

No Country on Earth Fully Respects Workers’ Rights, and it’s Getting Worse

Pete Dolack
July 17, 2026
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Class warfare continues to be waged incessantly. And that war’s offensives continue to be more intense. In just the past year, the world’s working people have seen more attacks on the rights of free speech and assembly, more attacks on civil liberties, more arrests and imprisonments, more refusals to engage in collective bargaining with unions and more technology used to monitor, discipline and silence workers.
Israel’s Crimes Against Humanity in the Americas

Michael K. Smith
July 17, 2026
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Gloriosa victoria, mural by Diego Rivera
“They will try to tell us that democracy, international law, human rights, and human dignity exist and are alive and well; that the genocide against the Palestinian people was merely an aberration, an exception within the global democratic oasis . . .
– Mexican journalist Sasi Alejandre
“Latin America has experienced the same tactics of state terrorism that Palestine faces at the hands of regimes armed, trained and advised by Israel.”
–Jack McGrath, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs
There might never even have been an Israel without arms shipments from the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua to the Zionist paramilitary Haganah in 1939 during the British Mandate over Palestine. Nine years after that helping hand was extended, the Haganah, with assistance from the Irgun and Lehi, erased Palestine from the map, building the state of Israel literally on top of where Palestine had been while recruiting Nazis from Europe to help the fledgling Jewish state build up enough weapons. Not long after that, Israel took charge of assisting bloody repression in Latin America.
Israel actually trained the army of Castillo Armas that overthrew Guatemalan democracy in 1954, later shoring up repression across the entire Southern Cone by providing the same training and arms to the military dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay. It also financed Colombian paramilitaries and developed the tactics and weapons used in Mexico’s “Dirty War,” which included forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings, carried out against student protesters, political dissidents and campesinos.
The Central America connection was established early on. Israel started sending automatic weapons, tanks, and military planes to the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua in the 1950s, later increasing its support when the dictatorship faced an ultimately successful popular revolution in the 1970s. Israel was Nicaragua’s sole source of arms after Jimmy Carter belatedly cut off military aid to Somoza in 1978, who killed tens of thousands of people in his last two years in power, ultimately using Israeli planes to bomb Managua in a final paroxysm of futile violence. After the Sandinista revolution took power, Israel acted as a conduit to arm and train cocaine-trafficking mercenaries (the Contras) attacking schools, farming cooperatives, and medical clinics throughout Nicaragua in an attempt to destroy the popular achievements of the revolution.
By far the bloodiest Israeli policy in the region was directed against Guatemala from the 1970s to the 1990s, when indigenous Mayans rose up against European-descended oligarchs defended by a brutal Mestizo Army. Tel Aviv’s arms, intelligence, advisors, surveillance technology, and torture tactics helped kill two hundred thousand people and displace a million more in what the Catholic Church and Guatemalan courts determined to be genocide. Guatemalan army officers credited Israel with turning the tide against the popular uprising via mass extermination in the countryside and counter-insurgency techniques that wiped out guerrilla networks in the cities.
No Path Forward, No Way Back, Imperial Decline Edition

Rob UrieFacebook
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July 17, 2026
When American politicians state that terrorism is a threat, what they need is a mirror and an introductory economics textbook to understand that there are many different ways to destroy a nation. From NAFTA to financialization to crypto grifts, the US has been led from one economic catastrophe to another by people claiming to know what they are doing. While you and I know that AI isn’t going to cause 50% – 60% of the jobs in the US to disappear, what astonishes is that this is considered an acceptable outcome by Donald Trump and the US Congress.
For context, the US unemployment rate at the worst point in the Great Depression was 25%. This led to mass protests, a dramatic rise in the fortunes of organized labor, the White House being surrounded by former soldiers wanting to be paid, and WWII. Most governments begin worry about political instability when unemployment rises to 10%. That Trump and Congress heard the 50% – 60% unemployment projection and still thought AI a brilliant idea is testament to an absence of political accountability. There is something deeply broken in US politics.
Graph: surprise, the class war is real. Illustrated is that capital’s share of national income (GDP) has been rising for five decades as labor’s share has been falling. Oligarchs own the capital stock. Labor owns labor. When payments to capital rise, oligarchs benefit. When payments to labor fall, labor loses. As the graph illustrates, labor has been losing in the US for fifty years. Source: economycharts'Distinctly sour mood': US Voters say they despise MAGA candidates more than socialists

Tom Boggioni
July 17, 2026
RAW STORY

Supporters wearing 'MAGA' caps gather ahead of a campaign rally featuring Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump in Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S., November 4, 2024. REUTERS/Emily Elconin

Republican candidates may want to dial back bragging about being card-carrying members of President Donald Trump's MAGA movement, a new survey of American voters suggests.

A stunning CNBC survey released Friday revealed that economic turmoil has rendered the MAGA brand more politically poisonous then the label of socialism.

"Half of all voters say they are unlikely to support a democratic socialist candidate, with 32% saying they would support one," CNBC reported. "An endorsement by the president is somewhat worse, with 52% saying they would not support such a candidate. Worst of all are self-described MAGA candidates, which the survey found 57% of the public said they would be unlikely to support."

This could present a fundamental problem for Trump's movement heading into the midterms, experts said.

“More voters expect things to get worse by a 41/29% margin, leaving the electorate in a distinctly sour mood heading into the midterm election cycle,″ Micah Roberts, partner at Republican pollsters Public Opinion Strategies, told CNBC.

Despite favorable economic indicators—a booming stock market and declining inflation—the public remains deeply pessimistic about economic conditions, the survey found.

Consumer anxiety about everyday costs has reached pandemic-era levels, creating a disconnect between headline numbers and lived experience. Add to that the unpopularity of Trump's war which has trickled down to some of his congressional supporters.

The polling numbers reveal a Trump endorsement makes 52 percent of voters less likely to support a candidate, compared to just 29 percent who say it helps.

The comes close to how radioactive the MAGA label has become, with an alarming 57 percent of voters saying identifying as a self-described MAGA candidate would make them less likely to vote for them. Only 27 percent said it would help their prospects.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:36:25 +0000

Devastating humiliation served to Trump as TV networks snub speech — for these shows

Nicole Charky-Chami
July 16, 2026
RAW STORY

President Donald Trump waves aboard Marine One in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on July 15, 2026. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

President Donald Trump was served a heaping helping of humiliation ahead of his primetime address Thursday night, with several major broadcast networks snubbing the planned remarks in favor of a nature documentary and game show.

"NBC and ABC will not carry Trump on their respective networks but will carry on their digital feeds, NBC News Now and ABC News Live. Expect CBS to do the same," Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Flint reported on X, hours before the speech was to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

It wasn't immediately known if CNN would also snub the address, Flint explained.

"But cable news can dip in and out and has a lot more freedom than a broadcast network that in theory needs to let affiliates know what's up and the producers of whatever show is airing etc etc," he posted.

The move comes as several networks were quiet about whether they would air the president's speech to the nation, which is expected to focus on elections, including his ongoing baseless fraud claims about the 2020 election. The time slot across networks continued to display "their standard scheduled content," with no indication that coverage would be interrupted for the presidential address.

NBC News, according to TV Insider, is scheduled to feature its series "The Americas," a nature documentary narrated by legendary actor Tom Hanks. This week's episode was set to focus on the Gulf Coast and its swamps and wetlands that are home to black bears and alligators.

The network said it planned to broadcast a special report following the address, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

ABC plans to air the Elizabeth Banks-hosted game show "Press Your Luck" during that hour, TV Insider reported.

Raging Trump smacked with 'brutal' response after demanding networks lose licenses

Nicole Charky-Chami
July 17, 2026
RAW STORY

President Donald Trump speaks about election security during an address to the nation from the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on July 16, 2026. SAUL LOEB/Pool via REUTERS

A top FCC official pushed back Friday on President Donald Trump's demand that the agency revoke the broadcast licenses of ABC and NBC after the networks refused to air his primetime address, according to reports.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the FCC, made her position known in a post on X.

"It is ridiculous to call for broadcasters to lose their license simply for making the same editorial decisions they've made under presidents of both parties, especially when the remarks were still available to anyone who wanted to watch them online," Gomez wrote.

"The FCC has no authority to punish a station for refusing to air a blatantly political speech," she added. "This is a naked attempt to bully broadcasters, and the FCC should have no part in it."

Trump used his speech to advocate for his SAVE America Act ahead of the midterms, push claims about China's interference in U.S. elections and attack ABC and NBC for not airing his speech, Deadline reported.

In the past, networks have opted not to show addresses from other former presidents, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Media and political experts responded to Gomez's comments.

"Brutal response," Scott MacFarlane, chief Washington correspondent for MeidasTouch, wrote on X.

"The networks didn't carry two Jimmy Carter addresses," Wall Street Journal media reporter Joe Flint wrote on X.

"A lot of people don't understand the First Amendment, or editorial independence, and for the record the speech was available to anyone who wanted to watch or listen to it," Robert Lang, WBAL NewsRadio reporter and anchor, wrote on X.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:28:42 +0000
A Global Fossil Fuel Phaseout Is a Challenge ‘Big Enough to Solve’

The immediate challenge is to develop a global phaseout road map that’s ambitious enough to stabilize the climate system and equitable enough to drive a resilient, renewables-based development in even the poorest parts of the world

A gas flare is seen at an oil well site outside Williston, North Dakota. Gas flares are created when excess flammable gases are released by pressure release valves during the drilling for oil and natural gas. North Dakota has been experiencing an oil boom recently, bringing tens of thousands of jobs to the region, lowering state unemployment and bringing a surplus to the state budget.
(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Tom Athanasiou
Jul 18, 2026
Foreign Policy In Focus

It’s no secret that the climate negotiations are failing. The simple fact is that the carbon concentration of the atmosphere continues to rise, rapidly and along a pathway that threatens—but does not yet guarantee—true catastrophe.

That said, there’s little agreement on why the climate negotiations are failing, or what their role would be in the emergency global transition that’s so desperately needed. Such a transition will have to be very widely accepted as fair if it is to have a chance of success, and the negotiations as we have them are hardly rising to the challenges of global climate justice. Is this likely to change soon? Perhaps not, but such a change is both necessary and possible, and the goal has to be to increase the odds.

One promising way of doing so is to concentrate effort on launching a global push to phase out fossil fuels—that is, a phase out of both fossil fuel extraction and consumption, and the simultaneous development and global deployment of a fossil-fuel free energy economy. Such a phaseout would not solve the whole of the climate problem, let alone the still larger ecological crisis, but it would make solutions possible. The phaseout challenge is one that, as Dwight D. Eisenhower used to say, is “big enough to solve.”

The Road to Santa Marta

The story of the climate negotiations can be told many ways. I like to tell it as a story of failure, and renewed effort, and late, inadequate, steps forward. Such a process gave us the foundational United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Paris Agreement, and the hard-won breakthrough at 2023’s COP28 in Dubai, where the world’s nations agreed to “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.” The question is if the current impasse, which settled in after Dubai, will play out in similar fashion.

How rapidly can the world’s civilizational dependence on fossil fuels be broken?

But first, know that a great burst of joy accompanied the Dubai agreement’s inclusion of the words “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” It broke a firewall that had held for decades, one in which a blocking coalition led by the Saudis and the American oil companies, playing a long and Machiavellian game, was able to keep fossil fuels from even being mentioned in a formal COP decision.

This silence has long been excoriated by climate activists around the world, but its origins are too seldom brought to light. To see them, drop back to 1992, when the Framework Convention was being finalized. Back then, the world’s climate diplomats were able to make substantive decisions. Some of these, like the agreement that countries would act in proportion to their “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,” were inspiring and visionary. But the founders fell short in at least one enduringly negative and perhaps fatal way—they were unable to agree to a majority, or even a super-majority “last resort” decision-making system. They got close, but the fossil coalition blocked all paths, and the result, by both default and design, was consensus decision-making.

Consensus decision-making, alas, is a special kind of problem. It appears to be a commitment to deep democracy, yet in practice it means everyone has a veto, which is not exactly what you want if you’re trying to negotiate a life-or-death global transition that requires the interests of wealthy and powerful minorities to yield to those of the global community as a whole. On the contrary, it empowers blockers, allowing them to endlessly force the deletion of ambitious text, and thus it keeps both fossil phaseout (which is blocked by the fossil cartel) and meaningful finance reform (which is blocked by the wealthy countries) forever off the table. Over time, it has driven the negotiations into a realm of shadow play far divorced from the realities of the actual world.

It is difficult to pinpoint the original sin here. The Saudis, after all, have a point. Their economy is indeed threatened by any phaseout of fossil fuels. So why should they not fight like hell to preserve their power and their privilege? Everybody else does. But there’s a deeper problem as well: the climate finance problem, which continues to loom forbiddingly over any possible international climate accord. Ultimately, the deadlock in the climate negotiations is defined by the intransigence of the Global Rich, most of whom reside in the Global North, on key justice questions—finance in particular. Bluntly, the rich refuse to pay their fair shares. This intransigence makes any real breakthrough impossible, in part by empowering blockers on all sides.

At COP30 in Brazil, push came to shove. After a large group of activist nations failed to land an agreement to negotiate a “roadmap” away from fossil fuels, those nations, many of them frustrated beyond words, made a new move. Led by Colombia and The Netherlands and with a great deal of support from civil society (the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative in particular), they forked off a more informal process, which launched the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, held in April 2026 in Santa Marta, Colombia.

Santa Marta seemed immediately to be a game changer. Here, for example, is Tzeporah Berman, founder and chair of the Treaty Initiative: “After years stuck in endless debates about whether to phase out fossil fuels, finally we are focusing on the how. We are no longer fighting for recognition of the problem, but creating solutions. It’s like watching a dam break—all that pent-up experience, knowledge, and passion suddenly flowing into concrete ways to phase out dirty fuels. The hope is contagious.”

The hope is also strategic. With President Donald Trump’s people in control of the US government, and doing everything in their power to undermine both the Paris Agreement and the Framework Convention itself, everyone could sense the opening. Which is why Santa Marta, as climate diplomacy’s favorite play-by-play announcer Ed King noted, was “weirdly” optimistic. One observer even described it as an “euphoric” experience.

Beyond any review of the formal takeaways, Santa Marta was a conference of the hopeful: 57 countries (plus California) representing about a third of the global economy, were present, and they all represented countries, or factions within countries, that wanted to face the fossil energy challenge. The US government, obviously, was not among them. Neither were the Gulf oil states, or Russia, or (more controversially) China and India. There was no formal negotiating. Civil society had its venues and made its declaration (a heroic synthesis), the academics had theirs, and a high-level science panel set the stage. The official discussions were universally reported to be congenial, even when it came to the equity question, which is always a reliable source of inconclusive discord.

The second Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels will be chaired by Tuvalu and Ireland. It will be in 2027, after COP31 in Turkey, which one way or another will have to react to Santa Marta and its outcomes. Moving forward with the transition is now on the official diplomatic agenda. Formally, this means defining national phaseout road maps and a global phaseout road map to plug them into. In reality it means much more, because even good road maps will mean little unless they’re accompanied by the financial and institutional breakthroughs that could bring them to life.
The Santa Marta Breakthrough

How rapidly can the world’s civilizational dependence on fossil fuels be broken?

The good news is that the renewable energy revolution is finally arriving in force, and this has made countries of all kinds willing to countenance a sharp break with fossil energy. Thanks in large part to China’s immense commitments to electrification and mass manufacturing, the cost of wind and solar, and the batteries that convert them into “firm” baseload power sources, has plummeted.

The US-Israeli war against Iran has accelerated the renewables buildout, by convincing countries to prioritize domestic energy production. Fadhel Kaboub, a prominent southern observer of today’s geopolitical ferment, put it well: “A world less dependent on oil would be less vulnerable to the weaponization of tanker routes, refinery disruptions, and sudden fuel-price shocks,” adding that “a renewables-based system does not make peace automatic, but it does make energy blackmail much harder.”

To avoid a future in which vast areas of the Earth become almost uninhabitable, the world’s governments will have to pick up the pace.

Further, the global renewables boom, which began before the war, may well be reaching its own inflection point. Solar evangelist Danny Kennedy cites 2025 as the big year, because that’s when China and India—the two largest energy consumers in Asia—together reached a historic tipping point. “For the first time, fossil fuel generation fell in both countries simultaneously: China down 0.9%, India down 3.3%. These are not small numbers.” Then, in 2026, as the war dragged on, China’s solar exports hit all-time records. “This is not charity. It is commerce. It is nations choosing energy security, economic agency, and lower costs over the inherited architecture of fossil fuel dependency.”

There are provisos. China and India still struggle to avoid new coal even as they scale up renewables. Also, China’s clean energy technology dominance, coupled with the Global North’s political inability to adopt robust industrial policies, seems destined to deepen deindustrialization and despair, particularly in the United States and Europe. But, though critical, these remain only provisos, because China’s mass manufacturing prowess shows a way forward. In fact, as the cost of electrification has dropped, it’s become difficult for the fossil cartel to convince the world’s people that their dreams of prosperity—or even stability—depend on the continued burning of coal, gas, and oil.

Alas, technology alone will not stabilize the climate in time. Renewables are displacing coal in particular, but the oil and gas story is more mixed. Thinktank Ember’s view is authoritative: “if demand and clean electricity growth continue at their recent pace, then fossil fuel generation will plateau before starting to decline consistently from the early 2030s.” Which is great, but not even close to fast enough to hold the 1.5°C line. To do better, it’s also necessary to stop fossil fuel extraction—drilling, fracking, and mining—as the second front in the phaseout battle, the second blade of the scissors.

This imperative has been obvious for decades. In 1998 at COP4 , Oilwatch, Amazon Watch, the Rainforest Action Network, and Project Underground launched a campaign to stop new exploration to avoid breaching the 1.0°C limit. The difference, 28 years later, is that the world has retreated to a far more dangerous 1.5°C goal, and could well retreat again. Moreover, the demand to “keep it in the ground” is now coming from the main stage. At Santa Marta, the science panel’s “action recommendations” included “halting all new fossil-fuel expansion” and “prohibit[ing] fossil fuel advertising.”

It’s easy to see why local communities that directly suffer the pollution, corruption, and abuse that typically accompany fossil fuel extraction have long been demanding its abolition. But why did it take so long for global actors to come to the table, and does their arrival indicate that the tide has definitively turned?

Probably not.

Pause to consider how the goal of “halting all new fossil fuel” investment would sound among the good citizens of Houston, or Oslo, or Riyadh, or Basra, or Moscow. What’s the way forward for nations whose economies are deeply entangled with fossil fuel revenues, or people whose lives are dependent on fossil fuel jobs? Such questions could be glossed over at Santa Marta, but they cannot go forever unanswered.

At Santa Marta, the signs were, as Orwell used to say, in front of your nose. Colombia represented the Global South and its co-host The Netherlands represented the Global North, but both countries will have very difficult times escaping their entanglement with fossil fuels. Colombia exemplifies the predicament of poorer fossil exporters: Over 75% of its energy demand and 35-50% of its export revenues are met by fossil fuels. The Netherlands, for its part, is far richer, and is not a fossil fuel exporter, so it will be far easier for it to extricate itself from its fossil entanglements. Easier but not easy: The Netherlands relies heavily on fossil fuel distribution and refining—the port of Rotterdam is Europe’s primary oil and gas gateway.

To avoid a future in which vast areas of the Earth become almost uninhabitable, the world’s governments will have to pick up the pace. At an absolute bare minimum this means eliminating the subsidies that promote fossil fuels. In practice, however, even this entirely rational reform slams directly into the stranglehold that fossil capital has on all countries. One excellent example is the so called investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which allows fossil fuel companies to sue governments for lost future profits if they move, however timidly, to regulate away even odious advantages that these companies have built over the years to maximize their profits. It’s an absurd and entirely corrupt legal and economic barrier to phasing out fossil fuels and, incidentally, it’s one that The Netherlands helped create in the 1960s. The ISDS was explicitly on the Santa Marta agenda, but was reduced to one meaningless sentence in the formal takeaways: ISDS “by some were perceived as creating barriers, while the extent to which these barriers are perceived varies.” Asked to explain this rather evasive blather, Dutch Minister and co-host Stientje van Veldhoven said. “This was not a negotiating conference, and therefore different parties, different countries have different positions.”

Sooner or later, a serious negotiating conference will have to take meaningful positions on ISDS, economic diversification, external debt, and many other difficult issues. To that end, it will have to distinguish the core problem of extractor dependence—especially in poorer extraction nations—from the broader problem of economic entanglement. Because all nations, rich and poor alike, are entangled with fossil fuels. The crucial step is to put the interests of the poor ahead of the entanglement of the rich, even as the world’s people struggle to face the realities, and the necessities, of climate stabilization.

One immediate question, as Tuvalu and Ireland prepare to host the follow-up conference in 2027, is which countries to invite. Santa Marta was widely praised as a leadership conference, but its attendees included countries, including co-host The Netherlands, that do not seem likely to halt fossil fuel expansion anytime soon, at least not voluntarily. And this while China, the undisputed leader of the clean energy transition, was not on the invitation list. Which is why one well-known, long-time activist (anonymously) suggested to me that the recent UN General Assembly vote on the International Court of Justice climate ruling might offer a convenient and logical first screen for admission to future conferences. Only signers would qualify. Eight countries, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the US, voted against the ruling, but another 28, including India, Turkey, Qatar, and 'Old and horrible-looking': Trump fixates on windmills as Iran fatalities mount

Alexander Willis
July 19, 2026
RAW STORY

Two days after at least two U.S. service members were killed as the United States and Iran edge closer to war, President Donald Trump took to social media to criticize "old and horrible looking" windmills in the United Kingdom.

"Word is that the UK is going to move the old and horrible looking windmills, which loom over and destroy the City of Aberdeen," Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

"That will be a big day for the Country, and will be very much appreciated by everybody."

Trump’s social media post marks his second on Truth Social since the killing of at least two U.S. service members in Jordan, who were killed by Iranian strikes on the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base on Friday.

A third U.S. service member stationed at the base is reported missing.

Trump has commented on the fatal attack only once since Friday, calling the soldiers’ deaths “a very sad thing” during a phone call with NewsNation’s Hannah Brandt on Saturday.

Atlantic columnist Tom Nichols on Sunday penned an editorial condemning this brief response.

"Two more deaths are not, as Trump calls them, merely a “very sad thing," he wrote. "But the president has not seen fit, in all this time, to give one address to the American people or to Congress about why he plunged the United States into war, the global economy into chaos, and young Americans into danger."

The president spent Saturday partly at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, a club that has a $125,000 member initiation fee to join.

Later today, Trump is slated to appear at the World Cup final.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:13:08 +0000

'Full-fledged disaster': Trump's new sanction demand fuels rage and conspiracy rhetoric

Kathleen Culliton
July 19, 2026
RAW STORY

Donald Trump speaks in Des Moines, Iowa. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

President Donald Trump's Sunday morning demand that Republicans "add Iran to the Russian Sanctions Bill" after two U.S. service members were killed in Jordan has fueled outrage and the spread of conspiracy theories online.

Trump's Truth Social comment on the fatal war in Iran referenced death only in his reliance on the name of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

"Republicans should add Iran to the Russian Sanctions Bill," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "That’s what Lindsey wanted to do."

This comment appears to be a correction of one Trump made earlier in the week — saying Graham would have wanted the Senate to pass the Clarity Act — that reportedly made one ally "wince."

“The most obvious and logical way [to honor Graham] would be the sanctions bill, because it’s his bill,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told Politico. “You’re not making anything up."

The bi-partisan bill would slap sanctions on buyers of Russian oil and gas, according to Politico, in a report describing Graham as a "one of the chamber’s fiercest Russia hawks."

"The problem is, the sanctions bill still faces serious doubts among some Republicans," Politico reported. "Graham at multiple points over the past year believed he had talked Trump into backing the measure, only for it to be put on ice as Trump tried to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin."

On Sunday, Trump's oft-reported praise of Putin spurred Garry Kasparov, an anti-authoritarian activist, to suggest the Truth Social post foreshadowed a new change to the legislation.

"Soon, Trump will be saying that Graham really only wanted Iran to be on the sanctions bill and not Russia at all, and that in fact, in private, he thought Putin was a strong leader they could work with," Kasparov wrote.

Meidas Touch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski called out Trump for having lifted the sanctions in June.

"Seems like only yesterday the Trump Admin was lifting sanctions on Iran and declaring victory," he wrote.

Activist podcaster Amy Siskind responded by citing recent Wall Street Journal reporting that Iran pocketed up to $6 billion from oil shipments after those sanctions were lifted.

"Now Iran is is using that money to target and kill US troops, likely with the help of intelligence from China and Russia," Siskind wrote. "What a full-fledged disaster of foreign policy!"

But conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer celebrated Trump's comment and used it as an excuse to recirculate her baseless theory that Graham's "sudden death" had been orchestrated by Russian and Iranian operatives — despite his office confirming cardiovascular disease was the root cause.

"President Trump just called for Republicans to add Iran to the Russian sanctions bill," Loomer wrote. "Great idea. And then the DOJ needs to arrest every single American Woke Reich influencer who is colluding with Russia and Iran and attending their state sponsored propaganda tours. Their assets should be frozen."

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:43:05 +0000

Partido Lakas ng Masa (The Philippines): Condemn the renewed US war of aggression against Iran

By Partido Lakas ng Masa
Published 18 July, 2026
First published at Ang Masa Para sa Sosyalismo.
No to the Philippines being drawn into the U.S. war agenda against the interests of the Filipino people.
We strongly condemn the United States and Israel for once again undermining efforts toward a ceasefire and negotiated settlement with Iran. Their renewed military attacks constitute an illegal and immoral war of aggression that further destabilises an already volatile situation, and pushes the Middle East closer to a wider and more destructive conflict.
The latest escalation follows the collapse of negotiations over the implementation of the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), particularly disputes over the management of the Strait of Hormuz. Beneath this lies a deeper strategic struggle over control of one of the world’s most critical energy corridors. Tehran has long viewed Washington’s objective as weakening Iran’s strategic leverage over the Strait and consolidating an alternative shipping corridor through Omani waters and beyond Iran’s influence.
Trump’s rhetoric also shifted recently, declaration that the ceasefire was over, calling the Iranians “scum” and threatening to resume bombing to “finish the job.” Tehran also viewed the US-brokered Lebanese-Israeli agreement — which linked Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon to Hezbollah’s disarmament — as a violation of the terms of the MOU.
It was clear that the U.S. was preparing another round of war.
Rather than resolving the conflict, renewed military escalation will only deepen regional and global instability. Global oil markets remain fragile, and further disruption to energy supplies threatens to increase fuel prices, inflation, transport costs, food prices, and the overall cost of living worldwide. At a time when millions are already struggling with economic hardship, reckless US military intervention risks triggering a wider global economic and political crisis.
Countries such as the Philippines, which host US military troops, bases, and facilities, are placed at even greater risk. As Washington diverts military resources to West Asia while expanding its military build-up in the Asia-Pacific, the Philippines is increasingly being drawn into the US global war agenda — endless wars instead of peace.
This undermines national sovereignty and increases the danger that the Filipino people will be dragged into conflicts that threaten their interests.
The United States must immediately end its war of aggression against Iran, and return to genuine diplomacy and negotiations.
Governments internationally must act urgently to prevent further escalation and uphold peace based on respect for national sovereignty, the peaceful and political settlement of disputes, and the fundamental rights of all peoples.
PLM likewise demands that the Marcos Jr. administration pursue a genuinely independent foreign policy rather than subordinating Philippine interests to US strategic military objectives. The expanding US military presence and activities in the Philippines threaten national sovereignty, undermine regional peace, and expose the Filipino people to the dangers of an escalating confrontation among major powers.
Lasting peace cannot be achieved through bombs, sanctions, and military intimidation, but through justice, mutual respect and self-determination.
July 14, 2026

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:37:17 +0000

Trump’s ‘All Stick, No Carrot’ Iran Policy Has No Exit
by Greg Pence | Jul 16, 2026 |
The ceasefire was supposed to mark the beginning of the end of a crisis. Instead, it quickly became a symbol of strategic failure. With renewed clashes in the Strait of Hormuz, fresh U.S. strikes on Iranian military targets, and Tehran’s retaliation, the last hopes that the Donald Trump administration could manage the Iran crisis through negotiations have collapsed. What remains today is not a clear path toward an agreement, but a return to the familiar instruments that have defined U.S. policy for years: economic pressure, military threats, and the use of hard power.
This time, however, there is one crucial difference. The Trump administration is no longer simply pursuing a policy of maximum pressure; it has entered a phase that can best be described as “all stick, no carrot.” The problem is not that Washington lacks coercive tools. The problem is that the incentives meant to transform pressure into a political settlement have lost their credibility.
Before the ceasefire collapsed, Trump’s strategy rested on a dual equation: raising the cost of Iranian resistance while simultaneously offering the prospect of economic benefits in exchange for an agreement. The White House hoped that a combination of military pressure, sanctions, promises of easing economic restrictions, higher Iranian oil exports, and renewed investment would convince Tehran that a deal was preferable to continued confrontation. In other words, the stick was supposed to bring Iran to the negotiating table, while the carrot was supposed to keep it there.
The collapse of the ceasefire, however, weakened the second half of that equation. When a process intended to reduce tensions once again ends in military exchanges, the credibility of any future political promise inevitably declines. From Tehran’s perspective, the central question is no longer simply how much pressure Washington can exert, but whether any future agreement can be trusted. If a diplomatic process cannot prevent a rapid return to confrontation, why should the next agreement be any different?
As a result, what remains available to the Trump administration today is largely the punitive side of the equation: sanctions, threats, and military strikes. But this raises a fundamental question: why does the White House believe that instruments which previously failed to compel Iran to accept American demands will now produce a different outcome?
This is precisely where Trump’s policy encounters its central contradiction. Pressure is effective only when it not only raises costs but also offers a viable exit. The history of diplomacy shows that even the harshest pressure campaigns have succeeded only when the targeted state believed that changing its behavior would bring tangible benefits. Threats without the possibility of compromise gradually cease to be instruments of negotiation and become instruments of punishment.
The Trump administration now finds itself trapped by this missing link. The greater the pressure, the more difficult it becomes to create the political space necessary for an agreement. And as the prospects for an agreement diminish, the White House feels compelled to intensify pressure further in order to demonstrate the success of its policy. The result is a cycle in which every new step demands another, without necessarily bringing Washington any closer to its stated objectives.
This is the “all stick, no carrot” trap. The problem is not a shortage of power, but an inability to convert power into a durable political outcome. The United States still possesses the capacity to impose economic and military pressure, but possessing tools is not the same as possessing a strategy. Bombing can send signals, sanctions can impose costs, and military threats can create temporary deterrence, but none of them alone can resolve a complex political crisis.
Supporters of this approach may argue that greater pressure will eventually force Iran to retreat. Yet this argument faces an uncomfortable question: what has changed this time? If economic pressure, political isolation, and military threats failed to produce Washington’s desired agreement in previous rounds, why should the same instruments succeed now without a credible political offer?
This is precisely where the Trump administration lacks a convincing answer. If the objective is an agreement, agreements do not emerge without incentives. If the objective is to change Iran’s behavior, Washington must explain what new factor has altered the equation. And if the objective is merely to increase costs, then this is no longer a strategy for ending the crisis, but one for managing it indefinitely.
The consequences extend far beyond Iran and the United States. Continued cycles of attack and retaliation increase the risk of a wider conflict in the Persian Gulf, threaten global energy security, and leave Washington’s allies more concerned with crisis management than with building a sustainable regional order. Each new round of escalation consumes additional political capital and resources without providing any guarantee of a lasting outcome.
The paradox of Trump’s policy is that, in seeking to demonstrate strength, it may ultimately leave him with fewer options than before. Retreating from pressure can easily be portrayed as political defeat, yet continuing along the same path offers no assurance of success. The longer the crisis persists, the more obvious the gap becomes between America’s instruments and its declared objectives.
Ultimately, the central weakness of Trump’s Iran policy is not that its stick is too small. It is that it assumes the stick alone can accomplish what only a combination of pressure and diplomacy can achieve. The Trump administration promised to secure a better agreement through American power, yet with the collapse of the ceasefire, the bargaining element has disappeared from the equation, leaving only pressure behind.
Successful foreign policy is measured not only by its ability to inflict costs, but also by its ability to end crises. Trump may impose additional sanctions, strike more targets, and raise the costs for Tehran, but until he can answer a simple question — what comes after more pressure? — his Iran policy will remain little more than a strategy of attrition.
The return to an “all stick, no carrot” approach is not evidence of a new strategy. It is evidence of a strategic deadlock in which Washington can still apply pressure, but no longer possesses a credible path for turning pressure into political success.
Greg Pence is an international studies graduate of University of San Francisco and my articles have been published on websites like Middle East Monitor.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:24:28 +0000
‘Couldn’t care less’: Trump finally weighs in on deadly Iran war flare up

Alexander Willis
July 19, 2026
RAW STORY

U.S. President Donald Trump views North Portico renovations as he returns to the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 11, 2026. REUTERS/Aaron Schwartz

President Donald Trump finally weighed in Saturday on the deadly U.S.-Iran flare-up that has killed at least two U.S. service members, telling a NewsNation reporter he "couldn't care less" about reports that Iran walked away from the tentative ceasefire.

"I couldn't care less," Trump told NewsNation's Hannah Brandt by phone when asked about Iranian officials suspending the memorandum of understanding, Brandt wrote in a post on X.

Brandt also asked Trump to comment on the two U.S. service members who were killed at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan on Friday from retaliatory strikes from Iran. A third U.S. service member remains missing, U.S. Central Command announced on Saturday.

“Very sad, it’s a very sad thing,” Trump said of the two killed U.S. service members, according to Brandt. “We hate to see it happen. It’s in service to our country.”

Trump, who on Saturday was spotted at his golf club in New Jersey, reiterated to Brandt during their call that it was still vital that the United States “never [allow] Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

The Iranian strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base prompted the United States to launch a new wave of strikes on Iran Saturday, the eighth such wave of strikes since negotiations between the United States and Iran broke down last weekend.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also weighed in on the deaths of the two U.S. service members on Saturday, writing in a social media post on X that “their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve.”

Aside from his remarks to Brandt, Trump did not issue any public statements on Saturday in the wake of the deaths of the two U.S. service members, sparking outrage after reports suggested he spent Saturday at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, a club that has a $125,000 member initiation fee to join.

'Due to Trump’s illegal war': U.S. service members' deaths met with despair and rage

Kathleen Culliton
July 18, 2026
RAW STORY

A satellite image shows smoke billowing near an oil facility in Ahmadi Governorate, Kuwait, July 18, 2026. European Union/Copernicus Sentinel-2/Handout via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT.

News that two service members had been killed by direct Iranian fire rocked the nation on Saturday.

U.S. Central Command announced the two service member's death, a third's disappearance and four medical evacuations one day after a base was attacked in Jordon.

"Out of respect for the families, CENTCOM will withhold additional information, including the identities of the fallen warriors, until 24 hours after the next of kin have been notified," the statement read.

Sixteen U.S. service members have been killed and more than 430 wounded since the war began, the Associated Press reported.

"The battle over the Strait of Hormuz has intensified in a conflict increasingly focused on control of the essential waterway that previously carried a fifth of the world’s crude oil," the Associated Press reported.

"The strikes threaten civilians and infrastructure, including desalination plants for drinking water, while the global economy again is on alert."

Americans responded to the news with words of outrage and despair.

"Really awful, dark, foreboding developments in the Middle East over the last 24 hours," wrote MS NOW analyst Sam Stein. "Hard to see how you deescalate from here."

Political strategist Mike Nellis condemned President Donald Trump for mounting an attack on Iran without approval from Congress.

"I will ask again: for what?" Nellis wrote. "Trump has no plan, no clear mission, and he’s getting our sons and daughters killed for his own vanity."

Nellis later added, "I’ll tell you what: if Barack Obama had launched an illegal war, 16 U.S. service members were dead, and another was missing in action, the MAGA media machine would be frothing at the mouth. Right now? Quiet as a church mouse. F---ing cowards."

Political podcaster Shaykh Sulaiman said simply, "Due to Trump’s illegal war."

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:53:26 +0000

Shocking Revelations Out of West Antarctica

Robert Hunziker
July 17, 2026

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Image by Cassie Matias.
Social Security is a Problem of Income Distribution, Not Demographics
Dean Baker
July 17, 2026
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The rich almost completely control debate in this country. There is no better proof of this fact than the current debate over the future of Social Security.
This has been conveniently framed as a problem of demographics. You know, too many people living long into retirement and not enough kids entering the workforce. That sounds compelling, as long as we don’t try to think about it too much.
First, we knew this basic story long ago. On the life expectancy side, we’re actually doing somewhat worse (better from the standpoint of the program’s finances) than was expected in 1982, the last time there was a major reform to the program. The projections from that year showed men living on average 16.6 years after they turned 65.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:45:06 +0000

Electoral setback in Colombia opens a new phase of struggle

By Ted Zuur
Published 18 July, 2026
First published at New Politics.
The razor thin loss of the left in the presidential election in Peru and the left’s rejection of the legitimacy of the election of US citizen and ultra-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia have set the stage for a new period of social and class conflict in Latin America.
The political temperature in Colombia continues to rise following the contested official election results that have made extreme-right wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella the presumptive president elect.
President Gustavo Petro has rejected the electoral results and called for national demonstrations on July 20 th , the day the new congress is to be seated. He wrote on X,
“The president of Colombia does not recognize the legitimacy of the incoming government. Abelardo did not win the elections.
“The national majority is called upon this July 20th to raise the cry of national independence in all public squares.”
Since the elections
On June 24, three days after the final round of Colombia’s presidential election, Senator Ivan Cepeda, the presidential candidate of the left-wing Pacto Historico and Alianza por la Vida, conceded the presidential race to Abelardo de la Espriella, the right-wing candidate and now the presumptive president elect of Colombia.
Cepeda said, “At this stage of the scrutiny of the ballots and voting, I have decided to accept the results of that process. They indicate that Abelardo de la Espriella is the new president of the Republic. I do it as an act of democratic responsibility… However, acceptance of the electoral result does not mean giving up the truth or remaining silent in the face of events that we consider serious and that marked this presidential campaign.”
Then, just six days later, Cepeda demanded that de la Espriella renounce his US citizenship and his ties to US intelligence and police agencies as a condition of assuming the presidency of Colombia. De la Espriella is a citizen of Colombia by birth, a naturalized citizen of the United States who has sworn to renounce all allegiances to all other countries, and also a citizen of Italy.
Cepeda called on the judicial authorities to act to protect Colombian sovereignty and called on the people of the country to engage in peaceful civil disobedience if de la Espriella does not renounce his ties to the USA.
President Gustavo Petro’s rejection of the election results and call for demonstrations began with the statement that,
“We have all the information regarding the IP server located in Los Angeles, California, owned by the Bautista brothers, which was integrated into the vote counting operation. Algorithms were used that substantially altered the vote count in favor of Abelardo. The algorithms that rigged the election results were used with the voter registration lists of those who never vote, replacing them with voters who could vote multiple times or with no registered voters at the polling stations.
“The polling stations abroad where Abelardo obtained 177,000 more votes than Cepeda had poll workers from Colombia who were not residents of the US or Spain, which is illegal. These polling stations also included voters brought in for the World Cup who were able to vote seven times using the names of those who never vote.
“The same thing happened in several regions of Antioquia and Medellín, in Norte de Santander, and at polling stations in northern Bogotá…. “The company that supplied the Bautista brothers with flawed algorithms and other support is an Israeli private intelligence firm called BlackCube.”
The opaque vote collection and counting software is owned by a private firm known as Thomas Greg and Sons. The company is owned by the Bautista family, Colombians now based in the United States. They have close ties to right-wing establishment politicians in both the United States and Colombia, and some of them have been convicted of financial crimes in the USA.
Separately, Petro announced that the government has uncovered evidence that a prominent Trump supporter in the United States named Dan Newlin had illegally donated $1.8 million to de la Espriella’s campaign. Newlin is a criminal defense attorney who has offices in Florida, Illinois, and in Medellin, Colombia. Trump had nominated him to be US ambassador to Colombia, but the nomination was rejected by the GOP dominated Senate Foreign Relations committee.
De la Espriella’s political position is rapidly deteriorating before he can even take office. Now, he says that his first action in office will be to issue a decree to establish an “urban defense force” reminiscent of Convivir, the legal cover used in the past by the Colombian paramilitary militias and death squads.
Although the situation in the country is very fluid and uncertain, tensions are rapidly rising between the left and right in Colombia, and between Latin American countries and the United States.
Who really won the election?
The National Election Council’s official vote count gave Abelardo de la Espriella 12,959,542 votes, less than 1% more than the 12,708,712 votes of Senator Ivan Cepeda. The voter turnout of 63.6 % was a record for this country.
The final complete official results were announced even though there had already been more than 57,000 challenges to irregularities such as vote buying and electronic fraud before Petro’s own announcement.
The widespread incidents of various types of fraud and irregularities had already led many supporters of the Pacto Historico to question Cepeda’s concession.
Luis Guillermo Perez Casas, a leader of the Pacto Historico, is heading the effort to collect evidence throughout the country at acciondenulidad2026@gmail.com. Casas is a human rights lawyer who served as Secretary General for the Americas of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). So far, nearly 200,000 Colombians have signed up to help the effort.
A wide variety of irregularities and frauds have been recorded in addition to those related directly to US intervention. They include votes cast by dead people and children, photos of votes used to collect payments from vote buyers, officials of the registrar of voters preventing poll watchers from doing their jobs, and changes made to vote certifications after they had been filed.
If the vote count is not overturned, de la Espriella will take office on August 7. Until then, the current leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, will remain in office although he has already begun the transitional process of handing over the government to de la Espriella.
Under Colombia’s constitution, the losing candidate of the final round of voting for president automatically becomes a member of the country’s newly elected Senate. Nevertheless, the right is now talking about trying to block Cepeda from taking his seat in the senate if Cepeda does not recognize the official election results. If seated, Cepeda will become the President of the Senate (with powers similar to the Senate majority leader in the USA) since the Pacto Historico has the largest block in the Senate. The members of the newly elected Senate and Chamber of Representatives will be seated on July 20.
A polarized and divided country
This election continued trends apparent in the last election: while the multiparty system lives on in the legislative branch and in departmental and municipal governments, Colombia’s multiparty system is collapsing towards a new two-party system in presidential elections and the center is disappearing.
The new binary system is not a repeat of the old system of the Liberal Party and Conservative Party. Those old parties were led by different sections of the ruling class which had evolved from before the country’s struggle for independence. Their corrupt but violence plagued rule was transformed with the inauguration of the country’s 1991 constitution.
Instead, those two old parties and the various factions and machines of which they had been composed are now coalescing into one new right wing ruling class conglomeration.
They still hate each other as much as ever, but more than they hate each other, they fear the growing power of the working class and the oppressed. That power is coalescing into the new political party called the Pacto Historico.
The Pacto Historico is the current incarnation of a series of electoral coalitions of the left which formed for reasons more closely related to electoral law requirements and a drive to elect leaders of the left than from any serious desire to create a unified party of the working class and the oppressed. Despite its often reactive, haphazard, and improvised history, the Pacto has become a very close approximation to a mass party of the working class and oppressed. Its voter base consists mostly of the urban working class, and the organizations which support it include the country’s unions, much of its indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, and large parts of the feminist, LGBTQ+ and environmentalist movements.
A good approximation of the ascendant growth curve of the left in Colombia is found in its presidential election results which you can see in the chart below.
Year Candidate Party First Round Second Round
votes % votes %
2002 Luis Eduardo Garzon Polo Democratico Independiente 680,000 6.16%
2006 Carlos Gaviria Polo
Ukraine and Putin’s Great Russian chauvinism against Lenin

By Eric Toussaint
Published 17 July, 2026
First published at CADTM.
Why does Vladimir Putin accuse Lenin of having “created Ukraine”? Behind this statement lies far more than a mere dispute amongst historians: it expresses an imperial conception of Russia under Putin’s leadership and constitutes one of the ideological foundations of the war against Ukraine. To understand this statement, we must look back at the debate between Lenin and Stalin in 1922–1923 concerning the creation of the USSR and what Lenin termed ‘Great Russian chauvinism’.
Vladimir Putin denounces Lenin’s ‘crime’ against Russia at the time of the USSR’s creation. He claims that Lenin favoured Ukraine over the legitimate interests of the Russian people. He also condemns the Russian Revolution of 1917, accusing the Bolsheviks led by Lenin of staging a coup against Russia’s interests by bringing the war against Germany to an end. In reality, Putin considers that the Tsarist empire served Russia’s interests.
Vladimir Lenin’s (1870–1924) criticism of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’, expressed in numerous writings throughout his life, and his stance in favour of the right of peoples to self-determination are key factors in understanding the political structure of the Soviet Union and the contemporary debates surrounding its legacy.
In a text published in 1916, in the midst of the First World War, Lenin wrote
Victorious socialism must achieve complete democracy and, consequently, not only bring about the complete equality of nations, but also give effect to the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, i.e., the right to free political secession…
The right of nations to self-determination means only the right to independence in a political sense, the right to free, political secession from the oppressing nation…
In Russia — where no less than 57%, i.e., over 100,000,000 of the population, belong to oppressed nations, where those nations mainly inhabit the border provinces, where some of those nations are more cultured than the Great Russians, where the political system is distinguished by its particularly barbarous and medieval character, where the bourgeois-democratic revolution has not yet been completed — the recognition of the right of the nations oppressed by tsarism to free secession from Russia is absolutely obligatory for Social-Democracy in the interests of its democratic and socialist tasks.
From 1922 to 1923, during the discussions about the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Lenin was concerned about the persistence of behaviours inherited from the Russian Empire within the Soviet state apparatus. He used the term ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ to describe the tendency of Russian political elites to regard the other peoples of the former empire as naturally subordinate to Russia. In his view, this imperial mentality posed a major threat to a multinational socialist state, as it risked transforming the new Soviet state into a mere continuation of the empire in a different ideological guise.
These concerns were clearly evident during the debate on the structure of the future Soviet state. Joseph Stalin, then People’s Commissar for Nationalities, proposed a plan for ‘autonomisation’ under which non-Russian republics would be integrated into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as autonomous units. Lenin opposed this proposal and instead advocated the creation of a formal federation of legally equal republics. Under this model, each republic would join the union voluntarily and retain, at least in theory, the right to withdraw from it.
The so-called ‘Georgian’ crisis of 1922 further radicalised Lenin’s position. Georgian Bolshevik leaders accused Stalin and other representatives of the central government of brutally imposing their country’s integration into a Transcaucasian federation. In his notes, dictated at the end of 1922, Lenin severely criticised the conduct of Stalin and his collaborators, arguing that their methods were precisely indicative of the Great Russian chauvinism which he considered particularly dangerous. In his view, nations that had been victims of Russian domination must be accorded special treatment in order to guarantee genuine equality between peoples (see the box on Lenin versus Stalin regarding the Georgian question).
Lenin’s approach explains the institutional logic adopted during the founding of the USSR in December 1922. The Soviet state was conceived as a union of national republics possessing their own state institutions and, under the constitutional texts, the right to secede. For Lenin, this arrangement was intended to provide guarantees to the peoples formerly dominated by the Russian Empire and to prevent the new socialist union from being perceived as a reconstituted Russian Empire.
A century later, this institutional architecture has become a central focus of Vladimir Putin’s criticism of the Leninist legacy. In several public addresses, particularly in the early 2020s, he asserted that the federal structure, based on national republics with the right to secession, constituted a ‘time bomb’ planted within the Soviet state. According to this interpretation, the Bolsheviks artificially created national entities with borders, state institutions and a constitutional right to secession, which contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Putin versus Lenin: The rehabilitation of Great Russian chauvinism
Here is an extract from the speech delivered by Putin on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022:
"Let me therefore begin by stating that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, or more precisely, by Bolshevik and Communist Russia. The process began almost immediately after the 1917 revolution, and Lenin and his comrades-in-arms carried it out in a manner that was very brutal for Russia itself – through secession, by tearing away parts of Russia’s historic territories.”
Here is a second extract from the speech delivered on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, in which V. Putin affirms his support for Stalin’s position as opposed to that of Lenin and the majority of the Bolshevik leadership:
Allow me to remind you that after the October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed, the Bolsheviks began to build a new state despite numerous disagreements amongst themselves. Stalin, who in 1922 held the dual roles of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) and People’s Commissar for Nationalities, proposed building the country on the principles of decentralisation, that is to say, granting the republics – the future administrative-territorial units – broad powers as and when they joined the unified state.
Lenin criticised this plan and proposed making concessions to the nationalists, as he called them at the time – the ‘independents’. It was Lenin’s ideas on an essentially confederal state structure and on the right of nations to self-determination, including secession, that formed the foundation of the Soviet state: first in 1922, they were enshrined in the Declaration on the U Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and then, after Lenin’s death, in the 1924 Constitution of the USSR…
From the perspective of the historical destiny of Russia and its peoples, the Leninist principles of state-building were not merely a mistake; they were, as they say, far worse than a mistake. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, this became perfectly clear...
In fact, as I have already said, Bolshevik policy led to the emergence of Soviet Ukraine, which, even today, can rightly be called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine’. He was its creator and architect. This is fully confirmed by archival documents, including Lenin’s strict directives on the Donbas, which was literally embedded within Ukraine.1
Putin’s critique is rooted in a historical vision that runs counter to Lenin’s. It is based on the idea of historical continuity between the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the contemporary Russian Federation, as well as on the concept of a shared civilisational space encompassing several peoples descended from the former empire.
Putin develops a historical vision according to which Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians form a single historical people descended from mediaeval Russia. The main argument centres on a ‘triune Russian nation’ comprising Russians (Great Russians), Ukrainians (Little Russians) and Belarusians (White Russians). This is the position that Putin sets out in a lengthy article published on the Kremlin’s website in July 2021.
From this perspective, the organisation of the USSR into national republics is seen as a political error, or even a crime, that undermined the unity of a historical space regarded as fundamentally integrated.
This divergence highlights a striking contrast between two conceptions of the national question in the post-imperial Russian sphere. Lenin sought to prevent the political domination of the historically dominant nation by establishing a theoretically voluntary federation and recognising the people’s right to self-determination. By contrast, the contemporary criticism of this legacy by Putin and his supporters emphasises the need to preserve the political unity of a shared historical space and tends to call into question the right to national secession.
Thus, the current debate surrounding the structure of the USSR and its legacy can be interpreted as a revival, in a new form, of the problem that Lenin had already identified in the early 1920s: the tension between building a multinational state based on the formal equality of peoples and the temptation to reconstitute a form of centralisation inherited from the former empire.
For Lenin, the creation of national republics and the right to secession were means of avoiding Russian domination and of building a voluntary union of the peoples of the former empire.
For Putin, by contrast, these decisions are presented as a historical crime committed against the Russian people, one which weakened the Russian state and led to the fragmentation of the Soviet space after 1991.
Thus, when Putin speaks of ‘Lenin’s Ukraine’, it is not merely a historical observation: it is a direct criticism of the Soviet federal model based on national self-determination, which Lenin had specifically designed to combat ‘Great Russian chauvinism’.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the conflict between Lenin and Stalin over the national question is not merely a matter of Soviet history. It sheds direct light on the ideology underpinning Vladimir Putin’s policies. Whereas Lenin saw ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ as a mortal danger to equality among the peoples of the former Tsarist empire, Putin, on the contrary, claims the historical continuity of that empire and condemns the right of nations to self-determination. His attack on ‘Lenin’s Ukraine’ is therefore not merely a historical critique: it constitutes an ideological justification for denying the political existence of the Ukrainian nation and, in the final analysis, for the war being waged against it.
Recognising the right of peoples to self-determination does not mean endorsing all the policies pursued by their governments. It means, amongst other things, refusing to accept that a state can deny the existence of a neighbouring nation in the name of so-called historical or imperial continuity.
Lenin versus Stalin on the Georgian question

Contemporary challenges for the Malaysian left

By Jeyakumar Devaraj
Published 17 July, 2026
[Editor’s note: Socialist Party of Malaysia activist Kirisna Veni Singham will be speaking at Ecosocialism 2026, September 11-13, Magan-djin/Brisbane, Australia. For more information on the conference visit ecosocialism.org.au.]
First published at Tricontinental.
To understand the current situation in Malaysia we need a brief overview of the history and political and economic development of the country. The Portuguese first came to Southeast Asia in the early 16th century. They, and the Dutch who came about 130 years later, had mercantile interests — they wanted to control the trade routes so that they could acquire the commodities that were in demand in the European market. Hence, they wanted control of the shipping routes and main ports, but were not interested in controlling the hinterland.
The industrial revolution in Europe created a hunger for raw materials such as tin, coffee, sugar, and rubber. The colonial powers needed control over the land in South East Asia to be able to mine, and to open plantations. They also needed cheap labour for the production of these commodities. The local population was not too inclined to slave in difficult conditions for low wages.1 Also, the British thought it best to not disrupt the indigenous Malay population, but instead relied on labour from India and China to develop the colonial economy. This led to a massive influx of Indians and Chinese to the Malayan peninsula starting in the mid-19th century.
Malaya, being colonised by the most ‘virile’ industrial power of that time, experienced the fastest development of mines, plantations, roads, railways, and ports, compared to Indonesia, Indochina, and the Philippines. This resulted in massive demographic changes — at Independence in 1957, the immigrant population of Chinese and Indians was actually slightly more than half the total population of Malaya. The class character of Malayan society had changed dramatically in the colonial period. Prior to 1800, the vast majority of the population were peasants and fishermen engaged in a subsistence economy. The colonial economy generated a large working class in the plantations, tin mines and the railways, and this in turn sparked off a network of supporting economic activities — market gardening, import of food and other basic necessities, retail trade, local production of some consumer products, transport, etc.2
In the meantime, the native Malay population was shielded from the colonial economy, and their lifestyle and economic activities did not change much. The British were outwardly ‘respectful’ of the Sultans of the various States and provided handsomely for them, as this helped sustain the myth that the British were benevolent ‘advisors’ to the native rulers. Land was plentiful in Malaya, so the British had no cause to deprive the Malay peasants of their land. But they enacted a law that forbade the Malay farmers from converting their rice fields to plantations of rubber or other commodities for export.3 Rice was the staple grain for the Malays as well as the immigrant Chinese and Indians. The British needed a sufficient supply of inexpensive rice for immigrant labour.
The only strata within the indigenous community which resented British rule were the Malay chieftains and lesser royalties whose sources of income — levies on the produce of the peasants, contributions for the use of rivers, etc. — were compromised when the British took over the administration of land in Malaya. There were, therefore, a series of revolts by these chieftains in the late 19th century, but they were not able to get the support of the peasants (whose way of life had not been much affected by the colonial economy) or the Sultans who were well looked after by the British.4
The Malayan Communist Party and the independence struggle
The Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was founded in 1930 in Singapore. The MCP retreated into the jungle in early 1942 and resisted the Japanese occupation of Malaya as the Malayan People Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA). The MPAJA was largely ethnic Chinese as the Japanese had a pronounced anti-Chinese bias. The MCP was recognised by the British post-World War II, with its leader Chin Peng receiving the Order of the British Empire in London. The MCP opened offices in several towns in post-World War II Malaya and continued organising the population.
Independence was in the air in Asia, spurred by vibrant independence movements in China, India and in Indonesia by the end of World War II. Though many of the Malay and Indian nationalists had been on the opposite side during the Japanese occupation, the MCP managed to set up a broad-based coalition called the All Malayan Council of Joint Action (AMCJA).5 It comprised the trade union movement, the MPAJA, the Malayan Democratic Union (a party set up by urban English educated Malayans), the Malayan Indian Congress, some Chinese business interests, and others. The AMCJA formed a pact with PUTERA, a coalition of Malay nationalists comprising the Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya, Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (API), and the Angkatan Wanita Sedar (AWAS).
The AMCJA-PUTERA coalition had a series of discussions that resulted in the ‘Peoples Constitution’ detailing how the nation would be governed post-Independence. However, the British rebuffed the efforts of this coalition to initiate negotiations for independence. The AMCJA-PUTERA coalition called for a Hartal that was carried out on 20 October 1947. All activity in Malaya was stopped for a day — a nationwide strike where even businesses did not open.
The British struck back. API was banned in July 1947 and several of its leaders including the charismatic Ahmad Boestamam was detained and imprisoned. The British then passed legislation to control the militant trade union movement. Unions had to limit themselves to specific sectors of the economy. The then-existing General Labour Unions had to reorganise themselves into smaller sector-based unions and register with the Registrar of Trade Union (RTU). The RTU however refused to recognise many of the re-organised unions. When they attempted to continue to organise the workers, these unions were deemed illegal criminal organisations and their leaders detained. Strikes were met with brutal repression with instances of workers being killed by the authorities.
On 17 June 1948, a unit of the MCP assassinated three British planters in Sg Siput Perak. The British declared the Emergency, arrested thousands of activists and outlawed the MCP, which took to the jungles. In the initial period, MCP units were able to prevail, over-running small rural police stations and even briefly taking over the administration of a rural town, Gua Musang. The British High Commissioner of Malaya, Sir Henry Gurney of Malaya was assassinated on 6 October 1951.
The British countered with the Brigg’s Plan in 1950 to deny food supplies to the communist forces. All the Chinese farmers scattered in the peri-urban regions were forced to move into 540 security camps, with barbed wire fencing all around, and a single-entry point guarded by the military or police. The farmers were allowed to tend to their crops during the day but were under curfew from dusk to dawn. Plantation workers were not permitted to buy rice. The management of estates gave each family a daily ration of cooked rice depending on the size of the family. The indigenous community, the Orang Asli, too was similarly confined in security camps.
The communist insurgency, deprived of food, was not able to sustain larger units. A decision was taken in 1952 to retreat to the Malayan-Thai border.6 The British also had a propaganda blitz where they painted the MCP as Chinese dominated and injurious to the long-term welfare of the Malay population.
Meanwhile the British set up Legislative Councils with representatives from the elites of Malayan society — the Malay aristocracy and non-Malay business leaders. They recognised United Malay National Organisation (UMNO) that was set up by Malay aristocrats and elites in colonial civil service. A national election was called in 1955 in which the Alliance Party, a coalition led by UMNO, won 51 out of the 52 seats contested. It had campaigned on the pledges of Amnesty for the MCP and Independence within two years. The leader of UMNO, Tunku Abdul Rahman was designated as the Chief Minister of Malaya.
The MCP responded to the 1955 election pledges by indicating that it was interested in Amnesty. The MCP could see by then that winning the armed struggle would be near impossible. They wanted access to the people and the electoral space. A talk was held between Alliance leaders and the MCP in Baling, Kedah in December 1955. The MCP were prepared to lay down arms and even dissolve the MCP. They wanted the right to return to Malaya and participate in the political process.6 The Tunku insisted on surrender, detention, and rehabilitation. An agreement could not be reached. The MCP leaders felt that Tunku had to take a strong stand to impress the British so as to win independence. They hoped that negotiations would resume after independence, but the MCP had to wait 30 long years for that. In August 1957, the British granted independence to Malaya helmed by the Alliance government.
The economic development of post-independence Malaysia
Malaya was primarily a producer of primary commodities during independence (1957). Rubber was its biggest export, and tin was the second largest. The plantation companies have since diversified to oil palm — now 5.6 million ha out of the 8.4 million hectares of agricultural land in Malaysia is dedicated to oil palm cultivation, while rubber is grown on 1 million ha of mainly smallholder farms. In the 1980s, the government managed to acquire a majority of shares in the plantation companies listed on the London Stock Exchange and currently more than 60% of plantation land is held by government-linked companies.
In the 1970s, the Chief Minister of Penang then, Dr. Lim Chong Eu, pioneered special economic zones catering for multinational electronic companies looking for lower costs of production. Many multinational corporations opened factories in Penang and a network of supporting factories have evolved over the years. Electronic components are now the largest export commodity of Malaysia, dwarfing oil palm. Employment in the manufacturing sector now accounts for about 18% of total employment, but wages are at about the minimum wage level, and around 30% of all workers in manufacturing are foreign workers. Much of our manufacturing is linked to global chains.
Post-independence, large petroleum deposits were discovered in Malaysia. The government enacted the Petroleum Development Act in 1974 which vested ownership of all petroleum discovered in Malaysia in Petronas, a company fully owned by the Ministry of Finance. Any foreign oil company which discovers petroleum in Malaysia has to negotiate an income sharing agreement with Petronas. Petronas has been contributing between 20 to 40

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:34:15 +0000

Washington’s Two Rogue Allies in the Middle East Face Off
by Ted Galen Carpenter | Jul 16, 2026 |
Allies and clients have frequently entangled their great power patrons in needless geopolitical crises and sometimes even bloody wars. The tragic events leading to World War I in 1914 are a classic example. Serbia helped drag Czarist Russia into that bloody maelstrom and Austria-Hungary did the same to Wilhelmine Germany. Similar dangers exist today in the international system.
Two of Washington’s current most odious and dangerous “loose cannon” allies are Israel and Turkey. U.S. administrations have funded and armed both countries for decades and routinely excused outrageous acts that their clients have committed. Even worse from the standpoint of America’s best interests and purported values, the respective governments have increasingly competitive political and strategic objectives. Such growing animosity could bring them to blows, with the United States being caught in the middle of their feud.
Israel arguably has become the single most brutal and disruptive player in the Middle East. Tel Aviv has pursued its aggressive agenda against multiple Islamic targets. Over the past several years, Israel’s top priority has been to attack opponents in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, and the negative effects on regional and even global stability are devastating.
Brutal actions that Israeli security forces have taken against Palestinian fighters and civilians in Gaza have led to plausible allegations of outright genocide. Credible estimates from a variety of international sources indicate that more than 70,000 Palestinian civilians, including more than 20,000 children, have perished at the hands of those security forces since Oct. 7, 2023. An additional 44,000 children have been injured. Moreover, Tel Aviv’s fighters have apparently targeted journalists for assassination in an effort to cover up their responsibility for such atrocities.
The war in Gaza is not the only case in which Tel Aviv’s actions should be a shameful embarrassment to U.S. officials. Israeli strikes on Iran’s air defenses in the spring of 2025 helped pressure the Trump administration to launch B-2 bomber assaults on Tehran’s nuclear installations. More recently, Tel Aviv’s actions, including missile strikes against Iran and assassinating Iranian leaders, triggered a wider U.S.-led war against Iran.
In addition to its direct acts of aggression against Iran, Tel Aviv expanded and intensified its coercive military presence in Lebanon. The latest measures amount to a de facto Israeli annexation of Lebanese territory south of the Zahrani River.
Israel and Turkey have been notorious violators of both international law and human rights for decades. Their current actions are not a new phenomenon.
An especially blatant instance of territorial aggression was Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus and subsequent seizure of more than one-third of the island in 1974. Indeed, Turkey, a NATO member, has committed blatant acts of aggression against three neighbors, Cyprus, Iraq, and Syria, to secure illicit territorial gains over the decades. Ankara also has received toleration and excuse-making from the United States that is similar to what Israel has enjoyed for such chronic misconduct.
However, the mounting tensions between Tel Aviv and Ankara may soon compel Washington to make some tough choices about which ally should have priority. The clash of regional strategic objectives between Turkey and Israel has been rising since the overthrow of longtime Syrian ruler Bashar al Assad in December 2024. Ankara and Tel Aviv have maneuvered to control the successor regime of Ahmad al-Shaara. Writing in the May 2025 issue of Foreign Affairs, Middle East scholars David Makovsky and Simone Sandmehr noted that Israel and Turkey had taken advantage of the power vacuum in Syria by establishing presences there—”and have already begun to butt heads.”
The authors contended that “Turkey has emerged as the dominant military power in Syria.” However, they pointed out, “Israel also wants more influence in Syria and does not trust that Ankara won’t exploit the power vacuum to support a new wave of Islamic militants under Ankara’s control.” Makovsky and Sandmehr concluded that “Israeli leaders viewed Assad’s ouster as a strategic windfall and are racing to take advantage of his removal by establishing buffer zones and informal spheres of influence in southern Syria.”
The power struggle between Ankara and Tel Aviv has intensified in the period since the Makovsky-Sandmehr article appeared. Israel has boosted its military presence in southern Syria, and Turkey effectively eliminated the autonomous Kurdish stronghold in northern Syria—with Washington’s tacit approval. Overall relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv have grown increasingly tense and acrimonious.
One of the most important challenges for any great power is to never let the actions of a nonessential ally or client undermine the great power’s own best interests. The United States has violated that rule repeatedly with respect to both Israel and Turkey. Tel Aviv’s maneuvers to draw the United States into a war with Iran have created disastrous results for the American people. Even from the narrow standpoint of the Trump administration’s global foreign policy, that conflict has been damaging. Among the negative effects, Washington’s expenditure of weapons puts a severe drain on the U.S. arsenal. Replenishing the weapons that Israel itself has used exacerbates the problem. Various NATO allies, and another U.S. client, Ukraine, are increasingly vocal in their worries and complaints about lack of missiles.
Discontented American taxpayers could legitimately respond that their country should not be involved in the Ukraine war or any of the other armed conflicts. However, absent an unlikely radical change in Washington’s grand strategy toward greater realism and restraint, those soaring costs will continue to be an unpleasant reality.
Matters are likely to become even worse if Israel and Turkey wage war. Washington would then face the prospect of two foreign clients that U.S. leaders consider important assets creating a massive disruption in an already volatile, extremely dangerous region. Trump administration policymakers need to take immediate steps to avoid that nightmare. The United States must not risk suffering a fate similar to that of Czarist Russia or Wilhelmine Germany.
Dr. Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and the Libertarian Institute. He is also a contributing editor to National Security Journal and The American Conservative. He also served in various senior policy positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,600 articles on defense, foreign policy and civil liberties issues. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:32:40 +0000

Competing Visions for Gaza’s Future: Endless Bloodshed Or Bloodless, Sterilized Techno-Concentration Camps

by Andy Worthington | Jul 16, 2026 |
Reprinted from Andy Worthington’s website.
While the attention of the conscious world is, quite correctly, focused right now on Rakefet Prison, an underground detention facility inside Israel’s maximum-security Ramla Prison Complex, where the pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is held without charge or trial, brutalized and in fear of death, it’s important not to forget that, in the Gaza Strip, the surviving Palestinian population is still suffering from an acute and enduring humanitarian crisis.
The crisis is engineered solely by the State of Israel, which has failed to abide by the requirement, in the ceasefire deal agreed last October, to allow 600 trucks of humanitarian aid — containing, at a bare minimum, adequate supplies of food, water, fuel and medical supplies — to enter Gaza every day.
Insight into the humanitarian crisis can be found via regular updates issued by UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), established in 1950, which remains the largest provider of educational and health support to the Palestinians, despite persistent efforts by Israel to destroy it.
The ongoing, Israeli-engineered humanitarian crisis on the ground in Gaza
UNRWA currently runs a total of 116 collective emergency shelters hosting 76,000 internally displaced persons, and in its most recent situation report provides a glimpse into the extent of the crisis and the extent of its involvement in trying to mitigate its worst effects. Between June 16 and 30, for example, UNRWA “distributed around 79 million litres of domestic and drinking water in various areas and from different sources, reaching over 860,000 displaced people daily”, and UNRWA teams also “collected around 6,000 tonnes of solid waste” inside its emergency shelters and the surrounding areas. In total, “More than 1,250 cleaning campaigns were conducted, benefitting over 1.4 million displaced persons”, via “cleaning emergency shelters, cleaning and clearing 500 manholes, as well as water desludging.”
UNRWA currently employs around 11,000 Palestinian personnel, who “continue to provide services and assistance to people in the Gaza Strip”, although all its international personnel have been banned from entering Gaza since January 2025, when a law passed by the Knesset took effect, which prohibited UNRWA’s operations “in areas that Israel considers its sovereign territory, including occupied East Jerusalem”, and sought to ban any contact with Israeli officials.
As UNRWA notes, “Since March 2025, the Israeli authorities have been blocking UNRWA from directly bringing humanitarian personnel and aid into the Gaza Strip. Despite the huge needs on the ground, UNRWA [has] therefore [been] unable to distribute the aid it had pre-positioned outside Gaza, which included enough food parcels, flour, and shelter supplies for hundreds of thousands of people.”
Food is arriving in Gaza via other UN agencies and NGO partners, and, over the two-month period from May 19 to July 11, 27,875 aid trucks reached their destination, with 80% of their contents consisting of food supplies.
Nevertheless, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which also provides regular updates on the humanitarian crisis, in the latest reporting period (from June 29 to July 5), “overcrowding, inadequate shelter, and limited access to medical services, safe water, and sanitation continued heightening public health concerns and undermining people’s safety, dignity, and well-being.”
OCHA reported that, “Despite all ongoing response efforts, communicable diseases remain widespread, with more than 243,000 consultations reported … through 206 disease surveillance sites during the reporting period, and over one in five consultations linked to reportable infectious diseases.” As they added, “Acute respiratory infections and skin diseases remain the leading causes of illness, while waterborne diseases — including acute watery diarrhoea, bloody diarrhoea and acute jaundice syndrome — continue to increase, particularly in Khan Younis. During the reporting period, more than 18,000 cases of chickenpox, ectoparasite infestation and impetigo were [also] recorded.”
OCHA also reported that “essential services for an estimated 350,000 people living with chronic diseases remain severely disrupted”, and that “shortages of medicines, diagnostics and specialized equipment continue to affect the treatment of hypertension, diabetes, kidney disease, cancer and cardiovascular conditions.”
OCHA added that “shortages of critical items and inputs — including fuel, engine oil, generators, specialized equipment — persist across all sectors”, both because of funding shortfalls, and because of “Israeli restrictions that limit what and how much can be taken into Gaza.”
On July 11, Al Jazeera reported on the profound effects of Israel’s deliberate restriction on fuel supplies entering Gaza. With “about 90 percent of power lines destroyed”, hospitals have been obliged to rely on generators for power, but are having to recycle used engine oil because of the lack of fresh supplies, which “has resulted in generators malfunctioning”, or has “affected their performance.”
As a result, power cuts are regularly preventing the running of “essential life-saving medical equipment at hospitals such as ventilators, incubators and monitoring devices”, which “have rendered hospitals semi-dysfunctional and affected thousands of patients and medical staff in Gaza, where the flow of patients caused by new waves of bombings and disease continues.”
As Al Jazeera noted, focusing on Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, “Most of [its] main generators went out of service in early May 2026, when doctors and nurses were already struggling to cope, leaving the hospital to use secondary generators and solar energy or simply cut back on operations.”
Omar al-Ashtal, a surgeon at the hospital, told Al Jazeera that medical teams “are struggling to provide proper and essential services to patients due to erratic power supplies, especially in operating rooms, where electricity is essential.”
As Al Jazeera noted, “Intensive care units, operating rooms, anaesthesia departments and neonatal care are the most affected by the latest power crisis. Any interruptions to these departments can lead to serious life-threatening complications for patients, including babies in incubators.”
For the Israeli government, all of the above must be enormously satisfying, because all they seek, every minute of their wretched genocidal existences, is for Palestinian civilians to keep dying by whatever means possible.
Israel now militarily controls nearly 70% of Gaza
On July 10, NPR reported how, on another front, Israel continues to squeeze the surviving Palestinians into an ever-smaller proportion of their homeland. When the ceasefire deal was agreed last October, Israeli forces militarily occupied around half of the Gaza Strip, designated via a “yellow line”, which they marked with yellow-painted concrete blocks, from which they were supposed to steadily withdraw as the ceasefire progressed.
Instead, however, as they summarily executed anyone who strayed near the often unmarked line — many trying to get back to their homes, or what little remained of them — and as they also continued destroying whatever structures remained standing, to make Gaza uninhabitable, they also steadily increased the amount of land they control to around 60%, and, as NPR explained, “In mid-March, as the world’s attention was focused on the US-Israeli war on Iran, Israeli troops took control of 10% more of Gaza by designating what they call a new ‘orange zone’ that runs north to south.”
That means, as NPR clarified, that “Israel’s military now controls nearly 70% of Gaza.”
According to NPR, Israel’s military told aid groups about the new “zone”, which, they said, now requires them to secure “prior notification” to be able to enter. Because more than 400 aid workers have been killed in Gaza over the last 33 months, the aid groups “have suspended operations in northern Gaza’s orange zone until the situation is fully clarified.”

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:30:14 +0000

Politicians Should Stop Hiding Behind the ‘Two-State Solution’ Fantasy

by Norman Solomon | Jul 17, 2026
Creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel seemed feasible when President Bill Clinton hosted the signing of the Oslo accords at the White House in September 1993. The goal was reaffirmed in 2011 when 90 percent of the Senate co-sponsored a resolution supporting “a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
But today, the two-state scenario is far-fetched to the point of delusion if not evasion.
For politicians, it has become a box to check. According to data from the American Jewish Congress, every Democrat and most Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee currently say they support “the two-state solution.”
Whatever the rhetoric, ending Israeli control over Palestinians in the territories occupied since 1967 is not on the table.
“Nobody who talks about a so-called ‘two-state solution’ talks about an end to settlements and colonization, and an end to the occupation,” Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi said in an interview this year. “If you don’t have those as the preconditions, it’s not a state – it’s some reshuffling of a status quo of colonization and occupation.”
At best, only such reshuffling is on the horizon. The essence of colonization and occupation is baked into Israel’s Jewish nationalism that has hardened into systemic cruelty toward Palestinians undergoing genocide.
Yet the boilerplate refrain for a two-state solution has great political utility in the United States. For most politicians, it’s very handy for virtue signaling. The same holds true for pro-Israel pressure groups. Even AIPAC, while incapable of faulting the Israeli government for anything, blames Palestinians for refusing “to negotiate on the basis of the Trump peace framework – which envisions a two-state solution.”
Especially for politicians eager to have the deep-pocketed Israel lobby on their side at election time, saying “two-state solution” has become little more than a way of dodging key facts that exist on the ground. The Israeli military now controls 70 percent of Gaza after reducing it to rubble that has buried an unknown number of bodies. The 2.1 million Palestinians still alive in the enclave are confined to just 30 percent of its 141 square miles, under terrible living conditions.
Meanwhile, the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank has pushed Palestinian people into smaller and smaller fragmented areas, divided by hundreds of checkpoints, while they face lawless violence from Israelis akin to the KKK’s terrorizing of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Several hundred settlements and outposts in the West Bank are now home to upward of 730,000 Israelis, with more arriving all the time.
Given such realities, advocates for a two-state solution have no credible answer to a basic question that is rarely asked: Where would the putative Palestinian state actually be located?
When Britain, Canada and Australia announced their formal recognition of a Palestinian state last fall, putting the number of nations doing so over 150, they were recognizing a phantom. “Israelis and Palestinians alike say the possibility of a two-state solution seems more remote than ever,” the New York Times reported at the time. “Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has devastated the enclave. Israeli settlements have become ever more entrenched in the West Bank.”
But in U.S. politics, the routine is to maintain the convenient fantasy of a two-state solution. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was simply offering up requisite platitudes during a CNN interview in August 2024 when she declared her commitment to “work toward a two-state solution, where Israel is secure and in equal measure the Palestinians have security and self-determination and dignity.”
David Mandel, a Sacramento chapter leader of Jewish Voice for Peace, told me: “In light of demographic and political realities, a ‘two-state solution’ has become a mostly empty mantra, frequently mouthed by politicians who did nothing to bring it about when it might have been a viable path to end violence and build toward something better.” He added: “It has also become a political refuge for many Americans, including a great many Jews, who are generally progressive and want to differentiate themselves from Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk, but only performatively, without joining efforts to end real violations of Palestinian rights like occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide.”
A grim truth is that no one really knows what a genuine “solution” might be for the mega-tragedy that continues to unfold in Palestine. Unhelpful from Americans is the facile prescription of a two-state solution or, for that matter, any other supposed remedy. Claiming to know what’s best for Palestinians is built into a colonial mindset that has propelled intervention in the region for more than a hundred years.
The pivotal role for Americans is to end their government’s enabling of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The obvious step in that direction is to halt U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, but much more is involved. “I want to stop American aid,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said during a June 30 interview on Israeli television. “It’s like welfare. I don’t want it.” Earlier in the month, Netanyahu wrote about his plan to “draw down U.S. financial military assistance over the next decade” in a letter to Republican Representative Marlin Stutzman. “The time has now arrived for us to move from aid recipient to partner.”
Netanyahu touted what the congressman described as a “new framework of joint defense cooperation, co-development, coproduction and mutual investment in areas including advanced missile defense, artificial intelligence unmanned systems, cybersecurity and next generation military platforms.” That Israeli wish list is in line with Section 219 of the National Defense Authorization Act now pending in the House. “The provision would speed efforts to embed Israeli technologies into U.S. weapons systems in ways almost never codified into law, even for allies,” Human Rights Watch warns.
While Israel’s disrepute is now wides

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:21:47 +0000
‘They are afraid’: Writer flags major tell in Trump admin’s ‘far-left’ crackdown

Alexander Willis
July 18, 2026
RAW STORY

The Trump administration has escalated its crackdown on what it calls "far-left terrorism" in recent days, though the move actually exposed a growing fear within the White House about losing its grip on power, political writer Caitlin Johnstone argued in an analysis published Friday.

On Thursday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller previewed the Trump administration’s renewed crusade against what it argues to be far-left extremists, vowing to “defund, debank” and “arrest these political terrorists.” In recent months, however, the Trump administration has broadly expanded its definition of terrorism, adding new indicators such as publicly expressing "anti-Americanism” views.

The crusade, Johnstone argued in an analysis published on her Substack, bore striking similarities to the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) started in the 1950s to illegally disrupt and discredit leftist and anti-war movements in the United States.

“Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted covert operations under COINTELPRO to infiltrate and subvert Black civil rights groups, the Communist Party USA, Vietnam War protester organizations, and feminist groups with the goal of stomping out all meaningful leftward political [movements] in the United States,” Johnstone wrote.

“It's clear the rightists in the White House are aiming for something far more aggressive, and FBI Director Kash Patel sounds super stoked about the chance to become a 21st century J Edgar Hoover.”

However, the crackdown actually revealed a weakness on the part of the Trump administration, Johnstone argued, one that she argued “should inspire hope.”

“The fact that this is happening in the first place should inspire hope, not despair. The empire managers aren’t ramping up authoritarianism because it’s easy and fun; they’re doing it because they need to,” she wrote.

“They know they’re losing their grip, and they know that they are vastly outnumbered by the ordinary human beings who just want a better world for their children. They are afraid. And they are afraid because they are losing. Keep pushing.”

Pete Buttigieg tells stunned MS NOW host: 'You can always rely on Stephen Miller'

Kathleen Culliton
July 19, 2026
RAW STORY

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller attends the 2026 White House Easter Egg Roll at the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 6, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

Former President Joe Bidens' Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg has revealed why he feels Americans "can always rely on Stephen Miller."

Buttigieg appeared on MS NOW Sunday morning to condemn what he described as President Donald Trump's administration's determination to crack down on dissenters.

"What our officials doing?" he asked. "Are they trying to lead a country where people have different values and different political opinions and the whole point is that we live together as one country?"

Buttigieg answered his own question with another question: "Or are they trying to demonize, dehumanize and harm fellow Americans?"

The Indiana Democrat posed these questions as Trump's White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy mounts what MS NOW described as a "sweeping attack against 'leftists.'"

Miller launched that attack at the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism" event Thursday in which he railed against "left-wing terrorism" he vowed to "disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute."

Political experts warn Miller, serving as Trump's "shadow president," has broadly expanding the Trump administration’s definition of terrorism to crack down on political dissenters.

“Miller has always dreamed of crushing the left,” Zeteo’s Andrew Perez wrote Friday. “Now, he’s getting to use the full force of the federal government to lead an all-out war on liberals, progressives, and leftists – and he’s throwing it in all our faces with his characteristically apocalyptic and authoritarian rhetoric.”

On Sunday, Buttigieg said this move should come as no surprise to Americans.

"To spout ideological gibberish at every opportunity," said Buttigieg, "you can always rely on Stephen Miller."

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:12:56 +0000

UK by-election: Nigel Farage faces 'record' number of rivals
Copyright Temilade Adelaja/AP

By Harry Bligh
Published on 18/07/2026 - EURONEWS
A fresh by-election has been called in the UK constituency of Clacton, after Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, resigned his seat to seek re-election. Farage had won the seat in 2024, securing 46% of the vote share.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, is set to face a "record" number of opponents in a by-election for the coastal constituency of Clacton in August.
A total of 34 candidates will contest the seat, thought to be the highest number recorded in any UK parliamentary election, according to Tendring District Council, the local authority administering the vote.
The previous record for a by-election is believed to have been set in 2008, when 26 candidates contested the Haltemprice and Howden seat after Conservative MP David Davis stepped down, also to seek re-election.
Farage won Clacton in the UK general election in 2024, but he resigned as an MP earlier this month amid mounting media scrutiny and a parliamentary investigation over an undeclared gift of £5 million (€5.88 million).
Announcing his resignation, Farage, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, said he had "decided that the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions," calling it "a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment".
The country's mainstream parties are not taking part in next month's by-election, after Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party all declined to field candidates, dismissing Farage's move as a stunt.
The Labour Party accused Farage of "desperately trying to change the subject," while the leader of the Conservatives, Kemi Badenoch, accused him of "running away from scrutiny".
Nigel Farage resigned earlier in July, triggering the by-election in Clacton, where he will seek re-election
The cost of this by-election to the taxpayer could be more than £275,000 (€323,345), according to an estimate reported by The Independent.
Reform UK has offered to cover the cost of holding the vote, however, the UK’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said that would be illegal, as election costs must be met from public funds “to maintain the independence and impartiality of the electoral process”.
Of the candidates taking part, 20 are independent, meaning they don't belong to a political party. Many others are novelty candidates, including three members of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.
Perhaps the most well-known is Count Binface, who wears a bin-shaped helmet and a black cape.
Related
Who is Count Binface – the alien space warrior standing against Brexit champion Nigel Farage?
Other rivals include the actor and right-wing political activist, Laurence Fox, who is standing for The Reclaim Party, of which he is the founded and is leader.
Find the full list of candidates for the 2026 Clacton by-election here.
At the 2024 general election, Farage and the Reform UK party won the constituency with a vote share of 46.2%.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:10:12 +0000

Mount Olympus seeks place on UNESCO World Heritage List

By Foteini Doulgkeri
Published on 18/07/2026 - EURONEWS

UNESCO’s final decision is keenly awaited, as the inscription of Mount Olympus on the World Heritage List would mark major international recognition for a place where mythology, history and unique nature converge.
The mythical realm of the gods of ancient Greece is just one step away from historic international recognition. Mount Olympus’s nomination for inclusion on UNESCO’s World Heritage List as a mixed site, of both natural and cultural value, is expected to be examined at this year’s session of the World Heritage Committee, which will take place from 19 to 29 July in Seoul.
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Mount Olympus, Greece’s highest mountain, with its summit at 2,918 metres, is not only a unique natural landscape. For centuries it has stood at the heart of Greek mythology, as tradition holds it was the home of Zeus and the twelve gods of the ancient world. At the same time, it shelters a rich ecosystem, rare species of flora and fauna, as well as important monuments that link the area to history and culture.
Mount Olympus Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
Greece submitted the nomination for the inclusion of the wider mountainous mass of Mount Olympus on UNESCO’s list back in 2014. However, international evaluators from IUCN and ICOMOS, UNESCO’s advisory bodies, requested additional information in order to strengthen the dossier.
According to their observations, further evidence is needed to substantiate the international significance of the area’s geological features, biodiversity and ecological processes. At the same time, they have called for the mountain’s cultural value to be clarified even more, with a proposal to add the archaeological site of Dion, at the foot of Mount Olympus, to the nomination.
Fears over foreign influence in France, as Musk backs Le Pen presidential bid

Billionaire Elon Musk has thrown his support behind far-right leader Marine Le Pen's bid for the French presidency, calling her "France's last hope", and prompting accusations of foreign interference in the 2027 election.

Issued on: 16/07/2026 - RFI

Elon Musk in May 2026. The billionaire has supported French far right leader Marine Le Pen's bid for president, raising criticism that he is interfering in France's elections. © Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Musk on Wednesday called Le Pen "France's last hope" on his social media platform X, in a post declaring his support for her presidential bid – which she confirmed earlier this month, even after her conviction for embezzlement was upheld on appeal.

Musk has shown support for figures on the far right and had personally backed Le Pen, particularly throughout her legal proceedings, but had previously stopped short of openly endorsing her presidential campaign.

‘Free Le Pen’: US conservatives rally behind French far-right leader

Election interference

His latest message has drawn criticism over possible interference in French politics.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot urged Musk to reconsider his position, writing, also on X: "Like we say in French: only fools don't change their minds."

Musk's support carries particular weight, as he became the world's first trillionaire after his company SpaceX went public last month, and he controls the algorithms of one of the world's leading social media platforms.

Formerly known as Twitter, X has been the target of a French criminal investigation following two complaints alleging that its algorithm had been used for foreign interference.

French MP Antoine Léaument, of the hard-left France Unbowed, described Musk's post as "foreign interference, which has begun for the presidential election".

He called on Arcom, France's independent communications regulator, to investigate.

Far-right voices

Musk has previously taken positions in several European election campaigns, often backing nationalist or populist figures.

He supported Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany party, saying in December 2024 that it was the only force capable of "saving Germany".

He called Romania's constitutional judges who annulled the first round of the presidential election "dictators", after concerns were raised about Russian interference in support of nationalist candidate Călin Georgescu.

French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called out Musk's alleged interference in European politics, after the billionaire published a string of hostile attacks on Starmer and Olaf Scholz, who was German chancellor at the time.

The Financial Times has reported that Musk had used his platform to amplify far-right voices, including extremist Tommy Robinson and Ashlea Simon, co-founder of the white supremacist group Britain First.

Million-dollar cheques

In the US, Musk is facing possible criminal proceedings over his political action committee's decision to hand out $1 million cheques to voters at a rally ahead of the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission recently referred two complaints from voters to the county district attorney's office, which can decide whether to bring criminal charges. Prosecutors have 40 days to respond to the commission.

Musk's political action committee used a similar approach before the 2024 presidential election, offering $1 million a day to voters in Wisconsin and six other battleground states who signed a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments.

A judge in Pennsylvania ruled that prosecutors had not shown the initiative was an illegal lottery, allowing it to continue until Election Day.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:25:31 +0000

IEA report flags critical minerals risks as France steps up its strategy

The International Energy Agency has warned that investment in critical minerals fell in 2025 and supply chains grew more concentrated, posing fresh risks for France as it races to secure the raw materials needed for its industrial and energy transition.

Issued on: 17/07/2026 - RFI

Workers transport soil containing rare earth elements for export at a port in Lianyungang REUTERS - CHINA STRINGER NETWORK

In its Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026, published on 16 July, the Paris-based agency said investment in mining and refining dropped by nine percent last year, citing geopolitical tensions and price volatility.

At the same time, supply chains have become more concentrated, with China and Indonesia accounting for more than three-quarters of growth in refined output over the past two years.

“Concerns about high supply concentration have moved from a theoretical vulnerability into an immediate economic security challenge,” said the IEA’s chief economist Tim Gould.

The report highlights the growing use of export controls, particularly by China, as a key risk.

Restrictions on rare earth exports introduced in April 2025 forced some manufacturers to scale back or halt production.

The IEA estimates that if Beijing expands such measures, as much as $6.5 trillion in annual downstream production outside China could be exposed.

A mining/crushing supervisor at MP Materials displays crushed ore before it is sent to the mill at the MP Materials rare earth mine in Mountain Pass REUTERS - Steve Marcus

Despite these vulnerabilities, the agency noted some progress. Public financing commitments for critical minerals projects more than quadrupled between 2023 and 2025, while countries including the United States and Malaysia have begun to erode China’s dominance in rare earth refining.

Yet the overall picture remains one of fragile supply chains at a time when demand is surging, driven by clean energy technologies, electric vehicles and advanced electronics.
Central challenge

For France, these global trends may cause problems: the country’s industrial ambitions depend heavily on materials whose supply remains largely external.

France’s €500 million critical minerals strategy, launched in 2023 under the France 2030 investment plan, is designed to reduce that dependence. It targets 26 raw materials deemed essential for industrial sovereignty, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements and semiconductor inputs such as gallium and germanium.

At the heart of the strategy is an effort to build domestic extraction and processing capacity. The Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières (BRGM), France’s geological survey agency, has identified lithium-rich geothermal brines in the Alsace region as the country’s most promising domestic resource.

An employee walk in the open-pit mine at the lithium plant of French multinational industrial minerals company Imerys in Echassierres, central France, on January 17, 2024. Minerals group Imerys has undertaken the Emili project, aimed at extracting lithium at its Beauvoir site to help Europe limit its dependence on China. AFP - OLIVIER CHASSIGNOLE

Several projects are now under development. Lithium de France, backed by TotalEnergies and Renault, aims to produce 34,000 tonnes of lithium hydroxide annually by 2028 using direct extraction technology. A parallel initiative, known as Emili, and developed by French industrial minerals company Imerys, targets production from 2027.

Europe's largest lithium mine to open in France

If successful, these projects would make France one of the first European countries with domestic lithium output, offering a strategic advantage for its emerging battery industry.

France is also seeking to strengthen its position in processing. In Normandy, the company Carester is developing a rare earth separation facility capable of supplying materials for up to 300,000 electric vehicle motors per year. The move addresses a critical bottleneck, as China currently processes around 85 to 90 percent of global rare earths.
'Urban mine'

Meanwhile, Paris-based mining multinational Eramet plays a central role in securing upstream supply. Its operations span manganese in Gabon, nickel in New Caledonia and lithium in Argentina. The company is also investing in refining capacity in France, notably in Dunkirk, where it produces high-purity manganese for battery cathodes.

However, volatility in global commodity markets illustrates the risks involved. The sharp drop in nickel prices, driven by increased Indonesian production, has put pressure on operations in New Caledonia, prompting French government support to maintain the sector.

France seeks deal to salvage New Caledonia's nickel sector

Beyond extraction and processing, France is investing in recycling as a strategic pillar. Companies such as Veolia, SUEZ and Eramet are developing facilities to recover lithium, cobalt and nickel from end-of-life batteries, seen as a future European “urban mine,” shorthand for the process of recovering valuable metals from manufactured products that have reached the end of their useful life, rather than extracting them from natural deposits.

(With newswires)

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:23:11 +0000

The Blue Ridge Mountain mine powering the world’s digital economy

One of the most abundant minerals in the Earth’s crust, quartz is essential for manufacturing core components of smartphones and computers. Most of the world’s supply comes from a single mining district in the Appalachian Mountains of the southeast United States, which has become an unlikely linchpin of the global tech economy.

Issued on: 18/07/2026 - RFI

A sample of a Spruce Pine pegmatite displayed in Appalachian State University's rock garden. The mines at Spruce Pine produce the world's purest known natural quartz.
© Marguliesgm, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

In a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, some 800 metres above sea level, lie a few square kilometres that feed the global computer chip industry.

The Spruce Pine mining district is estimated to supply more than 80 percent of the world’s ultra-pure quartz, a key material for making the semiconductors on which computers and other complex electronic devices depend. They are also essential for solar panels.

“We’re seeing the development of the components industry, and with it the need for materials of extremely high purity,” says geographer Laurent Carroué, director of research at the French Institute of Geopolitics (IFG) at Paris VIII University.

Spruce Pine produces some of the purest quartz in the world. Some 380 million years ago, major tectonic shifts occurred that generated intense heat deep below the surface of the Earth, creating silicon-rich magma that eventually cooled and crystallised. In this area, the process took place without water – and therefore without the trace impurities it can introduce.

This “truly rare phenomenon”, as Carroué describes it, created quartz deposits that are 99.999 percent pure.

Extremely heat-resistant, high-purity quartz is used to make crucibles in which semiconductor-grade silicon is melted at temperatures of more than 1,400C. The refined silicon then crystallises and can be sliced into thin “wafers” that form the basis of microchips or solar cells.

Strategic supply

The size and purity of Spruce Pine’s deposits make them highly sought after by chipmakers and solar developers in the US and beyond.

A handful of private companies currently have mining rights, including Belgian group Sibelco and French-Norwegian venture The Quartz Corp. While The Quartz Corp announced last month it was closing its Spruce Pine plant indefinitely due to “persistent losses” in the solar industry, Sibelco doubled its production capacity between 2023-25 and is planning to invest another $500 million in expanding by 2027.

As Carroué points out, these operations are by nature “non-transferable and non-relocatable”.

Quartz can also be found in other countries including Russia, Brazil and China, though the cost of extracting it is much higher. Europe has a supply in Norway, though production remains a fraction of Spruce Pine’s output.

Earlier this year, researchers identified a new source of high-purity quartz in Chinese-controlled Tibet, with deposits of almost as high a grade as found at Spruce Pine. State-run media hailed the discovery as an opportunity to end China’s dependence on imports from the US.

China produces the bulk of the world’s rare earth minerals and according to Carroué, the sector “has become a point of contention with Washington, prompting the United States to start rehabilitating previously abandoned mines in the American West”.

Seeking substitutes

In September 2024, a natural disaster highlighted the risks of relying on a single source.

Hurricane Helene smashed into the southeastern United States, causing flooding from the Atlantic Coast to the Appalachians. Landslides felled trees, cut power and closed roads, forcing Spruce Pine’s mines to halt production.

A satellite image by Maxar Technologies shows the North Toe River and market place after flooding in Spruce Pine, North Carolina on 2 October 2024, shortly after Hurricane Helene hit the southeastern United States. © Maxar Technologies / AFP / Handout

While the disruption was short-lived, a prolonged closure would no doubt lead to scarcity and higher prices on global markets – especially as rapidly developing artificial intelligence continues to demand more and higher-performing chips.

If manufacturers are to diversify their quartz supply, Carroué says, it would mean “accepting minerals that are initially less pure, and financing heavy infrastructure” to refine them.

In the longer term, lab-grown synthetic quartz could provide an alternative. However, it is significantly more expensive than mining natural deposits.

In that case, the world’s supplies of this critical material will no longer depend on geographical fortune, but on political and financial commitment.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:44:24 +0000
ANIMIST CATHOLICS

Faith vs therapy: Inside the Philippine school for exorcists

Manila (AFP) – Asia's only dedicated exorcism centre -- designed to train not only Philippine priests but clergy from across the region -- sits just off a busy thoroughfare in Metro Manila.

Issued on: 19/07/2026 - RFI

An exorcism centre in the Philippines says demands is steady for both the ritual and training of exorcists © Jam STA ROSA / AFP

Inside, neatly made-up rooms for visiting priests line warmly lit halls that lead to a chapel where the 400-year-old ritual takes place.

Holy relics employed in the proceedings line one wall, another features a one-way mirror that allows family members and novice exorcists to observe.

The Michael Center for Spiritual Liberation and Exorcism -- five months old this week -- was built because "cases were piling up", Father Jose Francisco Syquia told AFP.

Trauma driven by bullying, sexual abuse and the pain of separation as family members leave for work abroad has increasingly opened the door to spiritual attacks, he said.

"We had to find a more permanent and secure and private place to pray over people," Syquia said.

The centre's function as an effective school for exorcists, however, is what makes it unique.

Father Jose Francisco Syquia said the exorcism centre in Manila was built because "cases were piling up". © Jam STA ROSA / AFP

"I don't know of any other center in the world that trains exorcists," Syquia said of the two-storey facility built largely with donations from local families of the previously afflicted.

Priests from countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia and India were already lining up for training, Syquia added.

A key element of that training is discerning the difference between psychological and spiritual problems, he said.
'Beyond science'

While the centre operates without strict Vatican oversight, it follows long-standing Church rules governing exorcism, including mandatory vetting by mental health professionals.

"We have clinical psychologists. We have a psychiatrist... There are also neurologists, so they work hand in hand with us," Syquia told AFP on a visit to the centre.

Still, he insists he knows a demonic possession when he sees one.

Priests from countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia and India were already lining up for training, the centre said. © Jam STA ROSA / AFP

"You will see a change in behaviour... a different consciousness. Something else takes over a person," Syquia said, noting he had personally exorcised a demon only a week earlier.

"When it comes to the spiritual world, we need something beyond science."

But attempts to draw that distinction have long worried the mental health community.

"If a condition isn't recognised as medical, it delays appropriate treatment," Christopher French, a psychologist and emeritus professor at the University of London, told AFP.

"It's more dangerous to accept the supernatural explanations," he warned, noting that conditions ranging from schizophrenia to Tourette's syndrome were once interpreted as spirit possession.
'A lot of stigma'

The Philippines has roughly one psychiatrist for every 200,000 people in the archipelago, according to the World Health Organization. Some provinces have none at all.

Given the choice between an exorcist and a mental health professional, many in the heavily Catholic country will choose the former, Dr. Kathryn Tan, a Manila-based psychiatrist, told AFP.

"It's a lot of stigma when somebody is brought to a psychiatrist," she said.

"If it's an exorcism... you're a victim, but if you're brought to a psychiatrist, there's a lot of shame," she said.

Many of her own patients came only after first visiting indigenous healers, Tan said, viewing psychiatry as a "last resort".

Tan, who said alleged possessions are often accompanied by symptoms of psychosis, insisted Philippine psychiatrists were not seeking to "compete with the Catholic Church", but rather to bridge the gap between culture and science.

"It's about... compassion and empathy and trying our best to understand without judgement what our patients are experiencing," she said.

Both Tan and French agreed that cultural sensitivities need to be respected in treatment.

"You can shape a treatment to fit the belief system without explicitly endorsing it," French said, conceding an exorcism might even have a beneficial placebo effect in some cases.

Tan, who said she keeps an "open mind" about the supernatural, said it was not surprising when people seek spiritual explanations for something they cannot readily define.

"Perhaps this is our way of trying to control the unknown," she said.

Inside his office, Father Syquia told AFP he was confident science and faith could coexist.

"We're... focusing on the spiritual dimension. But of course, the body is always part of that," he said.

A greater national investment in mental health care might even lighten his own load, he conceded.

"If psychology and psychiatry, if proper mental and emotional health (are) fostered in our country, there will be (fewer exorcism) cases," he said.

"Science is a gift from God."

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:39:36 +0000
Greenpeace Africa demands halt to $17bn Kenya coastal oil refinery

Climate rights group Greenpeace Africa has called for a halt to a proposed oil refinery project by Africa's richest man, Aliko Dangote, in Kenya's coastal region, warning of the environmental risks.

Issued on: 16/07/2026 - RFI

A mangrove forest near the resort town of Lamu, on Kenya's north coast.
AFP - TONY KARUMBA

The east African oil refinery, with a planned capacity of 700,000 barrels per day, was confirmed earlier this month to be located at Kenya's Lamu port, ending months of speculation that Tanzania could host the project.

"This project threatens to damage one of East Africa's most fragile coastal ecosystems while locking Kenya into a risky fossil fuel future," Sherelee Odayar, Greenpeace Africa Oil and Gas campaigner, said in a statement.

The group said the oil refinery, which is expected to take about 30 months to build, will lead to "habitat destruction, marine degradation, oil spill risk and dangerous air pollution".

"Lamu's mangroves, coral reefs and seagrass beds are not expendable. They support fisheries, livelihoods and coastal protection," the NGO said.

Nigerian businessman and Africa's richest man Aliko Dangote attends the Africa Forward summit in Nairobi on 11 May. AFP - LUDOVIC MARIN

Greenpeace Africa called for the $17 billion project to be suspended pending an independent environmental assessment before any approvals are granted.

"No approvals should move forward without a full, independent environmental and social impact assessment, genuine public participation and transparent scrutiny of the long-term economic, health and ecological risks," Odayar said.
Job creation

Kenyan President William Ruto has praised the project, arguing it will create jobs.

Around 800,000 Kenyans join the labour market each year, according to the World Bank.

But Greenpeace said the project will only "create temporary jobs while undermining existing livelihoods in fishing, tourism and small-scale local economies".

"This refinery also risks becoming a stranded asset as the world moves toward cleaner energy. It would also lock Kenya into decades of carbon-intensive development, worsening climate change and its impacts," it said.

Lamu was designated a World Heritage Site in 2001, as it includes the oldest and best preserved example of a Swahili settlement – lamb Old Town – as well as a number of marine protected areas surrounding the archipelago.

Lamu Old Town. © Unesco

The site was at the centre of previous disputes over fossil-fuel projects.

Last year, Kenya’s High Court halted plans for a proposed $2 billion coal-fired power plant, stating that the project "failed to meet public participation requirements," ending a six-year legal battle over the facility.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:39:08 +0000
Zimbabwe’s gold rush adds fuel to a deadly surge in malaria

Mutare, Zimbabwe – In Zimbabwe, open pits left by informal gold miners and filled with stagnant water create breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Health experts say mining is worsening a surge in malaria infections, already spiralling due to funding cuts and climate change.

Issued on: 18/07/2026 - RFI

A miner panning for gold along Mutare River in Mutasa, in Zimbabwe's Manicaland Province. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

By: Farai Shawn Matiashe

In Penhalonga, a gold-rich area in eastern Zimbabwe, George Mutsoka woke up one morning suffering from fatigue, a severe headache and joint aches.

The 43-year-old artisanal miner was too weak to work, so he went to rest at his home in Chishakwe village, just outside Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, Mutare.

By late afternoon, his situation had deteriorated and he sought help from a village health worker. He tested positive for malaria and the health worker gave him treatment.

“I took the medicine for three days. After a week, I had recovered,” he told RFI.

Mutsoka soon returned to Penhalonga, where he works as an informal miner searching for gold.

Ideal conditions for mosquitoes

There are thousands of artisanal miners in Penhalonga, who carry out open-pit and riverbed mining.

Malaria cases have been spreading fast in this mining community and others across Zimbabwe, as stagnant water pools left by miners prove ideal conditions for the mosquitoes that transmit the disease.

Virginia Chakandinakira, the village health worker in Chishakwe who diagnosed and treated Mutsoka, says that all the malaria cases she documented in her community this year originated elsewhere.

“I have treated four people. Interestingly, they are not based in this village. Some of them are artisanal miners from Penhalonga and others are family members who followed to stay with their husbands in that area,” she says.

A Ministry of Health official, who was not authorised to speak to the media, confirmed to RFI that movements of mining communities are making it harder to get malaria under control.

“Our interventions usually target immobile people. Artisanal miners are mobile and bring complications to the interventions,” said the official.

Stagnant water in open pits left by artisanal miners in Mutasa, in Manicaland Province in eastern Zimbabwe. Such pools are breeding grounds for mosquitoes that can transmit disease. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

Sungano Mharakurwa, director of Africa University’s Malaria Institute in Mutare, says artisanal mining – and mining in general – has intrinsic environmental impact, including habitat expansion for mosquitoes.

“There is a high risk of outdoor malaria transmission, which is not amenable to control by mainstay indoor-based house spraying and bed nets in the mining areas,” he says, adding that research is underway to innovate more ways to prevent malaria in such settings.

Another complication is “the cosmopolitan background of the miner population”, Mharakurwa explains. Many miners migrate from non-malarious regions where they did not grow up exposed to strains circulating locally, leaving them especially susceptible to the disease.

How technology is helping African countries fight malaria from the skies

Deadly surge

Artisanal miners often sleep in makeshift tents without mosquito nets or repellents.

Nyasha Mungwasho, another informal miner from Penhalonga, says his wife and child contracted malaria after they visited him in May. They successfully recovered after Chakandinakira treated them in Chishakwe, their home village.

Mungwasho reports seeing several of his colleagues infected while they worked in Penhalonga.

A village health worker testing a patient in Mutare for malaria. Zimbabwe has since cases surge in the past year. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

Malaria cases have spiked in Zimbabwe in recent months. Between January and mid-April 2026, 65,399 cases were recorded, compared to roughly 36,000 in the same period in 2025 and 17,000 in 2024, according to the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health’s National Malaria Control Programme weekly surveillance report.

Deaths from the disease also surged to 174 between January and April 2026, double the 85 recorded in 2025 in the same period and five times the 34 in 2024, according to the same report.

Experts say this rise in malaria cases is because of a combination of factors, including mining as well as funding cuts and climate change.
Loss of US funding

United States funding cuts imposed shortly after President Donald Trump assumed office in January 2025 led to the discontinuation of critical malaria control programmes in Zimbabwe.

Some of the programmes crippled included the Zimbabwe Entomological Support Programme in Malaria (Zento) at Africa University, which provides the country’s national malaria programme with scientific research to combat the disease, and the Zimbabwe Assistance Programme in Malaria II (Zapim II) that supported high-burden districts by strengthening malaria diagnosis, treatment and prevention.

“The funding cuts affected Zento, which was contributing key malaria mosquito surveillance technical data for guiding game-changing malaria vector control by the National Malaria Control Programme,” says Africa University’s Mharakurwa.

The university has since used emergency funding from private donors to restart its malaria work.

Malaria fight under threat as US funding cuts raise fears in Africa

Thomas Chuchu, a health programme lead at Save the Children Zimbabwe, which helped implement Zapim II, said the funding cuts disrupted key activities such as the distribution of long-lasting insecticidal nets.

The programme worked through the existing Ministry of Health system, targeting 11 districts across Mashonaland Central, Mashonaland East and Matabeleland North. There are shortages of diagnostic kits, frontline health workers report, while some communities are without mosquito nets.

A malaria test showing a negative result in Mutare. Zimbabwe relies heavily on foreign donors for essential equipment such as diagnostic kits. © Farai Shawn Matiashe

The cuts also disrupted the leading US malaria control programme, the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), which operated across dozens of countries in Africa. Mharakurwa says the withdrawal of funding left communities in Zimbabwe stranded, given that PMI provided substantial budgetary support for procuring malaria medicines.

Given that US funding was supporting an impactful portfolio of health programmes, including malaria, he believes its abrupt termination is bound to have aggravated the disease’s spread.

South Africa faces HIV crisis as Trump’s aid freeze halts treatment and research

Effects of climate change

Heavy rains have also played a role. Chuchu says Zimbabwe’s current malaria surge appears to be linked, at least partly, to the high rainfall experienced in the previous season.

“The rains created favourable breeding conditions for mosquitoes, particularly in already endemic provinces such as Mashonaland Central, Manicaland, Mashonaland East and Mashonaland West,” he says.

Mharakurwa says climate change is worsening malaria outbreaks amid a lack of resources to control the vector-borne disease.

Without protection, Mutsoka and other artisanal miners remain at risk.

“I recently bought a sleeping bag. But we still do not have a mosquito net or repellent,” he says.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:53:20 +0000
France's wheat production to fall after heatwaves push early harvest

The wheat harvest in France, Europe’s largest grain producer, is expected to fall by 4 percent compared to 2025 after an unusually early harvest carried out during successive heatwaves.

Issued on: 17/07/2026 - RFI

A French farmer harvests wheat in his field, in Ligne, near Nantes, western France, 30 June 2026. © Stephane Mahe/Reuters

France is forecast to produce 32 million tonnes of wheat in 2026, according to the French agriculture ministry's first estimates published on Thursday.

The ministry's statistics office, Agreste, estimates the average yield at 6.93 tonnes per hectare, down from 7.42 tonnes per hectare in 2025.

This drop comes despite an increase of three percent in the amount of land planted with wheat.

Deteriorating growing conditions

The decline is largely due to deteriorating growing conditions towards the end of the season, as crops were hit by successive heatwaves, according to Agreste.

France is the European Union's biggest wheat producer and one of the world's largest wheat exporters, making its harvest an important benchmark for global grain markets.

For many French farmers, the smaller harvest is another setback after months of protests over low incomes, rising costs and regulation.

Industry groups have increasingly warned that more frequent heatwaves and droughts are adding to the financial strain on farms.

Heat hitting harvests

Conditions for the crop were generally good until May, before early heatwaves accelerated the cereal harvest, first for barley and then for wheat.

The extreme heat also made harvesting more difficult, with restrictions introduced in some regions where even a small spark from a combine harvester could start a fire.

The biggest losses were in central and western France, which have been hit hardest hit by drought and repeated heatwaves, while northern and eastern regions generally reported better yields.

France’s barley production is also expected to fall, down six percent, to 11 million tonnes, driven by a drop in spring yields of the crop that is particularly affected by the hot weather.
Global prospects

The heat has also taken a toll on maize. FranceAgriMer said crop conditions had fallen to their lowest level in at least 15 years following repeated heatwaves and a lack of rainfall.

French farmers race to adapt as repeated heatwaves hit crops and livestock

In its latest monthly update, the International Grains Council (IGC) left its 2026/27 global wheat crop forecast unchanged, but it cut its outlook for global maize production by 4 million tonnes, to 1.306 billion tonnes.

"Prospects for the 2026/27 maize harvest have been adversely affected by successive heatwaves in parts of Europe," the IGC said.

It lowered its forecast for France’s maize forecast to 9 million tonnes, down from its previous estimate of 12 million tones.

European grain trade association Coceral has also lowered its outlook for the EU maize harvest, citing weather damage in France and Hungary.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:33:50 +0000
Macron toughens stance on arson, with dozens arrested as wildfires sweep France

French President Emmanuel Macron has said there would be "zero tolerance" for arson after France was hit by wildfires that have scorched thousands of hectares, as multiple heatwaves since May have dried out forests and fields. Dozens have been arrested across the country over starting fires, including a volunteer firefighter.

Issued on: 16/07/2026 - RFI

A firefighter works to extinguish flames in Noisy-sur-Ecole, in the Fontainebleau forest, 13 July 2026. © Stéphane Mahe/Reuters

Around 35,000 hectares have been impacted by the recent fires – more than during the entire 2025 fire season, according to authorities.

France "has never faced so many outbreaks of fire across the country since the end of World War II", Macron said during a visit to the historic Fontainebleau forest near Paris, where more than 2,000 hectares have been hit by fires since 5 July.

"Here, as everywhere else in France, there will be zero tolerance [for arsonists] because it is, of course, our national territory that is under attack every time a fire breaks out", Macron added.

'Unprecedented pressure'

The president arrived at the operational command centre at Fontainebleau to speak with emergency teams who have been working since Sunday to contain two fires in the forest, which are now under control but still burning.

“France is facing unprecedented pressure” from wildfires, Macron said, expressing his “gratitude” to the firefighters mobilised across the country.

Fifty-nine arrested over French wildfires, as Fontainebleau blaze continues

Around 950 firefighters remain deployed in the Fontainebleau forest, with 120 additional military personnel being sent to help soak the edges of burned areas to prevent flames from reigniting.

The fire came close to the Fontainebleau Palace and park, a Unesco World Heritage site since 1981.

Nearly 1,000 residents have been evacuated from their homes in villages scattered throughout the forest, while the fires forced the closure of the A6 highway, which connects Paris with the south of France.
Firefighter arrested

Two men are in custody, suspected of having set the Fontainebleau fires. One is an 18-year-old volunteer firefighter who admitted to deliberately starting a fire.

The two men are unrelated, and accused of starting two separate fires.

The volunteer firefighter admitted to "setting fire to twigs with a lighter and gasoline”. The other suspect, an 18-year-old student, admitted to "accidentally starting a fire by throwing away his cigarette", prosecutor Diane Ngomsik told French media.

Both men have been charged with “destruction by fire” and are due to see a judge on Thursday. They have been placed in pre-trial detention.

Six people were arrested as part of the wider investigation into the fires that have burned though the forest, which has been a Unesco biosphere reserve since 1998.

The fires have destroyed much what Unesco calls the “exceptional diversity of habitats” in the forest that “support a remarkable array of plant and animal species”.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said the Fontainebleau blaze is contributing to what will likely be a record year for wildfires in France. Around 32,000 have already burned this year.

Another major fire broke out Wednesday in the La Grande-Verriere, in the Morvan region.

Nunez said 59 people have been arrested across France on suspicion of starting fires.

(with newswires)

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 14:53:11 +0000
‘They are afraid’: Writer flags major tell in Trump admin’s ‘far-left’ crackdown

Alexander Willis
July 18, 2026
RAW STORY

The Trump administration has escalated its crackdown on what it calls "far-left terrorism" in recent days, though the move actually exposed a growing fear within the White House about losing its grip on power, political writer Caitlin Johnstone argued in an analysis published Friday.

On Thursday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller previewed the Trump administration’s renewed crusade against what it argues to be far-left extremists, vowing to “defund, debank” and “arrest these political terrorists.” In recent months, however, the Trump administration has broadly expanded its definition of terrorism, adding new indicators such as publicly expressing "anti-Americanism” views.

The crusade, Johnstone argued in an analysis published on her Substack, bore striking similarities to the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) started in the 1950s to illegally disrupt and discredit leftist and anti-war movements in the United States.

“Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted covert operations under COINTELPRO to infiltrate and subvert Black civil rights groups, the Communist Party USA, Vietnam War protester organizations, and feminist groups with the goal of stomping out all meaningful leftward political [movements] in the United States,” Johnstone wrote.

“It's clear the rightists in the White House are aiming for something far more aggressive, and FBI Director Kash Patel sounds super stoked about the chance to become a 21st century J Edgar Hoover.”

However, the crackdown actually revealed a weakness on the part of the Trump administration, Johnstone argued, one that she argued “should inspire hope.”

“The fact that this is happening in the first place should inspire hope, not despair. The empire managers aren’t ramping up authoritarianism because it’s easy and fun; they’re doing it because they need to,” she wrote.

“They know they’re losing their grip, and they know that they are vastly outnumbered by the ordinary human beings who just want a better world for their children. They are afraid. And they are afraid because they are losing. Keep pushing.”

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:45:25 +0000
Climate Crisis-Denying Trump Threatens Canada With New Tariffs Over Wildfire Smoke

“When wildfires hit America, Canada sends firefighters,” said one journalist. “When wildfires hit Canada, America sends tariffs.”

Smoke from massive wildfires in Canada engulfed the New York City skyline on July 16, 2026.
(Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jul 17, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A day after a Republican senator pledged to introduce legislation sanctioning Canada for the wildfire smoke impacting various US communities this week, President Donald Trump on Friday threatened the United States’ northern neighbor with new tariffs.

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “I will call the Prime Minister during the day to find out what they are going to do about it.”

Out-of-Control Canadian Wildfires Prompt Calls for ‘Nuremberg Trials for Big Oil’

“The cost is incalculable! Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result,” Trump continued. “This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”

Melanie D’Arrigo, a campaigner for single-payer healthcare in the United States, responded, “So can Canada hold US oil companies, their lobbyists, and the congresspeople they bribe for the climate crisis that increases droughts and the risk of these wildfires?”

“When Trump talks about increasing tariffs on Canada, he’s talking about Americans paying more for the things they need—because the increased costs are paid by American consumers,” she also stressed.

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, when asked for a comment on Trump’s post, a spokesperson for Canada’s Embassy in Washington, DC only said Ambassador Mark Wiseman has “engaged directly with key administration and Hill officials regarding the wildfire emergency in Canada, our efforts to address it, and the impact of wildfire smoke on Canada and the US.”

CBC noted that a day earlier, four Michigan Republicans in the US House of Representatives had made similar statements in a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney, who didn’t address the missive when asked about it, but told reporters in French that “climate change is everyone’s responsibility—truly everyone’s—including the United States.”

Big Oil-backed Trump has notably rejected scientific conclusions about the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency on the world stage and, throughout both terms, made various policy decisions that serve industry polluters—even as his own government continues to publish climate science.

While Carney has publicly embraced climate science, the Liberal leader has also recently faced criticism for “pouring fuel on the flames of the climate emergency” by “expanding tar sands and the fracked gas industry.”

Meanwhile, the fires raging across Canada—and prompting air quality alerts across the US Midwest and Northwest—have spurred calls for “Nuremberg trials for Big Oil,” given that the burning of fossil fuels has made the blazes more extreme and frequent.

Despite the science, Republicans on Capitol Hill seem hell-bent on strictly blaming Canadian forest management. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), a key ally of Trump and the fossil fuel industry, said Thursday on the social media platform X that “I’ll be introducing a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity.”

Replying to the post, climate reporter Kate Aronoff wrote that a “major function of this site during climate-fueled disasters now is providing a space for right-wingers to beta test increasingly insane talking points for avoiding the obvious.”

More Perfect Union producer Jordan Zakarin also fired back on X, writing, “The United States sanctioning another country, much less Canada, for pollution and environmental destruction is the stuff of bad satire.”

Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, “How about sanctioning the companies fueling the climate crisis that’s making these fires more frequent and intense?”

Democrats in Washington, DC “should introduce a Make Polluters Pay bill that taxes oil and gas companies’ record profits and uses the revenue for wildfire relief, air purifiers, and all the adaptations we need to... deal with these climate disasters they helped create,” he proposed.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent who caucuses with Democrats, also took aim at Republican climate lies in a lengthy social media post on Thursday, noting that “in both the United States and Canada, this heat and drought is driving longer and more intense wildfire seasons, including the more than 800 wildfires across Canada and northern Minnesota that are currently causing dangerous levels of air pollution for at least 115 million people across 20 states.”

“NO, Mr. President: Climate change is not a hoax. It is reality. And your ignorance is putting our kids and grandkids at risk in exchange for the short-term profit of your billionaire friends in Big Oil,” Sanders said. “Our job: Reject President Trump’s lies and take on the crisis of climate change and the greed of the fossil fuel industry by transitioning our energy system to energy efficiency and sustainable forms of power. When we do that, we cut carbon emissions, reduce energy bills, and create millions of good union jobs.”

Cassidy DiPaola, communications director for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, charged that “blaming Canada for these wildfires is like blaming a homeowner when an arsonist sets their house on fire. Canada is choking on the same smoke we are, and sanctioning our closest ally doesn’t clear a single acre of burned forest or stop the next fire from starting.”

“If Republicans actually wanted to hold someone responsible, they’d go after the fossil fuel companies whose executives knew what their products were doing to the planet and buried the science anyway,” she argued. “Instead, Congress is moving in the opposite direction, weighing legislation that would grant the fossil fuel industry total immunity from climate liability. And if Republicans wanted policies that actually protect their constituents’ health, they’d support climate superfund bills that fund public health programs, help wildfire survivors rebuild, and prepare communities for the risks still ahead.”

Moreno’s bill, she added, “is a shameless attempt to make sure the blame lands anywhere but on the fossil fuel industry, and everyday Americans will pay the price for that misdirection while the companies that caused this crisis walk away untouched.”

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:45:11 +0000
Trump admin gives wildlife 'one-way ticket to extinction' with new policies: expert

Julia Conley,
Common Dreams
July 18, 2026

Dolphins swim in front of a boat in the Pacific Ocean outside Long Beach, California, U.S. July 17, 2026. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

“Yet again, the Trump administration has sold out our endangered wildlife to the highest bidder,” said one biodiversity advocate after the US Department of Interior, in a Friday news dump, issued two new policy changes that would weaken the Endangered Species Act and make it easier for corporate polluters to prioritize their own bottom lines over habitat protection.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) rescinded a policy that has been known as the “blanket rule” since 1975, which has given threatened species the same protections from illegal killing, trapping, harassment, and other forms of “take” under the ESA, as species that are officially designated as endangered.

The rollback would apply to species that have been newly declared as threatened, including the Florida manatee, the Pygmy rabbit, the Aztec Gilia, and Clover’s Cactus—which could now go for years without protections despite their habitat loss and declining populations.

“Today’s decision represents a profound failure by Interior Secretary [Doug] Burgum and his department, and it amounts to an utter abdication of the federal government’s responsibility to protect America’s wildlife,” said Sara Amundson, president of the Humane World Action Fund. “The department’s role is to faithfully implement—and certainly not to dismantle—the Endangered Species Act.”

The other policy change will require the FWS to consider the economic impact on various industries of designating areas as “critical” habitats in order to protect threatened and endangered species. The agency has previously had discretion over whether to consider economics when making habitat protection decisions.

Under President Donald Trump’s new rule, said the Center for Biological Diversity, the FWS will be forced “to accept at face value claims by corporations and landowners of economic impacts from designating critical habitat, which could greatly limit the amount and quality of habitat protected for imperiled wildlife.”

“The way this is written, a landowner could falsely claim they planned to build the next Disneyland on their property, so designating critical habitat would supposedly cost them tens of millions of dollars,” said Noah Greenwald, CBD’s endangered species co-director. “This rule is clearly intended to prevent the protection of the wild places that endangered animals and plants need to survive. It’s a despicable move that cheapens the value of our most imperiled wildlife so corporations can make more money. Anyone can make outrageous claims about how much their property is worth, but that shouldn’t be taken as gospel.”

Advocacy groups said both policy changes amounted to giveaways to the logging, mining, drilling, and cattle ranching industries. The latter industry has long lobbied against land being designated as a critical habitat for the ‘I’iwi bird in Hawaii, Clay Samford, an attorney with the environmental legal group Earthjustice, told The Washington Post.

“It’s part of this administration’s push to reduce protections for public lands and wildlife that are enjoyed by all Americans, in favor of narrow business interests,” Samford told the newspaper.

A senior attorney for the group, Elizabeth Forsyth, said in a statement that “the Trump administration is turning the law on its head by letting extractive industries dictate where critical habitat can be destroyed.”

“This prioritization of industry interests over science is fundamentally at odds with the clear purpose of the Endangered Species Act,” said Forsyth. “We won’t let this dangerous giveaway go unchallenged.”

There is currently a backlog of more than 500 species awaiting consideration for listing as threatened or endangered, and the rule changes, along with the Trump administration’s 18% reduction in the FWS workforce, are expected to leave imperiled species waiting even longer for protections.

“In the midst of an extinction crisis, with hundreds of species like the Florida manatee and the wolverine desperately needing stronger protections for their habitats, the Trump administration is gutting protections to benefit industry interests,” said Ryan Shannon, a senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife. “Where we see our nation’s irreplaceable wildlife, they see dollar signs. But our federal lands and waters, and the species they support, belong to all Americans, not to the logging, drilling, and mining industries that oppose all limits on maximizing their private profits.”

In a statement, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asserted that the ESA has long been “weaponized to stop almost any new project in America, driving up costs for families, weakening our competitiveness, and undermining our national security,” continued Secretary Burgum.

He added that the endangered species list has “fallen short,” with 97% of listed species remaining designated as endangered, and called for “species recovery and delisting.”

But Defenders of Wildlife noted that the ESA “has succeeded in preventing extinction for 99% of listed species.”

“Public support for protecting our native wildlife remains overwhelmingly high, with 84% of voters supporting the ESA, according to nationwide polling conducted by Defenders of Wildlife,” said the group.

The rules announced on Friday came days after the Interior Department proposed a new rule under which management of threatened grizzly bears would be transferred from the federal government to the states, where Republican leaders have pushed to end protections for the species.

The administration also exempted oil and gas companies from having to protect endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico, and earlier this month changed the regulatory interpretation of the word “harm” in the ESA.

“These rules are a one-way ticket to extinction for our most imperiled animals and plants, from monarch butterflies to giraffes to alligator snapping turtles,” said Greenwald. “Trump is bending over backward for corporate polluters by ripping away the blanket that protects so many struggling wildlife species as well as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the natural places where we seek peace of mind. This is the last thing we need in the middle of an extinction crisis, and we’ll fight it with everything we’ve got.”

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:34:10 +0000

Mamdani Says He Is Examining Whether His Government Can Arrest Netanyahu During NYC Visit

The mayor said he is in “an active conversation with our legal department” on the matter.

Mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani speaks in Brooklyn, New York on July 5, 2026. S
(Photo by Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Jul 18, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times Saturday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made clear that he plans to take any action available to him to ensure the city complies with the International Criminal Court’s warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if the opportunity arises.

Netanyahu, said Mamdani, “belongs in The Hague,” and he is currently examining whether his government has the authority to arrest the prime minister if he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September.

“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” said the mayor. “I will follow the laws that we have here in New York City because I believe that there is an importance in following the law as a leader who presides over our city.”

He then clarified that “whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end.”

The mayor told Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of the newspaper’s “The Interview,” that he is having “an active conversation with our legal department” to determine the scope of Mamdani’s authority on the matter.

In November 2024, the ICC issued a warrant for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, who was killed by Israeli forces. Netanyahu was accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, where Israel began a relentless assault in 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack.

Israel and its top military funder, the US government, have insisted that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been targeting Hamas in attacks that are still continuing in Gaza despite a ceasefire that was reached last October.

But evidence has steadily mounted that children, aid workers, refugee camps, schools, and hospitals have been attacked, and experts found last year that Israel was intentionally starving Palestinians in Gaza as a method of warfare.

More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, and more than 173,000 people have been wounded. Israeli attacks have made Gaza home to the largest number of child amputees in the world, and have decimated over 90% of housing units in the exclave.

Garcia-Navarro questioned Mamdani on the “political weight” he gives to the issue of Israel and Palestine, which has seen a marked shift in US public opinion since Israel began its latest US-backed assault on Gaza. More than half of Democratic voters and nearly a third of all voters told The Associated Press last month that they viewed the war in Gaza as a genocide against Palestinians.

Three-quarters of respondents to a New York Times poll in May said they opposed continuing to send military aid to Israel, compared to 45% three years ago.

“It’s hard to explain to a New Yorker why their needs are not even being discussed, and yet we have billions of dollars to kill civilians halfway across the world,” said Mamdani, who has been laser-focused during his term and his campaign last year on lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers and passing universal public programs.

“I think what we have seen from New Yorkers, what we’ve seen from Americans, when we talk about this hunger for a new kind of politics, it’s a hunger to move beyond the bankruptcy that characterizes a lot of politics today,” said Mamdani. “And it is hard to find a more bankrupt policy approach than what our country has done to Gaza and to Palestine and how it hasn’t been specific to any one party. It’s been, again and again, an insistence to tell New Yorkers, and to tell Americans, that what they are seeing is not something they should in fact either be concerned by or believe in. It is hard to then turn to another issue and say, Believe me here.”

A post shared by The Interview (@theinterview_nyt)

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations said Saturday that Netanyahu will be at the UN meeting in New York City in September, despite Mamdani’s threats—which date back to his mayoral campaign—while the prime minister said on a radio show this week that the mayor “hates America” and champions Hamas.

Journalist Mehdi Hasan said it was “pretty amazing to hear” Mamdani repeat his earlier conviction that Netanyahu should be arrested under the ICC warrant, given that he first publicly remarked on the issue “when he was polling at 1% in the Democratic primary polls and no one expected him to actually be mayor.”

Netanyahu has thus far evaded arrest when traveling to countries that recognize the ICC’s authority under the Rome Statute. The court opened an inquiry into Hungary last year when it failed to detain the prime minister when he visited. France also said it would not execute the warrant for Netanyahu because Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute.

UN Ambassador Michael Waltz responded to Mamdani’s interview on Saturday, saying the US is also not party to the Rome Statute.

Journalist Zaid Jilani said that although the mayor of New York likely lacks the authority to arrest Netanyahu, “he can certainly troll him.”

House GOP panics as Mamdani mulls arresting Trump ally

Alexander Willis
July 18, 2026
RAW STORY

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers a speech to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States of America at City Hall in New York, NY, U.S., July 3, 2026. Anna Connors/Pool via REUTERS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

House Republicans lashed out at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani Saturday after reports revealed that the rising star in the Democratic Party was actively considering arresting a key ally to President Donald Trump.

Speaking with The New York Times, Mamdani revealed that he was having “active” conversations with the New York City Law Department about whether he could order the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s scheduled to visit New York City in September for a gathering of the United Nations General Assembly.

In 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for alleged crimes related to Israel’s siege on Gaza, which countless human rights groups and a United Nations committee have labeled a genocide. The ICC alleged that Netanyahu has used starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directed attacks on civilians.

“Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mamdani told the Times when asked whether he planned to order the arrest of Netanyahu, long a key ally to Trump.

Responding to reports of Mamdani’s remarks, the official House Republicans account on X lashed out at the progressive mayor and urged him to instead focus on addressing “antisemitism” in his city.

“Mamdani is threatening to arrest the head of one of our closest allies,” reads a post from the House Republicans’ account on X published Saturday. “He should stop politicizing local law enforcement and interfering with US foreign policy and instead focus on rising rent and housing prices and antisemitism in NYC.”

House Republicans’ post was shared by Netanyahu’s son, Yair Netanyahu, a podcast host and avid supporter of Israel who since 2023 has lived in a “luxury Florida apartment,” despite being eligible for military service, The Jewish Chronicle reported.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:08:56 +0000
TATE BROS; RAPISTS ON THE RUN
Pro-Trump influencer jailed in Florida under ‘sealed’ warrant: report

Alexander Willis
July 18, 2026
RAW STORY

Bucharest, Romania. 21st June, 2023: Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate, surrounded by bodyguards, leave the Bucharest Court/ (LCV - Shutterstock)

Far-right influencer Andrew Tate, a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump, was arrested Saturday in Miami, Florida, the U.S. Marshals Service told the Associated Press.

In 2022, Tate was arrested on rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, though after pressure from the Trump administration, the case ultimately didn’t move forward.

On Saturday, British prosecutors revealed they were “seeking the extradition of the brothers on rape and sex trafficking charges,” the Associated Press reported, offenses that allegedly occurred between 2010 and 2017. A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed that both Tate and his brother, Tristan Tate, were arrested in Florida Saturday, but could not comment further as the “warrant was sealed,” per the Associated Press.

“The pending charges in the United Kingdom accused the brothers of abusing women between 2012 and 2015 in an area north of London, where they grew up,” the Associated Press’ report reads. “Their lawyers had said they denied the allegations.”

The Trump administration was accused of pressing the Romanian government to ease travel restrictions for the Tate brothers, who hold both U.S. and British citizenship. Further reporting revealed that the brothers were closer to Trump’s inner circle than previously known, with Andrew Tate joining Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump, on a video call in 2024.

A probe was launched last year over the Trump administration’s alleged intervention in investigations into the Tate brothers.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:00:39 +0000
Iran Says Real ‘Foreign Influence’ Campaign in US Is Being Directed by Israelis Working With Trump Ally

“Americans are being warned of foreign influence. How about the extensive Israeli campaign to bamboozle the US administration into an unwinnable war of choice?”

Brad Parscale, campaign manager for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, speaks on stage during the Conservative Political Action Conference 2020 (CPAC) on February 28, 2020 in National Harbor, Maryland.
(Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Jul 17, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump on Thursday accused the Chinese government of trying to meddle in US elections in a lengthy speech rattling off baseless conspiracy theories about his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden.

However, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi on Friday said that the president was overlooking a foreign influence campaign being carried out by one of his longtime allies.

In a social media post, the Iranian diplomat pointed to a report in Time about Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, who is now a registered foreign agent of Israel conducting influence operations on behalf of its government.

“Americans are being warned of foreign influence,” wrote Araghchi. “How about the extensive Israeli campaign to bamboozle the US administration into an unwinnable war of choice? Even worse: Israel is using US taxpayer dollars to silence any US critics. It will all soon unravel.”

According to Time, Parscale’s Clock Tower X firm last year signed an agreement to produce content across multiple platforms aimed at shoring up support for Israel among young US conservatives.

An anonymous Israeli Foreign Ministry official told Time that Parscale “presented himself as uniquely positioned to improve Israel’s reputation among young conservatives,” while stressing “his experience at the helm of Trump’s political operation, with a grasp of both the architecture of the modern internet and the political movement Trump had built” during his three runs for the presidency.

“Three people familiar with the campaign describe a messaging operation run through a network of interconnected firms overseen by Parscale or other firms he owns or created,” reported Time. “Through private group chats, they say, conservative influencers receive suggested language for posts on social media sites such as X, Instagram and TikTok. They were then compensated based on the impressions and engagement their content generated.”

One Trump official told Time they suspected that Parscale was also behind an operation aimed at undermining the president’s efforts to broker a deal to end his illegal war with Iran.

Parscale, however, denied pushing messages that attacked the deal shortly after its announcement.

“I have never funded, organized, or participated in any effort to undermine President Trump—ever—including his [memorandum of understanding] or ceasefire proposal,” the former Trump 2020 campaign manager told the magazine. “The claim that I am coordinating an effort to prolong the war is completely false.”

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:59:55 +0000
Trump admin accused of 'war crime' after strike leaves thousands without water: report

Julia Conley,
Common Dreams
July 18, 2026

A U.S. warship launches a munition at an unknown location during what the U.S. military says is its latest wave of strikes on Iran, hitting "Iranian military targets such as coastal surveillance and air defense sites, military logistics infrastructure, and maritime capabilities," in this still image taken from handout video released July 16, 2026. U.S. Central Command/Handout via REUTERS

About 10,000 people in nearly two dozen villages in southern Iran were without drinking water while the region was under an excessive heat warning on Saturday, after the US struck a water desalination plant in the village of Bonji in one of its latest attacks on Iranian civilian infrastructure.

Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting said the drinking water supply was expected to be restored within a week, and emergency supply operations had begun.

Drop Site News reported comments from the deputy governor for political and security affairs in Hormozgan province, who said several missiles had hit power infrastructure and water desalination plants in the region near the Strait of Hormuz, which President Donald Trump has demanded control over as he’s ramped up attacks on Iran in recent days, despite a ceasefire and a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to end hostilities that was agreed to in June.
On

On Saturday, Iranian officials said the country was suspending its commitments to the MOU after the US violated the agreement repeatedly over the past week.

“The US has violated and suspended all its commitments within the framework of the Islamabad MOU,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi. “We also likewise have suspended all of our commitments as a result; we are no longer implementing those commitments.”

He added that Tehran is now “busy defending the country.”

A representative for Hormozgan province, Ahmad Moradi, told Iran’s Tasnim news agency that over the past two nights, “about seven to eight people” have been killed in US attacks, all of whom were civilians. One attack targeted a bridge and hit two family cars. The neighborhood of Tappeh Allaho Akbar in Bandar Abbas was also hit, killing a woman and injuring a one-year-old, whose wounds required doctors to amputate.

At least 116 telecommunication towers were out of service in southern Iran Saturday, Al Jazeera reported.

The Iranian Embassy in India posted a video of the destruction of a bridge and also condemned the US attack on a maritime surveillance tower at the Chabahar Port, which US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth boasted about on social media on Thursday.

“For

“For a state that once cast itself as the global champion of order, liberalism, and the war on terrorism, proudly displaying images of destroyed bridges and civilian infrastructure has become its only remaining ‘victory,’” said Esmaeil Baqaei, a spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on Saturday. “Yet with the collapse of every bridge, every tower, and every civilian facility, it is not merely steel and concrete that is being reduced to rubble. It is America’s moral standing—along with the entire architecture of international law and the civilizational claims of the West—that is crumbling before the world’s eyes.”

According to Drop Site, US attacks have targeted nine bridges, two airports, a railroad junction, and a road tunnel since Wednesday. At least 41 Iranians have been killed and 408 have been wounded in US attacks so far this month, with Iranian authorities reporting that at least three women and one child are among those killed.

In a letter to United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s permanent UN representative, wrote on Saturday that US attacks had “targeted and caused extensive damage to ports, transportation networks, communications facilities, logistics hubs, radar installations, coastal defense systems and other infrastructure indispensable to the civilian population, and to the functioning of the national economy.”

“The continued commission of these unlawful armed attacks poses a grave threat to international peace and security, freedom of navigation, regional stability, and the security of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz,” wrote Iravani.

Iran has retaliated against the US this week by striking American allies, including Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan. Kuwait’s government Saturday said a power plant and water treatment plant had been attacked for the second time in two days, as well as an oil facility.

Two US soldiers were killed and a third was missing after an Iranian attack on a US military base in Jordan—the first American service members to be killed from hostile fire since an initial ceasefire was brokered in April.

Roxane Farmanfarmian, a professor of Middle East politics at the University of Cambridge, told Al Jazeera that Iranian forces are “using Kuwait, in particular, as an example of what they can do in retaliation.”

“The US is clearly hitting the south in Iran and hitting airports, desalination plants, and bridges, and so the same kinds of things are being hit now in Kuwait to show what kind of effect Iran really can have on those countries that are hosting American bases,” she said.

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, echoed Iranian officials’ condemnation of the US attack on the southern water desalination plant on Saturday, saying it was “not a legitimate military target.”

“It is a war crime to target it,” he said.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:56:43 +0000
Amid Fears of Killer Robots, Humanoid MMA Fight in China Ends With Decapitation

“One brutal kick sent the robot’s head hanging loose.”

Two humanoid robots fight at the Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend competition in Shenzhen, China on July 17, 2026.
(Photo by Shenzhen Story/YouTube/screenshot)

Jessica Corbett
Jul 17, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Amid warnings from experts and political leaders about “killer robots,” a Chinese robotics company on Thursday hosted an unprecedented combat tournament in which one humanoid robot decapitated another.

The fight featuring the decapitation—footage of which quickly circulated online—was part of the opening night of the Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend (URKL) competition in Shenzhen, organized by the company EngineAI, which developed the humanoid.

The Chinese Embassy in Ireland was among the accounts on the social media platform X that highlighted the moment when one robot’s “head” was dislodged.

The “white humanoid robot, named ‘White Eagle’ landed a high kick to the head of its black opponent, ‘Matador,’ which made the robot’s head rock precariously in its socket before rolling completely out of place,” according to Newsweek. “The two continued to spar as Matador’s head was swinging from its socket until eventually the robot fell, crushing its head underneath its body.”

Unveiled last year, the humanoid is called T800, a nod to the Terminator franchise. EngineAI’s website features videos of T800 executing various mixed martial arts (MMA) moves, from a combination punch and a roundhouse kick to punch-kick combos.

EngineAI announced UKRL, the “world’s first” humanoid robot combat league, early this year, seeking 32 teams from universities, enterprises, and research institutions worldwide to compete using its robots. The first round of competition is scheduled for July-August, followed by another round in September-October, and the grand finals in November-December.

As the Chinese tabloid Global Times reported when the tournament was announced in February:
Pan Helin, a Beijing-based veteran analyst, told the Global Times on Monday that such competitions help enhance public awareness of humanoid robots and expand potential application scenarios.

Pan noted that humanoid robots still face technological and practical limitations, and real-world application is key to their further development. Such events could yield positive effects in the entertainment and performance market, which is a necessary step forward in paving the way for further applications in factories or households, Pan said.

Tian Feng, former dean of SenseTime’s Intelligence Industry Research Institute, said that the free provision of T800 robots will lower research and development barriers for smaller companies and promote the integration of applications involving industry, academia, and research bodies.

The tournament’s opening night came on the heels of a series of artificial intelligence events hosted by the United Nations earlier this month, during which Secretary-General António Guterres said that “if AI is to be powerful, it must be governed,” and “my main concern is with ‘lethal autonomous weapon systems.’”

“Let us call them what they are: killer robots,” Guterres continued. “Machines selecting and engaging their target and taking a life—without human control and judgment. That is morally repugnant. It is politically unacceptable. And it must be banned by international law.”

“States are already at the discussion table. But let us not wait for atrocity to act. Some decisions must remain forever human—none more than taking a human life,” he added. “Some might claim that governance is the enemy of innovation. But innovation needs guardrails. The technologies we trust most—in aviation, in medicine, in nuclear energy and beyond—earned that trust because we acted to hold their makers to account.”

As Wired detailed in Friday reporting, “the US military has a long-standing interest in humanoids,” and Sankaet Pathak’s startup Foundation Future Industries aims to “produce an all-American robot supersoldier.”

The startup’s “unique in its targeting of the military market, and so far it’s been lucrative,” the outlet added. “The company has government contracts worth millions of dollars and high-profile backers to spread its message: Eric Trump, the president’s son, is both an investor and the company’s chief strategy adviser.”

This article has been updated to include the Wired reporting.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:28:28 +0000
The Cancellation of a Blue Hydrogen Boondoggle Proves No Project Is Inevitable

This retreat shows that these projects and their false climate solutions are not just unpopular, they’re also a major financial risk to companies, investors, and communities.

The global headquarters of Air Products is shown in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania
(CyberXRef via Wikipedia/ CC BY-SA 3.0)

Jessi Parfait
Taylor Hodge
Jul 18, 2026
CIEL Blog

Plans for one of the world’s largest blue hydrogen and ammonia projects have collapsed, wasting billions of dollars in a risky bet that frontline communities resisted for years. Despite “clean” marketing, the project would have relied on dirty fracked gas.

The gas and chemicals company Air Products canceled its proposed $4.5 billion Louisiana Clean Energy Complex, wasting $2.9 billion—more than half of the overall cost—after concluding the project no longer met its financial expectations. Once promoted as the company’s largest US investment—and the world’s largest carbon sequestration project—the cancellation is more than a corporate setback. It is a signal of the end of the so-called “low carbon” hydrogen hype despite years of industry promotion, generous public subsidies, and claims that these technologies can be used to tackle climate change.

This retreat shows that these projects and their false climate solutions are not just unpopular, they’re also a major financial risk to companies, investors, and communities. For Louisiana communities that opposed the project from the beginning, however, the announcement means something else: proof that projects portrayed as inevitable can be stopped.

A Flagship Project That Never Materialized

When Air Products first announced the project in 2021, the company described it as a transformational investment. Their plans included the production of 1,700 metric tons of hydrogen per day from fracked gas with up to 95% of emissions mitigated through carbon capture and storage (CCS). They planned to pump the hydrogen—called “blue” hydrogen due to the addition of CCS—through a pipeline along the Gulf Coast for refineries and petrochemical plants, or turn it into ammonia, which is a toxic, fossil fuel-derived chemical—used primarily as a fertilizer.

(Graphic via CIEL Ammonia Factsheet)

That vision quickly began to unravel. By 2024, Air Products was already seeking partners to offload parts of the project, including the ammonia and carbon capture components. In 2025, it entered advanced negotiations with Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara. By mid-2026, both companies announced the project had been abandoned, citing financial concerns and an inability to find customers for a speculative market.

The cancellation reflects a broader reality: Despite billions in public funds and years of political backing, many blue hydrogen projects continue to struggle with rising costs, uncertain markets, and technical challenges.

Why This Matters Beyond One Company

Air Products is not alone. At least 45 hydrogen and ammonia production facilities have been proposed in recent years across the US—mostly clustered in Texas and Louisiana—with only one making it to the construction phase, and many more on hold. Although more than 80% of ammonia produced in the US is used to manufacture fertilizer, much of the proposed buildout depends on speculative markets—including using ammonia as a shipping fuel, hydrogen carrier, and energy source—none of which are possible at scale today.

To make these projects appear climate friendly, companies increasingly market them as “clean,” “blue,” or “low-carbon” by pairing fossil fuel-based hydrogen and ammonia production with CCS. Yet, CCS has repeatedly failed to deliver emissions reductions while putting communities at elevated risk for pollution and related disasters. Despite that record, federal carbon capture subsidies were expanded in 2022 and again in 2025, potentially leading to the transfer of $1 trillion in public funds to private corporations over the coming decades.

The collapse of one of the industry’s flagship projects should prompt investors and policymakers alike to ask whether this business model is built on wishful thinking rather than sound evidence and economics.

Louisiana Was Forced to Bear the Risk

Air Products’ proposed Louisiana Complex would have consisted of a hydrogen and ammonia plant in Ascension, Louisiana, with 38 miles of pipeline sprawling across five parishes, connecting to one of at least 10 separate injection wells underneath Lake Maurepas. The project would have formed part of a larger effort to transform Louisiana into a national hub for CCS.

More than just a proposed storage site, Lake Maurepas is an important estuarine ecosystem beloved by locals for recreational activities like boating, fishing, and wildlife observation. One of the nation’s largest forested wetlands borders the lake, supporting wildlife, commercial fishing, and local businesses. For generations, communities have depended on these waters—not simply for income, but as part of their identity. From the moment residents learned about the Air Products project, they organized against it.

Today, more than 30 CCS projects are under review across the state by the Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy. Many would be built alongside communities already burdened by decades of petrochemical pollution in the 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, known locally as Cancer Alley.

These communities have long borne the health costs of fossil fuel development. Siting this experimental and knowingly dangerous CCS technology alongside frontline communities already overburdened by industrial pollution would force them to shoulder another layer of industrial risk, while companies stand to gain hundreds of billions of dollars in public money over the next 20 years through a federal tax credit.

This Isn’t the First Time

The failure of Air Products’ vision is not a surprise to anyone watching the proposed CCS buildout; the ballooning costs and failure to deliver on ambitious promises follow a familiar pattern.

The Kemper “clean coal” project in Mississippi was once celebrated as the future of carbon capture, claiming it would capture 65% of emissions from the power plant. Originally budgeted at $3 billion, the costs of the project more than doubled to $7.5 billion over the seven years of its construction (2010-2017), before the carbon capture system was abandoned altogether. Despite the massive investment, the Kemper facility never operated as promised and was partially demolished in 2021. Local residents are still paying for the corporate loss from this experiment through their electricity bills.

The failure of the Kemper project should have been a warning for future investments and should have prompted the more fundamental question: Who bears the cost of these projects?

While Louisiana leads the nation in oil refining, natural gas production, and chemical production, the state consistently ranks among the poorest and least educated states in the US. CCS projects will no doubt add to the unequal environmental burden that the state population is forced to bear for the benefit of corporations. While many of the hardships can be quantified, the joy and love for the land by its residents is immeasurable. There’s no metric that captures the experience of paddling a canoe across Lake Maurepas, seeing alligators bask in the sun, listening to birdsongs echo across the wetlands, or watching the flotant—marsh grasses that float on top of the water—bob with the waves.

An alligator basks in Lake Maurepas, Louisiana, US. (Photo by Jessi Parfait, CIEL.)

For the communities that have called this place home for generations, protecting the lake has never been about stopping a single project—it has been about safeguarding a way of life. The cancellation of the project is a victory not only for the hundreds of community members who organized against it—showing what is possible when people stand together to fight against false solutions—but also for the future generations who will continue to enjoy this remarkable ecosystem.

The cancellation is also a major win for communities that spent years warning about the project’s risks. Concerned residents across the complex’s planned footprint partnered with environmental groups to speak out at public hearings, organize neighbors, and challenge permits, refusing to accept that the project was inevitable.

Their persistence mattered. For years, the fossil fuel industry insisted that carbon capture represented the future—that projects like this were necessary and unavoidable. But as James Hiatt, founder of For a Better Bayou based in Lake Charles, Louisiana, put it:
Air Products pulling out proves that nothing here is inevitable. Industry wants us to believe these projects are a done deal, that our voices don’t matter. They do. Elected and regulators didn’t hand us this win; community pressure did. Consistent, persistent organizing works.

A Warning for The Future

Air Products’ withdrawal is not simply a failed investment by one company. It is a warning to policymakers considering whether public money should continue subsidizing projects that repeatedly fail to deliver.

Communities increasingly reject being asked to bear new risks in exchange for promises that never materialize. And this failure is likely not the last ammonia and CCS project to be canceled. Even now, many projects are on hold or delayed, further signaling to companies, investors, and communities that they are a bad bet.

The cancellation also sends a broader message: Expensive, speculative technologies designed to prolong fossil fuel production aren’t fooling anyone and companies pushing these risky projects will be footing the bill.

© 2024 Center for International Environmental Law

Jessi Parfait
Jessi Parfait is the senior US carbon capture campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law.
Full Bio >

Taylor Hodge
Taylor Hodge is the US agrochemicals and fossil fuels campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law.
Full Bio >

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:28:09 +0000
Inspired by Trump, Israel Advances Plan for Crocodile-Ringed Prison for Palestinians

“This is some Bond villain-level lunacy,” said one Reddit user.

Senior Israeli police officials take a fact-finding tour of a crocodile farm in Hamat Gader on January 1, 2026.
(Photo by Israel Police)

Brett Wilkins
Jul 17, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The Israeli government this week stripped Nile crocodiles of their protected status in order to advance a proposal that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said was inspired by the Trump administration’s now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz to build a prison for Palestinians surrounded by a moat full of the ravenous reptiles.

“You read that right,” the liberal US Jewish group J Street said in response to the news. “When cruelty becomes a governing principle instead of an aberration within the Israeli government, something has gone deeply wrong.”

Israeli Environmental Minister Idit Silman signed a directive Wednesday reclassifying Nile crocodiles as “specially managed wild animals,” a novel legal category enabling the government to keep them for security purposes.

Ben-Gvir, who heads the Israel Prison Service (IPS), said he was inspired by the Trump administration’s recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center in Florida. He is seeking to first introduce crocodiles into a moat around Ketziot Prison in southern Israel.

While it is not certain that the plan will come to fruition, Ben-Gvir celebrated Silman’s decree in a social media post showing him petting a crocodile, with the caption: “Cursed terrorist, thinking of trying to escape? Think again.”

Palestinians have occasionally escaped from Israeli lockups, such as in September 2021, when six men used improvised tools, including spoons, to tunnel out of the high-security Gilboa Prison. All six escapees were caught within weeks.

(Photo by Itamar Ben-Gvir/Facebook)

The move by Silman—who gained international notoriety by calling for the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip—came despite objections from her own ministry’s legal adviser and the Nature and Parks Authority.

IPS, which sent a fact-finding mission to the Hamat Gader crocodile farm in January, argued that its employees could handle the animals, citing the agency’s experience working with the attack dogs that Palestinian prisoners and human rights groups have claimed were used to maul and even sexually abuse detainees.

Silman’s approval is contingent upon IPS meeting animal welfare requirements and appropriate holding conditions.

Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir has openly boasted about the dramatic deterioration in conditions endured by Palestinian prisoners since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023 and Israel’s retaliatory obliteration of Gaza, which United Nations and other experts describe as a genocide.

“We go into the prisons, and they wet themselves,” Ben-Gvir said of Palestinian prisoners during a speech on Friday. “I’m not joking. They’re afraid. Fear rules them, and that’s how it should be.”

Ben-Gvir and other Israeli officials have worn noose lapel pins to celebrate a recently passed bill legalizing the execution by hanging of so-called “terrorists.”

Former Palestinian detainees and Israeli personnel have described beatings, rape and sexual torture by male and female soldiers, routine amputations due to constant shackling, burnings, electrocutions, attacks by dogs, ice-water dousings, denial of food and water, sleep deprivation, constant loud music, and other abuse.

The Israeli military is investigating the deaths of dozens of detainees at the Sde Teiman prison in the Negev Desert, including one who died after allegedly being sodomized with an electric baton.

Ben-Gvir has defended Israeli reservists accused of torturing Palestinian prisoners, and called the reservists who allegedly gang-raped a man at Sde Teiman prison “heroes.”

The minister is banned from entering a number of Western countries for his incitement to violence against Palestinians.

Several Israeli environmental groups issued a joint statement opposing the use of crocodiles in prisons.

“Crocodiles are sentient beings, with complex needs for space, water, temperature, and natural behavior,” the groups said. “It is also highly doubtful that the crocodiles intended for this purpose have aggressive temperaments, and in any event, during the winter they slow their metabolism dramatically, become very sluggish, and stop eating.”

“Security should be achieved through real security measures, not through animals,” they added. “We are considering filing a petition with the High Court of Justice over the matter.”

Last year, the Israeli military massacred 262 crocodiles that were being kept on a farm in the occupied West Bank near the illegal Israeli settler colony of Petzael, claiming the reptiles posed a risk to the public.

“They just slaughtered them,” farm owner Danny Bitan told reporters at the time, describing the scene as “some kind of killing valley.”

Ben-Gvir’s plan comes amid ongoing slaughter in Gaza—where Israeli forces have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, over 21,500 of them children, since October 2023—and accelerating colonization and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

News of Silman’s approval sparked disbelief around the world and on social media, where Reddit users called the plan “cartoonish idiocy” and “Bond villain-level lunacy.”

“The fact that Israel is trying to surround a prison with [crocodiles] tells you all you need to know about these camps, which are designed to torture, rape, and murder Palestinians, often held as hostages without charges,” Israeli researcher and political commentator Shaiel Ben-Ephraim said Thursday on X.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:27:42 +0000
Trump admin's shocking move just branded humanitarians as 'terror financiers': analysis

Alexander Willis
July 18, 2026
RAW STORY

U.S. Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) shows a picture of U.S. President Donald Trump with Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, during Blanche's confirmation hearing before a Senate Judiciary Committee on his nomination to be attorney general, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 15, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

An American far-left activist was arrested in Spain last week at the request of the Trump administration on money laundering charges, a case journalist Alissa Valdes-Rodriguez argued has disturbing implications for any American who's ever volunteered or donated to a relief fund.

Fergie Chambers, an American activist and heir to the Cox Enterprises fortune, was detained on an international arrest warrant by Spanish officials at the request of the U.S. Justice Department, which alleged Chambers had “provided material support to Hamas.” Valdes-Rodriguez offered a different characterization of what Chambers had done.

“Here is what Fergie Chambers actually did. He cut ties with his family in 2023, sold his stake [in Cox Enterprises] for roughly $250 million, and began giving the money away,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote in an analysis published Friday on her Substack.

“More than a million dollars went to humanitarian projects in Gaza, where a million children have been displaced, killed, starved, bombed, and/or orphaned by Israeli attacks upon civilians at a scale the International Court of Justice has been examining as a violation of the Genocide Convention.”

Valdes-Rodriguez warned that if Spain ultimately hands Chambers over to the United States and he’s convicted, he could face “up to thirty years in a federal prison” and effectively be placed “in a cage for the rest of his functional life.”

While Valdes-Rodriguez characterized Chambers’ arrest as disturbing in its own right, she argued its implications for ordinary Americans who donate to humanitarian causes were even more alarming.

“Feeding a starving child in Rafah is treated as materially indistinguishable from arming a militant. By this logic, every donor to every Gaza relief fund, every doctor who volunteered in a field hospital, every church that took up a collection for orphans, is a terror financier awaiting an indictment,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote.

“The logic is designed to be that broad. Breadth is the point. Fear is the product. Imprisoning – and I would guess, disappearing – American dissidents, humanitarians and people of conscience is the end goal.”

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:04:45 +0000
Critics Warn Bipartisan Bill to Abolish UNRWA Will Be ‘Death Sentence For Thousands of Palestinians’

“UNRWA is vital to keeping hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Palestinians alive.”

Palestinian refugees protest during a demonstration outside the Al-Shati camp food distribution center, a UNRWA facility, on July 15, 2026 in Gaza City, Gaza. The demonstration, organized by the Popular Committee in the Al-Shati refugee camp, was held to protest the exclusion by the US-led Board of Peace of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in its plans for Gaza.
(Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Jul 17, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Human rights advocates are raising alarm about a bipartisan bill in the US House of Representatives aimed at abolishing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which they say will help Israel in its efforts to starve Palestinians in the occupied territories of food and medical aid.

Across Gaza, the West Bank, and other surrounding areas, UNRWA provides emergency food or cash assistance to roughly 2.6 million people and records about 10.5 million primary-care visits annually, according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

But since the genocide in Gaza began, Israel has waged a multifront campaign to dismantle the agency, legally banning it from operating in Israeli territory, blocking it from bringing desperately needed aid and staff into Gaza, and pressuring nations around the world to cut off funding based on unfounded allegations that the organization is controlled by Hamas, which dissolved Gaza’s governing body earlier this month as part of the ceasefire agreement with Israel.

The bill introduced in the US House on Wednesday by Reps. Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) would require the State Department to “dismantle” and transition its services to other nongovernmental organizations.

“UNRWA has been corrupted by Hamas for years, with documented ties to terrorism,” claimed Lawler, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa. “That’s why [Rep. Gottheimer] and I have introduced the bipartisan Replace UNRWA with Real Humanitarian Assistance Act to abolish UNRWA and replace it with trusted partners that will deliver aid to those who need it, without empowering terrorist organizations.”

Gottheimer added that UNRWA “employs Hamas terrorists involved in the October 7 [2023] attack,” echoing a claim that has been presented by Israel in its assault on the agency.

In 2024, Israel accused 19 of UNRWA’s more than 13,000 employees in Gaza of having taken part in the attack, which resulted in the death of about 1,200 Israelis.

A UN investigation found that nine of the 19 employees may have been involved in the attack. Investigators found insufficient evidence to support involvement in nine cases and obtained no evidence in one case. UNRWA said the employment of the nine implicated staff members would be terminated.

Israeli officials have continued to portray UNRWA as a “civilian arm” of Hamas, alleging that hundreds of militants lurk among its ranks, but independent reviews have uncovered no evidence of this.

Nevertheless, many nations have taken Israel’s claims at face value, initially cutting off funds and creating an existential funding crisis for the agency. While many have since resumed funding, its largest contributor, the US—which provided around a third of the agency’s budget—has not, and the agency has been forced to scale back services for vulnerable refugees.

“This bill would be a death sentence for thousands of Palestinians who depend on UNRWA services,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy (CIP) and a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “What’s really going on here: using the false claim that ‘UNRWA equals Hamas’ to advance the Israeli right’s goal of removing the Palestinian refugee issue from the agenda.”

Adil Haque, a law professor at Rutgers University, raised concerns about what sort of NGO might replace UNRWA if it were fully dismantled.

“This is how we ended up with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and daily mass shootings of starving civilians,” he said, referring to the US-Israeli nonprofit that supplanted UNRWA as the primary distributor of aid before shutting down after the October 2025 “ceasefire.”

The organization consolidated aid distribution to a small number of sites under Israeli military control, where soldiers routinely fired into massive crowds of starving people. At least 859 people were killed near GHF sites in less than two months in 2025, and thousands more were wounded, according to a UN report.

Lawler and Gottheimer’s bill has 23 co-sponsors, all of whom are Republicans. However, a majority of Democrats in both the House and Senate voted for a spending package in March 2024 that defunded the agency. Some Democrats have since sponsored legislation aimed at restoring the funds.

“UNRWA is vital to keeping hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Palestinians alive,” said Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at CIP, in response to a post by Lawler promoting the legislation. “Your attempt to kill it unconscionably compounds Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:12:47 +0000
Switzerland

60,000 in Geneva against the G7, imperialism and fascism

Wednesday 15 July 2026, by Juan Tortosa

The mobilization that took place in Geneva, Switzerland at the call of the NOG7 Coalition, against the G7 meeting in Évian-les-Bains, France on 15-17 June 2026 was a huge success, despite the policy of intimidation and restriction of freedoms carried out by the authorities, the police and the media. Is the common thread of the global justice movement finally connected? [1]
The route of the demonstration had been negotiated with the authorities since November. We have come up against an intransigence on the part of the Minister of Police, a member of the Socialist Party, and the authorities of the city of Geneva.
The path requested by our coalition was not accepted. They didn’t want us to get close to the streets where multinationals and luxury boutiques are located. The city centre looked like a barricaded city, most of the windows and some windows were protected by planks. We have witnessed a political and media bludgeon on the part of the authorities and the right against possible violence.
The number of participants in the protest exceeded all the most optimistic forecasts of the NOG7 Coalition. We were counting on a range of 10,000 people; we were about 60,000!
The feminist strike remains the most powerful, socially anchored and most capable of mobilizing. Its cortege was undoubtedly the most numerous. Its demands are radical and anti-capitalist.
Solidarity with the Palestinian people was shown by a large group. The Kurds, in all their diversity, also played a very important role in the demonstration.
The “Living Defends” bloc brought together all the environmental movements. However, we can regret the weak presence of Swiss trade unions, as well as the limited and rather symbolic presence of French trade unions.
Repression and bludgeoning
A few days before the big demonstration, the city of Geneva was under siege: thousands of police and military personnel from other regions of Switzerland had been deployed in the city of Calvin, supported by the French police who could intervene in the canton. According to the newspapers, people were stopped up to five times a day, police vans in large numbers, German-speaking Swiss who did not speak French.
All along the route, grids were provided in “sensitive points” that the demonstrators had to channel. Once the protest ended, in the same park where it had started, the police intervened brutally and surrounded some of the protesters. More than 300 people were trapped until dawn, then about twenty of them were taken to the police station, before being released.
The Geneva and French NOG7 Coalition issued several statements hailing the success of the huge demonstration, but also the “serious security abuses” observed on Sunday. The coalition condemned “the very numerous tear gas shots, especially on the part of the procession reserved for families and children. Similarly, the coalition castigates the scandalous kettling of 549 people implemented for nearly 10 hours.”
The joy of having succeeded!
Despite the repression, we are very satisfied with the massive size, conviviality, diversity and radicalism of the demonstration. This feeling of victory is an excellent springboard for the mobilizations and challenges that await us.
23 June 2026
Footnotes
[1] Photo: joint contingent of SolidaritéS Switzerland and NPA-A France.
Juan Tortosa
Juan Tortosa is a leading member of CADTM in Switzerland.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 18:10:02 +0000
Marxism

Lenin and the Politics of Broken Time

The Party, the Crisis, and the Conjuncture

Monday 13 July 2026, by Daniel Bensaïd

LONG READ
This essay by Daniel Bensaïd remains one of the sharpest engagements with Lenin’s political thought from within the revolutionary Marxist tradition. Bensaïd identifies Lenin’s enduring contribution not as an organisational technique or a party model, but as a philosophy of political time: an understanding of history as fractured, uneven, and shot through with crises that open and close with brutal speed. Against the linear temporality of social-democratic evolutionism, Bensaïd’s Lenin is a thinker of rupture, conjuncture, and the irreducible specificity of the political. The essay weaves together the theory of the party, the distinction between class and politics, the meaning of the revolutionary crisis, and the demands of strategic decision --- culminating in an account of October 1917 as the paradigm of politics lived in broken time. [AN]
(This translation is of “Lénine ou la politique du temps brisé,” first published in Critique communiste no. 150, autumn 1997, and collected in the posthumous volume Octobre 17 (Éditions Lignes, 2017). It is not the same text as "’Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!’: Lenin and Politics," which was first published in English in International Socialism 95 in July 2002 and will already be familiar to readers.
Both texts share a preoccupation with Lenin’s conception of political time against the homogeneous, empty time of Kautskyan orthodoxy, and both draw on overlapping material — the analysis of the party as strategic operator, the critique of the reduction of politics to the social, the reading of the revolutionary crisis as a rupture in normal temporality. Readers will recognise the passages on Tucholsky’s "be ready," on the September and October 1917 letters to the Central Committee, and on the distinction between principles of organisation and systems of organisation.
This 1997 text is substantially longer than its 2002 successor. The section on plurality and representation — Lenin’s halting movement towards acknowledging that a single class may express itself through multiple parties — is considerably fuller here and constitutes a genuine argument rather than an aside. The analysis of Rosa Luxemburg’s relationship to bureaucratic conservatism is more extended.
The two texts end differently: where the 2002 article builds to its climax through the Hegelian "Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!" passage, the 1997 text closes on the figure of "broken time" itself — the bureaucrat who expects the announced and the revolutionary who watches for the event latent in crisis. That conclusion gives this earlier text its title and its distinctive register.[AN])
The party as gearbox
The term "Leninism" is now used loosely and carelessly, without even recalling that it was originally codified by Zinoviev at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International to justify bringing the young Communist parties to heel under cover of bolshevisation. Yet far more than a form of discipline and centralisation, Lenin’s guiding idea targets what he calls the "disorganising" confusion between party and class. The distinction thus introduced between class and party was part of the major debates of the socialist movement of the period and, more specifically in Russia, against the populist, "economist", and Menshevik currents. On fundamental questions such as the provisional government or alliances, in those formative years of Russian social democracy, the Mensheviks and "economists" sometimes jointly defended positions that appeared more uncompromising in appearance --- more in keeping with the idea of a "pure socialism" --- than the Bolsheviks. This orthodoxy in fact derived from a vision of the democratic "bourgeois" revolution against despotism as a necessary and inevitable stage, during which the nascent workers’ movement should remain an auxiliary force without compromising itself with any power, while awaiting a capitalist modernisation of society.
In neighbouring Germany, Kautsky was advancing the parallel idea of a "passive accumulation" of forces and non-participation in government, until the proletariat’s electoral majority, catching up with its social majority, allowed it to govern alone. This kind of socialism of the march to power, trusting in the logic of progress, has been termed "socialism outside time." It was more precisely a socialism abandoned to the flow of time: a flattening of properly political struggle in favour of sociological determinism.
Lenin’s opposition to this reduction of politics to the social was entirely original for the period. Like a psychoanalyst attentive to the "displacements" and "condensations" at work in neuroses, he understood that economic and social contradictions do not express themselves directly, but in the specific, deformed, and transformed shape of politics. This is why one of the party’s tasks is to listen closely, to decipher within the political field the often unexpected ways in which these contradictions manifest themselves --- a student struggle, the Dreyfus Affair, an electoral question, an international incident. Their untimely irruption at an unforeseen point becomes a symptom. It condenses and reveals a latent global crisis of social relations. That is the miracle of what constitutes, as distinct from the ordinary news item, the political event proper.
It is also why Lenin’s conception of the revolutionary militant is not that of the combative trade unionist but that of the "tribune of the people," intervening "in all strata of the population" to grasp the concrete way in which a multiplicity of contradictions are knotted together. This question is at the heart of the famous debate on party rules, minutely analysed in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. The definition of party membership --- whether the member simply identifies with the party, assists it, or sympathises... or whether they actively participate in one of its bodies, pay dues, and hold themselves responsible for decisions taken collectively --- is not a formal or administrative quarrel. What is at stake in this apparently minor difference is the demarcation of the party from the class. It is precisely the party form that makes it possible to intervene in the political field, to act on the possible, not passively to submit to the ebbs and flows of the class struggle.
This is the essential core of the "revolution within the revolution" according to Lenin. Through this distinction between party and class, between the political and the social, it becomes possible to think the relationship between the two --- "the representation of the social in the political" --- which Badiou identifies as "the key point." It may be that in 1902 the thesis was stated too forcefully in the heat of internal polemic; its excesses were corrected by Lenin himself. The controversial question of "democratic centralism," deformed by the practice of real bureaucratic centralism installed after 1924, derives in large part from this demarcation of party and class. It logically implies the selection of militants and the concentration of forces, alongside a democracy permitting the assimilation of all the party’s social experiences. Democracy serves reflection and decision; centralism serves action aimed at shifting the lines, at displacing the balance of forces. These are general necessities. They are irreducible to any particular technique of organisation.
In his discussion with Rosa Luxemburg about One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Lenin explicitly distinguishes the "principles of organisation," linked to the general conditions of struggle under capital’s rule, from the "system of organisation," which varies with the concrete conditions of legality, repression, and development. [1] In the light of the 1905 experience, Lenin insists in his collected writings Twelve Years that the party, however sharply delineated, lives in continuous exchange and dialogue with the experiences of the class --- notably the unforeseen innovation of the soviets. What persists, through all these nuances and variations, is that the party is not one organisational form among others --- trade union or associative --- but the specific form in which the class struggle inscribes itself in the political field. This idea of the specificity of the political reappears in the notion of revolutionary crisis, which is not the result of a simple social movement but of a "national crisis" --- a general crisis of the reciprocal relations between all classes of society. What Lenin wrote on this from USA

“Against Trump we have to defend our neighbors, defend our democratic rights and our labor rights”

Thursday 16 July 2026,
by Antoine Larrache, Janette Zahia Corcelius, Penelope Duggan, Raphaël Alberto

Janette Zahia Corcelius, a trade-union organizer from Minneapolis, visited Paris on two occasions this spring. First, in April, as member of a delegation speaking in a tour organized by on the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) campaign. Then in early June to speak at an anti-fascist festival. On her first visit she spoke to Raphaël Alberto for the l’Anticapitaliste you tube channel (published in French « Face à Trump, nous devons protéger nos voisinEs, défendre nos droits démocratiques et nos droits du travail » about the resistance movement to ICE in Minneapolis. [1]
On her second visit she spoke to Antoine Larrache of Inprecor and Penelope Duggan of International Viewpoint about the upcoming Labor Notes Conference, the labor movement, and the state and perspectives of DSA and the left in the US.
Raphaël Alberto: Hello Janette. Thanks for being with us today. So we wanted to talk to you about what happened in Minneapolis and about the metro surge, the operation by ICE in the US. So what was Metro Surge? Why did it happen in Minneapolis and what were the consequences for the people over there?
Janette Zahia Corcelius: Operation Metro Surge started on 1 December 2025 but back in June of that year ICE and other federal agents staged a raid on Lake and Bloomington to see how we would react. They also were conducting raids and abductions and deportations prior to that as well. But the height of it was in November. And from January to February and ways that we resisted were plentiful.
We had mutual aid networks. We had frontline protests and direct action. We had general strikes. And we also utilized this rapid response, what we called commuting network which harkens back to the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Truckers strike where the strikers used flying pickets to go after scabs. So in this case we used our cars to not go after scabs but to go after federal agents who were abducting our neighbors.
Organizing in Minneapolis
How did this movement start and how was it organized? From the beginning? And maybe who was involved in this movement?
So labor unions, nonprofit organizations, grassroots led organizations, socialist organizations all of them in concert in a united front were preparing for this because there were people who were close to the workers in the community who felt that a second Trump term was inevitable.
So one of the things the labor movement did to prepare was conduct a series of anti authoritarianism training prior to Trump’s election and after. And what we talked about and discussed and prepared for was how we would react during his second term. We were well aware that he could continue disintegrating our labor rights and our unions through cutting positions.
We also knew that he was going to ramp up deportations and attack our electoral system in terms of elections and the voting that would occur at the midterm elections as well as the next presidential election.
One of the things we discussed was utilizing the general strike which is a part of our history in the United States and also more specifically in Minnesota.The Minneapolis Teamsters Truckers strike in 1934 was a pivotal moment in the US labor movement. It happened the same year as two other strikes and that strike was led by Trotskyists, members of the Fourth International, and that strike along with the Toledo auto strike in Ohio with the UAW and Longshoreman strike in San Francisco were galvanizing events for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt presidency and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins to create the National Labor Relations Act and the board, because workers were being killed by the police and self-deputized Citizens Alliance and the bosses.The workers wanted to have collective bargaining rights and the right to strike but also the bosses wanted labor peace.
We realized that Trump is most likely going to get rid of the National Labor Relations Act and the board and he’s also going to continue this techno fascist feudalistic manifesto that the artificial intelligence executives are pushing.
We also knew that he was going to betray his base who were for America first. So we knew that we could get a broad movement of workers, whether they were unionized or not, to take action. So on 23 January we had a one-day strike. No work, no school, no shopping : where one out of four Minnesotans participated. That means around 2 million people were not working. And we had a march in downtown Minneapolis of 100 000 people in -20 degree Fahrenheit (-29°C) weather. It was so powerful and beautiful. And we’re getting ready for the May Day International Workers Day general strike happening on 1 May where we will also be doing another day of no work, no school, no shopping.
But this is nationwide and this comes on the heels of this Operation Metro Surge that’s still occurring. But it also comes from Shawn Fein, president of the United Auto Workers, who called for a general strike for May Day 2028. Obviously, that’s too far away. We need to be having a series of strikes leading up to the midterms and the presidential election.
And we also need to protect our neighbors. We need to protect our democracy and our labor rights. And we also need to show the bosses that they can’t continue to hurt us economically. The cost of living in the United States is skyrocketing. So this is something that has broad support and we’re excited to see what it’s going to look like when we return on Friday.
Maybe before talking about how it changed the way Trump is seen now, how do you organize such a broad movement? We’ve seen like the protests you’ve had in the cold and the like with priests with people like who are not unionized. How do you organize such a broad and diverse movement in Minneapolis and elsewhere. ?
So socialist organizations in the Twin Cities doorknocked small businesses, specifically ones that were owned by immigrants, the impacted community. And we also canvassed and flyered in public spaces. We held a series of trainings, there were legal observer trainings that were occurring almost every day for months to teach people about their rights.
In those trainings where we’re teaching people about their rights we also taught them about their rights in the workplace, in their home, on the street, you name it. And we also would keep lists. We would list buildings so that we could contact them about other trainings and events.
Also, it’s important to note that the 23 January General strike had the backing of the faith community. There’s a strong Lutheran community in Minnesota, and also there’s a large Muslim population because the largest Somali community outside of Somalia is in Minnesota. So, we build th