In only eighteen months, Kennedy — along with the corrupt mobster president and his parasitic accomplice Elon Musk —  turned a seasonal stomach bug into the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history.

Cyclospora, the foodborne parasite, has infected more than 22,000 Americans so far this summer — about a 95% increase in the typical number of U.S. cases (1,000). The infection is almost always the result of ingesting food or water contaminated with human feces containing cyclospora parasites. The ingested parasites unleash a brutal invasion of the small intestine that causes nausea, cramping, and what has been described as “watery diarrhea,” “relentless diarrhea,” and, most vividly, “explosive diarrhea.” Usually not life-threatening, the miserable symptoms of cyclosporiasis may persist for a month and even relapse.

The outbreaks are almost always caused by improper sanitation at farms or food processing facilities.

The American food safety infrastructure has been gutted by a three-headed monster named Kennedy, Musk and Trump. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods (NACMCF) was eradicated in early 2025 as result of an executive order by Trump. NACMCF provided reliable scientific advice and coordinated prevention strategies for defending against malignant microbes. As you might expect, just before the committee was terminated, it was doing its job and working on safety recommendations regarding foodborne illness outbreaks.

 FDA’s food safety inspections have been suspended under Kennedy’s mismanagement, having lost more than 4,000 employees. FDA Deputy Commissioner Jim Jones angrily resigned from the agency’s Human Foods Program, which monitors food safety, after more than 80 of his workers were sacked. Ravaged by Kennedy, deep staff cuts to the FDA not only mean no food inspectors, but a loss of institutional knowledge and delays in lab work.

 Answering to no one, Musk — through his perversely misnamed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — wreaked havoc on food safety as more than 20,000 workers were forced from USDA last year.

The damage to American public-health infrastructure, whose primary task is understanding and combating disease epidemics like this one, has been equally devastating. Since taking office, Kennedy has waged a deranged assault against the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) culminating in his decision to decapitate the CDC by firing Dr. Susan Monarez as director and eliminating nearly 3,000 science staff.

The decimation of the national public-health apparatus has had a direct impact on the cyclosporiasis crisis. The CDC’s parasite-surveillance team, which was instrumental in tracing the origin of the 2013 cyclospora outbreak, had eleven scientists before the systematic dismantling by Kennedy and DOGE. Now it has three.

Until last year, the FoodNet program, a joint project of the CDC, FDA, and USDA, mandated proactive surveillance of eight pathogens, including cyclospora. Kennedy directed Foodnet to cut six out of eight pathogens, including . . . wait for it . . . the diarrhea pathogen cyclospora. No, I’m not kidding.

Sabotaged by RFK, the CDC‘s Epidemic Intelligence Service, which trains and deploys “disease detectives” to trace and respond to outbreaks was also crippled, losing scores of personnel.

“The people who are still at CDC are working under incredibly constrained circumstances,” said former disease detective Arthur Reingold, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of California “We have a markedly reduced capacity to do the kinds of studies that underpin prevention-and-control strategies.”

The growing cyclospora epidemic has hit Michigan the hardest. The Michigan Department of Health counted 12,218 cases, 193 hospitalizations and recorded its first two related deaths last week. Cyclospora has erupted as an issue in the campaign for Senate.

“We DOGE-d away protection against explosive diarrhea,” said Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, former Columbia University Professor of Epidemiology and former Director of the Detroit Health Department. With scatological humor, he added, “I’m on the anti-explosive diarrhea side of things.” El-Sayed accused his Republican opponent Mike Rodgers of being “pro-explosive diarrhea” for supporting the government that fouled us with the outbreak.

The dramatic deluge of cases, with more than 740 hospitalizations across 47 states, has led a majority of American voters to say they have little or no confidence in government oversight of food safety, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll. With all this in mind, it makes sense that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee recently spent nearly three hours grilling a health official over his response to a disease outbreak.

Absurdly, the disease outbreak focus was COVID-19 and the health official was retired National Institutes of Health immunologist Anthony Fauci, more than three years removed from federal service. Pathologically obsessed with Fauci, committee chairperson Sen. Rand Paul has said he wants the 85-year-old scientist “behind bars.” 

The MAGA-led Senate committee attempted to humiliate Fauci, trap him into perjuring himself, and then voted – along party lines – to hold him in contempt of Congress after he declined to answer their hostile questions, asserting his Fifth Amendment rights.

Fauci became the public face of the COVID pandemic response — calm, confident, and reassuring, a symbol of scientific authority. The country turned him into a folk hero. Fauci refused to live in the Trump Twilight Zone and called out those who did. Putting a target on his back, Republicans accuse Fauci of doing what Trump did: lying to cover-up his responsibility for thousands of deaths. As most everyone remembers, Trump completely botched his response to containing COVID. According to a study published in The Lancet, the Trump Administration’s undermining of science and public health agencies directly “impeded the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.”

Paul and Republicans pursued a man who led the NIH for 38 years and whose work has saved countless lives. He frequently treated diseases, like Ebola, that kill the poor, the weak, and the marginalized. A key architect of PEPFAR, Fauci launched the emergency HIV/AIDS plan in 2003 that provided funds and medical resources to combat the global AIDS epidemic. Estimates show PEPFAR saved more than 25 million lives, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

Musk’s DOGE terminated USAID, thereby freezing all payments and services for PEPFAR despite its being a permanent part of U.S. law. Yet Fauci is the one Republicans defame, vilify and are determined to destroy. Instead of Fauci, they might have questioned Musk about the deaths he caused by terminating USAID. Americans also have a right to know how much he and DOGE contributed to the cyclospora outbreak: how his brand of “efficiency” has hollowed out federal, state, and local health departments charged with inspecting food facilities and monitoring microbial threats. Fauci serves as a distraction from the ongoing public health failures of Musk, Kennedy and Trump.

Instead of Fauci, they might have grilled the Kennedy-appointed acting commissioner of the FDA Kyle Diamantas about the FDA’s delay in implementing the federal Food Traceability Rule. With a compliance date set for January 2026, the Rule might have prevented thousands of Americans from spending much of the summer on the toilet. Once in place, it would promote greater traceability in the food system and facilitate solving foodborne outbreaks. After lobbying by the Grocery Store Industry, the FDA extended the compliance date 30 months from January 2026.

Food industry watchdog group Consumer Reports condemned this extension, saying, “This decision puts consumers at risk of getting sick from unsafe food because a small segment of the industry pushed for delay, despite having 15 years to prepare.” The diarrhea epidemic might have been contained but for the delay.

Instead of persecuting Fauci, the Committee should have put Taylor Farms CEO Bruce Taylor on the hot seat as the man who put thousands of Americans on the toilet seat. Taylor Farms’ surreptitious handling of this ongoing outbreak is deserving of microscopic inquiry. The company was implicated in numerous food recalls and food-borne illnesses, including a cyclosporiasis outbreak in 2013 and an E. coli outbreak in 2024.

 The FDA named Taylor Farms lettuce as the likely source of the outbreak on July 17, 2026. Its first clear actionable statement on cyclosporiasis was peculiar in its specificity. It described a “multistate outbreak of cyclospora infections linked to Taylor Farms’ shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations in 5 states.” Its advice to consumers was overly narrow: “Do not eat shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia.” The lettuce came from an unnamed “single supplier” in Mexico. “Shredded iceberg lettuce sold in grocery stores or served in other restaurants is not affected.”

Prudently going beyond the FDA recommendations, Taco Bell’s official statement encouraged “all relevant restaurants, retailers, and foodservice operators”— not just Taco Bells in the five states that the government had identified — to act responsibly, by pulling lettuce off their menu.

Taylor Farms’ initial recall included lettuce shipped not just to Taco Bell, but also to a number of major companies including Sysco, the largest wholesale food distributor in the U.S., supplying restaurants, hospitals, and schools. Taylor Farms’ lettuce, like microplastics and mycotoxins, is everywhere in our food system.

Suddenly upset that it was being targeted for the outbreak, Taylor Farms executives, who made a million-dollar donation to MAGA Inc — a pro-Trump superpac, met with White House officials. They tried to distance the company from the outbreak and voice concerns about the official investigations.

Two days later, Kennedy’s chaotic FDA reversed course announcing a false positive test on Taylor Farms lettuce which made things even more confusing. The embarrassing mistake was compounded by Taylor Farms, which issued a statement that began with: “Today, FDA apologized to us.” The FDA denied that it had issued a formal apology.

All of this confusion should be investigated by Rand Paul and his gang of witch-hunters. Instead they attacked Fauci while Taylor Farms’ CEO Bruce Taylor rests easy even as Americans get violently sick: a grim reminder of the privileges that political donations have secured under gangster Trump.

Rand Paul’s inquisitors, who want burn Fauci at the stake, might have also subpoenaed DHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, the gold-standard superspreader of misinformation. But what has characterized his agency’s response to the cyclospora outbreak is the absence of information. That owes partly to an absence of personnel and direction. Neither the FDA nor the office of the Surgeon General currently has a Senate-confirmed leader. Kennedy himself was silent for weeks.

f.j.zirbel, “Enemy of Science”

The governmental outbreak response “is starting to approach a catastrophic level in terms of how mismanaged it’s been on multiple fronts,” said former FDA deputy commissioner and Trump’s former top food safety official Frank Yiannas. He called for an independent investigation of the CDC, FDA and Kennedy.  

Kennedy has made only one public comment about the diarrhea epidemic. Weeks ago, Kennedy claimed the cyclosporiasis outbreak was “under control” — it’s not. He also asserted that DOGE cutbacks to food safety programs are not to blame — they are. His statements contradicted his own staff at the FDA who announced it is “investigating yet another outbreak of the diarrhea-causing cyclospora parasite, with 72 cases tied to an unknown source.”

“It’s hard to know what ‘under control’ means when there are so many mixed messages about what food products are involved and why people are getting sick,” said Sandra Eskin, the CEO of the Chicago-based nonprofit Stop Foodborne Illness.

If history is any judge, when the Trump administration declares a crisis under control, it’s time to brace for the worst yet to come. In typical fashion, RFK like Trump pats himself on the back for a job not done. We are also in the midst of the biggest measles outbreak since … oh wait, that’s the other health-related disaster Kennedy doesn’t want to talk about because it is, in part, caused by him personally, through his years-long history of spewing anti-vaccine misinformation.

Under Kennedy’s malign anti-vax influence, the gullible Trump, on Monday, disgorged an executive order foolishly and recklessly limiting vaccines because of “what some people say.” The President even stupidly repeated the thoroughly debunked claim linking autism and childhood vaccines, again undermining science and public health.

Kennedy lies about everything. Entrusted with our health, he and his agency cannot be trusted to perform the basic role of government safety: monitoring our food for parasitic pathogens, issuing timely recalls, informing us of risks, providing guidance on how to avoid those risks, and offering the best medical counsel about what to do if we become ill. Instead, he created a summer shit show.

(The Conversation) – The recent decision by Benjamin Netanyahu to reject the Board of Peace plan for Gaza sponsored by the US president Donald Trump is concerning – but is hardly surprising.

The 15-point roadmap, published by Trump’s Board of Peace, envisages Hamas’ disarmament and Israel’s phased withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian territory would then be run by the US-backed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza – a transitional body consisting of Palestinian technocrats. The plan was endorsed in November 2025 by UN security council resolution 2803.

At the end of July, Hamas said it had accepted the deal and would begin a staged disarmament process – provided Israel carried out its own obligations under the deal, to end “all forms of aggression” and withdraw its forces from Gaza.

Hamas’s disarmament had been a major sticking point in talks, and its acceptance of the plan was touted as a breakthrough. But Netanyahu has now put it in doubt, stating that Israel “will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is genuinely disarmed”.

Israel’s stance will not have improved Netanyahu’s often fractious relationship with Trump. Despite boasting about their closeness, Netanyahu has repeatedly drawn Trump’s ire both publicly and privately for his refusal to acquiesce to US demands.

In June, the US president shouted and swore at the Israeli prime minister in an angry phone call over Israel continuing its aggression in Lebanon, despite the memorandum of understanding which mandated a ceasefire in both Iran and southern Lebanon. And last summer, he posted a warning online for Israel to cease its bombardment of Iran.

With Israeli elections scheduled for October, and Netanyahu’s domestic approval ratings at 33%, his ability to manage Israel’s relationship with its closest ally – something he has long cited as a strength – is under the spotlight.

But, while Netanyahu faces significant internal opposition, his policies towards the Palestinians in general and Gaza in particular are typically areas of consensus in Israeli politics. If there are differences among mainstream parties, it tends to be over details and tactics, rather than the overall military strategy.

When Netanyahu’s defence minister, Israel Katz, declared that Israel “will never leave all of Gaza”, his statement was not an outlier among the Israeli political establishment.

In fact, Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s main challenger for the premiership – who served in Netanyahu’s cabinet for the first eight months of the war on Gaza – also opposes the Trump deal and Palestinian sovereignty. He
boasted recently: “I have never in all my 66 years said the words ‘Palestinian state’.” Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party, has similarly voiced support for Israeli territorial expansionism.

This shared opposition to relinquishing control of Gaza is perhaps unsurprising in view of public opinion. Since October 2023, polls have shown increased Israeli support for annexing and settling Gaza. In one poll taken in June 2025, 82% of Jewish Israelis were found to support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Meanwhile, Israeli support for Palestinian statehood is at a historic low.

Israel’s long claim on Gaza

Israeli claims on Gaza long predate the current era. Israel insists its current occupation of Gaza is in response to Hamas’s aggression, most notably its brutal attack of October 7 2023. Yet, as I discuss in my book A Short History of the Gaza Strip, Israel first invaded Gaza in 1956 – more than 30 years before Hamas was created, and 50 years before it came to power in the Palestinian enclave.

Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion – the country’s longest-serving premier before Netanyahu – first proposed annexing Gaza as early as 1949, during talks at the Lausanne Conference on Palestine. His proposal failed – but the idea remained. Six years later, Ben-Gurion – then serving as defence minister – tried to push through a cabinet proposal for Israel to occupy Gaza.

In 1955, foreign minister Golda Meir (who would herself go on to be Israel’s prime minister) declared openly that Gaza was “an integral part of Israel”. These were not just words. A year after Meir’s statement, Israel invaded and occupied Gaza for the first time.

Israel withdrew from Gaza after four months following direct intervention by US president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, but during that time the occupying regime developed plans for building Jewish settlements in Gaza. When it reoccupied the Strip a decade later, it put those plans into action.

Israel has arguably remained the occupying power in Gaza since 1967. Although it removed its settlements and redeployed its military in 2005, it never relinquished control of Gaza’s airspace, water, commercial crossing and entry points, fuel, electricity, or population register.

As a result, many legal experts have argued that Israel continued to occupy Gaza after 2005, despite the evacuation. In 2023, of course, its military re-entered on the ground too.

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

Israeli plans today

For most of its history, then, Israel has occupied Gaza, a fact that may shed further light on its politicians’ views today. And as in 1956, Israel is now developing plans to maintain its occupation long into the future. Last month, Katz confirmed funding to establish three new military outputs in northern Gaza of the kind that historically preceded civilian settlements.

And while Netanyahu has claimed that Israel will not resettle Gaza, his Likud party recently sponsored a far-right rally calling for exactly that. Members of Netanyahu’s cabinet took part.

In view of all this, it is unsurprising that Netanyahu has rejected a proposal for leaving Gaza. But finding a way forward may need to go much deeper than simply replacing him.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Anne Irfan, Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Commondreams.org ) – Previous research has shown that shifting the United States to a Medicare for All system could save roughly 68,000 lives and $650 billion per year, but a new study by experts at Yale University suggests the savings would likely be even greater on both fronts.

In a Tuesday statement, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), lead sponsor of the Medicare for All Act in the Senate, highlighted the findings, published recently on medRxiv, a server for preprints, or research that hasn’t yet been peer reviewed.

“The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, yet tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured, and coverage retractions enacted in 2025 are widening these gaps,” the five experts wrote.

Upward of 15 million Americans could lose health insurance coverage over the next decade because of Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the Republican-led Congress’ failure to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that expired at the end of last year.

“The misalignment between the for-profit insurance architecture and optimal patient care, together with the inefficiencies of a fragmented system, contributes to both unnecessary costs and preventable mortality,” according to the Yale researchers. “We update our previous analyses with the most recent data to project the economic benefits and the number of lives saved that would be achieved by single-payer universal coverage, as proposed in the Medicare for All Act.” 

“We estimate that such a system would reduce national health expenditure by $1,041 billion annually,” they explained. “Sources of savings include reductions in administrative overhead, pharmaceutical prices, fraudulent billing, and avoidable emergency care. Combined with the reversal of recent retractions, universal coverage would save over 114,000 lives annually.”

Specifically, as Sanders’ office detailed in a statement, Americans would save:

• $377.5 billion by paying no more than other major countries for prescription drugs;
• $286.3 billion by eliminating bureaucracy and waste;
• $285.7 billion by curbing fraudulent billing;
• $100 billion by preventing costly emergency room and hospital visits; and
• $295.6 billion by reimbursing providers fairly for the care they provide.

Welcoming the findings, the senator declared that “this study confirms what we have known for years: Medicare for All saves lives and saves money. In fact, guaranteeing healthcare as a human right through a Medicare for All, single-payer system would cost $1 trillion less than our current dysfunctional system.”

“It would save working families thousands of dollars a year. And it would prevent over 100,000 Americans from dying unnecessarily each and every year because they cannot make it to a doctor in time,” he stressed. “At a time when 15 million Americans are being thrown off the healthcare they have and 20 million Americans have already seen their premiums double, on average, as a result of Trump’s so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ we need Medicare for All now more than ever.”

“The time is now to end the greed of the big insurance and drug companies and pass Medicare for All,” he added.

A new study confirms that Medicare for All would save 114,000 lives every year and reduce overall healthcare spending by more than $1 trillion annually.

Do not tell me we cannot afford Medicare for All.

What we cannot afford is a broken healthcare system based on greed.

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 11, 2026

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

The research comes as Americans face high prices for not only healthcare but also food, gasoline, housing, and more under President Donald Trump and the GOP-led Congress. It also comes amid a renewed push by hundreds of advocacy groups that support Medicare for All and a wave of victories by progressive candidates who support the policy.

Among them is former Detroit health official Abdul El-Sayed, who won the Democratic primary for US Senate in Michigan last week having campaigned on a promise to prioritize “money out of politics, money in your pocket, and Medicare for All.” His victory followed those of various other candidates, from Colorado to New York and Pennsylvania.

However, it’s not just elected Republicans standing the way of a transition to universal healthcare in the United States. As a Monday analysis from the investigative outlet Sludge shows, the health insurance industry is pouring money into Third Way, a think tank reportedly preparing to spend $15 million combating the rise of candidates who support progressive policies including Medicare for All.

Via Commondreams.org )

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

The above is from a 2025 email exchange with Lara*, a Kurdish woman I taught at an international school in Erbil, northern Iraq from 2011 to 2013. Back then, she was a sophomore, navigating the complexities of puberty in a patriarchal and war-scarred landscape.

I have not lived a war-interrupted life because when my refugee father was seeking safety, security, and opportunity post-World War II, the US held its door open, allowing him in. My father’s experience has subconsciously shaped my life: I spent 15 years teaching in conflict/post-conflict/developing contexts, eight of which were in northern Iraq, from where US forces are scheduled to withdraw by September 30 of this year. Many forces have already left, their departure spurred on by Iranian attacks. If all US forces leave Iraq by September 30, this will be the first time since 2003 that Iraq has no conventional US military presence.

US withdrawal is a two-edged sword. In the Kurdish region, the US Consulate in Erbil and the joint training facilities near the Erbil International Airport have been prime targets during the current war with Iran. The US Patriot defense systems protect these targets and the nearby civilian infrastructure and facilities. Since February 28, US and coalition air defenses have defended the Kurdish region from more than 900 Iranian and Iraqi drone and missile attacks. Kurdistan Democratic Party member Idris Shaaban worries that a complete US withdrawal from the Kurdish region may leave it more vulnerable to attacks by “armed factions, Iran, and terrorist organizations.”

In January 2026, American forces withdrew entirely from the Ain al-Asad Air Base in the Anbar province, leaving the Iraqi military in complete control of the facilities and marking a transition in security sovereignty. My former student Hassan* remembers the US forces entering his hometown of Heet with toys, footballs, books, and food. They set up in the Ain al-Asad Airbase, the Lion’s Base.

Meanwhile, the resistance planted bombs at night for the US-led forces and collected them at dawn so the public wouldn’t get hurt. The resistance beheaded or shot anyone who worked with the Americans. They would videotape their operations and leave them on discs around the city as a warning. Some mornings Hassan awoke to streets littered with discs, other mornings to streets scattered with dead bodies.

In 2004, the house-to-house searches began. At first, the soldiers were friendly. They spoke English with Hassan’s father, took pictures with family members, removed their gloves to shake hands.  

After Saddam Hussein was deposed, things changed.

Eleven-year-old Hassan sat facing a wall in his family’s compound in the Anbar province. Alongside Hassan were his two older brothers, his father, some uncles, and a grandfather, all in a row, like birds on a line. Insect song trailed through the open front door only to be hushed by the strange sounds a man in a US military uniform made. A translator sitting next to Hassan magicked the foreign words into a question. “What do you know about the bombs on the street?”

No one had the answer.

The translator didn’t need to interpret Uniform Man’s punches. Violence was the same in any language.

“Shut up, you fat kid,” the US soldier yelled as he took a crying Hassan into another part of the house to be interrogated. Again, the soldier asked Hassan what he knew about the bomb that had been planted on a street one hundred meters from Hassan’s house in Heet.

Hassan thought this was the moment to be brave. “If you want information, come get it yourself.”

Smothering a smile, the translator turned Hamza’s words into something else.

The US officer threatened Hassan with prison if he didn’t tell.

“If you do that,” Hassan reasoned, “you will be the terrorist.”

One night, Hassan and his family heard the neighbors screaming as the search unit kicked in their door. Hassan’s father opened the door and waited.

Would you go to bed at night with your door unlocked or ajar? This became a habit in Heet.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Eric Pahon, a Broadcast Journalist (46R), conducting ENG while on a patrol in w:Iraq, 2006. Public Domain. Via Picryl

Since the US forces left the Ain al-Asad Airbase, occupation and sovereignty have slugged it out with no real winner. In March, there were attacks on a military base housing Iraq’s regular army and the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a paramilitary group which includes some Iran-aligned brigades, in western Anbar province. Other cross border and proxy escalations further destabilize the region, for which Iraq blames both the US and Iran.

Meanwhile, civilians pay the price. Today, Hassan lives in Baghdad, near the Green Zone. He is a tech entrepreneur and will soon be married. During March’s escalation, Hassan watched as US citizens were evacuated from areas around the Green Zone, and he was left to manage on his own.

The US has been engaged in Iraq for most of Hassan and Lara’s lives. Even if US forces fully withdraw, the consequences of the US decision to invade their country will reverberate long after the last US boot leaves the ground.

*Not their real names

In short, after all these years — 16 as an editor at Pantheon Books, a decade in a freelance editing (and writing) life, and almost a quarter of a century running and writing for TomDispatch.com, the website I created (and that’s now being run by the wonderful Nick Turse) — somehow, I still can’t believe (not truly) the world I find myself in. Phew! That was an exhausting sentence! (And no surprise there, since we’re on a distinctly exhausting planet.)

If there were a god (which, unfortunately, I doubt there is), he (she, it, they?) would surely be no less unable to believe the world we now find ourselves in. Of course, from the Stone Age on, humanity has always represented a difficult proposition. Our history is, in many ways, a running story of conflicts and wars, one seemingly grimmer than the next — a history that has anything but ended in our moment.

You would think, of course, that, with our very planet imperiled by climate change, which is slowly heating it to the boiling point, we might at least have taken a passing break from fighting each other. That would seem like an especially obvious thing to do, since war pours into the atmosphere in a stunning fashion the fossil fuels that are heating this planet so destructively. But no such luck, of course.

 

Buy the Book

Quite the opposite, in fact. Even in Europe, a continent warming up approximately twice as fast as the rest of the planet, where only recently more than 300,000 people in France and Spain were displaced by heat and wildfires of a startling kind, there’s still an ongoing major war between Russia and Ukraine. And thanks at least in part to it, at a time when humanity seems incapable of putting much effort into fighting climate change, a whole new form of fighting each other (by drone) has been developed in a distinctly unnerving fashion. And of course, Europe is hardly alone, since wars continue to be fought across parts of the Middle East (thanks significantly to “my” president and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu), and in Somalia and Sudan in Africa. In short, despite everything we humans might theoretically learn from our past, nothing truly seems to get in the way of more of the same.

Only recently, of course, “my” president launched a war more or less out of the blue against Iran. Yes, Iran, a country that — my best guess — most Americans couldn’t even locate on a map of the world! And talk about learning nothing from the past, how totally mad that my country — theoretically still the greatest power on planet Earth — should start yet another war thousands and thousands of miles away, given that it hasn’t actually emerged victorious from a single one of the wars it’s fought since World War II. And that’s true, despite the fact that it continues to fund its military to the tune of about a trillion dollars annually, year after endless year. And note that “my” president, who only recently launched that seemingly random war on Iran, also appears all too determined to raise the Pentagon budget from a mere (just joking, of course) trillion dollars yearly to one and a half trillion dollars.

Photo by Ella Ivanescu on Unsplash

A Planet Heading for the Boiling Point?

And yes, I’m aware that, almost 25 years after I first began writing pieces like this, I’m distinctly repeating myself, which is hardly unreasonable given the repetitiveness of both my country and humanity when it comes to such crucial matters. Although, wait a second, I may not be giving Americans the credit they deserve! After all, there was nothing repetitious about Donald Trump (not until his second term in office anyway)! Historically speaking, he’s come about as close as anyone could to being a one-of-a-kind American president and something of a unique global leader as well. He’s certainly a distinctive reminder that, from time to time, we humans can indeed truly change the script (however dismally).

I mean, the country that once elected George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy (as well, of course, as Grover Cleveland, Warren Harding, and Ronald Reagan) has certainly flipped the script entirely with Donald Trump in the White House. We’re talking, after all, about the man who is now building not an Arc de Triomphe or even an Arc de Trump in Washington, D.C., but an Arc de Défaite (yes, that’s defeat in French!) — the largest on Earth. But perhaps that shouldn’t be considered even faintly strange, given what the American military has been unable to do — win a war — across this planet since World War II.

And imagine that, at a moment in 2025 when, from Europe to the United States, we increasingly had a planet that was all too literally in flames, whether from our wars with each other or our ongoing climate war on the planet itself, Americans sent a distinct flamethrower into the White House for a second time. Who would have believed it once upon a time? (Of course, who would then have believed that humanity could potentially destroy this planet as a habitable place for life?)

Honestly, once upon a time, no one could have made all this up: the greatest power on Earth (oh, wait, that may now be China!) in the midst of the most stunningly dangerous “war” of all time, our war on the planet itself (all too mildly and pleasantly labelled climate change, rather than climate catastrophe, climate explosion, or climate hell) and led by — yes! — that living climate catastrophe Donald J. Trump, distinctly the madman-in-chief of a country in decline on a planet that itself is beginning to experience the kind of decline that would once have been unimaginable.

Whew, that was one long sentence! And imagine that, in the years to come, barring a surprise, we humans — incapable of stopping our wars and so much else — could all too literally heat this planet to the boiling point, leaving us all in the situation that hundreds of thousands of French and Spanish people recently experienced. In the future, all of us could become a new version of migrants with nowhere to go (unless Elon Musk truly does settle Mars) on a planet heading for the boiling point.

And in that context, imagine what our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will think about the fact that nearly 50% of American voters (twice!) elected Donald J. Trump, the planet-destroyer-in-chief, as president of the United States.

Excuse me, I’m starting to sweat…

Via Tom Engelhardt Substack

Iran’s January protests were a “bloodbath,” Nasrin Sotoudeh said as she called for international support for women from Tehran in February. Sotoudeh, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer, has been repeatedly arrested over the past two decades for her activism and has spent more than six years in prison. She was referring to protests that initially reacted to the collapse of the rial at the end of last year, then grew into a nationwide call for government leaders to step down. Iranian security forces responded with live fire, and estimates vary widely of how many they killed; from the government’s figure of 3,117, to the U.N. Special Rapporteur’s claim that there were “tens of thousands,” and Iranian medical professionals’ estimate of 30,000.

Two weeks after Sotoudeh’s call, on Feb. 28, the bombs came. Over the following month alone, U.S. and Israeli strikes killed 249 women in Iran, all civilians, according to government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani. But beyond the direct toll on people and the destruction of infrastructure, the bombing has also provided the Iranian government with a pretext of national unity, which it has used to intensify its crackdown on feminists and protesters.

Sotoudeh saw the January massacres as a “final blow” to Iranian society and saw no other option but to publicly ask for the implementation of international law within the framework of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter and its provisions around threats to peace — but she did not ask for war. She invoked the Responsibility to Protect, the doctrine the United Nations adopted by consensus in 2005, under which the international community bears responsibility to act — through encouragement, peaceful collective action or, as a last resort, blockades or the use of force through the U.N. Charter — if a state turns its guns on its own people.

Russia or China — strategic partners of Iran and two of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — could veto the whole effort, Sotoudeh acknowledged. The Security Council is the only body with the legal power to authorize international action, from sanctions to force, under Chapter VII.

The bombs that rained down on Feb. 28 were not sanctioned by the Security Council. What began that day was a unilateral war waged by Washington and Tel Aviv and clearly illegal. U.S. President Donald Trump described the bombs that killed Iran’s supreme leader in the first hours of war as aimed at regime change and nuclear disarmament. He spoke of “safety” and “freedom” for Iranians, language that implicitly included Iranian women — women whose long struggle had captured the world’s imagination with the Woman Life Freedom protests of 2022.

But here is the irony: For years, the Islamic Republic has been cast globally as an outlaw state, a violator of international norms, while the civilians it terrorizes keep reaching for the U.N. Charter as their last line of defense. Yet it is those who claim to be on the side of the law who bombed straight past it. Between Feb. 28 and April 7, U.S. and Israeli airstrikes killed at least 2,362 civilians in Iran, 383 of them children.

“When Nasrin called for the international community to step in, I was shocked,” Elahe, a teacher from east Tehran who was at the forefront of the Woman Life Freedom demonstrations, tells Truthdig. For her safety, her full name hasn’t been used.

“But then I realized that is all we had left. We have risen up peacefully against the regime time after time. And instead of listening, they arrest us. In January, they were killing us in the streets. What other choice did we have then to call for outside protection?” She pauses, then shrugs with a long sigh. Her weariness seems to fill up the video screen connecting us. 

“I felt like a traitor to my own country when I agreed with her, but I was sure that international law would help to protect us. I mean, otherwise what’s it for?” 

She shrugs again, and this time her words seem painful to even shape as she tells me, “But look how wrong we were! The way the bombs came and killed those girls in Minab, in hospitals, schools, so many innocent people … and obviously [the U.S. and Israel] don’t care about the Iranian people at all. We were fools to believe in America.”

Embedded feminism

Instead of helping anyone, the U.S.-led war has “strengthened the Islamic Republic” writes Firoozeh Farvardin, a Vienna-based feminist researcher who has spent years mapping the Iranian women’s movement. In this way, the war has allowed the Iranian government “to present itself as the defender of national sovereignty … and reduced the space for autonomous feminist politics.” 

There is bitter irony here too: A war launched in the name of liberating Iranians handed the Iranian government an easy excuse to do just the opposite. Criticism could be quashed in the name of national unity in the face of foreign aggression, and for sovereignty under siege. 

That manipulation of a cause has been taken a step further in the use of the Women Life Freedom slogan to justify war. As Beirut-based feminist writer Sahla Omar, writing for Raseef22 noted, the slogan has been “torn from its life-affirming origins in resistance” after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked it various times from November 2024 to June 2025 to justify future military action. Israel then bombed Iran from June 13 to 24, last year.

“When we heard Netanyahu start saying ‘Zan Zendeghi Azadi’ last year when Israel fought its first war against us, we felt desperate, like our beautiful movement was being co-opted.” says Monica, a south Tehrani activist with no headscarf in sight and a belly button ring on full display. Her full name has been withheld for her safety.

“And seeing how the war has escalated this year, I now understand the term ‘embedded feminism,’ which I learnt when I was reading feminist theory for myself but didn’t really get until now,” she tells Truthdig. “It’s where a state co-opts feminist language to sell a war as a humanitarian project. And I think now this is what happened to Iran.”

Women like Monica continue to defy the law and go out in public without a hijab, a gain they have fought for over the past year. Indeed, none of the women I spoke to over video call for this article wore a hijab. 

However, they are clear that the initial easing of hijab enforcement as the bombing began this year was not because the government was conceding, but because it needed bodies on the street for “national unity.” 

Iranian women told reporters exactly this in the first weeks of the current war. “Right now, they are just distracted by the war,” one woman, Zahra, told France24. “But after that, who knows what they will do about it.”

On July 21, she was proven right. Cafes — the most visible public spaces where the unveiled and the veiled sit side by side — were shut down for failure to observe Islamic norms. On central Tehran’s Sanaei and Iranshahr streets, cafe owners were given a range of justifications for the closures, from women’s noncompliance with mandatory hijab to blocking the pavement.

Repression of dissent

With the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, one might have expected the resulting changes in the top levels of government to bring some moderation. But the wave of executions of prisoners that followed — including some protesters from the January demonstrations — dispels that notion. 

“Iranian authorities are using the cover of what they call ‘wartime conditions’ to intensify their repression of dissent through mass arbitrary arrest,” noted Amnesty International.

The government police chief, Ahmadreza Radan, confirmed the scale of repression himself on May 17, announcing that more than 6,500 “traitors and spies” had been arrested since the war began. Amnesty International has also documented at least 41 people “arbitrarily executed” since the bombing started this year, with at least 78 more protesters and dissidents currently facing death sentences.

Every one of those trials and executions violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Iran ratified in 1976. Likewise, every strike that kills civilians, as opposed to military targets, violates the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. Yet neither Tehran nor Washington nor Tel Aviv seem to feel bound by these laws they themselves have ratified. 

Those killed are not abstractions. They are daughters, teachers, filmmakers and children. Whether it is Israel and the U.S.’ illegal bombs, or the Iranian government’s war against its own people, Iranian civilians are beset by forces seemingly determined to ignore international law.

Economic impact of the war

The damage of the bombings only starts with the body count. When hospitals are hit, when pharmaceutical factories are destroyed, it is society’s most vulnerable — women, people with disabilities or long-term illnesses and the elderly — who suffer, deprived of the medical services they need.

The war has compounded existing economic problems, seeing inflation increase further and the country’s supply of goods impacted by trade isolation. Employers are tightening their belts, with unemployment following. 

In a harsh economic landscape, it is always women who suffer more. The Statistical Center of Iran reported in June that women’s labor-force participation has collapsed to 12%, and it explicitly blamed “the shadow of war.” The center noted that men who lost work are finding their way back, but women are not. 

Youth unemployment among women stands at 35%, almost double the rate for young men. Layer that onto food inflation running at 134.6% from a year ago, and this is what so-called “liberation” costs. 

Photo by Thiago Rocha on Unsplash

Mariam, an artisan in Isfahan, runs her own small fashion brand using her town’s famous traditional block printing called qalamkari to create tailor-made contemporary clothes. “I haven’t had an order since June last year,” she tells me in her lilting accent. For her safety, her full name has not been used.

Like millions of Iranian entrepreneurs, she used to have a business account on Instagram. Before the two internet blackouts this year — first in January during the protests, then for 88 days during the war — Iran’s Chamber of Commerce estimated at least 500,000 solely Instagram-based shops were operating in the country, supporting roughly one million jobs. Afshin Kolahi, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, put direct daily losses due to the internet blackouts at $30 million to $40 million, with indirect losses likely twice that. 

Iran’s communications minister, Sattar Hashemi, put the number of jobs dependent on internet connectivity at roughly 10 million people. A lot of those entrepreneurs were, like Mariam, women. 

“My family is out of savings now, my Ph.D. place at a university in the U.S. was canceled, and honestly, soon I am not sure how we will manage,” she says.

Multiply her story by the millions like her, and here is what the war’s cheerleaders in Washington, in Tel Aviv, in the comfortable corners of the diaspora, cannot explain away. Nasrin Sotoudeh, and those Iranians appealing for international support, did not ask for this. Sotoudeh asked, on the record and weeks before the first strike, for the world to protect Iranian civilians under a doctrine built for exactly that purpose, through the one institution with the legal standing to make it possible. 

What she got instead was a war that bypassed that institution entirely and that has left the movement she spent her freedom defending mute, fractured and afraid. The war has contributed to putting more women and dissidents on death row, not fewer, and has priced women out of work and out of public life.

Sotoudeh is still, as far as we know, alive and out on bail in Iran, but paying with charges for what she said in February, as are many other women’s rights activists. They asked for help, and asked for it lawfully. Instead, they were used as fodder for an argument for someone’s illegal and inexplicable war.

Reprinted with permission from Truthdig

Kamin Mohammadi is an author, a journalist, broadcaster, public speaker, teacher and cultural curator. Born in Iran, she moved to the UK during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. She is a prolific journalist and writer who has written for the British, Italian and international press including The Times, the Financial Times, The Guardian, Harpers Bazaar, Marie Claire, Vogue, GQ, GQ Style, Men’s Health, The Sunday Times (UK), The Sunday Times of India, The Mail on Sunday, Virginia Quarterly Review and the Soho House magazine as well as co-authoring The Lonely Planet Guide to Iran and numerous other travel guide books.

Her journalism has been nominated for an Amnesty Human Rights in Journalism award in the UK, and for a National Magazine Award in the best essay category by the American Society of Magazine Editors in the U.S.

Kamin has authored two books: BELLA FIGURA: HOW TO LIVE, LOVE AND EAT THE ITALIAN WAY (published in 16 countries and in development as a television series); and THE CYPRESS TREE: A LOVE LETTER TO IRAN (Bloomsbury in UK, Piemme in Italy).

Our conversation took place in the professor’s modest home on Usishkin Street in Jerusalem. His study desk was crowded with piles of scholarly journals. When I spotted the Soviet journal ‘Voprosy filosofii’ (Problems of Philosophy), I realized he knew Russian, and we continued talking in my native language—which he, too, had learned as a child in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire. We shared several interests, including the history of science, which I then taught at the Université de Montréal. Moreover, we had both begun our academic lives as chemistry students. His weekly Torah commentaries on Israeli radio and sharp public critiques of Israeli society made him well known far beyond academic circles.

Professor Leibowitz was raised as an Orthodox Jew and remained one throughout his life. I had become observant barely a decade earlier and was drawn to this brilliant polymath—a deeply committed Judaic scholar and a fearless critic of oppression and injustice. I was eager to understand his views on science, Judaism, and Zionism.

In his youth, Leibowitz identified with religious Zionism in its early form, well before the onset of messianic militancy after the June 1967 war. He became a principled opponent of the occupation and settlement of the Palestinian territories that Israel conquered in that war. Leibowitz viewed social justice as an integral part of Judaism. After his immigration to Palestine in 1934, he became active in Haoved Hadati, which fused Orthodox religious practice with socialist labour values. It turned into a political party (Hapoalim Hadatiim) and even ran in the first Knesset elections of 1949, failing to secure a single seat. This showed that Leibowitz, ever a principled intellectual committed to justice, had no place in organized politics, “the art of the possible.” Fiercely independent, he found himself isolated from the Israeli mainstream.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz Tribute Page

[This post contains video, click to play]

He mocked the institution of the Chief Rabbinate by calling it ‘datikan’—a pun on ‘dati’ (religious) and the Vatican. His sarcasm did not spare even the Western Wall, often revered as Judaism’s holiest site. When the government turned it into a site of political pilgrimage for foreign dignitaries, Leibowitz dubbed it ‘discotel’—a fusion of ‘kotel’ (the Hebrew word for the Wall) and ‘discotheque.’ When he was awarded the Israel Prize in 1993, the then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, refused to attend the ceremony.

What drew me most to Professor Leibowitz was his strict loyalty to monotheism, intellectual honesty, and courage. He never flinched from calling a spade a spade, even when doing so was deeply unpopular or even blasphemous in many people’s eyes. Leibowitz saw that the sacralisation of the state and the army led to fascism and provoked a firestorm when he coined the term “Judeo-Nazis.”

Beginning with the Qibya massacre in 1953—directed by Ariel Sharon, in which most of the victims were women and children—he fiercely criticized Israel’s repeated military atrocities against Palestinians. As early as 1956, he argued that Israel’s violence exonerated the Nazis, who also claimed they were “just following orders.” It was particularly audacious to insist on comparing the Israeli military, which boasted of being “the most moral army,” with the followers of National Socialism. In a 1991 speech in Haifa, he declared: “A Nazi-like mentality also exists in our country. That is a fact.”

True, Leibowitz was not the first to diagnose fascism in Zionism. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and other preeminent Jewish thinkers publicly condemned right-wing Zionism as fascist. The steady drift of Israeli society to the right suggests that all political Zionism contains seeds of fascism, which may take time to sprout. This is how the ideas of Meir Kahane, barred from elections to the Knesset as racist in 1988, have now become mainstream. These ideas are embodied in the ongoing Israeli operations in Gaza, determined to be genocide by Amnesty International, a UN commission, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and the majority of international genocide scholars. They are also embodied in the settlers’ relentless attacks on the West Bank—a violent campaign of pogroms to drive out the local Palestinian population in order to make Israel—Greater Israel—“purely Jewish.” While the Israeli army has carried out the genocide in Gaza with sophisticated weapons, including AI, the enthusiastic adherents of National Judaism (dati leumi) operate with stones, torches, explosives, and machine guns.

By 2025, one could read in the Israeli daily Haaretz the conclusion of Gideon Levy, a veteran Israeli journalist: “It is no longer possible to be a Zionist and not a fascist.”

In September 2025, Orly Noy, the editor of Siha Mekomit (Local Call), another Israeli news outlet, came to the same conclusion:

Photo by Mohammed Abubakr: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pro-palestinian-demonstration-in-a-city-19490608/

The Gaza holocaust was made possible by the embrace of the ethno-supremacist logic inherent to Zionism. Therefore, it must be said clearly: Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.

Denazification will be long and all-encompassing, touching every aspect of our collective life. We will likely sacrifice more generations—both victims and perpetrators—before this scourge is fully uprooted. But the process must begin now, with the refusal to commit the horrors taking place daily in Gaza, and the refusal to let them pass as normal. Only two paths remain: either a Jewish, messianic, genocidal state, or a truly democratic state for all its citizens.

Leibowitz expected the Zionist state to abide by the moral principles of Judaism and was bitterly disappointed that it did not. Few people saw the early seeds of fascism at the time, and even fewer dared to expose them publicly.

Leibowitz died thirty-two years ago, on August 18 (Ellul 11), 1994. History has proven him right.

Those who deny or dismiss U.S. climate change have hit a Waterloo moment of sorts. The nation just experienced its hottest month in more than 130 years of analysis, which breaks a record that had stood since the infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930s. For the 48 contiguous states, the July 2026 average of 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) came in 0.12°F (0.07°C) above the value from July 1936. This makes last month the hottest calendar month in national data going back to January 1895.

Remarkably, the contiguous U.S. average temperature was also the hottest on record for the past six months (February-July 2026), and for the past 12-, 18-, 24-, 36-, 48-, and 60-month periods, as depicted in the Climate at a Glance plotting tool from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. The year to date (January-July) is the second-hottest on record nationally.

The sheer breadth of the 48-state heat for July was especially shocking. Only one U.S. state, Wyoming, had its hottest July on record, but nine other states had a top-10 hottest July, and every one of the contiguous states was warmer than average. Though not included in the contiguous U.S. report, Alaska had its 20th-coldest July on record and its 30th-coldest January-to-July period.

The Dust Bowl heat was real – and so is fossil-fuel-driven warming

There’s no denying the scorching conditions of the 1930s Dust Bowl. An impressive 24 of the 48 contiguous U.S. states have yet to exceed the single hottest readings observed in each of those states during the 1930s.

However, the Dust Bowl has been misused for years in climate-denial writing and speaking to argue that human activity isn’t warming the nation’s climate to any great degree. In fact, human influence played a vast part in the Dust Bowl itself. Decades of overplowing by European settlers in the Plains and Midwest – in the erroneous belief that “rain follows the plow” – left the landscape vulnerable when a sequence of multi-year droughts struck. Huge volumes of topsoil simply blew away, and the denuded land heated up far more quickly than better-managed land would have. The Dust Bowl intersected with the Great Depression to make the 1930s a period of profound misery for millions of Americans.

A 2022 study, “How the Great Plains Dust Bowl drought spread heat extremes around the Northern Hemisphere,” showed how the Dust Bowl’s physical influence extended well beyond U.S. borders. As lead author Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research put it, “This is a mechanism that arose in a unique way from human influence — not by burning fossil fuels but from plowing up the middle third of the U.S.”

Second-worst July drought conditions on record for the contiguous U.S.

July was the 26th-driest July in contiguous U.S. history, and the January-July period was the 17th-driest, according to NOAA. One state (Maine) had a top-10 driest July on record, and two states (Connecticut and Rhode Island) had a top-10 wettest July. Drought conditions are particularly dire in Puerto Rico, where the capital of San Juan just suffered through its driest and second-hottest July on record. Rotating 48-hour water shut-offs now affect 180,000 customers on the island.

The combined effects of the record warmth in July and below-average precipitation for the year made July 2026 the second-worst July for drought across the contiguous U.S.; only the Dust Bowl year of 1934 had worse July drought conditions. The latest U.S. Drought Monitor showed 71% of the contiguous U.S. with abnormal dryness or drought during the first week of August. Although this was a three percentage point increase compared to the last week of July, it was down considerably from the 80% peak reached during the last week of March, which was the third-worst month for U.S. drought since 1895 (exceeded only by the months of August and July during the Dust Bowl year of 1934). Three of the top-10 months for worst U.S. drought since 1895 have been in 2026 (March, April, and May); two others ranked in the top-20 (February and June), using the Palmer Drought Severity Index.

Drought has already cost the U.S. $2.5 billion in direct damages during the first half of 2026, according to Gallagher Re. The reinsurance giant pegged U.S. drought costs during all of 2025 at $4 billion.

According to NOAA, as of August 3, the largest area of rainfall deficit in the U.S. was in the Florida Peninsula, where up to 16-25 inches of rain was needed in just one month to pull the state out of long-term drought. The central Texas coast needed 10-11 inches of rain, which was a considerable improvement since the beginning of summer, when 20 inches was needed. The recent rains there have delayed the onset of a dire water crisis in Corpus Christi until at least the fall of 2028 — a year later than previously expected.

There’s some real hope that the intensifying El Niño event now in progress will bring welcome rains to much of the contiguous United States. As of Monday, August 10, weekly sea surface temperatures in the benchmark Niño3.4 region of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean had risen to 1.8°C above the seasonal average. That already puts the ongoing event into the “strong” category, fast approaching the informal 2°C benchmark for a “very strong” event (informally referred to as a “super El Niño”). El Niño typically brings wetter-than-average conditions to the southern half of the contiguous United States, especially during winter.

A dangerous summer of wildfires and wildfire smoke continues

As climate change bakes forests across the U.S. this record-hot summer of 2026, one of the worst wildfire years on record is intensifying. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, 101 new fires were reported nationwide Sunday, August 9, including nine new large fires. Over 6.3 million acres have burned, exceeding the burned area from all of 2025, and putting 2026 in first place for most burned area over at least the past 10 years. Dozens of additional out-of-control wildfires are burning throughout Canada. Six U.S. wildland firefighters have died so far this year.

Photo by Scott Goodwill on Unsplash

Dense smoke from 98 large uncontained wildfires is now blanketing tens of millions of people with hazardous pollution. Pollution from small particles called PM2.5 — the fine particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter are the primary air pollution killers — was in the red “Unhealthy” range across four states and two Canadian provinces in the Northwest on Sunday, continuing into today. Smoke from the wildfire smoke event that enveloped the Great Lakes and Northeast U.S. July 15-23 has already been blamed for about 4,000 premature deaths. Thousands of additional such deaths have undoubtedly occurred during the widespread smoke events that have occurred since.

Major U.S. weather stations in July: at least 184 all-time heat records

At least 184 all-time highs were set or tied at locations across the United States in July, bringing the total for the January 1-August 9 to 213, according to NOAA/NCEI. By comparison, only 20 all-time lows have been set or tied all year. Some of the major cities that set new all-time highs in July included: 

Atlantic City (New Jersey) 41.1°C (106°F), July 4
Miles City (Montana) 46.1°C (115°F), July 12
Bozeman (Montana) 41.1°C (106°F), July 12
Billings Airport (Montana) 43.9°C (111°F), July 12
Salt Lake City (Utah) 42.8°C (109°F), July 12
Brigham City (Utah) 41.1°C (106°F), July 12
Logan (Utah) 40.6°C (105°F), July 12
Cody (Wyoming) 41.1°C (106°F), July 12
Idaho Falls (Idaho) 39.4°C (103°F), July 12
Provo (Utah) 40.6°C (105°F), July 12
Medicine Bow (Wyoming) 36.7°C (98°F), July 13
Riverton (Wyoming) 41.1°C (106°F), July 13
Grand Portage (Minnesota) 36.1°C (97°F), July 15
Rapid City (South Dakota) 44.4°C (112°F), July 25
Trinidad (Colorado) 38.9°C (102°F), July 26
Burlington (Colorado) 45.0°C (113°F), July 27
Russell Springs (Kansas) 46.7°C (116°F), July 27

Drawing on data from NOAA’s U.S. Daily Records website as compiled and analyzed by meteorologist Guy Walton, July 2026 had 3,207 daily maximum temperature records, compared to 464 daily minimum temperature records: about a seven-to-one ratio.

This article first appeared on Yale Climate Connections and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

*Israeli forces’ continued killing of journalists shows a brazen willingness to commit atrocities without any fear of consequences.

*The Lebanese government should accede to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and submit a declaration accepting the court’s jurisdiction including since at least October 7, 2023. Other countries should press for accountability and use their leverage over Israeli authorities to prevent more crimes.

—

Human Rights Watch – (Beirut) – The Israeli military’s April 22, 2026 attacks in Lebanon that killed one journalist and severely injured another included apparently deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects, which would make them war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today.

The attacks on the southern town of al-Tiri killed Amal Khalil, who was reporting on hostilities in southern Lebanon for the Lebanese daily news outlet al-Akhbar, and severely wounded Zainab Faraj, a Lebanese freelance journalist, working as her camera operator. 

“The Israeli military says it does not target journalists, but the facts and evidence show that it has repeatedly done so. Amal Khalil and Zainab Faraj are the latest victims in a long series of such attacks,” said Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Israeli forces’ continued killing of journalists shows a brazen willingness to commit atrocities without any fear of consequences.”

Photo and video evidence reviewed by Human Rights Watch, witness statements, and a deconfliction request to access the site by the Lebanese Red Cross to the Israeli military, after the first of three strikes on the site that day indicate that the Israeli military knew or should have known that Khalil and Faraj were civilians. 

The first strike, at about 2:30 p.m. on a car in front of Khalil and Faraj’s car, killed two people they knew who were driving ahead of them, Ali Bazzi and Mohammed al-Hourani. The strike forced Faraj and Khalil to abandon their car and seek refuge near a neighboring building. At 3:00 p.m., the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) sent the Israeli military the request from the Red Cross, to access the site and rescue trapped journalists.

The second attack, between 3:21 p.m. and 3:42 p.m., hit Khalil and Faraj’s car, a few meters from their hiding spot, injuring Khalil, and forcing her and Faraj to move inside the building. The third attack at about 4:25 p.m. bombed that building, destroying it. Israeli quadcopter drones appeared to be monitoring Faraj and Khalil while they were hiding and subsequently attacked. 

The Israeli military also appeared to have further obstructed rescue efforts, including by deploying a drone-delivered stun grenade, forcing Lebanese Red Cross paramedics who were conducting rescue efforts to initially retreat without rescuing Khalil or potentially providing her with lifesaving care, witnesses said. 

The ambulance was also apparently struck with small arms fire, based on witness statements and images Human Rights Watch reviewed of the damage caused to the ambulance.  

A report that Human Rights Watch reviewed from Tebnin Governmental Hospital, where Amal’s body was taken after it was recovered that evening, stated that Khalil died around 7:00 p.m. as a result of cardiac arrest. The report also said that Khalil had a head injury that caused severe bleeding. The hospital report alongside the timeline established by Human Rights Watch analysis indicate that Khalil was most likely alive when Israeli forces forced the Red Cross team to retreat from the site.

In statements published after a ceasefire agreement went into effect on April 17, including one on April 21, the Israeli military ordered residents not to return to dozens of towns and villages south of a demarcated yellow line near the border, including al-Tiri. But civilians in areas subject to a displacement order do not lose their civilian status or the protection of international humanitarian law and may not be targeted simply for being in those areas. 

Human Rights Watch sent a letter to the UNIFIL, UN peacekeeping forces in Lebanon, on May 7, but did not receive a response. Human Rights Watch also sent a letter to the Israeli military on June 17 requesting information about the attacks. The Israeli military provided a brief response on June 24 but did not respond to follow-up questions. 

In response to Israel’s violations of the laws of war in Lebanon and across the region, Israel’s allies, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other European Union states should immediately suspend all arms transfers and military assistance to Israel, and impose targeted sanctions on Israeli officials responsible for ongoing abuses. The EU should immediately suspend the trade pillar of its Association Agreement with Israel as long as Israel’s atrocity crimes persist, Human Rights Watch said.  

The text of a recently concluded framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel raises concerns that Lebanon’s authorities could act to curtail victims’ access to justice for serious international crimes, Human Rights Watch said. To signal their commitment to accountability, Lebanon’s judicial authorities should initiate domestic investigations, while parliament should act to strengthen the legal framework by putting in place a law criminalizing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, in line with international standards. 

The Lebanese government should also accede to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and submit a declaration accepting the court’s jurisdiction, including since at least October 7, 2023.  

“The evidence is clear that the Israeli military knew or should have known that Faraj and Khalil were civilians, but attacked them anyway, and then prevented paramedics from rescuing them for hours,” Kaiss said. “Lebanon should put an end to impunity for Israel’s abuses, and other countries should press for accountability and use their leverage over Israeli authorities to prevent more crimes.”

Methodology

Human Rights Watch interviewed eight people, including Faraj, who survived the attack; one of Khalil’s colleagues at al-Akhbar; two first responders; a journalist who was in communication with Khalil while she was trapped in al-Tiri; and three people involved in the request by paramedics to access the site. Human Rights Watch reviewed the phone call log of a first responder who was in direct contact with Khalil between 2:36 p.m. and 3:48 p.m. the day of the attack, in addition to the phone call log of Khalil’s sister, who last spoke with Khalil at 4:22 p.m., nearly three minutes before the final fatal strike. 

Human Rights Watch verified at least 35 photographs and videos shared by first responders and Faraj, including from the attack site that day and at a temporary Lebanese army checkpoint, geolocated by Human Rights Watch to just over 2.5 kilometers northwest of the strike site, where some first responders waited for clearance to reach the trapped journalists. Human Rights Watch also reviewed eight photographs of the damaged ambulance. 

Human Rights Watch reviewed social media profiles of Bazzi and al-Hourani, who were traveling with Khalil and Faraj, and social media posts about their deaths; as well as photographs and videos showing the burial of the men whose bodies were wrapped in Hezbollah flags. Researchers did not find Hezbollah “martyr” posters for either man or other evidence indicating that they were fighters. 

Guidance by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sets out that people who have exclusively noncombat functions in armed groups, including political or administrative roles, or are merely members of or affiliated with political entities that have an armed component, such as Hezbollah, may not be targeted at any time unless and only for such time as they, like any other civilian, directly participate in the hostilities.

Chronology and Details of the April 22 Attacks

On April 22, Khalil and Faraj were travelling in a car across southern Lebanon to report on the hostilities and situation there. Prior to entering al-Tiri, they met with a relative of Faraj, Ali Nabil Bazzi, a local official, in Bint Jbeil, which borders al-Tiri, and another acquaintance, Mohammed al-Hourani, a personal trainer. The two were travelling in the car in front of Khalil and Faraj’s vehicle. At around 2:30 p.m., the Israeli military struck the men’s car, killing the two immediately, Faraj said. Khalil and Faraj were not injured.

“It was calm,” Faraj said. “I was taking a video and suddenly I heard Amal shout ‘They hit them!’ I looked in front of me, and I saw the explosion happen. […] Amal quickly pulled over the car to the side. We got out of the car and hid under a tiled roof near us.” 

Faraj and Khalil had press vests in the car but ran before they could retrieve them. 

Human Rights Watch reviewed two screenshots of a video call between Faraj and her sister, at 2:35 p.m. and 2:49 p.m., showing the car burning in front of Khalil’s parked car. Human Rights Watch geolocated the journalists’ hiding place and confirmed the presence of a tiled overhang in front of a food storage.

Moussa Shaalan, a first responder with the Lebanese Civil Defense, showed Human Rights Watch his April 22 phone log, including a 20 second call with Khalil at 2:36 p.m., during which he said Khalil told him that the car in front of theirs had been struck. Shaalan’s call log showed multiple calls he made between 2:37 p.m. and 2:50 p.m., including to Lebanese Civil Defense, the Lebanese Red Cross, and Khalil’s brother.  

The Lebanese Red Cross then sent a request to access the area via UNIFIL, three informed sources said. UNIFIL forwarded the request to the Israeli military at 3:00 p.m., indicating that journalists were at the site of the strike in al-Tiri and included a detailed route to the site for rescue workers, the sources said. 

Between 2:30 p.m. and 4:22 p.m., Khalil and Faraj communicated with members of the Lebanese Red Cross, Lebanese Armed Forces, first responders from the Lebanese Civil Defense, the Islamic Risala Scout Association, and UNIFIL, in addition to family members and journalist colleagues, asking for help to be evacuated, Faraj, Shaalan, and two informed sources said.  

Two first responders interviewed said that Khalil told them as early as 3:00 p.m. that she saw Israeli quadcopter drones hovering over her and Faraj for long periods.

“There was a crack in the roof, and we could see the quadcopter right above peering in,” Faraj said. “For one hour, we waited under the tiled roof and the entire time, there were two quadcopters above us. The quadcopter would go up and come down. It kept doing this.” 

Shaalan’s phone call log showed a 30 second call with Khalil at 3:08 p.m., during which he said that he told Khalil that first responders had requested clearance to access al-Tiri, but the Israeli authorities had not yet approved the request.

At 3:21 p.m., Khalil called Shaalan, he said: “She said, ‘Moussa, our situation is bad. The drone is above us.’ I told her we still haven’t gotten the clearance to come to you. I told her I would send her my location, and she should just come to me.” Shaalan’s phone call log showed an incoming phone call from Khalil at 3:21 p.m. that lasted 1 minute and 29 seconds.

Faraj said that their car was struck shortly after the 3:21 p.m. phone call. “We stood up and we were going to leave but decided against it. Then suddenly the sound of a drone got louder, and they struck the car. Amal hugged me and covered me. She said, “I’m ok, are you?” I said yes, but then the car started burning.” Khalil was injured from the strike on the car, Faraj said. 

The car, according to Faraj and photographs geolocated by Human Rights Watch, was parked only a few meters from their hiding place. After the second strike, they went inside the building. “I grabbed the car’s bumper and used it to cover us from the fire, but it was too hot,” she said. “So, I broke the garage door behind us and we went [into the building].”  

A video taken by Islamic Risala Scout Association members, verified and geolocated by Human Rights Watch, shows two civil defense vehicles arriving at a Lebanese army checkpoint 2.6 kilometers north of the attack site at 3:27 p.m.

From 3:29 p.m. to 3:46 p.m., Shaalan called Khalil four times, but she did not answer.

At 3:42 p.m. Khalil called the Lebanese Red Cross and told them that there was a strike on her car and that she and Faraj had taken refuge in a nearby building, said an informed source involved in the request to access the site.

At 3:48 p.m. Shaalan called Khalil and spoke with her for 38 seconds, based on his phone’s call log. “She told me, ‘Moussa, they dropped a bomb next to me … I’m injured, I can’t come to you,’” Shaalan said. Between 4:10 p.m. and 4:49 p.m., Shaalan called Khalil six times, but she did not answer, based on his phone’s call log. 

At 4:22 p.m. Khalil’s sister, Zainab, called Khalil and spoke with her for 21 seconds, according to her phone’s call log from that day, which Human Rights Watch reviewed.

A video taken by a member of the Islamic Risala Scout Association at the site of the checkpoint set up by the Lebanese army, north of al-Tiri, indicates that the Israeli military apparently struck the building in which Khalil and Faraj sought refuge at around 4:25 p.m. Based on the video’s timestamp, at exactly that time the sound of a loud detonation can be heard from the direction of the town. 

Between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. the Lebanese Red Cross was also in contact with the Lebanese Armed Forces’ Operations Division in order to secure access to the site via the ceasefire monitoring mechanism, which includes Lebanese, Israeli, French, US, and UNIFIL officials. Lebanon’s National Committee for International Humanitarian Law, a government body headed by Lebanon’s deputy prime minister, Tarek Mitri, reported that “[b]etween 15:00 and 16:00, rescue teams waited for authorization from the committee known as the ‘mechanism’ (the ceasefire monitoring mechanism), after it had been contacted at 15:41.”

Despite its earlier request for access, the Lebanese Red Cross was only able to enter the town at about 5:00 p.m., roughly 30 minutes after the Israeli military apparently attacked the building in which Khalil and Faraj took refuge. Human Rights Watch geolocated a photograph taken by first responders showing the Lebanese Red Cross team arriving in two vehicles at the Lebanese army checkpoint at 5:03 p.m.

Human Rights Watch verified photographs and videos showing first responders at the site as early as 5:08 p.m. One pulls a shovel from the car as he approaches the site. In that video, the building in which Faraj and Khalil had sought refuge appears to have been destroyed, and the road in front is covered in debris. Another video, with a timestamp of 5:21 p.m., shows the collapsed building and one of the two cars earlier struck by the Israeli military. 

Human Rights Watch verified three other videos and a photograph showing two Lebanese Red Cross workers digging through the rubble, uncovering Faraj with their hands. Faraj can be heard speaking with the paramedics as they attempt to remove her. Metadata reviewed by Human Rights Watch shows a 5:40 p.m. timestamp. Another photograph taken at the site after Faraj was pulled from the rubble shows a paramedic holding Faraj, who is bloodied with significant injuries on her legs, hand, head, and eye. 

Shortly after the Lebanese Red Cross team pulled Faraj from the rubble, they were also attacked, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, Faraj, and two informed sources, by what they said was a stun grenade delivered by a quadcopter drone. As a result, the first responders were forced to retreat at around 5:53 p.m. without rescuing Khalil.

The Israeli military has repeatedly used drones in Lebanon’s border villages to deploy stun grenades, typically to disperse individuals or force them to leave certain areas, according to Israeli and Lebanese media reports, UNIFIL, and statements collected by Human Rights Watch from nine people and local officials from three border villages. 

Witnesses also said that they heard bursts of gunfire while at the strike site, including while evacuating the site. 

Human Rights Watch reviewed eight photographs showing two holes on the driver’s side of one of the ambulances taken after the ambulances left the site, and witnesses had heard gunfire. Paramedics discovered the holes after they arrived at the hospital in Tebnine, but witnesses could not identify when exactly the ambulance was struck. The shape and size of the holes are consistent with cylindrical projectiles fired with enough force to penetrate the steel outer body of an automobile and were thus most likely caused by small arms fire. Human Rights Watch could not determine the size of the projectiles because of the deformity to the steel and angle of entry.

At the time the witnesses heard the gunfire, the ambulance was facing north on the main road next to the building where Khalil and Faraj had been hiding, and the damaged panel of the ambulance was facing west said an informed source, suggesting that the ambulance was most likely struck by armed forces west of the site. Human Rights Watch analysis of satellite imagery at 11:43 a.m. local time shows Israeli military vehicles 1-1.2 kilometers west of the site. The terrain profile of the area indicates that troops positioned at that location would not have a direct line of sight to the ambulance, but those forces could have moved. 

Human Rights Watch could not determine the exact location of Israeli troops in relation to the ambulance at the time the gunfire was heard, but the Israeli military was present in and had control of al-Tiri, in addition to all other towns west, east, and south, based on an Israeli military statement made on April 21, one day before the attack. 

The military said in the statement that it “continues to maintain its positions in southern Lebanon,” showing a map of the “forward defense zone” where the Israeli military is located, which includes al-Tiri, and surrounding villages.

Although Human Rights Watch could not determine at which exact time and from which exact position the projectiles struck the ambulance, the Israeli military’s control of al-Tiri, and presence west of the strike site hours before the attack, suggest that the Israeli military was responsible.

Human Rights Watch also analyzed a photograph taken at this time showing Faraj lying on a stretcher inside the Red Cross ambulance. 

“When they put me in the car, I heard a loud strike,” she said. “I got a panic attack from the strike. And the guys started saying ‘they hit us.’” 

The Lebanese Red Cross team then headed to the hospital, 6.5 kilometers away. 

They arrived at the hospital at 6:06 p.m. and initiated a second request to enter al-Tiri, said two informed sources. UNIFIL sent the request just before 7:00 p.m., but the Israeli military only granted the request at 8:15 p.m., two sources said. By that point, Khalil had died. A doctor’s examination of her body that day stated that she died at around 7:00 p.m. as a result of cardiac arrest. The report also noted that Khalil had a head injury that caused severe bleeding. Rescue workers recovered her body at around 11:00 p.m. 

At 8:27 p.m., an Israeli military Arabic spokesperson published a statement referring to Khalil, Faraj, and the two men traveling in front of them as “saboteurs.” The military said that Israeli “troops spotted two vehicles in the southern Lebanon region that had emerged from a military structure used by the Hezbollah terrorist organization,” adding that the “saboteurs crossed the front line and approached [Israeli military forces] in a manner that posed an immediate threat.” 

The statement continued, “after it was determined that they were violating the ceasefire agreement, the Air Force attacked one of the vehicles and then targeted a building where the saboteurs had taken refuge.” The statement said that “two journalists were reported injured as a result of the attack,” and that the Israeli military was not preventing rescue teams from reaching the site of the strike “during this period,” and that the incident is under investigation. 

It is not clear what “military structure” the Israeli military’s statement refers to. Faraj denied that the two cars had emerged from a military structure used by Hezbollah. She said that she and Khalil met Hourani and Bazzi in front of Tebnin Governmental Hospital and from there had travelled to al-Tiri, passing through the town of Kounine. “We did not enter any building, at all,” she said. Human Rights Watch asked the Israeli military about the nature and location of the military structure but received no response.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

At 9:28 p.m., Hezbollah posted on Telegram saying: “In defense of Lebanon and its people, and in response to the Israeli enemy’s violation of the ceasefire and the targeting of a car in the town of al-Tiri by an enemy drone strike, the Islamic Resistance fighters targeted a command Hummer vehicle belonging to the Israeli enemy army in the town of al-Qantara at 18:00…” Al-Qantara is roughly 10 kilometers northwest of al-Tiri.

The presence of drones that appeared to be monitoring Faraj and Khalil while they were trapped in al-Tiri and the submission of a deconfliction request to the Israeli military outlining the presence of journalists at the site around 1.5 hours before the fatal strike that killed Khalil, indicates that the Israeli military knew or should have known that Khalil and Faraj were civilians, but subsequently targeted them, committing an apparent war crime.

Likewise, the Israeli military knew or should have known that the ambulance with Red Cross insignia present at the strike site after the attack on the building belonged to the Lebanese Red Cross. Videos and photographs taken by first responders show at least two cars marked with Red Cross insignia, an emblem of the Geneva convention, parked near the strike site, with their emergency lights flashing.

Paramedics were wearing bright red overalls and white helmets marked with Red Cross insignia from all sides, and were present at the site for nearly 50 minutes before they were struck. Nevertheless, Israeli forces appear to have prevented them from completing their humanitarian mission by using a stun grenade. In addition, available evidence suggests the Israeli military may have been responsible for shooting the ambulance with small arms fire. 

The Israeli military’s response to Human Rights Watch did not provide detailed responses to questions. It stated that “a preliminary inquiry found that [Khalil] was killed during a sequence of events in which two military operatives in Hezbollah’s military wing Ali Nabil Bazi and Mohammad Al-Khourani [sic] were eliminated.” It added that the “incident has been referred to the General Staff Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism to conduct a comprehensive factual assessment.”

The Israeli military did not respond to follow-up questions on the nature of the evidence used to establish that Hourani and Bazzi were legitimate military targets. In its response, the Israeli military said that it “does not target journalists and respects freedom of the press and the important role journalists play.” Human Rights Watch has previously documented repeated, apparently deliberate attacks by the Israeli military against journalists in Lebanon in 2023 and 2024. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, “Israel was responsible for two-thirds of all press killings in both 2025 and 2024.”

Under the laws of war, journalists benefit from the general protection enjoyed by civilians and may not be targets of an attack unless they are taking direct part in hostilities. A person who commits serious violations of the laws of war with criminal intent—that is, intentionally or recklessly—may be prosecuted for war crimes. Individuals may also be held criminally liable for assisting in, facilitating, aiding, or abetting a war crime.  

Under the laws of war, healthcare workers are also civilians and explicitly protected in conflict situations. Ambulances, and other medical transportation must be allowed to function and be protected in all circumstances. They could lose their protection only if they are being used to commit, outside of their humanitarian function, “acts harmful to the enemy,” such as transporting ammunition or healthy fighters in service. 

The attacking force must issue a warning to cease this misuse and can only attack after such a warning goes unheeded. Intentionally attacking medical workers and transport units displaying the emblems of the Geneva Conventions is prohibited and amount to war crimes. The freedom of movement of humanitarian relief personnel, which is essential for the exercise of their functions, must be ensured by all parties to the conflict. That movement may only be temporarily restricted in case of an imperative military necessity.

Via Human Rights Watch