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Israel pushes ahead with vast illegal settlement in heart of West Bank
Exclusive: Tender posted for construction of 3,401 homes in settlement designed to ‘bury idea of a Palestinian state’Israel is moving to start construction on a vast illegal settlement in the heart of the West Bank, designed to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.The Israel Land Authority in mid-December quietly posted a tender for construction of 3,401 homes in the “E1” project, which will effectively sever the north and south of the occupied West Bank for Palestinians, and further cut off East Jerusalem. Continue reading...
This direct line links Jan 6 to Trump's attack on Venezuela
Donald Trump’s domestic and foreign policies — ranging from his attempted coup against the United States five years ago today, to his incursion into Venezuela last weekend, to his current threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland — undermine domestic and international law. But that’s not all.They threaten what we mean by civilization.The moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.This principle lies at the center of America’s founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It’s also the core of the post-World War II international order championed by the United States, including the UN Charter — emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.But it’s a fragile principle, easily violated by those who would exploit their power. Maintaining the principle requires that the powerful have enough integrity to abstain from seeking short-term wins, and that the rest of us hold them accountable if they don’t.Every time people or corporations or countries that are richer and more powerful attack and exploit those that are not, the fabric of civilization frays. If such aggression is not contained, the fabric unravels. If not stopped, the world can descend into chaos and war. It has happened before.We now inhabit a society and world grown vastly more unequal. Political and economic power are more concentrated than ever before. This invites the powerful to exploit the weaker because the powerful feel omnipotent.The wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Charles Koch, and a handful of others is almost beyond comprehension. The influence of Big Tech, Big Oil, and the largest aerospace and defense corporations extends over much of the globe. AI is likely to centralize wealth and power even more. The destructive power of the United States, China, and Russia is unmatched in human history.Trump — enabled by cowardly congressional Republicans and a pliant majority on the Supreme Court — has turned the U.S. presidency into the most powerful and unaccountable agent of American government in history.Put it all together and you see the threat.A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup five years ago to his capture of Nicolas Maduro last weekend. Both were lawless. Both were premised on the hubris of omnipotence.That same line extends to Trump’s current threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland.You see much the same in Putin’s war on Ukraine. In Xi’s threats against Taiwan. In global depredation and monopolization by Big Tech and Big Oil. In Russian, Chinese, and American oligarchs who have fused public power with their personal wealth.But unfettered might does not make right. It makes for instability, upheaval, and war.History shows that laws and norms designed to constrain the powerful also protect them. Without such constraints, their insatiable demands for more power and wealth eventually bring them down — along with their corporations, nations, or empires. And threaten world war.Trump’s blatant lawlessness will haunt America and the world — and civilization — for years to come.Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
This brutal doctrine explains what Trump's done to America — and what's coming next
When Donald Trump and the buffoons who surround him invaded Venezuela and captured Nicolás Maduro, they broke with almost a century of American-led respect for the international rule of law and, instead, nakedly embraced the Putin Doctrine.There was a brief, shining moment when Russia was a democracy. I visited there at the time. Starting with Mikhail Gorbachev and lasting about a decade, Russia embraced the ideals of the European Enlightenment, which itself was inspired by the North American colonists’ contact with Native American tribes who had been practicing democracy for millennia.Then Vladimir Putin came along, began suing media outlets and large law firms into bankruptcy so his oligarch buddies could take them over, packed the courts and rigged the elections, and finally outlawed dissent, calling dissenters “the enemy within” and “domestic terrorists.”Instead of power flowing from the people up, it began to flow from Putin down, turning the Russian democracy into an autocracy, functionally a dictatorship with the patina of democracy because they still have elections.Putin, via an oligarch named Oleg Deripaska, gave a man named Paul Manafort $10 million in 2005 to install a Putin-friendly president (Viktor Yanukovych) in Ukraine as the first step to essentially turning that country into a vassal state, the way they’d already done with Belarus, Chechnya, Georgia, Transnistria, Syria, and Kazakhstan.When, in 2014, the Ukrainian people threw out Yanukovych and voted for democracy, Putin invaded and seized Crimea, one of the most strategically important parts of the country (and where my daughter went to college), a preface to his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine proper.With this was born the Putin Doctrine:1. Russia’s policy decisions, both foreign and domestic, are dictated by Putin’s whims, not by the will of parliament (the Duma), or what’s best for the country or its people. He protects and enriches his family and friends while punishing his enemies.2. The rule of law internationally is irrelevant to the new Russian state; instead, “might makes right.” If another country has something you want, or you don’t like the way it’s being run, just invade, or send millions of bots and internet trolls via social media to disrupt its society and politics (see: Brexit and Trump 2016).3. The world is now multipolar, with the “great powers” of Russia, China, and the United States having final say in political and military activity in their regions regardless of objections from local governments. Russia will control Eurasia and eventually all of Europe; China will control Asia and eventually Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea; and the US will be the ultimate power in the Americas, both North, South, and Central.Manafort, meanwhile, came back to America and ran Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for “free” while shuttling insider political information to Russian intelligence to exploit with social media trolls and paid podcasters.While there have been times in America’s past when we’ve flirted with this sort of worldview, it’s never been made official US policy. Even when we’ve attacked other resource-rich countries, we’ve at least provided an excuse grounded in “making the world safe and advancing democracy.”That’s because the United States, both international and domestically, used to stand for the principles of the European Enlightenment. They included the idea that democracy was the natural state of humanity, ordained by what Thomas Jefferson called “Nature’s God”; that power would be diffused across three co-equal government branches; and that the public good would take precedence over the desires of the president’s or politicians’ friends.The Putin doctrine — fully adopted by Trump and his lickspittles with his media lawsuits, the invasion of Venezuela, and his National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) that identifies Democrats and anti-ICE protestors as potential domestic terrorists — tears all that down.Trump’s adoption of the Putin Doctrine ignores our history of democracy at home and the promotion of democracy abroad, saying instead that whoever has the stronger military rules the region.It abandons the “rules based order” that the United Nations proclaimed in the 1950s — which has prevented another world war for 81 years — and says instead that if you can successfully capture the head of a foreign state (no matter how good or bad he or she may be) you should simply go ahead and do it.Adolf Hitler was following his own version of the Putin Doctrine when he invaded Czechoslovakia and then Poland, kicking off World War II. The oligarchs of the Old South were following it when their Confederate Army commenced the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. And now Trump has made America officially embrace it.Our Founders never envisaged a future where an entire political party would be captured by a small group of oligarchs politically led by a demagogue, who would then abandon the ideals expressed in the Declaration and the Constitution.As Dan Sisson and I document in The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction, America’s Founders considered the demagogue part of the equation, but thought Congress and the Courts would protect the nation; they never imagined that six corrupt Supreme Court justices would rewrite the Constitution to give a president immunity for all crimes committed in the Oval Office after making legalized political bribery the official policy of the country.As Christopher Armitage points out, about the only government institutions that are trying to preserve democracy in America now are the Blue states. And they have considerable power, because Trump can’t pardon state-based prosecutions even when they’re against officials in his own federal government.Now that the Trump regime has seized almost complete control of the GOP, has its friends in charge of most of our major media and law firms, has corrupted our federal justice system, has deployed masked secret police across the country, and is challenging voters’ rights at multiple levels, America needs the Blue states to get more coordinated to push back against MAGA’s Putin-like behaviors in Red states.Each of us who lives in a Blue state has an obligation to reach out to our state’s politicians and demand that they stand up to this corrupt, illegitimate regime. As Armitage notes, we must push them to:“Prosecute federal officials who commit assault, kidnapping, or civil rights violations in your state. Build public revenue streams that don’t depend on federal funding. Expand state safety nets to catch the people federal cuts will drop. Demonstrate what good governance looks like.”The differences between the quality of life in oligarch-run Red states and Democratic-run Blue states have become so conspicuous it’s amazing they’re not more widely known:Blue states account for about 71 percent of America’s GDP, whereas Trump-supporting Red states only produce 29 percent of our income and wealth.The median family income in Blue states is $74,243. In Red states it’s $63,553. Individual states highlight the disparity: New Jersey’s median income is $89,703, while Mississippi’s is $49,111.Counties that voted for Biden in 2020 are better educated, with 36 percent of their population having some college education compared to Trump’s counties at 25 percent.Residents of Blue states live 2.2 years longer, on average, than residents of Red states.Republican/oligarch-controlled Red states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:Spousal abuseObesitySmokingTeen pregnancySexually transmitted diseasesAbortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)Bankruptcies and povertyHomicide and suicideInfant mortalityMaternal mortalityForcible rapeRobbery and aggravated assaultDropouts from high schoolDivorceContaminated air and waterOpiate addiction and deathsUnskilled workersParasitic infectionsIncome and wealth inequalityCovid deaths and unvaccinated peopleFederal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)People on welfareChild povertyHomelessnessSpousal murderUnemploymentDeaths from auto accidentsPeople living on disabilityGun deathsAmerica stands at a crossroads, as the Trump regime moves us closer every day to replacing our democracy altogether with a Russia-like federal autocracy.There’s no Abraham Lincoln in charge of our government, so it falls to us and our Blue states to enforce the rule of law, stand up for democracy, and show the skeptics and “dark enlightenment” billionaire Tech Bros that the will of the people still matters here.That doesn’t require waiting for the election this fall or in 2028; it just needs the governors and administrations of the Blue states to stand up against Trump’s embrace of the Putin Doctrine and preserve what’s left of our democratic traditions.Ballotpedia has a good site at https://ballotpedia.org/States#State_governments where you can drill down to the contact information for your state’s elected officials to let them know you want them to push back hard.Good luck: the fate and future of the American Experiment may well rest in your hands.Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and radio host. His Substack can be found here.
‘Destined to repeat’: J6 documentary's stark warning as America tries to forget
Five years after Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol amidst a blizzard of lies, with the president and his associates falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen, January 6th may be a story Americans no longer care to hear.Homegrown, a documentary that tracks three members of the neo-fascist street gang the Proud Boys from the turbulent summer of 2020 to Jan. 6 2021 and the attack on Congress, has won accolades and enthralled streaming viewers in Europe and South America. But the film’s producers have yet to find a U.S. distributor.“I really think it’s telling around the narrative, around January 6th that it’s been downplayed and diminished within our national conversation,” director Michael Premo told Raw Story. “That implies we’re only destined to repeat it.”‘A self-coup’Premo, a documentary filmmaker who was previously involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement and Hurricane Sandy relief, thinks Americans have trouble coming to grips with January 6th because it runs counter to what most believe about their country.“I think Trump is such a distillation of everything America pretends it’s not,” he said. “That is all wrapped up in what January 6th is. “If this was a country in the Middle East or South America, we’d be talking about a self-coup. That’s not what we’re talking about. That’s not the popular narrative.”Homegrown has received positive reviews in Europe and South America, and Premo told Raw Story that for a time it was the sixth-most popular streaming movie in New Zealand. But Americans who want to see Homegrown will have to rent it directly from the film’s website, from Jan. 6 through Feb.16 — the President’s Day holiday.“We’ve talked to many distributors, and we’ve gotten confounding rejection,” Premo said. “They’ve said, ‘We love it, but we can’t take it.’ People have been ‘counter-programming-the-apocalypse,’ is what I call it — just light, happy fare.”Revelatory portraitsFor anyone who followed the news closely from protests for racial justice in the summer of 2020 through the presidential election that November and its chaotic fallout, the feverish pace of the storytelling in Homegrown will summon familiar feelings of excitement, dread and anxiety. But the portraits of the three men profiled in the film, drawn in full humanity, revealing themselves with flashes of violence, self-reflection and regret, will likely come as a revelation to many.Chris Quaglin is a father-to-be who vandalizes a Black Lives Matter mural. Chris QuaglinChris Quaglin shows off ammunition for his various guns. Courtesy Storyline MediaThad Cisneros is a high-ranking Latino leader of the Proud Boys who forges a cross-ideological alliance against police violence. Randy Ireland is an Air Force veteran who takes on the unglamorous, behind-the-scenes duties of organizing the group.All are footsoldiers of the Trump movement, destined to sink back into obscurity once they’ve outlived their usefulness.In one scene, filmed about a week after January 6th, Quaglin is seen fixing up a room for his son, who is about to be born.“I got him to worry about,” Quaglin says. “And he’s the reason why I did go to DC — because I feel like something had to be done. But I think that all hell’s going to break loose. Sooner than later. If you think DC was bad, just wait. Just wait.”Quaglin was arrested about two months after his son’s birth, for his involvement in the January 6th attack. Convicted of 14 charges, including felony counts of assaulting police and obstruction of Congress, like about 1,600 other defendants, he received a pardon from President Trump shortly after Inauguration Day last year.In another scene, filmed in Portland, Oregon following January 6th, Ireland laments that newer members of the Proud Boys are interested in “Going to streets and hunting, and they found someone that they suspected and chasing them down. “We don’t do that,” he says. The next moment, the Proud Boys leader is seen riding in the back of a pickup wearing a helmet and ballistic vest as others fire Airsoft rifles at a group of antifascists in black bloc formation.‘They’re waiting’Now Trump has returned to power, rank-and-file conservative activists who hit the streets in 2020 and up to January 6th have largely faded from view.They’ve been rendered somewhat redundant, Premo said, as Trump has strong-armed media companies “to capitulate” and brought “universities to heel,” thereby neutralizing institutions that would ordinarily check a president’s power.The reason activists such as Quaglin, Ireland and Cisneros were “ascendant” in 2020, Premo said, “is they were playing this role that the state is now playing now that Trump in his authoritarian trajectory has so effectively consolidated power.” Randy Ireland at a rally in support of Jan. 6 defendants in Portland, Oregon in August 2021. Courtesy Storyline MediaReflecting on the past five years, Premo said he doesn’t see the flare-up of vigilante violence that culminated in January 6th as something to be consigned to the past.His observation recalls the moment during a 2020 presidential debate when Trump was challenged to condemn white supremacists and right-wing militia groups. “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said.Premo said: “The role that’s played by the foot-soldier activist is to be proactive. “When the state is playing the role that you wanted to play, you have to take a back seat. “They’re waiting for when they’re needed again. Maybe that happens when Trump refuses to leave office after his term is up.”Homegrown is available to rent from Jan. 6 to Feb. 16, via homegrown.film/watch
Trump's 'assault on Venezuela' is 'opening move' to take down major rival: analysis
An attack on Venezuela orchestrated by Donald Trump's administration is the "opening move" to a much larger rival, a political commentator has claimed. Writing in The Guardian, Owen Jones suggested the strike on Venezuela earlier this week, and subsequent capture of President Nicolás Maduro, is part of a longer game plan which would see Trump stand off against China. The major trade rival has become a growing concern for the Trump administration, with Jones citing a growing trade industry between China and Latin America as a reason the president may be keen to take action in the Western Hemisphere. Jones wrote, "And, crucially, China – the main US rival – has grown in power across the continent. The two-way goods trade between China and Latin America was 259 times larger in 2023 than it was in 1990.""China is now the continent’s second largest trading partner, behind only the US. At the end of the cold war, it did not even make the top 10. Trump’s assault on Venezuela is just the opening move in an attempt to reverse all of this."Jones would also suggest that the "domination" of the US in the last three decades has been challenged as a result of this trade agreement between major rival China and Latin America. It appears Trump is now trying to present himself as someone without "bluster" as was the case for his first term."The experience of Trump’s first term has led too many to conclude that the strongman in the White House was all bluster," Jones wrote. "Then, he reached an accommodation with the traditional Republican elite.""The unwritten bargain was simple: deliver tax cuts and deregulation, and he could vent endlessly on social media. Second-term Trump is a full-fat far-right regime."The strike on Venezuela could embolden Trump to take further action, with the president reigniting his interest in buying out or taking over Greenland as a US territory. Jones suggested that, should the US seize Greenland, it would be no different from Russia annexing parts of Ukraine.Jones wrote, "But a US seizure of Danish sovereign territory would surely spell the end of Nato, founded on the principle of collective defence. Denmark’s land would be stolen no less blatantly than Russia’s devouring of Ukraine. Whatever muted noises have emerged from London, Paris or Berlin, the western alliance would be finished."
Anger in Papua New Guinea after Starlink ordered to shut down internet services
In mid-December PNG said the company did not have a licence to operate in the country and ordered it to halt operationsFrustration is growing in Papua New Guinea weeks after the government ordered Starlink to shut down operations in the country as businesses, health providers and communities struggle without access to internet services.Starlink, owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is a satellite internet company that provides internet to remote places. In mid-December, the National Information and Communications Technology Authority (Nicta) ordered the company to halt operations because it was not licensed in PNG. Continue reading...
'Tuna King' pays record £2.4m for giant bluefin at Tokyo auction
Kiyoshi Kimura will turn prized 243kg fish into sushi rolls selling for £2.4o at his restaurant chainA sushi entrepreneur has paid a record 510.3m yen (£2.4m) for a giant bluefin tuna at a prestigious auction in Tokyo’s main fish market.Kiyoshi Kimura, who styles himself the “Tuna King”, paid the top price for the 243kg (536lbs) specimen, which was caught off Japan’s northern coast. Continue reading...
Anthony Joshua’s driver charged with dangerous driving after fatal crash in Nigeria
British boxer was injured in collision that killed his personal trainer Latif Ayodele and strength coach Sina GhamiNigerian police have charged Anthony Joshua’s driver with causing death by dangerous driving after a fatal crash that killed two people.Adeniyi Mobolaji Kayode, 46, was also charged with driving without a valid driving licence and “driving without due care and attention, causing bodily harm and damage to property”. He is due to appear in court on 20 January. Continue reading...
Ministers cannot go on ignoring the Shamima Begum case, for two important reasons
The fate of the woman who left the UK at 15 in search of Islamic State raises wider questions about citizenshipWhile many aspects of UK political polling have shifted drastically since 2019, the public’s view on Shamima Begum has remained largely fixed: a big majority do not want the now 26-year-old woman back in the UK.In 2019, Sajid Javid, then home secretary, stripped the Londoner of her UK citizenship on the grounds that she was a security threat, having travelled as a schoolgirl with two friends to territory controlled by Islamic State (IS) in Syria. At the time, 76% of people backed the move. Continue reading...
Sewage in drinking water blamed for at least 10 deaths in India’s ‘cleanest city’
Hundreds hospitalised in Indore after public toilet built above water pipeline appears to have let sewage into supplySewage-contaminated drinking water is being blamed for killing at least 10 people, including a baby boy, and sending more than 270 others to hospital in Indore, ranked India’s “cleanest city” for the last eight years.Residents of a congested, lower-income neighbourhood in Indore, Madhya Pradesh’s commercial capital, had been warning authorities for months about foul-smelling tap water. Their complaints went unheeded, despite the city’s much-lauded ranking for waste segregation and other cleanliness measures. Continue reading...
Cremation pyre in Africa thought to be world’s oldest containing adult remains
9,500-year-old pyre uncovered in Malawi offers rare insight into rituals of ancient African hunter-gatherer groupsA cremation pyre built about 9,500 years ago has been discovered in Africa, offering a fresh glimpse into the complexity of ancient hunter-gatherer communities.Researchers say the pyre, discovered in a rock shelter at the foot of Mount Hora in northern Malawi, is thought to be the oldest in the world to contain adult remains, the oldest confirmed intentional cremation in Africa, and the first pyre to be associated with African hunter-gatherers. Continue reading...
US ‘adapt, shrink or die’ terms for $2bn aid pot will mean UN bowing down to Washington, say experts
Afghanistan and Yemen excluded from list of 17 priority countries chosen by Trump administration to receive aid laden with demandsThe $2bn (£1.5bn) of aid the US pledged this week may have been hailed as “bold and ambitious” by the UN but could be the “nail in the coffin” in changing to a shrunken, less flexible aid system dominated by Washington’s political priorities, aid experts fear.After a year of deep cuts in aid budgets by the US and European countries, the announcement of new money for the humanitarian system is a source of some relief, but experts are deeply concerned about demands that the US has imposed on how the money should be managed and where it can go. Continue reading...
