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Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a neighbor’s barking dog with a shovel

Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a neighbor’s barking dog with a shovel

The Guardian reports: The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian. Kevin Roberts, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, is alleged to have told colleagues and dinner guests that…

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Iran brokering talks to send advanced Russian missiles to Yemen’s Houthis, sources say

Iran brokering talks to send advanced Russian missiles to Yemen’s Houthis, sources say

Reuters reports: Iran has brokered ongoing secret talks between Russia and Yemen’s Houthi rebels to transfer anti-ship missiles to the militant group, three Western and regional sources said, a development that highlights Tehran’s deepening ties to Moscow. Seven sources said that Russia has yet to decide to transfer the Yakhont missiles – also known as P-800 Oniks – which experts said would allow the militant group to more accurately strike commercial vessels in the Red Sea and increase the threat…

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Why energy-hungry civilizations on this planet and elsewhere are destined to self-destruct

Why energy-hungry civilizations on this planet and elsewhere are destined to self-destruct

Universe Today reports: Earth’s average global temperatures have been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), Earth has been heating up at a rate of 0.06 °C (0.11 °F) per decade since 1850 – or about 1.11 °C (2 °F) in total. Since 1982, the average annual increase has been 0.20 °C (0.36 °F) per decade, more than three times as fast. What’s more, this trend is projected to increase by between 1.5 and 2 °C…

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Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war

Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war

The Guardian reports: At least 492 people have been killed and 1,645 injured, Lebanon’s health ministry has said, after a wave of Israeli airstrikes on alleged Hezbollah targets that left the country with its highest daily death toll since the end of the 1975-90 civil war. Tens of thousands of people fled from south Lebanese towns and villages along the main road towards the capital, Beirut, in Israel’s most intense barrage in nearly a year of cross-border clashes, as sirens…

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Why is Netanyahu starting a cataclysmic new war?

Why is Netanyahu starting a cataclysmic new war?

Dimi Reider writes: For much of the last year, the prospect of an all-out war in the North was presented to Israelis as a pitfall to avoid. Israel, they were told, doesn’t want a second war – especially not one that could escalate to a regional one with Iran – and neither does Hezbollah. All in all, both parties would prefer a long-term accommodation or regularisation (hasdarah). Israel wants Hezbollah to stop firing and ideally move its forces further north,…

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Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented

Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib writes: My brother, Mohammed, has survived nearly a year of war in Gaza while working to aid its people. He has scrambled out of the rubble of an air strike that destroyed our family home, and he has seen far too many of our relatives wounded or killed. Through it all, he has somehow remained unscathed. However, he recently fell severely ill battling a hepatitis infection. Mohammed is a deputy director of programs for one of the…

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Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel’

Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel’

Ryu Spaeth writes: It was mid-August, roughly a month and a half before his new book, The Message, was set to be published, and Ta-Nehisi Coates was in my face, on my level, his eyes wide and aflame and his hands swallowing his scalp as he clutched it in disbelief and wonder and rage. At the Gramercy Park restaurant where we’d met for breakfast, Coates, now 48, looked noticeably older than the fruit-cheeked polemicist whose visage had been everywhere nearly…

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Key Nebraska Republican rejects Trump’s push to shake up electoral map

Key Nebraska Republican rejects Trump’s push to shake up electoral map

The New York Times reports: The Nebraska state senator who Republicans hoped would help ease former President Donald J. Trump’s path to the White House by agreeing to change how the state allocates its Electoral College votes said on Monday that he would not do so, ending a brief but intense lobbying effort from allies of Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. The state legislator, Mike McDonnell, a Democrat turned Republican from Omaha, said that he would not agree…

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FTC trustbuster Lina Khan

FTC trustbuster Lina Khan

  Lesley Stahl reports: Everywhere you go people are complaining about inflation: voters say it’s their number one issue. Enter trustbuster Lina Khan – the youngest chair ever of the Federal Trade Commission – just 32 when she was named. She says much of the blame for the exorbitant prices on everything from food to concert tickets, is widespread corporate consolidation. The FTC’s mission is breaking illegal monopolies, blocking mergers that stifle competition, and protecting consumers from a system Lina…

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Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows

Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows

The Guardian reports: Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world’s life-support systems. “Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold”, particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. “The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems.” The report, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), builds on years of research…

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Israeli attacks unite Lebanese

Israeli attacks unite Lebanese

The Observer reports: In hospitals around Lebanon, ­hundreds of patients were adjusting to a new life, many of them now with permanent disabilities. The pager explosions resulted in many being blinded and losing a hand. The pagers had beeped twice, and then there was a pause, giving people enough time to bring them to their face before they exploded. “Enucleation [removal of the eye] is a procedure that is rarely ­performed these days. One of our senior ­ophthalmologists was saying…

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Israel’s attack on Hezbollah’s communications network is not the victory it claims

Israel’s attack on Hezbollah’s communications network is not the victory it claims

Ori Goldberg writes: Israel has not claimed responsibility for the rolling “pager attack” in Lebanon. Israeli social discourse, however, is not even debating the issue. It is clear that “we did it” (exclamation point optional). What is it that we actually did? One can surmise that Israeli intelligence established a company that produced pagers and walkie-talkies and managed to pique Hezbollah’s interest in these devices. Hezbollah prides itself on its low-tech approach to communications, assuming that this makes its network…

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Closure of the Al Jazeera bureau is an expression of ‘Israeli fascism,’ says Knesset member

Closure of the Al Jazeera bureau is an expression of ‘Israeli fascism,’ says Knesset member

  Armed Israeli soldiers storm and shut down Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank for 45 days, forcing staff to leave the premises and destroying equipment. During the raid on Al Jazeera’s office, Israeli soldiers tear down a large banner of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank two years ago. Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi has more from Amman, Jordan, because the Israeli government has also banned Al…

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Putin regime will collapse without warning, says freed gulag dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza

Putin regime will collapse without warning, says freed gulag dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza

Carole Cadwalladr writes: The last time I met Evgenia Kara-Murza, it was a grim day in early March. The timing couldn’t have been worse. As we spoke, Alexei Navalny’s coffin was being lowered into the frozen ground in a Moscow cemetery. Meanwhile Evgenia’s husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was still incarcerated in a Siberian prison cell almost identical to the one in the Arctic Circle in which Navalny had been found dead, presumed murdered. The parallels were eerie. Because Vladimir, a journalist…

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