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Europe swings to the right — led by France

Europe swings to the right — led by France

Politico reports: Europe’s center of political gravity is veering to the right. Center-right and far-right parties are set to take the largest number of seats in Sunday’s European Union election in the most populous nations: Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. France led the rightward lurch with such a crushing victory for the far-right National Rally that liberal President Emmanuel Macron dissolved France’s parliament and called an early election. Early projections suggested the National Rally would win 32 percent or…

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In thrall to Viktor Orbán and the hard right, Europe is facing its moment of truth

In thrall to Viktor Orbán and the hard right, Europe is facing its moment of truth

Simon Tisdall writes: Viktor Orbán was his usual poisonous self, spouting toxic twaddle in true Boris Johnson/Nigel Farage style. Hungary’s hard-right prime minister and Europe’s saboteur-in-chief warned supporters at a Budapest rally that, without him, their country would be overrun by millions of illegal migrants and cease to exist as a nation. The EU was to blame, he said. The commission was under the spell of his liberal nemesis, the Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros. It was secretly preparing to go…

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Israel rescues hostages from Gaza, leaving trail of death and destruction

Israel rescues hostages from Gaza, leaving trail of death and destruction

The Washington Post reports: Israel’s military staged a blistering operation to rescue four hostages from the central Gaza Strip on Saturday, leaving hundreds of Palestinians dead or wounded in its wake and marking a much-needed political victory for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under both domestic and international pressure to wind down the nine-month-long war. The Israel Defense Forces said it retrieved Almog Meir Jan, 21; Andrey Kozlov, 27; Shlomi Ziv, 40; and Noa Argamani, who turned 26 in…

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Haaretz: ‘The countdown has begun’ for the collapse of Israel

Haaretz: ‘The countdown has begun’ for the collapse of Israel

Al Mayadeen English summarizes an editorial from Haaretz published on June 7: Recent internal events suggest that Zionism is on a path to demise, and unless leaders take swift action, the existential countdown has already started, Haaretz warned in its Friday op-ed. The newspaper mentioned the “Flag March” in occupied al-Quds, which took place earlier this week and saw Israeli settlers storming the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque and violating its sanctity, attacking Palestinians and journalists, in addition to other Israelis, describing…

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Columbia Law Review back online after student editors threatened to strike over Nakba censorship

Columbia Law Review back online after student editors threatened to strike over Nakba censorship

  The Intercept reports: After the Columbia Law Review’s board of directors responded to the publication of an article about Palestine by taking the prestigious journal completely offline, the students who run CLR voted on Wednesday to reject an offer in a letter from the directors to reinstate the website. The Columbia Law School students who run CLR were considering a proposal to append a note to the Palestine article disclaiming what the directors, in an unsigned letter to students,…

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Trump plans to claim sweeping powers to cancel federal spending

Trump plans to claim sweeping powers to cancel federal spending

The Washington Post reports: Donald Trump is vowing to wrest key spending powers from Congress if elected this November, promising to assert more control over the federal budget than any president in U.S. history. The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s…

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Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-constitutional’ vision for second term

Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-constitutional’ vision for second term

The Washington Post reports: A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.” He has helped craft proposals for Donald Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations…

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An object lesson from Covid on how to destroy public trust

An object lesson from Covid on how to destroy public trust

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Big chunks of the history of the Covid pandemic were rewritten over the last month or so in a way that will have terrible consequences for many years to come. Under questioning by a congressional subcommittee, top officials from the National Institutes of Health, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not backed up by solid science….

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The heat wave scenario that keeps climate scientists up at night

The heat wave scenario that keeps climate scientists up at night

Jeff Goodell writes: On a recent Thursday evening, a freakish windstorm called a derecho (Spanish for “straight ahead”) hit Houston, a city of more than two million people that also happens to be the epicenter of the fossil fuel industry in America. In a matter of minutes, winds of up to 100 miles per hour blew out office building windows, uprooted trees and toppled electric poles and transmission towers. Nearly a million households lost power. Which meant that not only…

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Netanyahu will block any attempts at peace

Netanyahu will block any attempts at peace

Alon Pinkas writes: If you think reports of Netanyahu rejecting an Israeli proposal are bizarre, think again. After all, this isn’t so much George Orwell’s 1984 but Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2024. The moment the Israeli leader stipulated that Israel would “reserve the right to return to war”, it was clear that the “Israeli proposal” presented by the US president, Joe Biden, last Friday, to end hostilities with a three-part hostage release and ceasefire deal, was dead in the water. Netanyahu wasn’t…

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‘We have normalised horror’ says UNRWA official, after Israeli strike on school

‘We have normalised horror’ says UNRWA official, after Israeli strike on school

The Guardian reports: Mass casualty incidents caused by the Israeli military offensive in southern Gaza are becoming normalised in the west and leading to a sense of fatalism inside Gaza itself, according to Sam Rose, the director of planning for the Palestinian relief agency Unrwa. He was speaking after an Unrwa school at Nuseirat was bombed by Israeli forces leaving at least 33 dead, including 12 women and children. “When everyone is living in cramped, overcrowded conditions, we always said…

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How Israel’s illiberal democracy became a model for the right

How Israel’s illiberal democracy became a model for the right

Suzanne Schneider writes: Amid the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, it is easy to forget the political drama that gripped Israel only one year ago. After assuming power in December 2022, a new far-right government led by Benjamin Netanyahu had proposed a slate of judicial and administrative reforms that prompted a wave of anti-government protests. Concerned journalists, former U.S. and Israeli government officials, and major American Jewish organizations issued ominous warnings about democratic backsliding. Israel, it seemed,…

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Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledges he should have disclosed free trips from billionaire donor

Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledges he should have disclosed free trips from billionaire donor

By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski This story was originally published by ProPublica. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged for the first time in a new financial disclosure filing that he should have publicly reported two free vacations he received from billionaire Harlan Crow. The pair of 2019 trips, one to Indonesia and the other to the Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in northern California, were first revealed by ProPublica. Last year, Thomas argued that he did not…

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Judge overseeing Trump’s documents case seen as isolated and inexperienced

Judge overseeing Trump’s documents case seen as isolated and inexperienced

CNN reports: [Judge Aileen] Cannon’s assignment to the documents case was a game of odds. Though the charges were filed in West Palm Beach, the division that is home to Mar-a-Lago, Cannon was randomly chosen from a broader pool of judges in Florida’s southern district. Her approach as a jurist – detail-obsessed to the point of tedious – appears uniquely prone to being exploited by a defense team eager to delay the case. And the complicated system Cannon has set…

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