Music: Bugge Wesseltoft & Henrik Schwarz — ‘Duolism – One Two’
Yes, it is genocide
Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg (translated by Sol Salbe) writes: Yes, it is genocide. It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained with the mark of Cain for the “most horrible of crimes,” which cannot be erased from its forehead. As such, this is the way it will be…
Over 600 Israeli extremists storm Al-Aqsa Mosque during Jewish Passover holiday
The New Arab reports: Over 600 Israeli extremists stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem early on Sunday, the Islamic Endowment Department which runs the holy site said. The storming coincided with the sixth day of the week-long Jewish holiday of Passover, The extremists performed Talmudic rituals in the mosque’s courtyards under the protection of Israeli forces, the department said. Video clips shared online showed the extremists entering the site, considered the third holiest in Islam. Many prominent extremist Israeli figures…
Israel rebukes U.S. calls for investigation into mass graves in Gaza
Politico reports: Israel’s military says it already looked into reports of mass graves and found no wrongdoing by its forces, even as the Biden administration calls for an investigation into the matter. Over the past few days, U.S. officials, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, have called for Israel to “thoroughly and transparently” investigate reports of mass graves at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which Israeli forces last raided in February. The State Department came under fire from advocates for…
Gaza’s 37 million tonnes of bomb-filled debris could take 14 years to clear, says expert
The Guardian reports: Israel’s war in Gaza has created 37m tonnes of debris, much of it laced with unexploded bombs, which could take more than a decade to remove, a top UN demining official said. Nearly seven months into the war, there is an average 300kg of rubble a square metre of land in Gaza, Pehr Lodhammar, the former United Nationals Mine Action Service chief for Iraq, told a news conference. “Based on the current [amount] of debris in Gaza,…
The far right alliance dedicated to the cause of raising the U.S. birth rate
Gaby Del Valle writes: The threat, we are told here this weekend, is existential, biological, epoch-defining. Economies will fail, civilizations will fall, and it will all happen because people aren’t having enough babies. “The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth,” Kevin Dolan, a 37-year-old father of six from Virginia, tells the crowd that has gathered to hear him…
Renewables cover 56 percent of Germany electricity use in March quarter
Renew Economy reports: Renewable energy sources covered around 56 percent of electricity consumption in Germany in the first three months of the year, according to preliminary calculations by the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and utility association BDEW. “In total, renewable energy plants generated around 75.9 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity from January to March, around nine percent more than in the same period last year,” BDEW said. Onshore wind energy plants alone produced 39.4…
DNA from ancient graves reveals the culture of a mysterious nomadic people
Nature reports:Most people know about the Huns, if only because of their infamous warrior-ruler Attila. But the Avars, another nomadic people who subsequently occupied roughly the same region of eastern and central Europe, have remained obscure despite having assembled a sprawling empire that lasted from the late sixth century to the early ninth century. Even archaeologists have struggled to piece together their history and culture, relying on spotty and potentially biased contemporaneous chronicles that, in many cases, were authored by…
Music: Bugge Wesseltoft — ‘Lone’
Naomi Klein: Jews must raise voices for Palestine and oppose the ‘false idol of Zionism’
Hundreds of protesters were arrested in Brooklyn on Tuesday when Jewish New Yorkers and allies gathered for what they called a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover. The demonstration, held one block away from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, came just hours before the Senate overwhelmingly approved a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes about $17 billion in arms and security funding to Israel. “Too many of…
‘Political arrest’ of Palestinian academic in Israel marks new civil liberties threat
The Guardian reports: The arrest and interrogation of a leading Palestinian legal scholar based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem marks a new threat to civil liberties in Israel, her legal team and employer have said. Prof Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was detained by police on the afternoon of 18 April over comments made on a podcast more than a month earlier and held overnight in conditions her lawyers described as “terrible” and designed to humiliate. “This case is unique,” said Hassan…
Some U.S. officials say in internal memo Israel may be violating international law in Gaza
Reuters reports: Some senior U.S. officials have advised Secretary of State Antony Blinken that they do not find “credible or reliable” Israel’s assurances that it is using U.S.-supplied weapons in accordance with international humanitarian law, according to an internal State Department memo reviewed by Reuters. Other officials upheld support for Israel’s representation. Under a National Security Memorandum (NSM) issued by President Joe Biden in February, Blinken must report to Congress by May 8 whether he finds credible Israel’s assurances that…
‘Kill all Arabs’: The feds are investigating UMass Amherst for anti-Palestinian bias
The Intercept reports: The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation into the University of Massachusetts Amherst in response to a complaint that alleges that the school took months to address the harassment of Palestinian and Arab students. In the previously unreported civil rights complaint, 18 students said that they have “been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance,…
Trump will dismantle key U.S. weather and science agency, climate experts fear
The Guardian reports: Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests. Joe Biden’s presidency has increased the profile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen. The plan to “break up Noaa…
FCC officially votes to reinstate net neutrality
TechCrunch reports: The Federal Communications Commission made its official vote Thursday to reinstate net neutrality, which bars broadband providers from slowing or even blocking internet traffic to some sites while improving access to others that pay extra fees. With some changes and protections, passing the order titled Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet restores rules passed back during the Obama administration in 2015 and rolled back in 2017, after Donald Trump was elected president. Since the FCC announced in September…
Nixon advisers’ 1971 climate research plan — another lost chance on the road to crisis
Marianne Lavelle writes: In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s science advisers proposed a multimillion dollar climate change research project with benefits they said were too “immense” to be quantified, since they involved “ensuring man’s survival,” according to a White House document newly obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive and shared exclusively with Inside Climate News. The plan would have established six global and 10 regional monitoring stations in remote locations to collect data on carbon dioxide, solar radiation, aerosols and…