Music: Wolfgang Haffner — ‘Shapes’
Gaza: ‘highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded… anywhere, anytime,’ new report warns
CNN reports: Famine is imminent in northern Gaza where 70% of the population are already suffering with catastrophic levels of hunger, a UN-backed report said Monday, as the EU’s top diplomat accused Israel of using “starvation as a weapon of war.” All 2.2 million people in Gaza do not have enough food to eat, with half of the population on the brink of starvation and famine projected to arrive in the north “anytime between mid-March and May 2024,” according to…
Jared Kushner: Palestinians should be moved to the Negev desert to ‘clean up’ Gaza’s ‘valuable’ waterfront
The Daily Beast reports: Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has offered his own solution to the mass bloodshed and displacement in Gaza: some good, old-fashioned real estate development. During an interview with Tarek Masoud, the faculty chair of Harvard’s Middle East Initiative, Kushner proposed moving Palestinians to Israel’s arid desert region to “clean up” Gaza’s “valuable” waterfront. “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable to—if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” Kushner said, without clarifying who exactly would profit…
Why won’t rich Republicans loan money to upstanding businessman Donald Trump?
Jonathan Chait writes: The Republican Party is united in its belief that Donald Trump’s court-ordered financial distress is the product of Democratic Party “lawfare.” Liberal prosecutors and courts have set out to persecute an upstanding businessman, hounding him over minor or nonexistent financial discrepancies. He is being forced to liquidate his extremely solid business to pay trumped-up fines. The conservative talk-show host Mark Levin has absorbed these complaints and earnestly raises a natural follow-up question: Why aren’t any patriotic conservative…
Judge Aileen Cannon could get herself booted from Trump’s classified documents case
Ray Brescia writes: For the last few weeks, the legal and political world had its eyes on the spectacle of an effort to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the prosecution of former President Donald Trump, over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. Yet over the last six months, a slow-moving car-crash of a case has been unfolding, with a judge who seems committed to protecting the former president at every turn of the…
Outside groups pledge over $1 billion to aid Biden’s re-election effort
The New York Times reports: A new $120 million pledge to lift President Biden and his allies will push the total expected spending from outside groups working to re-elect Mr. Biden to $1 billion this year. The League of Conservation Voters, a leading climate organization that is among the biggest spenders on progressive causes, announced its plans for backing Mr. Biden on Tuesday, at a moment when his Republican challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, is struggling to raise funds….
EU deal with Egypt rewards authoritarianism, betrays ‘EU values’
Claudio Francavilla writes: The European Union is about to reward Egypt’s autocratic leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, for preventing migrants’ departures towards Europe. Visiting Cairo on March 17, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, along with the Prime Ministers of Italy, Greece, and Belgium, will officially upgrade the EU-Egypt relations to a “comprehensive and strategic partnership”, paving the way for a package of EU aid, grants, loans and investments in the country estimated at between four and eight billion Euros….
Mysterious ‘unparticles’ may be pushing the universe apart, new theoretical study suggests
Live Science reports: The ever-accelerating expansion of the universe may be driven by a mysterious form of matter called “unparticles,” which do not obey the Standard Model of particle physics, a new theoretical paper suggests. Scientists widely acknowledge that the universe is expanding, though the cause of that expansion remains elusive. One of the most popular proposed explanations is a mysterious entity called dark energy in the form of a cosmological constant, which leads to expansion at a rate independent…
Music: Ulf Wakenius with Vincent Peirani & Lars Danielsson — ‘Chorinho’
‘Catastrophic levels of hunger’ in Gaza mean famine is imminent, says aid coalition
The Guardian reports: Famine is imminent in northern Gaza with people suffering “catastrophic levels of hunger”, a coalition of aid groups has warned. The situation was called “man-made starvation”, as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a group that includes the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization, said that 1.1 million people, half of Gaza’s population, faced famine. The IPC report came as Philippe Lazzarini, the head of Unrwa – the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees –…
Israel’s Shifa raid shows its grip is slipping as a ‘forever war’ looms
Jason Burke writes: The latest raid on al-Shifa hospital reveals that the Israeli military’s hold on the areas of Gaza supposedly cleared of Hamas militants is considerably more tenuous than the country’s political leaders have claimed – and suggests the region’s military superpower is facing its own “forever war” in the territory with enormous costs for everyone involved, particularly civilians. The fighting around the Shifa hospital and its eventual seizure was the climactic moment of the first phase of Israel’s…
Trump says Jews who support Democrats ‘hate Israel’ and ‘their religion’
The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump accused Jews who vote for Democrats of hating their religion and Israel, reviving and escalating a claim he made as president that Jewish Democrats were disloyal. He made his remarks in an interview published online on Monday with Sebastian Gorka, a former White House aide for Mr. Trump who now hosts a conservative talk radio program. Mr. Gorka asked Mr. Trump about criticism that prominent Democrats — including President Biden…
Putin bromance has U.S. intelligence officials fearing second Trump term
The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s continuing lavish praise and support for Vladimir Putin are fueling alarm among former intelligence officials and other experts who fear another Trump presidency would benefit Moscow and harm American democracy and interests overseas. Trump praised the Russian president as a “genius” and “pretty savvy” when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, and has boasted he would end the war in a “day”, sparking critics’ fears that if he’s elected again Trump would help Russia achieve…
Behind Trump’s campaign cash crunch: Small-dollar donor fatigue, major donor hesitation
CNBC reports: Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has begun to see warning signs that the small-dollar donors who fueled his last run for the White House have slowed their support to the former president this year, according to people familiar with the matter. Since late last year, members of Trump’s team have been warned by Republican Party advisors that their small-dollar donor base could be shrinking, said the sources, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters. Some have even…
Confirming that Jan 6 was an insurrection, Supreme Court lets ban against New Mexico official stand
Politico reports: The Supreme Court has turned away a convicted member of the Jan. 6 mob who was barred from public office in New Mexico under the Constitution’s “insurrection clause” seeking to reverse his disqualification. The justices on Monday denied Couy Griffin’s petition to consider his effort to overturn the rulings of courts in New Mexico that deemed him ineligible from holding office there ever again. Griffin, who was convicted in 2022 of misdemeanor offenses related to his role in…
The education of a true believer
The Washington Post reports: Linda Wenhold closed her eyes, bowed her head and offered a prayer. “Lord, let us see that the further we move from biblical truth, the further we move from our liberty and freedom,” she began. The 60-year-old grandmother stood at the front of a modest stone church in this former steel town just beyond the exurban sprawl of Philadelphia. About a dozen people had turned out on a cold February night for the fourth week of…