Mary L Trump writes: Americans have known for a while that my uncle has the thinnest skin on the planet. We now know that Vice President Kamala Harris is all the way under it because Donald keeps admitting it. “I’m very angry at her,” Donald said Thursday. “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible…
ProPublica reports: Last February, some 20 men and their wives gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant in Spokane, Washington, for their annual Valentine’s Day celebration. The men weren’t just friends; they did community service work together. They had been featured on local television, in khakis and baseball caps, delivering 1,200 pounds of food to an area veterans’ center; they were gearing up for their next food drive, which they called Operation Hunger Smash. A few days after the holiday,…
The Guardian reports: The Israeli government sought legal advice on a US federal law requiring the disclosure of foreign-backed lobbying campaigns, out of concern that mounting enforcement of the law could ensnare American groups working in coordination with the Israeli government, leaked documents reviewed by the Guardian suggest. Emails and legal memos originating from a hack of the Israeli justice ministry show that officials feared that the country’s advocacy efforts in the US could trigger the US law governing foreign…
The Observer reports: Lyubov Antipova last spoke to her elderly parents almost two weeks ago, when she first heard rumours of a Ukrainian incursion, and begged them to leave their village in Russia’s Kursk region. The threat seemed unreal – Russian soil had not seen invading forces since the end of the second world war – and Russian state media initially dismissed the invasion as a one-off “attempt at infiltration”, so Antipova’s parents, who keep chickens and a pig on…
NOTUS reports: There’s a good reason Donald Trump and his campaign are so desperate to distance themselves from the classified-sounding “Project 2025”: The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration is politically radioactive. A Democratic operative who has seen private polling on how a number of issues could move the 2024 presidential election — like health care, the economy and immigration — told NOTUS that, improbably, no issue was benefiting Democrats more than Project 2025. And, predictably, Democrats are…
The New York Times reports: Donald J. Trump’s latest financial disclosure lists more than $100 million in liabilities stemming from three civil lawsuits he lost in New York that required him to obtain bonds to pay the judgments — but also profits from licensing fees at Trump-branded properties in Dubai and Oman, as well as income that he made from his post-presidential books, including a Trump-endorsed Bible. The former president also holds more than $1 million in cryptocurrency as he…
The Guardian reports: Dalia Hawas was 24 years old when an Israeli airstrike flattened the apartment building where she lived in February, burying the young mother with her 10-month-old daughter, Mona. They are not listed among Gaza’s war dead, because their bodies were trapped too deep beneath the rubble for rescue teams to reach them. Ten months into Israel’s war on Gaza, the death toll has passed 40,000, according to health authorities there. Most of the dead are civilians and…
"This is our conception of security: the way we keep us secure is to abuse, to kill." Investigations by CNN, the UN, and Israeli media exposed alleged abuse of Palestinians in Israeli detention centers, which the IDF and the prison service have denied. Now a new report from… pic.twitter.com/wP8JxNLfJ2 — Christiane Amanpour (@amanpour) August 14, 2024
The Washington Post reports: When sales of Coca-Cola began to plummet in parts of the Middle East and Asia this summer in response to boycotts of corporations with alleged ties to Israel, the soda company’s franchise in Bangladesh rolled out an expensive advertising campaign featuring a television star known for his roles in South Asian soap operas and reality TV. The actor, Sharaf Ahmed Jibon, played a shopkeeper who assured customers that Coca-Cola was not an Israeli product and underscored…
Reuters reports: The powerful Iranian-backed Lebanese armed group Hezbollah published footage on Friday that appeared to show its fighters driving trucks with rocket launchers through a maze of tunnels to an apparent underground launch site. The footage, 4 minutes and 35 seconds long, is the latest in a series of videos by the group flaunting its purported military capabilities, as it trades fire with the Israeli military in parallel with the Gaza war. The newest video depicts fighters riding motorcycles,…
Rolling Stone reports: This month, GOP operatives and others close to Donald Trump have grown increasingly nervous over trends they’ve seen in recent private polling data produced by different Republican organizations and conservative allies. It’s not just the swing-state polling or the national surveys that are causing distress lately. The anxiety-spiking numbers are coming out of Trump strongholds like Ohio and Florida, according to three GOP sources, including two people close to the former president, who have reviewed the private…
CNN reports: Last month, Russell Vought sat in a five-star Washington, DC, hotel suite, bowing his head in prayer with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for a second Trump term, expected the meeting would help his think tank secure a substantial contribution. For nearly two hours, he talked candidly about his behind-the-scenes work to prepare policy for former President Donald Trump, his…
The Guardian reports: A US foundation associated with the oil company Shell has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to religious right and conservative organizations, many of which deny that climate change is a crisis, tax records reveal. Fourteen of those groups are on the advisory board of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint proposing radical changes to the federal government, including severely limiting the Environment Protection Agency. Shell USA Company Foundation sent $544,010 between 2013 and 2022 to organizations that…
Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza, according to the official death toll, though the true casualty figure is likely far higher with thousands of the dead unaccounted for. Meanwhile, Israeli forces have raided towns and villages across the occupied West Bank, and settlers under military protection have repeatedly stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in recent days. This all comes as the State Department on Tuesday announced the approval of $20 billion in new arms…
Politico reports: The Biden administration is “open” to sending long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine, a move that would give Kyiv’s F-16s greater combat punch as it seeks to gain further momentum in its fight against Russia. The White House’s willingness to give Ukraine the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile comes as Kyiv’s surprisingly successful ground assault deep inside Russia heads into its second week, embarrassing Vladimir Putin and forcing him to redirect troops from the battlefield in Ukraine. No final decision…
The United States, Qatar and Egypt are urging Israel and Hamas to hold a new round of negotiations to finalize a ceasefire deal in Gaza. However, Hamas is urging mediators to enforce the ceasefire terms proposed by President Biden in May that Hamas already agreed to and that Israel rejected. Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, says U.S.-led efforts for a ceasefire are…