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Category: Politics

U.S. troop numbers in Jordan surge to record high amid Gaza war

U.S. troop numbers in Jordan surge to record high amid Gaza war

Middle East Eye reports: The number of US troops stationed in Jordan has soared to a two-decade high amid Israel’s war on Gaza, according to a new congressional report. US President Joe Biden informed Congress on 7 June that the US had deployed 3,813 to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a nearly 20 percent increase in troop numbers from December. The troop levels are higher than at any time since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, according to US troop…

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Israel is killing entire Palestinian families. AP documents 60 who lost dozens or more

Israel is killing entire Palestinian families. AP documents 60 who lost dozens or more

The Associated Press reports: He is among the very last survivors of his Gaza family, a clan so close they knew without thinking how blood and marriage bound them across generations and city blocks. Then, branch by branch, 173 of Youssef Salem’s relatives were killed in Israeli airstrikes in a matter of days in December. By spring that toll had risen to 270. Bones and flesh strewn over the ruins of family homes. Blond curls of a young cousin peeking…

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U.S. pier for Gaza aid is failing, and could be dismantled early

U.S. pier for Gaza aid is failing, and could be dismantled early

The New York Times reports: The $230 million temporary pier that the U.S. military built on short notice to rush humanitarian aid to Gaza has largely failed in its mission, aid organizations say, and will probably end operations weeks earlier than originally expected. In the month since it was attached to the shoreline, the pier has been in service only about 10 days. The rest of the time, it was being repaired after rough seas broke it apart, detached to…

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ADL faces Wikipedia ban over reliability concerns on Israel, antisemitism

ADL faces Wikipedia ban over reliability concerns on Israel, antisemitism

JTA reports: Wikipedia’s editors have voted to declare the Anti-Defamation League “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, adding it to a list of banned and partially banned sources. An overwhelming majority of editors involved in the debate about the ADL also voted to deem the organization unreliable on the topic of antisemitism, its core focus. A formal declaration on that count is expected next. The decision about Israel-related citations, made last week, means that one of the most prominent and…

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Weeks before Oct. 7, IDF said to have been warned of Hamas plan to take 250 hostages

Weeks before Oct. 7, IDF said to have been warned of Hamas plan to take 250 hostages

The Times of Israel reports: A document put together by the IDF’s Gaza Division less than three weeks before October 7 warned that Hamas was training for a large-scale invasion of Israel during which hostages would be taken en masse, according to an Israeli television report Monday. Chillingly, the September 19 document by Military Intelligence’s Unit 8200 — which was ignored — estimated the target number of hostages at 200-250, according to the Kan public broadcaster, citing unnamed security sources….

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Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières: Gaza before October 7th

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières: Gaza before October 7th

📽️ Watch the documentary “Gaza before 7 October”, which captures the resilience of healthcare workers in Gaza, before the war erupted in October 2023, and the unfathomable loss and devastation that followed.https://t.co/PEzJvxAWuz — MSF International (@MSF) June 17, 2024 Most of the footage in this documentary was filmed in May 2023, some five months before the war that has now engulfed Gaza. The purpose of the original documentary project was to explore the impact of Israel’s blockade on Gaza, which…

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UNICEF decries Israel’s ‘war on children’ as starvation and deaths mount in Gaza

UNICEF decries Israel’s ‘war on children’ as starvation and deaths mount in Gaza

  The Israeli military on Sunday announced a daily “tactical pause” in its attacks on Rafah to allow humanitarian relief to enter the Gaza Strip, after systematically blocking aid from reaching Palestinians in Gaza since October 7. While a full ceasefire is still vital, “any pause in the bombing is good news for children,” says UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, speaking to Democracy Now! from Rafah. “The physical and psychological exhaustion they face is almost impossible to capture,” he says, characterizing…

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New polling shows the real fallout from the Trump conviction

New polling shows the real fallout from the Trump conviction

Ankush Khardori writes: Donald Trump’s criminal conviction didn’t instantly upend the 2024 presidential race. But the results of a new poll should be worrying for Trump. In the weeks since the verdict, both parties have sought to shape the public’s initial reaction, with Republicans largely denouncing it and Democrats citing the result as further evidence that Trump is unfit for office. To figure out how this unprecedented moment is being processed by the electorate, POLITICO Magazine partnered with Ipsos in…

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Crypto industry aligns with Trump

Crypto industry aligns with Trump

The New York Times reports: Ryan Selkis, a cryptocurrency executive, was eating dinner at Mar-a-Lago last month when he got an unexpected invitation: Former President Donald J. Trump wanted him to come to the stage and say a few words. Mr. Selkis, who runs the crypto data firm Messari, was one of a couple hundred attendees at an event celebrating Mr. Trump’s series of nonfungible tokens, the digital collectibles known as NFTs. When he reached the lectern, Mr. Selkis turned…

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WARNING: Social media can be harmful to your mental health

WARNING: Social media can be harmful to your mental health

Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, writes: One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency, you don’t have the luxury to wait for perfect information. You assess the available facts, you use your best judgment, and you act quickly. The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor. Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social…

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Israel’s descent

Israel’s descent

Adam Shatz writes: When Ariel Sharon​ withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there. The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by…

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In Israel’s new air war in the West Bank, nearly half the dead are children

In Israel’s new air war in the West Bank, nearly half the dead are children

The Intercept reports: Around 9.30 PM in late February, a white Mazda pulled up near a game cafe in the Jenin refugee camp on the northern edge of the West Bank, where a crowd of boys and young men often gathered to socialize. As the car stopped, a few people walked by on the narrow street. Two motorbikes weaved past in different directions. “Everything was fine at the time,” according to an eyewitness sitting nearby in the camp’s main square….

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Israeli politician invokes Hitler in call to expel Gaza’s ‘Islamo-Nazi’ population

Israeli politician invokes Hitler in call to expel Gaza’s ‘Islamo-Nazi’ population

Middle East Eye reports: Israeli politician and former Likud lawmaker Moshe Feiglin invoked Adolf Hitler when urging in a TV interview the expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, whom he described as “Islamo-Nazis”. In a panel discussion on Channel 12, Feiglin called for resettlement in Gaza and argued Israel should transform the Palestinian territory into a “Hebrew Gaza”. “We are not guests in our country, this is our country, all of it,” he said in the video shared on…

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After the European elections, President Macron takes a gamble

After the European elections, President Macron takes a gamble

Adam Gopnik writes: In the classic days of the Republic of Venice, you could lodge a complaint against the government by slipping a paper into the bocca di leone, the lion’s mouth, a kind of proto postal box. The lions’ mouths were distributed around town and were often highly specified: this one to get hot over taxes, this one to complain about garbage in the canal. Their purpose was not just, as some imagine, secret denunciation but also open protest;…

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Russia overtook U.S. as biggest LNG supplier to Europe in May

Russia overtook U.S. as biggest LNG supplier to Europe in May

First Post reports: While Russia continues to navigate through the host of sanctions imposed by Ukraine and Western allies, Europe’s gas imports from Russia overtook supplies from the US. This was the first time Russia overtook the US to be the biggest gas supplier in Europe in almost two years. The reversal which took place in May indicates the difficulty of reducing Europe’s dependence on gas from Russia, with several eastern European countries still relying on imports from their neighbour….

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Israelis demand hostage deal in one of the biggest protests since October

Israelis demand hostage deal in one of the biggest protests since October

The National reports: Thousands of Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv on Saturday demanding a peace deal that would bring home hostages being held in Gaza. Pictures from Israeli broadcasters showed huge crowds lining Kaplan Street in one of the biggest demonstrations seen in the capital since October. Attendees held up signs and chanted slogans demanding the immediate resignation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. [Continue reading…] One more photo from the protest in Tel Aviv tonight. Yup, just…

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