Browsed by
Category: Politics

Netanyahu vows to defy Biden’s ‘red line’ and invade Rafah. He also denies Palestinians are starving

Netanyahu vows to defy Biden’s ‘red line’ and invade Rafah. He also denies Palestinians are starving

Politico reports: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he intends to press ahead with an invasion of the city of Rafah on the southern border of the Gaza Strip in defiance of U.S. President Joe Biden, who has warned such an offensive would be a “red line.” Amid signs of increasing frustration with Netanyahu, the U.S. president told MSNBC on Saturday that he opposed an escalation of the conflict into Rafah, and that he could not accept “30,000 more Palestinians…

Read More Read More

Israeli rabbi calls for killing all Palestinians in Gaza

Israeli rabbi calls for killing all Palestinians in Gaza

  He’s not just head of a yeshiva; he’s head of a hesder yeshiva. Many yeshiva students do not serve in the military, but hesder yeshivas combine Torah study with military service. So young military recruits are being taught that genocide is a religious duty. https://t.co/gpzBny5pkv — Barnett R. Rubin (@BRRubin) March 10, 2024 They are proud to murder a 73-year-old deaf man. That's the type of savagery we are facing in Gaza https://t.co/VRxeW1DYTh — Khalil Sayegh (@KhalilJeries) March 9,…

Read More Read More

Chief Sephardic rabbi says ultra-Orthodox will leave Israel if forced into army

Chief Sephardic rabbi says ultra-Orthodox will leave Israel if forced into army

The Times of Israel reports: Chief Sephardic Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef warned Saturday that ultra-Orthodox Jews will leave Israel en masse if the government ends exemptions of mandatory military enlistment enjoyed by the community. “If they force us to go to the army, we’ll all move abroad,” Yosef said during a weekly lecture. “We’ll buy a ticket… We’ll go there.” “The [biblical] tribe of Levi was exempted from the army,” he noted by way of comparison, referring to the biblical tribe…

Read More Read More

Major U.S. corporations threaten to return labor to ‘law of the jungle’

Major U.S. corporations threaten to return labor to ‘law of the jungle’

The Guardian reports: Upset by the surge in union drives, several of the best-known corporations in the US are seeking to cripple the country’s top labor watchdog, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), by having it declared unconstitutional. Some labor experts warn that if those efforts succeed, US labor relations might return to “the law of the jungle”. In recent weeks, Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s have filed legal papers that advance novel arguments…

Read More Read More

No Labels will launch presidential campaign with no candidate

No Labels will launch presidential campaign with no candidate

Politico reports: The centrist political organization No Labels voted on Friday to move forward with its presidential ticket, according to a virtual meeting the group held with its delegates. But an official with the group acknowledged during the gathering, a recording of which was shared with POLITICO, that they currently do not have a candidate and may not find one. The decision by No Labels marks a potentially major turning point in the course of the 2024 campaign, with the…

Read More Read More

Should either of these people have the power to end the world?

Should either of these people have the power to end the world?

W.J. Hennigan writes: Forty-five feet underground in a command center near Omaha, there’s an encrypted communications line that goes directly to the American president. To get to it, you need to pass through a guarded turnstile, two reinforced steel doors and a twisting hallway that leads to an ultra-secure room called The Battle Deck. It’s here, below the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, where military personnel stand by 24 hours a day awaiting a call the world…

Read More Read More

Inside the Qatar hospital treating some of Gaza’s most severely wounded children

Inside the Qatar hospital treating some of Gaza’s most severely wounded children

  We hear Abdullah a few moments before we see him. His distant screams are echoing down the corridor at the Turkish hospital in downtown Doha. “I am in pain” he shouts, in Arabic from afar. “I need painkillers.” We travelled with him to Qatar from Egypt’s border with Gaza four days earlier. It’s hard to comprehend the deaths of 12,800 children. We put up figures of children on our studio walls – one for each child killed in Gaza…

Read More Read More

Immigrants are more law-abiding and show more entrepreneurship than U.S.-born Americans, studies show

Immigrants are more law-abiding and show more entrepreneurship than U.S.-born Americans, studies show

NPR reports: [R]esearch indicates that immigrants commit less crimes than U.S.-born people. Much of the available data focuses on incarceration rates because that’s where immigration status is recorded. Some of the most extensive research comes from Stanford University. Economist Ran Abramitzky found that since the 1960s, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born people. There is also state level research, that shows similar results: researchers at the CATO Institute, a Libertarian think tank, looked into Texas in…

Read More Read More

Trump praises ‘fantastic’ Viktor Orbán while hosting Hungarian autocrat for meeting and concert

Trump praises ‘fantastic’ Viktor Orbán while hosting Hungarian autocrat for meeting and concert

CNN reports: Donald Trump heaped praise on Viktor Orbán while hosting the Hungarian prime minister at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic,” the former president told a crowd gathered for a concert at the Florida resort, as shown in a series of videos posted to Orbán’s Instagram account. Trump added that the European autocrat is “a noncontroversial figure because he said, ‘This is the way it’s going to…

Read More Read More

U.S. prepared ‘rigorously’ for potential Russian nuclear strike in Ukraine in late 2022, officials say

U.S. prepared ‘rigorously’ for potential Russian nuclear strike in Ukraine in late 2022, officials say

CNN’s Jim Sciutto reports: In late 2022, the US began “preparing rigorously” for Russia potentially striking Ukraine with a nuclear weapon, in what would have been the first nuclear attack in war since the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly eighty years before, two senior administration officials told CNN. The Biden administration was specifically concerned Russia might use a tactical or battlefield nuclear weapon, the officials said. I first reported US officials were worried about Russia using…

Read More Read More

U.S. ‘prepper’ culture diversifies amid fear of disaster and political unrest

U.S. ‘prepper’ culture diversifies amid fear of disaster and political unrest

Reuters reports: Brook Morgan surveyed booths at the “Survival & Prepper Show” in Colorado that were stocked with boxes of ammunition, mounds of trauma medical kits, and every type of knife imaginable. A self-described “30-year-old lesbian from Indiana,” Morgan is one of a new breed of Americans getting ready to survive political upheaval and natural catastrophes, a pursuit that until recently was largely associated with far-right movements such as white nationalists since the 1980s. Researchers say the number of preppers…

Read More Read More

Don’t be fooled by Biden’s latest humanitarian initiative for Gaza

Don’t be fooled by Biden’s latest humanitarian initiative for Gaza

In his State of the Union speech, President Biden presented a plan to deliver aid by sea to the starving population in Gaza as a demonstration of American leadership: Tonight, I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters. No U.S. boots will be on the ground. This temporary pier would enable a massive increase…

Read More Read More

Senator Chris Van Hollen explains why the U.S. is legally required to suspend military aid to Israel

Senator Chris Van Hollen explains why the U.S. is legally required to suspend military aid to Israel

Isaac Chotiner interviewed Senator Chris Van Hollen: Am I correct that there is a law on the books in America which says that “funds appropriated or otherwise made available for United States assistance may not be made available for any country whose government prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance?” You cited that exactly right, and the President, just within the last couple of days, said, and I’m quoting, “We’re going…

Read More Read More

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton wants to crackdown on the next ‘Hamas sympathiser Aaron Bushnell’

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton wants to crackdown on the next ‘Hamas sympathiser Aaron Bushnell’

The New Arab reports: US Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) has unveiled two new pieces of legislation aimed at restricting security clearances and demonstration rights for pro-Palestinian government workers and contractors, following the self-immolation of US airman Aaron Bushnell outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. on February 25th. The announcement was made on Thursday in a statement posted to Cotton’s website, in which he suggested the actions of Bushnell and others who rallied in his memory as sympathetic with ‘terrorists’…

Read More Read More

Insure Our Future: A global movement says the insurance industry could be the key to ending fossil fuels

Insure Our Future: A global movement says the insurance industry could be the key to ending fossil fuels

Inside Climate News reports: Roishetta Ozane would have rather been sitting in a rocking chair at home in Louisiana with her seven-month old grandbaby than standing outside of a multinational insurance company’s office in New York City, surrounded by dozens of police officers, speaking to a rally. But she’d traveled to New York City to fight for the future of her new grandchild and six children. “I came here because decisions being made in this building impact my community miles…

Read More Read More

Leaked audio shows No Labels has no idea if it’ll find a candidate

Leaked audio shows No Labels has no idea if it’ll find a candidate

Greg Sargent writes: The centrist group No Labels held a vote of delegates Friday and announced plans to move forward in seeking candidates for a third-party presidential run. Multiple news organizations have treated this as a significant event, reporting that the group’s intent to run a third-party ticket is very much alive and forging ahead. But audio of the call on which the vote was held suggests another interpretation may be more accurate: The group really has no idea whether…

Read More Read More