Common Dreams:

"The Biden Administration's THAAD Deployment and the Path to War 

Far from being a stabilizing force, the deployment of these missiles raises the stakes for everyone involved, including American military personnel and bases stationed in the region.

This month, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin authorized the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to Israel, along with American personnel to operate it. According to observers, between October 14 and 21, a record 26 U.S. military transport flights landed in Israel, delivering personnel and equipment to set up the THAAD system. Satellite images confirm that the system is now fully operational, with all its components, including radar and missile launch platforms, positioned and ready. By placing U.S. troops and assets in a volatile conflict zone, the Biden administration risks exposing American military personnel to potential attacks, and further destabilizing the Middle East, all without explicit congressional authorization for such combat missions. ...

The United States should resist this reckless course of action. It is not in America’s interests to get entangled in another Middle Eastern war, especially one undertaken without public debate, congressional approval, or a clear exit strategy. Instead of sending more weapons and further fueling escalation, the U.S. should push for a ceasefire in Gaza, which remains the key to defusing the broader regional conflict. A ceasefire would halt the immediate bloodshed and prevent the cycle of retaliation from dragging the entire region into war."

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/thaad-israel-iran

-->The beginning a regional, and perhaps a world war. It's not what the people want, of course, but that makes no difference to the two war and genocide parties run by the billionaires and their Zionist religious fanatics. Why no national debate about WW III? Our pentagon controlled media won't allow it. 

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The Intercept:

"The chief legal officer of the European Union’s foreign service advised the department’s top official that a new opinion by judges in The Hague does not require EU states to ban goods imported from Israeli settlements, according to a leaked analysis.

Legal experts said that the analysis contradicts the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, ruling that states should end all support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In a seven-page memo, Frank Hoffmeister, the director of the EU foreign service’s legal department, argued that while European law required the labeling of settlement products, a ban on their import and sale was still up for debate. ...

The legal advice, which ... was sent to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on July 22, three days after the ICJ decided that states must not 'render aid or assistance in maintaining' Israel’s illegal occupation. ... 'The ICJ has made clear that ‘all aid and assistance’ of any kind by all states to the settlement project must cease. It is my assessment that this requires the EU to revise its policy to end any and all trade, funding or other assistance that in any way supports the Israeli occupation,' said Susan Akram, the director of Boston University School of Law’s International Human Rights Clinic.

https://theintercept.com/2024/10/23/eu-israel-settlements-trade-gaza/

-->It is not just the US that is braking its own laws to perpetuate the slaughter in Gaza. The European Union also has blood on its hands. But you wouldn't learn that by reading our mainstream news. Another disappeared story.

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Green Party:

"Earlier today, Jill sat down for an interview with celebrated journalist Tavis Smiley. As the interview began, Tavis read an email written to him on behalf of the DNC that was sent with the intention of coercing him into asking their outrageous gotcha questions to Jill as if they were his own!

Tavis Smiley is a real journalist who holds himself to high ethical standards. He wasn’t going to allow the DNC to dictate how he conducts interviews. So he did indeed read off the accusations disguised as questions that the DNC had sent him, while all along making clear that he was doing this to give Jill the opportunity to respond to the anti-Democratic Party’s preferred narrative of fear-mongering about 'spoilers' instead of what they clearly had in mind – using him as a mouthpiece to advance their narrative.

It begs the question of how many interviews have Jill and Butch done in good faith, only to have the DNC meddling behind the scenes? Might this explain why we’ve been seeing the same hostile narrative from the mainstream press over and over again? Not all journalists conduct themselves with Tavis Smiley’s integrity. We’re grateful to him for blowing the cover off of the way they try to rig the media against us."

https://www.gp.org/bombshell_revelation_from_tavis_smiley

-->The US media and the two major parties are in bed together. We only smell the stench when a story like this breaks through.

 Al Jazeera:
"The use of human shields in war is not a new phenomenon. Militaries have forced civilians to serve as human shields for centuries. Yet, despite this long and dubious history, Israel has managed to introduce a new form of shielding in Gaza, one that appears unprecedented in the history of warfare.

The practice was initially revealed by Al Jazeera but, subsequently, Haaretz published an entire expose about how Israeli troops have abducted Palestinian civilians, dressed them in military uniforms, attached cameras to their bodies, and sent them into underground tunnels as well as buildings in order to shield Israeli troops. ...

The Israeli army’s treatment of Palestinian civilians as expendable might not come as a surprise given the racialised form of colonial governance to which they have been subjected for decades. The deep-seated racism explains the ease with which Israeli President Isaac Herzog publicly claimed that there are “no innocent civilians” in the Gaza Strip as well as the prevailing indifference among Israel’s Jewish public to the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been killed."
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/10/20/israel-has-taken-human-shields-to-a-whole-new-criminal-level

-->What would happen if the NYT followed such Israeli war crimes as they happen? Maybe even more Americans would oppose Israel's genocide in Gaza. Maybe candidates in the two major political parties would even talk about it.

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Common Dreams:
"73% of Young US Voters Eager to Support Candidates With Bold Climate Agenda
Over three-quarters in a new survey endorsed the idea that the 'future is frightening' and 62.9% agreed that 'humanity is doomed.'

More than half of young people in the U.S. are 'very or extremely worried' about the climate crisis and an even larger percentage are motivated to do something about it, including at the ballot box.

The data came from a poll published on Thursday in The Lancet Planetary Health, which found that concerns about the climate crisis were impacting young people's decisions about their personal and public lives, with 52.3% saying they were 'hesitant to have children' and 72.8% planning to vote for candidates who back ambitious climate policies.
'Climate change is causing widespread distress among U.S. youth and affecting their beliefs and plans for the future,' the study authors concluded. 'These effects may intensify, across the political spectrum, as exposure to climate-related severe weather events increases.' "
https://www.commondreams.org/news/youth-concerned-climate-us

-->Why didn't this story appear in the NYT? I think its because neither Trump nor Harris talk about saving the environment. Like the Israeli genocide, our political system reflects what the very rich believe, not what is really happening in the world.

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Common Dreams:
"An Oxfam report published Wednesday estimates that war-fueled hunger is likely killing as many as 21,000 people per day in dozens of countries as parties to global conflicts weaponize starvation against children and other vulnerable people in Gaza, Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia, and elsewhere.

Food Wars, published to mark World Food Day, finds that nearly 278 million people across 54 war-torn countries faced crisis-level hunger last year. That population accounts for 99% of the people facing crisis-level hunger worldwide.
War, according to the new report, was a 'major cause of food insecurity' in each of the 54 countries examined, 'although in some of them, weather extremes or economic shocks may have been the principal driver.'

'As conflict rages around the world, starvation has become a lethal weapon wielded by warring parties against international laws, causing an alarming rise in human deaths and suffering,' said Emily Farr, Oxfam's food and economic security lead. 'That civilians continue to be subjected to such slow death in the 21st Century is a collective failure.' "
https://www.commondreams.org/news/global-hunger-report

-->Again, The NYT leaves an important story out. Perhaps that's because starvation is one of the most commonly used war crimes in US sponsored wars abroad. Yes, we are starving thousands of children in Gaza. We know it, and we pay for it. That is why, when justice finally comes, most recent US presidents will be judged to be war criminals.

Middle East Monitor:
"In a statement to the UN General Assembly, Lisa Doughten from OCHA warned of the dire humanitarian situation in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, saying the besieged Strip 'is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history'. ‘Each day 10 children are losing 1 or both of their legs,' she said, adding that women are 3 times more likely to suffer miscarriages as a result of Israel's bombing campaign. ...

'We cannot claim ignorance to what is happening — nor can we afford to look away,' she emphasised, repeating calls for the Council and Member States to act, adding: 'These atrocities must end.'

She warned that the systematic and permanent targeting of the health sector has deprived more than two million people in the Gaza Strip of receiving basic health services, where more than 50,000 pregnant women are deprived of maternity care."
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241011-un-gaza-home-to-largest-number-of-amputee-children-in-modern-history/

-->Hard facts like this are often missing in our pro-Zionist media. The NYT didn't cover this story, but did have a comprehensive report this Sunday from doctors and nurses in Gaza.

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Common Dreams:
"Corporate agribusinesses are playing fast and loose with the rules by choosing friendly compliant certifiers—and when they are caught in the act, the USDA often fails to take action.

Some of the oldest and largest U.S. Department of Agriculture-accredited certifiers have partnered with corporate agribusiness to change the working definition of organics, allowing large livestock factories; certified, uninspected imports; and soilless hydroponic produce grown in giant industrial greenhouses to be certified organic.

Organic certifiers are mixing lobbying, marketing, and activism with their certification responsibilities, and taking payola from the clients they certify. They are also certifying 'producer groups' in Eastern Europe, Central America, and Asia without inspecting and certifying each individual farm. This is against the law and an egregious conflict of interest—and it’s crushing U.S. farmers in the marketplace while raking in billions of dollars in profit for these large certifiers."
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/organic-certification-corruption

-->The NYT and most of our major media didn't cover this story, although the New Yorker did. I think this news makes our USDA regulatory system look bad, not something that our corporate controlled press worries too much about.

=====

Common Dreams:
"The Israeli military has over the past year released triumphant videos of airstrikes in Gaza that are linked to hundreds of civilian deaths, according to an investigation published Wednesday by Sky News and Airwars, a watchdog group.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted videos of 1,219 strikes between October 7, 2023 and August 31—the period studied—nearly half of which came from the first month of the war. The IDF often overlays captions citing Hamas targets. Most of the videos are grainy, with people on the ground not visible, deaths not directly evident, and locations unclear.

Airwars used geolocation data to match 17 of the strikes to specific incidents in which Palestinians were reported killed or injured. The newly released investigation includes detailed reports on each of the 17 strikes, which together killed 448 civilians.
'This is incredible work by Airwars clearly showing how Israeli targeting practices are way below acceptable legal standards,' Alonso Gurmendi, a human rights fellow and war expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, wrote on social media."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/airwars-idf-tweets-videos-strikes

-->This story was not reported in the NYT. Nor was it printed in any of the US major media. Actual studies of Israel's war crimes are hard to find in the US.

Aljazeera:
"Forces from the US Central Command (CENTCOM), the military command responsible for US forces in the Middle East, 'conducted strikes on 15 Houthi targets in Iranian-backed Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen today', it said on X on Friday.

Four strikes targeted Sanaa and seven hit Hodeidah, according to the Houthi-run Al Masirah TV network. Correspondents with the AFP news agency also reported hearing loud explosions in both cities. ...

Footage on social media verified by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency showed large plumes of smoke resulting from the strikes in Hodeidah. ... On Friday, thousands of people took to the streets of Sanaa to express solidarity with the Palestinians and Lebanese people amid intensified attacks by Israel.

'The aggression on the capital and Yemeni governorates after the … solidarity marches with Lebanon and Gaza is a desperate attempt to terrorise our people,' Houthi official Hashem Sharaf told Al Masirah. 'Yemen will not be deterred by these attacks and will continue its steadfastness in confronting the enemies with all its strength.' "
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/4/houthis-say-us-air-strikes-target-several-cities-across-yemen

-->The NYT didn't cover this story. With US bases in 800 locations throughout the world, how can one newspaper report all the wars and occupations our troops are involved in, especially when they take place in the Middle East? In fact, our newspaper of record my be purposely leaving out US military action since there is so very much of it.

=====

Common Dreams:
" 'I'm afraid first about my safety and about my family's safety because there's no safe place in Lebanon now,' said one physician.

The head of the United Nations World Health Organization said Thursday that Israeli forces killed 28 healthcare workers in Lebanon over the previous 24 hours, and that 73 medical personnel are among the nearly 2,000 Lebanese killed during Israel's bombing and invasion of its northern neighbor.

'In southern Lebanon, 37 health facilities have been closed, while in Beirut, three hospitals have been forced to fully evacuate staff and patients, and another two were partially evacuated,' WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference in Geneva. 'And yet healthcare continues to come under attack. In Lebanon alone, 28 health workers have been killed in the last 24 hours.' ...
 

Hundreds of Palestinians working in the health sector have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces, who have deliberately targeted medical workers. Israeli troops have also allegedly tortured doctors and other medical workers after kidnapping them from the coastal enclave."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/lebanon-health-workers-killed

-->This is how Israel wages war, in an attempt to kill as many Palestinians as possible. Maybe that is why the NYT did not cover this story. The foremost newspaper in the US just happens to be a pro genocide rag, determined to make Israel look less like the failed state then it is.

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Savage Minds on Substack:
"My naïveté was believing in the law. When push comes to shove, laws are just pieces of paper, and they can be reinterpreted for political expediency.

They are the rules made by the ruling class more broadly. And if those rules don’t suit what it wants to do, it reinterprets them or hopefully, changes them, which is clearer? In the case of the United States, we angered one of the constituent powers of the United States, the intelligence sector, the security state, the secrecy state.

It was powerful enough to push for a reinterpretation. The US Constitution, the US First Amendment seems pretty black and white to me. It’s very short. It says the Congress shall make no law, restricting speech or the press. ...

Ultimately if it got to the Supreme Court of the United States, and I was still alive in that system, I might have won, depending on what the makeup was of the US Supreme Court. But in the meantime, I had lost 14 years, on the house arrest, embassy siege and maximum security prison.

So I think this is an important lesson that when a major power faction wants to reinterpret the law, it can push to have the element of the state, in this case, the US Department of Justice do that. And it doesn’t care too much about what is legal. That’s something for a much later day. In the meantime, the deterrent effect that it seeks, the retributive actions that it seeks, have had their effect."  -Julian Assange
https://savageminds.substack.com/p/my-naivete-was-believing-in-the-law

-->Julian gets to the heart of the matter. The US Constitution be damned. If the US security/secrecy state wants you, law means nothing. The Department of Justice becomes an agency for suppressing freedom of speech. But why haven't the major media in this country bothered to print Assange's speech? More censorship, of course. You can't report on US war crimes.  

The Intercept:
"Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania. 'I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,' Finkelstein told me. 'It was never outside the bounds of what I do.'

For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.
Neither her longtime public support of Palestinians, however, nor the courses on Palestine she taught in her early years at the school prevented Finkelstein from earning tenure in 2021. Following the arduous tenure process, professors are supposed to enjoy lifetime job security and robust safeguards of academic freedom. The bar for dismissal from a tenured academic position is by design meant to be extremely high, requiring justifiable cause.

In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters."
https://theintercept.com/2024/09/26/tenured-professor-fired-palestine-israel-zionism

-->This is an important story if you care about the new McCarthy Era. Finkelstein was fired for putting a Palestinian poem on her social media account. That's the criteria, or really the lack of criteria for firing tenured professors. This firing will set the stage for the muzzling of an entire class of people, who are hired to teach young people how to think and write. State censorship has arrived. Although no major media bothered to cover the end of freedom of speech on campuses across the country.

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No US publication has published some of the writings and quotes of Hasan Nasralla, the Hezbollah chief in Lebanon. Isn't murdering him enough? It was our plaines and bombs that assassinated him. Time to let him speak!

-The day will come when the Palestinian people will be free and the usurpers expelled.
-It is our duty to support all those who resist colonialism and imperialism.
-Our struggle is not just for the Palestinians; it is a struggle for justice everywhere.
-Our resistance is a beacon of hope for all oppressed peoples around the world.
-Our fight is not with the Jewish people; it is with the state of Israel.
-Resistance is not terrorism; it is a legitimate response to occupation and injustice.
-Would you allow a people to come from somewhere else and occupy a part of the United States, and set up an independent state, and, after 50 years, you would not be able to stay on this land?
-The real danger to the world's resistance movements is the attempt to distort reality and to place the blame on the resistance groups' actions without allowing them to portray their perspective, thus ignoring the reality of the occupation and the siege, like the situation in occupied Palestine.
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/9/28/who-was-hassan-nasrallah-2

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The Intercept:
"Faculty from seven University of California campuses took a stand against the repression of protest over Israel’s war on Gaza on Thursday, taking the historic step of filing a joint unfair labor practice charge against their employer. The professors from the top-tier California public university system alleged that their schools targeted them for speaking out on Israel’s war in Gaza and for joining students’ pro-Palestine protests in the spring.

The 581-page labor violation charge, filed with California’s Public Employment Relations Board, largely focuses on the universities’ crackdowns on the student-led Palestine solidarity protests and encampments, in which school officials called on police to arrest hundreds of students, faculty, and staff members in May and June.
In some instances, police beat demonstrators with batons, fired rubber bullets and pepper ball munitions, and sprayed chemical agents. In the aftermath of the crackdown, faculty and staff have faced punishment for their role in the protests, from suspensions to firings.

'UC’s actions to suppress speech about Palestine on our campuses, which represents an illegal content-based restriction of faculty rights, sets an alarming precedent,' said Constance Penley, president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, which, along with faculty associations from the seven campuses, filed the labor charge. 'Our unfair labor practice filing demands they change course and follow the law, and make whole the faculty who have been harmed.'

Anna Markowitz, a UCLA faculty association member, said the school’s crackdown had one goal: 'to end Palestine solidarity activism on campus.' ”
https://theintercept.com/2024/09/20/uc-professors-palestine-protest-labor-violation

-->The violent crackdown on dissent at the nation's colleges and universities. And you are worried about a Trump fascist regime? Why you have fascism that is alive and well in the Democratic Party too.