Intercept:
Ahead of Supreme Court arguments over the future of TikTok, critics have warned that banning the popular social media app in the United States would be an assault on free speech. For some Republican lawmakers, that’s at least part of the point — and there’s a very specific type of speech they want to squash: pro-Palestinian sentiments.

Republicans have been discussing banning TikTok since Donald Trump’s first term, with a plethora of justifications centered around Chinese interference. But in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, conservatives have become hyper fixated on policing pro-Palestinian messages on the app, accusing TikTok of influencing young Americans to “support Hamas” and favoring pro-Palestinian content. TikTok, for its part, has vigorously defended itself against the perception that it favors Palestinian perspectives and asserted that its algorithm does not 'take sides.'

Nina Smith, a political communications strategist and former senior adviser to Stacey Abrams, said the GOP’s messaging around TikTok and Palestine is emblematic of the party’s double standards on free speech. 'They’re pushing for their ability to say all manner of things on the internet. And yet they want to try and censor people who are very concerned about, justifiably concerned about what’s going on in the Middle East,' Smith said. 'And so it’s absolutely a freedom of speech violation.' ”
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palestine-republicans/

-->The NYT has so far avoided one of the major reasons why TikTok is under attack. The right wing Zionists want to destroy another source of information about the Palestinian genocide.

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Common Dreams:
"The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) – a Quaker organization that has worked for peace and justice for over a century – has cancelled planned advertising with the New York Times after the paper refused to allow an ad that referred to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The ad read: 'Tell Congress to stop arming Israel's genocide in Gaza now! As a Quaker organization, we work for peace. Join us. Tell the President and Congress to stop the killing and starvation in Gaza.'

'The refusal of The New York Times to run paid digital ads that call for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza is an outrageous attempt to sidestep the truth,' said Joyce Ajlouny, General Secretary for AFSC. 'Palestinians and allies have been silenced and marginalized in the media for decades as these institutions choose silence over accountability. It is only by challenging this reality that we can hope to forge a path toward a more just and equitable world.'

After receiving the text for the ad quoted above, a representative from the advertising team suggested AFSC use the word 'war' instead of 'genocide' – a word with an entirely different meaning both colloquially and under international law. When AFSC rejected this approach, the New York Times Ad Acceptability Team sent an email that read in part: 'Various international bodies, human rights organizations, and governments have differing views on the situation. In line with our commitment to factual accuracy and adherence to legal standards, we must ensure that all advertising content complies with these widely applied definitions.' ”
https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/new-york-times-rejects-quaker-ad-for-calling-israels-actions-genocide

-->What a laugh about the NYT rejecting the full page ad because of "accuracy and adherence to legal standards." In many ways, the NYT is the newspaper of the genocide, always trying to hide the full nature of the Palestinian holocaust.

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United Nations:
"Gaza war: UN World Food Programme condemns Israeli attack on aid convoy.
Israeli airstrikes continued across Gaza overnight into Monday, while the UN World Food Programme (WFP) reported that one of its aid convoys in the war-shattered enclave was targeted by Israeli fire on Sunday.

The WFP issued a statement on Monday condemning the attack insisting that its vehicles had been 'clearly marked'. 'At least 16 bullets' struck the convoy of three vehicles carrying eight staff members which came under fire near Wadi Gaza checkpoint. 'Thankfully, no staff members were injured in this terrifying encounter,' the agency added.

All necessary clearances had been obtained from the Israeli authorities and WFP said that it was 'just the latest example of the complex and dangerous working environment' confronting its teams.' "
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/01/1158746

-->The NYT? Why, our newspaper of record is missing in action when it comes to Israel's war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Common Dreams:
"House Panel Quietly Drops Campaign Finance Probes. ... The bipartisan House Ethics Committee announced earlier this week that it unanimously opted to close several investigations involving alleged campaign finance violations by three Republicans and one Democrat, a move that one expert characterized as a 'New Year's Eve Ethics Massacre.' ...

Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute, argued that the panel's decision 'effectively legalized the conversion of campaign funds for personal use by members of the House of Representatives' by establishing 'a new weak standard' and ignoring evidence of wrongdoing provided by the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE).

'They can now take dollars from donors and put them in their pocket,' Schuman wrote in his newsletter. 'It's not what they said they did, but under the cover of the New Year's holiday, Ethics Committee Democrats and Republicans pulled a fast one, legalizing a money laundry so blatantly corrupt it would embarrass Walter White.' "
https://www.commondreams.org/news/ethics-committee-campaign-finance


-->This move to legalize the bribing of Congress was not reported in the NYT. Maybe the newspaper doesn't want the world to read about how the US oligarchy really works.

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The Intercept:
"U.S. Military Service Is the Strongest Predictor of Carrying Out Extremist Violence.
The mass murder in New Orleans and Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas fit a troubling pattern among U.S. vets, research says. ... From 1990 to 2010, about seven persons per year with U.S. military backgrounds committed extremist crimes. Since 2011, that number has jumped to almost 45 per year, according to data from a new, unreleased report shared with The Intercept by Michael Jensen, the research director at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland.

Military service is also the single strongest individual predictor of becoming a 'mass casualty offender,' far outpacing mental health issues, according to a separate study of extremist mass casualty violence by the researchers.

From 1990 through 2023, 730 individuals with U.S. military backgrounds committed criminal acts that were motivated by their political, economic, social, or religious goals, according to data from the new START report. From 1990 to 2022, successful violent plots that included perpetrators with a connection to the U.S. military resulted in 314 deaths and 1,978 injuries — a significant number of which came from the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City."
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/02/military-veterans-extremism-attack-new-orleans-vegas/

-->Why would this story be ignored by the Empire's media, including the NYT? It may be because the true costs of US wars are always hidden from the American public

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Jewish Currents:
"Pro-Israel groups have remade Title VI into a tool of repression—and a second Trump term will supercharge their crusade. On January 17th, Laura Rosenbury, the president of Barnard College, called sociology professor Debbie Becher into her office to discuss an event Becher was helping plan alongside several Jewish students: a screening and discussion of the documentary Israelism, which chronicles young American Jews’ disaffection with Zionism. Joined by provost and dean of the faculty Linda Bell, Rosenbury told Becher to 'pause' the screening, according to notes of the meeting Becher kept. ...

To critics, however, the whole episode was an alarming act of attempted censorship, with Miriam Nunberg, a former staff attorney at the Department of Education (DOE)’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR)—the principal agency that enforces Title VI in educational settings—telling Jewish Currents that the Barnard president’s invocation of Title VI to interfere with a film screening was a 'misuse' of the law.

'The film is produced by a Jew; it has Jewish protagonists; it discusses different viewpoints about Israel within the Jewish community in America,' said Nunberg. 'It doesn’t seem to me that there’s anything in that film that inherently creates a hostile environment that would rise to the level of a Title VI violation for any Jewish student on campus.' Instead, Nunberg said, Title VI was being deployed as 'a pretext for violating the right of free expression on campus.' Becher agreed, adding that by trying to censor campus speech in the name of legal compliance, university administrators are capitulating to groups that have 'weaponized' Title VI to repress political expression about Israel/Palestine."
https://jewishcurrents.org/civil-rights-law-pro-palestine-speech-israel-trump

-->This story of antisemitism being used to suppress dissent wasn't covered by the NYT. It is an important story, a real harbinger of things to come. Shame on our "newspaper of record."

Common Dreams:
"Outcry After Biden Admin Pushed for Retraction of Northern Gaza Famine Report
'It sure looks like USAID is allowing political considerations—the Biden administration's worry about funding Israel's starvation strategy—to interfere,' said one human rights expert. ...

The decision by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) to retract its December 23 alert on the rapidly spiraling starvation crisis in the northern part of the besieged enclave came after the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, publicly criticized the report.

FEWS NET, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), said in its report that Israel's 'near-total blockade of humanitarian and commercial food supplies' for nearly 80 days has made it 'highly likely that the food consumption and acute malnutrition thresholds for famine... have now been surpassed in North Gaza Governorate.' "
https://www.commondreams.org/news/icc-report-no-famine-in-gaza

-->The way our government deals with famine is to hide its role in it. Shameful really. But The NYT could have restored some decency to this retraction by running the story. But it didn't, and that is shameful as well.

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The Hill:
"Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) published an op-ed on Fox News, slamming the political power of billionaires in the U.S. and increasing wealth concentration, arguing the country is moving down 'the path of oligarchy.' Sanders, who in November secured his fourth term in the Senate, wrote that the country is diverging in two opposite directions: the billionaire class and the rest of the the U.S.

'We are in a pivotal and unprecedented moment in American history,' he argued in the op-ed, which was published Friday. 'Either we fight to create a government and an economy that works for all, or we continue to move rapidly down the path of oligarchy and the rule of the super-rich.'

The former two-time presidential candidate slammed the top 1 percent, calling out Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and claiming the trio 'own more wealth than the bottom half of our society — over 165 million people.' ”
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5057810-sanders-billionaires-fox-news-op-ed/

-->The NYT, the oligarchy's newspaper of record, didn't print this story. The newspaper just doesn't cover Bernie, even when he was running for president.

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Common Dreams:
" 'As Palestinians Starve and Freeze, Israeli Troops Unwind at Gaza 'Beachfront Resort'
"And U.S. taxpayers are funding this," fumed one critic.

As the people of Gaza suffer hell on Earth, Israeli soldiers committing what the world increasingly recognizes as a genocide against them can now kick back and relax at a beachfront resort in the embattled strip and enjoy treated water from a desalination plant while Palestinians die from lack of water, food, and other necessities.

The Israeli outlet Ynet reported Thursday that Israel Defense Forces troops in northern Gaza are relaxing at a 'beachfront resort' located 'amid the devastation' wrought by the IDF's U.S.-backed 445-day assault, which, according to Gazan and international agencies, has left more than 164,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing; millions more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened; and most of the coastal enclave in ruins."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-beachfront-retreat-gaza

-->More shame to be hidden by The NY Times. It didn't cover this story, that could have come from the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.