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Iran declares ‘historic victory’ over the U.S., says enemy forced to accept its proposal
(www.workers.org)
The following statement issued by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council in response to the MAGA president’s two-week “ceasefire” was published by Press TV on April 7. “Good news to the dear nation of Iran! Nearly all the objectives of the war have been achieved. * “The noble people of Iran . . .
From Workers World via This RSS Feed.
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In the first hours of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, up to 175 young children and school staff were blown to pieces at an elementary school. Others were maimed and burned, and will be suffering from their injuries for the rest of their lives. Even any comparatively fortunate ones with minimal injuries will surely experience permanent trauma from having witnessed something so horrific. Witnesses describe scenes of unfathomable horror, with limbs and blood strewn across classrooms. "People were pulling out children's arms and legs. People were pulling out severed heads," said a woman whose child was killed. The Guardian cites verified videos that show "children's bodies lying partly buried under the debris":
In one video, a very small child's severed arm is pulled from the rubble. Colourful backpacks covered with blood and concrete dust sit among the ruins. One girl wears a green dress with gingham patches on her pockets and the collar, her form partly obscured by a black body bag. Screams can be heard in the background.
Drop Site News spoke to the father of a six-year-old girl, Sara Shariatmadar, who was killed in the attack. "I cannot understand how a place where innocent children learn can be bombed like this," he said. "We are talking about small children who knew nothing of politics or wars. And yet they are the ones paying the highest price."
The United States and Israel have not denied responsibility for the attack, although it is still unclear which country fired the missile. The U.S. said that it does not "target" schools, which does not mean that it does not bomb them. ("We take these reports seriously," a spokesman said.) Israel's spokesperson said the government was not "aware" of such an attack, which does not mean its military did not carry one out. Photos supposedly showing that a misfired Iranian missile caused it were debunked, although they spread widely online among Americans and Israelis desperate to believe that only the Bad Guys do things like this.
Domestic coverage of this horrible crime against humanity has been muted. U.S. media has a policy of not showing gruesome images of violence---the Guardian explicitly stated that it was concealing the photos and videos it had "due to their graphic nature." As a result, war is always sanitized, so that Americans can read that 150+ schoolgirls were killed without having to confront the full horror of what it means for their country to drive a missile into a crowded school in the middle of the day. (Saturday is a school day in Iran, a fact that the U.S. government would easily have been able to know when deciding how to time its attacks, but Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been open about the fact that he regards such niceties as rules of engagement and international law as meddlesome hindrances that can be ignored, lambasting those who "wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.")
I suspect that this attack is also difficult for U.S. media to cover because the basic facts of the situation are so twisted, so depraved, so evil, that they shatter the comforting narrative that the U.S. has the moral high ground over the Ayatollah. In fact, the U.S. government is on the moral level of the Sandy Hook school shooter, a fact that even president Trump's critics may have a hard time fully accepting.
And this was not the only massacre carried out by the U.S. and Israel in a war that has been going on just a few days. The Human Rights Activists News Agency reports that there have already been over 1,000 civilian deaths in Iran, including 181 children under the age of ten, with thousands more civilians injured. Drop Site reports on the nauseating scene in a middle-class Tehran neighborhood following a "double tap" strike (dropping one bomb first, and then dropping another on the survivors and emergency responders, a favorite war crime of the U.S. and Israel). Warning, the following description is extremely graphic and may undermine any love you may have for your country:
Videos of the immediate aftermath of the attack showed several individuals dead and wounded as well as massive destruction on the street outside. In Cafe Ahla, next to the square, blood and debris soaked the floors. Several patrons who had been sitting there when the attack struck could be seen dead on the floor or with their mutilated bodies still sprawled across their seats. "We were sitting here around 8:00-8:30 p.m. and suddenly there was the noise and explosion. We got up and a few people ran away. We turned around to get our belongings and we saw that blood was spraying everywhere. Someone's hand had fallen on the floor, a head had fallen on the floor," said Shahin, a witness who had been at the cafe and asked to be identified by first name only. "There were scalps torn off, hands severed, a few people were laying here all cut up and two people were martyred."
I will get to the many ways in which the Iran war is illegal, making us less safe, founded on lies, strategically insane, unbelievably costly, etc. But let us dwell for a moment on what we are doing to these people. The right-wing Telegraph newspaper reports that in Tehran, "millions of civilians are trapped under relentless bombardment as food and medical supplies dwindle and the death toll mounts," and the city is an "'apocalypse' of hospitals in flames and children buried beneath rubble." The paper records a total humanitarian disaster, with sick people lacking medicine, children going hungry, diabetics running out of insulin, and the repeated bombing of residential areas. While Americans pat themselves on the back for assassinating Iran's repressive head of state, everyday Iranians (even those with little love for their theocratic government) are facing the prospect of being killed at any moment, or watching their children be ripped to pieces. I realize that in the U.S., the devaluation of Middle Eastern lives means that little Iranian girls will receive a fraction of the compassion and concern that has arisen around, say, Nancy Guthrie. But if we apply our morality consistently, I cannot see how we can be anything other than completely revolted by the carnage our president is choosing to inflict (and will apparently soon be further escalating, according to Marco Rubio, who is promising an increased use of force to come, and Pete Hegseth, who is salivating about delivering "death and destruction all day long").
We are all complicit. If you are an American, you paid your government to murder those little girls and those Tehran cafe-goers. Money was withdrawn from your paycheck in the form of federal income taxes. If the attack was conducted with a Tomahawk missile (of which 400 were fired in 72 hours), that money would have been paid to the RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon). Each missile fired costs somewhere between $1.3 million and $2.2 million, of which approximately $200,000 would be pure profit. Thus the killing of the Iranian schoolgirls, which left their bloody backpacks and tiny severed limbs scattered across classroom floors, transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars from us (the American taxpayers) into RTX's bank accounts. It also boosted the GDP. And the stock market.
Stock price of RTX (formerly Raytheon)
It is hard for me to write about this war, because I am so sickened every time I contemplate the full dark reality of the country I live in. I realize that not only are there people who will drop a bomb on a school without losing a wink of sleep, but there are people who get rich when we bomb schools, who have a direct financial stake in ensuring we keep dropping as many bombs as possible. (And that's just the weapons companies. Others are getting rich from betting on the atrocities on prediction markets.) The fact that many Congressional Democrats implicitly or explicitly supported this war (whether by outright goading Trump into it, as Chuck Schumer did, dragging their feet on opposing it, or raising meek procedural objections) further adds to my disgust. Many Democrats apparently declined to try to stop the war, reasoning that if it achieved U.S. foreign policy goals it would be embarrassing to have opposed it, but if it went south Trump would own it anyway. When I open the New York Times op-ed page, and I find resident foreign policy guru Thomas Friedman cautioning against adopting any "black and white narrative" about what goes on in "a complicated, kaleidoscopic region," I want to vomit. The moment calls for moral clarity: our country is engaged in a mass murder campaign. It must be stopped. It is depressing to see so many debates around strategic end-goals, congressional authorization, or the consistency of the justifications. They take us away from the basic fact that our president, with the blessing of his party and many members of the so-called opposition, is gruesomely murdering children by the dozen. Every day this continues, we are paying our government to commit some of the worst crimes humans are capable of.
Of course, the war is also based on a pack of lies. The Trump administration can't even get its story straight on why the war is being waged and has produced no justification beyond vague invocations of National Security. (Trump says Iran was a "bad seed.") Some Republicans won't even admit that this is a war. (Perhaps they might want to borrow a phrase from Vladimir Putin: "special military operation.") House Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to have it both ways, saying that while the Iranians "have declared war on us," we're "not at war right now." Others are tying themselves in pretzels trying to explain how this differs from the "regime change" wars that Trump has so vocally opposed. (Pete Hegseth: "This is not a so-called 'regime change war.' But the regime sure did change.") Sometimes there are direct self-contradictions within a single sentence, as with Tom Cotton declaring that "Iran has been an imminent threat to the United States for 47 years." This was too much for right-wing commentator Matt Walsh, who accused Republicans of "gaslighting" for suddenly discovering that Iran has been waging a half-century of war against the U.S. Even leading Iraq war hawk Bill Kristol is confused about the reasoning behind the war, saying there is "no coherent rationale." (Of course, Kristol's own favorite Middle East war was equally illegitimate, but that's an argument for another day.)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. attacked because it knew Israel was going to attack, and needed to defend itself against the inevitable Iranian retaliation for Israel's attack---perhaps the most tortured and unpersuasive case for self-defense ever made. Perhaps because this seemed like an admission that Israeli choices dictate U.S. policy, Trump subsequently denied that Israeli decision-making had anything to do with the attack, although it's clear that Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied heavily for this, as he has been salivating at the prospect of a major war with Iran for decades, and has been scheming for a way to get the U.S. involved.
The idea that Iran was a threat to the United States was always laughable. U.S. intelligence has consistently assessed that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. The Trump administration itself declared that it had destroyed Iran's nuclear program with last year's bombings. Iran has in fact consistently shown itself very reluctant to engage in military confrontation with the U.S., often carefully limiting its retaliation after U.S. provocations. To the extent that Iran did want to become a nuclear threshold state, with at least the capacity to pursue a weapons program if it wanted to, credible analysts believe that Iran mainly wanted an insurance policy against potential U.S. and Israeli attacks. North Korea has shown that the possession of nuclear weapons is enough to make the U.S. think twice about forcible regime change, and there is a good argument that it would have been rational for Iran to pursue nuclear weapons for the sake of its own self-protection. As Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld observed, the world "witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy." (Van Creveld is wrong that Iraq was attacked for "no reason," however. It was attacked for the same reason Iran is being attacked: the establishment of U.S.-Israeli dominance over the Middle East.) While U.S. commentators often talk as if Iran would pursue nuclear weapons mainly in order to destroy the U.S. or Israel (which would, of course, be suicidal given both countries' superior nuclear forces), there's no evidence that Iran would want nuclear weapons for any reason beyond deterring potential external attacks. (A fear that recent events have proven to be well-founded.)
In fact, the entire prevailing narrative about Iran is completely backwards. It's the U.S. that has been a threat to Iran, not the other way around. It was the United States and Britain that overthrew Iran's legitimately elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953. (The New York Times was elated by the coup, commenting that "underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism.") Since 1979, when the Iranians ousted the dictator (the Shah) that the U.S. had helped install and maintain in power, the U.S. has had a virtually unremittingly hostile attitude toward Iran. This is not because of the government's (very real) human rights abuses, since the U.S. is happy to support human rights abusing states that are pliant and servile (see, e.g., Saudi Arabia and Egypt). But Iran is viewed as a threat to U.S. dominance in the Middle East. Thus, in the 1980s, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein as he waged a ruthless war of aggression against Iran, killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians including with chemical weapons. (The U.S. concealed evidence of Hussein's chemical weapon use from the UN, because it wanted him to go on killing Iranians.) More recently, the U.S. and Israel have tried to destabilize the country through devastating cyberattacks, economy-wrecking sanctions, and assassinations. The sanctions have been explicitly aimed at harming civilians, with Mike Pompeo boasting in 2019 that "things are much worse for the Iranian people" thanks to sanctions and hoping that their suffering would lead them to overthrow their government.
Importantly, while U.S. policymakers in both the Republican and Democratic parties constantly affirm that "Iran must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons," they rarely state their implicit corollary to this proposition, which is that Israel must be allowed to have nuclear weapons. As it happens, Iran actually agrees that it shouldn't be allowed to have nukes, and has long supported turning the entire Middle East into an official nuclear weapons free zone, much as Africa and Latin America have done. The problem is that the U.S. and Israel demand a double standard, with Israel refusing to contemplate giving up its nuclear weapons. The entire nuclear disagreement, then, is not about whether Iran should have nuclear weapons, but about whether Iran should hold itself to a different standard to Israel. (Amusingly, Chuck Schumer recently accidentally declared that "no one wants a nuclear Israel," and had to correct himself, because he does want a nuclear Israel.)
Anyone who values human life should treat war as an absolute last resort, to be engaged in only once every diplomatic option has been exhausted. In this case, it was the Trump administration that sabotaged diplomacy. First, even though asking Iran not to pursue nuclear weapons means imposing an unfair double standard that imperils Iran's national security, Iran had agreed under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to severely constrain its development of nuclear technology, and agreed to a detailed monitoring and compliance regime. It was confirmed to be adhering to that agreement until Donald Trump ripped it up in 2018, subsequently criticizing Iran for failing to adhere to the agreement that he himself had destroyed. Joe Biden declined to pursue the revival of that agreement, even though Iran signaled that it was open to it. But to this day, Iran has shown that it is willing to consider even highly unfavorable agreements in order to avoid war---it has never shown any sign of launching an unprovoked strike, only deploying military action in response to violence by others, such as an Israeli attack on its embassy or the assassination of its allies' leaders.
Iran has long wanted to keep a war with the U.S. from breaking out, which is why its responses to U.S. and Israeli attacks have previously been notably measured and cautious. (This time around, Iran reasons that unless it inflicts major damage, it will be perceived as weak and attacked further, since previous restraint only encouraged the U.S. and Israel to press their advantage.) Diplomatic talks between the U.S. and Iran were ongoing, and Oman, mediating talks, saw "the most promising diplomatic opening in years" and thought "diplomacy was producing tangible results and that a negotiated settlement was imminent." The U.S. and Israel decided to sabotage diplomacy and assassinate the Iranian head of state, possibly because they felt they just couldn't forgo the opportunity to kill as many high-ranking Iranians as possible in one fell swoop. (They killed so many Iranian government officials that Donald Trump admitted the U.S. had killed all of the people who had been considered likely candidates to take Khamenei's place.) Iran professed itself baffled as to why the U.S. attacked. "I do not know why the U.S. administration insists on beginning a negotiation with Iran and then attacking Iran in the middle of talks," said the country's foreign minister. He told NBC: "We were able to address serious questions related to Iran's nuclear program. We obviously have differences, but we resolved some of those differences, and we decided to continue in order to resolve the rest of [the] questions."
Because mass civilian casualties are a predictable consequence of intense airstrikes, to choose to unnecessarily end diplomatic engagement and start bombing is unconscionable depravity. But it's clear that the Trump administration didn't really care whether Iran was genuinely willing to engage in diplomacy, because Trump's position is that Iran should simply do what we say, period. There is nothing to negotiate, because for Trump, the only choice is whether a country is willing to comply with U.S. demands, or whether we will have to use force to ensure their compliance.
I haven't even gotten to the illegality of the war. Leaving aside the ridiculous Republican denials that this is a war (if a country assassinated our head of state and bombed our cities, would anyone doubt that they were waging war?), it's plain that all of this is unconstitutional. The Constitution vests the power to declare war in Congress, not the president. Congress didn't declare war, therefore the war is illegal. Case closed. I know presidents have stretched their powers as far as possible (Obama's drone strikes, etc.) but if a president has the power to wage a relentless bombing and assassination campaign without Congressional approval, the Constitution simply ceases to mean anything. Congress has plainly failed in its responsibility to ensure that Trump complies with the Constitution, but the failure of our politicians to enforce the law doesn't change what it says.
Of course, it virtually goes without saying that the war violates international law. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force (or even the threat of force) except in response to an armed attack. Iran had not attacked the U.S., nor was there any evidence Iran was going to attack the U.S. Propagandists assert that Iran (and its "proxies") have killed "hundreds" of Americans over the years, but they decline to specify who these Americans are or discuss the Iranians killed by the U.S. and our own "proxies." There's no real point discussing international law, because Trump has made it clear he simply doesn't care about it, saying he doesn't need it and is unconstrained by it. Unfortunately, other countries have been just as pathetically weak as members of the U.S. Congress, with countries like Britain and France issuing statements that were de facto supportive of the assassination of a foreign head of state. (Canada issued a supportive statement and then appeared to regret it after noticing that letting the U.S. and Israel tear up the last vestiges of international law might be unwise.) Germany's chancellor has even made the stunning statement that Iran shouldn't be protected by international law, waving away the obvious illegality of the attacks by saying that "now is not the time to lecture our partners and allies." The killing of a head of state is a major crime, the normalization of which would open a horrible Pandora's box of lawless state action, and the world should be unified in condemning U.S.-Israeli lawlessness, but even among the Arab states there is a reluctance to antagonize the U.S.
None of the long-term consequences of this war will be good. The Trump administration does not appear to have any kind of strategic plan for what will happen next in Iran. (Lindsey Graham says it's "not [Trump's] job" to have a plan for what happens to the country's government next.) We could see the country's collapse into civil war, Libya-style. (Obama adviser Ben Rhodes recently admitted that Obama's decision to topple Libya's dictator without a plan for the country was a major error.) We could simply see the hard-line theocrats be replaced by more hard-line theocrats who are more convinced than ever that there can be no negotiating with the U.S., that the only language this country understands is force, and that the best thing for Iran's safety would be for it to obtain a nuclear weapon as quickly as possible. What we are unlikely to see is a pro-American government emerging, and this war puts Americans everywhere in considerable danger. (Ask yourself: if what happened to Sara Shariatmadar happened to someone you love, would you see the country that carried out the bombing as a liberator? Or would you want revenge?) Although plenty of Iranians are justly celebrating the end of the Ayatollah's rule, like the Iraqis who celebrated in 2003, they will soon find out that the U.S. has no interest in their well-being, and will happily watch their country slide into civil war if this serves America's perceived "national security" interest.
Six Americans have already died in addition to the 1,000 Iranians. Because this is a war of choice, totally unnecessary and unjustifiable, their blood is on Donald Trump's hands, and he (as well as Congress) should be treated no differently than we would treat someone who murdered these Americans with their bare hands. But the costs to this country are only just beginning. Of course, if you're an RTX shareholder this may be a bonanza, but the rest of us are likely to see major economic disruption, in addition to all the resources that are put into the production of weapons. Eisenhower famously tried to warn Americans that war spending is an act of "theft" from the public, because it's money not spent on schools and hospitals, and the "opportunity cost" is therefore enormous. But Eisenhower's warning has largely been ignored.
Worse, as Abby Martin notes in the terrifying and important new film Earth's Greatest Enemy, military action has catastrophic climate consequences, since the U.S. war machine is the world's biggest polluter and the carbon emissions of our vast, brutal empire are driving us toward ever-worsening climate catastrophe. Unfortunately, that's just fine with some in the administration and the military---terrifying recent reporting suggests that some evangelical Christian officers are celebrating the war as hastening the apocalypse, claiming Trump was "anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth." These people would sacrifice the rest of us to the inferno to fulfill their delusional prophecies.
Of course, the war reveals that Trump and his coterie were complete frauds when they pledged to keep the U.S. out of senseless Middle East wars. Trump fooled a lot of people with this stuff, although hopefully their illusions will now be hard to maintain. (Former hardcore MAGA types like Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes are now admitting they were duped.) If there is one silver lining here, amid all of the horror, it is that because this war is deeply unpopular and Trump has no idea how to deal with its consequences, perhaps we will finally see the MAGA movement collapse politically. Trump's approval rating was already in the toilet, and while I sadly have no illusions that public opinion will be especially moved by the bombing of a school, when the fallout in cost, lives, and global chaos begins to come home, perhaps Americans will turn once and for good against their warmongering president.
But it is hard for me to think hopefully right now, as I see pictures of the remnants of former schoolchildren, schoolchildren whose lives were brutally extinguished with the help of my tax dollars. All I can feel is horror and rage at the sociopaths willing to do such things, who claim to want peace while ensuring that humanity will be consigned to a future of endless, senseless conflict.
PHOTO: Graves being dug for the elementary school girls killed in the bombing of the Minab school. Iran Foreign Ministry.
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'One of The Scariest Things I Have Seen': Alarms Sound Over 'Technofascist' Palantir Manifesto
(www.commondreams.org)
Scholars on authoritarianism are expressing alarm after tech company Palantir posted a 22-point manifesto that they say espouses a "technofascist" doctrine.
The Palantir manifesto is based on the book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, written by Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir, and Nicholas Zamiska, head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to the office of the CEO at Palantir.
Among other things, the manifesto hails the creation of artificial intelligence-powered weapons as tools to enforce American "hard power" around the world; declares that "national service should be a universal duty," while suggesting the US should "seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force"; and denounces the embrace of "a vacant and hollow pluralism" on the grounds that some cultures "remain dysfunctional and regressive."
Many critics argued that the manifesto was particularly worrisome given Palantir's role in providing intelligence software to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US military, and the Israel Defense Forces, among other entities.
In a lengthy social media post, Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde described the Palantir manifesto as "one of the scariest things I have seen in a while."
"It is a call for a world dominated by an authoritarian US, generated by AI... run by tech-surveillance companies," Mudde explained.
Mudde said the manifesto shows that European countries need to end any reliance on Palantir for security, and he recommended Democrats draw up plans to go after Palantir and other Big Tech firms upon returning to power.
"Democrats should develop an actionable agenda of democratic reform in case they return to power," Mudde wrote. "This cannot be limited to institutional reforms, but must include reining in the power and wealth of technofascist companies and individuals."
University of Michigan political scientist Donald Moynihan published an analysis of the Palantir manifesto and concluded that "on the whole, the manifesto’s vision... is that of a US government and its tech allies as dominant players, unconstrained by accountability."
In his review, Moynihan zeroed in on the manifesto's disparagement of US "soft power" as insufficient to secure American dominance in the 21st Century, and he noted that Palantir's own financial interests rest in a US hegemon that eschews diplomacy in favor of maximal military aggression.
"A world where soft power has real and lasting impact is simply less profitable for a company like Palantir relative to a world where we blow a lot of stuff up," Moynihan observed. "A world featuring an AI arms race is more profitable than a world with AI regulation. A world where Silicon Valley polices domestic crime is more profitable than a world that constrains surveillance on the public."
Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis argued that the manifesto was useful for distilling Palantir's "hideous ideology in 22 points," revealing its desire to create a blood-soaked world where "ethics is for suckers."
"Palantir works overtime to equip US Marines with killer bots that take away from the US Marines whatever remnants of ethical judgment they are left with on the battlefield," Varoufakis wrote in summarizing the company's praise of AI-powered weapons. "American society should be rendered perfectly incapable of any debate that restricts Palantir’s capacity to get the US military to eliminate any remaining opportunity to reject its software’s choice of targets."
Cheyenne MacDonald, weekend editor at tech news site Engadget, summed up the Palantir manifesto by arguing that it "reads like the ramblings of a comic book villain."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
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Charlie Kirk alleged killer had already been in custody two hours before Discord ‘confession’
(www.thecanary.co)
Another gaping hole has opened up in the supposedly ‘open and shut’ case against Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of murdered US far-right activist Charlie Kirk.
Tyler Robinson
Kirk, who had begun to turn against Israel and refused approaches from Israel lobbyists just before his death, was murdered as he answered public questions in Utah. Footage from the FBI claims to show Tyler Robinson escaping shows an unrecognisable figure on a rooftop – with no gun. Robinson was then supposedly arrested in the woods with the gun. Court filings at the end of March 2026 then stated that the bullet does not even match the gun Robinson supposedly used.
The issues with the gun and with video and other evidence have led to huge speculation that Robinson is just an Oswald-type patsy. But the FBI claimed to have found a note under Robinson’s keyboard in the flat he shared with his lover, written in very atypical language for someone of Robinson’s age. And Robinson, under the handle “zealous_monkey_55095”, allegedly sent messages to friends on a ‘Discord’ chat server, confessing to Kirk’s murder. He had “bad news”, he wrote. Then he continued:
it was me at UVU yesterday. Im sorry for all of this. im surrendering through a sheriff friend in a few moments. thanks for all the good times and laughs, you’ve all been so amazing. thank you all for everything.
But the FBI’s timeline has fallen apart.
The timeline
In the public official narrative, Tyler Robinson turned himself in – after his father called a police officer friend – just before 9pm local time on 11 September 2025, a day after Kirk died. At the same time, 8.57pm, as he then supposedly sat for 2-2.5 hours in a custody suite waiting to be seen he wrote the Discord confession messages.
But documents released as part of attempts by Robinson’s lawyers to have cameras excluded from Robinson’s trial, completely overturn that narrative. One particular document, tagged as “Discovery Bates 000007”, shows that Robinson was already in custody and being reminded of his ‘Miranda’ rights at 6.25pm – more than two and a half hours earlier than the FBI has claimed:
In other words, Tyler Robinson’s phone would already have been taken away from him. So who sent the Discord messages?
As the Prospect notes, law enforcement officials have tried to claim that the interrogation was actually happening a day later, at 6.25pm on 12 September and that this explains away the time discrepancy. But this doesn’t fit with the evidence of the note itself. Robinson told officers that the lawyer he wanted to speak to was “closed for the night”. Friday 12 September 2025 was a Friday night, which would mean the office would have been closed for the weekend, but on 11 September would have been closed just until the morning.
What is going on?
The Washington County sheriff’s department repeatedly blocked public records requests filed by Salt Lake media for surveillance camera footage of Tyler Robinson entering and/or being held inside county police headquarters, which would have shown exactly when he was taken into custody. At first it claimed that Robinson had arrived at the building via a different entrance than the one mentioned in the request, then said the footage had been destroyed.
A former Utah prosecutor told the Prospect the timeline discrepancies are “a big problem for the prosecution”, particularly when combined with the missing footage and the recent resignation of the county sheriff over:
allegations that he had interfered in the investigation of another deputy who was charged in November on four counts of “unlawfully accessing, using, disclosing or disseminating criminal investigation records [in a different case].”
A bigger problem still if the bullet ballistics don’t match. Indeed, a huge problem.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
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In a historic vote, 75% of Senate Democrats backed an effort to block weapons to Israel. The resolutions failed, but the vote was the latest sign of Democrats' growing consensus against aid to Israel, as support for the country hits an all-time low.
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'You Are Out of Touch': Schumer Faces New Calls to Step Aside After Israel Weapons Vote
(www.commondreams.org)
Sen. Chuck Schumer faced fresh calls to step aside as the Senate Democratic leader on Wednesday after he broke with the overwhelming majority of his caucus and voted against a pair of resolutions aimed at preventing the Trump administration from selling more US bombs and bulldozers to Israel.
"Mr. Schumer, you are out of touch with the base of this party, and with your own caucus," Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who first called on Schumer to resign as Democratic leader last year, said in a short video posted to social media following Wednesday's votes. "Step aside."
The two resolutions, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called for halting the sale of around $450 million worth of bulldozers, 1,000-pound bombs, and related military equipment to the Israeli government, which has repeatedly used American weaponry to commit war crimes in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and Syria.
Despite facing record opposition from the Senate Democratic caucus—with 40 votes against the sale of bulldozers and 36 votes against the sale of bombs—the resolutions failed to pass, as Senate Republicans united against them.
But strong Democratic opposition to new US weapons sales to Israel was seen as evidence that the party is slowly catching up to its base, which overwhelmingly supports restricting American military aid to Israel.
"The fact that 40 of 47 Democratic senators voted to withhold military hardware from Israel is a new high-water mark in holding Israel accountable for violating US and international law," said Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy.
Williams went on to rebuke Schumer, who has led the Senate Democrats for nearly a decade, for opposing the resolutions "against the supermajority of his own caucus and Democratic voters."
"It’s well past time for him to step aside for leaders who actually represent the views of the party’s base," said Williams.
The votes on the Israeli arms measures came after the Senate rejected another war powers resolution aimed at withdrawing US forces from the illegal assault on Iran, which President Donald Trump launched without congressional approval—and in partnership with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in late February.
Schumer vocally supported the Iran war powers resolution. But one of his colleagues, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), said the efforts to end the US-Israeli war on Iran and the push to halt weapons sales to Israel are interconnected.
"A vote to approve arms sales to Israel at this time would be seen as a message of approval for Trump and Netanyahu’s disastrous war against Iran. I will not send that message," Markey said in a statement late Wednesday. "Why would we send American military weapons that could prolong, escalate, or worsen this horrible situation in the Middle East? I say no more."
J Street, the pro-Israel liberal advocacy organization, similarly connected the two fights following Wednesday's votes.
"We continue to oppose Trump and Netanyahu’s war of choice against Iran, and applaud those senators whose principled stand in today’s vote reflects the American public’s strong opposition to both the Iran war and to Israel’s actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank that undermine efforts for peace in the region," said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the group's president.
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
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New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced a historic new tax on owners of luxury second homes which are worth $5m or more, in a bid to raise $500m for the city.
The ‘pied-à-terre tax’ will apply to people who do not live full time in the city but reap the rewards of investing in the New York real estate market.
Mamdani called the new tax “specifically designed for the richest of the rich” and said it was aimed at tackling a “fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers”, in a video post on social media.
The new tax was formally proposed by NY state governor Kathy Hochul, who added on X: “New Yorkers show up for this city every day. Some of the wealthiest property owners and foreign oligarchs don’t. It’s time they start contributing like everyone else.”
According to the New York Times, Hochul has been resistant to taxing large corporations and the city’s wealthiest residents. However, she was more open to taxing luxury second-homeowners who do not pay state or city income taxes because their primary residences are outside New York.
The tax will contribute towards combatting New York City’s fiscal deficit, which is estimated to stand at $5.4bn through the next fiscal year.
Previous attempts to introduce a second-homes tax were quashed by powerful real estate developers, including as recently as 2019.
Sophia Sheera is a journalist in Novara Media’s social media team.
From Novara Media via This RSS Feed.
10
Increasingly, Reform UK’s lineup for the local elections looks like something out of the Monster Mash. The latest horrorshow we’re drawing your attention to is James Bembridge. Much like Nigel Farage, Bembridge has stated a desire to get rid of the publicly run NHS.
You know – that thing we all rely on to live:
Oh, sorry, you thought that Reform UK were running ‘salt of the earth’ candidates?
No, no – they said they’re running ‘salt the earth’ candidates.
Good luck if the earth they’re salting is the same that you happen to live on.
Reform on the NHS: “hate is too weak a word”
James Bembridge is the deputy editor of Country Squire magazine. We’re sure Reform’s working class voters know this already, because they’re all avid readers.
If you’re wondering how his work reads, here’s a sample:
‘Just write,’ my editor said.
What a load of Woman’s-Weekly-self-helping bollocks.
Did Monet just paint? Did Whitney Houston just sing? Did Jemma Jameson just wiggle that tremendous arse of hers? I think not. That arse made men pawns to her star, just as my writing will make –
‘You’re disgusting!’ some small, hen-faced woman says, and I realise I’m thinking aloud again – in Bloomsbury Street of all places.
Dreadful, isn’t it?
The sort of migraine-inducing stuff that makes you glad we have a free-to-use medical service.
It was Reform Party UK Exposed who drew attention to Bembridge’s opinions on the NHS. They’ve also exposed Bembridge for defending Tommy Robinson (a far-right activist that Reform generally distance themselves from):
Heres a video of Reform UK’s candidate in Soho, Westminster, James Bembridge (@TheBembridge) glibly defending Tommy Robinson against racism allegations.
He was a member of the BNP and EDL, and in the video Bembridge states he’s looked everywhere and not found any racism by him… pic.twitter.com/qE4Q59CMB1
— Reform Party UK Exposed
(@reformexposed) April 13, 2026
Tommy Robinson and David Starkey loving James Bembridge no less, the Reform UK candidate for West End, Westminster.
Wonder if he agrees with Starkey’s statement that slavery was not genocide because of the survival of "so many damn blacks". https://t.co/LgG3WMXd0K
— Reform Party UK Exposed
You’ll note Bembridge looks like a *Doctor Who-*style regeneration of the guy from the Crystal Maze (that or a British One-Punch Man). Unlike everything else in this piece, that isn’t a criticism:
‘For the past six years, I’ve been a louche bohemian writer writing about Soho. I think I have authority on this matter.’ I am a Sohoite standing for @reformparty_uk for the West End. @danwootton @Nigel_Farage pic.twitter.com/YpDXzKKX8q
— James Bembridge (@TheBembridge) April 9, 2026
Getting back to the criticism, this guy is properly evil:
Imagine thinking this is funny, two days before Christmas, then posting it.@TheBembridge is a Reform UK candidate in Westminster. pic.twitter.com/7HK5ds5Ile
— Reform Party UK Exposed
Other problematic Reform candidates include the following:
- Another Reform candidate has praised Enoch Powell.
- Reform welcomes ‘shoot the p*kis’ scandal ex-Tory.
- Reform UK accused of ‘nil vetting’ as another racist candidate exposed.
- Video emerges of Reform’s ‘Nazi salute’ candidate drink driving.
Public health
Unlike Bembridge, most people in the UK don’t want a private insurance system.
Using the US as an example, there are two key reasons why we shouldn’t go anywhere near an insurance-based system.
The first issue is one that most people are aware of. When you have an insurance based system of health, your citizens end up trapped beneath mountains of debt. As Health System Tracker note:
analysis shows that 20 million people (nearly 1 in 12 adults) owe medical debt. The SIPP survey suggests people in the United States owe at least $220 billion in medical debt. Approximately 14 million people (6% of adults) in the U.S. owe over $1,000 in medical debt and about 3 million people (1% of adults) owe medical debt of more than $10,000. While medical debt occurs across demographic groups, people with disabilities or in worse health, lower-income people, and uninsured people are more likely to have medical debt.
The second and most shocking issue is the US pays more per head for their healthcare.
That’s right; we’re not saying the US pays more overall; we’re saying more per head.
Despite US citizens having to arrange their own health insurance, the government still – somehow – ends up paying more to prop up their system than we do on a person-to-person basis.
The U.S. spends far more on healthcare than other rich countries. $15,000 per person (almost double), 18% of GDP (nearly twice as high), and healthcare inflation is 7% (roughly double others).
Yet outcomes are worse. Life expectancy is lower, infant & maternal mortality higher,…
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) April 9, 2026
Sure, we Americans may not have universal healthcare and fine, maybe we also have some of the worst healthcare in the developed world, but at least we get to pay thousands of dollars every month in health insurance for basically nothing and still go broke if we get sick
— Conspiratorial Templates (@mynamehear) April 13, 2026
The sick party
Saying you want to swap the NHS for a Yank-style system is like saying you want to swap your working car for a wheelless junker.
We’ll be the first to admit the NHS is in a sorry state of affairs following years of ideologically-driven austerity. The solution to that problem isn’t to replace it with the worst system imaginable, though; it’s to properly fund the NHS.
The country squires don’t worry about losing the NHS because they know they won’t be the ones to suffer.
Featured image via Reform UK
By Willem Moore
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0
Israelis are finally revolting against Netanyahu — for agreeing to the U.S. ceasefire with Iran
(mondoweiss.net)
The entire Israeli political spectrum is united in blasting Netanyahu for not continuing to attack Iran, and Israeli society agrees. The reason, to put it simply, is that Israelis are war junkies.
From Mondoweiss via This RSS Feed.
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In the latest fight to expose the yawning chasm between Democratic Party members and their leaders on Israel, the Democratic National Committee on Thursday shot down symbolic resolutions targeting AIPAC and arms transfers to Israel.
Members of a resolutions committee meeting in New Orleans rejected one symbolic resolution that would have condemned AIPAC’s role in party primaries and tabled a pair of resolutions that called for conditioning military aid to Israel.
Polls show that Democratic Party members are increasingly skeptical of Israel and supportive of Palestinians — a shift that hasn’t been reflected in the party’s official position.
[
Related
The Democrats Don’t Know Who They’ll Be in 2028. Michigan May Offer an Answer.](https://theintercept.com/2026/04/09/michigan-senate-abdul-el-sayed-mallory-mcmorrow-hasan-piker/)
Instead, party leaders rejected the AIPAC resolution and referred the hot-button issue of arms transfers to Israel to a task force created by DNC Chair Ken Martin, which has yet to produce concrete results since it was created in August.
Allison Minnerly, the DNC member from Florida who sponsored the AIPAC resolution, said the votes exposed serious shortcomings on the part of leadership.
“It says that the Democratic Party just isn’t willing to have a hard conversation, isn’t willing to stand up, and just misses the mark when voters need it the most,” she said. “It is an embarrassing display of cowardice.”
The DNC member chairing the meeting, Ron Harris, said the arms transfers resolutions would be better handled by the task force, whose work he defended.
“Just for the record, this isn’t one of those things where you kick it down the line, and a committee where things go to die. These are people working really hard over a very thorny issue, and taking the time that it takes,” he said.
The proposals before the DNC committee on Thursday once again put party leaders in the hot spot after an earlier resolution from Minnerly last August called for a ban on arms sales to Israel.
Minnerly’s latest resolution highlighted the millions of dollars AIPAC spent to influence recent Democratic primaries in Illinois before reaffirming the party’s commitment to “reducing the role of corporate money and large-scale outside spending in Democratic primaries and general elections.”
[
Related
AIPAC Is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/30/aipac-campaigns-elections-israel-congress/)
AIPAC in recent years has dumped tens of millions of dollars into Democratic primaries via a super PAC called the United Democracy Fund. It has taken an increasingly aggressive stance against anyone who questions U.S. support for Israel — including one pro-Israel congressional candidate who said he was open to conditioning military aid on respect for human rights.
The group’s heavy-handed role in recent Illinois campaigns drew fire from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who blasted AIPAC when he won the Democratic Party primary for the 9th Congressional District.
In response to the growing backlash, AIPAC’s supporters have called its critics “antisemitic,” a charge echoed during the Thursday meeting when one member said that to single out AIPAC would be to “pick on the Jews.”
Separately, another resolution called for pausing weapons transfers to Israeli military units accused of human rights violations and recognizing Palestinian statehood, and a third called for conditioning military aid to Israel in compliance with international law in light of the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran.
Those resolutions were referred to the task force.
The post DNC Shoots Down Resolutions Calling Out AIPAC and Limiting Arms to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.
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‘Another Outrageous, Criminal Act’: US and Israel Bomb University Known as ‘MIT of Iran’
(www.commondreams.org)
A wave of US-Israeli airstrikes on Monday hit and extensively damaged Sharif University of Technology, a leading Iranian educational institution that is widely known as "the MIT of Iran" and seen as one of the world's top engineering schools.
The attack on the Tehran university—one of dozens of education sites bombed by the US and Israel since they launched their war on Iran in late February—sparked outrage inside Iran and around the world. Mohammad Reza Aref, an engineer currently serving as Iran's first vice president, said the attack on Sharif University "is a symbol of [US President Donald] Trump's madness and ignorance."
"He fails to understand that Iran's knowledge is not embedded in concrete to be destroyed by bombs; the true fortress is the will of our professors and elites," Aref wrote. "No barbarity in history has ever been able to strip science from the Iranian people. Science is rooted in our souls, and this fortress will not crumble."
The National Iranian American Council called the bombing "another outrageous, criminal act in an illegal war."
"This was a center of learning, not a military target," the group wrote on social media, highlighting video footage showing a building in ruins. "The increasing use of the Gaza playbook in Iran is deeply disturbing and will only deepen insecurity for the US and Israel. End this war."
US Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), the lone Iranian American in Congress, noted that Sharif University has "produced a huge number of engineers who’ve gone on to Silicon Valley and founded some of the most successful American tech companies."
"Why are we bombing a university in a city of 10 million people?" Ansari asked.
Another outrageous, criminal act in an illegal war: U.S.-Israeli strikes have bombed one of the world’s most prestigious universities in Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. This was a center of learning, not a military target. The increasing use of the Gaza playbook in… pic.twitter.com/GE6J8WhgMC
— NIAC (@NIACouncil) April 6, 2026
Al Jazeera's Tohid Asadi reported from Tehran that the university was "severely hit, with extensive damage reported in the compound's mosque and laboratories."
Vira Ameli, an Iranian global health researcher and lecturer at the University of Oxford, decried the US-Israeli strike on Sharif University, where she spent time as a postdoctoral fellow.
"To wake to the news of this war crime, at a distance and unable to return, is difficult to articulate," Ameli wrote. "And yet history has made one thing clear: Iran is not a country undone by bombardment."
Iranian authorities say US-Israeli attacks have hit at least 30 of the nation's universities, including the Isfahan University of Technology and the Iran University of Science and Technology. The US and Israel have justified some of the attacks by claiming the universities were involved in military-related activities.
"Would American and Israeli leaders consider their own equivalent institutions fair game? Of course not," journalist Natasha Lennard wrote in a column for The Intercept last week. "By stated US and Israeli rationale, however, were Iran able to launch airstrikes on American soil, direct ties to the US and Israeli military-industrial complex would make valid targets of at least the University of California, Berkeley; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Johns Hopkins University, among dozens of other schools."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
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Conversion Therapy Gets Speech Protections — But Trans Kids’ Existence Gets No Protection At All
(theintercept.com)
A protester demonstrating for trans rights in New York City on Feb. 3, 2025. Photo: Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court marked International Trans Day of Visibility with yet another ruling that puts the lives of trans people at risk. The justices ruled that Colorado’s statewide ban on conversion therapy for young people likely violates a Christian counselor’s First Amendment rights. The decision threatens conversion therapy bans nationwide, which are currently on the books in nearly half of all U.S. states.
The eight-to-one ruling has far-reaching, terrifying potential consequences. And not only for trans youth: It indicates that speech delivered by licensed health care practitioners in a professional capacity, no matter harmful and debunked the claims, cannot be banned as illegal conduct, because it counts as protected speech.
Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the one dissenting judge, appeared to appreciate the grave stakes of this ruling.
“Before now, licensed medical professionals had to adhere to standards when treating patients.”
“Before now, licensed medical professionals had to adhere to standards when treating patients: They could neither do nor say whatever they want,” Jackson wrote in a blistering dissent. “Largely due to such State regulation, Americans have been privileged to enjoy a long and successful tradition of high-quality medical care. Today, the Court turns its back on that tradition.”
The dangers of conversion therapy to trans and queer youth cannot be overstated. According to the Trevor Project, a non-profit suicide-prevention organization for LGBTQ+ young people, “LGBTQ+ youth who experienced conversion therapy are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide and more than 2.5 times as likely to report multiple suicide attempts in the past year.”
Conversion therapy, however, may not be the only potentially harmful intervention the ruling would apply to. As Jackson added in her dissent, the ruling “might make speech-only therapies and other medical treatments involving practitioner speech effectively unregulatable—not to be reached via licensing standards, medical-malpractice liability, or any other means of state control.”
It is a ruling, then, completely in line with our Trumpian moment of decimated medical care standards and eliminationist assaults on trans people. Indeed, it was done with support from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department.
As journalist and trans rights advocate Erin Reed wrote, the court’s logic in the ruling holds that “any medical treatment delivered through words rather than instruments could now carry First Amendment protection—a framework that could shield a doctor who encourages a patient to commit suicide, a dietician who tells an anorexic patient to eat less, or a therapist who deliberately steers a vulnerable client away from life-saving treatment.”
Reed noted that the decision risks extending constitutional protections to “speech-based professional conduct” in other fields, like a lawyer giving knowingly harmful legal advice.
Speech as Medicine
The crux of the majority’s opinion rests on the contested line between speech that is protected against government interference, and conduct, which can be regulated.
“Her speech does not become ‘conduct’ just because a government says so or because it may be described as a ‘treatment’ or ‘therapeutic modality,’” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch in the majority opinion, referring to the speech of Christian counselor Kaley Chiles, who sued the state of Colorado over the conversion therapy ban with representation from the right-wing legal giant, the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Gorsuch’s opinion draws an extraordinary conclusion about the role of certain speech acts in professional health care settings.
The Colorado law did not ban Chiles from holding and expressing Christian views; the law, like regulations in over 20 other states, banned conversion talk therapy – that is, speech acts delivered with the specific aim to “change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”
It is precisely professional conduct that the law regulates.
As Jackson noted in her dissent, “The Constitution does not pose a barrier to reasonable regulation of harmful medical treatments just because substandard care comes via speech instead of a scalpel.”
Every major medical and mental health association has condemned the practice of conversion therapy.
Other Liberal Justices?
Given the danger posed by the court’s decision, it may seem surprising that the two other liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, sided with the far-right majority. Their decision, according to their concurring opinions, related to the fact that Colorado’s law was not written in sufficiently “viewpoint-neutral” language.
“We need not here decide how to assess viewpoint-neutral laws regulating health providers’ expressions because, as the Court holds, Colorado’s is not one,” wrote Sotomayor.
[
Related
Executive Lawlessness: Leah Litman on the Supreme Court Enabling Presidential Overreach](https://theintercept.com/2025/07/18/litman-scotus-executive-overreach/)
With this far-right super majority Supreme Court, however, even cautiously worded conversion therapy bans may not survive the conservative justices. In the last year alone, the court has bucked precedents and ignored medical expertise, not to mention basic humanity, in previous anti-trans decisions like banning trans youth health care and ejecting trans people from the military.
The court’s Tuesday decision did not in itself strike down the Colorado law, but in siding with conversion therapy, the justices returned the case to the Tenth Circuit, where the highest form of judicial scrutiny will be applied. The law will almost certainly be struck down.
If existing bans are invalidated, those seeking to stop a further proliferation of conversion therapy may now have to use “creative methods,” Reed wrote, like tort law and malpractice law.
This is the grim legal terrain forged by the Trump regime and bigoted groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, aided by too many negligent or complicit liberals. Medical malpractice and harmful speech acts are protected, whereas trans kids’ existence gets no protection at all.
The post Conversion Therapy Gets Speech Protections — But Trans Kids’ Existence Gets No Protection At All appeared first on The Intercept.
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‘Damning’ New Evidence Suggests Trump Stole Classified Documents to Advance Business Interests
(www.commondreams.org)
Democrats on the US mHouse Judiciary Committee on Wednesday demanded that President Donald Trump's Department of Justice "stop the cover-up" of former special counsel Jack Smith's full investigation into Trump's retention of classified documents following his first term, after new material sent to the panel revealed that some documents were stolen to advance the president's business interests.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi about "cherry-picked documents" related to Smith's investigations into Trump's taking of classified documents, which he stored at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
The DOJ has regularly produced documents for the Judiciary Committee as Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has sought to portray Smith as having a partisan vendetta against the president, said Raskin. Smith led investigations into Trump's hoarding of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results during the Biden administration. Last month US District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, permanently blocked the release of Smith's final report on the documents case.
Raskin wrote Wednesday that even as Jordan has embarked on a "vindictive campaign" against Smith and has sought a narrow selection of material from the DOJ, Bondi had "quite amazingly missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct and may well violate the gag order your DOJ and Donald Trump demanded from Judge Aileen Cannon."
Those documents include a January 13, 2023 memorandum from prosecutors who said the FBI had determined Trump retained documents that "would be pertinent to certain business interests.” The documents "established a motive for retaining them" that related to Trump's businesses.
Trump and his family have garnered condemnation for profiting off the presidency, with the family raking in more than $5 billion in cryptocurrency profits since he took office for a second time, and Trump's two eldest sons investing in a drone company that is vying for Pentagon contracts as the president wages war on Iran.
The prosecutors' memo also says the retention of some of the documents represented "an aggravated potential harm to national security," with one "particularly sensitive document" accessible only by an estimated six people in the US government, including the president, before he took it to his private property.
Additionally, the memo says prosecutors had "identified a classified map that we believe Trump may have shown to individuals on board” his private airplane in June 2022. Susie Wiles, the CEO of Trump's super political action committee and now the White House chief of staff, "was aboard and witnessed this event. Raskin's letter includes a flight manifest listing 14 people who were aboard Trump's private plane when he allegedly showed the classified map, but all of the names were redacted.
Raskin emphasized that without access to the second volume of Smith's final report, the Judiciary Committee cannot confirm what the classified map shows, the relationship between his business interest and the classified documents, or what the especially sensitive material is.
The congressman noted that some facts are known about Trump's activities around the time that he allegedly showed the classified map:
We do know that around the time of this flight to Bedminster, President Trump was entering into partnerships with Saudi-backed LIV Golf and state-linked real estate firm Dar al Arkan. A month after this flight, in July 2022, President Trump played golf at Bedminster with Yasir al-Rumayyan, head of the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia—the same official who plied the Trump family with tens of millions of dollars as the family began to run out of money between terms... We also know that there are reports that Donald Trump, at one point while on the phone with his ghostwriter, “made a reference to having classified records relating to the bombing of Iran.” He also reportedly boasted that it was only the hawks who wanted to attack Iran, not him, and that he had Pentagon war plans “done by the military and given to me” about such a potential attack.
"If this map is related to our military posture in the Middle East, and it was in fact shown to any foreign official, Saudi or otherwise, that would amount to an unforgivable betrayal of our men and women in uniform who are currently valiantly fighting in President Trump’s disastrous war against Iran," wrote Raskin.
"It is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses," he wrote. "It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them."
Raskin demanded information from the DOJ regarding who accessed the classified materials, whether any foreign actors were given access, and what the documents contain.
“Every new detail that comes to light about the report Judge Cannon has gone to great lengths to keep hidden underscores the same basic truth: The public is being denied access to critical information about one of the most serious national security scandals in American history,” said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of the government watchdog American Oversight. “While fragments of the factual record have seen the light of day, the full report remains under seal because Judge Cannon has prioritized the president’s personal interests over transparency. The public has a right to see special counsel Smith’s findings in full. Blocking the report’s release only serves to protect those in power and prevent accountability.”
After Raskin's letter was released, the DOJ took the social media to accuse him and Smith of being "blinded by hatred of President Trump" and pronounce the department "the most transparent in history."
"This letter is nothing more than a cheap political stunt, almost as if taking cues from members of the corrupt Jack Smith prosecution team," said the DOJ.
The House Judiciary Committee Democrats retorted that the administration "is doing legal gymnastics to prevent the American people from ever seeing special counsel Jack Smith's full report on how Trump stole classified documents to advance his corrupt business interests."
"If the DOJ is so confident in Trump's conduct, why are they desperate to keep Smith's report under lock and key?" they asked. "Stop the cover-up, release the evidence, and let the American people decide for ourselves."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
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11,000 Children Among Tens of Thousands ‘Waiting for Surgery’ in Cuba Due to US Blockade
(www.commondreams.org)
More than 96,000 Cubans, including 11,000 children, are "waiting for surgery" due to a fuel shortage caused by the American blockade, the country's deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, said on Sunday.
The numbers cited by the minister on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday were first reported earlier this month by Cuban Minister of Public Health José Ángel Portal Miranda, who explained that President Donald Trump's policy of “energy asphyxiation," using tariffs to threaten countries out of importing fuel to Cuba, has devastated its National Health Service.
The policy has left Cuba unable to import oil from abroad for more than three months, reducing its fuel supply by about 90% and leading to periodic blackouts and strict energy rationing.
Using the severely limited electricity at its disposal, Cuba's health system has been forced to prioritize continuing cancer treatments and other lifesaving procedures, putting those awaiting non-urgent surgeries on the sidelines.
Last month, a specialist at a hospital in Holguín told Diario de Cuba that the surgeries canceled included "uncomplicated hernias, cataract surgeries, some non-urgent gynecological procedures, and scheduled orthopedic surgeries."
Other healthcare professionals said that nobody was being admitted to the hospital for tests and that it was running low on basic supplies like syringes, IV tubing, and antibiotics, which could not be delivered due to fuel shortages. Most of those that have been used had to be donated by family members or purchased for exorbitant prices on the black market.
Jorge Barrera, a reporter for CBC News, spoke with patients and employees at Havana’s National Institute of Cardiology and Cardiovascular Surgery this weekend and found it to be at about half capacity, and that nonessential care has been virtually all suspended.
"Even though the health system is a point of pride for Cuba... something that they export to the rest of the world," Barrera explained, "because of this crisis, because of the impact it's had on the skyrocketing prices, it's just not enough for them to make ends meet. So people are quitting... to find other ways to make money to feed their families."
Experts with the United Nations have condemned the blockade of Cuba as "a serious violation of international law." Condemnations have grown louder over the past week as Trump said he believed he'd have "the honor of taking Cuba" after it collapsed.
De Cossio said he hoped the people of the United States would ask "Why does our government treat the whole population of Cuba this way?" and that they'd "understand that it's not correct to treat another nation the way the US is doing simply to try to achieve political goals."
The US blockade of Cuba is largely unpopular with the American public. A poll published last week by YouGov found that just 28% of adult US citizens said they approved of the US blocking oil shipments to the country, while 46% said they opposed it.
Asked by anchor Kristen Welker about suggestions from Trump that Cuba would collapse "on its own" without the need for the US to intervene militarily, De Cossio retorted, "What does 'on its own' mean when it’s being forced by the United States?"
Prior to Trump's further measures to isolate Cuba in January, the US had placed Cuba under an economic embargo for more than 60 years, which severely hampered the country's economic development and has cost Cuba trillions of dollars since it began, according to the UN.
"It’s a very bizarre statement, and it’s claimed by most US politicians repeatedly that Cuba will collapse on its own," De Cossio said. "Then why does the US government need to employ so many resources, so much political capital, so many human resources to try to destroy the economy of another country? Evidently, it implies that the country does not have the characteristics to collapse on its own."
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'US Siege Is Warfare': Cuba Faces Second Nationwide Blackout in Under a Week
(www.commondreams.org)
Some Cubans got power back on Sunday after another nationwide blackout on Saturday—the second in less than a week and the third time the grid has collapsed this month after the Trump administration intensified the United States' decades-long economic blockade, cutting off the island nation from Venezuelan oil.
"The Cuban Electric Union, which reports to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, reported that the total disconnection of the national energy system was caused by an unexpected shutdown of a generation unit at the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant in Camaguey province, without providing details on the specific cause of the failure," according to The Associated Press.
Critics from around the world have condemned the US siege as "economic warfare," which is notably occurring as President Donald Trump and his allies in Washington, DC repeatedly float a potential takeover of the country located just 90 miles south of Florida.
Saturday's blackout came a day after The Washington Post reported that "the Cuban government this week refused a request by the US Embassy in Havana to import diesel fuel for its generators, calling the ask 'shameless,' given the Trump administration's fuel blockade on the island, according to diplomatic cables" reviewed by the newspaper.
It also followed the arrival of some members of Nuestra América Convoy, which is bringing humanitarian aid to the island. The effort involves hundreds of people from over 30 countries and 120 organizations.
Highlighting the convoy on social media early Saturday afternoon, US Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-Ill.) declared that "Trump's oil blockade in Cuba has caused a worsening humanitarian crisis—cutting Cubans off from power, food, healthcare, and clean water."
"I am heartened by the solidarity and bravery of the courageous people on the Nuestra América Convoy, arriving in Cuba to bring critical aid directly to the people," she said. "I stand with the global community demanding that the Department of State and Department of Defense ensure their safety and security."
Another progressive in Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), similarly said later Saturday that "we must lift the US oil blockade on Cuba. This is economic warfare designed to suffocate an island. Food is spoiling. Water supply is compromised. Healthcare services are disrupted. End the blockade now. Grateful to all those helping deliver humanitarian aid!"
Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan Robinson is reporting on the convoy from Havana. On Sunday, he wrote that "when the power went, I was watching a concert held at the Pabellon Cuba, a delightfully strange Brutalist outdoor event space... People can live without music if they have to, I suppose. (The Cubans refuse to, though, and as I walked through the streets tonight I saw plenty of dancing in the dark.) What they cannot live without is healthcare, and the blackout is of course hitting hospitals hard. People aren't able to get crucial surgeries, or even get to the hospital, which means Trump is simply killing the sickest Cubans. Late last night, a report came in that patients on ventilators at the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital have died."
"It has been tragic and depressing watching the effects of the blockade. This is already a poor country. People didn't have much to start with. But now they can't take buses, they can't afford to run their cars (I have been told gas costs anywhere between 10 dollars a gallon and 40 dollars a gallon, if you can find it—this in a country where a nice meal will cost you about $20)," Robinson explained. "Food in restaurants is starting to run out. Garbage is accumulating in the streets. I had to sprint to get through a city block where the flies were so thick it was a struggle to breathe without ingesting one. The entire supply chain appears to be breaking down. Tourism is drying up—few want to come and experience shortages and sanitation crises. Taxi drivers can't drive their taxis."
"With the evaporation of tourists comes greater despair, since so many depend on this influx of foreign money. Everyone in Cuba is warm and friendly, but you can tell they're desperate. At the large San Jose art market, sellers had booths overflowing with souvenirs, and hardly anyone was there to buy. The merchants were outcompeting each other on pushiness—it was obvious many of them would not make a single sale all day," the American journalist added. "I cannot believe how cruel what my country is doing is."
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Anti-transgender bills have moved across the United States this year, and they have seen expanded enforcement mechanisms and scopes never before seen in previous years, making them the latest vanguard of anti-transgender legislation. Earlier this year, Kansas passed a bill that mass-invalidated transgender people's driver's licenses and created a bathroom bounty hunter system across the state. Missouri then advanced three anti-transgender bathroom bills in a single night. Now, Idaho has gone even further than these extreme bills in other states, with its House passing a bill that would ban transgender people from public bathrooms, including private business bathrooms, with a second-offense felony carrying up to a five-year prison sentence. The bill now will move to the Senate, which will could take up the measure in the coming weeks.
The bill, HB 752, states that "any person who knowingly and willfully enters a restroom or changing room in a government-owned building or a place of public accommodation"—a category that includes private businesses—"designated for use by the opposite biological sex of such person shall be guilty of a misdemeanor" punishable by up to one year in prison. A second offense within five years would be a felony carrying up to five years in prison. The bill would amend Chapter 41 of Title 18 of the Idaho Code, the state's indecency and obscenity statutes, adding a new Section 18-4117—classifying a transgender person's use of a public restroom alongside offenses like voyeurism and indecent exposure.
The bill, which was debated Monday, drew heavy criticism from the few Democrats who occupy seats in the Idaho legislature. "The truth of the matter is—and I know a lot of people don't want to say it, but—forcing people who don't look like the sex that they were born with, or transgender folks, forcing them to use other people's bathrooms is going to put a lot of people in danger," said Rep. Chris Mathias, a Boise Democrat. He continued: "If a Klansman comes into the bathroom in a full robe and hood, I'm going to be a little fearful. But if all he does is walk into the bathroom, use it, and wash his hands, do we want to criminalize that? I do…" (laughter from the House) "…but do we?" The bill then passed 54-15, with six Republicans joining the state's nine Democrats in opposition.
The bill contains two provisions that make it more extreme than other states that have passed public bathroom bans. The first is that the bill simply makes "knowing entry" into a bathroom that does not match a person's assigned sex at birth a crime. This distinguishes it from Florida's bathroom ban, which passed in 2023, and contains a "duty to depart"—a provision that allows a transgender person to avoid criminal charges if they leave after being asked to do so by a government employee. No such provision exists in the Idaho bill, meaning a transgender person could be arrested on the spot simply for being present in a restroom. That fact earned the bill opposition from both the Idaho Fraternal Order of Police and the Idaho Sheriffs' Association, who asked lawmakers to add a duty-to-depart amendment, which was rejected.
"Officers responding to a complaint would be placed in the difficult position of determining an individual's biological sex in order to enforce the statute," wrote Idaho Fraternal Order of Police President Bryan Lovell. "In many circumstances, there is no clear or reasonable way for officers to make that determination without engaging in questioning or investigative actions that could be viewed as invasive and inappropriate."
The second provision is even more extreme. In addition to making a second offense a felony, the bill states that prior convictions under "a similar statute in another state, or any similar local ordinance" would count toward the escalation threshold—meaning that if a transgender person had previously violated a bathroom ban in another state or a local ordinance in another jurisdiction, their first offense in Idaho could be charged as a felony, similar to how prior-offense drug convictions in other states operate. The bill does not specify how such cross-jurisdictional adjudication would work, a significant gap given that bathroom bans across the country employ wildly different enforcement mechanisms—ranging from civil fines to bounty-style lawsuits against the entity that owns the facility rather than the individual. The practical result is that a transgender person who has never set foot in an Idaho restroom could face up to five years in prison for doing so once.
The bill is the latest in an accelerating wave of legislation targeting transgender people for using the bathroom. In the 2021–2023 period of anti-transgender lawmaking, bills focused primarily on school sports, school bathrooms or the medical care of transgender youth. The current generation of bills has moved well beyond that. States like Florida, Kansas and Texas are now pursuing the full-scale criminalization of transgender adults using bathrooms in public buildings, each enacting more extreme enforcement mechanisms than the last—from Florida's criminal trespass arrests to Kansas's bounty hunter lawsuits and mass license revocations. Those states now carry a "do not travel" rating on the Erin in the Morning trans legislative risk assessment map, and Idaho could become the next if this bill clears the Senate, as the map of where transgender people can safely travel shrinks year by year.
“Bathroom laws don’t improve safety and privacy in public restrooms. They only serve to exclude transgender people from public life and put them in dangerous situations….these bans only serve to discriminate against the trans community by stripping them of their dignity and bodily autonomy and fueling a dangerous narrative that merely encountering a perceived trans person in public is damaging,” said ACLU Idaho about the bathroom bills moving through the state.
The bill now heads to the Idaho Senate, where Republicans hold a 29-6 supermajority. Governor Brad Little, a Republican, has not indicated whether he would sign or veto the measure if it reaches his desk. A separate bathroom ban bill, HB 607, which targeted private businesses through a civil lawsuit mechanism, passed the House last month but has not received a Senate committee hearing.
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US police took dying Black man’s ambulance for cop having a ‘mild anxiety attack’
(www.thecanary.co)
Dyshan Best was shot and killed in March 2025 by police during a foot chase in Bridgeport, Connecticut, US. As he lay dying, officers insisted an ambulance sent for Best be used to transport a colleague having a “mild anxiety attack” to the local hospital.
Police claimed Best had been armed — but he was shot in the back as he tried to flee and posed no imminent danger. Family lawyer Darnell Crosland said that Best had been carrying a vape — one was recovered close to the shooting scene. None of Best’s prints or DNA was on the gun police claimed to have recovered from his body.
Best’s family has begun legal action after an official report revealed the “abomination of justice”. Appalling, but not surprising given the record of police contempt for the lives of Black citizens in the US (and UK). Crosland said on Friday 13 March that they are suing the city because police ignored their “duty to render aid”.
Best’s niece Tatiana Barrett said that the police had simply left her uncle to die:
I really, truly believe that they allowed my uncle to die on that street
Erin Perrotta, the officer who took Best’s ambulance, refused medical care in the ambulance. She told paramedics:
I am fine, I just needed to get out of here.
Best lay on the ground, dying of liver and kidney wounds, for another fourteen minutes. Perrotta is now on administrative leave — but on an “unrelated matter”, not in connection with Dyshan Best’s police murder.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
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As His Iran War Drives Up Oil Prices, Trump Orders Restart of California Offshore Drilling
(www.commondreams.org)
State leaders and environmental advocates responded with outrage after the Trump administration on Friday ordered the restarting of a California pipeline that caused one of the largest oil spills in the state's history, a move that comes as oil prices have skyrocketed following President Donald Trump's launching of an illegal war against Iran and Iran's subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
After Trump issued an executive order on Friday authorizing the Department of Energy (DOE) to ramp up oil and gas development under the Defense Production Act, Energy Secretary Chris Wright ordered Sable Offshore Corp. to restart operations on the Santa Ynez Unit and Pipeline System, which include an offshore rig and a network of offshore and onshore pipelines along the Santa Barbara coast. Among them is a pipeline that ruptured in 2015, spilling around 450,000 gallons of oil into Refugio State Beach and killing hundreds of marine mammals and sea birds.
“Californians have repeatedly rejected dangerous drilling off our coast for decades," Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said in a statement on Saturday. "Now, after dragging the US into a war with Iran and driving up oil prices, the Trump administration is trying to exploit this crisis to further enrich the oil industry at the expense of our communities and our environment."
In his statement, Wright emphasized the defense benefits of resuming drilling, arguing that "today’s order will strengthen America’s oil supply and restore a pipeline system vital to our national security and defense, ensuring that West Coast military installations have the reliable energy critical to military readiness.”
“Directing a private oil company to push its project through without safety checks and adherence to California laws that keep our coast safe is appalling and illegal."
The DOE added that "Sable's facility can produce approximately 50,000 barrels of oil per day, a 15% increase to California’s in-state oil production, that can replace nearly 1.5 million barrels of foreign crude each month."
Yet, far from a novel response to an unexpected emergency, the order is actually an escalation in a preexisting battle between California and the Trump administration over the future of the pipeline system. The state's Attorney General Rob Bonta sued to stop the administration from a federal takeover of two of the pipelines in January.
Sable also faces several lawsuits due to its attempts to restart the system after it purchased it from ExxonMobil in 2024, and has not yet cleared all of the state permitting requirements, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
"In its latest brazen abuse of power, the Trump administration is attempting to seize exclusive federal control over two of California’s onshore pipelines," Bonta said on social media Friday evening. "We will not stand by as this administration continues their unlawful all-out assault on California and our coastlines, and we are reviewing all of our legal options."
California Gov. Gavin Newsom also spoke out against Wright's announcement.
"Trump knew his war with Iran would raise gas prices," he wrote on social media. "Now he wants to illegally resurrect a pipeline shut down by courts and facing criminal charges. And it won't even cut prices. I refuse to let Trump sacrifice Californians, our environment, or our $51 billion coastal economy."
The Center for Biological Diversity noted that this order would mark the first time that the Defense Production Act was used to force an oil company to restart out-of-use Infrastructure and to disregard the state permitting process.
“This is a revolting power grab by an extremist president. Trump is misusing this Cold War-era law just to help a Texas oil company skirt vital state laws that protect our coastline, and Californians will pay the price,” Talia Nimmer, an attorney for the center, said. “Mandating a restart of these defective oil pipelines won’t curb high gas prices, but it will put coastal wildlife at huge risk of another oil spill. Overriding state law to let an oil company restart pipelines sets a radically dangerous precedent. It’s clear that no state is safe from Trump.”
The center also promised to push back against the order.
“Directing a private oil company to push its project through without safety checks and adherence to California laws that keep our coast safe is appalling and illegal,” Nimmer said. “We’re exploring all legal avenues. This dangerous action should be swiftly blocked by the courts.”
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After over two years of arming and otherwise supporting the Israeli government as it lays waste to the Gaza Strip—even after an October ceasefire deal—the United States this week officially joined an International Court of Justice case to defend Israel from allegations of genocide.
The United Nations' primary tribunal announced Friday that the Trump administration had filed a declaration of intervention under Article 63 of the ICJ statute. The filing states, "To avoid any doubt, the United States affirms, in the strongest terms possible, that the allegations of 'genocide' against Israel are false."
"They are also unfortunately nothing new," the document continues. "The United States recalls that international fora have been misused to level false charges of 'genocide' against the state of Israel since at least May 1976 as part of a broader campaign (including UN General Assembly resolution 3379) to delegitimize the state of Israel and the Jewish people and to justify or encourage terrorism against them."
"Sadly, that effort remains' ongoing," the filing claims. "Only days after Hamas launched its assault of mass rape, murder, and kidnapping on October 7, 2023, pro-Hamas actors, including the Islamic Republic of Iran, were already falsely charging Israel once again with 'genocide.'"
The filing comes less than two weeks after President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began a joint war against Iran. Since then, Israel has also returned to bombing Lebanon, despite a November 2024 ceasefire agreement, and again cut off the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. The bombing of Gaza by Israel has also continued.
When South Africa initiated its case in December 2023, accusing Israel of violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide with its slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, Israel's bombardment and blockade had killed more than 21,500 people, according to local health officials.
The Gaza Ministry of Health now puts the death toll at 72,136, with another 171,839 wounded—including 651 killed and 1,741 injured since the ceasefire began. Experts around the world have warned that the true figures could be far higher.
The US filing states that "civilian casualties, even widespread civilian casualties, are not necessarily probative of genocidal intent, particularly when they occur in the context of an armed conflict involving urban combat."
However, as South Africa highlighted in its initial application, "repeated statements by Israeli state representatives, including at the highest levels, by the Israeli president, prime minister, and minister of defense express genocidal intent."
"That intent is also properly to be inferred from the nature and conduct of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, having regard... to Israel's failure to provide or ensure essential food, water, medicine, fuel, shelter, and other humanitarian assistance for the besieged and blockaded Palestinian people, which has pushed them to the brink of famine," South Africa's filing states. "It is also clear from the nature, scope and extent of Israel’s military attacks on Gaza."
Fiji, Hungary, and Namibia also intervened in the ICJ case on Thursday. While only Namibia supports South Africa, the interventions came a day after Iceland and the Netherlands also formally backed the arguments against Israel.
In addition to the ICJ case, the International Criminal Court—also based at the Hague—has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza. Trump has retaliated with sanctions against ICC jurists.
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