Some people really will believe anything, as long as you’re trash talking big tech. And this platform is particularly bad. Just say something like you should be paying for YouTube (via ads or premium) and brace for the swarm.
Here’s the case on the RECAP Archive (very handy if you ever want to look at documents for federal cases and/or keep tabs on an ongoing case): https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68493840/parizer-v-ajp-educational-foundation-inc/ edit: also here’s the text of the article ::: spoiler Full text (part 1) October 7 Survivors Sue Campus Protesters, Say Students Are “Hamas’s Propaganda Division” Four lawsuits alleging Hamas ties against Students for Justice in Palestine, the AP, UNRWA, and a cryptocurrency exchange share many of the same plaintiffs. Akela Lacy May 10 2024, 2:44 p.m. Survivors of the October 7 attacks filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court last week alleging links between Hamas and the pro-Palestinian student groups leading nationwide protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. The survivors claim the student groups are liable for monetary damages because of the purported terrorism links. “When someone tells you they are aiding and abetting terrorists — believe them.” That’s the opening line the suit filed Wednesday against the Palestinian advocacy groups American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine, the umbrella group supporting student organizers for Palestine, which supports more than 350 Palestine solidarity groups, including more than 200 campus organizations across the country. The lawsuit is part of a nationwide crackdown on pro-Palestine activism, especially on campus. It was filed a day after police in New York City deployed militarized forces to remove students from campus encampments protesting the war on Gaza and arrested hundreds. Some or all of the nine plaintiffs in the suit are involved in a raft of other civil suits related to the October 7 attacks. Among the defendants they’ve pursued in court are major media organizations and United Nations agencies. The survivors of the October 7 attack alleged that American Muslims for Palestine “serves as Hamas’s propaganda division in the United States.” “Through NSJP, AMP uses propaganda to intimidate, convince, and recruit uninformed, misguided, and impressionable college students to serve as foot soldiers for Hamas on campus and beyond,” the October 7 survivors wrote in their suit. The lawsuits rely on anti-terrorism laws that made it possible to bring civil cases for acts of international terrorism, including provisions around bans on material support to terrorism that have long been controversially applied. At the time of their passage, members of Congress who pushed the anti-terror laws linked them directly to crackdowns on pro-Palestine activities, according to a recent white paper from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal. “For years, CCR and others have been warning of the abuse of broad ‘material support’ laws to shrink the space for Palestinian rights,” said Diala Shamas, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. The group represented another Palestinian rights organization in what Shamas said was “years-long, meritless litigation” brought by the Jewish National Fund, a group that funds Israeli settlements. “The law’s provision of civil damages means that private actors — including those with seemingly endless resources — can bog you down in costly and distracting litigation,” Shamas said. “This means that Palestinians and those who support their rights become ‘high risk’ — and those who they rely on — charities, funders, banks or social media companies — are chilled from further engagement. The goal is to isolate Palestinians.” Four Survivor Lawsuits The nine plaintiffs include six survivors of the October 7 Hamas attacks. Five people attended the Supernova music festival, and another was attacked at Zikim Beach, where 19 civilians were killed as Hamas militants tried to overrun nearby military outposts. Two other plaintiffs who were not home on October 7 had homes in Kibbutz Holit, the site of additional Hamas attacks. Another plaintiff’s brother was killed at the festival. (Lawyers for the plaintiffs, AMP, and SJP did not respond to requests for comment.) The AMP suit is the fourth federal suit filed this year by members of the group. Last month, eight of the same plaintiffs sued the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, claiming that it gave material support to Hamas by allowing the militant group to fundraise on the platform. In November, the Treasury Department said Hamas and “a range of illicit actors” had used Binance to funnel money to their groups. Binance lawyers asked for an extension to reply to the complaint and have until August to do so. In April, the company’s former chief executive was sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to money laundering violations. Five of the plaintiffs in the American Muslims for Palestine suit also sued the news agency The Associated Press in February. The plaintiffs alleged that the AP used photographs from “known Hamas associates who were gleefully embedded with the Hamas terrorists during the October 7th attacks.” Lawyers for the AP moved to dismiss the complaint for failing to state a claim and asked to stay discovery pending adjudication of the motion to dismiss. In March, the same group of nine plus another October 7 survivor sued the U.S. committee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNWRA, the largest humanitarian organization operating in Gaza. The suit against UNRWA claims that the group “financed and aided” Hamas, a frequent refrain from Israeli officials that has gone unsubstantiated, according to an independent review released in April. UNRWA lawyers were granted an extension and have until May 28 to respond to the complaint. Following Israeli officials’ allegations, major donors initially cut funding to UNRWA, but later reversed the decisions — except for the United States, the group’s biggest donor, where Congress blocked funding as part of the budget package approved this spring. The major corporate law firm Greenberg Traurig has taken on the latest case. The National Jewish Advocacy Center has taken on the three other cases. The group did not respond to a request for comment. Crackdown on Student Groups Student advocates for Palestine have faced concerted and sometimes violent crackdowns by school administrators and police. Mainstream media outlets uncritically repeat unsubstantiated claims that they support Hamas. Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, which are at the center of much campus organizing, have faced harsh censorship since October. The group was singled out in congressional hearings that have pressured university administrators to further crack down on Palestinian advocacy on campus. Columbia University suspended its SJP chapter and its chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace in November. The New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal sued the university over the suspension in March in the New York Supreme Court. The case is pending. American University placed its SJP chapter on probation in April after the group held a silent indoor demonstration; the school banned indoor protests in January. Rutgers University suspended the SJP chapter on its New Brunswick campus in December and claimed that the group had protested in “nonpublic forums” and caused disruption on campus; the suspension was lifted in January. (I am a co-teacher of a class at Rutgers.) George Washington University suspended its SJP chapter in November after the group projected statements onto a library building calling for the university to divest from Israel. The projected images said GWU had blood on its hands and used the phrase “Glory to our martyrs,” a cultural reference to any Palestinian killed by Israel that was interpreted by outsiders as an endorsement of Hamas. Brandeis was the first private university to ban its SJP chapter in November, claiming that the group “openly supports Hamas.” :::
I could maybe believe that number is accurate for a median dual income family with no major health concerns before the premium increases that hit this year but it’s also absurdly high to begin with. To be basically fine and still pay $4k a year (probably around 5% of gross income) just for basic preventative care is absurd. Edit: or if he only means out of pocket expenses but then you’re probably doubling or tripling that number by adding healthcare premiums for the insurance that doesn’t even kick in until the family wipes their savings out every year.
Ugh. I can’t believe we waited all this time just for them to lie about local play, add a premium cash store where one skin can cost over the price of the game, and LOOTBOXES in a premium game. What a disappointment.
Operated through the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, and paid for by a justice department grant, Erpo is designed to help state and local governments, law enforcement, and others – including behavioral health and social service providers – “optimize” the use of red flag laws, Harris said. It will provide training and technical assistance, including educational opportunities and workshops “for a wide variety of stakeholders”. But the vice-president also acknowledged that red flag laws, which facilitate the temporary removal of firearms from a person a court believes capable of harming themselves or others, are not universally popular. We need actual gun controll on a federal level. Even just a register and requirement for private sales to go thru an FFL for a background check would be huge. Until we close the private sale loophole, gun laws do t mean shit. There’s a reason “new in box” guns get sold at a markup on the private market. Hint: people that can’t but at a store will pay a premium. I like guns, but I have too many buddies who buy guns, then sell them less than a year later and brag about how good of businessmen they are for making profit. All theyre doing is likely funneling guns to people who can’t pass background checks. There’s just the plausible deniability on their end that if it’s not legit, it’s not their fault.
Finally, in regards to AI, the belief among those polled was that AI could replace human localizations and translations within the next 12-24 months. Yeah throw a separate underapprechiated and extremely exploited workforce under the under the bus instead, fucking asshole morons. How can you talk about “premium games” if the premium experience doesn’t fucking involve the artistic touch of a writer in your own language actually translating it?
Honestly this is the most interesting thing in the world of mobile for me since I initially heard about GrapheneOS looking to branch out to another OEM as an option. Assuming it is in fact a Motorola phone, it would have to be a big piece of shit or unbelievably expensive for what it is before I wouldn’t be very tempted by it. If it was literally a Moto G Power 2025/2026 with GrapheneOS out of the box for $300-$800 I would probably be on board. Supporting something not Google Play or Apple bound is important enough to me that I will pay some level of a premium price for it to support the mission behind it, like I do with System76.
And the FAQ. Frequently Asked Questions Why is Reddit doing this? Reddit is built on tools that empower the community to be creative. We believe that Community Points can be a very useful and very powerful tool that communities own. We are excited to see what communities do with it! Isn’t crypto terrible for the environment? Not all crypto is the same. Different blockchains work in different ways, with different amounts of energy consumption. In our case, Community Points is built on a network that leverages the is built on the Ethereum blockchain, which is upgrading to a new version that uses 99.95% less energy. In addition, our project does not run on the Ethereum blockchain directly. We run on a “layer 2” scaling network, which further reduces energy consumption and lowers costs. In general, as crypto technology evolves, we expect it will become more efficient in order to scale to more users. Why didn’t I get Points? 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There are actually some people in China who believe that COVID was a conspiracy weaponized to destroy China’s economy. Since the central government allowed local governments to officially issue government bonds (debt) back in 2014, many local governments - which already saw increasing debt burden back then - had jumped on a property investment scheme, took out huge loans and banked on the property developers building new cities so the local governments can profit off selling the land with rising value in 10 years. They were betting on the land premium rising by so much by 2025 that it could pay off their outstanding debt. Then COVID came in 2020 and crashed everything - consumption was driven down, people unwilling to invest their savings, and the property sector boom was over by 2021 (in some cities, prices have fallen by as much as 40% by 2024 - it’s so over). Local governments had to take on strenuous debt to finance the measures taken against COVID, which decimated their budgets and many of them have since been saddled in outrageous amounts of debt (in Heilongjiang, for example, 500-600% of their GDP) with no easy way out. Figure: Provincial GDP contribution (gray bars) is highly uneven, with most of the economy concentrated in the coastal manufacturing regions in Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong, Zhejiang (left four). Blue line shows the debt to GDP ratio and many of the poorer regions have exceptionally high debt burden (e.g. Yunnan (云南), Guangxi (广西), Heilongjiang (黑龙江) all having 500-700% debt to GDP ratio). Only Shanghai has less than 100% debt to GDP ratio. Extremely good timing if you want to engineer an economic downturn in China. You can get very conspiratorial about it but chances are the pandemic likely happened due to factors including climate change coupled with poor sanitary measures.
Shortly after the Danish military evacuated a crew member of a US submarine off the Greenlandic coast for urgent medical care on Saturday, President Donald Trump pledged to send a “hospital boat” to the self-governing Danish territory—but officials from Greenland and Denmark declared it unnecessary, given the island’s publicly funded universal healthcare system. “Working with the fantastic Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, we are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there. It’s on the way!!!” said Trump, who in December named the Republican governor as his envoy to Greenland while threatening to take over the island. Trump has called the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency a “con,” but global warming is opening up potential shipping routes and access to natural resources in and around Greenland. He has claimed that if he doesn’t seize the island, China or Russia will do so—though last month he announced a “framework of a future deal” for security, temporarily easing fears of a US invasion. In his Truth Social post late Saturday, Trump shared an illustration of a Navy hospital ship, the USNS Mercy. “As of late January, the 1,000-bed hospital ship was firmly in drydock at Alabama Shipyard in Mobile, where it has been undergoing scheduled maintenance since July 2025,” according to the maritime industry news website gC**aptain. “The USNS Mercy, commissioned in 1986, departed San Diego last July for a one-year scheduled maintenance period at Alabama Shipyard under an $18.7 million firm-fixed-price contract for a 153-calendar day mid-term availability, including drydocking.” Responding to the US leader on social media Sunday, Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said: “It will be a no thanks from here. President Trump’s idea of sending an American hospital ship here to Greenland has been noted. But we have a public health service where treatment is free for citizens. It is a conscious choice. And a fundamental part of our society.” “It is not like that in the USA, where it costs money to go to the doctor,” he added. “We are always open to dialogue and cooperation. Also with the USA. But now talk to us instead of just making more or less random outbursts on social media. Dialogue and cooperation require respect for decisions about our country being made here at home.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen somewhat indirectly pushed back against Trump with a social media post, saying that she is “happy to live in a country where there is free and equal access to health for all. Where it’s not insurances and wealth that determine whether you get proper treatment. You have the same approach in Greenland. Happy Sunday to you all.” Denmark’s defense minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, similarly told Danish broadcaster DR: “The Greenlandic population receives the healthcare it needs. They receive it either in Greenland, or, if they require specialized treatment, they receive it in Denmark.” “It’s not as if there’s a need for a special healthcare initiative in Greenland,” he added. The Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers website states that in “a number of services are provided, which are free at point of use to everyone with permanent residence in Greenland. If a doctor has prescribed treatment, and the service is not available nearby, you have the right to have the transport covered to the nearest hospital.” The site also notes that island’s health service is “challenged by a shortage of staff, particularly in the most sparsely populated areas.” Aaja Chemnitz, one of the two Greenlandic politicians in the Danish Parliament, said on social media: “Another day. Another crazy news story. Donald Trump wants to send a poorly maintained hospital ship to Greenland. It seems rather desperate and does not contribute to the permanent and sustainable strengthening of the healthcare system that we need.” “Since the last election, where I campaigned for closer healthcare cooperation… we have succeeded in allocating DKK 35 million annually, and this year an additional DKK 185 million, for treatment of Greenlanders in Denmark,” she continued. Those figures in US dollars are roughly $5.5 million and $29 million, respectively. Chemnitz added: I believe there is one thing we are missing in our understanding of health and welfare in Greenland. We should have equal access to doctors, cancer treatment pathways, and healthcare assistance like those available in Denmark. Our healthcare system is deeply challenged—more so than what is seen in Denmark. And this is best solved together with Denmark, as one of the richest and most highly educated countries, for example in the healthcare sector. Not the United States, which has its own problems with healthcare. This requires closer and more committed efforts from Denmark in the field of healthcare in Greenland. More doctors from the Danish regions taking a turn in Greenland. Faster access to treatment in Denmark. And a crystal-clear prioritization of children and young people, cancer and heart diseases, and a significant improvement in psychiatry. Is Denmark ready for that? The United States has often ranked dead last among peer nations on metrics such as access to care and health outcomes, fueling Americans’ demands for a transition from the current for-profit healthcare system to one that is publicly funded and universal. Massive cuts to the social safety net in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by Trump last July and federal Republicans’ failure to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that helped tens of millions of people afford health insurance premiums—before they expired at the end of December—have further fueled calls for Medicare for All. From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
Late last month, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) published 3.5 million pages about convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein. On top of the grotesque and horrifying photos and emails that appear to offer more evidence of systemic and widespread child abuse, the Epstein files revealed further allegations of his ties to Israel and its intelligence agency Mossad. London Times (2/8/26) The Epstein/Israel revelations have been covered at length by independent and overseas media outlets: “The Israeli government installed security equipment and controlled access to a Manhattan apartment building” that Epstein managed (Drop Site News, 2/18/26). Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli spy Yoni Koren were frequent guests at the apartment, and Rafi Shlomo, then–director of protective service at the Israeli mission to the United Nations, “controlled access to the apartment for guests, and even conducted background checks on cleaners and Epstein’s employees.” An informant told the FBI he “became convinced that Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent” (Middle East Monitor, 2/8/26). Epstein emailed Barak in December 2018: “You should make clear that I don’t work for Mossad :)” (Dissident, 2/2/26). Barak responded, “You or I?” Epstein replied, “That I don’t :).” Epstein emailed Barak twice in November 2017 (London Times, 2/8/26): “Did Boies ask you to help obtain former Mossad agents to do dirty investigations?” and “Boies said he got to the Mossad guys through you? True? This is getting a lot of press.” Barak responded, “Call me. [Redacted] in Paris.” (Epstein was likely referring to attorney David Boies, who was facing scrutiny at the time for hiring a private firm, run largely by former Mossad officers, to investigate women who accused his client Harvey Weinstein of rape, and journalists trying to expose the allegations—New Yorker, 11/6/17.) Epstein’s foundation backed pro-Israel projects like Friends of Israel Defense Forces and the Jewish National Fund, which buys land in Palestine to build settlements (Middle East Eye, 2/7/26). Adding to existing evidence Al Jazeera (2/9/26) It is important to note that the Epstein emails contain allegations and intimations, and don’t prove that Epstein was an Israeli agent, formally or informally. However, they do add to the existing evidence that Epstein used his considerable connections and wealth to assist the Israeli state. The Epstein/Israel ties were reported before the latest DoJ release by various independent media outlets, particularly Drop Site News. Drop Site’s reporting received scant coverage by US corporate media, as I documented at the time (FAIR.org. 11/14/25). Drop Site based its reporting on a hack purportedly emanating from Iran’s government. The hack’s source seemed to have explained—at least in part—the lack of US corporate media coverage. The latest Epstein/Mossad ties, on the other hand, were uncovered in a release by the DoJ—a more acceptable source by US corporate media standards. (The Justice release confirmed some of the details in Drop Site‘s reporting based on the Iranian hack, such as Epstein’s close ties to the Israeli spy Yoni Koren—Drop Site, 11/11/25; Al Jazeera, 2/9/26.) And yet only a few US corporate media outlets—most notably Axios, New York magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Atlantic—have referenced the latest Epstein/Israel revelations. Even then, these outlets cast doubt on the legitimacy of the connections by framing them as conspiracy theories, or conspiracy-adjacent—hardly a surprise, given previous US corporate media coverage. ‘Ample fodder for speculation’ New York (2/6/26) Axios (2/3/26) wrote: FBI source reports and internal emails contain unverified claims and secondhand suspicions about Epstein’s possible ties to Mossad and other intelligence services—material that stops well short of proof, but offers ample fodder for speculation. A week later, Axios (2/10/26) acknowledged that Barak and his wife “stayed at Epstein’s apartment multiple times from 2015 to 2019,” citing Israeli media reports. Axios‘ Rebecca Falconer wrote that Barak “has said he ‘deeply regrets’ his past relationship with Epstein, and that he never saw nor participated in any inappropriate behavior during their meetings.” Falconer added: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected conspiracy theories peddled online that his longtime political rival Barak’s “unusual close relationship” indicated that Epstein was an Israeli spy. Although New York features writer Simon van Zuylen-Wood (2/6/26) mentioned “former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak” as one of the “seemingly endless list of VIPs” corresponding with Epstein, it warned against looking too hard at Epstein’s ties to the Israeli state by linking an interest in the issue to antisemitism: The horseshoe nature of the scandal makes it hard to untangle speculation about, say, Epstein’s intelligence ties from the antisemitism that is pervasive in Epstein discourse. “Yes, we are ruled by Satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” announced the YouTuber Candace Owens, who may have been reading the same emails that prompted the left-wing commentator Cenk Uygur to post, “To my knowledge no one in legacy media has ever even discussed the possibility that Epstein was Mossad when it is all over the files.” Right-wing conspiracy theories based in antisemitism (like Owens’) are a toxic form of discourse. But the latest batch of files—and Drop Site’s previous coverage, which Uygur has previously covered—is not hard to distinguish from antisemitism, and does more than just offer “ample fodder for speculation.” ‘Dark workings of cabals’ Atlantic (2/7/26) Still, pundits like the Wall Street Journal‘s Barton Swaim (2/11/26) treated questions of Epstein and Israel as necessarily conspiratorial, heaping scorn on “influencers and politicos determined to attribute all bad things to the dark workings of cabals,” and citing how “Tucker Carlson conjectured that Epstein worked with the Mossad to blackmail its enemies.” And the Atlantic (2/7/26) wrote that, “in death, Epstein has taken on far more significance than he did in life”: Some Americans were already primed to believe in international pedophilia rings. Bonus points if they were run by wealthy Jews—Jews who were perhaps on the Mossad payroll, as many conspiracists have insisted Epstein was. Jacob Shamsian of Business Insider (2/14/26) asked whether “there were any truth to the rumored connections to the CIA or the Mossad,” only to handwave away those connections by citing anonymous sources. Shamsian pointed to “four people who had access to the Justice Department’s files,” who “said there was no trace of intelligence material, which would have been the case if Epstein or Maxwell’s crimes were tied to the CIA or Mossad.” To Compact editor Matthew Schmitz (Washington Post, 2/12/26), the “scourge of rising antisemitism in recent years has found its latest manifestation in the government’s release of millions of files about sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” Schmitz referenced “antiestablishment voices” that “have advanced the claim that Jewish networks and interests are corrupting American society.” He lumped together “antisemites on the left and right,” linking Owens and Tucker Carlson with “progressive influencers” Ana Kasparian and Briahna Joy Gray. But Schmitz omitted any mention of Epstein and Barak’s very real relationship. A selective list of ‘powerful men’ New York Times (2/5/26) The New York Times, for its part, largely downplayed the relationship between Epstein and Barak, and omitted key context. A Times article (2/5/26) on Epstein’s ties with tech start-ups briefly mentioned that Epstein “suggested to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, that he speak with Mr. Thiel about an advisory role” at Palantir. The Times quoted a Palantir spokesperson as denying “Epstein ever investing in or being a shareholder in Palantir,” and asserting that Palantir “has never had a business relationship with Ehud Barak.” They failed to mention that Palantir signed its first contract with the Israeli government a year after the Epstein/Barak conversation. Less than a week later, the Times (2/11/26) wrote that “political score-settling has played a part in the reaction in other countries,” including in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “played up disclosures of emails” between Epstein and Barak. The Times noted in that piece that “India’s foreign ministry dismissed an email from Mr. Epstein, in which he appeared to take credit for the ingratiating approach of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a landmark state visit to Israel in 2017.” The paper omitted the detail that Epstein had connected Barak to Anil Ambani, an Indian billionaire close to Modi, ahead of the trip. Drop Site (1/31/26) reported that the introduction “helped accelerate the burgeoning relationship” between Israel, India and the US. More tangible ties Guardian (5/28/22) The sparse US corporate media coverage of the Epstein/Israel angle sharply contrasts with the extensive reporting of Epstein’s alleged ties to Russia. Epstein visited Russia at least three times during the 2000s. He maintained a network of recruiters in Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, whom he tasked with finding “girls”—often using modeling agencies as a front to traffic them to the US or Europe. He maintained Russian bank accounts and sought investments in Russia. Although Russia was referenced somewhat more often than Israel in the files—about 5,400 to 4,800 times—Epstein’s connections to Barak were far more tangible than his ties to Russian government figures. Epstein tried to meet with Putin multiple times, but there is no evidence that he ever succeeded (Washington Post, 2/7/26). Epstein maintained relationships with Russian oligarchs, tech investors and former Russian government officials, but there isn’t a Russian equivalent to Barak, with whom Epstein shared over 4,000 email messages. Indeed, Epstein and Barak arranged to meet face-to-face more than 60 times between September 2010 to March 2019. At least seven of these meetings took place while Barak was serving as minister of Defense for Israel (Jacobin, 2/6/26). ‘Might replace Putin’ Kyiv Independent (2/5/26) At least one email thread even connected Epstein to an anti-Putin dissident. Politician Ilya Ponomarev sent an email in 2011 to Bill Gates’ adviser Boris Nikolic, asking how he could gain access to the World Economic Forum in Davos “to communicate what is going on, so that not only official Putin’s voice is heard.” His email came as Ponomarev was participating in mass protests against Putin and his reelection during the 2011 Russian presidential election. Nikolic forwarded Ponomarev’s email to Epstein, writing: “We should go soon to Russia and you should meet my friend Ilya Ponomarev,” who he described as the “main organizer of the uprising against Putin.” He “might replace Putin and become a president by himself” if “he does not get killed before,” Nikolic said. He asked how Epstein could help, “not with Davos but with the other stuff in general.” Epstein replied: “I can do end of March.” It’s not clear from the files whether Epstein ever met with Ponomarev, but the email thread was noteworthy, showing Epstein’s willingness to meet with an anti-Putin dissident. Yet it received only one mention in the US corporate media—from Yahoo (2/5/26), which republished an article from the Kyiv Independent (2/5/26), a Ukraine-based news outlet that receives funding from the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy. Beyond including the email in the article, the Kyiv Independent didn’t bother expanding on its significance. Instead, the outlet wrote: The documents do not prove that Epstein worked for Russian intelligence. They do, however, reveal sustained, multi-year efforts by Epstein to embed himself in Russia’s political, financial and diplomatic circles—efforts marked by persistence, access-seeking and repeated attempts to present himself as useful to the Kremlin. ‘Whom Epstein was really working for’ New York Post (2/2/26) Among the US corporate media outlets to cover the Epstein/Russia connection in-depth are the New York Post, Washington Post and New York Times. A headline in the New York Post (2/2/26) read: “Emails Reveal New Theory About Whom Jeffrey Epstein Was Really Working For.” The right-wing outlet relied on two anonymous sources—”people close to the Russian tyrant” and “US security officials”—and an article by the British tabloid Daily Mail (1/31/26), which based its reporting on “intelligence sources.” In the final four paragraphs of the article, the New York Post acknowledged Epstein’s well-established connections to Israel—noting that his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was the daughter of British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, widely reported to be a Mossad agent—but excluded any mention of the recent revelations. Two days later, the New York Post ran an article (2/4/26) that detailed how Poland was launching a probe into whether Epstein was working as a Russian spy. The right-wing outlet also published an article (2/7/26) about Epstein’s ties to “key Russian government figures.” These figures included Sergey Belyakov, who the Post described as “Russia’s deputy economic minister at the time, and a Kremlin secret service–trained spy who Epstein often appeared to use as his personal fixer in Moscow,” as well as Vitaly Churkin, “Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, between 2015 and his 2017 death.” The New York Post did not mention that Epstein introduced Belyakov to Barak in April 2015 (Reason, 8/27/25; Drop Site, 10/30/25; Washington Post, 2/7/26). ‘Added momentum to previous suspicions’ Washington Post (2/7/26) The Washington Post (2/7/26) similarly hyped up a Russia connection under the headline “Epstein Built Ties to Russians and Sought to Meet Putin, Files Show.” Jeff Bezos’ Post—which recently largely gutted its foreign reporting desk—wrote that the files “show repeated attempts in the 2010s to arrange a meeting” with Putin, but added that there was “no evidence in the Justice Department files that such a meeting ever took place.” The Post (2/6/26) ran another article about the Russia ties, this time about “Russian expatriate tech investors who have drawn scrutiny from US intelligence agencies over their past ties with the Kremlin.” The Post speculated: The newly revealed extent of Epstein’s Russian connections, which also include senior Russian government officials, has added momentum to previous suspicions that he worked with or was targeted by intelligence agencies because of his personal connections to international elites. In its own longform article on the Epstein/Russia connection, the New York Times (2/10/26) similarly wrote that the latest batch of files have “raised new questions among Russia’s critics about whether the relationships opened the door to Russian intelligence activity.” It is possible that Epstein was a Russian intelligence asset. However, there is no good reason for the US corporate media to frame these allegations as a real possibility, while ignoring the Epstein/Israel ties, or continuing to paint them as a far-fetched conspiracy theory. The latest batch of files deepens the evidence, documented by Drop Site and others, that Epstein was engaged in assisting the Israeli state, serving as a go-between on commercial, diplomatic and intelligence matters. Although Epstein maintained relationships with Russian oligarchs, tech investors and former Russian government officials, no evidence has yet surfaced that he advocated on behalf of Russian interests. The only reasons to think that the former is more newsworthy than the latter are purely political. From FAIR via This RSS Feed.
Gentlemen. Be it not said that I’ve been idle these past weeks. Rather, what I’ve been doing for the last little while is dramatically brooding here in the dark, fingers intertwined in my very best Gendo Ikari pose, contemplating how the hell I’m going to explain all of this to you. (And no part of it was due to me being too lazy to dismount the Bird Lens from my camera and find somewhere to put it away. Honest.) A while ago a good friend of mine said to me in reference to Moxy Früvous’ iconic historical ballad, Video Bargainville, “I’ve figured it out. In Video Bargainville, you’re Roger!” Thus upon reflection and a bit of inspiration from another recent conversation here in the Fediverse, I’ve finally come to another important realization: I’m not Mr. Ikari, regardless of how mysterious and interesting I may be. No. I’m Mr. Dink. Always with the latest gadget or toy in hand. Like, for instance and no particular reason whatsoever, this fuckin’ thing. This, gentle readers, is the Terrain 365 Invictus-Bali Ti. It costs $325, and it’s got a hyphen in it because it’s somehow an offshoot of Terrain 365’s largely erstwhile Invictus Series despite not appearing there when you search for the same on their website. Except obviously it’s a balisong version, and not only that but it’s one of the apparently dwindling number of EDC sized offerings in that category, coming complete with a pocket clip (a vanishingly rare phenomenon), ceramic ball bearing pivots, and a spring loaded latch. All of this, as you know, has me written all over it in six inch high letters. The Invictus-Bali is 8-1/8" long from tip to tail when it’s open not including the latch, and 4-3/4" by my measure when closed. The blade is 3-11/16" long from the ends of the handles to its point, with let’s call it 3-1/8" of usable edge in a spear point kind of profile complete with a fancy fuller and a back bevel in it. Despite as much of it as possible being made from titanium, it’s a dense little number at 130.6 grams in total or 4.61 ounces. So not, with the best will in the world, the absolute lightest and most ephemeral of EDC balisong options. (That distinction probably still belongs to the Benchmade 32 Mini Morpho, or at least so far as I am aware and able to empirically observe via the expedient of apparently doing my level best to own at least one example of every damn fool balisong knife on Earth.) So what’s so bloody weird about it, then? Neon Genesis Unobtainium Well, in order to explain that we’ll have to get into what the rest of this thing is made out of. It’s Terrain 365’s “Terravantium Dendritic Cobalt Super-Alloy,” which is something that the manufacturer makes an awful lot of noise about. Their claims about it, for instance in the blurb, are incessantly in triplicate, thus: that it’s rust proof, non-magnetic, and they go on to boast that it will “hold an edge longer than virtually any blade steel and stainless steel alloys.” Maybe says I on the first and third points, but the second one is trivially easy to verify. Verily, a magnet doesn’t stick to the stuff, whatever it’s ultimately made out of. For their part, Terrain 365 are suspiciously mum about what, exactly, goes into the secret blend of herbs and spices in their particular “Terravanium” alloy that makes it different from anyone else’s. Various dendritic cobalt alloys, or possibly the same one, have sporadically seen use in knife blades from various manufacturers over the years. Boye Knives by way of David Boye seems to be the progenitor of the concept or at the very least certainly the major contributor to whatever minimal popularity it’s got. It seems we can neither confirm nor deny whether or not the Terravantium flavor is the same stuff or is somehow appreciably different. For whatever it’s worth, Terrain 365 claim that they at least used to sell their alloy in bar stock form for others to fiddle with, but that product category on their site (linked above) is now conspicuously empty. It’s tough to find any definitive answers about the stuff online. Various punters only seem to refer to it as "dendritic cobalt steel" out of sheer force of habit. It’s not entirely clear that it contains much if any iron at all, so referring to it as “steel” is probably wrong. Nobody will admit to its full composition. There is some verbiage on how it’s supposed to work here on the Boye Knives site, for a start. The general gist of it seems to be that there are ultra hard carbides suspended more-or-less uniformly throughout a cobalt alloy matrix. It’s supposed to be those carbides sawing away at the material you’re cutting like so many tiny teeth that make all the performance happen. Thus the scuttlebutt online is that the dendritic cobalt alloys are supposed to somehow keep cutting even after your edge feels dull, and apparently it’s supposed to be the bee’s own knees for cutting cord and rope in particular. With its purported total rustproofness plus excellence at rope cutting, it seems the Invictus-Bali is angling to be the ultimate seafarer’s knife, and the fact that a balisong based stab at that idea exists is so clearly prima facie absurd that there was absolutely no way I couldn’t participate. And so, you see, here we are. Of course everyone makes the same claims about whatever the hell their knife is made out of, vis-a-vis superior edge retention, corrosion resistance, sharpenability, toughness, and if you believe the marketing department they’ll try to tell you it’ll make your more handsome and have better luck with the ladies, too. As far as the Terravantium alloy goes, it’s hard to say how much of it is bullshit. For whatever it’s worth, the factory edge doesn’t feel that sharp. It’s got a decidedly obtuse angle, probably for durability’s sake, and when I threw it at my dinkum Post-It note slicing test it peaked at 126.8 grams before ultimately crushing the note without completing the cut. But if you draw the edge against any surface rather than just press, it cuts inexplicably well. Maybe there’s something to all that suspended carbide malarkey. It’s probably misguided to regard this dendritic cobalt stuff using the same metrics as steel. It’s dead soft, for a start. Trepidatiously, I attacked it with my graded hardness file set and discovered that it succumbs to the second softest file, just 45 HRC. And yet, they claim it’ll hold an edge better than typical steel. You have to wonder about that. One thing I’m sure about, or at least I’m pretty sure about, or at minimum I can be pretty sure I’m pretty sure about is that the Invictus-Bali’s blade is shaped like that because it’s not machined but cast that way. A consistent unique property of the various dendritic cobalt alloys is that they can be moulded into shape via an investment casting process. Apparently this actually works, much unlike steel which would result in absolutely disastrous mechanical properties if anyone were dumb enough to try it. So you can dispense with all that forging, rolling, milling, and machining. Just squirt the stuff into a mould, whack two holes in it and grind the edge, and off you go! The blade’s surface finish has a distinctive textured finish you can see under high magnification, and a complete dearth of the machine marks you would expect to see on the primary bevel of any production knife. One wonders if this allowed Terrain 365 to save any cash at all in the Invictus-Bali’s production, and if so why they didn’t see quite clear to passing any of those savings on to the buyer. Bali Bebop The Invictus-Bali puts on quite a display convincing you it’s an ultra premium knife, which you’d damn well expect it to thanks to it also arriving at such an eye-watering price. It’s extremely solid feeling in the hand and covered in tiny fine details like the jimping in the ears on the blade, plus matching patches of it on its titanium handle spacers. It’s so refined that it almost feels like one of those knives that’s too nice to use. Perhaps it’s just as well, then, that when you look closely you’ll notice that the grooves in the latch head are machined crooked. Thanks a lot, guys. If I were a more vindictive kind of bird I might complain to the manufacturer about this. But do you know what? I’m almost glad the Invictus-Bali has at least one wart on it, because otherwise I’d never use it and thus I’d never get the chance over the upcoming weeks to determine whether or not Terrain 365’s intrepid claims about its edge retention were just so many fiddlesticks. The Invictus-Bali isn’t a Zen pin knife, but rather has a traditional dual kicker pin design. I’m assuming the pins are titanium just like the handles are, since they appear to be pressed through and not cast out of the same dendritic stuff as the rest of the blade. My suspicions are furthered by the noise it makes on the rebound, or rather lack thereof, which would be readily explained by the contact bits being titanium-on-titanium. We’ve covered several highly bombastic and noisy knives here before. I’m not entirely sure which one is the current frontrunner between the Kershaw Moonsault or the Revo Nexus, but it’s got to be one or the other of them. The Invictus-Bali, conversely, is easily the quietest balisong I’ve ever flipped. There’s a titanium pocket clip on here which Terrain 365 bill as billet machined. It’s held on with a single screw and recessed into a pocket on that one handle scale which is absent on the other side, so it’s not reversible. It’s also on the wrong side of the knife as usual, gods damn it, and there isn’t a single thing you can do about it. It’s kind of football shaped in cross section (that’d be an American football, not the other kind) and also feels distressingly thin. I’m not sure if it’s actually thin enough to be a problem or not, but if you’re one of those oiks who insists on dangling your knife backwards off of your belt you’ll certainly want to rethink that strategy with this one. The Invictus-Bali’s most immediate comparison is obvious. It’s a little bigger than a Model 32 but certainly much smaller than practically everything else in the category. I can’t find anything to gripe about with the action. Uncanny, I think, is the best descriptor of the Invictus-Bali’s mechanics. Despite their short stature the handles carry a significant amount of inertia and thanks to the ceramic ball bearings inside the pivots are absolutely, unquestionably, unerringly without any wiggle whatsoever. There is no tap and not a single molecule of blade play. Even if you shake the whole knife vigorously and regardless of whether it’s open or closed, the only thing that rattles is the tiny torsion spring for the latch, where it’s slotted into its equally minuscule mounting hole. The latch is skeletonized and, yes, spring loaded. It’s under spring motive all the time, so after you squeeze the handles and it boings out into its open position it’ll stay there, and the spring prevents it from clashing with the handles or blade. For some reason Terrain 365 play up the Invictus-Bali’s nonmagnetism heavily. I have no idea why that would be a compelling feature for anyone on their knife, or what use case such a thing could possibly benefit. But it’s true — as far as I can tell, the only thing that even vaguely responds to a magnet is the latch spring itself. The blade is of course made out of that funky Terravanium stuff, the scales and handle spacers are titanium, and Terrain claims that the Invictus-Bali has “titanium hardware” as well. I imagine they’re talking about the latch and clip, because the screws certainly aren’t. But in dedication to the theme, whatever steel they’re made out of seems to be a high nickel or chromium content one, probably for anti-corrosion purposes, and thus they’re nonmagnetic as well. Terrain 365’s maker’s mark lives on one side of the blade and the reverse is unadorned. Aria: The Disassembly There’s not a whole heck of a lot inside the Invictus-Bali. It’s held together with a grand total of six screws, two of which are the pivots. For $325 you might wish for a longer bill of materials, but that’s your lot. In fact, after taking apart the latch side handle I concluded I’d already seen all there is to see, and didn’t even bother with the other side. I had an ulterior motive for picking that handle, of course. I wanted to see if one could cheat their way into a clip reversal, by way of swapping the upper and lower scales on that side. Well, you can’t. The handle spacer is retained by a pin which sinks into a recess in each scale. And it’s offset, so you can’t flip the scales over and still be able to put it back in the right way 'round. There’s no mechanical reason for that other than sheer obstreperousness. Foiled again. Eternal is my wrath, and wicked shall be my vengeance. Well, okay. Maybe not the second part. They’ve dealt with the obvious conflict of materials with the ceramic bearings riding on soft titanium by sticking a thin shim washer in between. I presume this is also some type of hyper corrosion resistant stainless alloy, because it too does not respond to a magnet. The Inevitable Conclusion It’s tough to tell just who, exactly, Terrain’s marketing is trying to aim this thing at. Is it salty fishermen, or tactical operators, or the flannel and beard wax crowd? Half of the blurb is talking about shedding unnecessary weight, which combined with the tree makes you think they’re expecting you to go backpacking with it. But the other half of it goes on to mention “those who demand reliability from every component of their knife,” so who the hell knows? It’s just possible, at the outside, that if it’s half as good as the very select band of weirdos are saying then some day this dendritic cobalt stuff will become the next big thing in cutlery. But it also hasn’t set the world on fire yet, and maybe that says everything about it we need to know. There’s no denying that it’s damn strange, though. So I’m here for it.
(This takes approx. five minutes to read.) The global publishing platform Substack is generating revenue from newsletters that promote virulent Nazi ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism, a Guardian investigation has found. The platform, which says it has about 50 million users worldwide, allows members of the public to self-publish articles and charge for premium content. Substack takes about 10% of the revenue the newsletters make. About 5 million people pay for access to newsletters on its platform. Among them are newsletters that openly promote racist ideology. One, called NatSocToday, which has 2,800 subscribers, charges $80 — about £60 — for an annual subscription, though most of its posts are available for free. NatSocToday is understood to be run by a far-right activist based in the U.S. and features a swastika, a symbol appropriated by the Nazi party in the 1920s to symbolise white supremacy, as its profile picture. The full name of the Nazi party was the [so-called] National Socialist German Workers’ party. One of its recent posts suggests the Jewish race was responsible for the second world war and describes Adolf Hitler as “one of the greatest men of all time”. Within two hours of subscribing to NatSocToday for the purposes of this investigation, the Substack algorithm directed the Guardian’s account to 21 other profiles featuring similar content. Some of these accounts regularly share and like each other’s posts. Many have thousands of followers. Erika Drexler, a self-styled “NS [national socialist] activist” with 241 subscribers, shared posts describing Hitler as her hero and the “most overqualified leader ever”. The account is also believed to be U.S.-based and charges $150 for an annual subscription. Ava Wolfe, who has 3,000 subscribers and calls herself an “archivist of articles and videos about history in particular WW2” appears to be based in the UK. She has a profile which features [anticommunist] imagery. An annual subscription to her Substack costs £38. Much of the content Wolfe posts engages in Holocaust denial. About 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, but she falsely claimed earlier this month that doctors had found that “no one was deliberately murdered by Germans” and that “death was from disease and starvation only”. It is unclear if Drexler and Wolfe have used their real identities to post their material, or if they write under pseudonyms. (Given that ‘Drexler’ could refer to Anton Drexler, and ‘Wolfe’ could refer to somebody’s nickname for an Axis dictator, these are very probably pseudonyms.) Another account, entitled Third Reich Literature Archive, with 2,100 subscribers, shared postcards purporting to be from a [Fascist] propaganda rally in Nuremberg in 1938, the year before [the Third Reich and the Slovak Republic invaded Poland]. It also charges $80 a year for a premium subscription. The Guardian account was shown separate posts that promoted conspiracy theories about Jewish power and influence and suggested antisemitism was a myth. The algorithm also promoted other extremist content, including newsletters relating to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory — the suggestion that there is a plot to replace white Europeans with people from other races. There has been a sharp increase in antisemitism and Islamophobia since the beginning of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023. Two men were killed when a synagogue in Heaton Park, Manchester, was attacked on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur in October last year. Fifteen people were shot dead as they celebrated Hanukah at Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December. The chief executive of the Antisemitism Policy Trust, Danny Stone, said harmful online content often inspired real-life attacks. As examples, Stone cited the racially motivated murder of 10 African Americans in Buffalo, New York, in 2022; a synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018 in which 11 people were killed and the 2017 attack on a mosque in Finsbury Park, north London, in which one person was killed and several injured. “People can be, and are, inspired by online harm to cause harm in real world,” he said. “The terrorist who attacked Heaton Park synagogue didn’t wake up one morning and decide to kill Jews; he will have been radicalised. “Algorithmic prompts and the amplification of harmful materials is extremely serious. The Online Safety Act was supposed to address the illegal content but very little is being done about so-called legal but harmful content.” Stone also expressed concern about online disinformation about the Holocaust. “There has been a drop in attendance and take-up of Holocaust memorial events,” he said. “We know that knowledge already was frighteningly low. “When you have Holocaust denial, inversion or comparisons, you are seeing, across the board, a diminishing of the memory of the Holocaust. As we are further away, with fewer survivors, the facts can get lost. “We have to win the battle for that narrative. This online content does extreme damage because if we fail to learn the lessons of that past, we’re doomed to repeat it.” A spokesperson for the Holocaust Educational Trust said: “Material like this that spreads conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial and which praises Hitler and the Nazis is not new but clearly its reach is increasing. The idea that Substack profits from this hateful material and allows for it to be boosted via their algorithm is a disgrace. “We are acutely aware of the passage of time which moves us further away from the events of the Holocaust, and eyewitnesses to this history are becoming fewer in number. At the same time, antisemitism is increasing — this extremism needs to be exposed, challenged and stamped out.” Joani Reid, the Labour chair of the all party parliamentary group against antisemitism, said she planned to write to Substack and Ofcom to ask them to address the Guardian’s findings. She said [that] antisemitism was “spreading with impunity” and getting worse. “We need to hold these tech companies to account because there are real-life consequences to this,” she said. “Jewish people have been complaining about this for years — saying this violence online is going to end in violence offline and that is exactly what has happened. We need to start taking this stuff far more seriously.” Substack was contacted for comment but did not respond. Launched in 2017, the platform has previously faced criticism for hosting newsletters that promote extremist views. Its co-founder, Hamish McKenzie addressed its decision to host [neofascist] content in one of his own posts on the site in 2023. “I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either — we wish no one held those views,” he wrote. “But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetising publications) makes the problem go away — in fact, it makes it worse. “We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.” (Apparently, this dullard has never seen David Irving repeatedly frustrate Shoah survivors.) McKenzie also said the site’s content guidelines “do have narrowly defined proscriptions, including a clause that prohibits incitements to violence”. I just want to add that Substack is most likely getting a good deal of dosh from hosting Herzlian newsletters, too. The uptick in alt-right content after Elon Musk acquired Twitter did little, if anything, to drive out its own Herzlian users.
Photograph Source: Caassemblyedits – CC BY-SA 4.0 California Governor Gavin Newsom has made headlines this winter by vowing to defeat a proposal for a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires in the state. Many national polls now rank him as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, but aligning with the ultra-wealthy is not auspicious for wooing the party’s voters. Last year, Reuters/Ipsos pollsters reported that a whopping 86 percent of Democrats said “changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority.” Newsom has drawn widespread praise for waging an aggressive war of words against President Trump. But few people outside of California know much about the governor’s actual record. Many Democratic voters will be turned off to learn that his fervent opposition to a billionaire tax is part of an overall political approach that has trended more and more corporate-friendly. A year ago, Newsom sent about 100 leaders of California-based companies a prepaid cell phone “programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself,” Politico reported. One note to the CEO of a big tech corporation said, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away.” While pandering to business elites, Newsom has slashed budgets to assist the poor and near-poor with healthcare, housing and food – in a state where 7 million live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are the highest in the nation. The latest Newsom budget, released last month, continues his trajectory away from social compassion. “The governor’s 2026-27 spending plan balances the budget by dodging the harsh realities of the Republican megabill, H.R. 1, and maintains state cuts to vital public supports, like Medi-Cal, enacted as part of the current-year budget,” the California Budget & Policy Center pointed out. “Governor Newsom’s reluctance to propose meaningful revenue solutions to help blunt the harm of federal cuts undermines his posture to counter the Trump administration.” The statement said that the proposed budget “will leave many Californians without food assistance and healthcare coverage.” So far, key facts about Newsom’s policy priorities have scarcely gone beyond California’s borders. “National media have focused on Newsom as a personality and potential White House candidate and have almost completely ignored what he has and has not done as a governor,” said columnist Dan Walters, whose five decades covering California politics included 33 years at The Sacramento Bee. “It’s a perpetual failing of national political media to be more interested in image and gamesmanship rather than actual actions, the sizzle rather than the steak, and Newsom is very adept at exploiting that tendency.” Walters told me that Newsom “has generally avoided direct conflicts with his fellow millionaires, such as discouraging tax increases, and has danced between corporations and labor unions on bread-and-butter issues such as minimum wages. He’s also quietly moved away from environmental issues, most notably shifting from condemnation of the oil industry for price gouging and pollution to encouraging the industry to increase production and keep refineries operating.” Newsom angered climate activists last fall by signing his bill to open up thousands of new oil wells. Noting that “Newsom just championed a plan to dramatically expand oil drilling in California,” the Oil and Gas Action Network said that he “can’t claim climate leadership while giving Big Oil what it wants.” Third Act, founded by Bill McKibben, responded by denouncing “Newsom’s Big Oil backslide” and accused the governor of “backtracking on key climate and community health commitments.” Great efforts to curb the ubiquitous toxic impacts of PFAS “forever chemicals” hit a wall in October when Newsom vetoed legislation to ban them in such consumer items as cookware, dental floss and cleaning products. “This bill had huge support from both within the state and beyond, and yet, apparently, the governor was interested only in the one sector opposing it – the cookware industry,” said Clean Water Action policy director Andria Ventura. The organization put the veto in context, observing that “the governor seems determined to move away from his pro-environment past.” As with the environment, so with workers’ rights. In 2023, Newsom vetoed a bill to provide unemployment compensation to workers on strike. In 2024, he vetoed a bill to help protect farmworkers from violations of heat safety regulations, while temperatures in California’s agricultural fields spike above 110 degrees. The latest Gallup polling of the party’s rank-and-file indicates a wide ideological gap between Newsom and the party’s base. Fifty-nine percent of Democrats described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal,” while 32 percent said “moderate,” and 8 percent “conservative” or “very conservative.” And the trendline is striking: Democrats’ self-identification as liberal or very liberal has doubled in the last two decades. It might be tempting to believe that Newsom’s services to corporatism and the rich are less important than the possibility that he would be an adept Democratic nominee to defeat the GOP ticket in 2028. But pursuit of such “moderate” politics was harmful to Democratic turnout in 2016 and 2024. Newsom’s current political attitude is similar to the timeworn approach that undermined the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. Newsom says he’s eager to pitch a big tent for the Democratic Party, declaring that he welcomes the likes of former U.S. senator Joe Manchin as well as New York’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani in the fold. “I want it to be the Manchin to Mamdani party,” Newsom said in November. “I want it to be inclusive.” He did not mention that during the Biden presidency, while in the Senate, Manchin wrecked prospects for transformational Build Back Better legislation and other measures that would have benefitted tens of millions of Americans. It’s telling that Newsom and former president Bill Clinton, a longtime backer, have voiced profuse mutual admiration. Interviewed after he came off the stage with the former president in a joint appearance at a Clinton Global Initiative event a few months ago, Newsom praised “the ability to reach across the aisle.” That formula is a throwback to what propelled Clinton into the presidency with a pledge to find common ground, only to toss the working class overboard from the Oval Office. The disastrous results – made possible by Clinton’s reaching “across the aisle” – included passage of the NAFTA trade pact, the “welfare reform” law that harshly undermined poor women with children, the mass-incarceration-boosting crime bill and the media monopoly-enabling Telecommunications Act. Launching his podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom” a year ago, the host began warmly showcasing extremist bigots by featuring Charlie Kirk as his first guest. When Kirk was assassinated in September, Newsom lavished praise on him, tweeting: “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” From the governor’s office, Newsom issued a statement that explained: “I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate.” The praise raises the question: how far right would someone need to be before no longer meriting Newsom’s admiration for “passion”? Clearly, Kirk wasn’t far right enough to be disqualified. He only said things like asserting that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” proclaiming “we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s” and castigating Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and others as affirmative-action hires: “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.” Newsom’s show has continued to give a friendly platform to such extreme right-wingers as Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro. In effect, Newsom is engaged in a podcast form of triangulation – by turns validating and disputing his guests’ attacks on progressivism. On no issue is Newsom more out of step with the Democratic electorate than U.S. support for Israel. Last summer, a Quinnipiac survey found that 77 percent of Democrats believed Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza – but last month Newsom said the opposite, declaring “I don’t agree with that notion.” Like most Democratic officeholders who combine their denial of genocide with support for the nonstop weapons flow to Israel, Newsom lays blame narrowly on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that he is “crystal clear about my love for Israel and condemnation of Bibi.” The same Quinnipiac poll found that fully three-quarters of Democrats were opposed to sending further military aid to Israel, a position that Newsom refuses to take at the same time that he dodges questions about the right-leaning Israel lobby group AIPAC. Newsom can expect a direct challenge from another California Democrat likely to be on debate stages when the party’s presidential campaigns get underway next year. Congressman Ro Khanna said of Newsom in January: “He doesn’t want to offend the AIPAC donors. He doesn’t want to offend the donor class. And that explains his position on going to give Netanyahu a blank check right after October 7, on not being willing to ever call out the funding we were giving, and not willing to call out that clearly it was a genocide, and then not willing to challenge the billionaire class on tax policy.” For anyone who wants a truly progressive Democratic Party, Gavin Newsom is bad news. The post The Actual Gavin Newsom Is Much Worse Than You Think appeared first on CounterPunch.org. From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed
The conversation around energy use in the United States has become … electric. Everyone from President Donald Trump to the Today show has been talking about the surging demand for, and rising costs of, electrons. Many people worry that utilities won’t be able to produce enough power. But a report released today argues that the better question is: Can we use what utilities already produce more efficiently in order to absorb the coming surge? “A lot of folks have been looking at this from the perspective of, do we need more supply-side resources and gas plants?,” said Mike Specian, utilities manager with the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE, who wrote the report. “We found that there is a lack of discussion of demand-side measures.” When Specian dug into the data, he discovered that implementing energy efficiency measures and shifting electricity usage to lower-demand times are two of the fastest and cheapest ways of meeting growing thirst for electricity. These moves could help meet much, if not all, of the nation’s projected load growth. Moreover, they would cost only half — or less — what building out new infrastructure would, while avoiding the emissions those operations would bring. But Specian also found that governments could be doing more to incentivize utilities to take advantage of these demand-side gains. “Energy efficiency and flexibility are still a massive untapped resource in the U.S.,” he said. “As we get to higher levels of electrification, it’s going to become increasingly important.” The report estimated that, by 2040, utility-driven efficiency programs could cut usage by about 8 percent, or around 70 gigawatts, and that making those cuts currently costs around $20.70 per megawatt. The cheapest gas-fired power plants now start at about $45 per kilowatt generated. While the cost of load shifting is harder to pin down, the report estimates moving electricity use away from peak hours — often through time-of-use pricing, smart devices, or utility controls — to times when the grid is less strained and power is cheaper could save another 60 to 200 gigawatts of power by 2035. That alone would far outweigh even the most aggressive near-term projections for data center capacity growth. Vijay Modi, director of the Quadracci Sustainable Engineering Laboratory Columbia University, agrees that energy efficiency is critical, but isn’t sure how many easy savings are left to be had. He also believes that governments at every level — rather than utilities — are best suited to incentivize that work. He sees greater potential in balancing loads to ease peak demand. “This is a big concern,” he said, explaining that when peak load goes up, it could require upgrading substations, transformers, power lines, and a host of other distribution equipment. That raises costs and rates. Utilities, he added, are well positioned to solve this because they have the data needed to effectively shift usage and are already taking steps in that direction by investing in load management software, installing battery storage and generating electricity closer to end users with things like small-scale renewable energy. “It defers some of the heavy investment,” said Modi. “In turn, the customer also benefits.” Specian says that one reason utilities tend to focus on the supply side of the equation is that they can often make more money that way. Building infrastructure is considered a capital investment, and utilities can pass that cost on to customers, plus an additional rate of return, or premium, which is typically around 10 percent. Energy efficiency programs, however, are generally considered an operating expense, which aren’t eligible for a rate of return. This setup, he said, motivates utilities to build new infrastructure rather than conserve energy, even if the latter presents a more affordable option for ratepayers. “Our incentives aren’t properly lined up,” said Specian. State legislators and regulators can address this, he said, by implementing Energy Efficiency Resource Standards or performance-based regulation. “Decoupling,” which separates a company’s revenue from the amount of electricity it sells, is another tactic that many states are adopting. Joe Daniel, who runs the carbon-free electricity team at the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute, has also been watching a model known as “fuel cost sharing,” which allows utilities and ratepayers to share any savings or added costs rather than passing them on entirely to customers. “It’s a policy that seems to make logical sense,” he said. A handful of states across the political spectrum have adopted the approach and, of the people he’s spoken with or heard from, Daniel said “every consumer advocate, every state public commissioner, likes it.” The Edison Electric Institute, which represents all of the country’s investor-owned electric companies, told Grist that, regardless of regulation, utilities are making progress in these areas. “EEI’s member companies operate robust energy-efficiency programs that save enough electricity each year to power nearly 30 million U.S. homes,” the organization said in a statement. “Electric companies continue to work closely with customers who are interested in demand response, energy efficiency, and other load-flexibility programs that can reduce their energy use and costs.” Because infrastructure changes happen on long timelines, it’s critical to keep pushing on these levers now, said Ben Finkelor, executive director of the Energy and Efficiency Institute at the University of California, Davis. “The planning is 10 years out,” he said, adding that preparing today could save billions in the future. “Perhaps we can avoid building those baseload assets.” Specian hopes his report reaches legislatures, regulators and consumers alike. Whoever reads it, he says the message should be clear. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The U.S. doesn’t need to generate as much new electricity as you think on Feb 4, 2026. From Grist via This RSS Feed.
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Held between January 26 and 27 at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center and called Generation Truth, the second international conference on combating antisemitism was a picture of cracking contradictions. Organised by Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, it featured speakers from various far-right groups, many European, and saw Australia’s former Prime Minister and Pentecostal believer, Scott Morrison, address attendees. (The man is obviously touting for gigs.) The attendance list caused problems prior to last year’s inaugural conference, not least because it included speakers from parties with memberships boasting neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. If this was Chikli’s effort at humour, violating that injunction that Zionism and Nazism shall never be linked, few were laughing. Notable international figures such as the UK’s chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, and Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein, cancelled their participation on realising the unsavoury lineup. ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt also withdrew from the conference “in light of some of the recently announced participants.” By 2026, Chikli had learned a few lessons sufficiently to see appearances by Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Jewish Federations of North America President and CEO Eric Fingerhut accede to appearing. Not that those lessons were deep ones. The minister still believed that far-right politicians, notably from Europe, had a role to play in combating antisemitism, much to the consternation of Jewish community leaders and advocates in the diaspora. “We just have a disagreement,” he put it dismissively in an interview with The Times of Israel. This particular approach involves a calculus on how Islamophobic your counterparts are relative to antisemitism. A rash of antisemitism can well be tolerated as long as the Prophet remains the arch enemy. “The real threat to European Jewry is radical Islam, not the political right,” comes Chikli’s confirmation. The intention was to “form a broad camp to fight together the lethal antisemitism that is coming from within. That’s not to say we can ignore the far left or the far right, but this is the most lethal form of antisemitism that we face.” Within what is not exactly clear, but presumably it’s the milieu that tolerates nuisance types who think Israeli policies towards Palestinian self-determination and suffering deserve condemnation, including the atrocities, dispossession and ethnic cleansing that has accompanied them. As the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs explained in a media release on January 22, this grievance was antisemitism in progressive guise, “which adopts the language of human rights while in practice working to delegitimize Israel, exclude Jews from the public sphere, and legitimize boycotts.” These are the very policies that have been found to be genocidal by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory last September, and deemed such by Amnesty International in December 2024 and the International Association of Genocide Scholars in August 2025. Such claims, filed by South Africa, are currently being reviewed by the International Court of Justice. It would be absurd to expect that indignant protests against such conduct would not follow, be it in the Palestinian diaspora and those sharing solidarity with its cause. But as such protests are seen to be antisemitic for attacking Israel, the argument comes full circle: those holding placards and crying through megaphones are the ones accused of encouraging acts of hatred to Jews in toto, not the diminishing stocks of Israel’s reputation before the mountainous pile of Gazan corpses. In hate, there are the pure and the soiled, with holy writ dispensing with the ambiguities. The opening address further showed how muddled Chikli is. “This conference seeks to banish political correctness, call the child [antisemitism] by its true name, and mobilise all forces in the ideological and physical struggle against the heirs of the modern Nazis,” he stated in his welcome address. “This is not just the struggle of the Jewish people. This is the struggle of the free world against the imperialism and tyranny of radical Islam.” Among the far-right figures in evidence was Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson. Willie Silberstein, as chair of Sweden’s Committee Against Anti-Semitism, told the BBC in 2022 when commenting on the rise of the SD that his committee had “a problem with parties that were founded by Nazis. That is not an opinion – that is a piece of fact.” The fact that Åkesson had thought it prudent to suspend the party’s entire youth wing in 2015 over its links to the far right gave Silberstein room to wonder: “If one party is so full of people that need to be excluded because they are Nazis – it says something about that party.” There was Brazilian Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, father of former President Javier Bolsonaro and self-declared contender for the Brazilian presidency. Rather than acknowledging the throbbing authoritarian lineage through his father, he promoted the importance of removing his country’s current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a man who had likened Israel’s war in Gaza to the Holocaust. Bolsonaro was judicious in referring to the importance of “Judeo-Christian values” and calling Brazil a “Christian, Jewish country”. Were he to be elected, he would move Brazil’s embassy to Jerusalem. Sam van Rooy and Geert Wilders, parliamentarians from both Belgium and the Netherlands, were also there to bulk the show. Hungary’s representative, EU Affairs Minister János Bóka, attended in premier Viktor Orbán’s stead, a figure so finely illustrative of the dangerous nonsense that afflicts Israel’s courting of European nationalism that ran, and to a large extent still runs, on the intoxicating fumes of antisemitic mania. Orbán’s verbal lashings of the Hungarian Jewish financier George Soros, whom he accused of wishing to settle millions of “illegal immigrants” on Europe’s chaste, Christian soil, are hard to discount. The Soros-founded Central European University wasn’t spared either. By way of contrast, one of Hungary’s rather sketchy historical figures, Miklós Horthy, an important if erratic figure in sending Jews to extermination camps during the Second World War, has received praise and admiration for being a capital fellow, a true statesman. Being in league with the Christers and blood-and-soil brigade is a confounding situation especially seeing how troubled they have been by Jewry. But when one considers that the likes of Chikli, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itama Ben-Gvir are themselves ethnonationalist and believers of the final war of Gog and Magog, those gathering for Armageddon in the Holy Land are going to be having a most interesting if confrontational encounter when the final reckoning is reached. Armageddon is intended to be a bigoted affair. The post Dancing with European Nationalism: Israel’s Generation Truth Antisemitism Conference appeared first on CounterPunch.org. From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed
After two years of denial and deception, the Israel Defense Forces acknowledged Wednesday for the first time that over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, while continuing to deny the famine Israel caused by blocking humanitarian aid from entering the obliterated strip. Israeli media including the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, and others reported that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) accepts the accuracy of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s (GHM) death toll, which currently stands at least 71,667, with more than 171,000 others wounded and 9,500 missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed buildings. “How many years did we spend screaming, with checked and re-checked figures, lists showing names and ID numbers, being told the numbers were completely fanciful despite rigorous, transparent verification, and now the IDF quietly accepts that they were correct all along,” Beirut-based journalist Séamus Malekafzali said on X in response to the IDF admission. Experts—including the authors of multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—assert that the actual death toll in Gaza is much higher than reported. Last June, a study published in Nature reported 84,000 deaths in Gaza. Others say the toll could be even higher, with one Economist study estimating between 77,000-109,000 Gazans killed by Israeli forces. “We should not care what the IDF accepts or not—they perpetrated the genocide,” said Jake Romm, the US representative for the Hind Rajab Foundation, which tracks suspected IDF war criminals and is named after a 5-year-old Palestinian girl massacred along with relatives and rescue workers by Israeli occupation forces on January 29, 2024. “Their communications are in service of that project.” “This is, in any event, an admission that will only be used to discredit the real, much higher death toll as the scale of the atrocity becomes known,” Romm added. Israeli academic Ori Goldberg was also skeptical of the IDF’s admission, asserting on X: “‘Accepts’ means that even the vast network of lies no longer holds. If the IDF ‘accepts’ 70,000, it has killed innumerably more.” While the IDF accepted GHM’s death toll, it argued that the famine in Gaza—which officially lasted from August-December 2025, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the standard international framework for classifying food insecurity and malnutrition—did not happen. GHM says at least 453 Palestinians, including 150 children, have died of malnutrition in Gaza since October 2023. The IDF contends that the figure is a mix of lies and misleading reporting about people who had preexisting health conditions before they starved to death. However, famine experts contend that Israel orchestrated a carefully planned campaign of mass starvation in Gaza. Throughout the war, Israeli leaders, their supporters abroad, and mainstream US media attempted to discredit GHM casualty figures by casting aspersions upon the “Hamas-run” ministry. This, despite Israeli military intelligence deeming the figures accurate and historical confirmations of their reliability. “The phrase *Hamas* Health Ministry was used as a slur for years to signal unreliability, even though it was pointed out again and again that its numbers had always held up,” noted journalist Jasper Nathaniel, adding sardonically that “I’m sure the ‘Pallywood’ crowd will be rushing to apologize today.” The International Center for Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) said on social media that “every media outlet that cast doubt over these figures with dogwhistling phrases like ‘Hamas-run MoH’ is complicit in these killings.” “In truth, the 71,000+ figure is conservative,” ICJP added. “Palestinian bodies are buried under the rubble and can’t be counted and many more have died from malnutrition due to Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians. Different tools, same outcome: Israeli genocide of Palestinians.” In the United States—which has supported Israel’s annihilation of Gaza with tens of billions of dollars in armed aid and diplomatic cover including vetoes of numerous United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions during both the Biden and Trump administrations—the House of Representatives approved a bipartisan amendment in June 2024 that banned US officials from using State Department resources to cite GHM casualty figures. The amendment’s lead sponsor, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.)—whose all-time top campaign contributor is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—contended that “at the end of the day, the Gaza Ministry of Health is the Hamas Ministry of Health." Former President Joe Biden faced genocide denial accusations for casting aspersions upon GHM reports. President Donald Trump has also said he does not believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. A senior IDF official told the Times of Israel that the military is in the process of determining how many of the Gaza dead were members of Hamas or other militant groups. While the Israeli government has claimed a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio in Gaza, classified IDF intelligence data obtained last year during an investigation by Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine and Local Call and Guardian senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison revealed that 5 in 6 Palestinians—or 83%—killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the US-backed war were civilians. Former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi—who led the IDF through most of the war—acknowledged after retiring last year that “over 10%” of Gaza’s population, or about 220,000 Palestinians, had been killed or wounded as of September 2025. “This is not a gentle war," Halevi said at the time, “we took the gloves off from the first minute.” Following the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, the IDF dramatically loosened its rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking. The IDF’s use of massive ordnance, including US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs capable of leveling entire city blocks, and utilization of artificial intelligence to select targets has resulted in staggering numbers of civilian deaths, including numerous instances of dozens or more people being massacred in single strikes. Through it all, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli political and military leaders claimed that the IDF, “the most moral army in the world,” went to great lengths to avoid harming civilians. While Israeli leaders scoffed at war crimes allegations, South Africa filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The ICJ, a UN body, subsequently issued multiple provisional orders for Israel to prevent genocidal acts. Israel has been accused of ignoring these orders, and last September a panel of UN experts concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Later, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. The killing isn’t over. Since a tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect last October 10, Israeli forces have killed more than 500 Palestinians in over 1,200 violations of the truce. Palestinians—mostly children and infants—are also still dying of exposure to cold weather as Israel continues to restrict the entry of aid into Gaza. “They said Palestinians were exaggerating. Lying. Propagandists,” Independent UK Member of Parliament Shockat Adam said on X Thursday. “Now, even the IDF accepts 70,000+ killed in Gaza. The real figure is much higher. This is a ‘ceasefire’ in name only. The slaughter goes on.” From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain The so-called ceasefire in Gaza was a cynical ruse to secure Israeli captives while giving Israel free rein to starve, murder and assassinate at will. The world was duped into swallowing yet another Zionist deception, orchestrated by Israel-first Americans, financed with U.S. taxpayer dollars, and drenched in Palestinian blood. Since the ceasefire was announced, north of 1700 have been murdered or injured by Israeli fire. In one day this past week, Israel murdered 11 Palestinians in Gaza, including three journalists and children. By the numbers, this ceasefire has been a misnomer amounting to an average of 17 Palestinians killed or injured every day over the past 100 days. Of those, and according to UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, “More than 100 children have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire . . . one girl or boy killed every day.” Some were shot or bombed. Babies died more quietly, but no less violently, freezing to death. Infants die of hypothermia not because winter is unforgiving, but because Israel has destroyed their homes and continues to block UNRWA from bringing safe shelters, winterized tents, and adequate housing into Gaza. Infants perish from cold in Gaza not as a result of a natural disaster; they are victims of an evil Israeli policy. Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump remain sanguine, insisting the ceasefire has “held” since early October 2025. One can ask, would they make the same assertions if only ten Israeli Jewish children had been killed? The answer is self-evident. This is not bias or ignorance. It is racism: a blood-soaked moral order, Western and Jewish supremacist calculus that renders Palestinian babies disposable, while the life of Jewish children is sacrosanct. At the center of this deception is the so-called yellow line, an ill-defined military boundary marking Israeli partial withdrawal as part of phase one of the supposed ceasefire. The yellow line has become a trap, a moving frontier. Israel shifts it in the middle of the night, and mow Palestinians at sunlight, without oversite, and without warning. Palestinians believed the ceasefire meant a chance to return to inspect their damaged homes, recover belongings, or forage for wild plants to feed their children. Instead, they find their homes erased, not in battle, but methodically by an enemy insatiable with hate. Parallel to this, aid is not allowed to enter Gaza in accordance with the “ceasefire” agreement. The siege has not been lifted. It was refined. Convoys are delayed. Medical equipment is rejected over technicalities. Fuel, shelter materials, and prefabricated housing are blocked or restricted. Hospitals go without medicine not because of unavailability, but because Israel has revoked the licenses of 37 aid organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, preventing them from sending staff or bringing aid in. Babies freezing to death while UNRWA is barred from delivering safe shelters is not a humanitarian failure, it is intentional murder. As Israel’s atrocities in Gaza continue, as Israeli Jewish mobs terrorize Palestinian villages, torch homes, and assault civilians with near-total impunity, and as new Jewish-only colonies expand across the occupied West Bank, Israel is escalating regional tensions with calculated intent. A familiar display of chicanery, provokes a wider confrontation to shift headlines, play victim, and drown culpability in the noise of a larger war. To that end, Israel is openly goading a confrontation with Iran in a bid to draw the United States into another made-for-Israel war. A war to serve Israeli political interests only, while exacting catastrophic costs on the region, as well as on American lives and resources. The United States remains Israel’s main enabler for laundering war crimes through diplomatic language. Europe’s wishy-washy position is not less cynical. In late 2025, the European Union debated punitive measures, including suspension of the preferential trade Agreement over Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law. Those measures were shelved the moment the fictional ceasefire was announced. By halting accountability in exchange of a supposed ceasefire, the EU granted Israel another pass. Israel understood the message, adjusted its tactics and the violations intensified. Demolitions continued, aid strangled and children died not only by bullets, or bombs, but freezing to death. Now we hear echoes of Trump’s archetypal diplomatic hubbub, cynically sold to the world as a “Board of Peace.” A “Board” that includes among its membership an indicted war criminal, who skips Davos’ signing to evade arrest and the ICC, is not peace, it’s a farce at the highest level. A “Board” originally created for Gaza has evolved into a billion-dollar club with lifetime memberships, governed by a founding charter that cannot even bring itself to mention Gaza, Palestine, or any credible path to self-determination. At the launch of his “Board,” Trump chose not to address the Israeli murder of more than 470 Palestinians or the babies freezing to death. Instead, he dwelled on his fixation with recovering the body of an Israeli soldier and on disarming the occupied. If this inauguration speech is any indication, the “Board of Peace” will be nothing but a performative shell, not a pathway to human justice. What emerges, in reality, is something closer to a Jared Kushner real-estate venture run by a self-appointed dictator with no mandate and answerable to no one. And where Chapter VI Article 6 grants the Board “… to enter into contracts, acquire and dispose of immovable and movable property, … receive and disburse private and public funds…” Palestinians do not need another peace circus, nor shark billionaires who view Gaza through the prism of a real-estate opportunity rather than a people. There can be no “peace” that erases Palestinian agency while entrenching Israeli criminal impunity. What Palestinians demand is self-determination and the right to live in a secure, sovereign state of their own. Anything less is not peace, it’s an international management of subjugation and oppression. Gaza does not need another phase or “Board.” Gaza needs legal redress for an Israeli system of cruelty. It must be granted unimpeded ingress and egress by land, sea, and air. Gaza must not be condemned to survive as a managed humanitarian dependency, rationed by aid and policed by donors. The international community must reclaim the primacy of international law by allowing the International Criminal Court to prosecute indicted Israeli political and military leaders for war crimes and genocide— without American coercion, without Western exceptionalism, and without the moral fraud of double standards. A ceasefire that leaves infants freezing to death because Israel continues to block the entry of weather shelters is not peace. A “Board” that grants itself the authority to “acquire and dispose of … property,” while Israel violates agreements in Gaza and Jewish mobs terrorize communities in the West Bank, is a new phase in the normalization of mass dispossession and genocide. The post Gaza’s “Board of Peace”: A Circus to Normalize a New Phase of Mass Dispossession and Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org. From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed
I hate my insurance company. They unironically believe: The myth of consent: Doctor: I consent (it’s time to up your hormones!) Me: I consent Insurance: isn’t there someone you forgot to ask? (How dare you try to use insurance? Didn’t you know you’re supposed to just pay premiums and then never get healthcare so that we can get filthy rich?) Luigi take the wheel
Keila Szpaller*Daily Montanan* The Commissioner of Securities and Insurance Office helped stop a fraudulent multimillion dollar billing scheme by agents preying on Native Americans on reservations, Commissioner James Brown announced this month. In cooperation with health insurers, tribal communities and law enforcement, the investigation secured more than $23.3 million of fraudulently incurred claims through the Affordable Care Act, Brown said. An additional $27 million is pending. Commissioner James Brown. (Provided by the Commissioner of Securities and Insurance Office) Credit: Provided by the Commissioner of Securities and Insurance Office The most reprehensible aspect of this scheme is how the people who were allegedly provided ‘care’ were vulnerable populations that were, in some cases, exploited, coerced, moved across state lines, and not even so much as given a way to get back home to Montana,” Brown said in a statement. In an interview, Brown said some Montana victims who were taken out of state for treatment that never took place have yet to be found. Brown said his office met with tribes in Montana throughout 2025 to alert them to the scheme. It also made referrals to federal law enforcement authorities in Montana and the FBI office in Los Angeles where the alleged crimes took place. In an interview, Brown described the way bad actors used a provision in the Affordable Care Act to victimize Native Americans to try to defraud an insurance company, how the scheme led to as much as $54.7 million in unjustified claims, and discussed the work that remains in the aftermath. In January 2025, PacificSource reported suspected fraudulent ACA enrollment to the Commissioner of Securities and Insurance, and the office launched an investigation a couple of weeks later, according to a timeline provided by CSI. Under the Affordable Care Act, Native Americans are able to enroll in the federal marketplace at any time, Brown said; they don’t have to wait for open enrollment. Fraudsters operating out of Arizona and, for the purposes of the Montana scheme, California, used that provision to entice Native Americans to disenroll from Medicaid and sign up for health insurance through the ACA instead, Brown said. In particular, he said, the agents would set up information booths on reservations — he believes nearly every reservation in Montana has been a target — and tell people about free drug and alcohol treatment at a beautiful facility in southern California. The schemers would then transport victims across state lines by buying them a plane ticket to California or driving them in a van; keep them for 90 days while providing “fake services”; and then bill the insurance company $9,000 a day for 90 days, Brown said. The billing was for services that didn’t take place, were unnecessary, or were provided at “greatly inflated prices,” according to the Commissioner of Securities and Insurance. Brown said the bad actors abused “Obamacare” and trafficked “vulnerable Native Americans.” He said at least 183 people were victimized. “We’re still trying to find some of these people, honestly,” Brown said. The Office of Indian Affairs could not be reached Monday about any efforts to find people. The FBI in Montana also could not be reached in time for this story. Brown said insurance abuse leads to higher premiums for everyone, but the investigation from his office and work with the Trump administration has meant $23.3 million in payments don’t have to be made to date. Brown said an additional $27 million is pending a decision by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He said so far, 80 policy recissions have been granted, and dozens remain under review. Brown said PacificSource first suspected a problem when it came across half a million dollars in alcohol and substance abuse being billed out of southern California and the southwest part of the country. “That is what set their alarm bells off, and they approached us for help,” Brown said. He said his office conducted an investigation that supported the ability of CMS to approve the non-payment of fraudulent claims and rescind the policies. CSI has a team of four investigators, and he said his office spent seven months on the investigation. The team uncovered falsified records, unlicensed and out-of-state actors, fabricated addresses, and unsupported earnings information used to obtain coverage, according to CSI. It also found “immediate, high-dollar billing patterns designed to extract maximum payouts.” In a statement provided by CSI, PacificSource spokesperson Erik Wood thanked Brown and his team for helping stop suspected fraudulent activity in the marketplace. “As a nonprofit health plan, PacificSource exists to keep health care accessible and affordable for our members, and preventing fraud is an important part of that work,” Wood said. “We appreciate the state’s commitment to protecting Montanans and the integrity of our health insurance system.” PacificSource is a not-for-profit health insurance provider and one of three insurers that offer plans under the Affordable Care Act. Brown said his office is helping to re-enroll victims into Medicaid so they have coverage. He encouraged Montanans to be wary of any alleged agents advising disenrollment in Medicaid and recommending treatment programs in California through the Affordable Care Act. Brown said Arizona and Alaska also have dealt with a variation of the scheme. He said any state with a significant Native American population is a target, and he has talked with his counterparts and insurance providers in Washington and Wyoming to alert them to the scheme. Brown said his office has “zero tolerance for fraud” and it is focused on consumer protection that “works for the people of Montana as opposed to scammers.” He said his office is pursuing additional investigations and will ask for an additional investigator in the future. “We don’t tolerate corruption, and we don’t apologize for enforcing the law,” Brown said in a statement. “If you exploit vulnerable people or try to game our system, we will come after you.” Credit: Daily Montanan The post Fraudulent health care scheme stopped in Montana appeared first on ICT. From ICT via This RSS Feed.