Donald Trump

Aid Group Sounds Alarm Over ‘Disturbing’ Israeli Rampage in West Bank

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Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams  under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Palestinians inspect the rubble of a house after an Israeli airstrike in the village of Burqin in the West Bank on January 23, 2025.
 (Photo: Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“This echoes the tactics Israeli forces have employed in Gaza.”

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday that Israel’s military is applying “lessons” learned during its bombardment of Gaza to recent attacks on the West Bank—and a leading human rights group warned that as in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces’ actions are resulting in “significant humanitarian consequences.”

Operations like “Iron Wall” in the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin and a “surge in settler attacks” that have been backed by the IDF “have heightened insecurity, displacement, and severe restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement,” said the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) on Thursday.

Iron Wall began Tuesday, with the IDF launching airstrikes and ground attacks in the West Bank two days after a cease-fire took effect in Gaza.

At least 12 Palestinians have been killed in the Iron Wall attacks and 40 people have been injured, including medical workers, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

After months of warnings from rights organizations that the IDF cut off access to essential services for Gaza residents with a near-total humanitarian aid blockade and the relentless bombardment of the enclave, the NRC said that Israeli forced have “increased checkpoints, roadblocks, and other physical barriers throughout the West Bank.”

“These measures further fragment Palestinian communities, restrict access to essential services, and prevent humanitarian agencies, like NRC, from reaching the communities we serve,” said the group.

The latest violence in the West Bank is part of a broader trend, with Israel having begun launching airstrikes in the territory after October 7, 2023, for the first time since the Second Intifada in 2000-05.

The IDF launched Iron Wall in Jenin two weeks after a shooting attack that Israel blamed on gunmen in the refugee camp, which has long been a hub for Palestinian resistance groups and is also home to more than 24,000 Palestinians who are registered in the camp.

Katz said in a statement Wednesday that with the Jenin raid, the IDF is applying “the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza.”

“We will not allow the arms of the Iranian regime and radical Sunni Islam to endanger the lives of [Israeli] settlers [in the West Bank] and establish a terrorist front east of the state of Israel,” he said.

In addition to the attacks in Jenin, masked Israeli settlers have been filmed setting fire to homes and vehicles in towns across the Israeli-occupied territory in what the Israel-based human rights group B’Tselem called an effort to “impose a ‘price tag’ for the release of Palestinians” as part of the cease-fire agreement in Gaza.

Residents told Al Jazeera that “constant gunfire and explosions” have been heard in Jenin since Iron Wall began, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reported that the IDF has left the camp “nearly uninhabitable.”

An estimated 2,000 families have been displaced from the Jenin area since December, according to the agency.

“We are seeing disturbing patterns of unlawful use of force in the West Bank that is unnecessary, indiscriminate, and disproportionate. This echoes the tactics Israeli forces have employed in Gaza,” said Angelita Caredda, NRC’s Middle East and North Africa regional director. “Under international law, Israel must bring its occupation of Palestinian territory to an end as rapidly as possible. Until then, it must fully comply with its obligations as an occupying power, including the protection of civilians.”

In addition to airstrikes and ground attacks, the governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Rub, told Agence France-Presse that Israeli military bulldozers have destroyed all roads leading to the camp and to the nearby hospital. Twenty Palestinians from villlages in the Jenin area have been detained since Iron Wall began on Tuesday, according to the governor.

“What we are seeing in Jenin camp is horrific, said one paramedic trained by Doctors Without Borders. “People are targeted while being evacuated, and the wounded cannot be reached by ambulance.”

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In 2024, Israeli demolitions in the West Bank reached a record high, said the NRC, with 1,768 structures destroyed. IDF soldiers and settlers killed at least 499 Palestinians in the territory last year.

U.S. President Donald Trump has selected at least two nominees for high-level diplomatic positions—Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) for U.N. ambassador and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for ambassador to Israel—who have expressed support for right-wing Israeli officials’ claim that Israel has a “Biblical right” to the West Bank.

Amid the settler violence and Jenin raid, Caredda called on the international community to “take decisive action to stop these violations and end the occupation.”

“Impunity for serious violations of international law has allowed Israel to unlawfully escalate violence in the occupied West Bank,” said Caredda.

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams  under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Experiencing issues with this image not appearing. I suspect because it's so critical of Zionist Keir Starmer's support of and complicity in Israel's genocides.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Continue ReadingAid Group Sounds Alarm Over ‘Disturbing’ Israeli Rampage in West Bank

Trump returns: nine things to expect for the climate

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Below the Sky/Shutterstock

Jack Marley, The Conversation

Climate scientists are probably among those most aggrieved by Donald Trump’s return as US president.

Trump has scoffed at the increasingly dire warnings of these scientists and declared his enthusiasm for digging up and burning the coal, oil and gas that is overheating Earth. His empowerment of the far right dims prospects for collective solutions to collective problems, but what is he likely to change about US climate policy?

This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage comes from our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed.

Trump has not published a climate agenda. To discern his impact on domestic and international policy, we have to sift through statements, appointments to political positions and the record of his first term.

Here, our academics glean grim portents for the years ahead – and some continuities with supposedly pro-climate presidents of the past.

1. It’s still ‘drill, baby, drill’

Trump’s three-word campaign slogan, “drill, baby, drill”, is intended to sum up his plans for the US oil and gas industry. It’s also an apt summary of existing US energy policy.

Since 2008, when Democrat Barack Obama was elected, oil production has soared from a 50-year low of 6.8 billion barrels a day to 19.4 billion in 2023.

A dry landscape littered with oil derricks.
Not starved of investment: an oil field in California. Alizada Studios/Shutterstock

“The United States is already producing more crude oil than any country ever,” says Gautam Jain, an energy and finance expert at Columbia University.

“Oil and gas companies are buying back stocks and paying dividends to shareholders at a record pace, which they wouldn’t do if they saw better investment opportunities.”

2. We won’t always have Paris (or even Rio)

Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris agreement on the first day of his second term (it took him six months to do it last time).

Jain frets that he may go further and exit international negotiations entirely, by rescinding his country’s membership of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was adopted in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Rejoining would be “nearly impossible”, Jain says, as a future president would need the consent of two-thirds of the Senate.

The US risks dropping the mantle of climate leadership on China, he adds. A recent analysis by Oxford economists Matthew Carl Ives and Natalie Sum Yue Chung suggests that that ship may have sailed years ago.

“China already processes most of the clean energy supply materials and has an advanced manufacturing base that is more capable of scaling up production to meet the rising demand,” they say.

3. The bucks stop here?

A US retreat from international climate diplomacy would afflict people who are particularly vulnerable to the mounting crisis in Earth’s atmosphere. Jain highlights how Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden donated several billions of dollars more towards renewable energy and adaptation in the developing world, compared with Trump in his first term.

However, a 2023 study that estimated each country’s “fair share” of this climate finance pot according to income, population size and historical emissions, issued this withering assessment while Biden was president:

“Based on these metrics, we found that the US is overwhelmingly responsible for the climate finance shortfall,” says environmental economist Sarah Colenbrander (University of Oxford).

“The world’s largest economy should be providing US$43.5 billion of climate finance a year. In 2021, it gave just US$9.3 billion – a meagre 21% of its fair share.”

4. Biden’s green tax credits may endure…

Trump could keep some Biden-era investments in clean energy (tax breaks for investors in renewables, for example) as the benefits are accruing in Republican states, Jain says.

He may still cut tax credits for people buying electric vehicles, though. This would slow the transition from combustion-engine transport by making it harder for people to afford an EV. (Biden’s 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs hasn’t help either).

5. … but his methane tax probably won’t

Jain predicts that the greatest damage inflicted by Trump will be to the regulation of fossil fuels and emissions. In his crosshairs is a federal charge for the release of methane from oil and gas wells and pipelines.

Biden identified cutting methane emissions as a potential brake on the accelerating pace of global heating. That’s because methane is a greenhouse gas that lingers in our atmosphere for decades instead of centuries like CO₂ and is far more potent in trapping heat during that time.

Reducing methane emissions could reduce climate change quickly – a climate action lifeline we will be sorry to see thrown away.

6. The nuclear option

Trump seems to have a soft spot for one low-carbon energy source: nuclear power. Perhaps because civil nuclear maintains the skills and supply chains needed for its military applications?

7. Up is down, left is right

Democrats may regret making “trust the science” their dividing line against Trump.

Eric Nast, an environmental governance expert at the University of Guelph, tracked how the first Trump administration altered language on US government websites.

He expects Trump to disguise his regulation bonfire as “strengthening transparency” (blocking air pollution standards that rely on private health data) and championing “citizen science” (dismissing academics from advisory boards for private citizens rich in time and money, who might benefit from scrapping rules and limiting scrutiny).

8. Fighting fire with money

Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg attended Trump’s second inauguration. Their presence – plus a pointed farewell speech by Biden – has provoked murmurs of “oligarchy”: rule by people whose immense wealth and influence has utterly captured ostensibly democratic societies.

At the still-raging LA fires, an oligarch-friendly response to climate change has presented itself: firefighters-for-hire.

“As public firefighters struggle to cope, affluent residents and businesses have turned to private firefighting services to protect their properties,” says Doug Specht, a University of Westminster geographer.

9. Arctic relations

What explains Trump’s sudden interest in the Arctic? Oil, gas and critical minerals newly liberated by thawing ice in a region warming four times faster than the global average says engineer Tricia Stadnyk at the University of Calgary.

“The second Trump administration is aware of both the new opportunities and risks as global temperatures shatter new records and thresholds, and an ice-free Arctic becomes a possibility,” she says.

Jack Marley, Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Continue ReadingTrump returns: nine things to expect for the climate

Trump’s Second Inauguration Took Influence Peddling to a Whole New Level

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https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-inauguration-donations

Meta and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L), CEO of Apple Tim Cook, and Founder of Amazon and Blue Origin Jeff Bezos attend services as part of Inauguration ceremonies at St. John’s Church on January 20, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The very ripeness for scandal this time around calls for reasonable restrictions on the sources and amounts of inaugural donations.

U.S. President Donald Trump sounded a lot of populist notes on the campaign trail. But as he took the oath of office for the second time, he was joined onstage by billionaires and CEOs who’d spent millions to be there—leaving supporters who’d traveled across the country to attend literally out in the cold.

Presidential inaugurations have always been an opportunity for wealthy special interests to curry favor with the incoming administration with generous inaugural donations. But the nation has never seen influence peddling like we just witnessed at Trump’s second inauguration.

Shattering all records, the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc. raised and spent over $200 million in special interest money celebrating the 2024 election victory. (The all-time previous record was $107 million for Trump’s first inauguration in 2017. By contrast, former President Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration raised and spent nearly $62 million.)

The sheer volume of today’s inaugural donations suggests that wealthy special interests believe it is worth the investment.

…

All the self-reporting donors—including Big Tech firms like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI—pledged $1 million or more. The cryptocurrency firm Ripple pledged $5 million. In fact, the cryptocurrency industry even hosted its own inaugural ball.

And of course, Wall Street is cozying up with major donations from Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin.

“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump marvels on his Truth Social account.

…

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-inauguration-donations

Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Continue ReadingTrump’s Second Inauguration Took Influence Peddling to a Whole New Level

As Trump II Begins, Bezos Swaps Scrutiny for ‘Storytelling’

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Original article by Julie Hollar republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

As the Washington Post faces a staff rebellion and plummeting subscription rates, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos has introduced a new mission statement: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

The Washington Post‘s new slogan, “Riveting Storytelling for All of America,” is “meant to be an internal rallying point for employees,” the New York Times (1/16/25) reported.

The new path forward, as introduced in a slide deck to staff by Suzi Watford, the paper’s chief strategy officer, demands that the paper “understand and represent interests across the country,” and “provide a forum for viewpoints, expert perspectives and conversation” (New York Times, 1/16/25). It will do this as “an AI-fueled platform for news” that delivers “vital news, ideas and insights for all Americans where, how and when they want it.”

This appears to mean shifting resources toward opinion, specifically opinions from the right. According to the New York Times report:

Bezos has expressed hopes that the Post would be read by more blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities, mentioning people like firefighters in Cleveland. He has also said that he is interested in expanding the Post’s audience among conservatives.

The Post has already begun to consider ways to sharply increase the amount of opinion commentary published on its website, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. An adviser to the Post, Lippe Oosterhof, has conducted brainstorming sessions about a new initiative that would make it easier to receive and publish opinion writing from outside contributors.

How AI is meant to play into this is unclear.

The Post already has more columnists than you can shake a stick at. This new direction sounds like the Foxification of the Washington Post, a move away from any attempt to hold the powerful to account, toward inexpensive clickbait punditry.

‘Make money’

The red area represents the proportion of Jeff Bezos’s total wealth that would be required to cover the Washington Post‘s losses for a year.

Watford’s slide deck presented three pillars of the Post‘s new model: “great journalism,” “happy customers” and “make money.” The Post lost roughly $77 million in 2023. (It also lost some 250,000 subscribers after Bezos killed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris—FAIR.org, 10/30/24.)

In order to make money, its new “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” (yes, that’s what the Post slide deck apparently called it) is to reach 200 million “paying users.” The paper currently has about 3 million subscribers, making it an “audacious” goal indeed. As the Times pointed out, even if the Post could achieve the impossible task of monetizing every visit to its website, no major corporate media outlet has been getting more than 100 million monthly unique visits—paying and non-paying—outside of the spike in traffic around the election.

Back in 2019, the Post was claiming 80–90 million unique visitors per month. Those visits peaked in November 2020 at 114 million, but quickly and steadily dropped after Biden’s inauguration. The Post stopped posting its audience numbers online after January 2023, when they were down to 58 million.

Of course, most online corporate media have been struggling. The thing about the Post is that its absurdly wealthy owner, the second-richest person on Earth, can easily afford to lose $77 million a year. That’s 0.03% of Bezos’s current net worth.

‘We are deeply alarmed’

Guardian (1/15/25): “The plea from staff…comes a week after the Post laid off roughly 100 employees…roughly 4% of the publication’s staff.”

No doubt the Post needs help. Just days before the new mission statement was revealed, over 400 staff members signed a letter to Bezos asking for a meeting (Guardian, 1/15/25).  The letter read:

We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave, with more departures imminent.

Bezos’s response—a slide deck about “riveting storytelling” on “an AI-driven platform” that prioritizes churning out opinions to draw in conservatives—is hardly likely to ease the mind of any serious journalist at the paper.

Nor is trying to “expand the Post audience among conservatives,” while still paying lip service to “great journalism,” likely to solve the Post‘s problems. As CNN‘s former CEO Chris Licht discovered (FAIR.org, 6/8/23), you can’t do good journalism while trying to appeal to both sides in the context of an increasingly radical right, because that side demands acceptance of lies and conspiracy theories that are incompatible with actual journalism.

When Bezos bought the Post (Extra!, 3/14), he assured the paper’s employees that “the paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.” That sentiment was repeated in Watford’s slide deck this week. But Bezos’s actions in the past months—including the killing of the Harris endorsement, Amazon donating $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund and paying Melania Trump $40 million for her self-produced documentary, and, most recently, Bezos appearing onstage with other multibillionaires at Trump’s inauguration—make clear that the principle is as meaningless to Bezos as the slogan that debuted after Trump’s first election: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

That slogan will continue to adorn the front page for the time being, perhaps in the hope that readers searching for an actual news organization that holds those in power to account will be fooled into subscribing.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

FAIR’s work is sustained by our generous contributors, who allow us to remain independent. Donate today to be a part of this important mission.

Original article by Julie Hollar republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Continue ReadingAs Trump II Begins, Bezos Swaps Scrutiny for ‘Storytelling’

Alarm Bells Sound as Trump Gets to Work on ‘Extreme Authoritarian Agenda’

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Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A poster with an image of the face of the Statue of Liberty, with her hands covering her face, is displayed at a January 18, 2025 rally held in Paris, France just days before U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration.(Photo: Owen Franken – Corbis/Getty Images)

“Trump isn’t king, but if Congress capitulates, he could be,” warned the leaders of Popular Democracy.

Since U.S. President Trump’s return to office on Monday—at an inauguration ceremony full of American oligarchs—as the Republican has issued a flurry of executive orders and other actions, progressive leaders and organizers have expressed alarm and vowed to fight against his “authoritarian” agenda.

On his first day back at the White House, Trump issued 26 executive orders, 12 memos, and four proclamations, plus withdrew 78 of former President Joe Biden’s executive actions, according to a tally from The Hill. Those moves related to the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, the death penalty, federal workers, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, prescription drug prices, and more.

“In the last 24 hours, Trump has passed dozens of executive orders—many beyond his powers,” said Popular Democracy co-director Analilia Mejia and DaMareo Cooper in a Tuesday statement. “Yet, not one of them has lowered prices or made life better for Americans. Instead, he’s focused on eroding democracy, attacking constitutional rights, and spreading fear, cruelty, and chaos.

“Trump has taken aim at the 14th Amendment’s rights of equal protection and citizenship—the fundamental American right to live and participate in our democracy—with an executive order targeting birthright citizenship,” they noted, referencing a policy that is already facing legal challenges from immigrant rights groups and state attorneys general.

Announcing one of the lawsuits, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said that “this order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans. We will not let this attack on newborns and future generations of Americans go unchallenged. The Trump administration’s overreach is so egregious that we are confident we will ultimately prevail.”

Mejia and Cooper said that “his ineffective and inhumane executive orders targeting immigrants misuse military power and double down on damaging our communities.”

The group America’s Voice similarly expressed concern over Trump’s “authoritarian notions of deploying the military on U.S. streets,” with the group’s executive director, Vanessa Cárdenas, saying that “this is an attack on American families and our American values. Trump’s framing of our nation being ‘invaded’ coupled with the attacks on birthright citizenship and policies that will throw our immigration system further into chaos show that this is a hateful campaign to justify a nativist agenda that seeks to redefine ‘American’ and move this nation backwards.”

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Popular Democracy’s leaders also called out various other items from Trump’s first day that are expected to face legal hurdles—though the Republican spent his first term working with GOP lawmakers to pack the federal judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court, with far-right appointees, so the effectiveness of such suits remains to be seen.

“Trump’s rollbacks of critical climate policy sell out future generations to the profit of oil and gas polluters, and further endangers the poor, Black, brown, and Indigenous people who have been at the frontlines of climate disaster,” they said. Trump not only repealed various Biden-era policies but also declared a “national energy emergency” to “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels.

Climate campaigners slammed Trump for invoking “authoritarian powers on Day 1 to gut environmental protections,” in the words of the Center for Biological Diversity. The organization’s executive director, Kierán Suckling, vowed that “no matter how extreme he becomes, we’ll confront Trump with optimism and a fierce defense of our beloved wildlife and the planet’s health.”

“The United States has some of the strongest environmental laws in the world, and no matter how petulantly Trump behaves, these laws don’t bend before the whims of a wannabe dictator,” Suckling stressed. “The use of emergency powers doesn’t allow a president to bypass our environmental safeguards just to enrich himself and his cronies.”

The president’s attacks on health are expansive. As Mejia and Cooper detailed: “Trump’s sweeping changes to healthcare will rip away access for millions, line the pockets of Big Pharma, and undo strides in reproductive rights. They also single out trans Americans, denying them lifesaving healthcare and the right to live freely and authentically.”

Imara Jones, a Black trans woman, CEO of TransLash Media, and an expert on the anti-trans political movement, said in a Tuesday statement that “Trump’s recognition of only ‘two genders’ means a war on trans people, as well as any cis person with a gender expression outside of the gender binary.”

“This is not political theater, this is the beginning of a potential authoritarian takeover of the United States, one that starts with targeting one of the smallest and most vulnerable groups: transgender people,” Jones emphasized. “They seek to erase trans people from public life and want to see if they can get away with it, as a prelude to much more. This should worry all of us.”

Another development that provoked intense worry—and even led the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Studies and Prevention to issue a “red flag alert for genocide in the United States”—was Elon Musk, the richest person on Earth and a key Trump ally, twice raising his arm in what was widely seen as a Nazi salute during a post-inauguration celebration.

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Trump’s Monday night decision to pardon over 1,500 people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, an insurrection incited by the president himself as he contested his 2020 electoral loss, elicited similar warnings.

“By granting clemency to these individuals, who sought to overturn the peaceful transfer of power, Trump is signaling that political violence and the rejection of democratic norms are acceptable tactics in service to his authoritarian agenda,” said Our Revolution executive director Joseph Geevarghese. “This is a direct threat to the foundations of our democracy and the safety of our communities.”

The leaders of Popular Democracy highlighted that “undergirding this extreme authoritarian agenda is a claim that Trump has a mandate to act like a despot—no such mandate exists, much less is acceptable to the American people.”

“Trump isn’t king, but if Congress capitulates, he could be,” they warned, just weeks after Republicans took slim control of both chambers. “Popular Democracy is prepared to push back against Trump’s assault on our communities. We will stand up against an unconstitutional power grab, and hold our representatives accountable in this fight.”

Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingAlarm Bells Sound as Trump Gets to Work on ‘Extreme Authoritarian Agenda’