Thursday, September 11, 2025
■ Today's Top News
"This is the latest chapter in the genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza and part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing engulfing the entire Gaza Strip," said Oxfam International.
By Brett Wilkins
Israel’s US-backed campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza City has left nearly 1 million people—half of them starved by design—with nowhere to seek refuge, United Nations agencies and other humanitarian groups warned Wednesday.
“We are witnessing a dangerous escalation in Gaza City, where Israeli forces have stepped up their operations and ordered everyone to move south. This comes two weeks after famine was confirmed in the city and surrounding areas,” said the UN Humanitarian Country Team (HCT), a strategic forum of UN agency heads and over 200 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
“While Israeli authorities have unilaterally declared an area in the south as ‘humanitarian,’ it has not taken effective steps to ensure the safety of those forced to move there and neither the size nor scale of services provided is fit to support those already there, let alone new arrivals,” HCT continued.
“Nearly 1 million people are now left with no safe or viable options—neither the north nor the south offers safety,” HCT added.
One elderly woman caring for an injured 8-year-old girl who is one of tens of thousands of children orphaned by Israeli attacks told Amnesty International Wednesday that “she’s all that I have left, and I have tried everything I can to protect her.”
“We have been displaced twice just in the last week,” the woman added. “We don’t have the means to go to the south, and we are tired of being forced to relive this ordeal all over again.”
An elderly disabled woman living in a makeshift refugee camp in southern Gaza City told Amnesty that “we were displaced from Sheikh Radwan three weeks ago; my son had to carry me on his shoulders because I have no wheelchair and no transportation could reach our area.”
“Now we are ordered to evacuate again. Where do we go?” she asked. “To secure transportation to the south, you have to pay close to 4,000 shekels ($1,200) and to buy a tent, you have to pay at least 3,000 shekels and we don’t know if we’ll find any land to pitch our tent on.”
“We had already spent all our savings to survive this war, looking for food and basics,” the woman added. “Every day is like the war is starting all over again, only far worse, but we are totally depleted, we have no will or strength to carry on.”
Photos showing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—including some with donkey-drawn carts—slowly streaming southward from Gaza City evoked images from the Nakba, when more than 750,000 Arabs were ethnically cleansed from Palestine by Zionist terror militias during the establishment of modern Israel.
The World Health Organization (WHO), a UN body, warned Wednesday that “starvation and malnutrition in Gaza are at the highest levels ever since the conflict began almost two years ago,” and that “deliberate blocking and delay of large-scale food, health, and humanitarian aid has cost many lives.”
“After 22 months of relentless conflict, over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution, and death,” the agency added. “Another 1.07 million people (54%) are in ‘emergency’ (IPC Phase 4), and 396,000 people (20%) are in ‘crisis’ (IPC Phase 3).”
WHO also cited overall casualties in Gaza—now approaching at least 65,000 deaths, mostly women and children—and 164,000 injuries, according to the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM)—and noted that “as of September 5, 2025, there have been 2,339 reported fatalities among aid-seekers near militarized distribution sites and along convoy routes since May 27.”
Oxfam International—a coalition of over 20 independent NGOs focused on alleviating poverty—echoed the UN experts, asserting that “Israel’s intent to displace around 1 million civilians, half of whom are living in famine, is impossible and illegal.”
“Displacement orders, on leaflets thrown from the sky, or posted on social media, signal grave next steps, a scene all too familiar in Gaza where every order has preceded new waves of destruction and mass casualties,” Oxfam said. “This is the latest chapter in the genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza and part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing engulfing the entire Gaza Strip, where nothing and no one has been spared.”
Heba Morayef, regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, said Wednesday that Israel’s mass displacement order for Gaza City residents “is cruel, unlawful, and further compounds the genocidal conditions of life that Israel is inflicting on Palestinians.”
“Gaza City... is now facing complete obliteration,” Morayef added. “It is evident that Israel is determined in pursuing its goal to physically destroy Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It is unconscionable that states with leverage over Israel continue to provide it with arms and diplomatic support to destroy Palestinian lives.”
Operation Gideon’s Chariots 2—Israel’s plan to ”conquer, cleanse, and stay” in Gaza and “annihilate everything” there—as Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently put it—has ramped up in recent days, with intensified Israeli air and artillery strikes and ground troops pushing deeper into Gaza City.
According to GHM, at least 72 Palestinians were killed and a minimum of 356 others were wounded by Israeli forces across Gaza on Thursday, including children and infants. At least 53 of the victims were killed in Gaza City. Israeli strikes reportedly targeted homes, tents housing refugees, and aid distribution points.
Additionally, GHM said that seven Palestinians including a child died from starvation over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of famine-related deaths in Gaza to at least 411, 142 of them children.
“Democracy faces a perfect storm of autocratic resurgence and acute uncertainty," said Kevin Casas-Zamora of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.
By Brad Reed
A new report from a Swedish think tank warns that democracy is backsliding all across the world, led by the US under President Donald Trump.
The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) on Wednesday published findings from its annual Global State of Democracy report that found democracy is declining in 94 countries around the world, representing 54% of all nations the think tank analyzed.
“Democracy faces a perfect storm of autocratic resurgence and acute uncertainty, due to massive social and economic changes,” Kevin Casas-Zamora, secretary-general of IDEA, told The Guardian. “To fight back, democracies need to protect key elements of democracy, like elections and the rule of law, but also profoundly reform government so that it delivers fairness, inclusion, and shared prosperity.”
The US has shown itself to be in a particularly precarious position, as IDEA ranked the country well behind several other nations that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the categories of rights, representation, and the rule of law.
The report includes data only from 2024, before the start of Trump’s second term, but it makes note of further negative developments that have occurred since his return to power.
“The rule of law has come under intensified pressure under the second Trump administration in the USA,” IDEA writes. “Since Trump took office in January 2025, his administration has issued a series of executive orders attempting to overhaul key aspects of governance, including the day-to-day functioning of the federal civil service, the country’s migration and asylum systems, and the balance of power between federal and state-level governments.”
IDEA adds that the administration has at times “disregarded or circumvented” court rulings, which has led to concerns about the rule of law in the US crumbling even further.
“The degree to which the balance of powers is respected in the months and years to come will be a key determinant of whether Rule of Law indicators in the USA remain resilient or continue to deteriorate,” the report stated.
In a separate interview with German publication Deutsche Welle, Casas-Zamora explained why developments in the US are dangerous not just to American citizens, but citizens in democracies around the planet.
“Some of the things that we saw during the election at the end of last year and in the first few months of 2025 are fairly disturbing,” he said.
The first months of Trump’s term were characterized by his attempts to seize constitutional powers from Congress by impounding federal funds, challenging the judiciary’s right to rule against the administration’s actions, and blatantly disobeying court orders.
“Since what happens in the US has this ability to go global,” said Casas-Zamora, “this does not bode well for democracy globally.”
"At the very same time that Trump is ordering strikes on a boat in Venezuela, he's cutting, gutting the programs that we use to interrupt the drug trade coming through Central America and Mexico," said Sen. Chris Murphy.
By Julia Conley
As new details emerged about the boat that the Trump administration bombed last week off the Venezuelan coast, legal experts and lawmakers said Wednesday that the White House’s case for carrying out the unprecedented military strike against suspected drug smugglers had grown even weaker—with new evidence showing the vessel had turned away from the US, back toward Venezuela, just before it was bombed.
Legal analysts have said in the days since the attack that killed 11 people that the bombing amounted to an extrajudicial murder, dismissing President Donald Trump’s claim that the White House has “tapes of [the victims] speaking” that proved they were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—the only “evidence” that’s been made public.
Even if the 11 people killed were members of the gang—which Trump has classified as a terrorist organization despite US intelligence agencies’ finding that Tren de Aragua is a relatively low-level gang without connections to Venezuelan government—the administration used military force to stop a suspected criminal enterprise, instead of following law enforcement procedures, experts have said.
In a video posted on social media Wednesday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said it was highly unlikely that the boat was carrying fentanyl, which killed an estimated 48,422 people in the US in 2024 and which is primary trafficked through Central America and Mexico—not Venezuela.
“His stated reason for taking the strikes to try to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, makes no sense as the centerpiece of a counternarcotics strategy,” said Murphy. “At the very same time that Trump is ordering these strikes on the boat in Venezuela, he’s cutting, gutting the programs that we use to interrupt the drug trade coming through Central America and Mexico. We have dramatically fewer resources to stop fentanyl coming to the United States while we’re taking airstrikes on a boat off the Venezeuelan coast.”
The strike, said Murphy, particularly in light of the new information disclosed by US officials, is “another sign of Trump’s growing lawlessness.”
With US officials disclosing Wednesday that the boat had not been headed toward the US when it was bombed, a former military attorney told The New York Times that the new information further undermined Trump’s claim that he ordered the strike to stop a threat to US national security.
“If someone is retreating, where’s the ‘imminent threat’ then?” Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, a retired judge advocate general for the Navy, told the Times. “Where’s the ‘self-defense’? They are gone if they ever existed—which I don’t think they did.”
The people aboard the vessel had turned back after spotting US planes that had been surveilling them “for a significant period of time,” The Intercept reported. Three sources including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has expressed outrage over the strike, said the boat was attacked by at least one drone, and The Intercept reported that the victims survived an initial attack before being killed in the second one.
The strikes were conducted after the boat turned back toward the Venezuelan shore.
Officials told the Times that a 29-second video Trump released that was purported to show several clips of a speedboat racing toward the US before an explosion, left out key details of the event.
“It does not show the boat turning after the people aboard were apparently spooked by an aircraft above them, nor does it show the military making repeated strikes on the vessel even after disabling it,” the Times reported.
A high-ranking Pentagon official told The Intercept that even if the White House’s claim that the boat’s passengers were trafficking drugs is true, the strike was a “criminal attack on civilians.”
“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”
US officials have yet to share information confirming where the vessel was headed; before the administration began claiming it was headed to US shores and driven by “evil narco-terrorists trying to poison our homeland,” as one White House spokesperson said, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters the boat was likely headed to another country in the Caribbean.
One foreign policy expert said these congressional authorizations "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
By Stephen Prager
Almost exactly 24 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to finally repeal a pair of more than two-decade-old congressional authorizations that have allowed presidents to carry out military attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In a 261-167 vote, with 49 Republicans joining all Democrats, the House passed an amendment to the next military spending bill to rescind the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in the leadup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War and 2003 War in Iraq.
The decision is a small act of resistance in Congress after what the Quincy Institute’s Adam Weinstein described in Foreign Policy magazine as “years of neglected oversight” by Congress over the “steady expansion of presidential war-making authority.”
As Weinstein explains, these AUMFs, originally meant to give presidents narrow authority to target terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and use military force against Saddam Hussein, “have been stretched far beyond their original purposes” by presidents to justify the use of unilateral military force across the Middle East.
President George W. Bush used the 2002 authorization, which empowered him to use military force against Iraq, to launch a full invasion and military occupation of the country. Bush would stretch its purview throughout the remainder of his term to apply the AUMF to any threat that could be seen as stemming from Iraq.
After Congress refused to pass a new authorization for the fight against ISIS—an offshoot of al-Qaeda—President Barack Obama used the ones passed during the War on Terror to expand US military operations in Syria. They also served as the basis of his use of drone assassinations in the Middle East and North Africa throughout his term.
During his first term, President Donald Trump used those authorizations as the legal justification to intensify the drone war and to launch attacks against Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria. He then used it to carry out the reckless assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq.
And even while calling for the repeal of the initial 2001 and 2002 authorizations, former President Joe Biden used them to continue many of the operations started by Trump.
“These AUMFs,” Weinstein said, “have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action.”
The amendment to repeal the authorizations was introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).
Meeks described the authorizations as “long obsolete,” saying they “risk abuse by administrations of either party.”
Roy described the repeal of the amendment as something “strongly opposed by the, I’ll call it, defense hawk community.” But, he said, “the AUMF was passed in ‘02 to deal with Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and that guy’s been dead... and we’re now still running under an ‘02 AUMF. That’s insane. We should repeal that.”
“For decades, presidents abused these AUMFs to send Americans to fight in forever wars in the Middle East,” said Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) shortly before voting for the amendment. “Congress must take back its war powers authority and vote to repeal these AUMFs.”
Although this House vote theoretically curbs Trump’s war-making authority, it comes attached to a bill that authorizes $893 billion worth of new war spending, which 17 Democrats joined all but four Republicans Republicans in supporting Wednesday.
The vote will also have no bearing on the question of President Donald Trump’s increasing use of military force without Congressional approval to launch unilateral strikes—including last week’s bombing of a vessel that the administration has claimed, without clear evidence, was trafficking drugs from Venezuela and strikes conducted in June against Iran, without citing any congressional authorization.
Alexander McCoy, a Marine veteran and public policy advocate at Public Citizen, said, “the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs” are “good to remove,” but pointed out that it’s “mostly the 2001 AUMF that is exploited for forever wars.”
“Not to mention, McCoy added, “we have reached a point where AUMFs almost seem irrelevant, because Congress has shown no willingness whatsoever to punish the president for just launching military actions without one, against Iran, and now apparently against Venezuela.”
In the wake of Trump’s strikes against Iran, Democrats introduced resolutions in the House and Senate aimed at requiring him to obtain Congressional approval, though Republicans and some Democratic war hawks ultimately stymied them.
However, Dylan Williams, the vice president of the Center for International Policy, argued that the repeal of the AUMF was nevertheless “a major development in the effort to finally rein in decades of unchecked use of military force by presidents of both parties.”
The vote, Williams said, required lawmakers “to show where they stand on restraining US military adventurism.”
"The middle-class squeeze from tariffs is here," observed one economist.
By Brad Reed
New economic data released on Thursday revealed fresh signs of stress for the US economy and working families.
A new Consumer Price Index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that overall inflation rose by 2.9% year-over-year in August, while core inflation—a measure that excludes commodities such as food and energy—rose 3.1%, the highest reading recorded since this past January.
Both of these numbers were in line with economists’ consensus estimates, although they still showed inflation trending in the wrong direction during a time when the US labor market is also showing signs of weakness.
Looking deeper into the report reveals that the cost of groceries continues to be a major pain point for US consumers, as food prices jumped by 0.6% on the month and 2.7% year-over-year.
The report comes days after US President Donald Trump said in a radio interview, “We have no inflation. Prices are down on just about everything.”
New York Times economics reporter Ben Casselman said that the spike in food prices was notable because it came after a long period in which food inflation had been coming down.
“Grocery prices are once again rising relatively rapidly,” he observed in a social media post. “Food inflation had eased significantly, and had been running well below overall prices, but that’s no longer true.”
Heather Long, the chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, singled out some particularly important household staples in the report that she argued were very likely being impacted by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Among other things, Long said that coffee was now 21% more expensive than it was a year ago, while living room and dining room furniture saw a 10% year-over-year increase, and the price of toilet paper rose by an annualized 5%.
“The middle-class squeeze from tariffs is here,” she said. “Inflation hit 2.9% in August, the highest since January and up from 2.3% in April. It’s troubling that so many basic necessities are rising in price again: Food, gas, clothing, and shelter all had big cost jumps in August. And this is only the beginning.”
Mike Konczal, senior director of policy and research at the Economic Security Project and a former member of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, said that the new report shows “inflation is broadening” given that the “percent of items that had at least a 3% annualized price increase over the last month” increased to nearly 60%, which is the highest percentage seen in years.
The inflation report was not the only troubling economic indicator, however.
The BLS also revealed that jobless claims in the US jumped to 263,000 last week, which was significantly higher than the 235,000 claims expected by economists. Joe Weisenthal, the co-host of the Bloomberg “Odd Lots” podcast, noted that this was the highest total for weekly jobless claims in nearly four years.
Long also flagged the worrying jobless claims number and predicted that it was just the start of a further downturn in the US economy.
“‘Cost cutting’ is back among CEOs and that is corporate speak for more layoffs,” she said. “It’s going to be a rough few months ahead as the tariffs impacts work their way through the economy. Americans will experience higher prices and (likely) more layoffs.”
With the suspect still at large and the motive unknown, the president "seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division."
By Julia Conley
Despite the fact that the murderer of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk remained unidentified and still at large, President Donald Trump declared the “radical left” as “directly responsible” for the assassination in remarks from the White House on Wednesday night—comments that critics say shows Trump is more than willing to exploit the killing for his own purposes while sowing more, not less, political violence in the future.
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump said that criticism of Kirk from the left was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
The president didn’t specify which opponents of Kirk he believed contributed to his killing; over the years the influencer, who frequently visited college campuses to debate students, clashed with and was criticized by supporters of abortion rights, gun control, and immigrants’ rights. But Trump said his administration would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
Trump did not detail how the White House would determine what groups “contributed” to Kirk’s killing.
“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” he asserted, though he did not mention any of the political violence—which is statistically more pervasive—on the political right.
The president was echoing sentiments expressed by far-right influencer Laura Loomer who has played a key role in shaping the Trump administration, lobbying for the hiring and removal of certain aides.
“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single leftist organization,” Loomer said Wednesday, even before Kirk was publicly pronounced dead. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The left is a national security threat.”
In a Thursday op-ed for Common Dreams, author and journalist Christopher D. Cook laments how “Kirk had barely been declared dead when President Trump hideously used his killing to falsely blame and attack the left.”
The president, writes Cook, “seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division, in a reckless, angry televised speech that hurled blame at the left despite not a scintilla of evidence about Kirk’s assassin or their politics.”
Trump named a number of victims of political violence in recent years, including US Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was shot in 2017 by a man who opposed the president; and Trump himself, who survived two assassination attempts last year.
The president did not mention the killing earlier this year of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat. The suspect in Hortman’s killing was an evangelical Christian who strongly opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) also asserted without any evidence that critics of the far-right agenda that Kirk embraced were to blame for his killing, specifically suggesting that her Democratic colleagues were implicated in the assassination.
“Democrats own what happened today,” she told reporters. “Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck.”
Mace added that it was “ridiculous” to suggest that by her logic, Republican lawmakers “own” Hortman’s assassination.
The comments from Trump and Mace, wrote Cook, only show that these are “not the people who are going to lead us out of this ugly toxic pit” of political violence now pervasive in the United States.
At Zeteo, journalist Mehdi Hasan listed several other recent acts of political violence in which the suspected or confirmed perpetrators held right-wing ideologies, including the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro earlier this year; the assault of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022; and the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.
“There is no equivalent or even similar list of Obama or Biden supporters who have carried out murders, attempted murders, or violent attacks against Republicans or conservatives in recent years,” wrote Hasan. “In fact, according to statistics compiled by the ADL’s Center on Extremism, 2024 was the third year in a row in which all of the extremist-related killings in the United States were carried out by... right-wingers.”
On the social media platform X, Texas Monthly senior writer Robert Downen pointed out that some far-right white supremacists had also “reviled” Kirk.
“I’m not speculating about the shooter,” said Downen. “I just have been stunned how quickly people have jumped with certainty to partisan conclusions. Because in extremism spaces, the Charlie Kirk Hater-to-Nazi pipeline is canon. It’s how we got a generation of antisemitic extremists.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was quick to rebuke the suggestion that Democrats or left-wing groups are to blame for the rise in politically motivated attacks or the emergence of violence as a commonplace, acceptable occurrence in American culture.
“Oh, please,” she said when a reporter asked her whether Democrats should tone down their rhetoric. “Why don’t you start with the president of the United States, and every ugly meme he has posted, and every ugly word.”
In a podcast put together Wednesday evening in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, journalist David Sirota said that “what we desperately need right now in this country are leaders who lower the temperature, leaders who will try to pull us back from the brink.”
Instead, Sirota warned, “we have a president right now who seems mostly interested in using the bully pulpit to actually bully people. Inflaming every cultural conflict he can stick his nose into—all for the cause of grabbing more power and money for himself and his family.”
In place of more anger, hatred, and calls for political retribution, Sirota told his audience he wanted to offer a different message.
“It’s a simple message whether you are a leftist, a liberal, a centrist, a conservative, or a MAGA fan,” said Sirota. “Your life has value and your political opponents’ lives have value too. You can hate your adversaries’ ideas, and you can fight hard for your cause, but the moment we stop seeing each other as human beings and we start concluding that violence is the answer, that’s the moment we let the soulless corporations, the ruthless authoritarians, and the sociopathic demagogues win.”
The “nihilism” and “greed” of too many, he added, “are creating the conditions for a civil war—one that we must all do our part to stop. Before it becomes unstoppable.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.