US congressman says ‘IDF is lying’ about his detention by West Bank settlers and soldiers

Robert Mackey
Sun, July 12, 2026 

THE GUARDIAN

Armed Israeli settlers were seen blocking the convoy of a visiting US congressman, Ro Khanna, in an image provided by another member of the delegation, Cameron Kasky.Photograph: Cameron Kasky/AP

Ro Khanna accused the Israeli government and military of "lying" on Sunday about the US congressman's detention by armed settlers and Israeli soldiers during a recent visit to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Khanna – a California Democrat – had posted video evidence on social media of Israeli settlers and soldiers blocking the path of his convoy on Wednesday in the South Hebron hills, near the village of Zanuta, where Israelis have driven Palestinians from their homes in what Amnesty International calls a government-backed "ethnic cleansing campaign".

During an interview with NBC News' Meet the Press on Sunday, the California Democrat was asked about the Israeli military's claim that its soldiers "quickly dispersed" the Israeli civilians and reopened the blocked road.

"The IDF is lying," Khanna said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. "What happened was unprecedented. They had violent settlers detain American citizens, including an American government official. You had these settlers brandishing M4 [rifles], kicking the tires of our van, laughing at us, mocking at us, videotaping us.

"We were detained for about 20 minutes, fearful of our lives. Then the IDF comes, four soldiers. They tell our translator that they're on the side of the settlers. They further detain us and block us in."

Khanna was also asked about comments by Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who appeared before him on Meet the Press and called the armed settlers who stopped the congressman's vehicle as a small band of "juvenile delinquents". Netanyahu maintained they are not part of what he called the "law-abiding" community of Israeli settlers.

Every Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is illegal under international law.

"I heard the prime minister, and he said Israel is a country of law and order," Khanna replied. "Let me be very specific: the prime minister needs to open an investigation on these violent settlers who are connected to Yinon Levi, who has destroyed Zanuta's village and is a known person who has killed Palestinians," Khanna added, invoking the name of an Israeli settler who was recorded on video about a year earlier firing what appeared to be a fatal shot that killed a Palestinian activist, Awdah Hathaleen, in the same region.

Despite video evidence, including images filmed by Hathaleen himself as he was shot, Levi was not prosecuted by Israeli authorities for the killing.

Israeli settler violence aimed at driving Palestinians in the region from their homes was the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which Hathaleen had worked on.

Netanyahu "needs to have an investigation on these four IDF officers," Khanna added. "Security cameras can see that they were involved in the detention of American citizens. How dare they mistreat people with an American passport that way?"

Israeli officials responded to Khanna's detention by claiming that he had rejected their effort to shape his visit to the region by adding a meeting with former Israeli hostages held in Gaza after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. They told the New York Post: "Congressman Khanna didn't come to understand the situation – he came looking for a headline."

Khanna responded on social media: "The Israeli government is lying to cover up for 4 IDF soldiers who aided violent settlers.

"I have met with Israeli hostages and condemned the brutal, terrorist attacks of Oct 7. That does [not] excuse the IDF from detaining American citizens."

In an interview on Sunday on CBS News' Face the Nation, Israel's US-born ambassador to the US, Michael Leiter, accused Khanna of visiting the West Bank as a political stunt – both to distract from his past support of Graham Platner, the former Maine US Senate candidate accused of sexual assault, and to promote his potential run for the White House in 2028.

Leiter first complained that Khanna had shunned the Israeli government's effort to help plan his trip, choosing instead to work with dissident groups like Breaking the Silence, an Israeli human rights group founded by former Israeli soldiers who oppose Israel's six-decade occupation of Palestinian territories seized in 1967.

He then suggested that the timing of Khanna's visit and revelation of his detention was suspicious. "To have this incident on Wednesday and wait to release it on Saturday, maybe this had more something to do with his support of Graham Platner beforehand and the difficulties he had with that, and trying to shift the focus to something else," Leiter said.

The ambassador's theory that Khanna went to the West Bank to shift attention away from Platner elicited an audible laugh from Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan.

After Brennan interjected to say that Khanna had asked for the news to be held until after he left Israeli-controlled territory, Leiter further accused the congressman of making the visit to appeal to Democratic voters in the US.

Khanna had previously cautioned Israelis against detaining "long-shot presidential candidates".

"It's kind of interesting that somebody wants to declare a presidential run by running off to Israel," the Pennsylvania-born Leiter said. "Not strange?"

Khanna's account of what happened was supported by Nadav Weiman, the director of Breaking the Silence, who accompanied him.

"Armed settlers were the first to arrive, and then, as has become the norm, Israeli soldiers joined them," Weiman wrote on social media. "Together they detained the delegation for over an hour. The IDF is lying and not for the first time.

"I went to speak with the soldiers to ask them to use their authority to remove the settlers who had threatened us and blocked the road. Instead, [I] saw how the settlers were giving the orders not the other way around."

The incident was documented on social media by Khanna's aide, Cameron Kasky, a Parkland school shooting survivor who works on digital strategy for the congressman. Kasky has been credited with using the hashtag #NeverAgain to call for an end to school shootings in the aftermath of that deadly attack, repurposing a slogan linked to Holocaust commemoration.

"I am always surprised when people ask me why I focus so much on Palestine," Kasky wrote last year. "Beyond my Jewish identity making me strongly opposed to genocide, I'm a school shooting survivor-turned-activist. I started my adult life demanding an end to American-made weapons slaughtering children."

Trinidad and Tobago signs agreements with US companies that pave the way for data centers

ANSELM GIBBS
Updated Sat, July 11, 2026 


FILE - Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar stands at the State Department in Washington, Sept. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad (AP) — Trinidad and Tobago has signed agreements paving the way for U.S. companies to begin groundwork for installing large data centers in the Caribbean nation, sparking concerns about potential energy consumption and environmental impacts.

The memorandums of understanding with the Florida-headquartered Hummingbird AI Holdings and New York-based Ernst and Young LLP were signed on Friday, according to a statement from the office of Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar. These are the first such agreements with a Caribbean country.

The deal with Ernst and Young LLP will set out the framework for collaboration on developing large-scale data centers, with the company planning to "partner with third parties in the development" of a 300 megawatt data center, the statement said.

The agreement with Hummingbird AI Holdings sets up the framework for "preliminary cooperation, due diligence and coordination" for a proposed 150 MW AI infrastructure and data center facility.

Data centers are listed with a megawatt figure to indicate their electrical power capacity to operate at peak load. The 300 MW center has a capacity of 300 million watts of electricity.

The deals raised online questions about the environmental impact of the centers.

Renowned social activist Dr. Wayne Kublalsingh told The Associated Press he was concerned about the energy consumption by the planned data centers.

The government is "trying to present something which looks like development, but which is not development," he said.

Trinidad and Tobago has long grappled with chronic water shortages and intermittent supply, raising concerns that large, water-intensive data centers could place additional strain on an already overstretched system.

The majority of the twin-island country functions on water schedules set by the state's utility company. Most homes have water tanks since the supply in their taps can be as rare as once a week. In some instances, communities have gone weeks without water being supplied by the state company.

Data centers could account for nearly 3% of the world's projected electricity use by 2030, with 935 trillion watt-hours, according to a recent United Nations University report. The environmental footprint of data centers already rivals some of the world's largest countries, according to the report.

Electricity supply in Trinidad and Tobago has improved over the years. While there are still power outages at times in parts of the country, they are rare.

Trinidad and Tobago's government signed a third agreement with another American company, Pinnacle Steel and Vanadium Corporation, which recently acquired a local iron and steel plant. Government officials said the agreement allows for further talks on recommissioning operating the plant.

The government said the three initiatives, combined, are expected to generate over 5,000 jobs.

The prime minister has been a strong supporter of the Trump administration. Her office said the U.S. government played a role in facilitating the parties involved in the agreements.

"They're going to invest here to work on data centers, two for data centers, and one to help us rejuvenate and rebuild our steel industry," Persad-Bissessar said Friday night, speaking at a U.S. independence anniversary celebration ceremony hosted by the U.S. Embassy in Trinidad and Tobago.

From Omnipotence to Democracy

Evaggelos Vallianatos

 July 13, 2026

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Ceremonies during the annexation of the Republic of Hawaii, 1898. Raising American Flag at United States Annexation Ceremony at ʻIolani Palace, Honolulu, Hawaii. The American marines performing the ceremony are from the USS Philadelphia. Collection: Ray Jerome Baker Collection. Public Domain.

I have been in the United States for most of my life. I witnessed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I could never understand why that young, handsome, intelligent and nearly great statesman was cut down. Kennedy was the son of petroleum wealth. However, he and the Soviet leader Nikita Chruschev saved the world from nuclear war annihilation. That experience convinced Kennedy that nuclear weapons and states don’t mix. He intended to abolish nuclear weapons before those genocidal bombs abolished humanity. His murder was fact number one that America was already in deep decline – in 1963. Gangsterism is the antithesis and enemy of democracy and civilization.

In 1963, I was a student at the University of Illinois. With rudimentary knowledge of English, I went through course in zoology. I really did not have a clear idea of what my “major” should be. I loved learning about the Greeks and other people, so I moved to historical studies: ancient, medieval, modern Greek and European diplomatic history, Roman, British, Russian, Soviet and Southeastern European history. Then, as a postdoctoral fellow, I turned to the insights and wisdom of the history of science at Harvard.

The next step in understanding my new home, the United States, was my work on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency. That 27 year experience was fact number two, that the United States was in deep decline. A “democratic republic” allowed a few corporations, domestic and foreign, to legally lace most of the food Americans eat with neurotoxic and carcinogenic chemicals – for the convenience of large farmers. No civilized society would have tolerated such a crime.

The state of America in 2026

America in 2026 is a pilotless supertanker floating in the oceans of planet Earth. In February 2026, Trump and Netanyahu of Israel attacked Iran. This unprovoked war unsettled and angered Pope Leo XIV. He said, a “delusion of omnipotence” is fueling the [US-Israel] war that has left thousands dead.” Indeed, the delusion of omnipotence powers became the hubris that led Trump to start the illegal war against Iran. Trump did not like Leo’s criticism. He accused the Pope of being weak on crime.

President Trump is ruling by edict, thus bypassing and almost shutting down the Constitutional responsibilities of US Congress.

One of the worst decisions of Trump was his undermining of the US Environmental Protection Agency, the country’s sole institutional “protector” of public and environmental health. But Trump undid EPA. An EPA scientist was just fired because he requested the monitoring of microplastics in a fish farm. In my lengthy experience at the US EPA, only the administration of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s nearly matched the corruption and anti-human and anti-environmental health policies of the Trump EPA.

Billionaires funded the election of Trump. And billionaires are behind Trump and his decisions. When they convinced him to eliminate most regulations that assured some health protection to Americans and the natural world, what has been going on in their mind? They are forcing America to the swamp and toxic pollution of the 19^th century. They must know, for example, that eating carcinogens and neurotoxins in food mean big trouble for this and future generations. Does this fit their nightmare obsession with AI-human hybrid robots? The billionaire class is hostile to Americans, fact number three that America is in dramatic decline. No democratic society can coexist for long with a minority of plutocrats turning democracy and everything else upside down.

In addition, climate chaos is in the room. Both Trump and his billionaire friends deny the very existence of climate emergency. They pretend they can ignore massive fires, deadly heat waves, the thawing of the permafrost in Alaska, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, diminishing drinking water and emerging difficulties in raising food. This denial of science and climate change / chaos if fact number four that America is in dangerous decline.

Warring theologies

Nature, however, is almighty. Like the Sun, it makes life possible. The ancient Greeks spoke about the Sun god Helios. They knew something we ignore at our peril. The Sun, the stars, the wind, the rivers and all of the natural world were divine. But the word “divine” in America means something different — in 2026.

In 2026, most people in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East have monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) that reject the divine nature of the world around us. This is one of the basic reasons why climate chaos and petroleum and other poisons that power agriculture have become existential dangers.

Rod Drehel, conservative Republican, writer and defender of Christianity, had a long discussion with a podcaster of the New York Times. He explained the decline of America in terms of Christianity. He abhorred the wokeness of the “liberals” and the Democratic Party. He also rejected Catholicism because of the massive sexual crimes of Catholic priests against boys. He joined the Orthodox faith and church. He said that Nazism and Soviet communism were products of the murder of god, meaning the Christian god. All these metaphysical illusions, especially his insistence on “transcendence,” drove him to extreme political and theological assumptions on what constitutes decline of a country like the United States.

On July 9, 2026, he tried to make sense of his religious and political realities of America. He said that “we’re living through, at the bottom, a crisis of meaning. People don’t know why they should go on. We have been raised by consumerist culture — both the left and the right have a role to play in this — to believe that more freedom, more wealth is going to make us happy, and it hasn’t. It’s made us more miserable…. I think it all ultimately goes back to a loss of a sense of transcendence. Losing the transcendent sense of life has been deadly for us spiritually, morally and aesthetically.”

I agree with Dreher that consumerism, more “freedom” and more “wealth” failed to improve the lives of most Americans. But he is wrong about wealth. Wealth is still a dream for the overwhelming number of Americans. Moreover, the idea of “transcendence” is strictly an invention of theologians who make a living on organized deception. We should know that neither polytheism nor monotheism are founded on logic, much less facts or science. The gods of polytheists like the ancient Greeks and Romans and the god of monotheists like Christians, Moslems and Jews were human inventions.

Homer and Hesiod explained the “birth” and function of the gods in Greek society. And it made no difference if those deities were real or imagined. The Greeks modeled their behavior to accommodate their culture to the expectations of those divine and mighty beings. After all, the Athenians, probably the best of the Greeks, built their beautiful and exquisite Parthenon to honor Athena, virgin daughter of Zeus and goddess of intelligence, war and freedom.

In America, Christianity was part of the culture of the British and other Europeans who established their hegemony over the country. Christianity justified the genocide of indigenous Americans. And with the coming to power of Trump, “Christian nationalism” spread the alarm of potential crusades and new theocracy. Nationalism baptized by the contaminated waters of religion means trouble. This is threatening the present and future of the country. Conventional Christians face specialized theological groups of Christians who like to believe they are living in the early days of Christian formation and conflict. Some of them pretend to have prophetic powers, others like to assume they are healers. And still others like the charismatic Christians are preparing themselves for crusades. They now proclaim that “God calls Christians into spiritual warfare against demonic forces.”

Molly Worthen, history professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has been studying these unorthodox rebel Christians. “The irony of our secular age,” she says, “is that theology is more powerful than ever.” And that’s where the danger of new crusades becomes factor number five of a declining America.

Congressman Jared Huffman (D-California), is very concerned about the emerging Christian zealots. He is proud he has no religion to confuse him. He says he is a “humanist,” which he defines this way: “To me, it means good without God. It means you don’t need the inducement or fear of an afterlife to have a moral framework and to know your place in the universe. You’re sort of at peace with the reality that, as far as we know, this is it. You get one time around. There are people of faith who sometimes think, well, that must be sad, that must be incomplete. I find it’s just the opposite. It makes this world and our opportunity to be part of it more sacred.”

Epilogue

It’s difficult to make predictions. But as a historian I noticed certain events highlighting changes inimical to democracy. Greek history is full of those seminal events or ideas that sparked warning signals. For example, in the sixth century BCE, a few plutocrats lent money to Athenian farmers. However, several of those farmers could not pay back their debt. The Athenian large farmers / lenders enslaved and sold the indebted farmers. This cruel and unpatriotic decision of Athenians enslaving Athenians rung the bells of civil war. The rulers of Athens invited a former Athenian archon / ruler, Solon, to rewrite the constitution of Athens. Solon did. He abolished slavery and set the foundations of Athenian direct democracy.

Why is this great paradigm of the creation of the first democracy in Western civilization ignored in America? I think Solon becomes paradigmatic in reforming the American constitution: making it a fence around democracy, thus preventing any president from becoming a tyrant or protector of plutocrats. The money in elections in America must stop or the American Republic is doomed, fact number six of the decline of the United States.

In fact, like the Athenian constitution, the revised American constitution should allow citizens to become rich but, when national needs arise, rich people would be responsible to fund defensive weapons or other national priorities.

In addition, the new American constitution would mandate the immediate phasing out of fossil fuels and the transition from fossil fuels to solar and other green energies; the immediate transformation of industrialized farming to small-scale family agriculture producing entirely certified organic food; the phasing out of animal farms; and the separation of church and state.

Of course, these measures require informed and responsible citizens who love their country more than money. But these modest reforms, if done, promise to reduce and eventually eliminate the emerging decline. The US, now 250 years old, has the opportunity to reinvigorate democracy, abandon its destructive war path and save itself and the planet from nuclear war and climate chaos.

Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., is a historian and ecological-political theorist. He studied zoology and history, Greek and European, at the University of Illinois and Wisconsin. He did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard. He worked on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency; taught at several universities, and authored hundreds of articles and several books, including Poison Spring (2014), The Antikythera Mechanism (2021), Freedom (2025) and Earth on Fire: Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Our Backyards (World Scientific, 2026).

May US Trade Deficit Jumps to Highest Level Since March 2025

Dean Baker

 July 13, 2026

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Donald Trump has made reducing the trade deficit a centerpiece of his economic agenda. As he has put it, the deficit means foreigners are ripping us off. Trump’s whole “Liberation Day” story was about putting an end to the rip-offs.

We can debate the extent to which the trade deficit means we are getting ripped off, but even accepting Trump’s claim, he is not doing a very good job by his own metric. On Tuesday, we got data from the Commerce Department showing that the monthly trade deficit jumped by $23 billion in May to $77.6 billion. The deficit would be $931 billion if this rate continued for a full year. This is the highest it’s been since March of 2025. If the trade deficit measures the extent to which we’re being ripped off, we’re going the wrong way.

To be clear, the story is a bit more complicated. The trade deficit had averaged $70.9 billion through the first ten months of 2024. It then jumped after the election, hitting $96.9 billion in December, as people rushed to buy cars, appliances, and other big-ticket items, and businesses stocked their inventories, before Trump’s promised tariffs went into effect.

It rose further in the first three months of 2025 as people became more convinced that Trump was serious about his tariffs. The peak was $133 billion in March. The deficit then fell sharply in April. Part of this story was the impact of the tariffs themselves, and part was that people who had bought cars and other big-ticket items in anticipation of the tariffs were not about to buy them again.

The impact of people buying in anticipation of tariffs had probably worn off by the start of this year, so we could see the direct impact of tariffs on the trade deficit. The average for the first four months of 2026 was $55.1 billion. That would translate into an annual trade deficit of $661 billion, a bit more than 2.0% of GDP. That is down from the $850 billion annual rate we had in the first ten months of 2024, but still far from balanced trade for those who care about such things.

But we then took a big step in the other direction in May. It seems the main story here is imports of AI-related capital goods. Imports of capital goods were $1.1 billion higher in May than they had been in April and $17.2 billion higher than they had been in January.

Many of the computer chips and other items that the big AI companies need for their data centers are imported, mostly from Taiwan and South Korea. If we think the trade deficit means we are being ripped off by foreigners, the AI bubble is increasing the extent of the rip-off.

Monthly trade data are highly erratic, and it’s possible that the May jump will be reversed in June or subsequent months. But for now, the data make it look like Liberation Day didn’t have its intended effect.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.