It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, May 11, 2025
'US Mail Is Not For Sale': Americans Across Political Spectrum Oppose Postal Service Privatization
"Postal customers should trust their gut when it comes to schemes to sell off or transfer the USPS," said the head of the American Postal Workers Union.
Activists protest during a "U.S. Mail Not For Sale" rally near the Brentwood Post Office on March 20, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
As the Trump administration signaled a potential step toward privatizing the U.S. Postal Service with the reported selection of a FedEx board member to serve as postmaster general, new polling on Thursday showed just how strongly the American public would oppose such a move.
The survey by Hart Research Associates and North Star Opinion Research, which was commissioned by the American Postal Workers Union, found that 60% of respondents were opposed to privatizing the postal service, while just 26% were in favor.
The opposition cut across ideological, geographic, and demographic divides, with people in all regions of the country saying they wanted to maintain the USPS as a public service by a margin of at least 29 points—and as many as 40 points in western states.
While rural voters supported President Donald Trump by a 23-point margin in the 2024 election, the research firms posited that the heavy reliance people in far-flung areas have on the USPS helped push rural respondents to say they oppose privatization, with 58% saying they were against it.
As Common Dreams reported last month, an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies found that private mail carriers like FedEx and UPS already charge "remote surcharges" to 8% of all U.S. ZIP Codes—home to nearly 4 million people—because they are in mountain communities and other remote areas. While USPS has a universal service obligation, people in rural areas pay up to $15.50 for deliveries from private companies.
Fifty-six percent of Americans said privatization would result in higher prices for mailing packages and letters, while 17% said prices were likely to improve.
Without competition from USPS, private companies could impose additional charges for weekend deliveries, fuel, residential deliveries, and more.
"Postal customers should trust their gut when it comes to schemes to sell off or transfer the USPS," said APWU president Mark Dimondstein. "Plans to privatize the Post Office are about enriching Wall Street and not serving Main Street. Evidence shows that selling off the USPS would lead to higher prices for postal services as well as higher prices for shipping packages at FedEx and UPS."
On the House floor recently, U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) warned that "corporations won't serve what isn't profitable."
"This isn't about efficiency," she said. "This is about dismantling public services so they can prove government doesn't work."
The poll was released two months after Wells Fargopresented a five-step plan for privatizing USPS to Wall Street investors, including raising USPS prices by as much as 140%, selling postal real estate to commercial bidders, and imposing mass layoffs on the service's 600,000 employees.
The bank said privatization would lead to the "harvesting," or closing, of neighborhood post offices across the country—something 72% of respondents opposed in Thursday's poll.
Trump ally Elon Musk also said in March that Amtrak and USPS were top targets for the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which the president selected him to lead and which has pushed to dismantle numerous government agencies and laid off nearly 300,000 federal employees.
"I think logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized," Musk said. Trump has also expressed support for privatization.
Respondents to Thursday's poll expressed support for a number of steps that could strengthen the U.S. Postal Service's finances, including 77% who backed making office supplies available for purchase in post offices, 72% who supported the selling of hunting and fishing licenses, and 60% who supported making magazines and newspapers available for purchase.
"The survey results indicate that the outlook is good in our ongoing fight against privatizers trying to sell off our public Postal Service for profit," said the APWU. "We should remain steady in our message—the U.S. Mail Is Not for Sale!"
Trump's NOAA Will Stop Tracking Costliest Climate Disasters
"Their philosophy is, if we ignore it, it's not a problem," said one meteorologist.
Damaged structures and homes are seen after the Palisades fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on January 11, 2025. (Photo: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)
On the heels of the news that higher-than-average temperatures continued globally in April, one of the United States' top science agencies announced Thursday that it will no longer update a database that tracks climate disasters that cause billions of dollars in damage.
As of Thursday, the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) website was replaced with a message saying there have been no such events in 2025 through April 8.
That flies in the face of an analysis by the National Centers for Environmental Information, which has maintained the database and said before it was taken down that six to eight billion-dollar climate disasters have happened so far this year, including the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles in January and caused an estimated $150 billion in damage.
The World Weather Attribution said in late January that planetary heating, fueled by greenhouse gas emissions, caused weather conditions in Southern California that made the fires 35% more likely.
Hundreds of people have been laid off from NOAA in recent weeks as the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, has pushed to slash government spending, and those who have lost their jobs include scientists who helped maintain the database.
NOAA spokesperson Kim Doster toldThe Washington Post that in addition to staff changes, "evolving priorities" were also partially behind the retiring of the database, which will now show disasters that occurred only between 1980-2024.
Between 2020-24, the number of billion-dollar disasters averaged 23 per year, compared to just a few per year in the 1980s.
"This Trump administration move is the dumbest magic trick possible: covering their eyes and pretending the problem will go away if they just stop counting the costs. Households across the country already have to count these costs at their kitchen table as they budget for higher insurance costs and home repairs. Families and retirees dipping into their savings or going bankrupt to recover from wildfires and hurricanes know what disasters cost," said Carly Fabian, senior insurance policy advocate with Public Citizen's Climate Program. "Hiding the national tallies will only undermine our ability to prepare and respond to the climate crisis. Deleting the data will exacerbate the devastating delays in acting to slow climate change, and the impacts it is having on property insurance and housing costs."
NOAA's "evolving priorities" have also included decommissioning other datasets, including one tracking marine environments and one tracking ocean currents.
Without NOAA's Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, Jeremy Porter, co-founder of the climate risk financial modeling firm First Street, toldCNN that "replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models."
"What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and nonpublic data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers," he said.
Chris Gloninger, a meteorologist who resigned from an Iowa news station after receiving threats for his frank, science-based coverage of climate disasters, said the retiring of the database suggests the Trump administration is "okay with spending billions of dollars on disasters."
"Every dollar that we spend on mitigation or adaptation saves $13 in recovery costs," said Gloninger. "But their philosophy is, if we ignore it, it's not a problem."
NAKBA 2.0
'Assault on Children': UNRWA Condemns Israeli Raids on East Jerusalem Schools
"Now, nearly 800 girls and boys—some as young as 6 years old—are left in shock and trauma." Israeli security forces raid an UNWRA school in the Shu'fat refugee camp in illegally occupied East Jerusalem, Palestine on May 8, 2025. (Photo: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images)
Israeli occupation forces enforced a ban on the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees on Thursday by storming three schools in East Jerusalem, terrorizing children and staff as they shuttered the facilities and drawing condemnation from human rights defenders.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, heavily armed Israeli security forces raided the schools in the Shu'fat refugee camp in illegally occupied East Jerusalem, detaining one UNRWA employee and forcing around 550 children out of their classrooms as the invaders closed the facilities.
"As a result, UNRWA was forced to evacuate all children across the six schools it runs in East Jerusalem," UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said. "Now, nearly 800 girls and boys—some as young as 6 years old—are left in shock and trauma."
"Storming schools and forcing them shut is a blatant disregard of international law," Lazzarini added. "These schools are inviolable premises of the United Nations. By enforcing closure orders issued last month, the Israeli authorities are denying Palestinian children their basic right to learn. UNRWA schools must continue to be open to safeguard an entire generation of children."
The International Court of Justice—which is also weighing a genocide case against Israel over the U.S.-backed Gaza onslaught—is considering whether the Israeli government's ban on UNRWA violates international law.
Hundreds of UNRWA staffers and their relatives have been killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip since October 2023. Israel has bombed many UNRWA schools-turned-shelters in Gaza, including a Tuesday "double-tap" airstrike on school in the al-Bureij refugee camp that killed at least 30 of the more than 2,000 people sheltering there.
UNRWA officials also accuse Israeli forces of torturing kidnapped agency workers in a bid to elicit false confessions that they took part in the October 7, 2023 attack. UNRWA and much of the international community have condemned such allegations as baseless.
In the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem, Israeli forces launched Operation Iron Wall in January. Israel says the invasion is targeting resistance fighters largely based in West Bank refugee camps. However, tens of thousands of people have been forcibly displaced by the offensive, which has killed numerous civilians.
According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 900 Palestinians including nearly 200 children have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since October 2023. Attacks by Israeli settler-colonists, sometimes aided by Israeli troops, have also killed, wounded, displaced, and terrorized West Bank residents as Israel's far-right government forges ahead with plans to steal more land from Palestinians, ethnically cleanse them, and open the door to further Israeli colonization.
Women, Children, and Journalists Among Nearly 100 Killed in Gaza Wednesday
"You haven't bombed any fighters or any weapons," said a restaurant owner in a neighborhood that was struck, addressing Israel. "You've only hit civilians."
Relatives of Palestinians killed in an Israeli attack on Al-Wehda Street, Gaza City mourn their loss during a funeral ceremony in Gaza on May 7, 2025. (Photo: Saeed Mohammed/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Julia Conley May 07, 2025 COMMON DREAMS \ "Death follows families in Gaza wherever they go," said the commissioner-general of a United Nations agency that has long provided aid and services to Palestinians in the enclave on Wednesday, as it was reported that nearly 100 people had been killed in numerous Israeli strikes across Gaza over the past day.
News outlets cataloged the latest deaths in attacks on restaurants, markets, and schools, with women, children, and two journalists who had covered Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza among those killed.
At least 33 people were killed in Gaza City when an Israeli reconnaissance drone fired two missiles—one inside a restaurant that had served as a gathering place for residents recently and one at a busy intersection.
Freelance journalist Yahya Sobeih was among those killed—shortly after he had posted on Instagram about the birth of his new baby.
The owner of Palmyra restaurant on al-Wehda Street, Abu Saleh Abdu, told the BBC that many children and elderly people had been killed in the blasts. He was seen in a video angrily addressing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
"What do [you] want to achieve?" he said. "You haven't bombed any fighters or any weapons. You've only hit civilians."
Israel and its allies including its top international military funder, the U.S., have persistently claimed the IDF is targeting Hamas and has inadvertently killed children, women, aid workers, and healthcare providers—but remarks from Israeli officials have pointed to an overall goal of targeting all Palestinians regardless of whether they are Hamas members or not.
"There is no reason to believe that doubling down on military strategies, which, for a year and eight months, have not led to a durable resolution, including the release of all hostages, will now succeed."
Other attacks over the past day include a strike at al-Karama school in the Tuffah neighborhood in Gaza City, which killed at least 13 people; a strike on a home in Jabalia in which three people were killed; a bombing of a home in Khan Younis, which killed eight people including a father and his children; and a strike on a tent shelter in Deir el-Balah, which killed three people including a child.
At Al Jazeera, Hani Mahmoud reported that Palestinians—who are also facing increasing levels of acute malnutrition two months into a total humanitarian aid blockade—have been "scrambling for cover" across Gaza.
"We have confirmed that a farmer was killed in the eastern part of Khan Younis, in Abasan, as he was trying to harvest what he managed to plant in the past couple of months, making up for the lack of food," Mahmoud said. "This is one of the elements that we have been seeing quite visibly. Not only are they suffering on a daily basis because of the enforced starvation and dehydration, they [also] try to plant their own food, but they are deprived, and their abilities to do so are [thwarted] by the ongoing attacks."
Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), said that 19 months into Israel's bombardment of Gaza, "no place is safe. No one is spared."
"In Gaza, day after day, inaction and indifference are normalizing dehumanization and overlooking crimes livestreamed under our eyes: families bombed, children burned alive, children starved," said Lazzarini. "Enough. Humanity must prevail before losing all moral compass."
The bloodshed on Wednesday followed an attack on a school-turned-shelter in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza on Tuesday. The Palestinian Civil Defense released an updated death toll in that attack Tuesday night, saying at least 30 people had been killed and dozens had been wounded.
Israel is ramping up its attacks as officials have approved a plan to seize Gaza, forcibly displace Palestinians to the southern part of the enclave, and enlist private U.S. security companies to help it take control of aid distribution.
On Wednesday, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said the plan fuels concerns that Israel's true intention is to make life for Palestinians "increasingly incompatible with their continued existence in Gaza."
"There is no reason to believe that doubling down on military strategies, which, for a year and eight months, have not led to a durable resolution, including the release of all hostages, will now succeed," said Türk.
Expanding Israel's attacks on Gaza "will almost certainly cause further mass displacement, more deaths and injuries of innocent civilians, and the destruction of Gaza's little remaining infrastructure," he said.
Independent human rights experts appointed by the U.N. said countries including the U.S. face a "defining choice... to end the violence or bear witness to the annihilation of the Palestinian population in Gaza—an outcome with irreversible consequences for our shared humanity and multilateral order."
"The world is watching. Will member states live up to their obligations and intervene to stop the slaughter, hunger, and disease, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity that are perpetrated daily in complete impunity?" asked the experts. "International norms were established precisely to prevent such horrors. Yet, as millions protest globally for justice and humanity, their cries are muted. This situation conveys a deadly message: Palestinian lives are dispensable, and international law, if unenforced, is meaningless."
"States must act swiftly to end the unfolding genocide," they said, "dismantle apartheid, and secure a future in which Palestinians and Israelis coexist in freedom and dignity."
'Civilized People Do Not Starve Children to Death': Sanders Rips US-Backed Israel's 68-Day Gaza Aid Blockade
"What we are seeing now is a slow, brutal process of mass starvation and death by the denial of basic necessities," the senator said, calling for an end to U.S. complicity in the humanitarian disaster.
Displaced Palestinians, including children, wait with empty pots to receive food distributed by humanitarian organizations at the Jabalia Refugee Camp in the northern Gaza Strip on May 7, 2025. (Photo: Mahmoud Issa/Anadolu via Getty Images)
"Today marks 68 days and counting since ANY humanitarian aid was allowed into Gaza. For more than nine weeks, Israel has blocked all supplies: no food, no water, no medicine, and no fuel."
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) not only highlighted those conditions in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday but also called out the fact that the worsening humanitarian crisis "gets very little discussion here in the nation's capital or in the halls of Congress," even though Israel has spent the past 19 months destroying Gaza with armed and diplomatic support from the United States.
"Hundreds of truckloads of lifesaving supplies are waiting to enter Gaza, sitting just across the border, but are denied entry by Israeli authorities," Sanders pointed out, echoing the U.S. nonprofit World Central Kitchen, which said Wednesday that it "no longer has the supplies to cook meals or bake bread," but "our trucks—loaded with food and supplies—are waiting in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, ready to enter Gaza."
The senator took aim at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian territory, and key members of his administration.
"There is no ambiguity here: Netanyahu's extremist government talks openly about using humanitarian aid as a weapon," Sanders declared. "Defense Minister Israel Katz said, 'Israel's policy is clear: No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers.'"
"The time is long overdue for us to end our support for Netanyahu's destruction of the Palestinian people."
Noting that Israel's actions run afoul of U.S. and international law, Sanders said: "Starving children to death as a weapon of war is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, the Foreign Assistance Act, and basic human decency. Civilized people do not starve children to death. What is going on in Gaza is a war crime, committed openly and in broad daylight, and continuing every single day."
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the Israeli assault on Gaza has killed more than 52,000 Palestinians. According to local officials, at least 57 Palestinians have died from malnutrition and a lack of adequate medical care. Many more are struggling to find food and water, particularly since Israel ramped up its blockade on March 2.
"With Israel having cut off all aid, what we are seeing now is a slow, brutal process of mass starvation and death by the denial of basic necessities. This is methodical, it is intentional, it is the stated policy of the Netanyahu government," said Sanders. "Without fuel, there is no ability to pump fresh water, leaving people increasingly desperate, unable to find clean water to drink, or wash with, or cook properly. Disease is once again spreading in Gaza."
Families in Gaza "are now surviving on scarce canned goods," and "the starvation hits children hardest," the senator continued. "With no infant formula, and with malnourished mothers unable to breastfeed, many infants are also at severe risk of death."
"What is going on in Gaza today is a manmade nightmare," one that "will be a permanent stain on the world's collective conscience," he said. "History will never forget that we allowed this to happen and, for us here in the United States, that we, in fact, enabled this ongoing atrocity."
Sanders has moved to block some U.S. weapons sales under both the Biden and second Trump administrations, but his efforts have not garnered enough support in Congress to succeed. Still, people across the United States and around the world have condemned the Israeli assault on Gaza as genocide—and Israel faces a case on the subject at the International Court of Justice.
The senator spotlighted Israel's latest plan for Gaza, Operation Gideon's Chariots, which involves "conquering" and indefinitely occupying the territory, and ethnically cleansing the region of its Palestinian inhabitants, who would be force into the south.
"This would be a terrible tragedy, no matter where in the world it was happening or why it was happening—whatever the causes of it might be. But what makes this tragedy so much worse for us in America is that it is our government, the United States government, that is absolutely complicit in creating and sustaining this humanitarian disaster," he said.
"It didn't just happen," Sanders emphasized. "Last year alone, the United States provided $18 billion in military aid to Israel. This year, the Trump administration has approved $12 billion more in bombs and weapons."
For months, U.S. President Donald Trump "has offered blanket support for Netanyahu," the senator said. "More than that, he has repeatedly said that the United States will actually take over Gaza after the war, that the Palestinian people will be driven—forcibly expelled—from their homeland, and the United States will redevelop it into what Trump calls 'the Riviera of the Middle East,' a playground for billionaires."
Citing unnamed sources, Reutersreported Wednesday that "the United States and Israel have discussed the possibility of Washington leading a temporary post-war administration of Gaza," sparking global criticism and comparisons to the U.S. misadventures in Iraq in the early 2000s.
"This war has killed or injured more than 170,000 people in Gaza. It has cost American taxpayers well over $20 billion in the last year. And right now, as we speak, thousands of children are starving to death," Sanders detailed. "And the U.S. president is actively encouraging the ethnic cleansing of over 2 million people."
"Given that reality, one might think that there would be a vigorous discussion right here in the Senate: Do we really want to spend billions of taxpayer dollars starving children in Gaza?" the senator bellowed. "You tell me why spending billions of dollars to support Netanyahu's war and starving children in Gaza is a good idea. I'd love to hear it."
Sanders then made the case that the U.S. Senate isn't having that debate "because we have a corrupt campaign finance system" that allows organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to set the agenda in Washington, D.C. He pointed to AIPAC and its super political action committee spending over $100 million in the latest election cycle.
"And the fact is that, if you are a member of Congress and you vote against Netanyahu's war in Gaza, AIPAC is there to punish you with millions of dollars in advertisements to see that you're defeated," he said. "Sadly, I must confess, that this political corruption works. Many of my colleagues will privately express their horror at Netanyahu's war crimes, but will do or say very little publicly about it."
"The time is long overdue for us to end our support for Netanyahu's destruction of the Palestinian people. We must not put another nickel into Netanyahu's war machine," he concluded. "We must demand an immediate cease-fire, a surge in humanitarian aid, the release of the hostages, and the rebuilding of Gaza—not for billionaires to enjoy their Riviera there, but rebuilding Gaza for the Palestinian people."
Let Them Die Alone, and Hungry
Osama Al-Raqab, 6, is one of tens of thousands of Gazan children slowly starving. Screenshot from NBC
"Drunk on impunity," Israel has grandiosely labeled its latest genocidal move "Operation Gideon's Chariots" wherein, moving from siege to seizure, it plans the bloody conquest, ethnic cleansing, and permanent recolonization of Gaza, using the rhetoric of holy war to justify unholy mass destruction - this, even as many of the Palestinian children who've somehow survived their savage 18 months of carnage now slowly starve to death. "We are complicit," says one angry, grieving doctor. "It is an abomination."
Having gotten away with so many atrocities while the international community looks away, Israel just unveiled the latest escalation of its illegal collective punishment of Gazans by finally declaring out loud, "We are occupying Gaza to stay." Unanimously approved by Netanyahu's far-right Security Cabinet, the new "conquering of Gaza" formalizes Israel's plan for the indefinite occupation, forced expulsion and incorporation into "sanitized" Israeli zones of an already long-besieged civilian population "for its own protection." The expansion of an onslaught that has left more than 185,000 Gazans dead, wounded, or missing and millions homeless, hungry, maimed and traumatized is being ludicrously framed as a final mission to dismantle Hamas and retrieve hostages, even though Israel repeatedly failed at each before breaking a ceasefire that would have accomplished both.
"Gideon’s Chariots will begin with great force and will not end until all its objectives are achieved," Israel thundered, again virtually ignoring the fact that permanent occupation, forced displacement and ethnic cleansing violate international law. "No more going in and out - this is a war for victory," said apartheid Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who urged Israelis embrace, not fear the word "occupation...A people that wants to live must occupy its land." But the name Gideon's Chariots, Merkavot Gideon, invoking the righteous Biblical warrior who led a chosen few to annihilate an ancient Arab people, "layers this symbolism with menace," blending the concepts of divine vengeance with state-sanctioned ethnic violence, the "mythic instruments of war (with) the Israeli Merkava tanks that have long razed homes and lives in Gaza and the West Bank."
Sicker, darker undercurrents reportedly surfaced during a Cabinet meeting rife with genocidal banter. After a minister leered that Gazans should "die with the Philistines," Gaza's ancient inhabitants, Netanyahu refuted the idea with, "No. We don’t want to die with them. We want them to die alone." Ominously, the proposal also calls for (now-banned) international aid groups to be replaced with private U.S. military contractors, aka mercenaries, distributing aid at Israeli-designated relief "hubs," which critics call "not an aid plan but an aid denial plan" that flagrantly violates international principles that prohibit an occupier from exploiting humanitarian needs to achieve military or political objectives. Gazan officials angrily rejected the idea as "perpetuation of a malicious policy of siege and starvation...The Occupation cannot be a humanitarian mediator (when) it is the source and instrument of the tragedy."
Any illusion of Israel abruptly becoming a merciful presence in Palestinian lives was shattered Tuesday when far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich proclaimed at a West Bank conference, “Gaza will be entirely destroyed." He added Gazan civilians "will start to leave in great numbers (to) third countries," with hopes the territory would be formally annexed "during the current government’s term." He did not mention such annexation or any acquisition of land by military force is forbidden as a founding principle of international law, including the UN charter. Citing a 2024 report by Amnesty International titled You Feel You Are Subhuman, Dalal Yassine writes that Gaza most bitterly represents the end of humanitarian law: "The past 19 months of genocide have not only demonstrated the double standard imposed on Palestinians in Gaza, but also that there is no standard at all."
And as it's been all along, the U.S. remains complicit. Israel will not act until after an upcoming trip by Trump, who's voiced no objections - his gold-plated hotel beckons - and as usual gets it all wrong, blaming Hamas for treating Gazans "badly." "People are starving, and we’re going to help them get food," he yammered. "Hamas is making it impossible (by) taking everything that’s brought in." This week, our complicity came into harsher, shocking focus when nine former Biden officials admitted its months-long claims of "working tirelessly" for a ceasefire - a phrase used by Biden, Harris, even AOC, and derided by skeptics as "not a thing" - were all a lie. No demands were made - a moral and political crime re-enforced by a 2024 memo finding "insufficient evidence" linking U.S. arms to rights violations or Israel to blocked aid. One critic: "The lack of concern about Palestinian lives is palpable."
Still, the killing goes on, with about half the dead women and children. Implausibly, Israeli forces grow ever more savage: Drones often fire on civil defense teams trying to retrieve the wounded under debris, soldiers just executed 15 Palestine Red Crescent workers, their hands and feet bound, before burying them and their ambulances in the sand; hundreds of doctors, aid workers and journalists have been killed. Last month, they included Ahmad Mansour, burned alive in a media tent, and Fatima Hassouna, a "self-made fighter" colleagues called "the Eye of Gaza," for whom the camera was a weapon to "preserve a voice, tell a story." She died with six siblings, just before her wedding, a day after it was announced a film featuring her, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, will screen at the Cannes Film Festival. "If I die, I want a resounding death," she wrote last year. "Fatima planned for joy," said a friend. "Despite the war, she insisted on dreaming."
With Israeli power left untethered, Arab nations largely silent and international rules of law ignored, what's left to protect Gazan lives are mere small gestures. Hundreds of Israelis attend silent vigils to hold images of dead Palestinian children; Artists Against Apartheid and other groups protested in D.C. bearing the names of the dead and installing 17,000 pairs of children's shoes as a searing memorial; Swedish Television announced an initiative to convert the late Pope Francis’s car into a mobile clinic for Gazan children, fulfilling his final wish; World Central Kitchen barely manages to keep open its mobile bakery, the last bakery in Gaza: "We are now near (the) limits of what is possible." Still, desperate hunger mounts. Most Gazans face "acute levels of food insecurity," with more and more children dying from "starvation-related complications," a now-common term that should not exist.
Aid officials say close to 300,000 children are on the brink of starvation; about a third of those under two suffer from "acute malnutrition," with the rate swiftly climbing; more than 3,500 under five face imminent death from starvation; at least 27 have died from malnutrition, and at least several more die each day, often newborns of mothers who cannot produce milk. To date, the Israeli onslaught has directly killed over 15,000 children; for every direct death, says The Lancet medical journal, there are up to four indirect deaths from hunger, disease, the collapse of small bodies' immunity and a country's once-flourishing healthcare system. If they can, sunken-cheeked children who've lost half their body weight scavenge in mountains of trash for anything to fill their stomachs alongside their frantic parents: "I don’t want my child to die hungry." One mother: "As people, we are almost dead."
The stories and images horrify: Stick-thin, Auschwitz-like limbs protrude, ribs jut from concave chests, eyes grow wide and glazed. Once vibrant, they lie in bed, skin on bone, too weak to walk, stand, turn, lift their head, eventually breathe. An emaciated six-year-old weighing half what he should writhes on a bed, pleading, "I want to leave." A four-month-old, six-pound girl died of malnutrition, blood acidity, liver and kidney failure after her hair and nails fell out. Of newborn twin girls, one died eight days later. A father's father's infant son Abdelaziz died hours after his severely malnourished mother gave birth to him; hospital staff hooked Abdelaziz, premature and gasping, to a ventilator; it stopped a few hours later when the hospital ran out of fuel, and he died "immediately." "I am losing my son before my eyes," says one mother. "In these beds, we are waiting for them to die one by one."
Each day, says Tareq Hailat of the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, up to ten sick children in Gaza need urgent medical evacuation, but, "It's just not happening." Each one, he stresses, has a story: "They aren't just a number." Among the handful his group managed to get out was 6-year-old Fadi al-Zant from Gaza City, who had cystic fibrosis; he was also starving. When his mother couldn't find food or medication, Fadi's weight dropped from 66 to 26 pounds and he became too weak to walk, he was miraculously evacuated to first Egypt, then New York. Once the media began following his story, Fadi became "the face of starvation in Gaza." But he was a rare, blessed exception. "We are breaking the bodies and minds of the children of Gaza," says Michael Ryan, executive director of WHO. "We are starving the children of Gaza. We are complicit. As a physician, I am angry. It is an abomination."
There are so many. Drop Site Newsposted video of the distraught mother of four-month-old Yousef al-Najjar as he lay curled on a hospital bed, small fists flailing, suffering from malnutrition and dehydration. He weighed just 3.3 pounds, one fourth of what he should have weighed. His young mother lamented: He has had spasms trying to breathe, his entire ribcage sticks out, she has never experienced this before, she doesn't know each morning if he's survived: "The woman you see before you is begging for money to feed her children." She held him in her arms, then repeatedly lofted him into the unlistening air, arms straight before her, up and down, up and down, almost weightless. "Why is this happening to us?" she cried. "I swear to God, it's wrong what is happening to us." On Monday, Yousef died from malnutrition, and Israel. May his memory be for a blessing.
Bonkers': US, Israel Reportedly Discuss US-Led Administration in Gaza
"Right, because the U.S. occupation of Iraq is certainly the best-case scenario for Gaza today," one critic quipped.
U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House on April 7, 2025. (Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Reutersreported Wednesday that "the United States and Israel have discussed the possibility of Washington leading a temporary post-war administration of Gaza, according to five people familiar with the matter," sparking widespread criticism across the globe.
Under both the Biden and Trump administrations, the U.S. government has provided armed and diplomatic support to Israel in the wake of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack. The Israeli assault over the past 19 months has killed at least 52,653 Palestinians, with thousands more missing. Survivors have been repeatedly displaced and are struggling to find food thanks to an aid blockade.
According to Reuters, other unnamed nations "would be invited to take part" in the provisional U.S.-led administration, which "would draw on Palestinian technocrats but would exclude Islamist group Hamas and the Palestinian Authority."
As the news agency detailed: The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the talks publicly, compared the proposal to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq that Washington established in 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
The authority was perceived by many Iraqis as an occupying force and it transferred power to an interim Iraqi government in 2004 after failing to contain a growing insurgency.
Several critics of the reported "high-level" talks also cited the United States' misadventures in Iraq in the early 2000s.
"This would be a rerun of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, but in a war-ravaged territory that isn't even a sovereign state and in which no American official has been allowed to set foot for two decades," said Gregg Carlstrom, Middle East correspondent for The Economist. "So bonkers, in fact, that whoever is floating this idea for Gaza is literally comparing it to the CPA in Iraq, an entity which two decades later remains a byword for waste, corruption, and incompetence."
Alexander Langlois, a contributing fellow at the foreign policy think tank Defense Priorities, quipped: "Right, because the U.S. occupation of Iraq is certainly the best-case scenario for Gaza today. Because that went so well the first time. It's clear Washington has learned nothing, in no small part because it refuses to actually reflect on such failures."
Journalist Bobby Ghosh said, "I'm guessing Paul Bremer has pulled on his boots and is waiting by the phone," a reference to the American diplomat who led the CPA in Iraq.
While the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a fugitive of the International Criminal Court whose government also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice over conduct in Gaza—declined to comment, a spokesperson for U.S. State Department sent Reuters a statement that did not address the news agency's questions.
"We want peace, and the immediate release of the hostages," the U.S. spokesperson said, referring to captives taken by Palestinian militants in October 2023. "The pillars of our approach remain resolute: stand with Israel, stand for peace."
Earlier this week, Netanyahu's Security Cabinet unanimously approved Operation Gideon's Chariots, a plan that involves "conquering" Gaza, occupying the Palestinian territory, and forcibly expelling its residents to the southern part of the strip.
Israeli Cabinet Minister Ze'ev Elkin suggested Monday that U.S. President Donald Trump would not object to the plan, claiming, "I don't feel that there is pressure on us from Trump and his administration—they understand exactly what is happening here."
Trump in February proposed a U.S. takeover of Gaza. He said that "we'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings—level it out and create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area."
In response to Reuters' Wednesday reporting, University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald nodded to those remarks, saying, "One step closer to Trump's dream of bulldozing Gaza to build Trump resorts."
Some critics connected the potential plan for Gaza to the Trump administration's other international endeavors. U.K.-based Jewish Voice for Labour said: "First Canada, then Greenland, now Palestine. This is what 21st-century imperialism looks like."
Johns Hopkins University historian Eugene Finkel—who was born in Ukraine and grew up in Israel—sarcastically said, "Because the U.S. does state-building, governance of places destroyed by U.S. weapons, and reconstruction even more effectively than Israel does conflict resolution."
"I was skeptical it was possible to produce something more unhinged than Trump's peace plans for Ukraine," Finkel added, "but hey, I've underestimated them."
MAKE AMERIKA WHITE AGAIN
While Locking Out Most Refugees, Trump Admin Poised to Resettle Group of White Afrikaners in US
"Thousands of refugees from across the globe remain stranded in limbo despite being fully vetted and approved for travel," said one refugee advocate. White South Africans supporting U.S. President Donald Trump and South African and U.S. tech billionaire Elon Musk gather in front of the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa on February 15, 2025 for a demonstration. (Photo: Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images)
While the Trump administration has largely halted refugee resettlement in the United States, in the coming days the U.S. government is gearing up to welcome a group of Afrikaners whom officials have determined are refugees.
A group of 54 Afrikaners, white South Africans largely descended from Dutch settlers, have been granted refugee status and are slated to arrive in the U.S. on Monday, according toNPR, which cited three unnamed sources. There will reportedly be a press conference featuring high level officials from the U.S. Department of State and Department of Homeland Security to welcome them at the airport, which one unnamed source told the outlet would be unusual.
In February, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the U.S. would "promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation."
Trump was referring to a law passed into South Africa earlier this year, allowing the government to take land under set circumstances, when it is not being used or when it would be in the public interest to redistribute the land. The law is meant to help rectify the economic exclusion that Black South Africans faced during apartheid. In February, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said that the government "has not confiscated any land."
Billionaire Elon Musk, who has played a core role in the Trump administration's efforts to slash government spending and personnel and is South African-born, has accused the government of South Africa of having "openly racist ownership laws."
According to a memo first obtained by the outlet The Lever, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement sought approval from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the "mobilization of immediate support for vulnerable incoming Afrikaner refugees," including "housing, health services, and resettlement support upon their arrival." Kennedy greenlit the request.
The Lever reporter who broke the story told NPR that officials made the request because the Trump administration has restricted the usual procedures and channels for assisting refugees.
The Lever also reported that the Office of Refugee Resettlement is planning tap funds from the Preferred Communities program in order to resettle the Afrikaners, a program that's reserved to support particularly vulnerable populations.
Sources who serve refugees in the United States indicated they are ready to help the incoming Afrikaners, but drew a contrast between the administration's readiness to accept this group while other refugee populations have been left stranded due to White House actions.
HIAS, one agency that contracts with the U.S. government to resettle refugees, is committed to welcoming Afrikaners, the organization's president, Mark Hetfield, told the Times. However, "we are profoundly disturbed that the administration has slammed the door in the face of thousands of other refugees approved by [the Department of Homeland Security] months ago, notwithstanding courts ordering the White House to let many of them in."
"Thousands of refugees from across the globe remain stranded in limbo despite being fully vetted and approved for travel, including Afghan allies, religious minorities, and other populations facing extreme violence and persecution," Timothy Young, a spokesperson for Global Refuge, which also supports refugees entering the U.S., told the Times. "We hope this development reflects a broader readiness to uphold the promise of protection for all refugees who meet longstanding legal standards, regardless of their country of origin."
Prior to Trump's first term in office, refugee resettlement generally took 18 to 24 months, according to the American Immigration Council. The Afrikaners set to arrive only had to wait three months, the Times reported. U.S. officials looked at over 8,000 requests from Afrikaners expressing interest in being resettled in the United States, also per the Times.
Trump Is Robbing Public Health to Pay for His Deportation Conveyer Belt
For $40 billion-worth of health cuts to come as our government wants to spend $45 billion to become Amazon-efficient at shipping human beings to foreign prisons is establishing this nation as a beacon of cruelty.
Demonstrators attend a protest against U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE cuts to medical research and higher education during a "Fund Don't Freeze" rally outside the Health and Human Services headquarters in Washington, D.C. on February 19, 2025. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
The Trump administration wants to spend $45 billion to build an inhumane deportation industry while planning to cut at least $40 billion in life-saving programs from the Department of Health and Human Services. The juxtaposition is a near-perfect gauge of how heartless our government has become in the richest nation on Earth.
For deportation, the administration virtually froths for an Amazon-like fulfillment center to robotically sort out handcuffed humans and shuffle them down the aisles onto trucks and planes.
Todd Lyons, the acting director of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), recently told private security companies seeking contracts that ICE needs to be “like Amazon, trying to get your product delivered in 24 hours… trying to figure out how to do that with human beings and trying to get them pretty much all over the globe is really something for us.”
So far, all that the government is proving is how cruel it is in running roughshod over due process to separate children from parents and deport U.S. citizen children, including one with late-stage cancer.
That is really something, on many levels. One is the sheer immorality of reducing humans to shrink-wrapped products to shove onto conveyor belts and stack on forklifts. Another is that so far, ICE is as indiscriminate and incompetent as Amazon is efficient. President Donald Trumppromised “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” Border czar Tom Homan said the United States government was “targeting the worst of the worst” for deportation.
Instead, there have been notorious incidents of students being rounded up for exercising their right to free speech and deportations of untold numbers of people without U.S. criminal records. One recent notorious case is that of 238 mostly Venezuelan migrants deported to prisons in El Salvador; Bloomberg Newsfound that only about 10% of them had a criminal record in the United States. The legality of many deportations is highly questionable, as the White House has defied court orders to turn back deportation planes and return wrongly deported people back to the United States
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, founded at Syracuse University, ICE issued 18,000 “detainer” requests for local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to hold people for possible deportation in the first month of the new Trump administration. That was more than triple the detainers issued in the first full month of the Biden administration, which faced its own fierce criticism from immigration rights advocates.
ICE says detainers are mostly for people who have been convicted of burglaries and robberies, kidnapping, homicide, sexual assault, weapons offenses, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. But only 28% of people targeted by a detainer in the first month of the new Trump administration had a prior conviction in the United States, with the most frequent offenses involving drunk driving and other traffic violations.
As for the “worst of the worst,” just one half of 1% of detainers involved a convicted rapist or murderer. So far, all that the government is proving is how cruel it is in running roughshod over due process to separate children from parents and deport U.S. citizen children, including one with late-stage cancer.
That the nation would spend $45 billion on this malicious ruination of lives and destruction of families looks even more unconscionable when President Trump and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. want to cut $40 billion from a department that says its mission is to “enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.”
A review of the proposed cuts—as detailed in a 64-page memorandum that was leaked to the media—shows how profoundly the Trump administration is about to betray that mission.
Cuts Despite Deadly Toll
The administration would end the HIV Epidemic Initiative, even though nearly 5,000 people a year in the United States still die with HIV/AIDS as the underlying cause. Despite many advances in HIV treatment that allow patients longer lives, there were still 38,000 HIV diagnoses in 2022, half of them in Southern states. While 1 in 5 people in the United States with HIV are still not able to access treatment.
The administration would kill the Minority AIDS Initiative, even though the disease is rife with gross racial disparities. Though African Americans are 12% of the nation’s population, they accounted for 37% of new HIV diagnoses in 2022.
The cuts would eliminate the division of Firearm Injury and Mortality Research. In doing so, the administration is imposing an ignorance that will likely further paralyze any debate on gun control, since the division’s mission is to provide data “to inform action” on a major cause of death in the United States. Last year, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring gun violence an “urgent public health crisis,” as gun deaths soared to a record 48,830 in 2021.
All this raises real questions of how people in this nation could needlessly die if the HHS cuts become real in the areas of gun safety, mental health, food safety, HIV, or nursing.
New research funded by HHS’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that emergency rooms were receiving a gunshot victim every 30 minutes in nine Southern and Western states and the District of Columbia. Even though murders have subsided somewhat from a record 21,000 in 2021 during the Covid-19 crisis, gun suicides kept rising to a record 27,300 in 2023.
The Youth Violence Division would also be eliminated, even though gun deaths are the leading cause of death for youth under 18, killing 2,500 kids a year. Due to the Trump administration’s demands to end equity across all public policy, HHS proposes to eliminate the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. More than half of Black youth who die before the age of 18 are victims of gun violence, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Black youth are six times more likely to die a gun death than white youth.
Besides the 27,300 gun suicides in 2023, another 22,000 suicides occurred that year from other methods, primarily suffocation and intentional poisoning. About another 100,000 people died in 2022 from unintentional overdoses of fentanyl, methamphetamine, prescription opioids, cocaine, heroin, and other substances.Yet, despite the approximately 150,000 combined deaths a year from suicides and overdoses, President Trump and Secretary Kennedy propose to eliminate dozens of mental health and substance abuse training and treatment programs for children, families, people of color, people in the criminal justice system, first responders, community recovery support, and crisis response.
As if the Flint Water Crisis never happened, HHS under the Trump administration would end the Childhood Lead Poisoning Program and the Lead Exposure Registry. That is despite a 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal that showed half of the U.S. population was exposed to high levels of lead in early childhood, and a 2016 Reutersanalysis that 3,000 communities across the nation had higher lead levels than Flint. A 2022 study found that without stronger congressional action to protect children from the brain damage of lead exposure, the nation will “needlessly absorb” about $80 billion in annual costs to the nation’s economy, double the proposed cuts to HHS.
HHS would end the direct involvement of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in routine inspections of food facilities, trusting an uneven patchwork of state vigilance on bacteria, parasites, and viruses in our food systems. Never mind that the CDC says there are 48 million cases of foodborne illness every year, costing 3,000 lives and requiring 128,000 hospitalizations. A study last year done by researchers from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Colorado School of Public Health found that food illnesses cost the nation $75 billion a year in medical care, lost productivity, premature deaths, and ongoing chronic illnesses.
Yet, HHS wants to cut $40 billion from the budget.
Cuts Range From Chronic Diseases to Drowning Programs
The Trump administration and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, have disingenuously stated that funding and eliminations of departments are targeting waste and fraud. One need not be a math major to see that what they propose is the opposite.
For instance, the cuts would eliminate the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, even though cancer, heart disease, and stroke kill more than 1.5 million people a year in the United States, and cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars a year in healthcare costs and lost productivity. Many of those diseases, along with diabetes and obesity, are often preventable, and the national center has been a resource for programs to reduce smoking, promote physical activity, lower alcohol intake, and improve nutrition.
The administration wants to eliminate the National Institutes for Nursing Research and several other nursing programs. This is in the face of studies that show that lower nurse-to-patient ratios and lower patient waiting times (because of more nurses) can save a hospital a couple of million dollars a year. It is also in the face of a 2021 study that found that in New York state alone, lower nurse-to-patient ratios could save more than 4,000 lives and more than $700 million over a two-year period.
The administration is so heartless that it even wants to eliminate its program for drowning, even though 4,500 people a year perish underwater, even though it is the top cause of death for preschoolers, and even though 55% of U.S. adults have never taken a swim lesson.
All this raises real questions of how people in this nation could needlessly die if the HHS cuts become real in the areas of gun safety, mental health, food safety, HIV, or nursing. It should be unfathomable that the nation would let its guard down after Flint, risking stunted brain development in untold children.
For these $40 billion-worth of cuts to come at the same time our government wants to spend $45 billion to become Amazon-efficient at shipping human beings “all over the globe” to foreign prisons is establishing this nation as a beacon of cruelty in the developed world. The government wants a conveyor belt of deportation as it dismantles health systems in the name of efficiency.
That would be quite the fulfillment center. Immigrants are forklifted into misery. The rest of us are being carted into a cavalier world by a government that clearly does not care how many people die.
