curated citations to news sources
BBC: Israel’s Gaza City plan means more misery for Palestinians and big risk for Netanyahu
News of the Israeli government’s decision to take over Gaza City is being met not surprisingly with despair in Gaza. Gaza City, its capital, is on a countdown to oblivion.
Assuming that Hamas does not capitulate in the coming weeks – and there are currently few signs of this happening – then the Israeli military is set to embark on a devastating new phase of the war.
For Gaza City, where an estimated one million civilians still live, the prospects are bleak.
Hundreds of thousands are people who were forced to flee during the early months of the war but who returned in January when a ceasefire raised hopes of an end to the fighting.
They spent more than a year away from their homes, driven from one location to another, living in increasingly desperate conditions.
When they returned to the north, many found their homes destroyed and their neighbourhoods erased. But they settled down where they could, believing the war might finally be over.
But life in the city, hard enough already, deteriorated rapidly after Israel broke the ceasefire in mid-March and cut off aid supplies, triggering the worst humanitarian crisis of the conflict.
Now it seems a new cycle is about to unfold.
(BBC more…)
Closer to the Edge: Starvation as a Weapon, Silence as a Shield
Closer to the Edge: Starving children silent hands
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – August 8, 2025
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed he could stop Russia’s war on Ukraine with a single phone call. Instead, Matt Murphy and Ned Davies of the BBC report that Russian attacks on Ukraine have doubled since Trump took office. Today was the deadline the president had announced for Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in his illegal invasion of Ukraine or face further sanctions. Instead, Trump announced this afternoon that he intends to meet with Putin on August 15 in Alaska.
Putin generally cannot travel outside Russia because he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, including the theft of Ukrainian children. And yet Trump is welcoming him to the United States of America.
…Now Trump will welcome Putin to the United States, to territory that once belonged to Russia, reinforcing for Russian nationalists the dream of recreating Russia’s old empire. That dream has been part of the ideology of Russia’s drive to seize Ukrainian land.
Donato Paolo Mancini, Alberto Nardelli, and Daryna Krasnolutska of Bloomberg reported this morning that U.S. and Russian officials are planning this summit to hammer out an agreement that will force Ukraine to cede to Russia its land currently occupied by Russian troops, as well as Crimea. This deal would hand Ukraine’s eastern industrial territory to Russia and bless the principle that one country can seize territory from another through force. Observers note that once this principle is established, as Putin wishes, there will be nothing stopping him from invading Ukraine again as soon as his war-weary country recovers its strength.
The plan revealed by the Bloomberg journalists is still vague, but it excludes Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and European allies and is similar to the one Russia demanded in April 2025. That plan, in turn, rehashed almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in exchange for helping Trump win the White House.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)Lev Parnas: Trump–Putin Alaska Summit — With Zelensky and Ukraine on the Menu
From Trump’s nuclear submarine show to Witkoff’s secret dealings with Putin — the inside story of how Alaska became the stage for a plan to carve up Ukraine.
Dean Blundell: Russia’s Child-Trafficking “Catalog” Of Kidnapped Ukrainian Children Is a War Crime With a User Interface
Kremlin-occupied Luhansk is openly sorting abducted Ukrainian kids by eye color, hair color, and “personality” for Russian families
emptywheel: How John Durham Buried Evidence He Had Been Doing the Work of Russian Spies … and then Tulsi Gabbard Buried More
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Atlantic: America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy
On climate, the U.S. and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds.”
Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how international law should regard climate harm. The International Court of Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so—by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels—may “constitute an internationally wrongful act.” In other words, curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is not merely voluntary in the eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal.A week later, the U.S. government proffered an entirely opposite picture of legal responsibility. It announced a plan to rescind one of the most important legal underpinnings of the federal effort to combat climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, from 2009, says quite simply that these emissions endanger the public and qualify as harmful pollution; they can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This finding is the legal basis for power-plant rules, tailpipe-emissions regulations, and almost every other action the executive branch has taken to curb the release of carbon dioxide and methane. And the U.S. EPA would now like to throw it out.
(Atlantic more…)Verge: Why Donald Trump’s environmental data purge is so much worse this time
Resources on climate change and inequity have vanished, and disinformation is taking its place.
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AXIOS: Trump’s China gamble
President Trump is abandoning — or actively undermining — core pillars of U.S. strategy toward China in pursuit of a legacy-defining trade deal with Xi Jinping.
(AXIOS more…)
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Salon: Trump escalates his racist attacks on Black Americans
Failure to connect his comments to our worsening democratic crisis is an act of complicity
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LA Times: Hegseth reposts video on X of pastors saying women shouldn’t be allowed to vote
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“All of Christ for All of Life,” Hegseth wrote in his post that accompanied the video.
(LA Times more…)
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Bulwark: Can We Ever Repair This Moral Rot
MAGA can learn grace from the folks their leader wrongfully imprisoned.
What happens to a man after he’s been resurrected from hell?When I talked to Andry Hernández Romero earlier this week, he tried to answer this question. Andry explained why he wanted to come to America. How he was treated in our hands. The disgusting and unconscionable abuse that he was subjected to an infamous Salvadoran prison. His hopes for freedom and so much more.
The entire discussion was remarkable because he is remarkable. Not just his sense of humor and unshakable faith in God in light of all that has happened. But, most of all, his empathy and mercy for those who were responsible for his persecution.
(Bulwark more…)
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NY Times: Trump Officials Press Case Against Harvard, and Add a New Investigation
The administration doubled down against Harvard, asserting that rising violent crime on campus meant the school should not host international students. It will also review the school’s patents.
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BBC: Mexico rules out Trump’s reported military plan against drug cartels
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NY Times: Why Are Tariffs on Switzerland So High?
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Texas Wants to Erase Voters’ Voices & U.S. Under Trump Declared Civil Rights “Emergency”
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Wired: Hackers Went Looking for a Backdoor in High-Security Safes—and Now Can Open Them in Seconds
Security researchers found two techniques to crack at least eight brands of electronic safes—used to secure everything from guns to narcotics—that are sold with Securam Prologic locks.
(Wired more…)
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NY Times: Trump Attack on Intel’s C.E.O. Could Compound Factory Struggles
The challenges in Ohio highlight the risks that federal and state officials took when they financially backed Intel, a once-powerful force in chip manufacturing.
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WSJ: Why These 12 Republicans Want the Epstein Files Released
In their own words, GOP lawmakers explain their reasons for backing a contentious House vote
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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