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Purchased With Blood and Lies
Another Memorial Day: boasts, insults, "self-defense strikes," cheap clichés from a "Secretary of War" prattling about dead boys "delivered from the battlefield into the arms of a loving Lord and savior." Spare us. And maybe revisit the war to end all wars, which didn't - its "infinity of waste" and trenches with skulls in the sides where "he who had a corpse to stand on was lucky." Pat Barker: “A society that devours its own young deserves (no) unquestioning allegiance.”
"Happy Memorial Day to all," babbled our ever-unseemly Idiot-In-Chief, "including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military and all of the tremendous success that it has had over the last year," because obviously the best way to honor the dead is to not acknowledge their sacrifice but to denigrate half the ravaged country they died defending. Also, at Arlington National Cemetery, the infinitely hollow, "Wherever the American soldier (falls), he does it for the destiny of a nation like no other - there’s never been anybody like you." Also, noted Private Bone Spurs, 18,000 Williams, over 20,000 Johns, and other names fell, but "not too many" Donalds. Huh.
Adding to the day's eloquence with a much-needed "monster truck rally vibe" was inexplicably non-veteran, Hegseth bestie, tawdry aging rock star Kid Rock. Because "Tokyo Rose wasn't available," he was chosen by the Pentagon to honor American service members' ultimate sacrifice in a hoodie, fedora, gold chain and sunglasses, looking like "a creature you’d expect to hiss at you from the dank depths of a garbage bin" and intoning, "We are remembering the sacrifice and service of so many who are not with us today...It’s a special day. We’re thinking of them... Keep on Kid Rocking in the free world."
Then there was bombastic, dime-store-cliché-spouting Christo-fascist Pete Hegseth urging we "remember our republic was forged and purchased with blood, American blood," evidently only male according to his pronouns. Ever a fatuous buffoon, he declaimed "the sacred names of bygone eras to the 13 souls of Epic Fury (who) answered the call when it mattered the most (and) gave the last full measure of devotion," even when he failed them in an Iranian strike in Yemen: "They stood against the darkness of the world wearing the breastplate of righteousness (and) raced to the brink so we could walk in freedom and prosperity (and) may almighty God bless our warriors." Jesus weeps.
It remains unclear how many of the up to 22 million dead, both military and civilian, and over 20 million wounded, "the butcher's bill" of World War One, came to be blessed by almighty God, especially in its Western Front's godforsaken trenches teeming with sludge, rats, mud, blood, water and disease. The war's "inconceivable loss" and "purposeless waste of a generation" is perhaps best exemplified by the Battle of Verdun, where the French, set upon by German forces, adopted a "They Shall Not Pass” mantra that in the end saw over 700,000 dead on both sides - ultimately, vast "heaps of bones."
For many, the horrors of "the greatest conflagration the world had seen" live on through the searing literature, both prose and poetry, that emerged from them. Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est epitomizes the bitter, bloody tone that often prevailed amidst its "guttering, choking, drowning" victims - Hegseth's benighted "warriors." "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags," cursing, gargling, limping bootless through sludge, "blood-shod...deaf even to the hoots/Of gas-shells dropping softly behind," they reject, "The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori."
Siegfried Sassoon lived the privileged life of a British country gentleman, writing poetry and fox hunting, until the start of World War 1, when he served as an officer with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in France. He was awarded a Military Cross, was later wounded in action, and refused to fight any longer to protest "a senseless slaughter." On June 15, 1917, he wrote "A Soldier's Declaration" as "an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those how have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers."
"I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust," he wrote. He was protesting, he made clear, "against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed...against the deception which is being practiced on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise."
His letter was read before the House of Commons and printed in The London Times. He expected to be court-martialed; instead, he was declared "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where Dr. William Rivers was charged with restoring Sassoon’s “sanity” and sending him back to the trenches. The story of their real-life encounter, wherein Rivers came to diagnose war's "shell-shock" and share Sassoon's view, is powerfully told in Pat Barker's historical novel Regeneration, the first in a trilogy about the psychological carnage of war. "It (was) the Great White God de-throned. We assumed we were the measure of all things," Rivers says. "(But) nothing justifies this. Nothing nothing nothing."
Siegfried Sassoon's 1918 Suicide in the Trenches mourns "a simple soldier boy/Who grinned at life in empty joy" until he goes to war: "In winter trenches, cowed and glum/With crumps and lice and lack of rum/He put a bullet through his brain./No one spoke of him again./ You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye/Who cheer when soldier lads march by,/Sneak home and pray you'll never know/The hell where youth and laughter go." Too many of those young lie in a cemetery near Ypres, where one Inscription stands out in a sea of "For King and Country" headstones. It was written on the grave of Arthur Young by his father, a diplomat wiser than any vacuous Hegseth: "Sacrificed to the fallacy that war can end war."
May 26, 2026
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'Shame! Shame! Shame!': Local Residents Furious After Shark Tank Billionaire's Data Center Approved in Utah
County commissioners in Box Elder County, Utah, were deluged with chants of "Shame! Shame! Shame!" from a crowd of hundreds on Monday night as they voted unanimously to move forward with a sprawling "hyperscale" artificial intelligence data center project that many residents fear will cause energy prices to soar and imperil water access.
The project, known by state officials as "Stratos," was proposed by the celebrity venture capitalist Kevin O'Leary and has been rushed along by Utah's Military Installation Development Authority, which recently approved a gigantic energy tax break for the program to help "lure" the billionaire "Shark Tank" investor.
The development, dubbed "Wonder Valley" after O'Leary's "Mr. Wonderful" TV persona, would span more than 40,000 acres of northern Utah—more than two and a half times the size of Manhattan—and would consume more than twice the electricity currently used by the entire state if approved, according to Axios.
CBS 2 KUTV called it "the biggest thing in the region since the completion of the first transcontinental railroad." And yet Utahns say they've been given little information about the plan and few opportunities to voice their concerns.
Residents were given short notice before Box Elder commissioners gathered at the county fairgrounds on Monday for a "special" meeting to vote on the project, but an estimated 500 still showed up to voice their displeasure.
They raised fears that they'd have to endure the same dramatic energy price spikes as other states with high concentrations of data centers. Residential utility costs have jumped 13-20% year over year in Virginia, Illinois, Ohio, and New Jersey, a trend attributed to the rollout of data centers in these states.
The developers of the Utah project have emphasized that it will be powered by an on-site natural gas plant, which they claim would limit the impact on utility bills.
However, that still leaves the massive environmental concern, especially since natural gas is almost entirely made of methane, one of the worst planet-heating pollutants.
Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, has said that the estimated nine gigawatts of power the center would require, "would increase the carbon dioxide emissions for the state of Utah by more than 50%," meaning "there’s a huge climate footprint associated with that proposal.”
Environmental advocates also warn that the facility will further drain water from the Great Salt Lake amid an already severe drought.
The Salt Lake Tribune has found that Utah's dozens of other data centers consume wildly different amounts of water depending on the technology they use.
The developers of the Box Elder facility have claimed the project will use "zero water turbine" technology that allows it to recycle water, resulting in "net zero" consumption.
But Samantha Hawkins, the communications director for Grow the Flow Utah, a group dedicated to protecting the Great Salt Lake, said it's impossible to know if the developers are telling the truth when they say their facility is designed to limit water usage.
"So far, there’s no publicly available hydrologic analysis or independent review to support those claims," she said, "and there haven’t been any manufacturers, technologies, or contracts cited in relation to the 'zero water turbine' technology."
Even if the centers limit water use, they still need to remain cool, which the Tribune said often requires more energy.
Many of the Utahns who showed up to protest Monday's vote felt they were being kept in the dark about the facility's potential harms and that the plans for the facility, which were not made public until last week, were being kept from them.
“I’m outraged," said Colleen Flanagan, a resident of Sandy who spoke with Fox 13 Salt Lake. "I am absolutely angry that there was no studies done—it just came up out of the community. Nobody knew about it."
Mitchell Tousley, who drove more than an hour from Draper to protest the decision, said, "A project of this scale just absolutely requires public input, and there really hasn’t been."
Deals to build these facilities have often been made in secret, with contract details hidden from the public by nondisclosure agreements that stifle dissent until the project has already been approved. Despite this, these projects have often drawn fearsome backlash from the communities where they are planned. In some cases—like in Virginia late last month, where a 2,100-acre center was set to be built—it has led developers to pull out.
But the commissioners in Box Elder County, who said they'd reviewed more than 2,500 public comments on the proposal, appeared unmoved by the outpouring of public concern on Monday night. They said water and air quality issues were not factors in their vote and that the water rights were held by the private landowners.
As the crowd jeered, with chants of "cowards" and "people over profits," Commissioner Boyd Bingham, a Republican, shouted them down.
“For hell’s sakes, grow up,” he yelled. “This is beyond a joke.” The commissioners then left the room and addressed the crowd via a virtual meeting.
In a video response to Monday night's protest, O'Leary said: "I’m the only developer of data centers on Earth that graduated from environmental studies. I'm pretty aware of what these concerns are. They are around air, water use, heat, noise pollution. So sustainability is at the heart of what we do in terms of all these proposals."
He claimed without evidence that 90% of the opponents of the data center project were "being bused in" from out of state. He also claimed that the facility would be powered in part by "solar, wind, and batteries," when it is actually powered entirely by natural gas.
Opponents continue to characterize Stratos as a billionaire vanity project to loot Utah's vast natural resources with little consideration for how it will affect residents.
Utah State University physics professor Robert Davies told Fox 13 that the Great Salt Lake "is occupied by amazing living systems" and that "projects like this go into environments like this and scrape the living systems right off the face of the Earth.”
He said, “This is a private enterprise that is coming in to extract from our natural wealth and pipe it out of the state… and leave us with a few crumbs.”
May 05, 2026
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Tax Refunds From GOP’s Big Ugly Bill ‘Largely Erased’ Thanks to Illegal Iran War: Expert
Congressional Republicans had been hoping their political standing would improve this spring when American voters received larger refunds thanks to changes in US tax law made under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
However, The Financial Times reported on Tuesday that much of the projected fiscal stimulus from the larger refunds has already been swallowed up by the rise in gas and energy prices caused by President Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran, and the financial situation could grow even worse in the coming months.
Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY Parthenon, told The Financial Times that "the tax refunds have been largely erased by the increase in Middle East price pressures," and warned that "the longer the conflict lasts, the more we move to an adverse scenario where inflation proves more persistent and erodes consumer spending growth."
Nathan Sheets, global chief economist at Citigroup, told The Financial Times that the Iran war has only accelerated problems for US consumers who were already facing high pressures from the cost of living.
"By our reckoning, wage growth has steadily lost ground relative to the pace of inflation since the middle of last year," Sheets said. "First President Trump’s tariffs and, more recently, Iran-related pressures on oil and commodity prices have pushed up prices relative to wages."
US retailers have been expecting the positive impact of the tax refunds to dwindle, with Target CFO Jim Lee telling The Financial Times that they "will be fading over the rest of the year" as Americans are using larger shares of their incomes to pay for basics such as food and energy.
Lee's concerns were echoed by Walmart CFO John David Rainey, who told CNBC last week that while tax refunds have been helping Americans buffer the costs associated with the Iran war, that financial cushion is shrinking by the day.
“I think higher tax returns muted some of the pressure related to higher fuel prices," said Rainey, "and as we’re in a period of time right now where those tax refunds are largely not coming in, I think consumers are going to feel more of that pressure from higher fuel prices."
Walmart's stock price on has fallen sharply over the last week despite strong quarterly earnings, as investors express concerns that low-income consumers are feeling squeezed financially.
As reported by The New York Times, Walmart noted in its most recent earnings call that "sales continued to be driven by its low-price private label goods and higher-income households trading down to stretch their budgets," suggesting that consumers are under increasing distress.
May 26, 2026
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Dell Scores Major Pentagon Contract Weeks After Trump Promoted Company
Just weeks after President Donald Trump urged Americans to "go out and buy a Dell" and months after he bought millions of dollars worth of stock in the company, the computer giant was awarded a $9.7 billion Pentagon contract.
The Department of Defense confirmed the contract with Dell Federal Systems, the government-focused arm of Dell Technologies, on Wednesday.
Euronews reported:
As part of the Core Enterprise Technology Agreement (CETA), a Pentagon-wide Microsoft licensing and software procurement framework, the company will provide and manage Microsoft software licences, cloud subscriptions and on-premises software licensing across the US military, intelligence agencies and the US Coast Guard.
The contract would have raised scrutiny regardless, given the Dell family’s proximity to Trump in his second term. CEO Michael Dell and his wife, Susan, have pledged $6.25 billion to help fund the so-called “Trump accounts” that were part of the president's 2025 mega budget legislation, a policy that critics have described as a tax shelter for the wealthy.
This tied the Dell family fortune to Trump's political agenda. In recent months, he's also hitched it to his own personal wealth.
Follow this:First, Trump quietly buys up to $5 million of Dell stock.Then, he urges his followers to “go out and buy a Dell.”Today, his Pentagon awards a $9.7 billion deal to Dell. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
[image or embed]
— Bill Grueskin (@bgrueskin.bsky.social) May 27, 2026 at 7:45 PM
During his frenetic burst of stock trading in the first three months of the year, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million in Dell stock on February 10, according to financial disclosure forms, when the stock traded at $126 per share.
Months later, at a Mother's Day event on May 8, he publicly shilled for the company's products—a possible violation of White House ethics policy—and lavished praise upon the Dell family:
They've done such a job, such a job on that. They put up a lot of money, too [for Trump accounts]. Put up $6.25 billion. That's somebody and he started making computers on his bed in college and selling them because they were better than other computers.
And he just—I said, "How did you do that?" He said, "Well, I did it and I just never stopped." He just kept going.
So, go out and buy a Dell, they're great.
After the president's remarks, the value of Dell stocks surged by 14.6% to an all-time high of just under $264 before settling at just over $260 by the end of the day.
The announcement of the lucrative new Pentagon deal on Wednesday has caused the stock’s value to soar, reaching nearly $318 per share as of Thursday morning. The value was $305 per share before the announcement.
In total, the share price of Dell stock has climbed by about 155% since Trump bought it back in Feburary. Depending on how much of it he owns, that means he could have unrealized gains of between $1.55 million to $7.74 million. About 47% of those unrealized gains would have come just in the last month since he used the White House to boost Dell stock.
DELL stock chart by TradingView
Acting US Navy Chief Information Officer Barry Tanner has insisted that there was no playing favorites when Dell was selected for the contract.
But Trump, who has increased his net worth by an eye-popping $3 billion since retaking office last year, according to the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), has regularly faced accusations of lavish self-dealing.
In fact, a ProPublica report out on Thursday found that his White House adviser, Peter Navarro, personally intervened to push the Pentagon to give a $620 million loan to a startup linked to Donald Trump, Jr., out of dozens of companies that were under consideration.
Dell is also far from the first company to receive a Trump administration contract or other beneficial action after Trump purchased their stock. Earlier this month, NOTUS reported that Trump had bought shares in companies, including Palantir, Axon, and AMD, mere weeks before they were granted government contracts or regulatory relief.
Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council staffer under former President Barack Obama and now the host of the liberal Pod Save America podcast, said on social media that the Dell contract was an example of how “every day there’s another example of insider trading and corruption by Trump himself.”
Noting that Trump’s personal profit from the presidency far exceeds that of anyone else who has held the office, Tim Miller, a journalist and commentator at The Bulwark, said that a contract with such an obvious conflict of interest would be a “front-page story and weekslong scandal for anyone other than Trump.”
May 28, 2026
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'A Dramatic Abdication': Trump Admin to Send US Citizens With Ebola Exposure to Kenya
In what one emergency physician and public health expert called “a dramatic abdication of what we owe our own,” the Trump administration is reportedly preparing to send Americans with suspected and confirmed cases of Ebola to a facility in Kenya, instead of repatriating them and treating them in the state-of-the-art quarantine and treatment facilities the US has for dangerous diseases that pose a threat to public health.
The facility is currently being set up, The New York Times reported, and several dozen Public Health Service officers—whose agency operates under the Department of Defense—are training to deploy to Kenya. The PHS also deployed to Liberia during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
"This is unbelievable and infuriating," said Dr. Craig Spencer, a professor of public health at Brown University.
According to the Times, the PHS officers in Kenya were initially going to monitor any Americans, such as healthcare workers who have gone to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to help contain the outbreak that was declared a public health emergency of international concern earlier this month. Those who showed symptoms would be transferred to European hospitals; at least seven Americans have been sent to facilities in Germany and the Czech Republic in recent weeks.
But two people familiar with the plans told the Times that the administration now plans to see to the patients' treatment in the Kanya facility as well.
"When Americans will need us most—especially those who go abroad to help end this outbreak at its source—the US government plans to send them to a hospital it is standing up from scratch in Kenya," wrote Spencer on Substack on Tuesday. "I find it incredibly difficult to believe that we can stand up a facility in the next few weeks—or even months—with the staff, the supplies, and the experience we’ve built over the past decade in more than a dozen hospitals across the US."
Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, who helped treat Ebola patients in Sierra Leone in 2014, said the plan does not make sense "from a preparedness, operational, or ethical standpoint."
"How are public health officers going to take care of persons who get sick?" said Kuppalli. "These are not persons who have experience in providing high levels of care for persons with this infection. Also, why would a PHS officer deploy knowing if they had an exposure that they wouldn’t be repatriated?"
Spencer raised concerns that the plan "could push people to hide potential exposures, or incentivize individuals or organizations to downplay those exposures. If you know that any 'high-risk' exposure will get you shipped to Kenya instead of sent home, it’s not hard to imagine people not being fully forthcoming about what may have happened to them. That is exactly backwards from how you contain a disease."
"This will also discourage Americans from joining as part of the response," he wrote. "I know of multiple healthcare providers who are considering deploying with humanitarian organizations, and we need a cavalry to help support the on-the-ground response if we have any hope of ending this outbreak. But programs and policies like this are exactly the reasons people will hesitate to sign up."
Spencer, who contracted Ebola after deploying to West Africa in 2014 and was quarantined and treated at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, emphasized that the strain of Ebola that began spreading in Ituri Province, DRC and is confirmed to have spread to Uganda does not have an approved treatment or vaccine.
"Survival depends heavily on the quality of the system and the people around you," wrote Spencer. "We have that system—I survived Ebola and am here today partly because of it—but we are choosing not to use it."
The news of the plan to send infected Americans to Kenya comes as suspected cases have ballooned to at least 906, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO) latest Weekly External Situation Report, released on Sunday. The report said there have been 223 suspected deaths from the current Ebola strain, which is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, as opposed to the Zaire strain, for which a vaccine and treatments have been approved. More than 100 cases and 10 deaths have been confirmed in DRC, while seven cases and one death have been confirmed in Uganda.
The report emphasized that following up with contacts of people who have developed Ebola symptoms is a "major challenge," with just 19.3% of contacts seen by health professionals within the previous 24 hours as of May 23.
"Constraints include insecurity, movement restrictions, highly mobile populations linked to mining communities, and
difficulties tracing contacts across dispersed and cross-border populations, as well as limited trained contact tracers to
date," reads the report.
Low levels of trust in the affected communities—a major impediment to an effective response—also appear to be raising the risk of transmission. As Reuters reported on Monday, at least three attacks on Ebola treatment facilities in the northeastern DRC have caused dozens of patients to flee the hospitals.
"The attackers are reportedly motivated by a desire for the hospitals to release the bodies of deceased Ebola patients for burial—unsafe given that the virus remains transmissible after death—or by suspicion or doubt about the virus," reported Reuters.
Dr. Richard Lokudu, medical director of the Mongbwalu General Referral Hospital in Ituri, told Reuters that "there is denial of the disease within the population."
While US Secretary of State Marco Rubio blamed WHO for being "a little late" to identify that outbreak, public health experts have pointed to the Trump administration's massive cuts to foreign assistance and global public health initiatives, including the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), as a major factor that likely allowed cases to spread for an extended period of time before international officials realized the outbreak was occurring.
As Common Dreams reported last week, USAID's Ebola prevention work was largely halted by the Department of Government Efficiency, run last year by tech billionaire Elon Musk—despite Musk's insistence that funding for Ebola efforts was maintained. USAID had more than 50 staffers dedicated to responding to and preparing for disease outbreaks like Ebola and Marburg virus, but DOGE's cuts reduced the workforce to about six people.
With Rubio insisting that "we can’t have Ebola cases" in the US and that keeping the disease out of US borders is the top priority for the country, the administration has invoked Title 42 to keep travelers from the DRC, Uganda, and neighboring South Sudan from entering the US if they were in any of the three countries in the previous 21 days. WHO has warned that travel bans and restrictions are not based in science.
Cuts at the CDC have also led the agency to put out a call to its workforce, seeking volunteers to conduct public health screenings at airports.
The State Department said last week it had mobilized about $23 million to help the DRC and Uganda respond to the outbreak and is "mobilizing CDC staff and resources."
But Spencer said Sunday that the administration's travel bans and focus on keeping those affected by Ebola out of US borders are "a policy you put in place when you have nothing else meaningful to add. It gives the appearance of doing ‘something’ while effectively doing nothing of value at all. And it takes away attention from where the real problem is."
May 27, 2026
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Lebanese Cities Face ‘Direct Threat of Israeli Occupation’ as IDF Orders 200,000 People to Evacuate
The Israel Defense Forces' intensified its bombardment of the southern Lebanese city of Tyre on Wednesday just two hours after ordering the evacuation of 200,000 area residents, further violating a US-brokered ceasefire and stoking fears of Israeli occupation and even colonization.
The IDF ordered the entire city of Tyre and surrounding areas, including Palestinian refugee camps, to immediately flee north of the Zahrani River. Israeli bombing of Tyre has caused considerable damage to the UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities.
"Our villages have been systematically razed over these past months, and now the cities themselves are in the crosshairs," Lebanese journalist Ali Hashem said on X.
IDF Arabic language spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on X Wednesday that "in light of the terrorist Hezbollah party's violation of the ceasefire agreement and targeting of Israeli territory, the Israel Defense Forces are compelled to act forcefully against it."
While Hezbollah has launched drones, rockets, and attacks against Israeli troops, the militant resistance group says they are responses to Israeli violations of the April 16 ceasefire. IDF attacks have killed more than 700 Lebanese, including many women and children, since the truce took effect, despite US President Donald Trump telling Israel that such strikes are "PROHIBITED."
"The Israel Defense Forces do not intend to harm you," Adraee's message continued. "Your presence near Hezbollah elements, their facilities, or their combat means puts your lives at risk. Any building used by Hezbollah for military purposes may be subject to targeting."
"To ensure your safety, evacuate your homes immediately and move north beyond the Zahrani River," the order warns. "Be advised—any movement south of the Zahrani River may put your lives at risk."
Adraee's warning came as Lebanese communities reeled under intensified airstrikes that have killed or wounded scores of people across southern Lebanon since Tuesday.
Since Israel renewed its attacks on Lebanon in March at the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, more than 3,200 Lebanese have been killed—including hundreds of women and children—nearly 10,000 more have been wounded, and over 1 million people have been forcibly displaced, according to officials. As in Gaza, Israeli forces have been accused of deliberately targeting Lebanon's healthcare infrastructure, including first responders, as well as journalists.
Israeli forces also killed and wounded more than 20,000 Lebanese during 2023-25 attacks carried out during the war on Gaza after Hezbollah launched rockets and drones at Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance.
Israel has been accused of ethnic cleansing as its forces raze entire villages in southern Lebanon, drawing comparisons to Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, which has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, and around 2 million people forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in March that Lebanese people displaced north of the Litani River would not be allowed to return to their homes—many of which have been looted by IDF troops—until people living in northern Israel are secure from Hezbollah rocket and drone threats.
The IDF has also extended its so-called "Yellow Line" in Lebanon, which it designated largely along the Litani River, in an effort to counter Hezbollah drone attacks that have killed or wounded at least scores of Israeli invaders.
Some observers fear another prolonged Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, as happened for 18 years late last century. IDF troops briefly occupied the capital city of Beirut in 1982 and did not withdraw from southern Lebanon until 2000.
Others fear even worse, including the possible Israeli colonization of parts of Lebanon in pursuit of realizing a “Greater Israel” stretching from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq, land many religious Jews believe was promised to them by their deity figure.
Earlier this month, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir revealed the existence of a "settlement plan" for southern Lebanon. This, after Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich asserted that "the Litani must be our new border."
Such Israeli expansion would likely include the permanent ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, similar to the 1947-49 forced expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba, or "catastrophe," a period of terrorist attacks, massacres, and death marches perpetrated by Jewish militias during the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
The International Criminal Court is believed to be seeking the arrest of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich in connection with the ethnic cleansing and settler colonization of the illegally occupied West Bank. The Hague-based tribunal has already issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
While negotiators from the United States, Iran, and mediating nations seek to achieve a lasting halt to hostilities in the Middle East, Israeli leaders have been actively working against peace. Addressing the prospect of a peace agreement, Ben-Gvir vowed during a Tuesday press briefing that "we will not allow this to happen."
May 27, 2026
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'Let's Call This What It Is: Censorship': Fired '60 Minutes' Journalists Speak Out
Cecilia Vega, one of several journalists ousted from the show, said many of her colleagues "have had to fight to maintain editorial independence" under CBS News' new Trump-aligned corporate owners.
May 29, 2026
A group of veteran “60 Minutes” journalists was fired on Thursday as CBS News’ recently installed right-wing editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, moves to reshape the network in her image. Some of the ousted employees are describing their mass firing as a clear act of political “censorship.”
News had already broken earlier this week that correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi was on the way out after more than ten years on the flagship news program, after she'd publicly criticized Weiss' decision to delay her story on the Trump administration's deportation of immigrants to a notorious Salvadoran torture prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), late last year.
But Alfonsi's departure was rumored to be part of a larger shakeup by Weiss, who has been accused of molding the network into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration following the government-approved acquisition of CBS's parent company, Paramount, by billionaire David Ellison, owner of Skydance.
On Thursday, the hammer finally fell. In addition to the formal firing of Alfonsi, The Washington Post reported that Weiss had also fired Tanya Simon, who’d worked on the show for a quarter-century and had recently taken on the role of executive producer. Correspondent Cecilia Vega—who had also covered CECOT for the network before Weiss' arrival—was canned as well, even though her contract was not set to expire until March 2027. So was executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.
In a memo to staff on Thursday, Weiss and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski said the firings were the result of them “building a show that thrives in the 21st century.”
“That requires a new approach,” they said, outlining their goals of “expanding ‘60 Minutes’ beyond a one-hour television broadcast, deepening its role across CBS News, and holding everything we produce to the ambition, fairness, and fearlessness that have defined ‘60 Minutes’ at its best.”
To fill the role of executive producer, Weiss brought in a network outsider, Nick Bilton, a former technology columnist at The New York Times and producer of documentaries for HBO and Netflix. Weiss called him “one of the most entrepreneurial journalists of our time and the perfect leader for one of the most entrepreneurial news brands of all time.”
Though Weiss reportedly viewed Simon as a “bad leader” who “couldn’t control the staff,” according to one source who spoke anonymously with The New York Post, Simon announced her departure with warm words for those who’d continue working on “60 Minutes.”
“While leadership has decided it is time for a new chapter—I want to be unequivocally clear about one thing: It has been an immense privilege to lead this broadcast, and I could not be prouder of what we have built, fought for, and delivered together over the last year," Simon said in a statement published Thursday. "'60 Minutes' has always been more than just a broadcast: It is an institution built on independence, grit, and rigorous search for the truth.“
But Vega gave a more candid explanation for her and her colleagues' firings.
"In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories," she said in a statement Thursday. "Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions."
"Let's call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven," she continued. "It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy."
Vega's criticisms mirror those made earlier this week by Alfonsi, who said her firing was "a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting."
In December, Weiss abruptly pulled Alfonsi's story featuring the testimony of some of the men who were tortured in the CECOT prison shortly before it was set to air, citing a lack of commentary in the segment from Trump administration officials, who had repeatedly ignored the journalists’ requests for an interview. At the time, Alfonsi said Weiss had effectively given the government a “kill switch” on critical reporting. The segment eventually went to air the next month with some editing.
Following her ouster on Thursday, Vega described her own efforts to oppose what she viewed as politically-motivated meddling by network higher-ups.
"I held the line and refused to incorporate suggestions that offend the conscience," she said. "I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity."
“I am far from the only ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent who has asked herself, ‘What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?'" Vega added.
She said she was proud of her work at '60 Minutes' and cited her reporting on CECOT for the program, which won a DuPont Columbia journalism award, as one of her finest achievements.
Weiss' overhaul of '60 Minutes' comes as Ellison eyes the merger of Paramount with another major media conglomerate, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.
President Donald Trump has said it's “imperative” that any acquisition of Warner Bros. includes CNN and has publicly denounced a rival bid for the company by Netflix.
Earlier this week, Reuters reported that antitrust regulators at the Department of Justice appeared ready to approve a $110 billion takeover by Paramount following meetings with Ellison and other company executives.
A group of journalists—including tech reporter Kara Swisher, former CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta, and NBC News legal analyst Katie Phang—warned at an event hosted earlier this week by a coalition of press freedom groups that, especially in the wake of Alfonsi's firing, the government-approved consolidation of media posed a dangerous threat to the future of journalistic freedom.
“I think what’s happening right now is pretty dangerous,” Acosta said. “To essentially announce the departure of Sharyn Alfonsi from 60 Minutes is a very in-your-face move by some people who don’t care very much about the First Amendment.”
“Folks need to use a little bit of their imagination here to recognize what may be coming down the pike,” he said, warning that the Trump administration was building a “strange oligarchical empire… attempting to do state media.”
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Report Finds 'Remarkable Increase in Food Insecurity' Across US Under Trump
"More people are going hungry now than at the height of the pandemic. Families are skipping meals, relying on food banks, and turning to SNAP to get by."
May 29, 2026
An analysis released this week by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that food insecurity in the US has reached levels not seen since the height of the coronavirus pandemic, underscoring the devastating impact of Republican cuts to federal nutrition assistance and President Donald Trump's inflationary economic and foreign policy decisions.
In a blog post, New York Fed researchers detailed their findings of "a remarkable increase in food insecurity, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income households and households with young children," as well as "a contemporaneous increase in pessimism among the same groups, along with a sharp decline in job-finding expectations."
The researchers cited new data showing increases in the percentage of Americans who reported receiving food donations and skipping meals in recent months, as prices for basic necessities rose. Cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that Trump and congressional Republicans enacted last summer are also having an impact, stripping food aid from hundreds of thousands of low-income children and millions of people overall.
Among those who reported skipping meals and relying on food banks, "there is a lower, and more rapidly declining, net share of respondents expecting to be better versus worse off financially a year from now," despite some topline figures indicating a relatively strong economy (such as a low unemployment rate), the researchers observed.
"This means that an increase in the incidence of food insecurity is associated with a deterioration in consumer sentiment," they added.
More people are going hungry now than at the height of the pandemic. Families are skipping meals, relying on food banks, and turning to SNAP to get by. Hunger is rising and Congress cannot look away. https://t.co/ImAFSuTJSg
— Food Research & Action Center (@fractweets) May 28, 2026
The New York Fed's analysis came amid a flurry of new data showing that rising inflation—now at a three-year high—is eroding Americans' paychecks and causing personal savings rates to plummet as households are forced to spend more on gas, food, and other basics.
Following the release of new federal data on Thursday, the nonprofit research group Equitable Growth pointed to "an important milestone: Household incomes are now down year-over-year. American households had more money to spend in April of 2025."
"Although income is down for all households this month, it is falling faster for the bottom 50% households, who have seen their income fall by 1.6% compared to April of last year," noted Equitable Growth visiting fellow Austin Clemens. "This group’s income has fallen in five of the last six months.”
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Platner Hits Back After Collins Shirks Responsibility for Votes That Sent Troops Like Him to War
"There's nothing more Orwellian than voting to send 18-year-olds to die in another forever war—and then blaming them for it."
May 28, 2026
Republican US Sen. Susan Collins of Maine was widely dragged Thursday after she responded to upstart Democratic challenger Graham Platner's criticism of her vote for the Iraq War by trying to make the issue about him.
Platner—a Marine Corps combat veteran turned staunch opponent of illegal wars of choice—told The New York Times earlier this month that "we destroyed Iraq and we destroyed Afghanistan, and all the suffering, all the killing, all the dying, all the displacement—we, the United States, did that."
"The anger that I feel is for the people that sent me, who are frankly still the same people who are sending people off right now to be in harm’s way so we can have this stupid war with Iran," the presumptive Democratic nominee continued. "Susan Collins voted to send me to Iraq, and she’s also there to help [President] Donald Trump continue this absolutely insane conflict in the Strait of Hormuz."
"If I have any anger, it is reserved for the political system itself and the people in it who view war not as a thing that has a human toll but as a political game," Platner added.
Collins, who is trailing Platner by nearly double-digits in head-to-head polling, told The Maine Wire on Thursday that the Democrat "not only enlisted twice after the war was started, but he also went to work for a security company, a controversial one, named Blackwater, after his term in the service was over."
"So I respect anyone who steps forward to serve their country," Collins added, "but the fact is, that was Platner's decision to serve. He was not drafted."
Collins has voted for US wars fought in countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. The Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates that more than 940,000 people—including over 432,000 civilians—were killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001 and 2023.
More than 7,000 US service members died in the post-9/11 wars, which cost American taxpayers more than $8 trillion.
Collins has also backed the illegal US-Israeli war of choice on Iran and supported the invasion of Venezuela and abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The senator faced immediate backlash for her remarks.
"It was your decision as a senator to send Americans to fight in a dumb and pointless Iraq War," Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) said on social media. "You voted for it. Do you tell the kids and widows of the Iraq War dead that it was their fallen hero’s fault for enlisting?"
Independent journalist Nathan Bernard said on X that "voting to send thousands of soldiers to die and then blaming them for dying doesn't seem like a great way to win over voters, especially veterans."
David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, also took to X, writing: "While [Platner] was deployed in Iraq in 2007, Collins cast one of the deciding votes to block legislation to create a timetable for ending the war and bringing Platner and other troops home. She literally voted to *keep* Platner in Iraq."
Sam Seder, host of "The Majority Report With Sam Seder," accused Collins of "a stunning abdication."
"If she regrets her support of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, she should say so instead of pretending the all-volunteer military owns all responsibility," he wrote.
Platner responded to Collins' attack by noting that the senator "voted to support starting the war in Iraq."
He continued:
On three occasions after that, she voted against withdrawing troops. On at least two occasions, she voted to fund the war. Now, all these years later, instead of acknowledging that she was wrong, she's decided that she's going to blame those of us, who in our late teens and early 20s, signed up to serve our country. That somehow it's our fault that she and establishment politicians like her wanted to abuse our willingness to serve, to go send us off to fight in stupid wars that did nothing but make some people very, very rich at the expense of American taxpayer dollars.
"It's no surprise to me, because even today, she continues to not stand up against the stupid war in Iran," Platner said. "She continues to not stand up against any of the abuses or the idiocy coming out of the Trump administration."
"This is very, very expected from establishment Republican politicians who love to talk about supporting the troops, but in the end, will always desert us," he added.
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