SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
In what one sage deemed "amateur-hour, clown-fucker, reality-show dictatorship shit," this week's House hearings on ICE abuses, Epstein cover-ups and other GOP atrocities showcased a parade of rancid, lying, stonewalling MAGA lickspittles and deplorables - loudest among them sneering "bad acid trip come to life" Pam Bondi - facing off against a for-once united cohort of smart, angry, truth-telling Democrats with righteous history on their side and, finally, no fucks left to give. We are here for it.
Deep in his delusional bubble, the mad child-king ostensibly in charge of these evil cretins told Fox News Wednesday that Americans are living in "the greatest period of anything we’ve ever seen." Maybe he meant how he's been bravely standing up for a bridge he thinks Canada ripped us off for while forgetting he praised it when it was built, and paid for, by Canada. Or maybe it's 'cause in exchange for idiotically spending our money trying to prop up dirty, pricey, inefficient coal - "the 19th century called and it wants its fuel source back" - and glitching out en route, the "simplest mark of all time" got another shiny participation trophy as the “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal." "Lookit his happy face!" the Internet chortled. "The big special boy is so big and so special!" Also, "Marvel is running out of Superheroes" and "This is the saddest thing I've ever seen."
Possibly sadder is MAGA Reps. Andy Ogles and Mark Alford still melting down about Bad Bunny's "pure smut" half-time show wherein "children were forced to endure explicit displays of gay sexual acts" that are "illegal to be displayed on public airways" which is why he wants a Congressional inquiry into said "unspeakable depravities," though they might be confusing them with Epstein's, which they've notably ignored. Also sad is another bigly fail by US Attorney Jeanine Boxwine to get a grand jury indictment for fake crimes, in this case against Dem Sens. Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin and four Reps, all veterans, for their video reading the law out loud to remind military they have the right not to obey illegal orders. The kicker: Her attempt was so ludicrous that reportedly zero grand jurors thought she hit the famously low ham-sandwich bar for probable cause.
In this week's House hearings, it was clear Dem lawmakers, like the rest of us, had reached the famed point in 1954's McCarthy hearings when an appalled Joseph Welch, at the limit of his tolerance for McCarthy's lies and cruelty, exclaimed, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" That fierce moral outrage, and the strength and clarity needed to vent it, has been evident in besieged Minnesota for weeks - In grand jurors' refusal to indict so-called "rioters,” in protesters' profane, hilarious anthem pillorying ICE Barbie, in neighbors seething at the masked, armed rabble that just caused a multi-vehicle crash in St.Paul, the latest in endless ICE crimes and transgressions. "Oh my God, you guys are so....evil. I can feel it, " railed one resident. "Jesus. Fucking incels, racists, murderers, thugs. What are you doing?!"
So it was that, in Tuesday's House Homeland Security Committee hearing, when acting ICE director Todd Lyons whined in his opening statement that "to say the men and women of ICE are Gestapo (is) wrong" and hurts their alleged feelings, Rep. Dan Goldman wasn't having it. "People are simply making valid observations about your tactics, which are un-American and outright fascist," he said. Goldman cited their racial profiling, asking people for their papers, use of excessive force and other forms of intimidation, likening them to Nazi/ Soviet regimes and shutting down Lyons' protestations as "unnecessary speaking." "I have a simple suggestion," Goldman said calmly. "If you don’t want to be called a fascist regime or a secret police, then stop acting like one." Tell it to power-mad, I-want-my-blankey ICE Barbie, reportedly fascisting it up big time over her goons. Jesus.
Other Dems minced no words. Rep. LaMonica McIver: "Mr. Lyons, do you consider yourself a religious man?" "Yes, Ma'am." "Well, how do you think Judgment Day will work for you with so much blood on your hands?" "I'm not gonna entertain that question." "Oh, ok, of course not. Do you think you’re going to hell, Mr. Lyons?" "I’m not gonna entertain that question." When the Chair chides her about "standards of decorum," she blithely notes, "Well, you guys are always talking about religion, so it's OK for me to just ask a question, right? Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate you." (Comment: "We need more Black women in Congress.") She goes on, "How many government agencies, Mr. Lyons, are you aware of that routinely kill American citizens and still get funding?” "Ma'am, I'm not gonna entertain that." "Of course you're not. This is exactly why we should not be funding this agency...The people are watching you."
And so it went. Quoting Lyons' earlier testimony he "wanted to see a deportation process like Amazon Prime, but with human beings," Eric Swalwell asked, "How many times has Amazon Prime shot a mom 3 times in the face?" "None," said Lyons, lamely noting he meant it "needs to be more efficient" and he'd added, "we deal with humans so we can't be like them." Swalwell, coolly, "Speaking of humans, how many times has Amazon Prime shot a nurse 10 times in the back?” Online, commenters clarified, "Obviously, Amazon Prime doesn't shoot you in the face. You have to pay for Amazon Prime Plus to get that level of service," though, "you'll still get ads unless you step up to Premium, and you'll have to pay for the ammo." From another, "Is this the first time Amazon has been used as the good guy in a comparison? Fuck him up."
Rep.Delia Ramirez ripped Lyons: "My mother, a Guatemalan immigrant and (finger in air) an American taught me I have a responsibility to look evil in the eye and you have used your power to perpetrate great evil, and it's time you answer to this committee for the lawlessness you have empowered." She named Good, Pretti, Marimar Martinez - "Do something bitch" - and myriad other crimes: 100 court orders violated, dozens of tear-gas attacks despite a court order, banned chokeholds, warrantless arrests, 3,800 children in detention, roving patrols, plate switching, observer intimidation. On ICE demands to "respect the mission": "I have as much respect for you as I do for the last white men who put on masks to terrorize communities of color... the inheritors of the Klanhood and the slave patrol. Their activities were immoral and criminal, and so are yours."
Wednesday, A.G. Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in a rabid attempt to make them forget her months of covering up the Epstein files, missing deadlines, redacting perps, releasing survivors' names and otherwise ignoring them by "shouting, lying and being a cold bitch." Over five hours, in "an astonishingly contemptuous performance," she failed to answer a single question. Acting out "a sociopathic tween," she shrieked, veered, lied, argued, sniped, stonewalled, deflected, rolled her eyes and mean-girled through a book of scripted smears at Dems daring to seek accountability: "Insolent, Shouty Brat Brings Burn Book To Congress." She was "a nasty piece of work," a "demented skank," a "Nazi redneck bleach blond Barbie," a "historic villain" who once vowed to "put human trafficking monsters (behind) bars" and will now be shunned "in every room she ever walks into for the rest of her life," to die "as a disbarred lawyer and a national disgrace...Her cheese has slid off her cracker."
She was snippy queen of the frantic non-sequiturs, with "an unmistakable stench of desperation" in her tantrums. When Jerry Nadler asked how many Epstein perps she's indicted - zero, duh - she raved, "You all should be apologizing. You sit here and you attack the President, and I am not going to have it." Then she wildly pivoted - what child rape? - yelling, "The Dow is over 50,000, the S&P at almost 7,000, the NASDAQ is smashing records, Americans’ 401(k)s are booming. That’s what we should be talking about." WTF. When Zoe Lofgren asked her about redacting traffickers' names, she sneered, "I find it interesting she keeps going after President Trump, the greatest president in American history. She didn't say how much money she took from Reid Hoffman, did she?" Asked about Ludnick's ties to Epstein, she bickered, "what is ties?", scowled "shame on you," scoffed, "I'm stunned you want to keep talking."
Jamie Raskin, the Committee's Ranking Member, repeatedly called bullshit: "You can filibuster all you want, but not on our time. The way it works is, we ask you a question, you answer it. I warned you at the outset of this hearing." Bondi exploded. "You don't TELL ME anything,” she shrieked. “You’re a washed-up, loser lawyer." Then, mad-Lady-Macbeth-like, she muttered, "You’re not even a lawyer." (Raskin, a graduate of Harvard Law School and former editor of Harvard Law Review, is a longtime professor of Constitutional law at American University, and has written several books.) Unflappable, Raskin coolly accused her of running an Epstein cover-up of "staggering incompetence." "You've turned the people's Department of Justice into Trump’s instrument of revenge,” he charged. “Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza, and you deliver every time."
Bondi blocked questions from Becca Balint with smears against Merrick Garland - Balint: "Weak sauce" - then with charges of anti-Semitism. Balint, whose grandparents were killed in the Holocaust: "You want to go there?! Really?!" Ted Lieu asked if Trump attended parties with underage girls; Bondi rolled her eyes. "This is so ridiculous," she said. "They are trying to deflect from all the great things Donald Trump has done. There is no evidence he has committed a crime. Everyone knows that." Lieu: "I believe you just lied under oath, which is a crime." Bondi, screaming, "Don't you ever accuse me of committing a crime!" Jared Moskowitz noted Trump's name appears over a million times in the Epstein files, "more than God's name in the book about God." Grinning, he mused about her Burn Book zingers: "I'm curious. Just flip to Moskowitz. Because we’re in the Olympics, I’m going to give it a grade. Give me your best one. Whaddya got?"
With almost a dozen Epstein survivors sitting behind Bondi in the hearing room, Pramila Jayapal asked them to stand and raise their hands if they'd tried and failed to meet with DOJ officials. They all did. She asked Bondi to turn around and apologize; Bondi stood her ground: "I'm not going to get in the gutter with this woman and her theatrics." Noting an earlier claim that any victim who wants to talk to the DOJ has done so, Dan Goldman took up her quest. He asked how many had met with the DOJ: None. How many had reached out asking to: All. Of those who reached out, how many were ignored: All. And despite "their shameful, despicable efforts to intimidate," how many are still willing to talk to them? All. Bondi, still sitting, still hating, still steadfastly unperturbed, breezily flips her fake blond hair back, gazing into space.
Jasmine Crockett declined to "ask any questions of this witness because (she) has no intention of answering them." She turned to Ballint. "Right or wrong? Raping children." Ballint: "Wrong." "Killing random citizens." "Wrong." Etc. Crockett: "OK, thank you. I never woulda got that from our witness, who is somehow a lawyer but doesn't understand how it works with witnesses. I'm not sure what law school you went to (Stetson)... but you don’t seem very good at your job...Americans are looking for answers (not) protecting pedophiles and creeps. You will be remembered as one of the worst Attorney Generals in history." Bondi cuts in to rave about immigrants convicted of crimes in Texas. Crocket cuts her off: "CONVICTED! So what we talkin’ about? Convict some of these perpetrators who raped these women sitting behind you that you won’t even acknowledge are here!” She stalks out. Bondi is still babbling about Hakeem Jeffries and some money.
Observers were aghast at the wretched Bondi spectacle. Online, one older woman conceded "I'm sure this will get taken down" but spoke her mind for all of us: "Bondi is an absolute cunt, and needs to rot in prison for the rest of her life. What an evil evil woman. My God." Trump loved it: Bondi was "fantastic." John Pavlovitz, pastor and father, looked on at her "masterclass in gaslighting," and wondered, "How does someone become Pam Bondi?" He muses about "the meandering road to losing one's soul...so completely bereft of empathy, so seemingly unencumbered by other people’s suffering, and so strident in the face of simple accountability." As someone's daughter, he writes, "I'm sure there’s a story you have to tell yourself to keep the self-loathing at bay and let you sleep at night...I hope whatever you got for your soul was worth it to you. It sure as hell isn’t for the rest of us."
"
Friday, the day after Amazon revealed record 2025 profits, 10 members of Prime Members for a Cleaner Amazon staged a pedicab protest in front of its Seattle headquarters, calling on the company to raise its climate ambition to the level of its earnings.
In its fourth quarter report, released Thursday, the tech giant announced that its 2025 income had soared to $77.7 billion, up from $59.2 billion in 2024.
“Amazon has an extraordinary opportunity and an obligation to act more swiftly on climate change,” participant Michael Lazarus told Common Dreams. “It’s a leading provider of consumer goods to consumers who want climate action. It has made broad pledges to take action on climate change, it has made some small steps, but it needs to deliver on immediate action.”
Concerned customers are demanding the company put some of those profits toward speeding up the electrification of its delivery fleet, powering its data centers with renewable energy, and improving working conditions for its employees while respecting their collective bargaining rights. A Morning Consult poll found that 80% of Prime members surveyed wanted the company to reduce its transport and delivery emissions, and 75% would accept slower delivery times in exchange for less climate pollution.
“Profits are up. So is pollution. Prime members say: Deliver more climate action.”
“Amazon’s success is built on us, its customers. Now, we’re asking the company to stop celebrating profits and start delivering climate action,” said Dr. Chris Covert-Bowlds, a Seattle-based member of Prime Members for a Cleaner Amazon and Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The protest took place outside Amazon’s Day 1 building, where CEO Andy Jassy has his office, from around 8:00 am to 10:30 am Pacific time. Participants rode four pedicabs as a subtle suggestion to the company of how to move goods without fossil fuels. The cabs were decorated with billboards with messages such as, “Deliver packages. Not pollution,” and “Profits are up. So is pollution. Prime members say: Deliver more climate action.”
Participants also handed out hundreds of stickers and flyers to Seattle residents and Amazon employees.
Amazon has a history of making sustainability promises it does not keep and retaliating against employees who call it to account. While it has pledged to reach carbon neutrality across its operations by 2040, it is increasingly unclear how it will achieve this given its buildout of energy-intensive data centers and artificial intelligence.
“We’ve been calling attention to Amazon’s failure to align its emissions reductions with the latest climate science for years,” Stand.earth campaigner Joshua Archer told Common Dreams.
However, he said what “makes this moment really unique” is that Amazon is now failing three distinct groups of people: consumers like those at the protest who want it to do better on climate, investors who are concerned about returns from the AI buildout, and the 30,000 employees it laid off since October despite its record profits.
“The company is not respecting the employees on whose backs the company has built its success” just as it’s “not respecting the latest climate science,” Archer said.
Lazarus said that many employees expressed interest in the protesters’ demands. While some zipped past in headphones, others “lit up and were clearly engaged and simpatico.”
He noted that Amazon employees have been organizing for years to pressure the company to increase its climate ambitions through Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and hoped the addition of consumer advocacy would help “Amazon realize that there’s a groundswell of support for taking more aggressive measures to reduce their climate impact... which is becoming quite monumental given the growth in data cents and the influence that they carry.”
Lazarus told Common Dreams it was also important to him that Amazon ramp up its climate ambitions given President Donald Trump’s determination to double down on fossil fuels and inhibit renewable energy.
“We know that we’re not going to see much climate action at the federal level,” he said. “It becomes all the more important for corporate actors like Amazon to demonstrate that it remains committed to and acts upon its need to reduce emissions.”
US Sen. Bernie Sanders responded incredulously on Tuesday to President Donald Trump's claim that the nation's economy under his stewardship is "the greatest... actually ever in history," despite surging personal and business bankruptcies, plunging consumer sentiment, rising costs, and anemic job and wage growth.
In an appearance on MS NOW, Sanders (I-Vt.) said that "you wonder whether Trump is completely crazy and delusional or just a pathological liar, but the idea that anybody would believe that this is a great economy when 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, when the cost of healthcare is going up, people can't afford housing, people can't afford their basic groceries, the childcare system is dysfunctional, people can't afford to go to college."
"If this is the greatest economy in the history of the world," the senator added, "God help us."
Watch:
Sanders' remarks came in response to Trump's interview Tuesday with Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, during which the president falsely claimed he has ushered in "the greatest period of anything that we've ever seen," including "the greatest economy actually ever in history."
While Trump and members of his class have seen their wealth surge to record levels during his second White House term, working-class Americans are struggling to make ends meet as the president's tariffs and assault on the social safety net drive up costs. One recent analysis estimated that the average US family paid $1,625 in higher costs last year as prices for groceries, housing, and other necessities continued to rise.
Trump's claim of an economic "golden age" in the US was also undermined by a new House Budget Committee report report showing that personal bankruptcy filings increased 11% last year, reaching levels not seen since 2019—during the president's first term in the White House. Those figures came on top of earlier data showing that business bankruptcies are at a 15-year high.
“Donald Trump’s reckless tariff taxes are driving up prices, hurting the economy, and leaving families to pay the price," Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in a statement. "The only people benefiting in Donald Trump’s economy are his billionaire donors—everyone else is falling further behind.”
Sanders echoed that message during his MS NOW appearance late Tuesday, saying, "The billionaires who sat behind Trump at his inauguration: Yeah, the economy is the best ever for them."
"But for the average working person," Sanders said, "not quite the case."
A pair of experts warned this week that President Donald Trump is clearly telegraphing his intention to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections.
Stephen Richer, former recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, said during an interview with The Atlantic published Wednesday that he's grown worried that "something truly spectacular is going to happen in which our 2026 midterm elections are not administered like past elections have been."
When asked to flesh out how Trump could potentially rig the upcoming elections, Richer said it was unlikely that he would deploy US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to polling places across the country, if for no other reason than he lacks the manpower to accomplish such an operation.
However, Richer did express concern about the president's ability to muddy waters in tight races and put pressure on his Republican allies to refuse to seat Democratic winners when he is claiming there are disputes about the results.
"Where I think President Trump is most potent is still in the post-election procedures," he explained, "still in sowing doubt in the minds of enough Americans that they don’t think the elections are legitimate and, therefore... the Congress doesn’t have to seat its new members. That’s certainly a popular theory that’s floating about: that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), the outgoing speaker, will choose not to seat the new members, because they’re in allegedly disputed elections."
Richer argued that California could be particularly vulnerable to this, since the state infamously takes so long to finish tallying its votes.
In a New York Times editorial published Thursday, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center for Justice's voting rights and elections program, argued that Trump's "campaign to rig our elections is well underway," and he pointed to the president's mass pardon last year of rioters who violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 as the beginning of his election subversion campaign.
"We have every reason to expect more actions like these in the coming months," wrote Morales-Doyle. "A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump reiterated his threats to prosecute election officials who ran the 2020 election. Just days later, FBI agents seized ballots and election records from 2020 in Fulton County, Georgia."
However, Morales-Doyle also said there was reason to believe that the American system can withstand the president's assault on its election integrity, and he gave a nod toward several efforts across the country to fight back, including states resisting Trump's demands to hand over their voter rolls and Democrats refusing to let new voter suppression legislation pass through Congress.
"We are already seeing how effective people can be in pushing back," he concluded, "whether on the streets of Minneapolis or at town halls hosted by their representatives in Congress. It will be incumbent on all of us—election officials, advocates, state law enforcement, and voters—to see the administration’s efforts for what they are and to fight back."
US Department of Homeland Security agents are increasingly infiltrating social media platforms to monitor users, collect intelligence, and target people, according to new reporting based on leaked documents.
Ken Klippenstein exposed the open source monitoring program, which DHS calls "masked engagement," with new reporting Thursday that details how agents "assume false identities and interact with users—friending them, joining closed groups, and gaining access to otherwise private postings, photographs, friend lists, and more."
"A senior [DHS] official tells me that over 6,500 field agents and intelligence operatives can use the new tool, a significant increase explicitly linked to more intense monitoring of American citizens," Klippenstein wrote.
The so-called "masked engagement" by DHS operatives online comes as actual masked federal agents are engaged in the Trump administration's deadly deployments in communities nationwide.
Important to note that "Authorized" here means that DHS/ICE have given *Themselves* permission to do this "masked engagement" bullshit, not that either congress or the courts say it's okay.Challenge this everywhere & every way possible, & in the meantime, keep ourselves & each other safe as we can
[image or embed]
— Dr. Damien P. Williams can't think of a fun display name right n (@wolvendamien.bsky.social) February 12, 2026 at 4:46 PM
Masked engagement adds a new level to DHS' open source intelligence (OSINT) collection regime, which previously consisted of overt engagement, overt research, overt monitoring, masked monitoring, and undercover engagement. Masked engagement, in which agents conceal their government affiliation without assuming a false identity while interacting with a target, is a step below undercover engagement, in which DHS operatives use false identities and cover stories.
According to Klippenstein:
Masked monitoring allows officers at agencies like [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and Border Patrol to use alias accounts to passively observe public online activity. Crucially, this level of monitoring bars DHS representatives from interacting with other users directly. Under masked monitoring, officers are not allowed to ask an admin for entry into a private group or to “friend” a target to see non-public posts.
But with masked engagement (separate from masked monitoring), that firewall has now been dismantled. The only restriction imposed on masked engagement is that DHS officers [note] the threshold of “substantive engagement”—a term the rules leave conveniently ill-defined.
"By labeling this a 'middle ground' between monitoring and full-blown undercover work, the DHS allows agents to infiltrate private digital spaces without the rigorous internal approvals and legal checks required for a formal undercover 'sting,'" Klippenstein explained.
Sources told Klippenstein that DHS has been using masked engagement tactics to infiltrate pro-Palestine groups in the United States and to compile databases of suspected Mexican and Mexican American transnational criminals.
“Open source monitoring has become so ubiquitous that we even have databases of identities used by the department to track our own online engagements,” the senior DHS official said.
“Yes, we have safeguards against violating people’s privacy, but masked engagement is just the first step in breaching people’s privacy settings in ways that they are not even aware of," they added.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, told Klippenstein that “CBP’s expansion into what they’re calling ‘masked engagement’ is cause for real concern."
“This new capability is being shoehorned in one step below undercover engagement (which already allows for a lot of overreach), it appears CBP believes that friending someone, following them, or joining a group is not as invasive as directly engaging or interacting with individuals," she continued.
“In addition, doing so through an alias account—an account that doesn’t reveal the user’s CBP affiliation, and pretends to be someone else—will weaken trust in government and weaken the trust that is critical to building community both online and off,” Levinson-Waldman added.
A DHS spokesperson told Klippenstein that the agency "has utilized its congressionally directed undercover authorities to root out child molesters and predators for years."
“We will continue using every tool at our disposal to protect the American people as our agents and officers Make America Safe Again," they added.
Those tools include an error-plagued mobile facial recognition application, mass phone surveillance technology, data broker platforms that allow operatives to circumvent warrant requirements, forensic extraction to bypass phone locks, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, and more.
Civil liberties groups, digital rights advocates, and some Democratic lawmakers are pushing back.
Last week, Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) introduced the ICE Out of Our Faces Act, legislation that would ban ICE and Customs and Border Protection "from acquiring and using facial recognition technology and other biometric identification systems."
The bill would "also require the deletion of all data collected for use in or by biometric identification systems and allow individuals and state attorneys general to seek civil penalties for violations."
An investigation conducted by Al Jazeera based on evidence collected by the Civil Defense in the Gaza Strip has concluded that nearly 3,000 Palestinians have been "evaporated" by Israel through the use of thermal weapons—some of them supplied by the US.
As reported by Al Jazeera on Tuesday, the investigation found that 2,842 Palestinians were killed due to Israel's "systematic use of internationally prohibited thermal and thermobaric weapons, often referred to as vacuum or aerosol bombs, capable of generating temperatures exceeding 3,500 degrees Celsius [6,332 degrees Fahrenheit]."
The heat generated by these weapons is so intense, investigators noted, that they leave behind almost no detectable human remains other than blood stains or pieces of flesh.
Israel's use of such weapons was flagged last year in a social media post by Omar Hamad, a Gaza pharmacist who posted a video purportedly showing a thermobaric bomb being detonated in Beit Hanoun.
Israel is using thermobaric (vacuum) bombs in Beit Hanoun. These are shock waves that spread in a circular and low pattern near the ground surface, preceding the appearance of the dust cloud by far, indicating a speed faster than the speed of sound.
This is genocide. pic.twitter.com/tA7jC61g33
— Omar Hamad | عُـمَـرْ 𓂆 (@OmarHamadD) July 13, 2025
Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Gaza Civil Defense, said hat the investigation was not a mere estimate of Palestinians incinerated by thermal and thermobaric weapons, but the result of painstaking forensic work.
"We enter a targeted home and cross-reference the known number of occupants with the bodies recovered," Basal explained. "If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we treat the remaining two as ‘evaporated’ only after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces—blood spray on walls or small fragments like scalps."
Unlike the explosions caused by traditional bombs, the thermobaric weapons used by Israel in Gaza first disperse clouds of fuel in a given area that are then ignited to create an enormous and intense fireball.
The investigation found that the fuel typically used in Israeli thermobaric weapons was tritonal, a mixture consisting of 80% TNT and 20% aluminum powder often found in US-manufactured weapons such as the Mark 84 aircraft bomb.
Dr Munir al-Bursh, director general of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that the heat generated by these weapons is so intense that any living creatures' bodily fluids will immediately boil.
"When a body is exposed to energy exceeding 3,000 degrees combined with massive pressure and oxidation, the fluids boil instantly," al-Bursh explained. "The tissues vaporize and turn to ash. It is chemically inevitable."
Gaza resident Yasmin Mahani told Al Jazeera that her son, Saad, was incinerated by a 2024 Israeli strike that hit a school in the Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City.
“We found nothing of Saad," Mahani said. "Not even a body to bury. That was the hardest part.”
"The only beneficiaries will be polluting industries, many of which are among President Trump’s largest donors,” the lawmakers wrote.
A group of 31 Democratic senators has launched an investigation into a new Trump administration policy that they say allows the Environmental Protection Agency to "disregard" the health impacts of air pollution when passing regulations.
Plans for the policy were first reported on last month by the New York Times, which revealed that the EPA was planning to stop tallying the financial value of health benefits caused by limiting fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone when regulating polluting industries and instead focus exclusively on the costs these regulations pose to industry.
On December 11, the Times reported that the policy change was being justified based on the claim that the exact benefits of curbing these emissions were “uncertain."
"Historically, the EPA’s analytical practices often provided the public with false precision and confidence regarding the monetized impacts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone," said an email written by an EPA supervisor to his employees on December 11. “To rectify this error, the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone.”
The group of senators, led by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), rebuked this idea in a letter sent Thursday to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
"EPA’s new policy is irrational. Even where health benefits are 'uncertain,' what is certain is that they are not zero," they said. "It will lead to perverse outcomes in which EPA will reject actions that would impose relatively minor costs on polluting industries while resulting in massive benefits to public health—including in saved lives."
"It is contrary to Congress’s intent and directive as spelled out in the Clean Air Act. It is legally flawed," they continued. "The only beneficiaries will be polluting industries, many of which are among President [Donald] Trump’s largest donors."
Research published in 2023 in the journal Science found that between 1999 and 2020, PM2.5 pollution from coal-fired power plants killed roughly 460,000 people in the United States, making it more than twice as deadly as other kinds of fine particulate emissions.
While this is a staggering loss of life, the senators pointed out that the EPA has also been able to put a dollar value on the loss by noting quantifiable results of increased illness and death—heightened healthcare costs, missed school days, and lost labor productivity, among others.
Pointing to EPA estimates from 2024, they said that by disregarding human health effects, the agency risks costing Americans “between $22 and $46 billion in avoided morbidities and premature deaths in the year 2032."
Comparatively, they said, “the total compliance cost to industry, meanwhile, [would] be $590 million—between one and two one-hundredths of the estimated health benefit value."
They said the plan ran counter to the Clean Air Act's directive to “protect and enhance the quality of the Nation’s air resources so as to promote the public health and welfare,” and to statements made by Zeldin during his confirmation hearing, where he said "the end state of all the conversations that we might have, any regulations that might get passed, any laws that might get passed by Congress” is to “have the cleanest, healthiest air, [and] drinking water.”
The senators requested all documents related to the decision, including any information about cost-benefit modeling and communications with industry representatives.
"That EPA may no longer monetize health benefits when setting new clean air standards does not mean that those health benefits don’t exist," the senators said. "It just means that [EPA] will ignore them and reject safer standards, in favor of protecting corporate interests."
In some cases, the administration has kept immigrants locked up even after a judge has ordered their release, according to an investigation by Reuters.
Judges across the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since the start of October that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has illegally detained immigrants, according to a Reuters investigation published Saturday.
As President Donald Trump carries out his unprecedented "mass deportation" crusade, the number of people in ICE custody ballooned to 68,000 this month, up 75% from when he took office.
Midway through 2025, the administration had begun pushing for a daily quota of 3,000 arrests per day, with the goal of reaching 1 million per year. This has led to the targeting of mostly people with no criminal records rather than the "worst of the worst," as the administration often claims.
Reuters' reporting suggests chasing this number has also resulted in a staggering number of arrests that judges have later found to be illegal.
Since the beginning of Trump's term, immigrants have filed more than 20,200 habeas corpus petitions, claiming they were held indefinitely without trial in violation of the Constitution.
In at least 4,421 cases, more than 400 federal judges have ruled that their detentions were illegal.
Last month, more than 6,000 habeas petitions were filed. Prior to the second Trump administration, no other month dating back to 2010 had seen even 500.

In part due to the sheer volume of legal challenges, the Trump administration has often failed to comply with court rulings, leaving people locked up even after judges ordered them to be released.
Reuters' new report is the most comprehensive examination to date of the administration's routine violation of the law with respect to immigration enforcement. But the extent to which federal immigration agencies have violated the law under Trump is hardly new information.
In a ruling last month, Chief Judge Patrick J. Schiltz of the US District Court in Minnesota—a conservative jurist appointed by former President George W. Bush—provided a list of nearly 100 court orders ICE had violated just that month while deployed as part of Trump's Operation Metro Surge.
The report of ICE's systemic violation of the law comes as the agency faces heightened scrutiny on Capitol Hill, with leaders of the agency called to testify and Democrats attempting to hold up funding in order to force reforms to ICE's conduct, which resulted in a partial shutdown beginning Saturday.
Following the release of Reuters' report, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) directed a pointed question over social media to Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.
"Why do your out-of-control agents keep violating federal law?" he said. "I look forward to seeing you testify under oath at the House Judiciary Committee in early March."
"Aggies do what is necessary for our rights, for our survival, and for our people,” said one student organizer at North Carolina A&T State University, the largest historically Black college in the nation.
As early voting began for the state primaries, North Carolina college students found themselves walking more than a mile to cast their ballots after the Republican-controlled State Board of Elections closed polling places on their campuses.
The board, which shifted to a 3-2 GOP majority, voted last month to close a polling site at Western Carolina University and to reject the creation of polling sites at two other colleges—the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNC Greensboro), and the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T), the largest historically Black college in the nation. Each of these schools had polling places available on campus during the 2024 election.
The decision, which came just weeks before early voting was scheduled to begin, left many of the 40,000 students who attend these schools more than a mile away from the nearest polling place.
It was the latest of many efforts by North Carolina Republicans to restrict voting ahead of the 2026 midterms: They also cut polling place hours in dozens of counties and eliminated early voting on Sundays in some, which dealt a blow to "Souls to the Polls" efforts led by Black churches.
A lawsuit filed late last month by a group of students at the three schools said, “as a result, students who do not have access to private transportation must now walk that distance—which includes walking along a highway that lacks any pedestrian infrastructure—to exercise their right to vote.
The students argued that this violates their access to the ballot and to same-day registration, which is only available during the early voting period.
Last week, a federal judge rejected their demand to open the three polling centers. Jay Pavey, a Republican member of the Jackson County elections board, who voted to close the WCU polling site, dismissed fears that it would limit voting.
“If you really want to vote, you'll find a way to go one mile,” Pavey said.
Despite the hurdles, hundreds of students in the critical battleground state remained determined to cast a ballot as early voting opened.
On Friday, a video posted by the Smoky Mountain News showed dozens of students marching in a line from WCU "to their new polling place," at the Jackson County Recreation Center, "1.7 miles down a busy highway with no sidewalks."
The university and on-campus groups also organized shuttles to and from the polling place.
A similar scene was documented at NC A&T, where about 60 students marched to their nearest polling place at a courthouse more than 1.3 miles away.
The students described their march as a protest against the state's decision, which they viewed as an attempt to limit their power at the ballot box.
The campus is no stranger to standing up against injustice. February 1 marked the 66th anniversary of when four Black NC A&T students launched one of the most pivotal protests of the civil rights movement, sitting down at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Greensboro—an act that sparked a wave of nonviolent civil disobedience across the South.
"Aggies do what is necessary for our rights, for our survival, and for our people,” Jae'lah Monet, one of the student organizers of the march, told Spectrum News 1.
Monet said she and other students will do what is necessary to get students to the polls safely and to demonstrate to the state board the importance of having a polling place on campus. She said several similar events will take place throughout the early voting period.
"We will be there all day, and we will all get a chance to vote," Monet said.