US contractors confirm; Gazans are being targeted at aid sites: AP

from al Mayadeen English

American contractors guarding food distribution sites in Gaza have been accused of using live ammunition and stun grenades on Palestinians seeking aid, according to testimonies and videos obtained by The Associated Press.

Two US contractors, speaking anonymously due to the sensitivity of the matter, revealed on Thursday that security personnel hired by the US-led Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) were often unqualified, heavily armed, and operated with little oversight. The accounts confirm that these contractors regularly deployed stun grenades, pepper spray, and, at times, live rounds to "manage crowds".

As a testament to their claims, videos from the sites show hundreds of Palestinians jostling for food amid gunfire, stun grenades, and pepper spray. One contractor recounted a moment when he believed a Palestinian was hit by a bullet, saying: "There are innocent people being hurt. Badly. Needlessly."...

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Israel kills more than 300 in Gaza in 48 hours as focus intensifies on GHF

from al Jazeera

More than 300 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the last 48 hours, according to the Gaza Government Media Office, which says Israel has “committed 26 bloody massacres” in that period.

At least 118 Palestinians were killed and 581 others injured in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, the enclave’s Health Ministry said on Thursday. At least 73 of those were killed since dawn, including 33 aid seekers at the controversial Israeli and United States-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid sites...

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Trump Administration Live Updates: Policy Bill Moves Toward Final House Vote

from the NYT

The House took its first step early Thursday toward a final vote on President Trump’s marquee domestic policy bill, after Republicans put down a revolt by conservative holdouts that had threatened to sink it.

After a day and night of paralysis on the House floor, and haggling and uncertainty in the Capitol, Speaker Mike Johnson scored a preliminary victory in his bid to overcome resistance within his party when the House voted to allow the bill to come up for debate. The 219-to-213 vote suggested he had won the backing of recalcitrant Republicans whose resistance had stalled the measure, though the House still had to take a final vote to approve it.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, was delaying the vote on Thursday morning by using his prerogative as a leader to take far more than his allotted one minute to speak, assailing the bill as a “disgusting abomination” that would hurt Americans. Mr. Jeffries began speaking before 5 a.m. Eastern and has spent much of his time reading testimonials from Americans who said they relied on Medicaid and worried that cuts to the program would upend their lives...

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Hamas issues 10-day ultimatum to Daesh-linked group leader to surrender over ties to Israel

from PressTV

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has given Yasser Jihad Abu Shabab, leader of a Daesh-linked group, 10 days to surrender to authorities, waning he will be tried in absentia if he fails to comply.

Abu Shabab faces charges of treason, armed rebellion, and forming an armed gang.

Palestinian and international reports have described the group as a "militia" cooperating with Israeli forces, particularly in areas of Israeli military control east of Rafah near the Karam Abu Salem crossing.

Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, has slammed Abu Shabab for leading a network of collaborators recruited by Israel to sow chaos in the Gaza Strip.

This marks the first such public move by Hamas since Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza 21 months ago.

The Revolutionary Court, part of Gaza’s military judiciary, emphasized the severity of the charges and urged the public to report his whereabouts.

Local sources say Abu Shabab is hiding near eastern Rafah. This follows Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s recent admission of arming militants in Gaza to counter Hamas...

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Trump eases sanctions on HTS amid report of Israeli expansion in Syria's Quneitra

from PressTV

... On June 29, the United States lifted most sanctions on the Arab country, citing alleged reforms under the head of the HTS-led regime in Syria, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, whose administration reportedly agreed to normalize ties with Israel and expel Palestinian factions.

As part of the executive order, the US president also ordered Secretary of State Marco Rubio to review the designation of the HTS leader and Jolani as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.”

During a visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in May, Trump initially revealed his intention to lift sanctions that had crippled Syria’s economy for over a decade and driven more than 90 percent of its population into poverty.

Based on Western media reports last month, the US government’s conditions to lift sanctions against Syria included normalizing relations with Israel through signing the Abraham Accords and expelling Palestinian resistance factions from the country.

Washington has imposed sanctions on Syria since 1979 in response to its foreign policy stance against Israel.

The executive order was scheduled to take effect on July 1...

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US approves $510 million arms deal for Israel amid Gaza genocide

from PressTV

The US government has approved a $510 million weapons sale to the Israeli regime, reinforcing Washington’s military backing as the regime’s genocide in Gaza reaches its 21st month.

The sale, approved on June 30, includes over 7,000 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kits – 3,845 KMU-558B/B kits for the BLU-109 bomb body, and 3,280 KMU-572 F/B kits for the MK-82 bomb body.

Additionally, the agreement covers technical support, engineering assistance, and logistics services provided by the US government.

The US State Department stated that the arms transfer is intended to "assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready [military] capability," calling it "vital to US national security interests."

The arms deal was approved through the Foreign Military Sales program and officially notified to Congress on Monday.

Boeing serves as the primary contractor, with a portion of the order likely sourced from existing US military inventories...

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Trump’s Finances Were Shaky. Then He Began to Capitalize on His Comeback.

from the New York Times

Last spring, even as Donald J. Trump’s march back toward the White House dominated public attention, his finances, largely out of view, faced serious threats.

His office building in Lower Manhattan generated too little cash to cover its mortgage, with the balance coming due. Many of his golf courses regularly lacked enough players to cover costs. The flow of millions of dollars a year from his stint as a television celebrity had mostly dried up.

And a sudden wave of legal judgments threatened to devour all his cash.

Then, with his clinching of the Republican nomination, everything began to change.

In the following months, Mr. Trump, along with his two eldest sons, Eric and Donald Jr., refocused the family business, forming a series of partnerships, especially in cryptocurrency, with investors who were willing to bank on his victory.

Once Mr. Trump won the presidency in November, that approach kicked into overdrive.

His family business announced numerous new deals that would financially benefit Mr. Trump directly, even as he made policy decisions that affected those industries or that involved countries in which the United States had political interests. Most glaringly, Mr. Trump is now both a partner in several crypto ventures and, as president, crypto’s chief policy regulator, and he has signaled that he wants his administration to have a hands-off approach to digital currencies.

Today, those moves are seen by Mr. Trump’s detractors as a money grab of historic proportions. But an analysis by The New York Times of thousands of pages of internal Trump Organization documents filed in one of the legal actions against him suggests a more urgent motivation for Mr. Trump’s behavior: a need, rather than simply a desire, for easy money to keep his empire intact...

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Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.

from Greg Palast

And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.

Stay with me and I’ll give you the means, methods and, most important, the key calculations.

But if you’re expecting a sexy story about Elon Musk messing with vote-counting software from outer space, sorry, you won’t get that here.

As in Bush v. Gore in 2000, and in too many other miscarriages of Democracy, this election was determined by good old “vote suppression,” the polite term we use for shafting people of color out of their ballot. We used to call it Jim Crow.

Here are key numbers:

• 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.
• By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.
• No less than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).
• At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.
• 1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.
• 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.

If the purges, challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast...

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Stolen? Swing State Vote Data Shows Possible Tampering — Election Truth Alliance

from The Mark Thompson Show

 

• Election Truth Alliance  
• Smart Elections 
• Greg Palast 
• Black Box Voting 

A Ponderous Chain: Trump's Rapacious, Craven Budget Backstab

Title says it all.

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