'The Witkoff Massacre': Hundreds Killed or Wounded as Israeli Forces Open Fire on Gaza Food Aid Site

 

from Common Dreams

"There was fire from all directions, from naval warships, from tanks and drones,"  Amr Abu Teiba, 

...

In a point-by-point breakdown on Friday, Drop Site News' Jeremy Scahill detailed that Witkoff, through his negotiations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is trying to "strong-arm Hamas into a deal that does not end the genocide" that continues apace in Gaza.

After Israel last week rejected tentative language amenable to both the U.S. and Hamas negotiators, Witkoff responded on Saturday to an updated draft submitted by Hamas with a rejection of his own, calling it "totally unacceptable."

Meanwhile, the threat of famine for the entire population of Gaza continues—all with firm U.S. backing and complicity, infuriating humanitarians worldwide as the death and suffering mounts.

Reda Abu Jazar toldAl-Jazeera on Sunday that her brother was among those killed as he attempted to retrieve food at the distribution site in Rafah.

"Let them stop these massacres, stop this genocide. They are killing us," she said...

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'Another Day, Another Cover-Up,' Rights Group Says as IDF Releases Report on Medics' Killing

from Common Dreams

The Israel Defense Forces' report on the killing of 15 paramedics in Gaza last month was "sure to lead to increased demands for an independent investigation," said one journalist for Sky News, which recently released an extensive account of the incident that experts and advocates have called a potential war crime.

The IDF said it had found "several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident" that took place on March 23, when Israeli troops opened fire on a convoy of vehicles that included ambulances, killing the 15 rescue workers.

But officials claimed that there was "no attempt to conceal the event" and the report suggested the firing of a deputy commander for providing an "inaccurate report" and the reprimanding of a commanding officer should satisfy the international outcry over the incident, after which United Nations and Palestinian Red Crescent officials discovered the medics' bodies and their crushed rescue vehicles had been buried in a shallow mass grave...

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'Victory for Scammers' as Trump Fires 90% of Consumer Protection Agency Staff

(That's right folks. TrumpyBear the Magnanimous  is clearing the way for Big Banking, Wall Street, Big Business and the hedge funders to RIP YOU OFF EVEN MORE THAN EVER right after giving them a chance to Buy the Dip before he announced a pause on the 'Liberation Day' tariffs. This is outright systemic graft, letting his oligarch friends rip us off over and over again before they deliberately tank the economy. Amazing this guy has one single supporter left.)

from Common Dreams

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration on Thursday dealt what advocates fear could be a fatal blow to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by moving to fire 90% of its workforce, gutting an agency that has returned tens of billions of dollars to Americans defrauded by corporate abusers.

With no advance notice, roughly 1,500 CFPB employees received news Thursday afternoon that they're being fired, a major step toward billionaire Trump lieutenant Elon Musk's stated goal of deleting the bureau. The mass terminations, if upheld, would leave the CFPB with a "skeleton crew" of around 200 staffers.

"This is another assault on consumers and our democracy by Trump's lawless administration," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a key driving force behind the creation of the CFPB in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. "We will fight back with everything we've got."

The so-called reduction-in-force (RIF) notices came days after a federal court issued an order requiring the CFPB—currently headed by far-right Project 2025 architect Russell Vought—to conduct a "particularized assessment" for employees it wants to terminate...

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The Next Person in a Cell With No Charges Could Be You

from Common Dreams

Yesterday was the day democracy in our nation officially died.

We no longer live in the America we grew up in: “The land of the free and the home of the brave.” The country the rest of the world looked up to and depended on. The country that claimed to follow the rule of law, and valued compassion and the protection of its most vulnerable people.

We are now in the midst of a outright coup against the Constitution, against the United States, and against our founding ideals: Donald Trump proclaimed it yesterday when he openly defied the Supreme Court and our founding documents with a sneer, and his neofascist sycophants chuckled and giggled in the Oval Office.

When Marco Rubio claimed that arresting and deporting a man legally living in the US was “foreign policy” that can’t be overseen by the Supreme Court and then congratulated himself on his cleverness.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal U.S. resident who committed no crime, is now held in El Salvador’s most notorious concentration camp, where as many as 75 men are packed into cells designed for a fraction of that number...

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Today’s ‘Death Squad’ Dems Enable the Trump-Backed Slaughter in Yemen, Gaza, and Beyond

from Common Dreams

...

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has sponsored Joint Resolutions of Disapproval over some of Trump’s continued backing of Netanyahu.

“As a result of Israel’s blocking of humanitarian aid into Gaza, many thousands of children there face malnutrition and even starvation,” Sanders said. “Sadly, and illegally, much of the carnage in Gaza has been carried out with U.S.-provided military equipment. Providing more offensive weapons to continue this disastrous war would violate U.S. and international law.”

Among the weapons included in the resolution are 35,000 two-thousand-pound bombs, which have caused thousands of civilian casualties over the past 18 months. The international outcry over these war crimes was so great that even President Joe Biden suspended their shipment last spring. Trump insisted that such arms shipments should be resumed, however, and the majority of Senate Democrats are supporting him.

Indeed, only 14 Democratic Senators voted for Sanders’ resolutions to block the transfer of these and other deadly weapons.

This was not a result of political pressure. Only 15% of Americans and just 5% of Democrats support additional military aid to Israel. Senate offices were flooded with calls to support the resolutions in a campaign organized by a wide array of peace, human rights, and religious organizations. Despite this, more than 70% of Senate Democrats sided with Trump and the arms industry over the wishes of their constituents.

The truth is that a number of Democratic members of Congress, whom millions of people see as leading the resistance, actually ally with Trump on foreign policy...

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Call It the 'Dismantling Government Act': House GOP Advances Bill Backing Musk-Led Destruction

from Common Dreams

The top Democrat on the U.S. House committee tasked with holding the Trump administration accountable said Tuesday during a debate on a Republican proposal that the GOP knows President Donald Trump cannot legally "'delete' whole federal agencies" or "take a chainsaw to beloved programs like Social Security and Medicaid."

"Congressional Republicans also know these dangerous, deeply unpopular cuts would never be approved by Congress through regular order," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "So now they've brought us H.R. 1295, the so-called Reorganizing Government Act, in a desperate attempt to circumvent the normal congressional process."

The bill, said Connolly, would more accurately be called the Dismantling Government Act, with its resurrection of a "long-dormant statute as a Trojan horse to give President Trump and Elon Musk unprecedented, filibuster-proof authority to eliminate federal departments and agencies, statutory programs, government services, and regulatory protections that promote the health and well-being of American families."

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Make No Mistake, Trump Is Turning the US Into a Police State

by Jeffrey Isaac Common Dreams 

... Last weekend, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) arrested Khalil Mahmoud, a Columbia University graduate student, living in campus housing, who has been one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement on campus. Mahmoud is a Palestinian who was born in Syria, who has been in the U.S. on a student visa, is currently holding a green card, and is married to a U.S. citizen. There is no evidence that he has ever engaged in a violent act. He was apparently arrested in accordance with the Trump Executive Order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” signed on January 29, 2025, and also in connection with the recently announced State Department “catch and revoke” policy, which employs AI tools to locate, detain, and deport international students considered to be pro-Palestinian and thus, by definition, “anti-Semitic.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly acknowledged the action, announcing that “we will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” [It must be noted that a U.S. federal judge has just ordered a temporary halt to Mahmoud’s deportation. But it must be noted only parenthetically, because the halt is only temporary, and Mahmoud remains in ICE custody, and if there is any domain where the Trump administration can be relied upon to stick to its metaphorical—and actual—guns, it is this one.]

The arrest of Khalil is a major escalation in a “New Campus McCarthyism” that has beset U.S. higher education for at least the past two years. It follows hard on the Trump administration’s cancellation of over $400 million in Columbia University grants and contracts, and preceded by one day Tuesday’s announcement that the U.S. Department of Education has sent letters to 60 universities “under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment.”...

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Wall Street Cheers Trump's Treasury Pick, Corporate Tax Cut Proponent Scott Bessent

from Common Dreams

With the stock market surging Monday morning after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's nomination of hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to be treasury secretary, some Wall Street executives said they were celebrating a "reasonable" pick who would moderate some of Trump's most extreme proposals.

But economic justice advocates and experts said the jubilation was likely over expectations that Bessent will deliver "trillions in tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy."

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, founder and president of the Yale Chief Executive Institute, toldCNN that the billionaire Key Square Group executive is a "pragmatic" choice who supports only "selective tariffs" and could dial back Trump's plan to introduce across-the-board tariffs of up to 20% on imported goods—a plan that economists say would raise prices for U.S. households.

But Bessent himself told radio host Larry Kudlow on Saturday that tariffs "can't be inflationary."

David Kass, executive director of the economic justice group Americans for Fair Taxation (ATF), said that during Bessent's confirmation process, the organization will work to ensure lawmakers get answers to questions about whether the Wall Street billionaire plans to use tariffs to fund another Trump plan Bessent has endorsed: the renewal of the 2017 tax cuts.

"As income inequality is soaring and Americans are being crushed by the rising costs of living, we have to ask why billionaire Scott Bessent supports renewing the Trump tax bill, which gives trillions in tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and mega-corporations," Kass said. "Moreover, we also need to know how Mr. Bessent would fund this massive tax giveaway. Will he make working and middle-class Americans foot the bill by enacting wide-ranging cuts to vital government programs like Social Security and Medicare? Will he squeeze Main Street by raising prices on essential goods through tariffs?"...

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Trump's Nomination of Project 2025 Architect Means Social Security, Medicare 'Are At Risk'

from Common Dreams

President-elect Donald Trump's choice of Russell Vought, a Project 2025 architect, to lead the White House budget office was seen as further evidence of the threat the incoming administration poses to Social Security, Medicare, and other critical government programs.

Vought, who currently heads the far-right think tank Center for Renewing America think tank, served as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump's first term, and he's set to return to the post after playing a central role in crafting the Project 2025 agenda that the Republican president-elect attempted to disavow on the campaign trail.

In remarks to an undercover journalist earlier this year, Vought dismissed the notion that Trump opposed the aims of Project 2025, saying the Republican leader was "very supportive of what we do."

Vought is expected to aggressively pursue federal spending cuts in concert with other actors within and around the incoming Trump administration, including the "government efficiency" commission led by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy...

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