For months, U.S. and Israeli officials have been negotiating a plan to shift U.S. aid to Israel from the State Department to the Pentagon. It would integrate parts of the Israeli and American defense industries, and facilitate new joint projects... "It's just going to be repackaged, reframed — and possibly not include the same kind of congressional oversight."

NPR 

What Trump meant when he said the U.S. is cutting aid to Israel

Updated November 10, 20263:20 PM ET

 

Heard on All Things Considered

 

JERUSALEM — On the day of the U.S. midterm elections, when President Trump told Fox News he is cutting $4 billion in U.S. aid to Israel, many Israelis panicked. Israel has been one of the biggest recipients of U.S. military aid for decades.... LISTEN OR READ MORE  https://www.npr.org/2026/11/09/nx-s1-6029320/us-trump-israel-military-aid

AMERICAN DOCTOR: ‘Can we accept what we have done or not done?’: harrowing film follows doctors in Gaza. American Doctor follows three volunteer doctors as they try to save lives on the frontline and then return to the US to become advocates in congress

"... But the moral weight of American Doctor lies not just in its depiction of Gaza but its unflinching examination of the political and media machinery that enables it." 

Feroze Sidhwa in American Doctor.

Photograph: Watermelon Pictures

When she wanted to confront Americans about the consequences of their actions – or inactions – in Gaza, Poh Si Teng reached for a genre with mass popular appeal: the medical drama.

“Whether it’s The Pitt, Grey’s Anatomy, House, ER, even a comedy like Scrubs, you name it,” the documentary film-maker says via Zoom from her New York apartment. “I thought to myself, there’s something about medical dramas and doctors and human mortality in this space so let’s make The Pitt. The difference is it’s real and it’s set in Gaza and maybe this is the way to bring Palestine back to the United States.”

The result is American Doctor, a 93-minute film directed by Teng and co-produced with Kirstine Barfod and Reem Haddad, which premiered at the Sundance film festival and is out now in US cinemas.

The documentary follows three doctors from different cultural and religious backgrounds – Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American emergency doctor; Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina; and Feroze Sidhwa, a Zoroastrian trauma surgeon based in California – as they volunteer on the frontlines of Gaza’s collapsing hospital system.

They return to the US as advocates in the halls of Congress, which continues to send military aid to Israel. The film highlights the unique position of American doctors as witnesses whose professional standing makes their testimony difficult for politicians and even rightwing media to dismiss as propaganda.

The journey of Teng to making the film began in the fall of 2024, a year into the military campaign in Gaza. The Malaysian-American had spent years as a producer, documentary commissioning editor for Al Jazeera English and creative director at ABC/Disney but felt suffocated by the professional and political silence surrounding what she does not hesitate to call a genocide.

 “I was so frustrated and it felt like nothing was changing,” the 41-year-old explains. “In our journalism circles, even though we were seeing so many Gazan journalists being targeted and executed, it felt like in the western part of the world – specifically where I was situated in New York – that people were still whispering about Palestine... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/aug/17/gaza-doctor-documentary

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Why does the US want to ‘dismantle’ the international criminal court? Marco Rubio has offered nonsensical rationale in attacking the court. The Trump administration’s real goal is impunity

‘What worries Trump officials most is the prospect that territorial jurisdiction could be used to prosecute them.’ Photograph: Graeme Sloan/Pool/Graeme Sloan - Pool/CNP/Shutterstock

Kenneth Roth in The Guardian

Opinion   International criminal court 

Thu 16 Jul 2026 05.00 EDT

With the pointless war of choice in Iran going poorly, the Trump administration has declared a virtual war on the international criminal court (ICC). Secretary of state, Marco Rubio, vowed on Monday to “dismantle” the court as a supposed threat to US sovereignty. His rationale is laced with sophistry. The administration’s real goal is to secure impunity for war crimes, even those committed on the territory of ICC member states.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed and a video posted on X, Rubio conjures up a dystopia in which local American officials such as police officers or border patrol agents “could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America”.

This is utter fiction. The ICC has no jurisdiction over crimes committed in the United States. Unless Donald Trump were to start deploying police officers or border patrol agents abroad, the ICC would have no capacity to charge or prosecute them.

Nor can the US government claim not to have consented to the laws applied by the court. They are drawn from treaties such as the genocide convention and the Geneva conventions and protocols that the US government has either ratified or incorporated into its military manuals. Is it really un-American to outlaw genocide? ... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/16/international-criminal-court-marco-rubio

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"It more than a little ironic that these experts at tax avoidance are at the helm of a technological revolution that could drive inequality to new, unprecedented heights." Eduardo Porter in The Guardian

Analysis

by  Eduardo Porter

Condemned to plutocracy? The relentless rise of US inequality

Elon Musk is a beneficiary of America’s lopsided prosperity – does the country have any appetite for redistribution?

People protest against the SpaceX IPO in New York. Photograph: Sarah Yenesel/EPA

As Barack Obama’s presidency was coming to a close, Jason Furman, then chairman of the president’s council of economic advisers, laid out the strides his administration had made to curb the nation’s exorbitant income inequality in “the largest investments in reducing inequality since the Great Society”.

Indeed, by the end of 2016, taxes and transfers cut the share of income accruing to the richest 1% of households by just over a fifth, according to estimates from the congressional budget office (CBO), more than under any government since at least Jimmy Carter’s. They raised the slice of income going to the poorest fifth from 3.9% to 7.9%, the highest share since at least 1979.

Those were the days.

As Elon Musk is anointed the world’s first trillionaire, following the public offering of shares of his internet to AI conglomerate SpaceX, that moment, just 10 years ago, when the government bragged about its efforts to curb America’s lopsided distribution of prosperity, might give us some hope that we are not condemned to plutocracy; social and political forces can stop inequality’s relentless rise.

Benjamin Franklin liked to talk of America’s “happy mediocrity” – a country with “few … so miserable as the poor of Europe … few that in Europe would be called rich”. And yet, America’s history of combating inequality is rather grim. Obama’s track record as the United States’s most committed equalizer in over half a century underscores the ultimate lack of interest of the nation’s political coalitions in bringing about a more equitable distribution of the fruits of prosperity.

Supposedly a populist champion of the working stiff, Donald Trump’s priorities quickly turned elsewhere. His Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 offered massive tax cuts to Americans in the upper percentiles of income... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/21/us-inequality-plutocracy

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The space for freedom of expression is shrinking dramatically as governments use new technologies to suppress dissent and digital giants manipulate information online to enrich themselves, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, warned today. In her final report to the Human Rights Council, Khan highlighted the conflation of State and corporate interests to exploit vulnerabilities of the right to freedom of expression.

UN Special Procedures

@UN_SPExperts

 

Space for freedom of expression shrinking as govts use tech to suppress dissent & digital giants manipulate info for enrichment, warns @Irenekhan   @UN_HRC. 

 

“Freedom of expression has been privatised, monetised, manipulated & unlawfully restricted.  

 

#UNHRC62 

 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/06/freedom-expression-must-not-be-treated-fodder-geopolitics-or-commodity-trade

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https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session62/advance-versions/a-hrc-62-67-aev.pdf 

US politics: After years spent documenting state terror, I know it when I see it. And I see it now in the US and Israel. It’s chilling to watch as Trump and Netanyahu adopt the methods of regimes their countries once condemned

 Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza

"The true irony is, state terror does not make a state safer. When democratic states adopt the methods of tyrannies, they become weaker. Their global credibility frays. They sacrifice the legitimacy they once held that distinguishes them from the regimes they claim to oppose." 

'WE CAN'T TRUST YOU' witness protest sign as Officers arrest an anti-ICE protester in Minneapolis Minnesota, 30 January 2026. Photograph: Craig Lassig/UPI/Shutterstock

In Syria, where I worked during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s terror, people were often taken away to torture cells before dawn by masked men. The timing was deliberate. It disoriented them at their most vulnerable, ensuring the torture to come would be even more agonising. The testimonies I recorded from survivors almost always contained the same phrase: “The morning they came for me.” One young woman, shattered by rape and violence, later told me that her life had split in two – before and after the masked men came for her.

In Iraq, those who spoke against Saddam Hussein – even abroad, even casually – were punished in cruel ways by a vengeful leader determined to crush any hint of dissent.

In Egypt in 2016, Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian academic researching labour unions, was abducted, beaten and tortured to death, it is thought, by president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s security services. His own mother had difficulty recognising his mutilated body.

During the second Chechen war, I met the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Chechnya. She repeatedly attacked Vladimir Putin’s policies, documenting human rights abuses during Russia’s military campaigns. To punish her, a bullet was put in her brain on Putin’s birthday – a warning to other truth-seekers. Stay silent or die.

In the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli soldiers, masked and unmasked, kill, torture and imprison Palestinian doctors, journalists, teachers, activists and scholars not for what they have done – but because of who they are.

After decades of documenting state terror, I know how it starts. Governments begin to use words like security, order, deterrence. Every excuse for Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct in Gaza is framed as “security”. ICE agents are trained in a language of order in which violence becomes procedure.

What happens when democratic states adopt the methods of the regimes they once condemned? Terror is not only masked men and arbitrary detention. It also operates through fear. Policies are designed to make people more compliant, more submissive. As the historian Timothy Snyder warned in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, this is how societies slide into danger: people obey in advance.

In Donald Trump’s US, I have watched CEOs, academics, journalists and government officials allow fear to override decency and moral authority. I have seen this pattern before. It begins with... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/08/state-terror-us-israel-donald-trump-benjamin-netanyahu

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"It’s not what we can or cannot say that matters; rather, it’s whether what we say can get any visibility at all, and whether it is able to move against the political climate imposed by those controlling platform algorithms."

What the US TikTok takeover is already revealing about new forms of censorship

Paolo Gerbaudo

Over recent days, US TikTok users have reported a number of suspicious malfunctions.’ The company’s headquarters in Culver City, California. Photograph: Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

It’s not what we can or cannot say that matters – rather, it’s whether what we say can get any visibility at all under the US-specific algorithm

We tend to think of censorship as the direct suppression of speech. We conjure images of mouths taped shut, courts seizing books and films, and journalists or activists thrown in jail to silence their voices. But what if, in a digital era governed by invisible yet highly consequential algorithms, censorship no longer revolved around the ability to speak, but rather around the visibility of content, its effective “reach”?

The launch of TikTok’s new US-specific algorithm underscores the urgency of this risk. This week, control over the platform’s operations has shifted to the TikTok USDS joint venture led by a consortium of investors that includes US big tech firms such as cloud-computing company Oracle, with the Chinese parent company ByteDance retaining a 19.9% stake. This arrangement is presented as a means of complying with US legislation introduced under former president Joe Biden, with the aim of protecting user data and preventing political interference from China. Yet many of TikTok’s 200 million US-based users now fear that Donald Trump and his allies may use algorithmic control to do precisely what China was accused of doing: interfering with political discussion by suppressing voices critical of Trump and his international allies.

Over recent days, US TikTok users have reported a number of suspicious malfunctions: videos covering controversial topics, such as the killing of Alex Pretti by a federal agent remaining under review; newly posted videos recording surprisingly low-view metrics; and allegations that it is impossible to post messages containing keywords such as “Epstein”. Drawing on these denunciations, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has called for a review into the TikTok algorithm to determine whether it complies with state law. Further, app store data shows that many users are cancelling the app and downloading alternatives.... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/30/tiktok-us-takeover-new-type-of-censorship

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Israeli officers and soldiers have told a local newspaper that they were instructed to shoot at unarmed Palestinians seeking aid at Israeli-American GHF Gaza "Humanitarian" Foundation designated distribution zones in Gaza, despite the crowds posing no threat.

 

Israeli soldiers say they were ordered to fire at unarmed aid seekers: Report

Israeli officers and soldiers have told a local newspaper that they were instructed to shoot at unarmed Palestinians seeking aid at designated distribution zones in Gaza, despite the crowds posing no threat.

Israel’s Haaretz reported that it had learned that the military prosecutor’s office has demanded that the military’s supreme command launch an investigation of suspected war crimes at the aid hubs.

In the report, the soldiers described how they fired on crowds of aid seekers to prevent them approaching or disperse them, rather than using non-lethal crowd control measures.

“It’s a killing field … where I was, between one and five people were killed every day,” one soldier said.

“They fire on them as if they were an attacking force: they don’t use riot control devices, they don’t shoot tear gas, they shoot everything you can think of – a heavy machine gun, a grenade launcher, mortars.

He added: “We communicate with them through fire.”

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 549 people have been killed near aid centres since they began operating in late May.

The US has just approved $30m in funding for the group, despite the routine violence at its sites and warnings from human rights lawyers that its staff could be held criminally liable for complicity in war crimes.... READ MORE  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/6/27/live-israel-kills-over-70-in-gaza-as-549-killed-seeking-aid-in-past-month?update=3803146

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