We begin today with Yaniv Kubovich, Adi Hashmonai, and Ran Shamoni of Haaretz look at a range of Israeli preparations for an expected response from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran for the killings of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeah in Tehran and Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr in Beirut within the space of 12 hours.
Top Iranian officials have vowed to avenge the assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian territory, although at this stage it is not clear what the scope of the retaliation will be.
Regarding Hezbollah's response, Israel's security establishment is divided on whether the response will be measured or if it will target civilian infrastructure. Either way, Israel's security establishment says that they are prepared for all scenarios. [...]
As for Hamas, the IDF expects the terror group to try in every way possible to carry out a military response to avenge Ismail Haniyeh's assassination in Tehran, including attempts to fire long range rockets aiming to hit central Israeli towns and cities.
With regard to Hamas' response, Israeli intelligence officials believe that after ten months of war, Hamas' status in general and the organization's military arm in particular will struggle to carry out a significant response.
Arash Azizi of The Atlantic notes that Iranian security is highly vulnerable against outside military and intelligence forces because of the regime’s focus on its own population.
Ismail Haniyeh should have known that Tehran wasn’t a safe place for him to be. What has Israel ever wanted to do on Iranian territory that it hasn’t been able to accomplish? In 2018, it stole the country’s entire nuclear archive. In 2020, it killed Iran’s top nuclear-weapons official. In 2022 and 2023, it reportedly abducted, interrogated, and then released security officials who were planning actions against Israeli tourists in the region—and it did this entirely on Iranian soil. Such extensive operations show that Mossad has deeply penetrated Iran’s security architecture, much as it has in the hit Israeli TV show Tehran. [...]
The extent of Israeli ease of operations in Iran is jaw-dropping. The Islamic Republic likes to claim that even if Iran is not democratic, free, or prosperous, at least it’s safe and secure. The regime enrolls tens of thousands of men in an alphabet soup of security forces—and yet it can’t seem to guard even highly valued guests, such as Haniyeh.
The regime’s security failures would be embarrassing for any sovereign state anywhere, but they are not hard to fathom when you consider the focus of Tehran’s repressive apparatus. Iran’s prisons are filled with dissidents, feminists, trade unionists, and ordinary folks who have committed such crimes as posting dance videos online. Hours before Haniyeh’s assassination, Tehran’s prosecutors pressed charges against a cartoonist and a journalist for the crime of openly discussing gay and lesbian life in Iran. We Iranians have long known that the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is adept at going after its own citizens but can do little when faced with the military might of adversaries such as the United States and Israel.
Andrew Lawrence of the Guardian examines how the shoe salesman’s outbursts and uncouth at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference in Chicago yesterday left Trump highly exposed.
When ABC’s Rachel Scott opened the proceedings by asking the former president his impetus for addressing the Black journalists, women and Chicagoans in the crowd who have been regularly subject to his hostility, Trump dismissed the question as “horrible” and called Scott “nasty” before turning his bluster meter up to 11.
He declared himself the best president since Abraham Lincoln for “the Black population”. He pushed back on the idea that Kamala Harris would identify as Black. (“She was Indian, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went.”) He enunciated the word with such contempt, as if coughing up a hairball –
buh-LAAAAA-kuh. All the while, crowd reactions whipsawed from incredulous laughter to deep groans. At one point the discussion shifted to
Sonya Massey, the latest Black person to be unlawfully killed by police. “Are you talking [the one] with the water?” Trump asked to audible gasps. [...]
In theory, being interrogated by three Black women should have worked against Trump. Doubtless his many supporters will take his performance as confirmation of his fitness for the fight against Harris. But for the many in the room who could see past the bluster, Trump looked for all the world like an old crank who can barely hear or have a thought without somehow making it racist. Asked by Goba how he’d know if he was too old to stay in the job, Trump didn’t hesitate to take another shot at Scott. “Look, if I came on stage and got treated so rudely as this woman,” he said, still smarting from her pointed line of questioning. That was the payoff the NABJ had hoped for, and Trump never looked more exposed.
I guess that when the dynamism of Vice President Harris on the campaign trail or the weirdness of your running mate, JD Vance, or Project 2025 is eating up a large portion of media time, you have to do something, right?
I guess that Omarosa is tired of people bringing those cookout plates to her house, she wants to attend the cookout, chile…
The shoe salesman’s Mom was Scottish and not Irish but still, points were made.
But no, you still can’t come to the cookout.
Ja’han Jones of MSNBC looks at some of the internal politics behind the NABJ invitation to Trump.
NABJ announced ahead of the panel that no one in the audience full of journalists would be permitted to ask questions. And the composition of the panel — particularly, its inclusion of Fox News host Harris Faulkner, who has given Trump chummy interviews on a network that has helped spread Trump’s lies and paid a historic legal settlement for doing so— fueled suspicion that NABJ was giving the GOP nominee a relatively friendly platform to lie and peddle propaganda. [...]
This car crash of an event was forecast by NABJ members. It sowed distrust and animus among members toward NABJ leadership. It sparked a protest outside the event, an NABJ convention co-chair’s stepping down from her role and multiple speakers’ backing out of their planned discussions.
It also highlighted some of the broader internal debates that have raged within the organization. As the Columbia Journalism Review wrote in 2018, NABJ has faced divisions over shifting paradigms in journalism, pitting some older members and other traditionalists against younger journalists “attuned to the fast pace of new media.” That rift was at play ahead of this event, with some supporters of the panel arguing NABJ's tradition of inviting presidential candidates justified inviting Trump this year and critics of the panel arguing Trump’s tendency to lie with abandon — and the fact most of his illiberal views have been broadcast for nearly a decade now — warranted a departure from the norm.
Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe reaffirms that no matter how much Trump may want the to disassociate itself from Project 2025, it’s out there, the right-wing put it out there, and Vice President Harris is using it in her pitch to voters.
But it’s easy to understand why Trump and his team want to pretend that the plan has disappeared. They learned the hard way that in a post-Roe world, such a boldface plan that focuses largely on rolling back the rights of women and other marginalized Americans was a bad idea. It has enraged — and engaged — Trump opponents from the grass-roots up. And now, with Vice President Kamala Harris as Trump’s presumed presidential opponent, it is his political kryptonite.
Harris has now made the plan a key part of her pitch to voters. And there is plenty of fodder within it to rev up her base to defeat Trump and other Republicans down the ballot: Project 2025 would, among other things, dramatically expand the president’s power; use arcane federal laws to restrict abortion and reproductive health care nationwide; boost federal law enforcement authority in American cities; and even boost the ability of federal authorities to bring legal action against state and local officials whose policies don’t comport with the Trump administration’s views. [...]
Now conservatives are suffering from their own success — and hubris. The pipeline of conservative judicial nominees are what led to the swift evisceration of constitutional protections for abortion access, and it now threatens everything from the availability of contraception and IVF treatments to marriage equality. While such conservative gambits were carried out under the radar years ago, now people are paying attention.
Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown writes for the Guardian that a new special inquiry has been opened against Rupert Murdoch’s News Group and that Washington Post publisher and chief executive Will Lewis’s 2011 statements in a previous phase of that investigation have been found not to be credible.
I have only recently discovered how Lewis attempted to accuse me of a crime I did not commit. He was asked by the Metropolitan police why, in 2010-2011, News Group had ordered the deletion of millions of emails. These were emails that the police authorities thought may be relevant to their investigations into phone hacking. The Murdoch group continues to claim that emails were deleted “for commercial, IT and practical reasons”. But when the police confronted Lewis about the deletion of emails, including those of the then chief executive, Rebekah Brooks – despite the Met having requested them to be retained – it was a different story, which gave the game away.
His explanation conceded that emails were being destroyed to prevent them being seen. In an interview with the authorities on 8 July 2011, he tried to blame me by explaining to the police that he had been told that I, with Tom Watson, also an MP at that time, was conspiring to steal these emails. The Murdoch team implied I had bribed one of their former employees to do so, and indeed that we already had some of the documents. “We got a warning from a source that a current member of staff had got access to Rebekah’s emails,” Lewis told the police. “Then the source came back and said … emails had definitely been passed … she went into a panic.” This operation to steal, according to the source, “was controlled by Gordon Brown”. According to an email chain, which had been sent on 24 January 2011, the supposed thief had “met with Brown”.
None of this was anything other than a complete fabrication. The senior police officer Sue Akers, who headed the initial investigation, has now saidshe finds Lewis’s explanation to beunbelievable.
Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic summarizes the evidence showing that Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro was the big loser in last Sunday’s presidential elections.
How do they know that Maduro had truly lost the vote? Because organizers of Venezuela’s democratic opposition—thousands of people inside and outside of the country—painstakingly prepared for this election, assumed it could be stolen, kept track of multiple legal violations and violent attacks from the regime, and stayed united anyway. More than 2 million people from different opposition parties participated in a joint presidential primary and selected a candidate, María Corina Machado, a politician who has been active for more than two decades and is well known for her belief that the regime requires fundamental change. When Maduro arbitrarily barred her from running, the coalition switched to Edmundo González, a little-known former ambassador—and united behind him too. [...]
...independent polls taken throughout the campaign repeatedly showed González with a large lead. On voting day, Edison Research, a U.S.-based company, conducted an exit poll, commissioned by a private company. The result showed a landslide: 65 percent for González, 31 percent for Maduro, with González leading among old, young, male, female, urban, rural, and suburban voters. AltaVista, a parallel-vote-tabulation initiative—a project aimed at tracking votes in case the regime cheats—also produced an estimate of the national vote using methodology that organizers had explained in advance, posting it on the Open Science Foundation website. On the day of the election, AltaVista obtained real results from about 1,000 polling stations, photographed them, analyzed them and then sent the results around the world. They also showed a landslide: 66 percent for González, 31 percent for Maduro. By Monday evening Machado announcedthat her team had received voter tallies from more than 70 percent of the country’s precincts. The result, again, was a landslide for González.
This painstaking collection of evidence Sunday, along with the months of preparation needed to produce it, contrasts sharply with the sloppiness of the regime, which has so far not produced a full set of electoral statistics. Instead, Maduro has made ludicrous claims of victory and accused López and Machado, among others, of having hacked the results from a mysterious location in North Macedonia—an explanation that even the most fanatical loyalist must find hard to believe. The contrast between the two sides is impossible to obfuscate or deny: On one side people are defying violence and arrest to reform their country, reverse its downward slide, stop the tide of emigration. On the other side is a slovenly dictator who can’t even compose an intelligible lie.
Megan Specia of The New York Times says that misinformation is fueling the far-right attacks in England in response to the fatal stabbing of three girls in the northwestern English city Southport.
Although some details of the unrest remain opaque, one thing is clear, according to the police, lawmakers and experts in online extremism: Disinformation and far-right agitators fueled the violence.
Supporters of the English Defence League, an extremist anti-Islam organization, were part of a large group that attacked a mosque in Southport around 7.45 p.m., according to a statement from the Merseyside Police Service, which covers the region.[...]
The rapid spread of misinformation about the attacker’s identity left the authorities fighting a two-pronged battle on Tuesday: one on the streets of Southport, where the police were pelted with bricks and other objects, and another online, where lawmakers, local officials and the police seemed powerless to halt viral falsehoods. [...]
On X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, users shared false information about the attacker. Some posted what they claimed was the attacker’s name, which the police said was incorrect, but that information continued to spread. Others spread falsehoods about the attacker’s immigration status, incorrectly claiming he was an asylum seeker or that he had come to England illegally. Some of the posts received millions of views, fanning the flames of far-right narratives that oppose immigration.
Finally today, I would like to wish a Very Happy Birthday to my friend, mentor, elder, and Auntie Miss Denise Oliver-Velez.
Everyone have the best possible day!
