❧ We are now two days into the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and thousands of displaced Palestinians have begun returning to their homes. They have found their towns and cities reduced to piles of rubble by 15 months of bombardment from Israel.
The most complete destruction has occurred in the north, which Israel forcibly evacuated in the first week of the onslaught. One resident, Mustafa Hassan Abu Hamada, who fled the Jabalia refugee camp with his family described it as “abnormal, catastrophic, as if a nuclear bomb had hit the area” upon his return. This is hardly an exaggeration. An estimated 85,000 tonnes of explosives have been dropped on Gaza—the equivalent of more than five of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.
We are just now beginning to understand the complete toll that the last almost year and a half of exterminationist war has taken. Bodies are just beginning to be pulled from the rubble, and thousands of people are still missing. The official death toll is estimated to be over 46,000, but there is good reason to believe that it is a vast undercount. Should the ceasefire agreement hold, its third stage is set to include the “reconstruction” of Gaza. But rebuilding a society that has been so thoroughly destroyed will take years, if not decades.
There needs to be accountability for the people who are responsible for this destruction so nothing like it can ever happen again. That begins with the prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and everyone else who has enabled him.
❧ As we predicted (and feared) would happen, Cuba has been placed back on the United States’ “sponsors of terror” list. This wasn’t hard to see coming, since incoming secretary of state Marco Rubio is a vehement anticommunist and has spent more than ten years trying to tighten U.S. sanctions against the island nation. Placing Cuba on a list of “state sponsors of terror” was always ridiculous, since Cuba hasn’t been linked to any particular terror attack; the justifications used are always flimsy stuff like the country’s friendly relations with Venezuela or the fact it once sponsored a peace talk between the Colombian government and the insurgent National Liberation Army (ELN), protecting the latter from extradition—something Norway also did and Colombia’s president does not object to. But the Trump government doesn’t care about facts; it only wants to punish everyone it dislikes. Now, the people of Cuba will be thrown back into a completely avoidable crisis, and international support and solidarity for them will be more important than ever. (Reuters)
Oh look, anti-imperial cartoons from the 1890s are relevant again.
(Top text: “Uncle Sam’s Craving,” Bottom text: “Saving the island so it won’t get lost.”)
❧ Trump also wants to carry out regime change in Venezuela to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro. Trump’s CIA already carried out a failed attempt to overthrow Maduro during his first term, something Wired reported on extensively back in October. And in 2023, Trump lamented that he did not launch a full invasion of Venezuela, saying “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten to all that oil; it would have been right next door.” As Trump re-enters office, the press has already begun to push for military action against Venezuela. In the New York Times last week, Bret Stephens flatly called for Trump to “Depose Maduro” using “coercive diplomacy” or “force if necessary,” including “military intervention.” He points to Maduro’s awful human rights record as a justification. But Trump has hardly even pretended to care about human rights when it’s American allies violating them. (Nor has any other president, really—read The Myth of American Idealismfor more on that!) If he does launch an invasion, Trump has already made clear that it will be with nakedly imperialist aims: to steal the natural resources of another sovereign nation. (Axios)
❧ In a much-needed piece of good news, 1,109 lemurs and tortoises have been rescued. The unlucky animals were being held captive by traffickers in eastern Thailand, who were apparently planning to sell them on the black market as exotic pets. However, a “historic” joint operation between Thailand, Madagascar, the United States, and INTERPOL broke up the whole criminal enterprise last May, and as of this month all the animals have been repatriated to their original homes in Madagascar.
This probably goes without saying, but as a brief public service announcement: Please do not buy a lemur, a rare tortoise, or any other exotic animal as a pet! Even though they are undeniably cute, you almost certainly can’t take care of them properly—sorry, but it’s true—and you may be contributing to a horrible global kidnapping industry. Instead, it’s always better to symbolically adopt an animal in a sanctuary somewhere, like an axolotl or perhaps a puffin. (Al Jazeera)
❧ Denmark is getting rid of psychological “competency” tests for Greenlandic parents. The evidence suggests that these tests have resulted in the children of Greenlandic families being placed into protective care more often than those in Danish families. The tests caused outrage in November, when Keira Alexandra Kronvold, a Greenlandic mother who was not fluent in Danish, lost custody of her baby because authorities claimed her “Greenlandic background, where even small facial expressions have communicative significance” could lead the child to be ill-equipped for the “social expectations and codes that are necessary in Danish society.” It was a case of what appears to be blatant discrimination—one Danish human rights organizations believe these tests have enabled. “The tests fail to account for potential language barriers or cultural differences. This puts Greenlandic parents at risk of being wrongly assessed in child placement cases,” said Louise Holck, the director of the Danish Institute for Human Rights. (The Guardian)
❧ Ordinary Syrians are resisting their new government’s plan to fire thousands of public servants. Shortly after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship, the incoming Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) government announced its plans to transition to a free-market economy, and they weren’t kidding. As journalist Omar Hassan reports, HTS is already slashing Syria’s public sector, with a goal of cutting 300,000 jobs from a government workforce of 900,000 before they’re done. In response, around 600 people held a mass protest last week in Suwayda, which was also a hotspot for resistance to Assad. In Daraa, another anti-Assad revolutionary city where HTS wanted to cut the public health department by half, people have occupied public buildings in protest. Unless Syria’s new leaders change course, they can expect more resistance to come.(Red Flag)
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Louisiana’s Governor Jeff Landry is waging war on New Orleans’ homeless citizens before the Super Bowl comes to town. Landry has done this kind of thing before, kicking off a series of anti-homeless police “sweeps” right before a Taylor Swift concert in October. But his new effort is on a much larger scale. He’s established a grim-looking “transitional shelter” in a warehouse out in the city’s Gentilly suburb, and his special “Troop NOLA” police force has started forcing people to relocate to it under threat of arrest. The “shelter,” which is really more of a detention camp surrounded by chain-link fencing, will reportedly cost $11.4 million to operate for 60 days, and will house up to 200 people.
If you put this building in a movie about an evil governor, people would say it was too on-the-nose. (Image: Chris Joseph via Twitter)
For those keeping score at home, that’s approximately $57,000 per person—a sum that could rent someone a nice apartment for an entire year, not a cot in a drafty warehouse for two months. But this isn’t about helping unhoused people. It’s about shoving them out of sight, so tourists don’t have to see visible reminders of poverty and inequality as they chug overpriced beers at the Superdome. And it’s about funneling money to private “emergency preparedness” companies like The Workforce Group, which is operating Landry’s shelter and has political ties to his administration. What a sick joke. (Louisiana Illuminator)
FIGHTING BACK
Thankfully, Jeff Landry and his cronies are not representative of the people of Louisiana. Projects like the Fred Hampton Free Store are. As Veronica Cross recently reported for Antigravity—an excellent local publication, by the way—the Free Store is an ambitious mutual aid project, named after the former Black Panther Party activist who was assassinated by the FBI in 1969. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a storelike space located in an abandoned Family Dollar, where people can donate anything they like, and others who need it can come pick it up for free. Cross interviewed project director Dan Bingler, who had this to say:
People often ask me, “Is this good enough to bring?” And my rule for volunteers is: If you would feel dignified receiving this, it’s good. And if you would not feel dignified receiving it, let’s not put it out there for people, because it’s not about just giving people anything. It’s about creating a retail experience, but one that’s divorced from money or even barter. It’s truly mutual aid… You’re not doing charity work. This is for you, it’s for me, it’s for them, it’s for all of us together.
As disasters of various kinds continue to break out all over the country, projects like this are becoming more and more vital. If your community doesn’t have a Free Store yet, why not think about getting a few of your friends together and starting one, even if it’s only small at first? It might make all the difference in the world.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What’s going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)
It seems like we’re forgetting something… oh yeah…
❧ Trump is the president again. There isn’t much to discuss from the actual inaugural address. It was pretty standard Trump Stuff about the horrors of immigration, the need to “drill baby drill,” and how we all need to be terrified of China, with a heavy dose of transphobia thrown in. What was more noteworthy is that Trump—who has somehow fooled a lot of people into thinking he is a “populist” sticking it to “elites” — gave the speech surrounded by many of the literal most elite people in the world. Three of the richest people in the world—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—were all seated front and center, as were Alphabet co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, Louis Vuitton CEO Bernard Arnault, and casino magnate Miriam Adelson.Bloomberg estimated that this coterie of less than a dozen people, who were given primo seating in front of even Trump’s cabinet appointees, are worth more than $1.3 trillion put together. That’s about equal to the entire annual GDP of Indonesia—the fourth most populous nation in the world.
If their mere presence didn’t make it clear enough where Trump’s priorities lie, when he spoke about the fires that have devastated thousands of ordinary people in Los Angeles, he specifically lamented that they were “even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now,” adding that “They don’t have a home any longer.” According to him, these are the real victims—people who can easily buy another home anywhere they want (and already own several in many cases). Not the many who will actually become homeless as a result of the fires. This should tell us everything we need to know about who Trump will be looking out for these next four years.
Just once, can we NOT make the news cycle about irrelevant nonsense like Melania's hat? Please? (Image: PBS via YouTube)
❧ Shortly after taking office, Trump unleashed more than 100 executive orders, which you may be surprised to learn are almost uniformly terrible. Axios has a comprehensive list of them here. But here are some of the most noteworthy:
In a blatantly unconstitutional move, Trump stripped birthright citizenship from millions of children who were born to undocumented parents.
He’s shut down Customs and Border Protection’s CBP One App, which asylum seekers have used to schedule appointments for their asylum claims to be heard. Tens of thousands of appointments were immediately cancelled, leaving migrants who traveled thousands of miles to legally escape persecution and poverty suddenly stuck at the border with nowhere to go.
He suspended America’s admission of refugees, which led the flights of 1,660 Afghans cleared by the U.S. to resettle in the country to be cancelled.
He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord and ended a few of the (relatively weak) clean energy orders put in place by the Biden administration.
He declared that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” The order removes transgender people from federal discrimination protections, prevents them from having their preferred gender listed on documents like passports, and eliminates federal funding for gender-affirming care.
He re-instated “Schedule F” employment for government employees, making it easier for him to fire ones that are disloyal to him.
And finally, he also rescinded a 2022 order from Biden that lowered prescription drug costs. Is America great again yet?
❧ The richest member of Trump’s billionaire squadron, Elon Musk, appeared to do a Nazi salute during a post-inauguration rally. Here’s a video of it:
You can decide for yourself what’s happening here. The Anti-Defamation League, which has had no issue comparing students to Nazis for wearing Palestinian clothing, is twisting itself in knots to defend this as merely an “awkward hand gesture,” urging that “all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath.”
It’s possible that Musk just made that oh-so-common mistake of accidentally Sieg Heil-ing in front of a cheering crowd.(We’ve all been there before!) But it’s hard to give him the benefit of the doubt since it’s not exactly his first Nazi-related scandal. This is a man who spent more than a week almost exclusively tweeting in defense of a fascist party in Germany and who has previously gotten himself in hot water for agreeing with antisemitic and racist posts. It’s a man who, recently named himself “Kekius Maximus” on X, referencing a warmed-over 4chan meme that utilizes Nazi imagery. It seems far more likely that the guy who seems to do Nazi stuff constantly decided it would be funny to do more Nazi stuff on the biggest stage in the world.
❧ The inauguration week was also a bonanza for borderline-fraudulent cryptocurrencies. The distinction between a “shitcoin,” as they’re known, and a so-called “real” cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum is a little vague. At the end of the day it’s all speculative assets that don’t correspond to anything real and can’t be used for much besides exchanging for other cryptocurrencies. But even in the highly dubious world of crypto, some coins are more obviously worthless than others, like “Fartcoin” or “Pickle Token.” As financial analyst Toe Bautista puts it:
“Because they’re worthless, you’re betting on the ‘greater fool,’” he said, referring to the idea that someone else will pay a higher price for a given memecoin. “You’re thinking, ‘I’m early to this, someone will buy the bags.’ But there’s no underlying driver of its value.”
Now the president has his own scammy crypto coin, called “$TRUMP,” which he’s been promoting to his supporters—many of whom are not really crypto people, and won’t know what kind of financial risk they’re getting into—as his “official meme.” And in a bizarre coincidence, the wild fluctuations of its price look a lot like Trump’s face when you turn the graph sideways:
Basically the red bits are confused grandparents losing their retirement savings.
But that’s not all: shortly after $TRUMP was announced, Melania Trump released her own meme coin (called $MELANIA). And even Reverend Lorenzo Sewell, who gave the prayer at Trump’s inauguration, got in on the action with a coin called $LORENZO. At the time of writing, both $TRUMP and $MELANIA are now down more than 50 percent from their weekend peaks—which means that, just as Bautista said, a lot of people “bought the bag” and lost out, while others were successful in finding “greater fools” to rip off before the crash. At this point, the only way Trump could become more of a scam artist is if he announced a federal Office of the Wallet Inspector.
❧ Minutes before leaving office, Joe Biden unleashed a final flurry of pardons. He pre-emptively pardoned five members of his own family, even though none of them have been accused of any crime yet. He also pardoned other potential Trump targets like Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Rep. Liz Cheney, and General Mark Milley. It was an effort to head off any effort from Trump to take legal “retribution” against these people, which is a fair concern. But it also seems like yet another tool that will allow presidents to act with impunity—their lackeys can commit crimes expecting a pre-emptive pardon at the end of their term. Of course, Biden is hardly the first president to use this power, and Trump would probably use it regardless of any prior precedent. But it’s still not a good thing to perpetuate.
Biden also commuted the sentence of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of killing two FBI agents in 1975. After nearly half a century in prison, he will move to home confinement at the age of 80. This was a very good bit of news: Peltier’s case was marred from the beginning by prosecutorial misconduct and a lack of evidence. That said, Biden should have simply pardoned him. Even if he were guilty—which evidence suggests he’s not—he’s more than served his time. Biden also should have pardoned other political prisoners like former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal and environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who were convicted on similarly flimsy charges. At least Biden gave a posthumous pardon to the Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who died in 1940. We’re sure he really appreciated it.
❧ “Lil’ Marco” Rubio is the first confirmed member of Trump’s cabinet, having received a unanimous 99-0 vote in the Senate. That means even progressive senators like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren voted for him—and given Rubio’s worrying pattern of encouraging regime change operations against countries like Venezuela, condoning Israeli war crimes, and pushing for greater hostilities with China, we’d really like to know why they did that. (New York Times)
The giraffe weevil takes the phrase “sticking your neck out” literally!
You might be familiar with the boll weevil, which has made itself pretty notorious in the United States by munching on crops. If you’re a real weevil head, you might even know about the water hyacinth weevil, a more benevolent bug that eats invasive plants. But the giraffe weevil (Trachelophorus giraffa)is especially cool, and you might not know about it yet.
Giraffe weevils only live in Madagascar, and they’re bright red with necks longer than their bodies, as the name suggests. More specifically, it’s the males who have the huge necks, and they play an important part in weevil mating rituals. According to entomologists, the insects “perform elaborate displays involving the swaying of their necks,” bobbing their heads up and down to compete with other males. If she’s impressed, a female weevil will then “roll a leaf up and lay a single egg inside the tube, snipping it off to fall onto the forest floor.” And thus, new generations of funky-looking weevils are born!
Weevil Knievel prepares for a daring jump off a small leaf. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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