Israel Begins Assault in Southern Beirut, Raising Fears of Wider Incursion
Source: NYT > U.S. > Politics · Bias: Center Left
Summary
As the war with Iran threatens to engulf more countries in the region, President Trump said he wanted to be involved in picking a new leader in Tehran.
Israel Begins Assault in Southern Beirut, Raising Fears of Wider Incursion
Center Left
As the war with Iran threatens to engulf more countries in the region, President Trump said he wanted to be involved in picking a new leader in Tehran.
Trump administration officials reportedly believed that the Israeli government intended to assassinate Iran’s top negotiators—including the country’s foreign minister—during peace talks with the US in an effort to sabotage diplomatic progress.The New York Times reported Thursday that “American concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials—Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament—spiked during delicate ceasefire negotiations that began in April.” In response, the US “went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility Israel could target the two officials,” according to the Times, which cited unnamed current and former American officials.The US and Israel have killed dozens of top Iranian officials since launching their illegal joint war in late February. But the allied countries reportedly removed Araghchi and Ghalibaf from their target list in late March, opening the possibility of high-level negotiations to end the war.But Israel remained bent on targeting the negotiators, according to the Times, whose reporting was later corroborated by The Washington Post.The Times detailed one dramatic incident in April, when Ghalibaf was planning to travel to Pakistan’s capital to meet with US Vice President JD Vance:Pakistani fighter jets escorted the Iranian airplanes carrying a delegation of more than 70 Iranians from the border of Iran to Islamabad and back again when the session was over.But on the way back to Tehran, an Israeli security threat emerged.Iran’s security forces notified the plane carrying Mr. Ghalibaf back to Tehran that they had picked up intelligence that Israel planned to attack the plane and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iran’s airspace from its western border near Iraq, the two officials said.Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser for Mr. Ghalibaf, who accompanied him to Islamabad, confirmed this account on his social media page. The plane made an emergency landing in the city of Mashhad, Iran’s closest airport to the Pakistani border, and the Iranian delegation traveled some eight hours by land back to Tehran, Mr. Mohammadi and the two officials said.The Post reported that “cracks emerged” between the US and Israeli approaches to the war following Israel’s assassination of top Iranian national security official Ali Larijani in March.“They’ve wiped out everybody,” Trump told reporters in late March, suggesting Israel’s assassination campaign was making it difficult to find potential negotiating partners.Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in response to the new reporting that “Israel is a state that, on paper, is a US partner, but in reality is so extreme in its obsession to undermine US diplomacy that it even tries to assassinate those the US engages with in crucial negotiations.”“I can’t recall a government as terrified of peace as the one running Israel,” Parsi added.At present, the Israeli government—led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—is endangering tenuous US-Iran peace talks with its continued occupation of and assault on Lebanon, which Iran has highlighted as a key factor in the negotiations.Visiting occupied southern Lebanon earlier this week, Netanyahu declared to Israeli troops that “our insistence is that we will not leave... until the threat is removed.”Parsi wrote earlier this week that “beyond his long-standing desire to use American force to subjugate Iran to Israeli domination and achieve a regional balance favorable to Israel,” Netanyahu “now also has stark political and personal reasons to restart the war” with Iran.“The [US and Iran’s memorandum of understanding] has come at a steep political cost for Netanyahu,” wrote Parsi. “His prospects for reelection in October are weaker than they have been in months. Once seen as the Israeli leader uniquely capable of delivering President Trump, he now confronts the prospect that both the war and the ensuing diplomacy will leave Israel in a strategically weaker position—undermining the very case he has made for his leadership.”“And of course,” Parsi added, “if he loses the elections, he will likely spend the next few years in jail, as he will lose his immunity as prime minister and face trial over corruption charges.”The story was published in partnership with Common Dreams, read the original here.
Majdal Zoun, south Lebanon — The Israel Defense Forces revealed on June 19 that it had discovered an Iranian-financed and designed Hezbollah tunnel in the heart of this town that can be used to launch lethal drones into Israel. The IDF blew up the drone factory and tunnel. An IDF official told me, “It took them […]
Israel attempted to kill Iran’s negotiators on their plane after talks between the U.S. and Iran concluded in Pakistan, The New York Times reported. The attempt occurred […]
Former special counsel Jack Smith has been a constant target of fury and legal threats by President Donald Trump, dating back to even before the election, when the famed prosecutor was helming a pair of federal criminal cases against him.But Smith doesn't dwell much on the possibility that Trump's Justice Department will fabricate some charges against him, he told MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace in an exclusive interview on Thursday. There's something he worries a lot more about."Do you think that this is a department that you could send someone to go work in, and they could be asked to indict you?" asked Wallace.Smith agreed "that could happen" — however, he continued, "in the Justice Department, even as we sit here right now, there are lots of people doing good work prosecuting violent crime, protecting their communities, doing the everyday work of being a prosecutor. And yes, it could happen. That could happen, and that would be unfortunate. And then you might have to step down." Nonetheless, he added, "I don't want to see people run from public service because of that possibility.""Do you expect to be indicted?" Wallace followed up, noting that Trump "said he would indict you."Smith replied, "I'll tell you, Nicolle, I honestly do not spend a lot of time thinking about the things he says about me and his threats about me."Instead of that, he continued, "I'm really focused on the people who I worked with, looking out for them. I'm really focused on how the Justice Department is going to be better going forward, things like that."What Smith worries about more, he made clear, is the future of the people he worked with who helped him do his job.Ultimately, Smith said, "I had an all-star team ... the agents on my case, if I were to walk you through all the awards they've won throughout generations of administrations, we would be here all night. These were superstars. I'm much more concerned that those people get to serve in the department, get to serve in the bureau again someday." - YouTube www.youtube.com
The Department of Labor's latest economic report revealed concerning trends despite a declining unemployment rate of 4.2%. Job creation fell sharply to just 57,000 over three months, down from 129,000 in the previous report, according to the survey released Thursday morning. CNN senior business reporter David Goldman highlighted red flags in specific sectors: nursing jobs added only 22,000 over the past year, compared to 38,000 the previous year, while hospitality hiring experienced significant decline despite multiple cities hosting World Cup games. "That is something that we need to watch," Goldman said.He noted economists expect future revisions to clarify the numbers. "I think, and there are a number of economists who are smarter than me who think, that this might change as we get those revisions in the future months, because this is kind of defying logic and defining what we can see with our own eyes," Goldman said.Watch the video below. Your browser does not support the video tag.
According to the renowned fascism historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the Supreme Court has become President Donald Trump’s “partner in corruption,” not only working to enrich those who are in on the scam, but reshaping the U.S. as an authoritarian state in which one must “fear and obey” Trump.“This is the summer of corruption,” wrote Ben-Ghiat on Thursday. “Defined as the abuse of power for private gain, corruption can happen in any kind of organization and government, but under authoritarianism it attains a new status: it is how the executive branch operates, expands its power, and recruits elite and grassroots partners. The Supreme Court is one of these partners, as we’ll see below.”The Trump administration and its enablers on the Court, argues Ben-Ghiat, “are providing Americans and the world with a lesson in how corruption can become systemic.” This, she says, is the goal of all authoritarians: they “seek to retool government and the culture to create the conditions to lie, steal and repress people with impunity. That means going after journalists, judges, investigators, opposition politicians and others who expose official wrongdoing. It also means puffing up the leader’s personality cult and inventing narratives, backed by complicit religious institutions, about his selflessness and purity.”She raises the example of Justice Clarence Thomas, who has a well-documented history of “accepting luxury gifts and travel from billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow,” who in turn “has a garden full of statues of dictators, and collects Adolf Hitler and Nazi memorabilia.” And, according to Ben-Ghiat, “As per the sacred laws of corruption, these ‘gifts’ were likely supposed to be repaid whenever Thomas put on his robes. No matter that the Court, which has no ethical oversight mechanism, finally instituted a code of conduct in November 2023, which states that justices must ‘uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary’ and avoid actual and apparent impropriety.”Thomas has paid no attention to this code, refusing to recuse himself in cases involving Trump’s election lies, even though Thomas’s wife Ginny was directly engaged in those lies. As Ben-Ghiat muses, “What good would Thomas be as a link in the chain of corruption if he took himself out of the game just when he was most needed?”“And here we arrive at the Supreme Court as a partner in Trump administration corruption, first by giving the President immunity for official acts, and now by upholding his right to dismiss an official on political grounds,” writes Ben-Ghiat. “A landmark ruling in July 2024 gave the president ‘the power of a king,’ as the Brennan Center termed it, conferring upon him absolute immunity (for the exercise of core constitutional powers) and presumptive immunity (for all other official acts). This created the legal space for a lawless individual such as Trump to feel even more emboldened to use corruption and violence to destroy our democracy and make money doing it.”Now, while the Supreme Court has for 100 years upheld that the president does not have the authority to fire heads of independent agencies without cause, Trump’s allies on the court have overturned that precedent, creating conditions for further “systematic corruption.”“We need to see this decision through autocratic eyes,” explains Ben-Ghiat. “Not obeying the Leader, refusing to participate in his corruption, and politicizing the practice of government are acts of negligence and malfeasance in office in the authoritarian world. Such people must be removed from public service, lest they influence others with their moral stances.”The power to fire agency officials at will is exactly what the president needs to shape government to his private agenda. According to Ben-Ghiat, proof of this intention was revealed by the words of Solicitor General John Sauer, who represented the Trump administration in the case, arguing before the court that the president needs to be able to remove officials in the agencies because “the President must have the power to control and…the one who has the power to remove is the one who…is the person that they have to fear and obey.”
