Respecting the human right to sleep? Dream on

 Al Jazeera English

When I was a freshman at Columbia University in 1999, the professor of my Literature Humanities course shared some personal information with my class, which was that she slept exactly three hours per night. I forget what prompted the disclosure, though I do recall it was made not to elicit pity but rather as a matter-of-fact explanation of the way things were: sleeping more than three hours a night simply did not allow her sufficient time to simultaneously maintain her professorship and tend to her baby.

This, of course, was before the era of smartphones took the phenomenon of rampant sleep deprivation to another level. But modern life has long been characterised by a lack of proper sleep – an activity that happens to be fundamental to life itself. . . .

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national public health agency of the United States, approximately one-third of US adults and children under the age of 14 get insufficient sleep, putting them at increased risk for anxiety, depression, heart disease, and a host of other potentially life-threatening maladies. As per CDC calculations, a full 75 percent of US high schoolers do not sleep enough. . . .

Meanwhile, speaking of the Gaza Strip, residents of the occupied territory are well acquainted with acute sleep deprivation, which is currently a component of the Israeli military’s genocidal arsenal for wearing Palestinians down both physically and psychologically. Not that a good night’s sleep in Gaza was ever really within the realm of possibility – even prior to the launch of the all-out genocide in 2023 – given Israel’s decades-long terrorisation of the Strip via periodic bombardments, massacres, sonic booms, the ubiquitous deployment of buzzing drones, and other manoeuvres designed to inflict individual and collective trauma. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Yes, The New York Times is committing genocidal journalism

 Al Jazeera English

The Israelis certainly owe Bret Stephens a favour.

Yesterday, The New York Times opinion columnist took to the pages of the United States newspaper of record to promote his latest deranged argument, headlined: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza”. . . .

In the very first paragraph of his Times intervention – which should perhaps come accompanied by a trigger warning for readers prone to aneurysms – Stephens demands defiantly: “If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal – if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans – why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?”. . . . He goes on to proclaim that “the first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher?” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump’s big beautiful police state is here

 Al Jazeera English

On July 4, United States President Donald Trump signed into law his so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill”, which will reduce taxes for the rich, punish the poor, and otherwise propel American plutocracy to ever more noxious heights.

Just days earlier, Trump’s Vice President JD Vance took to X to underline the key component of the legislation: “Everything else — the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

Indeed, the bill allocates the unprecedentedly ludicrous sum of $175bn to anti-immigration efforts, approximately $30bn of which will go directly to the notorious federal law enforcement agency ICE, known in long form as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Another $45bn is earmarked for the construction of new immigration detention centres, which, as the American Immigration Council notes, “represents a 265 percent annual budget increase to ICE’s current detention budget”. 

Thanks to these budgetary machinations, ICE now occupies the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money at its annual disposal than the military of any country in the world apart from the US and China. 

Given that ICE agents have as of late made a name for themselves running around in masks and kidnapping people, however, one would be forgiven for seeing this sudden windfall to the agency as something less than, um, “beautiful”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Massive Expansion of Trump’s Deportation Machine Passes With Little Press Notice

 FAIR

And so it has come to pass: US President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has set the stage for tax cuts for the rich, slashed services for the poor, and a host of other things that qualify as “beautiful” in the present dystopia. Some cuts, like those to Medicaid, have been heavily covered by the corporate media. But one key piece of the bill has gotten much less media scrutiny: The preposterous sum of $175 billion has been allocated to fund Trump’s signature mass deportation campaign, which, as a Salon article (7/3/25) points out, exceeds the military budget for every single country in the world aside from the US and China.

Approximately $30 billion of that is destined directly for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the goons who have recently made a name for themselves by going around in masks and kidnapping people. This constitutes a threefold increase over ICE’s previous budget, and propels the outfit to the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history. $45 billion will go toward building new ICE detention centers, including family detention centers.

Prior to the signing into law of the sweeping bill on July 4, US Vice President JD Vance took to X to highlight what really mattered in the legislation: "Everything else—the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement." READ MORE AT FAIR.

Who better than Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize?

 Al Jazeera English

In the latest instalment of the “can’t-make-this-sh*t-up” contest in global politics and diplomacy, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has nominated United States President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In other words, the person currently presiding over the genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has proposed that the world’s top peacemaking prize be awarded to the primary enabler of that genocide – the man who in March announced that he was “sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job” in Gaza. That “everything” has entailed billions of dollars in lethal weaponry and other assistance.

From October 2023 to the present, nearly 60,000 Palestinians have officially been slaughtered in the diminutive territory, although the true death toll is no doubt far higher considering the surplus of bodies lost under the pervasive rubble. More than 700 Palestinians have been killed in recent weeks while seeking food at aid distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an organisation backed by both the US and Israel. . . .

Of course, it should go without saying that anyone who positively invokes the nuking of hundreds of thousands of civilians should be categorically ineligible for any sort of serious peace prize. But in a world in which the supposed pursuit of peace is so often utilised as an excuse for more war, Trump’s nomination might very well be meaningful, indeed. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Did God want Trump to bomb Iran?

 Al Jazeera English

After ordering the United States military to bomb Iran last month, US President Donald Trump made a brief address at the White House to laud the “massive precision strike” that had allegedly put a “stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror”.

The speech, which lasted less than four minutes, ended with the invocation of God’s name no fewer than five times in a span of seven seconds: “And I wanna just thank everybody and in particular, God. I wanna just say, ‘We love you God, and we love our great military – protect them.’ God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America.” . . . .

This, to be sure, was not the first time that Trump relied on God to sign off on worldly events. Back in 2017, during the man’s first stint as president, the deity made various appearances in Trump’s official statement following a US military strike on Syria. God, it seems, just can’t get enough of war. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

By bombing Iran, the US continues to make the world safe for war

 Al Jazeera English

It seems like just yesterday that United States President Donald Trump was pushing a “diplomatic resolution” to the Iranian nuclear issue.

Now, the US has joined Israel’s illegal assault on Iran, striking three Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday in what Trump has boasted was a “very successful attack”.

As CNN dramatically put it, “a midsummer night in June 2025 could come to be remembered as the moment the Middle East changed forever; when the fear of nuclear annihilation was lifted from Israel; when Iran’s power was neutered and America’s soared”.

Of course, a “fear of nuclear annihilation” has nothing to do with Israel’s current strikes on Iran, which have been dutifully portrayed in the US media as targeting military and nuclear facilities but have somehow managed to slaughter hundreds of civilians. . . .

[A]side from being a persistent thorn in the side of US imperialism, Iran’s behaviour has been rather less apparently, um, “evil” than certain other international actors – like the US itself. For instance, Iran is not the one currently funding a straight-up genocide to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

Nor is Iran the one that has spent the past several decades bombing and otherwise antagonising folks in every corner of the world – from backing right-wing state terror in Latin America to conducting mass slaughter in Vietnam.

Furthermore, the sole clandestine nuclear weapons power in the Middle East is not Iran but Israel, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has never allowed UN safeguards on its facilities. READ  MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Working Hard to Justify Israel’s Unprovoked Attack on Iran

FAIR

Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”

Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)

On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead. READ MORE AT FAIR.

As Israel strikes Iran, what happened to ‘America First’?

 Al Jazeera English

Early this morning, Israel conducted unprecedented strikes on Iran, killing civilians along with senior military officials and scientists and basically forcing the Iranian government into a position in which it must retaliate – as if there already was not enough going on in the Middle East, particularly with Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Israel, of course, thrives on perpetual upheaval and mass killing, all the while portraying itself as the victim of the folks it is slaughtering and otherwise antagonising. True to form, the Israelis have now cast Iran as the aggressor, with the country’s nonexistent nuclear weapons allegedly posing a “threat to Israel’s very survival”, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in his statement announcing the launch of “Operation Rising Lion”.

Unlike Iran, Israel does happen to possess nuclear weapons – which just renders the whole situation all the more flammable. But for Netanyahu, at least, keeping the region in flames is a means of saving his own skin from domestic opposition and embroilment in various corruption charges. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Democrats wooing Musk after the Trump breakup is US plutocracy at its best

Al Jazeera English

It’s official: United States President Donald Trump and the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, have broken up.

At the end of last month, Musk departed from his post as the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he oversaw the mass firing of federal employees and dismantling of various government agencies – all the while benefitting from his own companies’ lucrative contracts with the government.

Anyway, US “democracy” has never met a conflict of interest it didn’t like. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.