Iranian parliament votes to close the Straits of Hormuz, a crucial oil transit channel
In retaliation for Donald Trump's illegal bombings of Iran's nuclear power facilities, Iran's parliament has voted to play their ace in the hole — closing the Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the flow of Middle Eastern oil to the rest of the world. You can imagine that might cause some economic upheaval and sky-high gas prices for America's insatiable fleet of gas-guzzlers. It's important to remember that all of this is entirely unnecessary and was completely avoidable...but the bloodthirsty neo-cons in Trump's orbit exploited his petty jealousy of President Obama and goaded him into tearing up one of the most successful and significant nuclear peace treaties in the world. Millions of public dollars sunk into the Iranian countryside, economic upheaval, likely even more lives lost, all because a weak, spineless man was envious of the accomplishments of a real leader.
Take Action: Tell Congress to block Trump's illegal war with Iran!
VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump announces US attack on Iran
Brian Tyler Cohen breaks down Donald Trump's announcement that the United States has used bunker-busting bombs to try and destroy Iran's nuclear facilities in an illegal and unprovoked attack on a foreign power without consulting Congress and based entirely on lies.
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Top scientist takes on the GOP's crusade of ignorance
Jasmine Clark for Georgia: Trump, RFK Jr., and the rest of their cronies in Congress have taken a chainsaw to our scientific research, public health, and climate initatives and are waging an all out-war on science and the truth. PhD scientist Dr. Jasmine Clark has had enough, and she's running for Congress in order to restore sanity to the government and make America a global leader in scientific development once again. Will you chip in to help jump-start her campaign and flip the House blue?
Like George W. Bush, Donald Trump is lying his way into war
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin: "For the past two decades, disastrous Middle East wars have been synonymous with the name Bush. The current US president seems determined to now make them synonymous with the name Trump. It is widely understood that the US war with Iran that the Donald Trump White House is barreling toward, and the regime collapse that seems to have become the unofficial goal of the Israeli government, would be terrible for everyone involved, and for the same reasons as the Iraq War was twenty years ago: massive civilian death in yet another Muslim-majority country that will inflame a new round of anti-American terrorism; US troops and even civilians needlessly sacrificed as they become targets of reprisal in the region and possibly beyond; a violent internal power struggle involving ethno-sectarian violence and a tug of war for influence by foreign powers; and a flood of weapons and desperate, angry people leaving Iran’s borders that destabilizes neighboring countries, nearby regions, and even the very same Western countries backing this war. Trump is now a fingernail’s length away from doing exactly what he bashed Bush for doing in order to kickstart his political ascent. Just like Iraq, the Iran war he’s poised to directly enter will be a war based on faulty intelligence and sold to the public with lies. And they are lies, the claims that Trump and his political allies are making to justify going in. The charge that Iran is days away from producing a nuclear weapon, that this is even the goal of its leadership, and that preemptive war is therefore legally and morally justified is a lie — Bush’s same weapons-of-mass-destruction lie warmed over and lazily served up as if no one would notice. Aping Bush official Condoleezza Rice’s infamous line that 'we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,' pro-war Sen. Ted Cruz went on Fox News this Monday to warn that 'if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, I think the odds are unacceptably high that we would find out with a mushroom cloud.' A high schooler tries harder to cover up plagiarism than this. What’s more, everyone saying this knows it’s a lie. How can we be sure? Because the US intelligence agencies that your taxes fund to the tune of tens of billions of dollars have repeatedly said the opposite. Just three months ago, Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Senate committee that US intelligence 'continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.' This conclusion, by the way, has consistently been the same one US intelligence agencies have made since at least as far back as 2007. Pro-war officials, both Democrat and Republican, have simply decided to pretend this never happened. Nearly every senator who was physically there and heard Gabbard has since gone on to misleadingly tell the public the exact opposite of what she told them. Trump himself was recently asked point-blank about what Gabbard relayed and replied, 'I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.' It is no exaggeration that just about every brick of the road toward this war was laid by Trump over his two terms. And having laid it in place, he’s now strolling toward the dark pit at its end, dragging the country along as he prepares to plunge in.
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The simple truth about these miserable heatwaves
Kate Aronoff, The New Republic: "In the coming days, some 200 million people across the United States will sweat through temperatures in the high 90s and triple digits, made worse by 'oppressive' humidity. It’s the country’s first major heat wave of the year, which may—like last year—turn out to be among the warmest years ever recorded. Last month was the second-hottest May ever recorded; 10 of the hottest years ever recorded on earth have occurred over the last decade. A study published on Thursday in Earth System Science Data finds that the amount of planet-heating carbon dioxide already emitted into the atmosphere by human activity will very likely, by 2028, have made the world 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was in preindustrial times. This increase might sound mild on its face, but respected scientists are in agreement about what this means: more brutal, dangerous heat waves like the one spreading across the U.S. right now. Maybe the most sobering aspect of rising temperatures is how predictable they are. Xuebin Zhang—a co-author of the study, professor at the University of Victoria, and head of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium—says that in his decades of research, very little has surprised him about how the planet has reacted to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. 'The world’s climate is behaving exactly as we said it would all along, for many years. It is warming due to human influence. It gets faster if we don’t act on it,' he told me. 'It’s more than beyond a reasonable doubt. It is a fact.'
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Israel turns Gaza aid distribution sites into open killing fields
Hamza M.Salha and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Drop Site News: "Every single day, starving Palestinians are forced to journey to remote areas to try and get food and attacked en masse, turning so-called aid distribution sites into open killing fields. The attacks on Palestinians seeking food have dramatically increased over the past week, with dozens of people being shot and shelled on a daily basis. The death toll from the past few days alone is shocking: at least 38 people were killed on Monday, 59 on Tuesday, 22 on Thursday, and 35 on Friday. Over 400 have been killed and more than 3,000 wounded since late May in what the Gaza health ministry calls 'aid massacres'—a new term added to the Gaza genocide lexicon. Ahmed Nejm, a 28-year-old currently displaced with his family of 10 in Deir al-Balah, is in a wheelchair, unable to walk after he was wounded in an Israeli attack on a gathering of Palestinians seeking aid near Wadi Gaza (the Netzarim Corridor) on June 11. He went to the site fully aware of the risks. “We are trying to manage during this famine,” Nejm told Drop Site. “There’s no bread and no flour. This is what made us go to try and find aid.” He said he arrived with his cousins and neighbors to the site before dawn to wait alongside hundreds of others. Hours later, the Israelis attacked without warning, opening fire with live ammunition and quadcopters. Dozens were killed, including Nejm’s 15-year-old cousin Abdulrahman. Covered in blood, Nejm managed to crawl away as the bullets kept coming. Ambulances were unable to reach the area and he was eventually carried to Al-Aqsa hospital. 'We were in an area [the Israelis] had marked as green on the map. I don’t know why they started firing,”he said. The worst aid massacre came on June 17, when at least 59 Palestinians were killed and over 200 wounded as they gathered to receive flour rations in Khan Younis. Nasser hospital was overwhelmed with casualties. 'Palestinian lives have been so devalued. It is now the routine to shoot & kill desperate & starving people while they try to collect little food from a company made of mercenaries,' UNRWA’s Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini said in a social media post on Wednesday. 'Inviting starving people to their death is a war crime. Those responsible [for] this system must be held accountable. This is a disgrace & a stain on our collective consciousness.'"
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