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Israel Is Still Starving Gaza, And Other Notes

Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 06, 2025

In an article titled “Not enough tents, food reaching Gaza as winter comes, aid agencies say,” Reuters reports that “Far too little aid is reaching Gaza nearly four weeks after a ceasefire” due to Israeli restrictions preventing aid trucks from getting to their destinations, and that according to an OSHA report last week “a tenth of children screened in Gaza were still acutely malnourished.”

A report from the UK’s Channel 4 News shows warehouses full of food that aid groups say isn’t being allowed into Gaza nearly as rapidly as needed.

In an article titled “‘Under the Guise of Bureaucracy’ — Israel Blocks Humanitarian Groups From Delivering Essential Aid Despite Calm in Gaza,” Israeli outlet Haaretz reports that “Israel has implemented a new procedure requiring all humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza and the West Bank to reapply for official approval, with many denied, despite the relative calm in Gaza following the cease-fire.”

They’re using bureaucratic red tape and arbitrary restrictions to put as much inertia on the effort to rush aid into Gaza as possible. As Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah put it, Israel has “successfully rebranded its genocide as a ‘ceasefire.’”

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Still can’t wrap my head around the fact that internationally renowned activist Greta Thunberg said she was tortured and sexually humiliated by Israeli soldiers when she was abducted for trying to bring aid to starving civilians, and the world just shrugged and moved on.

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It’s so silly when US empire apologists cite “the Monroe Doctrine” to defend US warmongering in Latin America, as though “the entire western hemisphere is our property” is a perfectly legitimate policy to have.

The Monroe Doctrine was just American imperialists telling Europe, “You see all these brown people over here south of our border? These are our brown people. You can do whatever you want to those brown people over there in Africa and Asia, but these brown people over here belong to us. Only we get to dominate and exploit them.”

That’s all it has ever been, and people cite it to justify warmongering toward Venezuela or wherever as though saying “yeah well that’s the Monroe Doctrine” is a complete argument in and of itself. It’s bat shit insane nonsense and it should be rejected in its entirety.

US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous wherever it happens. It always causes immense suffering and instability, it’s always justified by lies, and it never accomplishes what its proponents claim it will accomplish. No amount of bleating the words “Monroe Doctrine” will ever change that.

The US empire backs genocidal Gulf state monarchies like the UAE and Saudi Arabia because if those states were democratically governed their people would prioritize their own interests over the agendas of the west. They wouldn’t permit US military bases on their territory, and they never would have tolerated Israel and its abuses in the region. Fossil fuel policy would be set without regard for western interests. The entire region could long ago have united into a superpower bloc which rivaled or outmuscled the western power structure using its critical resources and trade routes.

That’s why you see the US and its allies preaching about the values of Freedom and Democracy to the public while privately telling these tyrannical monarchies they can do whatever they want and receive the backing of the imperial machine. Not until their pet tyrant fails to sufficiently kowtow to the interests of the empire does the west suddenly get interested in advancing Freedom and Democracy in their nation.

This is one of the major dynamics at play in Sudan. The United Arab Emirates has been backing the genocidal atrocities of the RSF and the US empire is placing no pressure on them to stop, because that’s part of the deal. As long as the UAE plays along with the agendas of the empire, the empire will tolerate or actively facilitate its abuses……………………………………………………………….. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-is-still-starving-gaza-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=178143727&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

November 8, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

US Army wants to deploy small nuclear power plants

The Janus Program aims to put commercial reactors into military service by 2028

by Craig Bettenhausen, Chemical and Engineering News, October 31, 2025

A plan by the US Army to deploy small modular nuclear reactors could help the military replace fossil fuels shipped along precarious supply lines with electricity and synthetic fuels generated on-site. Project Janus, which Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright jointly announced on Oct. 14, aims to put a small modular reactor (SMR) in operation by the end of 2028.

The shutdown of the federal government is delaying the rollout, army officials say, but a draft request for proposals should be out in a matter of weeks.

Though the program aims to put the first military SMR at a base in the US, the bigger vision is mobile microreactors that can provide power in far-flung locations. “The biggest military use case is contested logistics,” says Staff Sheehan, CEO of a nuclear chemistry start-up that is in stealth mode. “How do you power small, tactical, forward-operating bases, or even larger bases of thousands of servicemembers, that historically required a diesel generator and hydrocarbon fuels?”……………………………………………………….

The 2028 installation target was set in May by President Donald J. Trump in an executive order, which calls for the first reactor to be in operation by September that year. The same order also directs the US energy and defense secretaries to use “all available legal authorities” to smooth the regulatory road for advanced nuclear reactors and nuclear-fuel-recycling facilities built at sites controlled by those agencies. It also designates a wide range of activities, including those serving artificial intelligence hardware, as defense-critical electrical infrastructure.

That designation is important because many military reactors don’t require approvals from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the independent federal agency that issues permits and regulations for civilian nuclear power. Many nuclear power advocates accuse the NRC of driving up the cost of nuclear power through overregulation, whereas critics hold the agency up as a critical public safeguard……………………. https://cen.acs.org/energy/nuclear-power/US-Army-deploy-small-nuclear/103/web/2025/10#:~:text=Project%20Janus,%20which%20Secretary%20of,by%20the%20end%20of%202028.

November 8, 2025 Posted by | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump, Putin, and Nuclear Arms Diplomacy

Gordon Hahn, Nov 06, 2025

As I wrote a while back, it is one thing for a political leader to loosely play with language that circles around making a nuclear threat, as Russian Security Council Deputy Head and former Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev has done again recently in a public social net spat with US President Donald Trump. But it is quite another to play global chess with the repositioning of nuclear forces to actually threaten another nuclear power of superior nuclear weapons strength (https://gordonhahn.com/2025/08/05/trumps-suicidal-nuclear-brinksmanship/). 

. This is even more so when said nuclear power is technologically advanced and intent on defending ist homeland. Such a country is Russia – a major world power and the leading power in western and central Eurasia – the World Island, as Halford MacKinder wrote more than a century ago. Russian President Vladimir Putin, after proposing a nuclear compromise Trump in typical American fashion chose to ignore has rolled out a counterthreat. In sum, we are seeing the Bidenization of Trump’s Russia policy, oriented towards escalation in the mistaken belief that Moscow can be cowed into submission to US hopes of preserving its dissipating global hegemony. Let’s review the record.

Putin’s initial instinct to the new Trump administration was to signal Moscow‘s desire for nuclear arms talks, seeing the new administration as a small window of opportunity for achieving greater strategic stability for Russia through the conclusion of a new strategic nuclear arms control treaty (https://gordonhahn.com/2025/05/23/a-new-new-start-putin-sees-trump-administration-as-a-window-of-opportunity-for-strategic-arms-control/). The New START treaty, which entered into force in February 2011 and was extended for another five years in 2021, is set to expire without possibility of further extension in February 2026. Any new treaty would have contributed to the larger US-Russian rapprochement broached by the Trump administration in connection with its now collapsed efforts to broker an end to the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. Trump’s Ukraine diplomacy was welcomed by Putin, but the result is ‘no dice’ so far, and prospects look dim.

In contrast to the Biden administration, Trump has an opportunity to restart nuclear arms talks with Moscow as part of his self-declared hope of normalising relations between Washington and Moscow……………………………………………………(Subscribers only) https://gordonhahn.substack.com/p/trump-putin-and-nuclear-arms-diplomacy?r=1qt5jg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

November 8, 2025 Posted by | politics international | Leave a comment

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