July 26, 2025

As Gaza starves, Israel's far right sees a dream coming true

Members of Israel’s government embrace the Trump-inspired vision of a Gaza of gleaming towers, ritzy tourism and pristine neighborhoods, but without Palestinians.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/25/worldview-gaza-hunger-crisis-israel/

https://archive.ph/NYDdb



It’s a split-screen moment. On one side, you have the crushing daily reality of the Gaza Strip. The scale of mass starvation taking place in the besieged territory is so vast that medics and humanitarian staff tasked with helping provide for the hungry are themselves barely managing to stay on their feet. Aid groups are either bereft or running out of supplies amid more than four months of blockade. One in three people in Gaza are going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations.

Each day brings new images of skeletal children and desperate families seeking sustenance amid Gaza’s ruins. Health officials report a surge in deaths from malnutrition as daily bombardments by Israeli forces continue to kill Palestinians. Israeli troops have opened fire repeatedly in the vicinity of the sites doling out the little food available in the territory, according to humanitarian experts, witnesses and visual evidence. On the other side, you have the surreal vision conjured by Israeli Science and Technology Minister Gila Gamliel, who uploaded an AI-generated video this week to social media showing a vision of what a postwar Gaza Strip could look like.



It echoed an AI video posted by President Donald Trump to Truth Social in February, although that one featured an Elon Musk likeness eating hummus out of a bread bowl, golden Trump statues and statuettes, and a “Trump Gaza” song. The minute-long clip shared by Gamliel celebrated Trump’s proposal to help redevelop the war-ravaged territory into an area of gleaming high-rises, ritzy tourism and pristine new residential neighborhoods. Luxury yachts float by the Strip’s Mediterranean beaches; Jewish residents grin over platters of hummus. The catch? Most or all of Gaza’s actual population is nowhere to be seen.



In her post, Gamliel pointed to the necessity of the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s Palestinian population. She’s not alone among cabinet ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government in calling for this outcome. Since the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, numerous Israeli politicians have not only sought the full defeat of Hamas but cast the entirety of Gaza’s more than 2 million inhabitants as an enemy population that needs to be removed.

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July 26, 2025

TOPJAW - Best Curry in London: Where Chefs Eat

We’ve interviewed 200 chefs, industry dons and our favourite celebs on the Best of London, we’ve totted up all the answers and these are the Top 5 best curries as voted for by them.

Best Curry doesn’t mean Indian, we receive answers from all regions around the world where curry is a significant part of their cuisine. However, I guess the Top 5 list is a reflection of our affinity towards Indian cuisine.

Which question shall we do next?

00:00 Brigadiers
03:48 Tayyabs
07:20 BiBi
11:17 Darjeeling Express
14:15 Gymkhana

Thank you so much for watching - we love seeing your comments!

July 26, 2025

Elizabeth Warren Says Trump Is Turning the White House Into a "Crypto Cash Machine"

In an exclusive interview with Vanity Fair, the progressive stalwart sounds off on Trump’s crypto moves and his focus on the Fed—instead of “the Epstein files.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/elizabeth-warren-says-trump-is-turning-the-white-house-into-a-crypto-cash-machine

https://archive.ph/aooMW


Elizabeth Warren speaks during a "People’s Town Hall" at Pearl-Cohn High School in North Nashville, as the town hall events are being held in GOP competitive districts across the country, in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S., April 5, 2025. Seth Herald/Reuters/Redux

When I got Elizabeth Warren on the line Thursday morning, I asked how she was doing. “You know, personally, I’m fine,” the Massachusetts senator replied. “But I worry about the state of our republic.” Warren—a leading progressive and the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee—has spent her career sounding the alarm about a financial system rigged against everyday Americans. Now the president of the United States seems to be using her warnings as a blueprint—dismantling oversight, empowering industries, and seeking to profit from the chaos. Donald Trump, she said, “is using the presidency to enrich himself through crypto, and he’s doing it in plain sight.”

But Warren isn’t despairing: “The billionaires who are running the joint right now hope the rest of us will just give up,” she told me. “But the response is not to get discouraged—it’s to get angry and get back in the fight.” In a wide-ranging interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity and length, Warren sounded off on Trump’s meddling in the upcoming Paramount merger, his attacks on Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, and the crypto legislation he pushed through last week—with help from members of her own party. “There’s been a long, bipartisan tradition of helping out industry,” Warren said. And “when Washington works for industries like this, a handful of people get really rich, and the American people pay the price.”

Vanity Fair: Just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen Paramount settle with Trump in his 60 Minutes lawsuit. Trump bragged about a side deal with Skydance as part of the looming merger. Stephen Colbert, a critic, had his show canceled—a move that Trump himself seemingly hopes he can take some credit for, based on what he wrote this week. All parties have denied anything untoward. But from the outside, it sure looks like palm-greasing, doesn’t it?

Elizabeth Warren: Yeah, the whole deal smells bad. Was it a coincidence that CBS canceled Colbert just three days after he spoke out? If CBS canceling Colbert’s show was “purely a financial decision,” why did Trump say he [hoped he] played a major part in getting Colbert fired? Since taking office, Trump has exploited the power of the presidency to hand out favors for the right price and to threaten punishment for anyone who pushes back. Trump is the single most corrupt president in American history. And he is using that corruption to try to control anyone who challenges him or disagrees with him, and that’s also true in the media, in universities, and in law firms. It’s all happening where we can see it.

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July 25, 2025

Voters Fell for Zohran Mamdani. The Democratic Establishment Will Be Harder to Convince

The antiestablishment candidate is launching a charm offensive on Democratic lawmakers, while trying to preserve the indie cred that powered his victory in the primary.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/voters-fell-for-zohran-mamdani-the-democratic-establishment-will-be-harder-to-convince

https://archive.ph/y7r5M



The meeting itself was important. On July 18, Zohran Mamdani, the freshly minted antiestablishment winner of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, traveled to Brooklyn to sit down, for the first time, with Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader of the House and one of the most powerful people in New York’s political establishment. The two men covered plenty of complicated ground in one hour, including Mamdani’s proposals to lower the cost of living and Jeffries’s determination to win back a majority in the 2026 midterms.

Yet nearly as significant as what the two men said while talking face-to-face was the message Mamdani had sent the night before, on TV. During an interview on Inside City Hall, the city’s highest-profile political news show, Mamdani said he would now “discourage” use of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” distancing himself further than he ever has from the slogan used by some opponents of Israel’s war in Gaza. Mamdani had never encouraged its use, and acknowledged that it was offensive to some, but he had not denounced it, either. “That was a sophisticated move, to go on NY1 with Errol [Louis] the night before meeting with Hakeem, and to start lowering the heat,” one House Democratic insider tells me.

In the month since his surprising and decisive win over former governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani has been making the rounds of Democratic elected officials, in both New York and Washington, seeking to “build a coalition,” as an adviser to Mamdani describes the outreach. In some places he’s been eagerly received, including a gathering of roughly 30 House progressives hosted by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In other corners, the mood has been chillier: Jeffries, as well as Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, and Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor, have still not endorsed Mamdani for mayor. “He’s a very likable guy,” says Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party chairman and a former close ally of Cuomo’s, who recently talked with Mamdani for the first time. “The substance is where he’s got problems. Not just the policy proposals, but the language he uses on the Middle East conflict. And the mayor’s race has national ramifications—the Republicans have already weaponized his primary win to try to paint moderate Democrats in competitive districts as being aligned with Mamdani.”

Part of the tension is parochial. Mamdani’s win fueled speculation that Democratic incumbents, possibly including Jeffries, might face primary challenges from the left next year. André Richardson, one of Jeffries’s advisers, fired back hard to CNN: “If Team Gentrification wants a primary fight, our response will be forceful and unrelenting.” Grace Mausser, a cochair of the city chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, a key part of Mamdani’s primary campaign infrastructure, tells me that DSA has no plans to challenge incumbents, including Jeffries—though she points out that Mamdani won by a large margin in the congressman’s district. “I think that probably is a little scary to him,” Mausser says. “It indicates that he may need to compromise, to adjust tactics a little bit.”

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July 25, 2025

The American Prospect Weekly Roundup: July 25th, 2025

Today, Prospect executive editor David Dayen talks with writing fellow Emma Janssen about several stories she wrote this week, including about how states will have problems implementing work requirements on Medicaid and food assistance, the emptiness of the MAHA effort to change ingredients in unhealthy foods, and an alliance between truckers and environmentalists in fracking-heavy regions. Plus, we’ll talk about Donald Trump’s continued Epstein scandal problems, and how he’s doing the bidding of Big Tech firms.

July 25, 2025

Beyond food and people

Nietzsche shows us how to embrace our connection with nature – without denying its essential conflict, strife and suffering

https://aeon.co/essays/nietzsches-startling-provocation-youre-edible-and-delicious


A saltwater crocodile. Photo by Ken Kiefer/Connect/Alamy



It looked like a piece of driftwood floating in muddy floodwaters. But then it grew a pair of eyes that peered above the waterline. As the canoe came closer, the crocodile struck, attempting to topple it. Not knowing what else to do, the woman inside paddled toward a set of trees with branches hanging over the water. When she jumped to grab one, the crocodile leapt, too, pulling her underwater into a death roll. ‘That was the worst part of the whole experience,’ she told the news team that interviewed her in hospital. ‘The part that I still don’t like to remember.’

In February 1985, the Australian eco-philosopher Val Plumwood survived a crocodile attack on a remote river in Kakadu, one of Australia’s largest national parks. After being pulled under three times, she clawed her way up a muddy bank, making a tourniquet to stem the bleeding in her leg. For several hours, she dragged herself through the bush, dreading another attack that never came. Plumwood would have been the 17th person to be killed (and possibly eaten) by a crocodile since 1930 in Australia’s Northern Territory. As the interviewer reminded her, there were two methods for dealing with crocodiles that kill or maul humans: captivity or death. The crocodile that attacked Plumwood had supposedly been shot and killed.

Still recovering from surgery, Plumwood told the news team that she thought this act of revenge was ‘basically pointless’. Why is it, she continued, that we think it is outrageous when another animal attacks a human being? Why is this kind of predation seen as something completely outside the naturally ordained order of things? The interviewer paused to clarify: ‘That we’re the dominant species and should never be under attack?’ ‘That’s right. We can’t accept the idea that we are part of the food chain. We eat other species all the time, we do dreadful things to other species and we see that as quite natural, but when we’re attacked by other species and they treat us as food, well, that’s unbelievable. We can’t accept that at all.’

For many centuries, European cultures have conceived of humans as radically separate from nature, formed in the imago Dei, and possessing immortal souls that transcend the natural order. But this human exceptionalism has begun to fray. Science has shown that we are, just like other animals, subject to the surging forces that constitute the natural world. We are immersed in nature. At a microscopic level, we exchange atoms with surrounding objects, and are densely populated by microbial panoplies shared with the things we touch, wear, and consume. We are not independent entities, but vast, shifting communities of living and non-living participants.

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July 25, 2025

Fever Ray - If I Had A Heart (Radical Romantics Session) - Official Visualiser (video dropped earlier today)

Announcing new album The Year Of The Radical Romantics - out now on Rabid Records

The Year Of The Radical Romantics is a document of the juicy, throbbing missives used to woo crowds from Sydney to Seattle on the globe-trotting There’s No Place I’d Rather Be Tour in support of 2023’s Radical Romantics.

The new album consists of live versions of tracks from Radical Romantics in addition to highlights from 2017’s Plunge and massive new iterations of early classics performed by the musicians who accompanied Fever Ray on tour - Minna Koivisto on keyboards; Romarna Campbell on drums; Maryam Nikandish and Helena Gutarra on keytars and vocals.

Radical Romantics’ riotous, world-building videos introduced an unforgettable cast of characters. Accompanying Fever Ray (aka the white-suited Casanova) are wannabe-womanizer Romance, clockwatcher Main, witchy Snusis, and axe-wielding bombshell Demona Lisa.

The Year of The Radical Romantics offers a culmination of these character’s arcs with a pair of videos directed by longtime longtime Fever Ray creative visionary Martin Falck. The visuals find the misfits navigating group therapy sessions led by the human improvement and performance boosting guru Ebba.

These sessions are soundtracked by blistering versions of fan favorites from Fever Ray’s beloved self-titled 2009 debut album: “I’m Not Done (Therapy Session)” and “Now’s the Only Time I Know (Therapy Session).”

July 25, 2025

Against type

The existentialist philosophies of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon offer important insights into the nature of prejudice

https://aeon.co/essays/what-existentialist-philosophy-reveals-about-prejudices


Afro-Caribbean immigrants arrive at Waterloo station in London, England, in 1964. Photo by George Rodger/Magnum



Boarding a train in France a few years after the Second World War, a medical student specialising in psychiatry at a prestigious university, a man who had previously volunteered and fought for the Free French forces against the Nazis, found himself being pointed out by a small child: ‘Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!’

For the student, those words triggered a psychic storm of associations and identification that crystallised the racism of his society into one intense episode of distress. ‘I cast an objective gaze over myself,’ he later wrote of the incident, and was ‘deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders’ and, above all, the pidgin refrain of the grinning cartoon character in adverts for a banana-flavoured breakfast cereal. These associations that made up the stereotype of un nègre carried with them an incoherent mix of condescension, pity, fear and disgust. The child was amused, then scared. The student’s distress was in seeing himself through this cluster of negative associations and feelings.

That student was Frantz Fanon, and his description of this incident is central to his analysis of the psychic distress caused by racism. He initially wrote this as the dissertation for his medical degree, but his supervisor thought such an unusual work was unlikely to pass. Fanon submitted a dissertation on spinal degeneration instead, and his theory of the psychological structures and effects of racism became his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

Fanon’s theory rests on the idea that we unwittingly inherit aspects of our worldview from our society. In this way, it bears important parallels with Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of gender in The Second Sex, published only three years earlier. Both these philosophers argue that ideas and values instilled in us through childhood shape our adult lives, often in ways that we are unaware of. They agree that these aspects of our outlook can remain quietly influential on our thought and behaviour, even after we have rejected them. Both consider the tension between our own ideas and values and those inherited from our society to be a source of difficulty and distress.

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July 25, 2025

JD Vance's "Intellectual" Spin on the Racist Great Replacement Theory

As the Trump administration advances its draconian immigration schemes, the vice president is doing his part—by polishing ideas from the far-right gutters with an Ivy League sheen.

https://newrepublic.com/article/198347/jd-vance-great-replacement-theory

https://archive.ph/N4t04


Drew Hallowell/Getty Images

Trump’s latest proposal to expel asylum-seekers to the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau continues the pattern of performative cruelty already well established by the illegal deportations, the establishment of a grifty concentration camp on American soil, the declaration that people previously granted legal entry are no longer entitled to be here, the grotesque mistreatment of foreign visitors and former aides to the U.S. military, and other outrageous actions by the present administration. It is already evident that Trump’s interlocking immigration schemes will drive up inflation in the United States and reduce economic output. In spite of Trump’s vow to go after “the worst of the worst,” most of those being deported and incarcerated have never been accused of any crime in the U.S. or elsewhere. Meanwhile, the need for a genuine, long-term policy to deal with immigration, asylum, and the existing undocumented population goes almost entirely unmet. So what is really behind the needless and public exercises in sadism that pass for immigration policy?

The short answer is a version of the “great replacement theory”: the idea that immigration is part of a deliberate plot to destroy the United States by replacing “real” or “true” Americans with aliens. The point of Trump’s immigration policies is to satisfy the desire, on the part of Trump’s base as well as nativist ideologues in his administration, to see pain inflicted on undesirables and their supposedly malevolent supporters—liberals, “the woke”—within the country.

The great replacement theory and its variants have a long history, and they have always been in the wrong. The nineteenth-century physician Horatio Robinson Storer, an early anti-abortion campaigner, lamented that “abortions are infinitely more frequent among Protestant women than among Catholic” and wondered whether America’s western and southern territories would be “filled with our own children or by those of aliens?” The sociologist and eugenicist Edward Alsworth Ross argued that Japanese immigrants should be banned from entering the country and coined the term “race suicide.” In Charlottesville in 2017, the neo-Nazi crowd chanted, “The Jews will not replace us.”

But this idea does have a polite version, an intellectualized variant, articulated at the kind of think-tank gatherings where people in suits and ties with advanced degrees from highly respected institutions can pretend that their dehumanizing and racist ideology is not, in fact, dehumanizing and racist. By virtue of his Yale law degree and his apparent desire to make the “intellectual” case for a corrupt, kleptocratic, cronyist regime based on nationalist demagoguery and unhinged conspiracism, JD Vance has now presented himself as an exponent of the “thoughtful” version of replacement theory that now underpins the immigration policies of the present government.

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July 25, 2025

Trump Gives Israel Chilling Order as It Starves Gaza to Death

Donald Trump doesn’t care that Gaza is on the brink of extermination.

https://newrepublic.com/post/198457/trump-israel-get-rid-of-it-gaza

https://archive.ph/V9iKk



President Trump suggested on Friday that Israel should “finish the job” and “get rid of it,” when asked about Gaza, which is now suffering from mass starvation due to Israel’s blockade.

“Gaza, they pulled out of Gaza, they pulled out in terms of negotiating. It was too bad, Hamas didn’t really wanna make a deal. I think they wanna die. And it’s very, very bad,” the president said on Friday before departing for Scotland. “You’re gonna have to finish the job … don’t forget, we got a lotta hostages out. So now we’re down to the final hostages and they know what happens after you get the final hostages. And basically because of that they really didn’t wanna make a deal I saw that. So they pulled out, they’re gonna have to fight, they’re gonna have to clean it up. You’re gonna have to get rid of it.”

Trump on Gaza: "Hamas didn't really want to make a deal. I think they want to die ... they're gonna have to finish the job ... they're gonna have to fight and they're gonna have to clean it up. You're gonna have to get rid of it."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-07-25T13:45:05.006Z

The Trump administration has been explicit about its horrifying vision for Gaza, as the president clearly views it as potential property for an Israeli beach resort rather than an area that human beings call home. The genocidal language he casually uses here, saying that Israel needed to “get rid of it,” only reinforces that.

While leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and the U.K.’s Kier Starmer have this week finally decided that the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—for throwing rocks, for waiting for aid, for doing journalism, for simply refusing to leave their homes—has become too much, Trump has tripled down in his dismissiveness. All signs point to him allowing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s butchering of Palestine to continue uninhibited.

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