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Aug 18, 2025 - World

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky left his embassy for the White House on Monday as air raid sirens started to sound in several parts of Ukraine, signaling incoming Russian attacks, according to CNN reporter Kristen Holmes..Zelensky is meeting with a group of European leaders at the White House to continue negotiations aimed at ending the war following Russia’s invasion. Just before 8 p.m. local time in Kyiv, as residents rushed to shelters, the Ukrainian air raid alert map showed at least five regions at risk.Zelensky’s visit to the White House comes only days after President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which ended without an agreement. Putin continues to demand that Ukraine cede part of its territory to Russia.Trump’s stated goal is to persuade Zelensky to accept some of Putin’s demands, including relinquishing land and vowing never to seek NATO membership.In a post on X on Monday, Zelensky outlined the goals he and his fellow European leaders hope to achieve during these talks."Our main goal is a reliable and lasting peace for Ukraine and all of Europe," he said. "It is important that the dynamics of all our meetings yield exactly this result. We understand that Putin cannot be expected to voluntarily abandon aggression and new expansionist attempts. Therefore, pressure must be applied, and it must be joint pressure – from the USA and Europe, from everyone in the world who respects the right to live and the international order.""We must stop the killings, and I thank the partners who are working toward this and ultimately toward a reliable and dignified peace," he continued. "Together with the leaders of Finland, the United Kingdom, Italy, the European Commission, and the NATO Secretary General, we coordinated our positions ahead of the meeting with President Trump. Ukraine is ready for a real ceasefire and the establishment of a new security architecture. We need peace."

Aug 18, 2025 - World

We’re all familiar with Trump’s famous deportation flights of Venezuelans and Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a concentration camp in El Salvador in violation of a court order.But did you know there have been over 1,000 such flights in the past few months, some to absolute hellhole countries?On top of that, the Washington Post reports that ICE is planning to open or expand 125 new “detention facilities” across the country, including ones to hold families, giving America the largest prison system in the world. The paper notes:“The documents outline the strategy behind ICE’s breakneck expansion, a chaotic effort that has already triggered lawsuits and accusations of cruelty.”Are Americans being conditioned by our media to become “Good Germans”?For several decades I did international relief work for a nonprofit based in Germany; my family and I even lived at the organization’s headquarters in Stadtsteinach for much of 1986/1987. One of my closest co-workers and mentors was a man 25 years my senior, Horst Von Heyer, who’d been a teenage member of the Hitler Youth when WWII ended.I started working with Horst in the late 1970s after his assistant was eaten by a crocodile in southern Africa. For example, we went into Uganda together to deal with the post-Idi Amin 1980 famine and set up a program for orphaned kids that continues to this day. When we lived in Germany, Horst and I used to have lunch together nearly every day when we were both in town. He became one of my closest friends (he’s now passed away).So, of course, I asked him how Germans (and he, as a teenager) could possibly have been okay with the Nazis rounding up millions of Jews and other “undesirables” to ship via boxcars to the death camps.His answer was frankly shocking in its simplicity:“We didn’t know.”The concentration camps within Germany were, he explained, for “the worst of the worst” criminals and “traitors” who’d tried to overthrow the country. The Republican Great Depression and the chaos that followed WWI, he told me, had created a massive problem of street crime and homeless people, so most middle-class Germans, feeling unsafe, enthusiastically supported Hitler’s “law and order” agenda.Those “innocent” Jews, Gypsies, and others removed from local areas were being moved, Horst said he was told, because their residences were slated to be part of what we’d call “urban renewal” efforts. They were simply being resettled, and it would end up better for them and the communities they were leaving.“I remember how shocked we all were when the pictures came out from the Polish death camps like Auschwitz at the end of the war,” he told me. “You Americans and the rest of the world were shocked, too. Hitler’s men and the German media had done a really good job of keeping it all under wraps.”In that, I discovered by reading William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and other research, Horst was right.By the end of 1933, Hitler had largely neutered Germany’s free press; not by market competition, but by bankrupting writers and outlets with libel lawsuits, unleashing police raids for “slander” claims, vigilante “Brownshirt” militia violence against reporters, arrests of publishers for “publishing anti-German propaganda,” the outright seizure of progressive newspapers, and a sweeping Schriftleitergesetz “Editor’s Law” which criminalized journalism that exposed government excesses.Nazi loyalists and party-friendly oligarchs took over the press outlets that remained in a massive media consolidation project, ensuring that every headline and every radio news report served the regime much like Fox “News” and rightwing hate-radio/podcasts do today for Trump.When stories were published about Jews and others being transported, they were couched in euphemisms such as Umsiedlung (“resettlement”) or Evakuierung (“evacuation”) and Arbeitseinsatz (“labor deployment”) in official communications, press coverage, and public speeches.These terms fit neatly into propaganda narratives about “urban renewal,” war-effort labor needs, or “population transfers” from “overcrowded” and “crime-ridden” cities. There were literally no public reports in Germany about mass killings or illegal detentions between 1934 and the end of the war in 1945.Today in the U.S., the lack of coverage of Trump’s brutal treatment of immigrants, lack of due process, and hundreds of monthly deportation flights to hellhole countries or foreign concentration camps isn’t due to a Schriftleitergesetz legal ban but rather to billionaire owners sucking up to Trump, partisan political framing, and the media’s tendency to underplay ongoing, systemic human rights abuses once they’ve been normalized.We saw something like this in the early days of the Iraq war when the Bush administration tried to normalize and justify the black sites, torture, and murders that were later exposed to the horror of Americans and the world.In both 1940s Germany and today’s America, the effect is similar: the public is shielded from the human scale of state-led actions against targeted groups, making it easier for those policies to continue without mass pushback.In the first week of Trump’s second term, 7,300 people were put on military flights and deported from the US. The numbers have only grown since then, with virtually no oversight and little by way of due process. Since he took power, over 100 immigration judges (about 15%) have been fired nationwide; as Chicago’s former Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Jennifer Peyton noted. She added:“Since January 2025, the immigration courts under EOIR are no longer honoring or offering due process like they did when I was appointed. The court system has been systematically and intentionally destroyed, defunded, and politicized by this administration. I don't know why this has happened, but I fear for our country and for justice.”Meanwhile, American media has engaged in a 1940s-German-like scheme to downplay the horrors of these disappearances.When I heard a guest on CNN mention in passing that there’d been over 1,000 deportation flights in recent months, I was shocked. Why didn’t I know?Every day I read at least a dozen different news outlets and am a voracious consumer of cable news. Yet, like most Americans, I thought deportation flights to foreign horror chambers were the exception — like with Abrego Garcia — rather than the rule. After all, the Biden administration was also running deportation flights; the difference is that they only happened after due process had been granted the deportees, and they were never sent to foreign concentration camps or dumped in hellholes like South Sudan.In 1944, as questions were being raised by stories leaking into the foreign press about the boxcars of people traversing the countryside, the Hitler administration produced a slick PR effort around a concentration camp in Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. It served as a way-stop on the routes to the death camps, but Goebbels had the barracks painted, gardens planted, and the grounds beautified.He then organized “social and cultural events for the visiting dignitaries” and the press, and made a documentary film of their one-day visit with the simple title Theresienstadt that played in theaters across Germany.The international press bought it hook, line, and sinker, reporting to the world that the Nazi detention camps weren’t all that bad and were just part of rebuilding and cleaning up Germany after WWI and the Great Depression.Which raises the question: How long will it be before we start seeing films and made-for-TV events with Kristi Noem or Pam Bondi telling us how “humane” the new private, for-profit “detention centers” are that are being built by Trump’s donors and cronies?I give them about a month to get their propaganda routine together. In the meantime, they seem to be doing everything they can to make sure we don’t really know the full scope and brutality of their efforts to push brown and Black people out of the United States.

Aug 18, 2025 - World

President Donald Trump's administration denied assisting an Israeli official who was reportedly charged with child sex crimes in Nevada.In a statement last week, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said that eight individuals had been arrested in a sting targeting child sex predators. Israeli government cybersecurity official Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, 38, was charged as part of the operations, Las Vegas officials said.By Saturday, Alexandrovich had been released and returned to Israel, according to The Guardian.Independent journalist Sean King reported that "the Trump administration personally intervened, at Israel's request, to override U.S. law enforcement, including their own federal agents involved in the sting, to make sure that Alexandrovich got back to Israel quickly and safely."On Monday, however, the U.S. State Department denied any involvement in Alexandrovich's return to Israel."The Department of State is aware that Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, an Israeli citizen, was arrested in Las Vegas and given a court date for charges related to soliciting sex electronically from a minor," the department said in a statement. "He did not claim diplomatic immunity and was released by a state judge pending a court date. Any claims that the U.S. government intervened are false."

Aug 18, 2025 - World

A few hours ahead of a scheduled White House meeting between President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and European leaders, the former took to his social media to reassure critics: "I know what I 'm doing."Posting to Truth Social on Monday morning, Trump claimed, "I’ve settled 6 Wars in 6 months, one of them a possible Nuclear disaster, and yet I have to read & listen to the Wall Street Journal, and many other who truly don’t have a clue, tell me everything that I am doing wrong on the Russia/Ukraine MESS," Trump ranted. The six wars claim has been made before, with Trump crediting himself in halting conflicts between Israel and Iran; the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda; Cambodia and Thailand; India and Pakistan; Serbia and Kosovo; and Egypt and Ethiopia.Experts, however, have suggested he's exaggerated his role in at least some of them.Trump went on to blame former President Joe Biden for Russia's invasion of Ukraine — though Trump did promise that he would end the war within his first 24 hours in office."I know exactly what I’m doing, and I don’t need the advice of people who have been working on all of these conflicts for years, and were never able to do a thing to stop them," Trump claimed. He went on to whine that those people offering advice were "STUPID" and had "no common sense, intelligence, or understanding, and they only make the current R/U disaster more difficult to FIX."Trump closed by calling his critics "jealous" and "lightweight." He also claimed he "always" can get things done. Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Trump on Friday, where Trump failed to secure a ceasefire.

Aug 17, 2025 - World

European world leaders united to announce they would attend a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, leading MAGA supporters to complain online.Friedrich Merz, Chancellor of Germany, is one of many European leaders who announced they would be accompanying Zelenskyy on a trip to meet Trump. A former Trump insider recently warned that the meeting was a "trap" by Putin and Trump against Zelenskyy."Tomorrow I will travel with President Zelenskyy and other European heads of state and government to Washington. We will exchange views with US President Trump on the status of peace efforts, security guarantees, territorial issues, and further support for Ukraine," Merz wrote.This outraged many MAGA supporters, such as author Hans Mahncke."After little Volodymir’s meltdown at the last meeting he is back but this time must be chaperoned by Europe’s regional manager caste. The whole spectacle is so pathetic and humiliating," he wrote.A conservative Christian account, @LIz77306, complained about the participation of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission."Ursula, Do you think he will be respectful of our @Potus's efforts & extensive hours, planning to make this happen?" the user asked. "Or will he present in his normal T-Shirt attire & flipped, intitled attitude to our country & Chief? To be clear... We are the main catalyst in regards to monetary help & weapons. THIS IS NOT OUR WAR! YET WE/OUR CHIEF IS DIVERTING PRECIOUS TIME TO THIS THAT COULD BE SPENT ON AMERICANS. MAKE THIS HAPPEN & THE KILLING ON BOTH SIDES STOP!"MAGA commentator Gunther Eagleman said on Sunday, "Zelensky is going to f--- this up, isn’t he?"An account called Maga Puppy said of the Ukrainian leader's red line on giving land, "I don't think Zelensky had the clout he imagined. Even with US sanctions Russia can really ramp it up and push in even further."Economics professor Roman Sheremeta had another take, saying, "This is the right move.""Zelensky won’t be flying to Trump alone — he’ll be joined by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and other top European leaders. His plane has already departed with a stop in Brussels. Media report that NATO Secretary General Rutte, French President Macron, UK Prime Minister Starmer, German Chancellor Merz, Italian Prime Minister Meloni, and Finnish President Stubb may also fly to Washington," he wrote Sunday. "More names could be added. A united front. Europe stands with Ukraine."Akash Maniam chimed in, "Forget cards, Zelenskyy's bringing the whole deck to Washington."