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https://archive.ph/AGIF3

The crabs are warming up, Cocaine Mitch.

During a House Science, Space, and Technology Committee hearing on June 10, 2026, Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) delivered opening remarks calling out Energy Secretary Chris Wright for misrepresenting science, peddling lies about renewable energy and commissioning a "widely debunked, error-filled" climate science report.

In a civil complaint filed May 26 in Manhattan Supreme Court, Yvette Hinds describes the sandwich that took her out as having contained “contaminants, poisons, toxins, parasites, bacteria, germs and/or organisms which would and did cause various serious personal injuries.”

🎶 All the food is poison

🎶 All the food is poison!

The Army spent over a billion dollars on nearly 10,000 augmented-reality headsets for soldiers to wear in combat. A federal watchdog reported this week that they won’t end up being used.

Healthcare pls

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/56653

Iranian negotiators hired senior psychologists to vet diplomatic messages for US President Donald Trump during indirect talks between Washington and Tehran, US journalist Jeremy Scahill reported on June 13, citing Iranian sources.

Speaking on the Breaking Points podcast, Scahill said the shift was implemented a few weeks ago as the Iranian delegation believes Trump is "legitimately mentally ill" and “operating in an impaired mental state.”

Negotiators told Scahill the decision was not made with "any lightness" but as a response to what they perceive as a "mentally incapacitated" leader.

After having medical professionals "work up a psychological profile," the team began to “cater” messages before delivering them to mediators.

This strategy coincides with renewed scrutiny of the President’s health as he celebrates his 80th birthday Sunday.

Earlier reports noted physical symptoms in the president, including hand bruising, swollen ankles, a neck rash, and frequent dozing during cabinet meetings.

From thecradle.co via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/56691

A protester raises a hand showing the message "I support Palestine Action" while being arrested during a demonstration at Woolwich Crown Court on June 12, 2026 in London, England. Photo: Martin Pope/Getty Images

Four UK-based Palestine solidarity activists were sentenced as terrorists on Friday for damaging military drones and other equipment at an Elbit Systems UK factory in 2024. Elbit, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has provided the vast majority of drones used in the Israeli military’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza, among other horrors.

The terrorism sentences, handed down by Justice Jeremy Johnson, set a frightening precedent. This is the first time in Britain that anyone has faced terrorism enhancements at sentencing without actually being convicted of terrorist offenses. It is also the first time that “criminal damage” convictions have been classified as terrorism. It is not, of course, the first time that the so-called Palestine exception has entailed the setting of vile legal precedents.

As a point of comparison: The convicted activists, who are affiliated with the Palestine Action network, will spend significantly more time in prison than the majority of people arrested and convicted for participating in brutal white supremacist riots across the UK in 2024, 2025, and again in recent weeks in Belfast, Northern Ireland — riots in which migrant shelters have been set on fire and Black and brown people have been beaten in the streets.

The four Elbit protesters, part of the so-called Filton 25 arrested in relation to the Elbit factory incident, have already been in detention for over two years. They now face five more years in prison for criminal damage with a “terrorist connection.” One defendant was sentenced to a further three years for striking a police officer during the incident. By contrast, a 30-year-old man who kicked and punched Black man in the face amid an anti-immigrant race riot in Manchester in 2024 was sentenced to three years in jail; while labeled a “violent racist” by the presiding judge, he was not labeled a terrorist, nor were any of his fellow pogromists.

“This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists using a manipulated court process.”

The Palestine Action activists were all previously cleared of heftier charges of aggravated burglary and violent disorder. Now labeled terrorists, however, they will be subject to at least 15 years of terrorist notification requirements, including informing the police of personal and financial details and travel plans.

The defendants were not convicted of terrorist offenses — the jury convicted them on charges of criminal damage. It was explicitly hidden from the jurors that, in finding the protesters guilty of specific criminal acts, they also opened them to hefty terror enhancements by the judge at sentencing. Justice Johnson had also set strict restrictions on the trial: the defendants were not permitted to tell the jury that their actions were motivated by a desire to save Palestinian lives and prevent greater crimes of mass slaughter; they could not mention the genocide in Gaza or Elbit’s role in it.

“Criminal damage has never been treated as terrorism within the UK justice system before, and it is completely disproportionate to do so because the offence occurred at a protest,” Kerry Moscogiuri, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, said in a statement.

“A terrorism sentence carries restrictions that stay with a person for the rest of their life. We should all be worried about what this means for other individuals taking direct action in protest at a genocide or any other issue,” Moscogiuri said. She called the sentencing a “new new low in the ongoing crackdown against protest across the UK.”

“This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists, using a manipulated court process,” Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told Novara Media.

[

Related

Pro-Palestine International Students Have Won in Court. Why Hasn’t Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom?](https://theintercept.com/2026/02/26/mahmoud-khalil-deportation-case-free-speech/)

Palestine Action, a loose-knit network of Palestine-solidarity direct-action advocates and activists, has faced extraordinary authoritarian crackdowns in the UK, including a government proscription under the Terrorism Act that renders any support for the group a criminal offense.

For simply holding signs at rallies and sit-ins that bear slogans like “I support Palestine Action,” nearly 3,000 people have been arrested. A British High Court ruled the government’s proscription of the group unlawful in February, but the ban remains in place as the government appeals the decision. Over 100 people, many of them elderly retirees, were arrested on Friday outside the sentencing hearing while holding signs in support of Palestine Action.

“Convicting activists for one charge, then sentencing them as terrorists, is more outrageous than the proscription of Palestine Action. Everyone needs to mobilize against it,” said Ammori.

As ever, the “terror” label here tells us more about the ideological priorities of the authorities that apply it than it does about the nature or moral standing of any acts deemed “terrorism.”

The treatment of violent anti-immigrant racists in the UK provides a telling point of comparison. After all, the very same Justice Johnson who sentenced the Palestine Action defendants as terrorists and foreclosed their potential for a fair trial moved last year to release the UK’s leading far-right provocateur, Tommy Robinson, early from prison. Robinson had been convicted for contempt of court after continuously violating injunctions on spreading false allegations against a Syrian refugee. A High Court had rejected his appeal for early release, which Johnson nonetheless granted. Robinson has gone on to aggressively and continuously stoke more anti-immigrant, racist violence like the recent pogroms in Belfast.

“If sentenced with a ‘terrorist connection’, the Filton 4 will not be afforded the same opportunity as Robinson, a repeat criminal, for early release,” noted jury conscience advocacy group Defend Our Juries.

To explain his “terrorism connection” sentencing of the pro-Palestine activists, the judge said, “I am sure that each defendant’s offence of criminal damage involved serious damage to property, was designed to intimidate the UK government and a section of the public and was for the purpose of advancing a political or ideological cause.”

There’s a certain irony here, in that the actions taken to disable Elbit equipment were specifically not acts of political persuasion. They were not petitions, or rallies, or economic pressure campaigns. The very point of direct action is that it aims to interfere with a given site of production and circulation of materials – a broken quadcopter drone can’t rain fire down on the bodies of Palestinian civilians, can’t flay the flesh of Palestinian toddlers (as quadcopter fire has been shown to do).

It’s a grim irony indeed that activists feel called to take direct action precisely when efforts to pressure our governments to end support for genocide fail and are themselves treated as potentially criminal acts.

If “terrorism,” per Johnson, refers to criminal acts with the aim of ideological, political persuasion, we might consider this: Following escalations in Britain’s white riots against immigrants, the government has moved to further harden its border regime and shutter many asylum hotels that had become focal points for racist protests. By the lights of the British government, this does not constitute yielding to white supremacist terror, though. The label “terrorism” is reserved for other targets.

The post They Weren’t Convicted of Terrorism, But These Palestine Activists Got Sentenced as Terrorists Anyway appeared first on The Intercept.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/56477

Protesters and police clashed outside Mexico City Stadium on the opening day of the World Cup. (Reuters / Fred Ramos)

Editors’ Note: On June 1, 2026, the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers union (CNTE) in Mexico went on strike. The CNTE is a Mexican militant labor union of teachers founded 1979 by rank and file teachers in response to the dominant teacher union SNTE’s widespread bureaucratism and capitulation to the state. The central demands of this strike include the repeal of the controversial ISSSTE law, which privatized teachers’ pension funds and significantly raised the barriers to retirement. Although President Claudia Sheinbaum pledged during her campaign to repeal the law, her administration has still not done so. Striking teachers are also demanding substantial wage increases, arguing that current salaries are insufficient to provide a decent standard of living, as well as the reversal of a series of education reforms that have expanded privatization within the education system and undermined the rights of both teachers and students.

In response to the demonstrations of the teachers, the union has faced serious police repression resulting in the beating and teargassing of many striking teachers and their allies, including students and community and family members. The union has since escalated its demonstrations, and is now targeting the World Cup games in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey.

The World Cup has seen massive investment but none of the profits will reach the working people of Mexico. The government has spent millions of dollars beautifying the streets of Mexico City that tourists will see while kicking out native residents. This has sparked outrage within the working-class community of Mexico City. This comes in the midst of the country’s ongoing crisis of “disappearances.” Mothers of the disappeared have condemned the government’s decision to spend millions of dollars on a sporting event while thousands of families continue searching for missing loved ones. They say that the government has failed to adequately address the epidemic of disappearances.

The CNTE has united with these powerful working-class forces to disrupt the World Cup and force the government to confront the pressing needs of the people. By threatening the profits of corporations and political interests set to benefit from the tournament, they seek to make it impossible for the authorities to ignore their demands. This is the current situation.

Vanguardia Proletaria #721 | June 1-15, 2026 | Translated for the Red Phoenix–

As in every broad and united front of the working class, a sharp political and ideological struggle is taking place within the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers union (CNTE) between democratic and revolutionary positions on one side and reformist, conciliatory positions aligned with the government on the other. These ideological battles, which reflect contradicting class interests, determine the direction of the national democratic teachers’ movement: either toward containing and moderating the workers or toward strengthening the organization of the working-class and the struggle for its demands.

In the period leading up to the outbreak of the National Strike, the reformists and conciliators within the union attempted to consolidate a balance of forces favorable to their designs of supporting the Fourth Transformation (4T) (A program initiated in 2018 with the election of President Obrador which proclaimed to end the deeply unpopular and economically devastating neoliberal period, but which has in fact continued neoliberal policies in more sneaky yet more harmful ways while proclaiming to be “progressive” – Editor). Their goal is to contain any forceful political action that could affect capitalist interests during the World Cup, an event that will generate enormous profits for the capitalist groups that monopolize that spectacle.

Yet, the attempts to conciliate to the 4T program and President Sheinbaum’s supposedly “progressive” government have been clearly been exposed as bankrupted. In 2025, when the CNTE threatened a Popular Teachers’ Strike, the call of conciliation to 4T was stronger and the strike was called off. When this happened, the State launched a counterinsurgency strategy to deny the demands of the teachers that has gone through different phases and employed different methods.

The tripartite dialogue tables which the government set up following the threat of strike in 2025 have served to entertain, distract, and loudly proclaim that dialogue exists. Yet even when agreements were signed, they were never implemented and became dead letters, failing to resolve the demands of the contingents involved. Furthermore, these negotiations do not address the CNTE’s central demands which is the repeal of the educational reform and the ISSSTE law (highly controversial and harmful pension law which moved teachers pensions into the hands of private corporations), promises that the governments of Morena made in 2018 during their campaigns but have still failed to fulfill! First, the government justified their inaction by claiming they lacked a qualified majority to pass such laws; later, they argued there were insufficient economic resources for these reforms.

The statutory sectional leadership elections are also part of a plan to distract the CNTE’s strongholds, forcing them to fight on two fronts: the national strike process and the struggle against bureaucratic union leadership, which possesses financial resources to usurp the teachers’ union structures.

The counterinsurgency campaign which the government has developed since has sought to remove from negotiating structures the most consistent and committed teacher comrades, those who firmly defend the interests of the rank and file and possess the necessary knowledge and experience to defend workers’ rights at the negotiating table. In the same vein, pro-government elements have attempted to divide the movement through consultations within the union designed to encourage internal confrontation.

Despite all these efforts aimed at breaking the CNTE’s unity and strength, the National Representative Assembly unanimously decided to launch the national strike on June 1, while also sending an advance contingent from Oaxaca beginning on May 25.

The State failed to fracture the movement’s unity and, during this period, resorted to desperate measures such as proposing that the school year end on June 5, believing this would demoralize workers who would supposedly prefer to go on vacation rather than continue the struggle. However, the proposal provoked outrage on digital media and had to be withdrawn. The teachers understood that they would face the same problems coming back next year!

Likewise, Claudia Sheinbaum was forced to retreat from her refusal to negotiate with any contingent of teachers. Under pressure from teachers in Chiapas, she opened direct talks with them, effectively recognizing bilateral negotiations with the union on strike.

Ultimately, as the national strike took shape and ceased to be viewed merely as a teachers’ movement, becoming instead a teachers’-and-popular movement, the government urgently reached out to social sectors it had previously neglected, such as the families of the 43 Ayotzinapa education students who were victims of forced disappearance. None of these maneuvers have worked, and the State foresees that the national strike will advance despite all its efforts.

For this reason, it has resorted to phrases used by previous more right wing regimes which it claims to break from, claiming that the protesters are “only a few people,” that “there is permanent dialogue,” and that “there is no need for a strike.” Through this rhetoric, the government seeks to gain political ground in public opinion while concealing its true intention to break the strike

The repression began to take shape on May 25 in Mexico City, when the CNTE’s advance march toward the national strike was met by more than a thousand riot police, forces that, far from disappearing, continue to carry out the task of beating and gassing social protests. The repressive offensive continued with attacks by paramilitary groups against education workers who were carrying out a peaceful political activity in Mitla, Oaxaca!

What is required now is to strengthen the national strike that will begin on June 1. To do so, we must continue organizing and conducting outreach work, counteracting the effects of counterinsurgency wherever the CNTE and popular discontent allow us to take advantage of this international contradictions. We must make it clear to the so-called “left wing populist” governments of Mexico and Latin America that it is not enough to hold forums on democracy while failing to fulfill promises to the working class. Only the workers united in a General Strike can bring about a real transition which will firmly end neoliberalism and condemn it to the dustbin of history.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/56624

Cuba's leader announces new economic reforms to foster foreign investment and the national economy to counter the US-imposed economic and energy sanctions.

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Paramount-Warner merger approved, Bari Weiss set to head CNN