https://ghostarchive.org/archive/8qvpv

An aid group in Gaza backed by Israel and the United States said that on Wednesday night a bus carrying some of its Palestinian workers was attacked by Hamas, leaving at least five people dead and others injured.

At the time of the attack, the bus was carrying about two dozen of the group’s workers and was en route to an aid distribution site in southern Gaza, according to a statement from the group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Some of the workers “may have been taken hostage,” it said, adding that it was still gathering information.

“We condemn this heinous and deliberate attack in the strongest possible terms,” said the foundation, which is run by American contractors. “These were aid workers. Humanitarians. Fathers, brothers, sons, and friends, who were risking their lives every day to help others.”

The New York Times could not independently verify the attack. Hamas did not comment on the accusation that it had attacked workers from the group, and the Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The foundation said it held the militant group “fully responsible” for the deaths of “dedicated workers who have been distributing humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people.” The group called on the international community to condemn Hamas for the attack.

“Tonight, the world must see this for what it is: an attack on humanity,” it said.

http://archive.today/2025.06.11-113426/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/world/middleeast/israel-knesset-vote-orthodox-draft-law.html

Israel’s opposition parties said they would bring a motion to dissolve Parliament to a vote on Wednesday, presenting the most serious challenge yet to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and raising the specter of early elections.

If the motion passes, it is unlikely that the government will fall immediately. The parliamentary process before any final vote could take months, giving the prime minister time to shore up his increasingly fractious governing coalition or set his own agenda for a return to the ballot box. But it would deal a heavy blow to his political credibility.

The opposition parties are exploiting a crisis within the governing coalition over the contentious, decades-old policy that exempts ultra-Orthodox men who are studying religion in seminaries from compulsory military service.

http://archive.today/2025.06.11-204837/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/us/politics/iran-us-iraq-diplomats-middle-east.html

The State Department has decided to reduce its diplomatic presence in Iraq, the department said in a statement on Wednesday, as tensions across the Middle East spiked amid signs that nuclear diplomacy between the United States and Iran may be deadlocked.

Word of the U.S. decision, along with a warning from the United Kingdom about new threats to Middle East commercial shipping, came hours after President Trump said in a podcast released Wednesday that he has grown “less confident” about the prospects for a deal with Iran that would limit its ability to develop nuclear weapons. American and Iranian negotiators have been planning to meet later this week for another round of talks, although Mr. Trump told reporters on Monday that Iran had adopted an “unacceptable” negotiating position.

The British warning came from the country’s maritime trade agency, which issued a public advisory saying that it had “been made aware of increased tensions within the region which could lead to an escalation of military activity having a direct impact on mariners.” The advisory urged commercial vessels transiting the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz to use heightened caution.

The sense of alarm was heightened by comments from Iran’s defense minister, General Aziz Nasirzadeh, who warned on Wednesday that in the event of a conflict following failed nuclear talks, the United States would suffer heavy losses from Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Middle East. His comments were reported by Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency.

The State Department did not provide details on how many personnel would be removed from Iraq, or why. The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that nonessential U.S. personnel would be withdrawn from Baghdad, and that nonessential personnel and family members of diplomats had been authorized to depart from U.S. embassies in Bahrain and Kuwait.

http://archive.today/2025.06.10-210801/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/magazine/romania-election-tiktok-russia-maga.html

Early last December, Adrian Thiess, a well-connected political fixer in Romania, sent an urgent text message to Brad Parscale, the digital media strategist who had been working off and on for Donald J. Trump since 2012. Thiess and Parscale bonded in 2019, Thiess told me, when Parscale was managing Trump’s re-election campaign. Thiess had paid Parscale to speak at a conference in Bucharest called “Let’s Make Political Marketing Great Again” — as it happened, the day before Robert S. Mueller III, then serving as a special counsel, submitted his report about Trump’s dealings with Russia. The pair hit it off, both feeling the Russian accusations were a hoax. In the years since, Thiess had parlayed his friendship with Parscale into an entree into Trump’s inner circle, even inviting the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., to Bucharest for his own paid talk.

But it wasn’t a speaking gig that was on Thiess’s mind that night — he wanted to sound an alarm. “Have you seen what’s happening in Romania?” Thiess asked.

Thiess was referring to the Romanian presidential election, specifically to a candidate named Calin Georgescu. Georgescu was a 62-year-old agronomist who had turned to nationalist politics, starting out as a fringe candidate who claimed on television that electronic chips were planted in soft drinks. Georgescu also professed a love for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for whose manifesto attacking Dr. Anthony J. Fauci he penned an introduction in its Romanian edition. He made several promotional TikTok videos of himself that appeared to be inspired by Vladimir V. Putin’s flamboyantly macho campaign imagery — in which Georgescu was sometimes on horseback, sometimes doing judo.

The iconography was striking because Putin was extremely unpopular in Romania, a NATO member with an expanding air base on the Black Sea whose importance has grown since the war in Ukraine began. Georgescu, however, railed against NATO, which he said was dragging the country into World War III, while hailing Putin as a “patriot and a leader.” What’s more, Georgescu said he had spent no money on his campaign, and he didn’t throw a lot of big outdoor rallies like his competitors. So it came as a big surprise when, after the first round of voting in November, Georgescu won — beating all five top candidates and sending him to a runoff that would decide the election.

The next jolt came days later from Romania’s top court: It abruptly halted the second round, essentially canceling the country’s election. All ballots from the first round were thrown out, and the judges told the country to vote again. Georgescu had cheated, Romania’s intelligence agency now said — his campaign had colluded with Russia, which had run a vast disinformation campaign on, it turned out, TikTok. An army of fake accounts, some 25,000 strong, had been mobilized on the platform by the Kremlin to promote Georgescu. And authorities said a series of illegal campaign payments had been made through cryptocurrencies to support Georgescu online, leading to speculation that the candidate would soon be under criminal investigation. The accusations stunned Romanians, but the solution — to cancel an election and order a do-over — shocked the country just as much.

What follows is the story of an alliance that formed between America’s conservatives and European nationalists who saw common cause — not just in a canceled election in Romania, but across a global map where the right is on the rise. No country in the European Union has ever taken such a measure as drastic as canceling a presidential election, and it comes at a time when the political establishment across the region, facing an antidemocratic right and an increasingly anti-establishment electorate, is taking other measures once seen as unthinkable. As Thierry Breton, a former E.U. commissioner said of the canceled election: “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously do it if necessary in Germany.”

http://archive.today/2025.06.09-221437/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/world/canada/carney-canada-nato-military-spending.html

Declaring that Canada is too dependent on the United States for its defense, Prime Minister Mark Carney on Monday committed to having his country meet NATO’s spending target this year, seven years ahead of schedule.

The Canadian government said it would immediately add 9.3 billion Canadian dollars, about $6.8 billion, to its defense budget. That will raise total defense-related spending this year to 62.7 billion dollars, slightly higher than the 2 percent NATO target. To get there, the government included 2.5 billion Canadian dollars in spending related to “defense and security” for other departments, including the Canadian Coast Guard, an unarmed civilian agency which is under the department of fisheries.

President Trump and leaders of other allied nations have long criticized Canada for consistently falling well short of NATO’s goal of a military budget equal to 2 percent of each member’s gross domestic product. Canada’s previous government, under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, planned to raise Canada’s spending, which is at 1.37 percent, to meet the military alliance’s target by 2032.

Mr. Carney laid out a long shopping list for the military, including “new submarines, aircraft, ships, arm vehicles and artillery.”

He also said the military would add drones and sensors to monitor the seafloor in the Arctic, a vast region of the country that is becoming a source of competition among global powers like Russia and China.

Mr. Carney also said that money would be directed toward much-needed improvements, noting that three of the Royal Canadian Navy’s four diesel submarines were not seaworthy.

Mr. Carney, speaking in Toronto, said that new geopolitical threats, advances in technology and the fraying of Canada’s alliance with the United States demanded an accelerated spending schedule.

“We stood shoulder to shoulder with the Americans throughout the Cold War and in the decades that followed, as the United States played a dominant role on the world stage,” he said. “Today, that dominance is a thing of the past.”

Mr. Carney also said the country would no longer rely as extensively on American defense contractors to supply its armed forces, underscoring Canada’s strained relations with the United States and focus on shifting away from its neighbor.

While Mr. Carney promised to increase spending by billions of Canadian dollars, he did not specify where the funds would come from. Government officials spoke mostly in broad terms about how the money would be used.

http://archive.today/2025.06.09-025229/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/08/world/middleeast/gaza-flotilla-greta-thunberg-israel.html

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said early on Monday morning that a Gaza-bound ship carrying a dozen pro-Palestinian activists and some aid had been diverted toward Israeli shores and that its passengers were expected to return to their home countries.

The civilian ship, called the Madleen, has been operating under the auspices of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, an international grass-roots campaign that opposes the nearly two-decade-old blockade of Gaza. The ship set sail from Sicily on June 1. The passengers included the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament.

The Madleen was carrying only a symbolic amount of humanitarian assistance — an amount the Israeli foreign ministry dismissed as “tiny” in its statement, and “less than a single truckload of aid.”

Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said on Sunday that he had instructed the country’s military to prevent the vessel from reaching Gaza.

In a blunt statement, he said, “To Greta the antisemite and her friends, propagandists for Hamas — I say clearly: You would do well to turn back, because you won’t get to Gaza. Israel will act against any attempt to breach the blockade or aid terrorist organizations by sea, air or land.”

Israel said at the time that its soldiers, some of whom had rappelled onto the ship from helicopters, came under ambush and were attacked with clubs, metal rods and knives.

“The ‘selfie yacht’ of the ‘celebrities’ is safely making its way to the shores of Israel,” the Israeli foreign ministry wrote on social media on Monday. It accused “Greta and others” of attempting “to stage a media provocation whose sole purpose was to gain publicity.” The ministry later posted video of what it said were the passengers, who were wearing life jackets and being offered sandwiches and water.

http://archive.today/2025.06.08-025637/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/us/trump-national-guard-deploy-rare.html

President Trump took extraordinary action on Saturday by deploying 2,000 National Guard troops to quell immigration protesters in California, making rare use of federal powers and bypassing the authority of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom.

Governors almost always control the deployment of National Guard troops in their states. But according to legal scholars, the president has the authority under Title 10 of the United States Code to federalize the National Guard units of states to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

In a presidential memo, Mr. Trump said, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Saturday night that President Trump was deploying soldiers in response to “violent mobs” that she said had attacked federal law enforcement and immigration agents. The 2,000 troops would “address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester,” she said.

Protests have occurred Friday and Saturday in California to oppose federal immigration raids on workplaces in California. The latest incident was at a Home Depot in Paramount, Calif., about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, immediately rebuked the president’s action, indicating that Mr. Trump had usurped his own state authority.

Mr. Trump suggested deploying U.S. forces in the same manner during his first term to suppress outbreaks of violence during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

He opted against doing so at the time, but he has repeatedly raised the idea of using troops to secure border states.

http://archive.today/2025.06.07-203705/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/us/la-immigration-raids-ice.html

Protesters and immigration officials clashed again in Los Angeles County on Saturday as agents conducted raids at a Home Depot, local officials said, just a day after dramatic standoffs at similar workplace raids elsewhere in the area.

In Paramount, Calif., about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, protesters squared off with federal immigration agents after at least two immigration raids took place on Saturday, including one at the Home Depot and another at a nearby meatpacking facility.

Video of the protests showed agents using what appeared to be flash-bang grenades to disperse the protesters. Immigrant rights advocates said that the agents, who were wearing riot gear, had also used some type of tear gas to break up the crowds. José Luis Solache Jr., a state assembly member, said on social media that he was among those who were hit with tear gas.

The standoff followed a series of immigration raids that swept through Los Angeles on Friday, which resulted in chaos outside a federal building downtown where people detained in the raids were being processed.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, said on social media on Saturday that the protests on Friday were “an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.”

“What took place in Los Angeles yesterday was appalling,” said Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of ICE. He added that Los Angeles police officers took “over two hours” to respond to the unrest, “despite being called multiple times.” The Police Department has not responded publicly to Mr. Lyons’s remarks.

On Saturday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said that it was not involved in any of the federal operations and that its response was limited to traffic and crowd control.

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