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by NAINA SHARMA

Iran’s retaliatory strike on Al Udeid Air Base highly calibrated and limited but nonetheless raises urgent questions about US deterrence

On June 23, 2025, Iran launched a volley of missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military installation in the region. The strike, reportedly named Operation Basharat al-Fath (“Glad Tidings”), was Iran’s direct retaliation for the US President Donald Trump’s airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites days earlier.

While most of Iran’s 14 missiles were intercepted by US and Qatari air defenses, one landed near the base, there were no casualties but geopolitically, the strike was seismic. While Iran had directly attacked US forces before, most notably in Iraq in 2020 – this is the first time it has struck a US base located inside a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) state.

The Al Udeid attack thus marked a bold departure: an overt, calculated warning that the US military presence in the Gulf no longer guarantees insulation for host states. Iranian officials had warned that the American attack on its territory has “expanded the scope of legitimate targets.”

That threat is now no longer hypothetical, because with Al Udeid, Iran has firmly placed US bases on Arab soil inside its retaliatory framework.

Qatar responded by closing its airspace and within hours, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, and the UAE followed, shutting down one of the busiest air corridors in the world. Commercial flights were canceled or diverted.

Qatar Airways suffered major disruptions, even Dubai International Airport suspended operations briefly. The economic fallout from just one attack illustrated the fragility of Gulf infrastructure in any direct US-Iran conflict.

Though airspace was reopened later, the region was shaken. Even Gulf states with recent tensions like Bahrain and the UAE quickly expressed solidarity with Qatar. Bahrain called the strike a “blatant violation of sovereignty,” and the UAE warned of the “urgent need to de-escalate.”

Iran’s strike had not only raised the military stakes but also triggered a rare moment of diplomatic unity born out of shared vulnerability.

Asia Times for more

by YVES SMITH

Yves here. Below Michael Hudson explains how long-standing the neocon plans to break up Iran have been (as going back to before they were called “neocons”) and why this project has been and still is seen as vital to preserving US dominance.

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is The Destiny of Civilization. Originally published at The Democracy Collective

Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that does not pose any visible threat to the United States. This appeal to reason misses the neocon logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea. That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.

What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.

Around 1974 or 1975 there was much talk of creation a New International Economic Order (NIEO). I was working at the Hudson Institution with Herman Kahn on international finance and trade, and he brought me to sit in on a military strategy discussion of plans being made already at that time to possibly overthrow Iran and break it up into ethnic parts. Herman found the weakest spot to be Baluchistan, on Iran’s northeast border with Pakistan. The Kurds, Tajiks and the Turkic Azerbaijanis are others whose ethnicities were to be played off against each other, giving U.S. diplomacy a key potential client dictatorship to reshape both Iranian and Pakistani political orientation if need be.

Three decades later, by 2003, General Wesley Clark pointed to Iran as being the capstone of seven countries that the United States needed to control in order to dominate the Middle East, starting with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, culminating in Iran.

Fast Forward to Today

Most of the discussion of the geopolitical dynamics of how the international economy is changing is understandably focusing on the attempt by the BRICS and other countries to escape from U.S. control by de-dollarizing their trade and investment. But the most active dynamic reshaping the international economy has been Donald Trump’s whirlwind presidency since January has to lock other countries into a U.S.-centered economy by agreeing not to focus their trade and investment on China, Russia and other states seeking their own autonomy from U.S. control. That is what the war in Iran is all about.

Trump expected that countries would respond to his threat to create tariff chaos in hope of regaining the U.S. market by reaching an agreement not to trade with China and indeed to accept U.S. trade and financial sanctions against it, Russia, Iran and other countries deemed to be a threat to the unipolar U.S. global order. This fight explains the U.S. objective in its current fight with Iran, as well as with Russia and China – and Cuba, Venezuela other countries seeking to restructure their economic policies to recover their independence.

From the view of U.S. strategists, the emergence of China’s industrial socialism poses an existential danger to U.S. unipolar control in providing a model that other countries might seek to join to recover the national sovereignty that has been steadily eroded in recent decades.

The Biden Administration and a host of U.S. Cold Warriors frame the issue as being between democracy (defined as countries supporting U.S. policy as client regimes) and autocracy (seeking national self-reliance from foreign trade and financial dependency. This way of framing the international economy views China as an existential threat to U.S. unipolar domination, and that attitude explains the US/NATO attack on Russia in the Ukraine war of attrition, and most recently the US/Israeli war against Iran threatening to engulf the whole world in U.S.-backed war

The motivation has nothing to do with Iran’s attempt to protect its national sovereignty by developing an atom bomb. The basic problem is that the United States has taken the initiative in trying to pre-empt Iran and other countries from breaking away from dollar hegemony.

Here’s how the neocons spell out the U.S. national interest in overthrowing the Iranian government and introducing a regime change – not necessarily a secular democratic regime change, but perhaps an extension of the ISIS-Al Qaida Syrian Wahabi terrorists.

Naked Capitalism for more

by MATTHEW WARD AGIUS

Overhauling public policy could be key to improving long-term health outcomes says Brazil investigation of eight national dietary surveys.

What you need to know

• A Brazil-led study

• has found a link showing premature deaths increase as ultraprocessed food consumption rises.
• Stronger food cultures tend to have lower rates of death attributed to these products.
• The US is encouraging food manufacturers to switch from artificial to natural additives.

An investigation by one of Brazil’s leading health research institutes has linked high intakes of ultra processed foods to greater rates of premature death.

For some countries like the US and United Kingdom, as many as 1 in 7 deaths could be attributed to ultraprocessed food consumption.

The study led by researchers from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, based in Rio de Janeiro, analyzed data from eight countries, including nationally representative dietary surveys and mortality data.

They discovered what they call a “linear dose-response association,” which means that as the amount of dietary energy derived from ultraprocessed foods increases, so too does the risk of mortality from any cause.

While many studies have found ultraprocessed foods may be bad for health due to deficiencies in key nutrients, this study investigated the impact of dietary patterns, or how having a diet higher in these food products, on mortality risk.

Eduardo Nilson, a nutritional epidemiologist at the Oswald Cruz Foundation, who led the study, said the focus on single nutrients is “reductionist,” and that a whole-of-diet assessment was necessary to understand the impact of ultraprocessed food.

“We should look at the pattern of the diet,” Nilson told DW. He points to Brazil’s adoption of “food system” dietary guidelines and other interventions to promote healthier food systems as a way forward to reducing mortality.

What are ultraprocessed foods?

The University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, developed a classification system to group foods based on the amount of processing a product undergoes before being sold to consumers.

The four groups used by this Nova classification system are:

• Unprocessed or minimally processed foods, which can include whole foods, fruits and vegetables, fresh meat, eggs and milk.
• Processed culinary ingredients, which can include certain condiments, oils, salts and sugars.
• Processed foods, which can include preserved and tinned fruits and vegetables, preserved meat products, breads and fresh cheese.
• Ultraprocessed foods are those that undergo industrial processing and modification using food derived substances such as fats, starches and proteins, and may include coloring, flavor enhancing chemicals and preservatives. These include chocolates, soda and energy drinks, pre-packaged meals, baked products and pastries, certain breakfast cereals, sweetened yogurts and juices.

Ultraprocessed foods — sometimes abbreviated to UPFs — are often referred to as “junk foods,” which should be consumed sparingly.

They have been associated with 32 health impacts and disease, including obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, cancer, and cognitive health, gastrointestinal, metabolic and respiratory problems.

How do different countries compare?

Of the eight countries studied, those in Latin America had the lowest share of UPFs in their diet and the lowest number of premature deaths that could be attributed to their consumption. 

That contrasts to four major Anglosphere economies — Australia, Canada, the UK and US — with particularly high premature mortality, and larger proportions of UPFs in the average diet. 

Nilson attributes durable food cultures that have resisted infiltration by UPFs as crucial in keeping premature death rates low.

“It’s not surprising that the countries that have the stronger food culture, that have been less changed by ultraprocessed foods have maintained healthy patterns,” said Nilson. “We’re talking Japan, Italy, France, the Mediterranean countries in general.”

“With the Brazilian food pattern, with rice, beans, salad, fruits and some kind of protein, it also leads to a cardioprotective outcome.”

Deutsche Welle News for more

by MANASH GHOSH

A new book details the circumstances which led to the Bangbandhu’s assassination.

The following is an excerpt from the book Mujib’s Blunders: The Power and the Plot Behind His Killing.

Fidel Castro was right in giving a prescient and timely warning to Bangabandhu that showing magnanimity to his political enemies, who had dourly opposed the Liberation War, would be considered as a sign of inherent weakness in his character and not as a moral virtue. His benevolence would only spur them on to conspire and act with greater gusto and vengeance against him and his government and, in the process, frustrate his dream of building a sonar (golden) Bangladesh.

Castro was among the few world leaders who had paid the most glowing tribute to Bangabandhu saying he had not seen the mighty Himalayas but had seen Mujib. And yet Bangabandhu paid no heed to Castro’s advice as he thought that by accommodating the committed pro-Pak minded officers in the top echelons of his administration and uniformed services, he had been able to win their trust and confidence.

‘Mujib’s Blunders’, Manash Ghosh, Niyogi Books, 2025.

However, when he started getting hard evidence of how some of his ambitious plans and projects were being sabotaged by an influential section of the bureaucracy, he confided in his party colleagues that he had committed a big blunder by placing repatriates in key bureaucratic posts. He had confessed saying he had tried to build a Bangladesh of his dreams with untrustworthy Pakistani materials and admitted that this was the ‘worst mistake’ of his life.

The Wire for more

As NATO’s secretary general urges member nations to ‘shift to a wartime mindset’, now more than ever it is clear that this aggressive alliance poses a threat to peace on a global scale.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On 24 and 25 June, the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) will strut around the streets of The Hague for their annual summit – the first since Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency and the first under new NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. On 13 March, Rutte visited Trump in the Oval Office, where he praised the US president on a number of fronts, including the war in Ukraine. Rutte ended the meeting by telling Trump that he was looking forward to hosting him in The Hague, his ‘hometown’, and was eager to ‘work together to ensure that [the NATO summit] will be a splash, a real success projecting American power on the world stage’.

There are thirty-two full members of NATO, thirty from Europe and two from North America. The United States is only one among them, yet, as Rutte made clear in his statement, it is the one that defines NATO and is but a vehicle for the projection of US power. There should be no doubt about that fact. It is precisely for this reason that the idea of the US leaving NATO – as Trump threatened to do if the Europeans did not increase their military spending – is moot. NATO is the United States.

From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the No Cold War collective, and our European partners at the Zetkin Forum for Social Research comes our June dossier, NATO: The Most Dangerous Organisation on Earth. The title is bold but not hyperbolic. It reflects the facts before us. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has conducted some of the most lethal wars on the planet and now threatens us with the unthinkable possibility of nuclear conflict. The dossier provides ample evidence of this. Here, we simply note two of the alliance’s more egregious acts over the past decades:

• It was NATO that dismembered Yugoslavia in 1999.
• It was NATO that destroyed the Libyan state in 2011.

It is erroneous to see NATO as an autonomous actor. NATO, as Rutte so eloquently stated, is an instrument of ‘projecting American power on the world stage’. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has used NATO to incorporate Eastern Europe into a pliable set of states subordinate to its interests. When the European Union expanded eastward and sought to build autonomous European institutions, NATO came along and ensured that the United States would be the engine of any European expansion. One might be forgiven for having forgotten the warning that came not from Russia’s current President Vladimir Putin but from his decidedly pro-US predecessor Boris Yeltsin, who warned during NATO’s 1995 bombing of the Bosnian Serbs, ‘this is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. … The game of war could burst out across the whole of Europe’. In 1990, the Soviet Union reluctantly agreed to the reunification of Germany and its entry into NATO under assurances that the alliance would not expand eastward (the US also used the move to ‘keep the Germans down’ bykeeping them anchored within NATO structures). But there was no agreement that the US could use NATO as an instrument to project power right up to Russia’s borders. Nor was there any mandate for NATO to be used in far-off theatres like the South China Sea to confront the People’s Republic of China under the pretext of freedom of navigation and regional stability. NATO – against the self-interest of its European member states – has been drawn into confrontations against Russia and China that are entirely about the US wanting to shackle its ‘near-peer rivals’. These confrontations have nothing to do with European security: neither Russia nor China have threatened Europe, with Russia repeatedly reiterating that its war in Ukraine has everything to do with threats on its borders and China emphasising that it is a defensive power with no aggressive intentions regarding Europe.

The Tricontinental for more

by FREDERIC LORDON

The first says: ‘Zionism could never have triumphed without the Holocaust.’ The second adds: ‘Netanyahu more or less let it happen in order to take back Gaza.’ Who are these people? Where are they speaking? How long before they are denounced by the media, summoned by the police and taken into custody? The answer: they are talking heads of the French political centre, the former MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit and erstwhile education minister Luc Ferry, appearing live on the cable news channel LCI. As for their public condemnation and visit to the police station, we’re still waiting. Such is the scale of the tectonic shift.  

The astonishing volte-face unfolding before our eyes, and the collective whitewashing that accompanies it, will go down as a textbook case in the annals of propaganda. A reversal emanating from the most hypocritical precinct of the propaganda bloc – the ‘humanists’: Delphine Horvilleur, France’s first female rabbi, Joann Sfar, a well-known cartoonist, and Anne Sinclair, the former TV anchor. Celebrated for their moral integrity, all three were perfectly comfortable with eighteen months of mass slaughter, systematically smearing those who saw things clearly from the beginning and took every risk – symbolic, legal, even physical – to decry the genocide and the obscene conflation of support for Palestine with antisemitism. Then, once these paragons of virtue gave the signal, the mass of denialists moved in lockstep, pretending to open their eyes – or better yet, claiming that they had never been closed in the first place. 

Why have our ‘humanists’ finally come around? Not out of any stirring of a universal conscience, but rather to protect a set of interests, starting with their own, symbolic and reputational, imperilled by complicity with a crime that has broken every taboo; followed by those of the Zionist project itself, whose political and moral credentials have been shipwrecked, and yet must be kept afloat – hence the need to present its ‘humanist’ face.

Here is the heart of the matter: the question of Zionism, the axiom that must be preserved at all costs, whether by silencing dissent or feigning contrition. This is the neuralgic point where repression persists, even amid the great reversal. The Socialists and the Greens, in the colonial camp from day one, deniers of seventy-seven years of occupation, censors of every voice raised in defence of the Palestinian cause, mute before the massacred until permission to speak had been granted – these same Socialists and Greens, only a month ago, voted through the infamous university censorship law affirming the equivalence of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and criminalizing the former in the name of the latter. All the more perverse, at a moment when the concept of Zionism is the only thing preventing the blanket attribution of a crime to all Jews, including those who utterly reject it. Anti-Zionism, far from being equivalent to antisemitism, is a bulwark against it.

In these quarters, European panic is understandably at fever pitch. By what right do the perpetrators of the Judeocide presume to pass judgement on the state of Israel? Overwhelming historical guilt, complicated by a troubled philosemitic conversion, logically issued in a carte blanche – and the message was received. But the truth is this: there will be no settlement either in the region or, by the classic boomerang effect, at home, until we break with the wretched euphemisms of the ‘humanists’ and return to politics: that is, to calling the indisputable into question.

New Left Review for more

DEMOCRACY NOW

A new report in The New York Times takes a deep dive into Project Esther, a policy blueprint to crush the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States from the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank best known for spearheading Project 2025. Project Esther was formed during the Biden administration and lays out plans for surveilling, silencing and punishing pro-Palestinian activists, including deporting non-U.S. citizens and withholding funds from universities. Many of the Heritage Foundation’s proposals appear to have been taken up by the Trump administration.

“Project Esther aims to rebrand all critics of Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters as providing material support for terrorism,” says investigative reporter Katie Baker. “They’re very explicit that this is what they’re doing. … This is all laid out online, and it has been for months.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

We turn now to a new report in The New York Times that takes a deep dive into Project Esther, a policy blueprint from the far-right Heritage Foundation, best known for creating Project 2025. Project Esther was launched October 7th, 2024, and lays out plans for surveilling, silencing and punishing pro-Palestinian activists, including deporting non-U.S. citizens.

New York Times investigative reporter Katie J.M. Baker spoke to the people behind Project Esther for her new piece, “The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement.” Katie joins us now to explain.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. What did you find?

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, so, I found that the architect behind Project Esther said that it’s no coincidence that what we’re seeing in terms of actions taken against universities and pro-Palestinian protesters on a federal, state and local level is happening months after they released their report.

AMY GOODMAN: So, The Forward had originally talked about this kind of white paper of the Heritage Foundation, but you went much further. You named names and talked to people behind Project Esther. Tell us who they are.

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Yeah, so, the woman overseeing Project Esther is Victoria Coates. She is a former national security adviser to Trump during his first administration, and she has a long history of working on Israeli matters. And then, Robert Greenway ran the Abraham Accords, and he’s one of the co-authors of Project Esther.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you can talk about what exactly their plans are? And how many Jewish groups are involved in shaping Project Esther, as they talk about — as the leaders of Project Esther talk about combating antisemitism?

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Yeah, so, Project Esther aims to rebrand all critics of Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters as providing material support for terrorism. So that means that anyone who’s ever participated in a pro-Palestinian protest at a university, for example, is potentially providing material support and should be fired or deported or otherwise ostracized from what they call open society. And there’s not very many Jewish groups involved in this project. There are a few, but the task force that inspired Project Esther was primarily Christian and right-wing organizations.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the role of Christian Zionists?

Democracy Now for more

by PEPE ESCOBAR

This is as serious as it gets. Let’s survey the chessboard – from micro to macro.

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Israel’s shock’n awe on Iran – straight from the trademark US playbook – essentially failed, despite the initial combination of speed, meticulous military planning and the element of surprise, including hacking the Iranian electronic communications within the military grid; decapitation of the vertical IRGC nomenklatura; the spiderweb drone attack playbook; and bombing – ultimately ineffectual – of key nodes of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.It took hours for top Iranian technicians to get their grid back. And once that happened, the tide began to turn, to the point that after surgical missile volleys deep in the night on Sunday, the IRGC announced its capability to seriously disrupt Israel’s command and control systems using “enhanced intelligence”, thus breaching Iron – or Paper – Dome.

Absolutely key infrastructure nodes in Tel Aviv and Haifa have been destroyed – from the Rafael weapons complex (specialized in missiles, drones, cyber warfare and Iron Dome components) to the power plant and oil refinery in Haifa. This is historic in more ways than one.

Compound the cries of joy all across the lands of Islam to the massive psychological trauma inflicted on Israel. The myth of Israeli invincibility has been definitely shattered. Unleashing hell from above, killing women and children and spinning like there’s no tomorrow does not win a war against a real opponent.

The tweaked IRGC strategy – applied by an instantly revamped leadership – is being fine-tuned day by day in a calculated, surgical manner. It’s not that hard for the IRGC to totally paralyze Israel’s economy. Israel has only one oil refinery (already bombed); three ports, of which one is already bankrupt (Eilat) and another is on fire (Haifa); and one airport (already in dire straits).

The blowback on Tel Aviv’s desperate, indeed suicidal move – no chess involved – is in effect. Tehran is proving that every Zionist axis calculation that Iran could – and was – bled dry in a matter of hours was, predictably, false.

The POTUS, for his part, fell into a voracious trap. His MAGA base is already fractured – in depth. Non-Zionist MAGA is the overwhelming majority. He admitted in a stunning infantilist post that he knew everything about the Israeli shock’n awe all along.

Sputnik for more

by SHARON ADARLO

Doctor ChatGPT will see you now.

Since OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT to the public back in 2022, people have done all sorts of ill-advised things with the AI tool — from attorneys filing court documents that cite hallucinated caselaw to everyday users spiraling into severe mental health crises as the chatbot affirms delusional thoughts.

Now add to that list: asking ChatGPT for advice on how to inject facial filler — a trendy cosmetic procedure intended to puff up features like lips and cheeks — at home, without the assistance of a medical professional.

“I’ll be injecting myself tonight,” one Redditor wrote in a recent post. “I have all things needed on hand and I’m trying to research the best way of keeping things as sterile/clean as possible. I asked ChatGPT and it said I should absolutely not use normal gloves, I googled and can’t find any specific info on it.”

Needless to say, this is a resoundingly terrible idea. Please don’t do this procedure at home, and instead go to a qualified medical facility so you don’t hurt yourself. (While pros can screw up this process too, at least they can be held liable.)

Unfortunately, nobody chastised the Redditor for asking ChatGPT for advice. In fact, a quick perusal of the same subreddit, where thrifty beauty aficionados swap tips on administering cosmetic procedures on their own, finds a huge number of similarly alarming situations.

“I used ChatGPT to help me map my tox and PN placements, how to dilute my tox facial and depth of injections, etc,” one commenter enthused. “If you send it annotated photos it can view your mapping and correct it.”

Another user turned to AI after problems with a DIY cosmetic procedure.

“Asked [ChatGPT], and it said that since a small amount likely migrated to cheek area through tear trough [sic],” they wrote. “But since it migrated, likely was dissolved into bloodstream. Fibrosis possible but may resolve. If fat was dissolved it should be very negligible.”

AI models may be set to revolutionize medicine in certain ways, such as at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which is incorporating AI into training doctors. Researchers are excited about AI being used to diagnose diseases such as prostate cancer and heart disease earlier than before.

But the jury is still out on how effective AI chatbots will be in dispensing useful medical advice. For example, a recent npj Digital Medicine paper in March revealed that while large language models such as ChatGPT are more accurate than search engines, they are still going to spew out more than 30 percent of incorrect advice under certain circumstances.

In addition, the quality of output is reliant on the quality of the prompt.

Futurism for more