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Epstein’s Ties to Israeli Intelligence

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Epstein files: Western media must stop burying the Israel connection

by MOHAMAD ELMASRY

Since the release late last month of millions more files in the Jeffrey Epstein saga, western media outlets have provided nonstop coverage. Yet despite an extensive focus on the disgraced financier’s relationships with powerful figures, his links to Israeli political and intelligence circles have been largely ignored, marking a conspicuous omission.

Searches across online news archives turn up thousands of recent stories on legitimate issues of public concern, highlighting victims of Epstein’s abuse and the alleged involvement of prominent persons and groups in that abuse. 

The New York Times, PBS, NBC and CNN, among other notable outlets, have drawn from the files to publish exhaustive accounts of powerful men with ties to Epstein.

In addition to naming business, academic and sports figures, much reporting has focused on political figures, such as US President Donald Trump, former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland, and the UK’s Prince Andrew and politician Peter Mandelson.

Media coverage has also emphasised Epstein’s relationships with foreign countries, with Reuters and the Washington Post running stories about his alleged ties to Russia. Other pieces have documented Epstein’s purported links to Norway and Slovakia. 

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The criminal elite exposed in the Epstein files are burying the truth

by JONATHAN COOK

If you struggle to cope with the endless pressure to communicate in an ever-more connected world, spare a thought for the late serial paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. 

The flood of three million documents released by the US Department of Justice over the weekend confirm that Epstein spent an inordinate amount of time corresponding with the huge network of powerful acquaintances he had developed. 

Emailing alone looks to have been almost a full-time job for him – and in a real sense, it was.

The personal attention he devoted to billionaires, royalty, political leaders, statesmen, celebrities, academics and media elites was how he kept himself at the heart of this vast network of power. 

His address book was a who’s who of those who shape our sense of how the world ought to be run. But it was also critical to how he drew some of these same powerful figures deeper into his orbit, and into a world of debauched and exploitative private parties in New York and on his Caribbean island. 

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by SADIAH QURESHI

Technologies of preserving and reviving organisms are already redefining the meaning of life, death, and extinction itself

In 2003, a unique baby goat lived and died. In doing so, she might be regarded as the first species to have endured the indignity of going extinct twice.

The Pyrenean ibex, also known as the bucardo, was once native to the mountainous regions of Spain. By the mid-20th century, hunting had severely depleted populations. By 1999, only one survived, named Celia. When she died a year later, the bucardo was declared extinct.

While she was alive, tissue samples from Celia’s ear were collected, and frozen in liquid nitrogen. Encouraged by previously successful techniques for cloning animals, a team of Spanish, French and Belgian scientists hoped to bring back the bucardo. They cultured the harvested cells to isolate bucardo DNA, and transferred cloned genomes to domestic goat eggs with the nuclei removed. A total of 208 embryos were transferred to surrogate mothers: either Spanish ibex (a still-living, related species) or hybrids of Spanish ibex and domestic goats. Seven pregnancies resulted, but only one goat carried to full term. That goat gave birth to a bucardo kid by caesarean section.

The tiny Pyrenean ibex was genetically identical to the last living bucardo, making her a direct clone. But while the kid appeared healthy until birth, she never took a breath. The desperate team tried to help her breathe, but she was declared dead within a few minutes. An autopsy on her miniature body identified a defective lung.

The story of the cloned bucardo kid can be told in many ways. Was this a rare double-extinction? Perhaps. More cautiously, we might suggest that the experiment was never a successful de-extinction at all, because the kid was never able to perform the same ecological function as the lost species. But there is also a more provocative telling: that neither happened, because the bucardo never went extinct in the first place.

In recent years, some advocates of de-extinction technologies have argued that if an animal’s tissues and cultured cells persist in a state of cryopreservation, it is not extinct, but ‘evolutionarily torpid’. In other words, the death of the last living animal is not an ending, merely a pause.

This reframing isn’t merely semantic – it reshapes the meaning of conservation. If frozen cells forestall extinction, when do we declare a species lost? And if genetic material assuages our guilt that a ‘way of being’ survives, why invest in protecting living animals? The question cuts deeper: what distinguishes being alive from existing as dormant genetic material?

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by STEPHEN CHEN

Each March, many of the country’s most selective colleges and universities release their admissions decisions, reviving debates over the roles of race, wealth and privilege – and putting Americans’ cultural obsession with rankings back in the spotlight.

Meanwhile, a more personal set of questions will emerge in many homes and schools. Who got into a “better” school, and why? And for those who didn’t, what to do with a dream school deferred? What’s missing are more fundamental questions about the costs of striving for status and how to know when to stop.

From my former life as a college counselor to my current one as a psychology professor, I’ve spent more than two decades working with Asian American families, the demographic group that often finds itself at the center of college admissions debates. I listen as they grapple with questions of race, social status and who makes it in the U.S. and why. I’ve also seen firsthand, both inside and outside of the research lab, how some students’ never-ending quest for achievement takes a toll on their mental health.

Americans’ frenzy over college admissions may be a relatively modern affliction, but striving for status is timeless and universal, and it can benefit from the wisdom of ancient texts. This is why, in my team’s research with Asian American families, we bring the Chinese philosopher Laozi into the conversation. Through the Daodejing, one of the central texts of Daoism, Laozi offers perspectives from a tumultuous period of status-striving in Chinese history – and shifts our focus from comparison and competition to contentment.

The ‘success frame’

In interviews with Asian American parents, children and teens over the past 10 years, I hear echoes of what sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou call the “Asian American success frame”: success defined by elite educational credentials, graduate degrees and select occupations. Their research shows how the success frame is endorsed by Asian Americans across different ethnic groups, generations and socioeconomic brackets.

My team’s ongoing interviews, in turn, provide a window into how that idea of success is promoted. One mother told her 11-year-old son her wish is for him not to pursue an M.D. or a Ph.D., but both. Another parent of a 16-year-old with college applications on the horizon discouraged her from applying to state schools, because she had heard that some job recruiters consider only Ivy League resumes.

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by CINZIA ARRUZZA

Nancy Holmstrom’s From a Marxist-Feminist Point of View: Essays on Freedom, Rationality and Human Nature is a collection of essays written across several decades by a philosopher whose commitment to theoretically and politically integrating Marxism and feminism has remained unfashionably steady across half a century of shifting intellectual trends. Emerita Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University-Newark, Holmstrom has spent her career doing what analytic philosophy in its mainstream forms has largely refused to do: taking the political and economic structures that condition human life seriously and asking what philosophy—rigorously practiced—has to say about them. The book announces its ambition plainly. As Holmstrom writes in her introduction, the essays integrate her intellectual work with “the values I have been committed to all my life: freedom, justice and equality.”¹ What distinguishes this collection is that the integration is genuine. In Holmstrom’s case, the political commitments are not context for the philosophical work—they are its content.

The volume is organized into four thematic parts—“Modes of Production,” “Rationality,” “Freedom,” and “Human Nature/Women’s Nature”—unified by a sustained engagement with Marx’s concept of the mode of production and a normative commitment to freedom, equality, and social justice. Holmstrom is explicit that the sections are not independent but represent different theoretical angles on the same underlying question: how does capitalism structure social life, subjectivity, gender, and the horizon of emancipation? Together they constitute a systematic Marxist Feminist perspective.

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by MOHAMMED HANIF

ON THE NIGHT OF THE HANGING

Every thing is as calm and orderly as it should be in a jail devoted to the safety and care of one very important man. All prisoners but one are asleep in their cells, restless, dreaming of their victims or their loved ones, which in most cases are the same people.

The Rawalpindi sky is clear and full of stars; all the talk about omens is rubbish: there are no meteor showers, no storms brewing on the horizon, the sky is not going to shed tears of blood, the earth is not about to split open and swallow its wretched inhabitants and their grief.

The man who is awake has asked for a safety razor, claiming that he doesn’t want to look like a mullah in death. After consultations with superiors, the jail superintendent has sent for a barber, who shaves the man gently, making sure to clear the fuzz from his earlobes. The man asks for a cigar and the jail superintendent doesn’t need to ask for his superiors’ permission. No man who is about to be hanged in three hours and forty-five minutes has ever tried to kill himself with a Montecristo.

The jailer makes sure to light it himself; the man chews on his cigar, takes two deep puffs and regrets it, thinking maybe he should have quit when he had the time. The man asks for his Shalimar perfume, sprays himself and lies down on the floor. A mosquito buzzes near his ear. On any other night he might have called in the jailer and given him a dressing-down for infesting his prison cell with poisonous insects, might have accused him of being a tool of the White Elephant, his favourite invective for the United States of America, but tonight he just shoos the mosquito away half-heartedly, listening to the rising and fading whirr of its wings. He is grateful for the company.

Everyone agrees on the above events. Those who wanted to hang him, those who wanted to save him, those who wanted a martyr in the early morning whose blood could help them bring about a revolution, even those who were indifferent, all agree up to this point that the man lay down on the floor, pulled a sheet over himself and stayed still, dress-rehearsing being dead.

The latest novel by Mohammed Hanif is set in the immediate aftermath of the hanging of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but revolves around an eclectic cast of characters, including a disillusioned socialist who runs an English tuition centre for the children of peasants in OK Town, his childhood friend who is a mosque imam and who provides him space in his compound, the on-the-run young daughter of a former comrade and an ambitious young army captain deputed to gather intelligence against the martial law regime’s foes. Eos presents, with permission, excerpts from Rebel English Academy, published recently by Maktaba-i-Danyal in Pakistan…

Although everything was still and orderly in and around the cell where an about-to-be hanged man practised his death pose, there was activity, quite a lot of activity, around the country in some crucial spots. Many would later say, especially journalists and diplomats who made a living out of exaggeration, that it was the longest night of their lives, that they knew something historic, something catastrophic was about to happen. But only those who had been woken up without warning with a degree of rudeness would remember this night when their own time came.

Dawn for more

by SCOTT FERGUSON & WILLIAM SAAS

For over twenty years, India’s national rural jobs program provided a legal right to work for over 265 million people–the majority of them women–serving as a vital lifeline against poverty and a global model for social security. Tragically, however, that lifeline is now being cut.

In this episode, we speak with Khush Vachhrajani, writer and national coordinator at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research in India, about his recent article in The Wire, “How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More than it Hides.” Vachhrajani contextualizes the sudden 2026 demise of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and its replacement by the new Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (VB-G RAM G). As he explains, this shift effectively “kills the golden goose” for millions of rural workers by replacing a demand-driven legal guarantee with arbitrary budget caps and centralized control. We discuss the neoliberal money politics behind this move: a calculated transition from a rights-based framework that empowered workers to a supply-led scheme that prioritizes fiscal austerity over human dignity.

Still, our dialog is not merely a post-mortem of a fallen policy. From the “Save MGNREGA” nationwide agitations to defiant resolutions passed in thousands of Gram Sabhas, the people of India are actively fighting to reclaim their right to work. This episode explores both the devastating effects of the repeal and the growing movement of workers, unions, and activists who refuse to let this Golden Goose go quietly, proving that the struggle for democratic accountability is far from over.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

William Saas

Khush Vachhrajani, welcome to Money on the Left.

Khush Vachhrajani

Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.

William Saas

Could you start by just telling us a little bit about your background and what brought you to the kind of questions that you’re asking in your most recent research, which you’re producing through your position at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research, or SAFAR, and sharing on your Substack?

Khush Vachhrajani

Sure. So, I’m from India. I’m from this city called Ahmedabad, which is in the western state of Gujarat. That’s also where the Prime Minister comes from, so, I think it has gone on the maps because of that. But it’s also the state where Gandhi was born and a very long part of his life after coming back from South Africa, when he started his journey in India, began from the state that I come from. I studied in a school that was sort of built on the foundation of some of the principles that Gandhi himself sort of taught us as a society. I currently work with a collective called the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research.

We are a group who’s just interested in making democracy work on a day to day basis for the most marginalized. We don’t see democracy as just an election-to-election arrangement, but also in terms of a person’s right to be heard, a person’s right to grievance, a person’s right to participate in the smallest decision making that affects the person or the society as a whole.

The work also is sort of anchored in some of these democratic principles. Apart from that, I love to read. I have been a follower of many of the progressive ideas that you all have sort of built over a period of time on Money on the Left and also have learned immensely from the writing, and the guests who have come here which has also sort of shaped a very core part of my own politics around money, around looking at monetary design. I enjoy music. I enjoy sports, and I have a lovely dog who’s going to turn five years old this year, and her name is Estelle. And that’s it. That’s more or less about me.

Scott Ferguson

That’s great. Can you maybe talk a little bit about some of your experience? You also studied in the United States and worked in the United States for a little bit.

Khush Vachhrajani

I did, so I did my master’s in public affairs. In the US, I was at Brown University in 2019 and 20. So my education was over when the pandemic sort of kicked in. During my time in the US, I also spent three months working in Houston, in the Mayor’s Office of Complete Communities, which was an initiative largely to identify and then work towards supporting under-resourced and historically underrepresented communities in Houston. My task was to sort of look at the habitability question in one of those communities called Gulfton, where I learned a lot around some of the challenges that the United States also face in terms of the politics of, at times, immigration, challenges around creating a safer environment for many of the people who come to the United States with a lot of ambition or aspirations, and sometimes also out of desperation.

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by DREW FAVAKEH

Since the US and Israel first attacked Iran in late February, it has been easy to spot the stark difference between the New York Times’ distant coverage of Iran and its up-close and personal coverage of Israel.

Multiple Times employees are reporting from and currently living in Israel. These include reporters Isabel Kershner, Aaron Boxerman, Gabby Sobelman, Natan Odenheimer, Ronen Bergman, Adam Rasgon, Johnatan Reiss and Raja Abdulrahim, as well as Jerusalem bureau chief David M. Halbfinger.

They routinely report stories that center Israeli citizens, as in “How Israelis Feel About Another Potential War With Iran” (2/26/26). First-hand Times reports have Israelis taking “Shelter as Sirens Warn of Incoming Missiles” (2/28/26), feeling “Tense But Relieved That Iran’s Supreme Leader Is Dead” (3/1/26) and celebrating “Purim Amid Iranian Missile Attacks” (3/4/26). They also have penned stories on Iranian missile strikes in Israel mere hours after they took place (3/1/26, 3/18/26).

Many articles have been based primarily on statements from Israeli officials (3/1/26, 3/3/26, 3/11/26, 3/19/26) and US officials (3/2/26, 3/7/26). Other articles have centered on the perspective of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and what would benefit him (2/28/26, 3/14/26, 3/18/26).

Meanwhile, the Times has no reporters based in Iran, as its editors admitted in two Q&A-style articles (3/9/26, 3/16/26). Instead, the paper has largely relied on its Visual Investigations team (3/12/26) and reporters based elsewhere to cover Iran, including correspondents in Israel, the US, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, India, Sri Lanka, South Korea, England, France and Germany. The Times reporters who most often quote Iranian voices—like Farnaz Fassihi, Parin Behrooz (both based in the US) and Yeganeh Torbati (reporting from Turkey)—largely rely on telephone interviews (3/2/26, 3/27/26), along with “text messages and social media posts” (3/18/26).

This lack of on-the-ground coverage in Iran has directly resulted in slower coverage and confirmation of US/Israel culpability for deadly strikes. For example, it took five days for the Times (3/5/26) to report that the US was “most likely to have carried out the strike” on the school in Minab that killed at least 175 Iranian civilians, mostly schoolchildren.

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by WALDEN BELLO

A landmark book on a remarkable Asian personality comes out just in time for the 50th anniversary of the passing of Zhou Enlai.

An epic life deserves an epic biography, and Chen Jian provides this for Zhou, who was probably the consummate diplomat of the twentieth century. Chen combs the vast literature on the Chinese revolution as well as primary sources in the archives of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to give us a sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of the second most important figure in the struggle to free China from imperial domination and feudalism in the twentieth century, one that set the stage for its emergence as an economic superpower in the first quarter of twenty-first.

The world is most familiar with Zhou’s diplomatic performance, especially his role in bringing about the historic visit of President Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972. But probably equally important was his debut on the world stage in 1954-55. He was the central figure in the Geneva Conference of 1954, where he crossed swords with a hostile American delegation led by the arch-anti-Communist John Foster Dulles in an effort to forge a diplomatic settlement of the Korean War. Although he was not able to break the stalemate in that front, he enjoyed success on the second issue at that historic meeting, critically contributing to the formal end of the First Indochina War that saw the political dismantling of the French empire in Southeast Asia after its defeat on the battlefield by the Viet Minh.

After Geneva, Zhou’s most important next stop was Indonesia, where he was key in planting the seeds of the Non-Aligned Movement of countries in the Global South during the historic Bandung Conference in April 1955. His personal warmth and flexibility won over personalities as diverse as the onion-skinned Indian prime minister Nehru, the mercurial Indonesian leader Sukarno, and the pro-American Filipino diplomat Carlos P. Romulo. As a middle school student, Zhou loved acting in plays, and Chen speculates that “if Zhou indeed deserved the accolade as ‘one of the world’s greatest actors’…his performance in stage plays must have enabled him to practice those performing arts that would benefit him tremendously in his political and diplomatic career.”

The French Connection

Like many in his generation, Zhou was radicalized by the efforts of the western powers and Japan to carve up China into spheres of influence in the early decades of the twentieth century. Japan especially was a source of fascination, admired for its successful effort to catch up with the West but hated for its brazen moves to colonize China. Zhou spent a year and a half in Japan, trying to get into a university. Exile politics, however, got in the way of academic commitments, along with difficulties in learning Japanese.

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by ANANYA BHATTACHARYA

Quick commerce promises instant convenience, but it’s driven more by deep discounts and habit-building than real need.

Amazon has placed its bet on a service that has struggled to thrive in the West.

On March 17, the company started testing a 30-minute delivery service in select locations across the U.S, alongside one- and three-hour delivery options across thousands of American cities.

The move marks a renewed push into quick commerce — a model that has struggled to take hold in Western markets.

Amazon hasn’t entered this experiment blind. It has been running a 10-minute delivery service in India since June 2025, and a 15-minute service in the United Arab Emirates since October. Those markets offer a glimpse into both the promise — and the pitfalls — of ultrafast delivery.

China has built the largest quick-commerce market in the world at $125 billion. Around one in four people in China use these services. Around 200 million workers, up to 40% of China’s urban workforce, rely on digital platforms for employment. 

India is inundated with ultrafast delivery services, with standalone apps BlinkIt and Zepto leading the pack. The segment has been one of the most-funded tech startup sectors in the past few years.

Experts believe these platforms have managed to “manufacture” the need for ultrafast deliveries by offering deep discounts rather than solving a real problem.

Companies trained consumers to expect instant fulfillment, whether or not the need was truly urgent.”

“A large part of the category was also manufactured through aggressive subsidy, convenience marketing, and habit formation,” Kartik Hosanagar, a tech and marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told Rest of World. “Companies trained consumers to expect instant fulfillment, whether or not the need was truly urgent.”

Quick commerce accounts for just 1%–2% of all trade in India, even after massive cash burn to increase speed and offer deep discounts. Price discounting in quick commerce is 6%–9%, compared with 2%–5% for general trade, data from management consultancy Kearney shows. India’s quick-commerce market, currently less than a tenth of China’s, has just 12 million gig workers.

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