On this day in 1985, the Rainbow Warrior—a decommissioned trawling ship that was owned and operated by activists from Greenpeace—was struck by a mysterious explosion where it was docked at a wharf in New Zealand. A photographer working with Greenpeace, Fernando Pereira, went onboard to try and retrieve his camera equipment before the ship completely sank, only to be killed by a second, even bigger explosion. And who was responsible for this heinous act of terrorism? As it turned out, the French government was. 

For years, the Rainbow Warrior and its crew had sailed around the world, mounting all kinds of environmental and humanitarian protests. They intercepted whaling ships off the coast of Iceland and hassled fur hunters in northern Canada—but most of all, they got in the way of nuclear weapons tests. Shortly before its fiery demise, the Rainbow Warrior was scheduled to lead a group of ships from around the world to Mururoa Atoll to protest French nuclear blasts there. So the French government launched a covert mission, aptly named Opération Satanique, against the activist group. After weeks of spying, secret service agents planted two explosive mines on the Rainbow Warrior before it could reach Mururoa, sinking the ship and killing Pereira. The bomb test

Last month, as part of its illegal, U.S.-supported bombing campaign against Iran, Israel attacked the notorious Evin prison in Tehran, a “a sprawling complex that holds thousands of prisoners and has been a symbol of the Iranian regime’s repression for more than four decades.” Israel said the attack was “symbolic,” but what it was meant to symbolize is unclear. The Times of Israel says it “was widely taken as a signal that Israel was expanding its targets to symbols of the regime, after an initial focus on military and nuclear targets.” But if an authoritarian regime imprisons dissidents, attacking its prison is likely to kill the captive dissidents rather than undercut the regime. Evin is “used to house political prisoners who dare show dissent to the country's Islamist regime.”

We are now learning of the horrific consequences of Israel’s strike. The New York Times reports that “prisoners, families, activists and lawyers said that Israel’s action had shown total disregard for the lives and safety of the prisoners.” Horrendously, Israel appears to have killed a huge number of transgender inmates, whose gender identity is criminalized in Iran: 

About 100 transgender inmates are missing after their section of the prison was flattened, and the authorities say they are presumed dead, said Reza Shafakhah, a prominent human rights lawyer, who added that the government often treats being transgender as a crime.

The Financial Times reports today that the Tony Blair Institute “participated in a project to develop a postwar Gaza plan that envisaged kick-starting the enclave’s economy with a ‘Trump Riviera’ and an ‘Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone.’” The plan, which would “reimagine Gaza as a thriving trading hub,” was “led by Israeli businessmen and used financial models developed inside Boston Consulting Group.” It “proposed paying half a million Palestinians to leave the area and attracting private investors to develop Gaza.”

One lengthy document on postwar Gaza, written by a TBI staff member, was shared within the group for consideration. This included the idea of a “Gaza Riviera” with artificial islands off the coast akin to those in Dubai, blockchain-based trade initiatives, a deep water port to tie Gaza into the India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor, and low-tax “special economic zones” The TBI document said the devastating war in Gaza had “created a once-in-a-century opportunity to rebuild Gaza from first principles... as a secure, modern prosperous society.”

Genocide as an opportunity for “blockchain initiatives” may be the bleakest thing I’ve ever heard. The plan imagined Gaza’s land being put into a trust “whose assets could be sold to investors via digital tokens traded on a blockchain,” with Gazans “offered the chance to contribute their privately owned land to the trust in return for a token that gave them the right to a permanent housing unit.” They even made a demented map of the future depopulated Gaza. 

We shouldn’t be surprised that human vultures are planning ways to profit off of the destruction and ethnic ...

This week, the New York Times ran a piece on New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s college application. The piece itself is a nothingburger. Mamdani checked that he was both Asian and African American on his college application to Columbia University in 2009. Mamdani was born in Uganda and at the time was only a citizen of Uganda (he now holds dual US-Ugandan citizenship). He also was not admitted to Columbia. 

But more interesting is how the Times came about this tip. The article initially credited “an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux.” That man is better known as Jordan Lasker, a PhD student at Texas Tech. Lasker is a self-described eugenicist and racist; his writing is centered on one argument: that white and Asian people are genetically superior to those of Black and Hispanic descent. The Times eventually added that Lasker “writes often about I.Q. and race.”  

This is one chapter of the extremely troubling rise of “scientific” racism, the belief that some races are genetically more intelligent than others. These views are extremely prominent in Silicon Valley, and they’ve exploded in visibility since Elon Musk began promoting them on Twitter. They’re also being laundered by major liberal media outlets surprisingly frequently. For example, the Times reported favorably on the Natal conference, a conservative convention on the issue of convincing people to have more kids. They ...

Paramount has agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit from Donald Trump over 60 Minutes’ editing of an interview with Kamala Harris. Trump alleged that the interview was deceptively edited to make Harris look good. This was not true (Harris sounded her usual vacuous self in every edit CBS put out) but even if it had been true, Trump had no case. If the case had been litigated, this baseless lawsuit would have been resolved in Paramount’s favor. But they settled with the president in order to stay in his good graces. Trump originally sought an insane $20 billion in damages. 

By capitulating to Trump’s extortion, Paramount has encouraged Trump and others on the right to try this tactic more in future. If you don’t like coverage, file a frivolous lawsuit. You might lose, but on the other hand you might get paid millions of dollars even if you have no claim whatsoever. To Paramount, a profit-seeking corporation, the calculus here was obvious: $16 million is a trivial sum to avoid the president’s ire. Paramount obviously doesn’t care what the implications of this are for journalism, or for others in the media. But the rest of us now have to navigate a world in which the right sees litigation as a great way to squelch totally legitimate critical coverage…