The News You Need, Thursday, August 13, 2026
Southern Lebanon is Israel’s New Gaza / Trump Threatens Another Coup / Hegseth Keeps It All In the Family / Steve Schrader’s Lovely Memories / The Times and the Progressives / Trump’s Regime Change in Iran / $20 million for Electric Gloves for ICE / Say A Little Prayer
Israel’s campaign to make southern Lebanon a new Gaza
Financial Times
IDF demolition targets inside Israeli-occupied South Lebanon/FT
Scott: The Israeli government has grudgingly agreed to a series of accords providing for Israeli withdrawal from the territory of Lebanon. At the same time, domestic Israeli political discourse consistently indicates that Israel has no intention to honor any of these agreements. Instead, it is increasingly clear that Israel is implementing a carefully prepared plan under which all habitable dwellings in occupied southern Lebanon will be systematically demolished, the area will be rendered uninhabitable, and the civilian population will be expelled. This is part of a program of de facto territorial expansion of Israel into Lebanon.
Scattered around the country, Bazzi and Lebanon’s nearly 1mn displaced people have been reduced to studying satellite imagery for glimpses of their homes. But from the haunting remove of the sky, Bint Jbeil and other border areas look like dusty grey scars across hills once dense with centuries-old villages, traditional stone houses and olive groves — a moonscape of pulverised concrete.
“We see nothing but destruction, the colour of ash,” Bazzi, who was displaced from Bint Jbeil by Israel as a child in the 1980s and longs to return for good, said from her rented Beirut apartment. She is still unsure of the extent of any damage to her house. “We have become prisoners of satellites, prisoners of maps, waiting.”
An FT visual investigation with journalism non-profit Lighthouse Reports found systematic destruction across Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon, including tens of thousands of homes, schools, farmland and forests.
Analysis of satellite imagery, open-source data and verified footage shows that much of the damage occurred after Israeli forces established control over emptied villages in mid-April. It has rendered large areas uninhabitable, destroying systems needed for civilian life, from water and energy infrastructure to medical care, a tactic rights groups and legal experts say appears designed to prevent residents’ return.
“It’s an extensive, long-lasting and organised attack on the people of southern Lebanon,” said Kristine Beckerle, a deputy director at rights group Amnesty International. “If you raze everything to the ground, critical infrastructure and healthcare, if you scorch the earth, you are creating effective wastelands that are unliveable and making it very difficult for people to return to southern Lebanon…”
Fighting raged for weeks, but most of the destruction documented by the FT and Lighthouse came after an initial Israel-Lebanon ceasefire on April 17. While the truce did not hold and some clashes have continued even past the latest ceasefire in June, Israeli forces — who had already established control over many emptied villages — continued to lay waste to the south through air strikes, controlled detonations, bulldozers and the use of white phosphorus…
The FT has found evidence of controlled detonations and demolitions by Israeli forces and civilian contractors in dozens of border communities.
Verified footage shows heavy machines and excavators clearing areas — machinery produced and sold by companies including Caterpillar and Volvo, according to FT analysis and the CNRS. Caterpillar did not respond to a request for comment, while Volvo said it had limited control over how its products were ultimately used but worked to prevent their “misuse”.
Israel has also done extensive damage to historic monuments and Unesco-listed sites, including 16th-century mosques, 19th-century libraries, religious shrines, ancient Roman ruins and Crusader castles.
“It is an attempt to make the areas unrecognisable . . . to sever people’s connection to their land and their history,” said Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly of Biladi, an organisation dedicated to preserving Lebanon’s cultural heritage. “How can they rebuild their communities if everything is gone?”
When the President Won’t Rule Out Another Coup 82 Days Before the Next Election
Zeteo
Charles: At Zeteo the indispensable Martin Pengelly reminds us there is still nothing that will make Donald Trump guarantee a free and fair election–ever. Trump was on Real America’s Voice, a far-right network, listening attentively to host Wayne Allyn Root describing a viable alternative to the SAVE ACT, the voter suppression law which is so outrageous not even the Republican-controlled Senate will touch it—much less eliminate the filibuster to pass it.
Root said:
“If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections… if you declare a national security emergency as the president of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote by both houses of Congress. So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship [to register to vote], and a limit to mail-in ballots.”
Trump’s reply: “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”
Hegseth Fills Pentagon Advisory Boards with Trump Family Business Cronies
The Guardian
Blake Masters, a Defense Policy Board appointee, ‘sits on the boards of three ventures tied to 1789 Capital’, while fellow appointee Marc Andreessen’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), ‘co-invests alongside the Trump partnership 1789 Capital in three defense contractors’. He is widely also understood to be a protégé and intimate of Peter Thiel Photograph: Getty Images
Scott: At this point, Pete Hegseth has emerged as the most despised member of Trump’s cabinet, according to public opinion polling. But he has seized on a perfect approach to holding on to his job, and it includes incessant appearances on his former home stage at Fox News and insuring that the Trump and Kushner families and business interests close to them secure an unprecedented share of the Department of Defense budget. A major means to this end is the appointment of Trump family cronies to key boards that advise on the awarding of no-bid procurement contracts and associated funding. Aram Roston reports on this for the Guardian.
Pete Hegseth’s appointments to a key Pentagon advisory body include two men with ties to the venture capital fund where Donald Trump Jr is a partner, which has lucrative investments in military and space technology.
Defense Policy Board appointee Marc Andreessen’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firms and known by the name “a16z”, co-invests alongside the Trump partnership 1789 Capital in three defense contractors. Fellow DPB appointee Blake Masters also sits on the boards of three ventures tied to 1789 Capital.
Both men now advise the Pentagon on the defense-technology sector those companies operate in.
Companies jointly backed by a16z and 1789 have already drawn billions in federal loans and contracts since the start of the second Trump administration.
The appointments by the US defense secretary not only appear to increase the influence of rightwing ideologues, autonomous weapons manufacturers, and one-time clients of authoritarian states on the world’s most powerful arsenal, but to potentially put the financial interests of the US president’s family at the heart of setting US strategic priorities.
The Horton-Kaiser Book Report
Charles: Steve Schrader has been chronicling the peculiarities of Manhattan’s Upper West Side with his subtle prose for more than fifty years. The latest collection of his work, The Other Steve Schrader, arrived from Hanging Loose Press just in time for his 90th birthday.
The book is full of poignant humor, especially about his father, Abe Schrader, a larger-than-life manufacturer of women’s clothes who lived to be a hundred before The New York Times reported in his obituary that he had “reigned as one of the kings of Seventh Avenue.”
Steve Schrader
Abe Schrader was addicted to Moustache, a fine French aftershave, as well as his weekly visits to the race track. “He would bet all the long shots in each race…Once he collected $25,000 and fainted from excitement. When he came to, seeing the alarmed crowd around him, he asked if he had died and gone to heaven.”
The book is full of lovely moments like that one from the author’s life and the lives of others who have nurtured, annoyed and amused him over many decades.
Earlier this year The West Side Rag did a fine job of describing Schrader’s importance to the neighborhood where he has been a recognized treasure for seventy-five years. If you’re lucky you can still catch him strolling up Broadway almost every afternoon.
When Does a “Razor-Thin Victory” for one candidate equal a “Stunning Loss” for his opponent?
New York Times
Charles: Only if The New York Times is reporting on the Wisconsin Governor’s race–and only if the loser, Francesca Hong, is to the left of her opponent, David Crowley.
To the reporters credit (?) at least half of the story made it clear there was nothing stunning or even surprising about this outcome at all. It included the fact that Hong was actually a very odd candidate, whose old tweets included an attack on Thanksgiving.
Wisconsin Democratic Gubernatorial Nominee David Crowley
