Bibi’s Closest Confidant Denounces Him / Trump Accused of Yet Another Rape / Putin sent AfD Leaders to Syria / Trump Celebrates Billions for Big Oil / Student Power Prevails in Serbia
Ron Lauder, President of the World Jewish Council, Denounces Netanyahu
Charles: Today Israelis go to the polls to make their most important decision since their country was founded: will they finally rid themselves of the most catastrophic prime minister they have ever had?
Ron Lauder is perhaps the single most important pillar of the international Jewish establishment: President of the World Jewish Congress. He has devoted his whole life to the Zionist project. He financed a network of Jewish schools in Eastern Europe and contributed millions to Israeli institutions.
For decades he was also Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest confidant.
But now he has sold all of his homes in Israel and vowed that he will never visit the country again.
Ron Lauder in his mansion in Manhattan
Last week, on the eve of the Israeli election, he gave an explosive interview to Haaretz, denouncing his old friend and begging Israel to throw him out of office.
Lauder says the house of Israel is burning and that his life’s work is in real danger.
“I’ve been silent for 20 years, 30 years,” Lauder says. “One of the things that made Israel so special compared to other countries is that they had a real democracy. What we’re seeing now feels more like a banana republic.”
More than anything, just before next week’s elections, Lauder is determined to explain why he is so concerned about the future of the State of Israel. To try and wake Israelis up, before it is too late. “I want you to hear me. I’m 82 years old, I may not have that much longer to live... I want this thing to be written in Haaretz.”
He contends that the government has put its own interests ahead of the people’s, and that extremists like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich are destroying the country with Netanyahu’s knowledge and consent.
“What you have is a dictator, a one-person show. Israel is a democracy, but Netanyahu is not playing by the rules of democracy.”
The only thing that you can never have again is extremists in the government. They have done so much harm. Smotrich, with his statement saying that the Palestinians have no right to be in the Israeli area – it was very much looked on as a declaration [of intent] by Israel to get rid of the Palestinians. And Ben-Gvir’s hatred of Palestinians, being able to kill them, destroying their villages, with the complete consent of the prime minister... If Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s parties play any role in government in the future, Israel is doomed. The fact is that Bibi could have been one of the great leaders of all times, and is going to go down in history as a failure.”
Meanwhile, in another blockbuster development, yesterday a commission of United Nations human rights experts flatly declared that Israel was continuing to commit genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza despite the ceasefire there, and is also carrying out crimes against humanity in the West Bank.
The report by the U.N. Independent Commission of Inquiry, which comes on the eve of Israel’s first general election since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack, is meant to look at the drivers of violence by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the panel said. It said that Israel was deliberately targeting Palestinian children and was using torture, rape and sexual violence as part of a broader attack aimed at displacing and subjugating the Palestinian population.
Israel immediately rejected the claims.
The report, delivered to the U.N. General Assembly, noted that between the cease-fire announced on Oct. 10, 2025, and the end of September 2026, Israeli airstrikes, artillery and gunfire had killed 1,431 Palestinians in Gaza, including 300 children. The report rejected a claim in May by the Board of Peace set up by President Trump that the cease-fire had “largely held.”
An Israeli strike on a Gaza City mosque in July.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Dramatic New Rape Allegations Detailed Against Trump
Huffington Post
Trump with the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Photo: Estate of Jeffrey Epstein
Scott: It’s commonplace for anchors on corporate US broadcast media to observe that there are “no credible allegations of rape or sexual assault involving President Trump.” Heaven knows why they make such statements, because they’re obviously false. Not only is there is an abundance of detailed, credible evidence of sexual assaults committed by Trump, he is in fact an adjudicated rapist based on the federal court case of E Jean Carroll in Manhattan, with respect to which Trump has now exhausted his appeals and been forced to pay a first installment of damages. Now the House Judiciary Committee Democrats have issued a 50-page report which details more than two dozen sexual assaults committed by Trump, including a never-before-reported rape that occurred in the Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey immediately following a meeting between Trump, his best friend, Jeffrey Epstein, and the victim. The import of this document? Rep Jamie Raskin (D-MD) who oversaw it will, after the new Congress is installed in December, be the Judiciary Committee chairman and will have responsibility for the committee’s inquiries and possible impeachment proceedings. Do the rapes and sexual assaults constitute a basis for impeachment? The law on that, based on seventeenth century English precedent, is clear: yes, they do. Moreover, the report also contains a searing indictment of the DOJ under Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche as it covered up all this evidence and lied under oath about it.
A former beauty pageant contestant who has said she rebuffed a sexual advance from President Donald Trump in 1993 now says Trump raped her during the encounter, according to a report from the House Democrats who will take the lead on any potential impeachment of Trump next year.
In a series of interviews with Democratic staff on the House Judiciary Committee, Beatrice Keul said Trump raped her that year in “brutal” fashion in a hotel room at Trump’s Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City after the pair spent time with Jeffrey Epstein, the now-deceased child sex trafficker who was among Trump’s closest friends at the time.
Democrats detailed Keul’s account in a lengthy report on Monday, saying it’s consistent with several of the other already-public accusations of sexual assault against Trump and describing it as a pattern of behavior the president pursued during his friendship with America’s most notorious sexual predator.
“A growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s,” the report says.
The document says the Trump administration has illegally prevented the full release of the Justice Department’s files on Epstein in order to protect Trump and other former associates of Epstein, who killed himself while awaiting federal charges in 2020. Congress ordered the documents to be made public last fall.
“Government complicity in a cover-up to protect traffickers and rapists is criminal obstruction of justice and an intolerable offense against a free society,” the report says. “The full extent of the President of the United States’ involvement with a criminal sex trafficking ring is, inescapably, of the utmost concern to Congress and the American people.”...
Keul, who is Swiss, first described unwanted advances from Trump in an October 2024 interview with the Daily Mail. She said Trump “jumped” on her and groped her but that she ultimately convinced him to stop. She was 24 at the time.
“I tried everything I could. Finally, I said, ‘Let’s talk first’ or something like that, then he slowed down,” Keul told the Daily Mail.
How Putin’s Training Bureau Sent AfD Leaders to Syria for Training with Hezbollah
Handelsblatt
Scott: A massive leak of internal communications and documents from Germany’s Neo Nazi AfD is creating quite a stir in Germany, but has thus far gone essentially unreported in US corporate media. None of the disclosures is more indicative of what this party is and how it came to power than the materials assembled here by Germany’s leading business journal, Handelsblatt. We learn of a field trip organized for senior AfD figures by the Kremlin to travel to Syria and meet there with Assad and leaders of Hezbollah, ostensibly for an introduction to Middle East politics. We still have little detail over what the AfD leaders did and who they met on their furtive trip to Syria.
But the whole junket is particularly interesting in a historical context. Figures from Germany’s Baader-Meinhoff gang and its Rote-Armee-Faktion, notorious terrorist groups active in the seventies and eighties, report that they were supervised by a young KGB major in Dresden whom they knew as “Vova” and whom they subsequently identified as Vladimir Putin. Vova was responsible for arranging their mission training, dispatching them to Greece, Libya and, notably, Syria for meetings with Palestinian and other terrorist groups.
Today of course Vova is the president of Russia, and he is known to take a strong personal interest in the whole AfD project of the Russian intelligence services. Which may well explain this particular Syria junket.
Keep in mind as you read this that it is now official US government policy to support—and fund through a diversion of DOS democracy support funds—the AfD. Donald Trump, JD Vance, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk all praise the party, and both Musk and Thiel have steered considerable money to them. And yet this party is not much more than a Russian intelligence operation designed to subvert the government of Germany, a longstanding US ally.
“The last Beck’s is in Reyhanli, just before the Syrian border,” wrote AfD security officer Peter M. in an email to a party politician. After that it will be dry – until Latakia or Damascus.
It is Wednesday, March 7, 2018, 2:35 p.m.: Seven AfD members are in Syria at this time. It is a trip that M. describes from afar as irresponsible and careless.
As a German, the best way to enter Syria is to take the route via Reyhanli to the rebels: “Shortest route to Aleppo and the best arms market in the area,” writes M. Or via the northeast to the Kurds, “who wants to join IS.”
Peter M.’s emails are part of a data leak that became public in mid-October. Hackers attacked an AfD service provider and published more than 420,000 emails. According to the hackers, the data comes from the AfD.
There is a lot to be said for the authenticity of the emails. Press inquiries from the Handelsblatt could be compared. The party admitted that there had been a data leak. When asked by the Handelsblatt, the former federal spokesman for the AfD, Jörg Meuthen, also assessed an email he had sent as authentic. He could not confirm the exact time of the email…
M. quickly gets to his own people in his email. He calls them “our little excursion company”. You fly “comfortably” to Beirut and then let Hezbollah take you “the shortest route to the border, where the Russians then take you over and take care of the rest of your travel.”
He writes that you don’t have to get the visa at the Syrian embassy in Berlin - the guys from Hezbollah or the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, do it on site “without any bureaucracy.”
On the Campaign Trail, Trump Brags about the Profitability of the Fossil Fuels Industry, Meanwhile a Study Shows He is Profiting From the Iran War by Investing Heavily in Oil & Gas Stocks
CBS News
Scott: In campaign appearances this weekend in Ohio and Michigan, Trump belittled concerns about the price of gasoline and diesel fuel, saying that Americans instead should be happy about the record profits that the fossil fuels industry is achieving in the wake of his decision to go to war against Iran. He is happy about it, he added. And indeed, he is. An examination of his own stock portfolio shows that just before he decided to go to war in the Gulf, Trump diverted huge sums in his investment portfolio into oil and gas industry stocks, from which he is now reaping huge profits. CBS News has the story.
As President Trump boasts about how much money the U.S. oil and gas industry is making from the war with Iran, the president’s personal holdings in oil and gas are now worth between $22.5 million and $81.6 million, compared with $12.6 million to $46 million at the end of 2025, according to a new report by Democrats on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.
The stocks the president holds have increased in value by an average of 43% since the end of 2025, the Democratic minority said, based on data from LSEG Data Analytics. The report also found the president purchased between $4.7 million and $17.5 million in oil and gas stocks between March, after the war began, and the end of August, which is the most recently available data. He also sold between $2 million and $5.4 million in oil and gas stocks in the same timeframe, the minority found.
The report was obtained exclusively by CBS News and is based on the president’s financial filings with the Office of Government Ethics. Filers are only required to report transaction ranges, not specific amounts.
But as Americans are paying significantly higher gas prices due to downstream effects from the war, Mr. Trump on Saturday night in Georgia bragged that U.S. oil and gas companies are “making hundreds of billions of dollars.”
“And while oil prices are temporarily high and will be falling dramatically in a short period of time, as soon as that war’s over, because there’s so much oil,” he told the crowd. “All in the Hormuz Strait, there are ships waiting to come, we’re getting them out so fast. The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars. … Our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East.”
In Serbia, Vučiċ Falls and the Student Movement Comes to Power: But Who Are They?
Financial Times
Scott: In my career as a legal consultant I had several meetings with Aleksandar Vučiċ and always thought of him as a clever and rather complex figure, constantly trying to straddle several lines—between the Kremlin and the EU, between Serbia’s militaristic nationalists and something more peaceful and rational. He was for the most part closer to Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico than other European leaders. But fidelity to the Kremlin and maintenance of its populist themes was his prime directive.
Yesterday he fell in Serbian elections that produced a remarkably clear result in favor of a spontaneous students’ movement that has produced no real high profile leadership figures and an agenda that defies conventional left-right categorization. The essence of the opposition to Vučiċ is an anti-corruption drive and demand for good government that focuses less on the global stage and more on villages and neighborhoods, rotting infrastructure and a feel that political hacks are taking the country down. Vučiċ’s dealings with Jared Kushner and his efforts to give the president’s son-in-law valued state property for development projects figured as the prime example of corruption in the country. And indeed, that’s exactly what it was. Significantly, the vote on Sunday saw a dramatic increase in voter turnout, led by young voters—who were markedly hostile to the party in power, and political parties, generally.
Financial Times gives us a look at the newly empowered student movement. Who are they and what are they up to? They turn out to be the best educated part of the electorate, and not committed to any ideology.
Serbia’s Student List swept to power without a clear leader, party structure or fully formed programme. Now the protest movement that ousted Russia-friendly, Maga-linked strongman Aleksandar Vučić must work out how to govern.
Based on collective decision-making and comprising people with no political experience, including university professors, opera singers and former sportspeople, the movement formed two years ago must now quickly form a government and prove it can rid the Balkan nation of entrenched corruption and mismanagement.
“The institutional heart will be the list of 250 candidates, most of whom will be MPs, plus the movement itself, which will guide them. They won this way. Now they need to figure out how to govern,” said Aleksandar Rankovic, a Paris-based teacher and activist who helped the movement during the election campaign.
“They have really taken the collective approach seriously,” he said, adding that the movement “will have to invent a mechanism for how to do that”.
The challenges ahead were apparent on election night, when Student List struggled to decide who should deliver its victory speech. Radomir Saičić, a chemistry professor and one of its leading figures, eventually declared: “This is the victory of the conviction that Serbia can and will do better.”
According to a projection by independent polling groups CeSID and Ipsos, 140 people on the list have won seats, including ex-basketball star Dejan Bodiroga, actor Tihomir Stanić, opera singer Nikola Mikić and former National Bank of Serbia governor Dejan Šoškić.
Topping the list is a cardiologist from Novi Sad, Ilija Srdanović, who joined the protest movement in 2024 after the collapse of a renovated railway station canopy killed 16 people. Allegations of corruption and lax oversight in the awarding of public contracts turned the disaster into a symbol of Vučić’s 14-year rule.
“As parents of four . . . when we first heard what had happened, we desperately tried to account for our family members,” Srdanović told the FT before the vote. “The sense of horror turned into anger, then demands for consequences.” The movement must also decide whether to evolve into a conventional party or retain the democratic assemblies known as plenums that have guided its decisions so far.
M42: The Great Nebula in Orion
Explanation: The Great Nebula in Orion, an immense, nearby starbirth region, is one of the most famous of all astronomical nebulas. Here, glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. In the featured deep image in assigned colors highlighted by emission in hydrogen, wisps and sheets of dust and gas are particularly evident. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye near the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. In addition to housing a bright open cluster of stars known as the Trapezium, the Orion Nebula contains many stellar nurseries. These nurseries contain much hydrogen gas, hot young stars, proplyds, and stellar jets spewing material at high speeds. Also known as M42, the Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.
Photo: Roberto Palaia
Your Online Moment of Zen
Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 8 (Pathétique)
Second Movement
Performed by Lang Lang
When I was seven years old I stayed home sick one winter day. The newest addition to my parents’ record collection was RCA’s boxed set of Beethoven’s 9 symphonies, performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Arturo Toscanini. I played every one of them that day.
I have been addicted to the Maestro ever since.
Though I always refer to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony as Western culture’s greatest achievement (Don’t I Mr. Lowder?) the melodies that reach the very bottom of my soul are from the second movement of the Pathétique,
Re Wiki: Sonata Pathétique, was written in 1798 when the composer was 27 years old and was published in 1799. It has remained one of his most celebrated compositions. Beethoven dedicated the work to his friend Prince Karl von Lichnowsky. Although commonly thought to be one of the few works to be named by the composer himself, it was actually named Grande sonate pathétique (to Beethoven's liking) by the publisher, who was impressed by the sonata's tragic sonorities.
<iframe width=”560” height=”315” src=”
title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0” allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen></iframe>