“A far-right party with roots in Holocaust complicity is now Germany’s most pro-Israel political force, with AfD winning nearly half the vote in Saxony-Anhalt’s state election. Germany’s political establishment is calling it a shock; anti-fascist activist Phillipp Slanina says it isn’t one.

Support for Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was roughly halved in what analysts are calling an AfD testing ground for more state elections this fall. Slanina argues the party isn’t the anti-establishment political outsider it styles itself as. It was built from inside the center, founded by both conservatives and liberals before neo-Nazi factions moved in and took over its core, and its rise has been fueled by CDU and SPD’s commitment to neoliberalism. 

Slanina says the same parties now claiming to present a “firewall” against the far right actually mainstreamed the platform that ushered in victory for AfD: on immigration, on militarization, on cuts to social services, on the crackdown on Palestine solidarity. He explains that by branding itself as the most aggressively pro-Israel parliamentary bloc and backing unconditional support for Tel Aviv, AfD can get away with claiming it can’t possibly be neo-Nazi – even while pushing some of the harshest crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech in Europe.

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“South Lebanon has become Gaza.”

Breakthrough News’s Rania Khalek tears apart Netanyahu’s “security” strategy that’s killed 27 people in Lebanon over the last three days, with relentless Israeli attacks on the country’s south designed to render entire villages unreturnable –  paving the way for future annexation and “Greater Israel” expansion. Lebanon’s government provides the political cover, with President Joseph Aoun condemning Israel’s strikes while remaining committed to the US-brokered framework that cements its occupation.

The so-called November 2024 “ceasefire” has never functioned as one: Israel violated it more than 15,000 times before Hezbollah entered the US-Israeli war on Iran in March, at which point Israel ramped up its attacks, killing over 4,300 people in Lebanon since then and occupying 600 square kilometers of the country, according to Israel’s own figures. Meanwhile new data shows 65% of the destruction in the south occurred after April. And, Khalek says, Hezbollah has barely responded: “It’s totally one-sided at this point.” 

Over the weekend, Israel leveled a hospital in Nabatieh al-Fawqa, then tweeted, without evidence, that it was a Hezbollah “command and control center” — the same justification used repeatedly for now-normalized hospital strikes in Gaza. And Israeli forces have pushed into Sunni-majority Kfar Shuba, in a pattern Khalek compares to West Bank-style occupation. She also draws a direct line to Syria, where Israel continues striking a country that has never once fired on it.

“Israel is completely out of control,” Khalek says — and still faces no real consequences for it.

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As Israeli plans emerge to expel all two million Palestinians from Gaza and Itamar Ben-Gvir shares what can only be described as genocidal AI fantasy videos on X, Mouin Rabbani, non-resident fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, says Israeli election season means everyone from Ben-Gvir to Israel Katz to Bezalel Smotrich to Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to one-up the other, with the most extreme proposals for the mass forcible transfer of Palestinians from their homeland, all to score points with voters. Rabbani says the global impunity Tel Aviv has enjoyed for decades has taught Israel there’s no cost and no accountability for war crimes against humanity, all with unflinching US support.

Without ruling out Trump greenlighting Israel to “march into Gaza City to load families onto trucks bound for the Egyptian Sinai,” Rabbani says the more likely scenario is Israel continuing to make Gaza unfit for human habitation, leaving Palestinians a “choice” between leaving or eventual death. In Zionist parlance, that’s called voluntary transfer.

Rabbani explains how the “Board of Trump” is camouflage enabling Israel to continue annihilating Gaza, comparing this to the Oslo Accords of 1993, which set the same double-standard pattern: Palestinians held to the letter of the agreement while Israel keeps expanding settlements unchecked — a pattern Rabbani says is playing out in Lebanon today, too.

But Western governments are finding it increasingly impossible to ignore changing public sentiment on Palestine — from last summer’s wave of Palestine recognitions to the UK’s new settlement ban. The task now, Rabbani says, is making sure these first steps become binding policy to end the genocide, not just symbolic gestures.

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Meta would rather pay out billions to teen mental health programs than risk losing teen addicts on Instagram. 

The day before running full-page ads across the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times calling on competitors TikTok and YouTube to adopt tougher child safety standards, Meta settled a landmark lawsuit brought by 52 state attorneys general accusing Instagram of intentionally addictive design. Community organizer and parent advocate Amanda Getty says Meta’s efforts to spin its predatory business model as a responsible parenting issue are meant to distract users: Big Tech’s bottom line depends on hooking teens as young as possible. 

Meta denied knowingly exposing minors to serious harm and misleading the public, but agreed to pay up to $18 billion over 10 years – workable for a company that made $60 billion in profit last year alone. Getty points to Meta’s track record of failing to implement – and actively lobbying against –  the kinds of guardrails this settlement ostensibly imposes, including a 2024 investigation that found only a fraction of Instagram Teen Account safety protocols were functional. Meanwhile teens are still being bullied and nudged toward features associated with predatory grooming. Getty cites a 2018 internal strategy memo instructing Meta employees to “win big with teens” by bringing them in “as tweens.”

Meta fears losing young users to less regulated platforms; Getty argues that’s why it’s begging Google and TikTok to get in line, all the while shifting responsibility onto parents for a business model built on addiction by design.

 “There’s no version of reform here that leads to an actual win for parents,” Getty says, arguing the fight isn’t about better parental controls – it’s about confronting economic predation targeting kids at scale

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