“Minutes of Terror”: Lebanon Death Toll Tops 300 from Israel’s “Black Wednesday” Attack | Democracy Now!

 

  “Minutes of Terror”: Lebanon Death Toll Tops 300 from Israel’s “Black Wednesday” Attack | Democracy Now!

Trump’s new budget ignores dying Americans and gives away record sums to the US military | Trump administration | The Guardian

Trump’s new budget ignores dying Americans and gives away record sums to the US military

Eduardo Porter

If the White House’s proposed 2027 budget is anything to go by, healthcare is not the government’s problem. Composite: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images/George Grosz (Eclipse of the Sun)

"Americans are dying in droves. Deaths due to avoidable causes in the United States –which could be dealt with via prevention or proper healthcare – far outpace those in most of country’s peers in the industrialized world. Most notably, Americans die of treatable conditions at nearly twice the rate as Spaniards, French, Japanese and Australians.

They would most likely live longer if they enjoyed better access to healthcare. Americans are the most likely to skip a doctor’s appointment due to its cost, the most likely to skip a medical test and to skimp on prescription drugs. This is unsurprising, given the extraordinary lack of public health insurance in the United States. Americans face the highest out-of-pocket expenses for medical services in their peer group.

Donald Trump evidently does not believe this is an issue for the world’s richest nation.

If the budget for 2027 the White House proposed last week is anything to go by, healthcare is not the government’s problem: the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could see its budget cut by over $15bn, 12% less compared with this year.

The cut comes on top of the evisceration of the healthcare budget last year, when the president’s “big, beautiful bill” (BBB) cut more than $1tn over 10 years from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, largely by imposing onerous work requirements on Medicaid that will push 15 million Americans to lose health insurance, according to some analysts.

Unattainable healthcare is not the only challenge Americans face that Trump has decided is not his problem. The lack of affordable childcare is a key reason why American women’s labor participation is among the lowest in the industrialized world. But government spending on early childhood education and care is also among the stingiest among affluent nations.

What does Trump care about? The BBB communicated his overarching interest in cutting the tax bill of the well-to-do, offering up a $4.5tn tax cut over 10 years that will boost the after-tax income of the richest 10% of the population by 2.7%, a cool $13,622 per household, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

To the average American, it must be hard to understand Trump’s budget proposal as anything but a betrayal

Trump’s other interest is hard power, to better crush his foes. The BBB last year included $165bn for the Department of Homeland Security to “deliver on the President’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe again”. Last week, he bet the house to pay for a bigger military. As he put it at an Easter lunch reception last week: “We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

That is proving expensive. By some estimates, the Pentagon spent $12.7bn in the first six days and $28bn in a little over five weeks on the war against Iran, which appears to have next to nothing to do with guarding the country. His budget proposal, released last week, the one that cut the budget for HHS by 12% and the entire non-defense budget by 10%, was transparent about the Brobdingnagian sums Trump wants to spend on this kind of stuff: $1.5tn in 2027 alone. About three times Iran’s entire GDP and 42% more than the budget for 2026.

The message to everyday Americans is: beware. The cuts to the non-defense budget in the 2027 proposal are nowhere near enough to cover this increase in defense spending. Given Trump’s and the Republican party’s aversion to taxes, they are all but certain to come after the rest of the safety net to cover the bill.

Trump was even willing to go on the record, if only momentarily, in a message that will surely become the basis for Democratic attack ads as this year’s midterm elections get into full swing. “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis,” he said at a White House Easter reception. “All these little scams you have to let states take care of them.” The message was so outrageous that after posting the video of Trump’s remarks on its YouTube page, the White House deleted it. To no avail, of course. Things on the internet live for ever.

The White House claims corruption justifies cutting the non-defense budget: it said it cut $4bn from a program to ensure poor households’ access to electricity because dead people were getting benefits, among other fraudulent things. It took $5bn from the budget of the National Institutes of Health because it “broke the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health”.

To the average American, however, it must be hard to understand Trump’s budget proposal as anything but a betrayal. He won the presidency twice, largely by promising help for America’s beleaguered working stiffs, forever ignored by cosmopolitan elites in power, invested in foreign trade agreements and open borders policies. The budget proposal confirms that, if it ever was sincere, this commitment has by now been forgotten.

The data carries a warning for the president, though. If he keeps ignoring the needs of his base, he may soon no longer have one. This is not just about his sagging poll numbers. This is about American men and women dying. They are also his voters. He might show them some care."

Trump’s new budget ignores dying Americans and gives away record sums to the US military | Trump administration | The Guardian

Inside Tyre, a Lebanese City Bombarded by Israel - The New York Times

Inside Tyre, a Lebanese City Bombarded by Israel

April 12, 2026

 York Times ·

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(Where are the numbers of how many Lebanese civilians Israel has murdered since the start of this war? Why won't the New York Times publish them. I think we know!)

Medics transporting a man who was critically wounded by an Israeli strike in Tyre, Lebanon, last month.

‘I Can’t Endure This’: Inside a Bombarded City in Southern Lebanon

In Tyre, a city on Lebanon’s coast, near-daily bombardments by Israel have killed and injured civilians, and left many searching for shelter.

Medics transporting a man who was critically wounded by an Israeli strike in Tyre, Lebanon, last month.

The mother sat on the curb outside a hospital in southern Lebanon, holding her phone and pleading with a photo of her sons on its screen.

“I’m waiting for you, answer me, answer me,” the woman, Fatima Kholeif, cried. “I’m your mother, just answer me.”

Her relatives huddled around her, unsure of what to do. When one tried to coax the phone from Ms. Kholeif’s hands to calm her down, she just clutched it harder. Didn’t they understand? The photos were all she had left of her sons — the sons who had just bought her hair dye so she could color her wispy, gray curls, a respite from the Israeli bombing. The sons who had kissed her cheeks that morning as they left for work harvesting oranges in an orchard nearby. The sons who were killed on that orchard in an airstrike.

“I can’t endure this,” she cried, her voice trailing off. “Two of my sons, two, two, two.”

A neighborhood destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon’s southern port city of Tyre.

Within minutes, a frenzy erupted around her as news arrived that the Israeli military had issued a warning about imminent strikes near the hospital in Tyre, a coastal city within the large swath of southern Lebanon where Israel has told residents to flee north. Other families waiting outside the hospital scattered, racing away on motorcycles toward the seaside. “Come on,” Ms. Kholeif’s neighbor said, lifting her off the curb and shuttling her into a car before Israeli warplanes arrived overhead.

Ms. Kholeif’s sons, 23-year-old Abdul Rahman Jadour and 30-year-old Ayman Jadour, were among several Syrian farmworkers killed in the strikes, according to relatives, hospital officials and rescue workers. They were the latest casualties in a war that has consumed Tyre. The fighting began after Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, fired on Israel last month in support of Tehran, prompting Israel to bombard and invade Lebanon.

Ever since, Tyre has been transformed by fear. The city’s population is predominantly Shiite Muslim, the same sect as Hezbollah. Its busiest streets have emptied, the metal shutters have been pulled over storefronts, and residents are wary of leaving their homes.

Despite a fragile cease-fire in Iran, Israel has vowed to keep striking Hezbollah and on Wednesday launched a barrage of airstrikes across Lebanon that killed more than 300 people. It was the deadliest day since the war began.

Littered across the roads are the remains of Israeli airstrikes. There are buildings with their facades sheared off. Entire rooms of apartments were hurled across the road and lie on top of mounds of rubble. Poking through the wreckage are signs of the lives once lived there: A doll with blond hair. A black and bright green roller blade. The severed half of a headphone.

Tyre is within the large swath of land south of the Litani River — around 10 percent of the country — that Israel says it plans to occupy after its ground invasion ends. That rhetoric has stoked concerns among residents that if they abide by the evacuation warnings and leave their homes, they may never be able to return. Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, has said that Israeli forces will not allow Shiite residents who flee north to return south until the “security of northern Israeli residents is ensured.”

That fear has pushed many more residents of Tyre to remain in the city compared with the previous hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel in 2024, according to municipal officials. Even in the surrounding countryside, which has been battered by airstrikes, around 5,000 residents have stayed in their villages — twice as many as during the 2024 war, the officials said. Nearly 20,000 more have fled southern villages for Tyre rather than head north of the Litani River.

“People are saying that if we leave, it will make it easier for them to occupy,” said Daher Habib Baher, 59, referring to Israeli forces. Mr. Baher left Tyre during the 2024 escalation, but chose to stay in the city this time in a school turned shelter that felt safer than his neighborhood.

“We have roots here,” he said. “We have to do whatever we can to keep our land.”

Mediterranean

Sea

For those in the city, daily life has been upended. The thunder of warplanes has echoed overhead along with the clap of outgoing artillery fired by Hezbollah fighters. White plumes of smoke from Israeli airstrikes and artillery hitting the hinterland billow over the horizon as Israeli ground forces inch closer to the city, stoking fears that it could soon be invaded or besieged.

One recent afternoon in central Tyre, Zeinab Judi, 55, watched as her brother tried to untangle the spider web of electrical wires that had come crashing down after a strike hit her neighbors’ apartment building.

White plumes of smoke from Israeli airstrikes and artillery billowing over the horizon as Israeli ground forces inched closer to Tyre, stoking fears that it could soon be invaded or besieged.

In the two days since, all she could focus on was furiously cleaning up her home. She swept glass off the floors, fixed the doors that had flown off their hinges and searched in the broken porcelain tub for her missing shower head — small tasks to regain the sense of control that the war had stripped from her.

“I want to go back to how life used to be,” Ms. Judi said, bursting into tears. “How can we live like this?”

Around the corner, her neighbor, Salwa Mamlouk, 35, looked on as she patched a broken pipe that was still spouting water.

“We are still paying the price from the last war,” Ms. Mamlouk said.

Still, she said, any frustration she felt with Hezbollah for firing on Israel and kicking off the war had been replaced by anger at Israel for the devastation it has wrought, and by exasperation with the Lebanese government for being unable to stop it.

“Hezbollah is the only one defending us against Israel,” she said. “The government is just sitting by and watching.”

That sentiment is widespread in Tyre, where Hezbollah maintains a large base of support and where they have made their presence known. The highway leading into the city is decorated with yellow and green Hezbollah flags. In recent weeks, posters with photos of Iran’s slain leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, have cropped up across the city.

So, too, have temporary graves for civilians and Hezbollah fighters killed in the war, whose bodies cannot be transported to the border villages that Israeli forces have captured. Instead, they are placed in plywood coffins, lowered into trenches beside a shopping mall and marked with numbers spray-painted in red on cinder blocks.

Much of the life that remains in Tyre takes place in the city’s Christian enclave by the seaside, the only area that has not been included in the evacuation warnings. There, Christian residents mix with Shiites from other parts of the city who have slept in cars or city-run shelters.

Inside one broken-down school bus, 7-year-old Jana Fadi Muhana looked up when she heard the thud from Israeli strikes one recent afternoon.

“There’s a sound! There’s a sound!” she cried out. She paused, looked to the bus door, which was jammed shut, and then asked her sister to pull her out through the driver’s side window and take her to their mother.

“Sometimes she collapses or cries when she hears the planes and the drones,” her father, Fadi Muhana, 50, muttered as he stood nearby. By the time the family decided to leave their house, the shelters had filled up, so his boss lent him the bus to sleep in after the restaurant where he worked shuttered.

“What can we do? Where can we go?” Mr. Muhana said.

Down the road, Yousef Ghafary cut through plywood in his carpentry shop, among the only businesses open on the street. A Christian whose family has lived in Tyre for generations, Mr. Ghafary said that Tyre’s minority Christian and Sunni Muslim residents had been tightly integrated with its Shiite population for decades.

But the war has strained that delicate social fabric. Many Christians now decline invitations from their Shiite friends for fear that they could become collateral damage in Israeli attacks targeting Shiites.

“You know they are the ones under threat, and you worry about exposing yourself to it by being with them,” Mr. Ghafary said.

“I just don’t see an end to this war,” he added."

Inside Tyre, a Lebanese City Bombarded by Israel - The New York Times

Iran War Live Updates: Trump Says U.S. Will ‘Blockade’ Strait of Hormuz After Peace Talks Fail - The New York Times

3 minutes ago

Iran War Live Updates: Trump Says U.S. Will ‘Blockade’ Strait of Hormuz After No Peace Deal Reached

"Vice President JD Vance said that marathon talks between the United States and Iran had failed to produce a deal to fully reopen the strait and end the war. Iran’s top negotiator suggested further talks were possible.

Updated 

April 12, 2026, 11:07 a.m. ET10 minutes ago

Katie RogersTyler PagerAaron Boxerman and Isabel Kershner

Tyler Pager reported from Islamabad, Pakistan.

Here’s the latest.

President Trump said Sunday that the United States will enforce a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, stepping up pressure on Iran after marathon peace talks between top Iranian and American leaders in Pakistan ended without a breakthrough.

The announcement by Mr. Trump plunged the already brittle truce into further uncertainty. Vice President JD Vance and the chief Iranian negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, met in Pakistan over the weekend, but did not reach a deal to fully reopen the strait or conclusively end the war.

“Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!” Mr. Trump wrote of his planned U.S. blockade in one of two lengthy social media posts on the talks.

Mr. Trump had conditioned the two-week cease-fire on Iran ending its own blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for oil and gas in the Persian Gulf. Iran’s grip on the strait sent global oil prices soaring by more than 50 percent during the monthlong conflict, which began in late February.

In practice, however, only a few ships have transited the Strait of Hormuz since the cease-fire came into effect last Tuesday. U.S. officials blame Iran, which they say has sought to impose tolls on ships passing through the waterway.

Mr. Trump said the U.S. Navy would “seek and interdict” any vessel that paid the fee to Iran. For its part, Iran could see an American naval blockade as an act of war.

Iran’s leaders have given no indication that they intend to relax their control of the waterway, which they view as a crucial bargaining chip, until a permanent peace is reached. In a defiant post on social media earlier on Sunday, Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, said “the key” to the strait “is firmly in our hands.”

Analysts said the issues dividing the two countries were so complex — and their differences so entrenched — that cinching a deal in a single round of talks had been highly unlikely.

Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Ghalibaf, the Iranian negotiator, appeared to rule out additional negotiations. Mr. Trump said in an interview on Sunday with Fox News that his threats had forced Iran “to the bargaining table and they haven’t left,” adding that he believed the United States would eventually get “everything” it wanted from Iran.

Mr. Ghalibaf said on social media earlier Sunday that the United States had been “unable to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation” in this round of talks. “Now it is time for it to decide whether it can earn our trust or not,” he added.

The last talks between the United States and Iran fizzled, and were promptly followed by a U.S.-Israeli attack in late February that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and ignited more than a month of war. Mediated by Pakistan, this weekend’s negotiations were the highest-level face-to-face encounter between U.S. and Iranian leaders since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Mr. Trump, who was watching a U.F.C. fight in Florida during the talks, had declared the cease-fire last week in part to ease the shock from the loss of access to 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies. The other two key issues were the fate of nearly 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium and Iran’s demand that about $27 billion in frozen revenues held abroad be released, the officials said.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Mines in Hormuz: The Pentagon said on Saturday that two U.S. warships crossed the Strait of Hormuz to begin an operation to clear mines from the critical waterway. Iran denied the claim. Only a handful of ships have passed through the strait since the cease-fire began. U.S. officials said one reason Iran had been unable to get more ships through was that it could not locate and remove all of the mines it had laid in the waterway.

• Israel and Lebanon: Israel was not involved in the weekend negotiations and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu avoided mentioning them in an address on Saturday evening as he faces criticism at home over the cease-fire with Iran. Israel has kept up deadly attacks on southern Lebanon, including on Sunday morning, according to Lebanon’s state media. Iran had accused Israel of breaking the cease-fire by continuing to attack in Lebanon, leading Mr. Trump to ask Israel to rein in its assault. The Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors to the United States are expected to meet in Washington next week for rare direct talks.

• Death tolls: The Human Rights Activists News Agency said at least 1,701 civilians, including 254 children, had been killed in Iran as of Wednesday. Lebanon’s health ministry on Saturday said that 2,020 people had been killed in the latest fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, including 357 in a wave of Israeli strikes on Wednesday. In attacks attributed to Iran, at least 32 people have been killed in Gulf nations. At least 22 people had been killed in Israel as of Sunday, as well as 12 Israeli soldiers fighting in Lebanon. The American death toll stands at 13 service members.

April 12, 2026, 11:13 a.m. ET3 minutes ago

Michael Crowley

State Department reporter

Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, declined to say what assurances Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made to President Trump about Lebanon, where Iran says Israeli air strikes are violating the current U.S. cease-fire agreement with Tehran. Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Leiter said that Israel supports and will be “in tandem with the president’s efforts.”

Iran War Live Updates: Trump Says U.S. Will ‘Blockade’ Strait of Hormuz After Peace Talks Fail - The New York Times