Thursday, April 9, 2026
■ Today's Top News
"Our goal from day one was for Iran to open the strait that didn't close until after we attacked."
By Brad Reed
Comedian Dave Columbo on Wednesday released a parody video that lampooned the Trump administration’s contradictory and constantly changing rationales for its unconstitutional war with Iran.
In the video, which was first posted on Instagram and has since gone viral on other social media platforms, Columbo assumes the role of a White House spokesperson trying to explain what the US has achieved so far with its war, which Trump illegally launched without any congressional authorization more than a month ago.
“This is a victory for the US,” Columbo says at the start of the video. “Because our goal from day one was for Iran to open the strait that didn’t close until after we attacked, which was completely controlled by their military that we had total dominance over. And it was a waterway that we could have taken over, but instead we asked for help that we didn’t need, but we’ll remember our allies did not give us.”
Columbo then explains that this purported victory has only come about due to “a FIFA Peace Prize recipient’s threat to annihilate a civilization in order to liberate them.”
The comedian next touts the administration’s success in changing the Iranian regime from “an old man who hates us to his younger son, who hates us for those reasons, and that we killed his father.”
Columbo acknowledges that the administration is unsure about “the status of Iran’s nuclear capabilities that we obliterated last year, but were going to be a problem in two weeks,” before boasting that Iran now has “more money and control over the strait than they had when they made the old deal that we ended because it was terrible.”
While Columbo’s video is intended as satire, much of it simply relies on arguments that the Trump administration has made throughout the course of the war, such as the president’s demands that NATO allies give help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz that he also says is unnecessary given US military strength.
As of this writing, the Iran War has cost US taxpayers more than $45 billion, and the Strait of Hormuz has still not reopened.
"Even when kids try to learn, after over two years of nonstop running from the bombs, Israel shoots them."
By Stephen Prager
WARNING: The following article contains graphic video and images that some people may find disturbing…
Israeli forces shot and killed a 9-year-old girl in northern Gaza in front of her third-grade class on Thursday, local news sources report.
According to a report Thursday from the Gaza Education Ministry, Ritaj Rihan was sitting at her desk at Abu Ubaida bin al-Jarrah School in Beit Lahiya when she was shot in front of her classmates, who were left in “psychological shock.”
“We suddenly heard the students screaming, so we rushed to the tent to find Ritaj lying face down, blood gushing from her mouth,” her teacher told the Xinhua news agency.
Photos of Rihan’s dead body were shared on social media by Mosab Abu Toha, a local poet. He said that the makeshift tent where Rihan studied was built on top of the ruins of his former high school, which was destroyed during Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
“Even when kids try to learn, after over two years of nonstop running from the bombs, Israel shoots them,” he wrote in a post which accompanied a photo of Rihan wrapped in a body bag at a hospital in Gaza City.
“It’s painful for me to post this,” Toha said. “It seems nothing is moving the world to stop Israel’s terrorism.”
Photos and videos showed Rihan’s bloodied body being rushed through the streets on foot. The school’s principal told the Quds News Network that there was no medical transport in the area, so the only way to carry her to the hospital was via horse-drawn carriage.
Another photograph shows the bullet that reportedly killed the child.
“We were stunned,” another of the educators said. “A 9-year-old child. By what right was she martyred? For what sin was she shot while she came just to learn to write?”
The Israeli military has not commented on the shooting.
The killing came on the six-month anniversary of the “ceasefire” in Gaza that has been in place since October. At least 738 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,000 injured since then, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. In January, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that more than 100 children had been killed since the ceasefire began.
Authorities in Gaza have accused Israel of violating the ceasefire thousands of times. And according to a report out Thursday from Oxfam and other humanitarian groups, “Palestinians are continuing to suffer extreme deprivation, hunger, injury, and death due to the Israeli government’s continued attacks, movement restrictions, and aid obstructions.”
Israel still occupies more than half of the Gaza Strip, leaving more than 2 million residents crammed into about a third of the strip’s territory. With most buildings either damaged or totally destroyed, the vast majority of the population lives in makeshift tents and is left with little protection from storms and ongoing attacks by Israel.
According to Human Rights Watch, 97% of schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks. But educators, most of whom are volunteers, have still tried to use the few resources they have to provide schools for Gaza’s more than a million children.
The school attended by Rihan was just two kilometers away from the yellow line dividing Israel’s official occupation zone from the rest of Gaza.
Rihan’s mother said she woke up excited to go to school that day and was looking forward to wearing her favorite dress to her uncle’s wedding the next week.
“It wasn’t meant to be,” her mother said, while holding her daughter’s bloodstained school notebook. “She wore her shroud instead.”
The reported attack also comes just a day after Israel launched an unprecedented assault on civilian areas across Lebanon, which has threatened to destroy the ceasefire reached earlier this week between the US and Iran.
The Gaza Ministry of Health described the attack that killed Rihan as a “brutal and horrific crime, adding to Israel’s long, dark record of atrocities.”
“It was not an isolated incident,” the ministry said, “but a direct extension of a systematic policy targeting the Palestinian people.”
The resolution was "'out of step with the policies of the Democratic Party' while being entirely in step with the vast majority of Democratic voters," said one advocate.
By Julia Conley
Poll after poll shows that support for Israel and political candidates’ associations with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group that poured more than $100 million into the 2024 elections, are toxic for the Democratic Party.
One of the most closely watched Democratic primary elections last month was significantly swayed toward US Senate candidate James Talarico in Texas when he spoke out against the US arming Israel.
And the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) own suppressed autopsy of the 2024 election found that the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza harmed then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ efforts to win over some voters.
But the mounting evidence that voters want candidates to shift away from the party’s decadeslong alliance with Israel wasn’t enough on Thursday to convince a DNC panel to approve a resolution condemning the “growing influence” of dark money and corporate spending in Democratic races, particularly by AIPAC.
The committee’s resolutions panel killed the motion, which called for “robust” campaign finance transparency, at its spring meeting in New Orleans.
“The use of massive outside spending to support or oppose candidates based on their positions regarding international conflicts or foreign governments raises concerns about undue influence over democratic debate and policymaking, potentially constraining elected officials’ ability to represent the views of their constituents,” reads the resolution, which was submitted by Allison Minnerly, a DNC member from Florida.
The resolution was voted down weeks after organizations linked to AIPAC accounted for $22 million in super political action committee spending in Illinois’ US House primaries.
Margaret DeReus, executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project, said the vote shows that “Democratic leadership is asleep at the wheel when it comes to one of the biggest existential threats to the party.”
“AIPAC’s extreme agenda for unconditional weapons funding to Israel is deeply out of step not just with most Democrats, but with the majority of the American people,” said DeReus. “We know DNC officials conducting their unreleased post-2024 autopsy found President [Joe] Biden’s support for Israel cost Democrats votes in the last presidential election and paved the way for [President] Donald Trump to ascend to the White House. Party leadership needs to wake up.”
In a memo to the DNC resolutions committee ahead of the vote, the IMEU Policy Project stressed that “the vast majority of Democratic voters agree Israel is committing genocide and support ending weapons to Israel.”
“Democratic elected officials face intense pressure from AIPAC to not align with their voters and most voters across the country,” wrote the group.
Resolutions like the one Minnerly put forward, said DeReus on Thursday, are “entirely in step with the vast majority of Democratic voters.”
Progressive advocate Brian Tashman wrote that “as Israeli settlers carry out violent pogroms, Israeli soldiers shoot children in Gaza in the head, Israeli warplanes bomb apartment buildings in Beirut, and Israeli leaders try to sabotage the Iran ceasefire, the pro-Israel lobby still demands total support for Israeli war crimes.”
"Our tax dollars are doing more to bomb children in Iran and other countries than to feed and educate children here."
By Jake Johnson
A new analysis released Thursday estimates that the average American taxpayer shelled out over $4,000 to the federal government last year “for militarism and its support systems” such as the Pentagon, whose already-massive annual budget is poised to surge to $1.5 trillion if President Donald Trump gets his way.
The National Priorities Project (NPP) at the Institute for Policy Studies found in its latest annual Tax Receipt report that, through their federal taxes, the average US taxpayer contributed $4,049.35 to Pentagon contractors, military personnel, nuclear weapons, aid to foreign militaries, and last year’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear energy facilities. That’s significantly more than the average US taxpayer contributed to healthcare for low-income Americans through Medicaid—$2,492.
NPP’s estimated militarism sum for last year does not include costs related to the current, massively unpopular US-Israeli war on Iran, which began on February 28, 2026 and has already cost Americans billions at the pump.
“But if we place the 2026 Iran war costs in the context of our 2025 tax receipt and put the cost at $35 billion—a line the US is likely on the verge of crossing—the average taxpayer will have paid $130 for the war on Iran, eight times more than the $16 the average taxpayer paid for a full year of home heating and energy assistance in 2025,” NPP said.
The $1,870 that the average US taxpayer paid toward Pentagon contractors in 2025 was “fifteen times as much as the $124 the average taxpayer paid for school lunches and other nutrition programs,” the analysis found.
“It’s shameful that our tax dollars are doing more to bomb children in Iran and other countries than to feed and educate children here,” said Lindsay Koshgarian, NPP’s program director. “Instead of spending even more of our hard-earned dollars on war and mass deportation, we deserve a massive reinvestment in making this country a place where we can all survive and thrive.”
“We’re facing chronic underinvestment in this country, from healthcare to education and more. That money has instead been funding a $1 trillion war machine and a class of Pentagon contractors getting rich off our tax dollars.”
NPP noted that Trump’s recent request for a $1.5 trillion US military budget for the coming fiscal year would, if approved by Congress, further drive up costs for American taxpayers.
“Our tax receipt shows why so many people in this country are struggling,” said Koshgarian. “We’re facing chronic underinvestment in this country, from healthcare to education and more. That money has instead been funding a $1 trillion war machine and a class of Pentagon contractors getting rich off our tax dollars. The good news is that if we reverse our backwards priorities, we can start to make Americans’ lives better.”
MarketWatch reported earlier this week that Americans are “increasingly saying they won’t pay their taxes this year as a political protest,” citing the illegal war on Iran and Trump’s unleashing of federal immigration agents and National Guard troops on US cities.
Activist and attorney Rachel Cohen wrote in Current Affairs magazine last month that she is not paying her federal income taxes this year, noting that “our enormous military budget is going to illegal wars of aggression in multiple hemispheres.”
“When I learned about pacifists who participated in draft refusal during the Vietnam War,” Cohen wrote, “I was confident they were doing the right thing, and that if I were similarly situated, I would have joined them.”
"Netanyahu helped walk us into war, but he cannot keep us there," said US Rep. Debbie Dingell.
By Brad Reed
The US "has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world," a top official told the Vatican's US representative. "The Catholic Church had better take its side."
By Julia Conley
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