Today's Omissions

On May 13, 2026, Cuba's Energy and Mines Minister Vicente de la O Levy announced on state media that the country has completely run out of diesel and fuel oil reserves. "We have absolutely no fuel oil, and absolutely no diesel," he said. "We have no reserves." The national power grid is in what he described as a "critical" state. Blackouts in Havana now run 20 to 22 hours per day in many neighborhoods. Protests broke out across the capital Wednesday evening as residents banged pots and pans from balconies and gathered in streets demanding electricity. Reuters witnessed multiple protests at which power was restored mid-demonstration, prompting crowds to cheer and disperse. This is happening to a country of nearly 10 million people, in the Caribbean, 90 miles from US shores.

The blockade structure: The current fuel crisis is the direct, intended consequence of Trump's January 2026 executive order threatening tariffs on any country that ships fuel to Cuba. Mexico and Venezuela — Cuba's traditional suppliers — have not sent fuel to the island since that order. Only one large tanker, the Russian-flagged Anatoly Kolodkin, has delivered crude oil to Cuba since December 2025, providing brief relief in April. Today, May 16, marks four full months of comprehensive US fuel blockade. The Cuban government's announcement of new variable fuel prices at the pump beginning May 15 is an attempt to manage the collapse of supply through demand destruction — meaning ordinary Cubans paying more for less.

The "humanitarian assistance in exchange for political reform" frame: Per CNBC's May 14 reporting, the Trump administration has "offered assistance in exchange for political reform." This is the explicit policy mechanism: fuel access for the Cuban population is being conditioned on the Cuban government's compliance with US political demands. The civilian population becomes the coercion vector. This framework — "we will lift the conditions causing your humanitarian crisis if you change your government" — is the textbook definition of collective punishment, prohibited under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The fact that the framework is being applied to a country the US is not formally at war with does not change its structural character.

The UN's unlawful determination: The week before the May 13 fuel-exhaustion announcement, the United Nations formally called Trump's fuel blockade "unlawful," stating it had "obstructed the Cuban people's right to development while undermining their rights to food, education, health, and water and sanitation." This is not a softly worded diplomatic protest — it is a formal UN determination that an active US foreign policy is in violation of international law. US coverage of this determination is essentially absent. If the UN had made an equivalent determination about, say, Russia's energy policy toward Ukraine, it would be the lead story on every US network.

The cascading civilian consequences: With 20-22 hour daily blackouts: refrigerators do not run, so food spoils; water pumps do not run, so households lose water service; medical equipment cannot operate, so dialysis patients, infants in incubators, and those on oxygen are at acute risk; medicines requiring refrigeration are destroyed; food preservation collapses across the household and commercial supply chain. Public services across the country are collapsing. The blackouts come on top of pre-existing severe food, fuel, and medicine shortages that have produced a measurable acceleration of out-migration — over 1 million Cubans have left the island since 2022, the largest exodus in the country's history. The blockade architects know this. Migration to the US is itself a feature of the policy, designed to destabilize the Cuban government further.

What's getting buried: The Cuba fuel crisis is receiving thin US coverage relative to its scale. The story is being framed (in the rare US coverage it gets) as "Cuban government can't keep the lights on" rather than as "US policy has produced a humanitarian crisis the UN has formally called unlawful." The "humanitarian assistance for political reform" framing in particular is being processed as routine diplomacy rather than as collective punishment. The Iran war's energy shock is also being cited by Cuban officials as compounding the supply problem — global oil prices and transport costs have risen sharply, making the few possible alternative sources more expensive — meaning the same US foreign policy choices that produced the Iran war are producing second-order humanitarian effects in Cuba. The structural connection is invisible in US coverage. This site has been documenting the Cuba blockade's trajectory across multiple weeks; the May 13 announcement is the predictable endpoint of the policy as designed.

As Eurovision 2026 holds its final tonight in Vienna, three European public broadcasters are refusing to air the contest at all: Ireland's RTÉ, Spain's RTVE, and Slovenia's RTV Slovenia. Two additional countries — Iceland and the Netherlands — withdrew from competing but are still broadcasting. This is the biggest crisis in the 70-year history of the Eurovision Song Contest. Slovenia's RTV is broadcasting "Voices of Palestine" — a series of feature films and documentaries about Palestine — in place of Eurovision. Ireland's RTÉ is airing a Father Ted episode. Spain's RTVE is showing alternative programming. Only 35 countries are competing this year, the fewest since entry was expanded in 2004.

The Russia comparison that names the framework: In February 2022, the European Broadcasting Union suspended Russia from Eurovision within days of its invasion of Ukraine. The suspension was treated as moral common sense — a member state engaged in mass violence against civilians should not enjoy the cultural legitimacy a Eurovision performance confers. Israel's war in Gaza has now killed over 72,000 Palestinians, destroyed most of the enclave, produced an ICJ genocide case, and continued for over two years. The EBU has refused to suspend Israel. Amnesty International's Secretary General Agnes Callamard stated in May: "The EBU's failure to suspend Israel from Eurovision, as it did with Russia following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, is an act of cowardice and an illustration of blatant double standards. Israel's participation offers the country a platform to try to deflect attention from and normalise its ongoing genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip." The framework operates selectively. Russia 2022: out. Israel 2024-2026: in. The pattern is the analysis.

Why this matters structurally: Eurovision is run by the EBU — the world's largest alliance of public service media organizations. When public broadcasters defy their own continental organization to protest a member state's inclusion, this is not just cultural commentary. It is institutional defection from an established consensus about which states the framework will protect. National public broadcasters in Western European democracies — Ireland, Spain, Slovenia — are putting their relationship with the EBU at risk in order to refuse the EBU's complicity in the framework's selective application. This is not happening for ordinary cultural disputes. It is happening because public-broadcaster leadership in these countries has determined that maintaining the Russia/Israel double standard is itself a reputational risk they cannot accept.

What about Israeli vote manipulation: Eurovision's previous voting system allowed one person to vote up to 20 times. The Times found that under that system, "a few hundred people could sway the public vote." In 2024 and 2025, Israel's vote totals were "excessive" per Eurovision director Martin Green, including coordinated vote-multiplication campaigns. For 2026 the EBU has reduced the maximum votes per person from 20 to 10 — itself an admission that the previous system had been gamed. Saturday's vote, the EBU told Israel's delegation to remove videos instructing viewers to "vote 10 times for Israel." The cultural-legitimacy question and the vote-integrity question are now both contaminated. This is what the boycotting broadcasters are also responding to: the contest's apparatus has been compromised in ways that suggest the framework is willing to manipulate its own procedures to protect its preferred outcomes.

The pattern Eurovision is part of: Eurovision's crisis is one expression of a broader cultural and institutional shift. European public opinion has moved significantly against Israel's Gaza operations over the past 18 months — large majorities in Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Norway, and many other European countries now disapprove of Israeli government conduct. National governments have been slower to move than public opinion. Public broadcasters, as semi-independent institutions, are tracking public opinion rather than government policy. This is institutional democracy doing the work that elected governments are not yet willing to do. The same pattern is visible in: European universities divesting from Israeli institutions, European artists refusing tours in Israel, European retailers labeling settlement products separately, European parliaments passing recognition-of-Palestine resolutions. Eurovision is the most visible because of its scale, but it is not isolated.

What's getting buried: US coverage of the Eurovision boycotts is treating them as a cultural curiosity rather than as institutional documentation of the framework's collapse. The Amnesty International "double standards" quote is essentially absent from major US coverage. The structural significance — Russia suspended within days, Israel protected across years of larger civilian casualty counts — is not being drawn. The Russia comparison, the public-broadcaster-vs-EBU institutional drama, the vote-manipulation evidence, the multi-country coordination — all of this is documentary evidence that the framework's selective application is producing institutional defection across Western Europe. US coverage is not equipped to process this as the news it is.

On May 11, 2026, Israel's Knesset passed legislation establishing a special military tribunal in Jerusalem to try approximately 300 Palestinian suspects accused of involvement in the October 7, 2023 attacks. The vote was 93-0, with 27 members abstaining and none opposing. The tribunal is authorized to impose the death penalty on those convicted of genocide as defined under Israel's 1950 Law for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Proceedings will be livestreamed online to the public. The court will have a dedicated staff of 400 — 15 senior judges plus support — and will operate at an estimated cost of NIS 2-5 billion ($689M-$1.72B). Detainees will remain in prison and will not physically appear at the courthouse; hearings will be conducted remotely. The bill was co-sponsored by far-right Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman and Yisrael Beytenu MK Yulia Malinovsky, who proclaimed: "These will be the trials of the modern-day Nazis, and they will go down in the history books."

What "Israeli military court" actually means in practice: Israeli military courts that prosecute Palestinians from the West Bank operate at a 95% to 99% conviction rate, per multiple human rights organizations documenting their procedures over decades. The standard procedural features include: admission of evidence obtained through coercive interrogation that may amount to torture under international standards; "secret evidence" hidden from defense attorneys; an assumption of guilt that effectively reverses the burden of proof; mass-trial procedures that deviate from individual due process; convictions often resting solely on confessions extracted in detention facilities under documented conditions of mistreatment. This is not a debating point — it is the documented operating reality of Israel's existing military court system, which the new tribunal extends and intensifies. The new law explicitly permits broader exemptions from standard legal procedure.

Israel's own human rights organizations are calling these "show trials": Adalah (the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel), Hamoked, and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel have issued a joint briefing warning that any death sentence imposed under the new tribunal "will be considered an arbitrary deprivation of life" in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Sari Bashi, executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel: "These are show trials that will fast-track executions through denial of due process and based on confessions extracted under torture." The phrase "show trials" — historically associated with Stalinist procedural fraud — is being used by Israeli rights organizations to describe Israel's own legal apparatus. The Israeli human rights establishment is not a marginal Palestinian-advocacy voice. It is naming what is happening, in Hebrew and English, from inside the country.

The Eichmann comparison the bill's sponsors are making: Knesset members backing the law have explicitly invoked the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial as the model — proceedings that, in Israeli national memory, served as the foundational case of justice for the architect of the Holocaust. Adalah attorney Muna Haddad has pointed out the comparison is legally and historically false: "Adolf Eichmann was not, in fact, tried under the Genocide Law but the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law." The bill seeks to apply the crime of genocide in an "expansive and exceptional manner" against Palestinian defendants — at the same moment that Israel itself is facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its operations in Gaza. The structural inversion is total. The state that the ICJ has determined faces a plausible case of committing genocide is establishing a tribunal to convict its own civilian-population enemies of genocide. Al-Shabaka policy fellow Fathy Nimr to Mada Masr: "It really feels like the world has been turned upside down. The state that is actually carrying out genocide is accusing people living under military rule of wanting to commit genocide."

The death penalty context: Israel has not executed anyone since Adolf Eichmann in 1962 — a 64-year operational moratorium. The new tribunal is paired with a March 2026 Knesset bill mandating death penalty for Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis labeled as terrorism, while not imposing the same penalty on Jewish Israelis convicted of killing Palestinians. Adalah and the UN human rights chief have characterized the death penalty law as "deeply discriminatory" because it applies asymmetrically by ethnicity of victim and perpetrator. This is operational, race-based capital punishment — a category of state practice the international human rights framework was specifically designed to prohibit. The implementation timeline is calibrated to occur before the October 2026 Israeli elections, per multiple Israeli analysts, because "there is such wide public and parliamentary support for the move, it's unlikely that the next government would make significant changes" (Sari Bashi to The National).

What's getting buried: US coverage of the Knesset law has been technical and procedural — "Israel passes law to try Hamas attackers" — rather than structural. The 95-99% conviction rate of Israeli military courts is essentially absent from US coverage. The Israeli human rights organizations calling these "show trials" are not being quoted in US mainstream coverage. The Eichmann/genocide-law parallel — which is the inversion of Israel's own ICJ situation — is not being drawn. The asymmetric death penalty (Palestinians yes, Jewish Israelis no, for the same underlying crime category) is being processed as a procedural feature rather than as institutionalized racial discrimination in state capital punishment. The framework that prosecuted Bato Dela Rosa this week (omissions Thursday, №01) is the same framework that protects Israel from equivalent or larger prosecutions while Israel constructs its own tribunal to try its enemies under expanded genocide definitions. The selective application of the framework, named clearly elsewhere on this site, is operating in real time inside this story.