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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

As the perpetrators of Gaza’s genocide pose as its saviours, survivors return home – to a wasteland

As the perpetrators of Gaza’s genocide pose as its saviours, survivors return home – to a wasteland

Nesrine Malik writes: Today, Sharm el-Sheikh will host the most high-profile gathering of global leaders in the Middle East of recent years. Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sánchez and others are meeting “to end the war in the Gaza Strip, enhance efforts to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East, and usher in a new era of regional security and stability”. If the ceasefire holds, this language is an augur of the future. One where there is…

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Chicago chooses justice over fear, as it has in the past

Chicago chooses justice over fear, as it has in the past

Claudia M. Fegan and Linda Rae Murray write: When federal agents storm a South Shore apartment complex by helicopter, deploy chemical agents near a school in Logan Square and handcuff a Chicago City Council member inside a Humboldt Park hospital, something fundamental has gone wrong. What we are witnessing in Chicago today — the increasingly militarized immigration raids — is not simply a matter of law enforcement. It is a test of conscience. This is not the first time Chicago…

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Growing number of veterans face arrest while protesting ICE raids

Growing number of veterans face arrest while protesting ICE raids

The Guardian reports: US military veterans increasingly face arrest and injury amid protests over Donald Trump’s deportation campaign and his push to deploy national guard members to an ever-widening number of American cities. The Guardian has identified eight instances where military veterans have been prosecuted or sought damages after being detained by federal agents. The latest incident occurred in Broadview, outside Chicago, where 70-year old air force veteran Dana Briggs was charged with felony assault on a federal officer on…

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Immigrant advocates face escalating consequences and threats from Trump

Immigrant advocates face escalating consequences and threats from Trump

Caitlin Dickerson writes: Since immigration-enforcement agents began their descent on Chicago, acting with seemingly unprecedented speed and ferocity, Evelyn Vargas and her colleagues at Organized Communities Against Deportation have been in a frenzy. They help run an emergency hotline that refers people who have been detained to immigration lawyers and directs their families to support services such as food pantries, emergency housing, and mental-health care. (On a single day last week, it took 800 calls.) And they oversee a team…

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BDS: Boycotting Israel has gone mainstream

BDS: Boycotting Israel has gone mainstream

The Guardian reports: For more than a decade Shouk offered an Israeli-inspired, plant-based and kosher menu in and around Washington. Last week the chain was forced to close the last of five locations and lay off the last of 30 staff. It said the war in Gaza had made it impossible to do business; activists claimed the restaurant appropriated Palestinian food and imported Israeli products. “It didn’t let up: boycotts, harassment, you name it,” recalled Dennis Friedman, 46, a Jewish…

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The social aftershocks from weaponized mass starvation in Gaza will reverberate for generations

The social aftershocks from weaponized mass starvation in Gaza will reverberate for generations

Alex de Waal writes: On August 22nd, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification mechanism, affiliated with the United Nations (UN), reported that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza had officially passed the “famine” threshold. The same day, the United States government’s own Famine Early Warning Systems Network quietly confirmed this finding, noting that there was good evidence to believe that in Gaza, “mortality from the interaction of hunger and disease” was at famine levels. For months, Gaza’s descent into famine had…

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Retaliation: State violence is targeting journalists

Retaliation: State violence is targeting journalists

David Wallace-Wells writes: Last Friday, the 48-year-old Emmy-winning reporter Mario Guevara was deported to El Salvador from an ICE detention facility in Folkston, Ga. He was held in detention there for over 100 days. The state’s filings concerning his detention seem to largely focus on the crime of committing journalism. Guevara was arrested in June at a No Kings rally outside Atlanta, where, while filming the protest for his livestreaming platform MG News, he (clearly wearing a press vest and…

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Chicago Latina activist shot by Border Patrol survives, lawyers up

Chicago Latina activist shot by Border Patrol survives, lawyers up

Pablo Manríquez writes: On Saturday, federal agents shot Marimar “La Maggie” Martinez five to seven times in Brighton Park. Yesterday, she walked out of the hospital—bandaged, limping, but alive—flanked by her lawyer, Christopher Parente, and a crowd chanting her name. That image—a Latina activist standing upright after federal bullets tore through her car and body—belongs to a long ledger of American overreach. CBP called it an “ambush.” Her community calls it what it looks like: an execution that failed. The…

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Rubio lied: Starving children scream for food as aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar

Rubio lied: Starving children scream for food as aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar

The Associated Press reports: Mohammed Taher clutched the lifeless body of his 2-year-old son and wept. Ever since his family’s food rations stopped arriving at their internment camp in Myanmar in April, the father had watched helplessly as his once-vibrant baby boy weakened, suffering from diarrhea and begging for food. On May 21, exactly two weeks after Taher’s little boy died, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat before Congress and declared: “No one has died” because of his government’s…

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The activists tracking ICE in Los Angeles

The activists tracking ICE in Los Angeles

Oren Peleg writes: On a crisp September morning in Los Angeles, Elijah Chiland, Victor Maldonado, and four other volunteers of the Harbor Area Peace Patrol gathered at Wilmington Waterfront Park, just outside the city’s port. “If you would have told me at the beginning of the summer that, three months into this, we would be waking up at ungodly hours to fight fascism, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Maldonado said. At 6 A.M., they piled into two cars and drove…

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Federal agents taunted Chicago woman to ‘do something, b—-’ before shooting her, attorney claims

Federal agents taunted Chicago woman to ‘do something, b—-’ before shooting her, attorney claims

Chicago Sun-Times reports: Body-camera video of a Border Patrol agent involved in the shooting of a woman who was allegedly chasing agents in Brighton Park over the weekend shows an officer saying, “Do something, b—-,” before pulling over and shooting the woman five times, the woman’s attorney said in federal court Monday. The video appears to contradict the government’s allegation that Marimar Martinez, 30, drove toward officers before one of them opened fire on her late Saturday morning on Kedzie…

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The Israeli right’s ‘time of miracles’ is over. The Palestinians are going nowhere

The Israeli right’s ‘time of miracles’ is over. The Palestinians are going nowhere

Meron Rapoport writes: We should know better than to take any so-called peace proposal presented by U.S. President Donald Trump along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at face value. But as the world awaits Hamas’ response to Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the war in Gaza, published in conjunction with the pair’s White House press conference on Monday, it is possible to begin drawing some early conclusions about what this all means for Israel and the Palestinians. Before any…

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Federal thugs assault 84-year old couple during Portland protest

Federal thugs assault 84-year old couple during Portland protest

The Oregonian reports: An elderly couple says they were charged and knocked down by federal agents as they peacefully protested on Saturday in front of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in South Portland, just blocks from their home. Laurie Eckman, 84, said she and her husband Richard Eckman, also 84 and a Vietnam war veteran, were rushed by federal officers “for no apparent reason.” She said her husband was leaning on his walker and wearing his Vietnam veterans…

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Stephen Miller accused of ‘incitement to violence against judges’

Stephen Miller accused of ‘incitement to violence against judges’

Raw Story reports: U.S. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller Saturday was accused of “incitement to violence against judges.” Miller, who has been accused of making his subordinates cry at work, took to social media over the weekend to make several proclamations related to “leftist” judges. “The Democrat Party has filled our legal and judicial system with radicals who protect leftwing terrorists,” Miller wrote Saturday. “This is a very real and dire crisis for our Republican form of…

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Trump officials discussed sending Army’s 82nd Airborne division to Portland, text messages show

Trump officials discussed sending Army’s 82nd Airborne division to Portland, text messages show

Minnesota Star Tribune reports: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth considered sending an elite U.S. Army strike force to Portland, Ore., to quell protests that President Donald Trump has characterized as “lawless mayhem,” according to images of messages provided to the Minnesota Star Tribune. The messages, casually exchanged last weekend in a crowded, public space, show high-level officials in the Trump administration discussing the deployment of the Army’s 82nd Airborne, an infantry division that has been deployed to combat zones in both…

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