Emily Witt writes: On Tuesday, June 17th, Nancy Urizar was at her job working in the fund-raising department of a Jesuit boys’ high school in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts when her phone rang. “It was just a normal day for me,” she said. “It was twelve, and I had just come back from lunch.” On the other end of the line was her father’s landlord. Some friends of her dad’s had come over, the landlord told her, and…
Ahmed Ahmed and Ibtisam Mahdi report: In the early hours of June 11, before sunrise, 19-year-old Hatem Shaldan and his brother Hamza, 23, went to wait for aid trucks near the Netzarim Corridor in the central Gaza Strip. They hoped to return with a bag of white flour for their family of five. Instead, Hamza returned with his younger brother’s body wrapped in a white burial shroud. The Shaldan family had lived virtually without food for nearly two months due…
Shatha Yaish reports: As Israelis awoke early last Friday morning to discover that their country had started a war with Iran, Palestinians in the West Bank found that the Israeli army had placed them under lockdown. Closures and checkpoints have been the norm in the occupied territory for decades, becoming even more numerous and restrictive in the wake of October 7. But after striking Iran, the army reduced Palestinians’ movement to a near-total standstill — sealing off towns and cities with iron gates, closing checkpoints between the West…
HuffPost reports: The only information Ysqueibel Yonaiquer Peñaloza Chirinos’ family has received about him in the past three months came from former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz. Gaetz probably didn’t mean to help. But last month, as part of a propaganda video for the far-right One America News Network, he took a tour of the infamous Salvadoran prison to which President Donald Trump has sent hundreds of U.S. immigrants for indefinite detention, without charge, trial or sentencing: El Centro de Confinamiento…
Gadi Algazi writes: Maybe you were waiting for the alarm bells to ring, or for the Israeli army spokesperson to issue an official announcement. But the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, long referred to in Israeli parlance as “transfer,” is already underway. Not in some distant future. Right now. It’s not exactly happening before Israeli eyes — it’s always possible to look away — but the echoes are reaching Israeli homes. The thundering blasts from Gaza heard across the…
The Guardian reports: As federal agents rushed to arrest immigrants across Los Angeles, they confined detainees – including families with small children – in a stuffy office basement for days without sufficient food and water, according to immigration lawyers. One family with three children were held inside a Los Angeles-area administrative building for 48 hours after being arrested on Thursday immediately after an immigration court hearing, according to lawyers from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), which is providing non-profit…
“We have seen people basically disappeared, without any sense of actual accountability.” Jonathan Blitzer, who covers immigration for The New Yorker, talks about the Trump Administration’s “terrifying” and unprecedented use of the Alien Enemies Act. pic.twitter.com/IIFxItUiDn — The New Yorker (@NewYorker) June 10, 2025
CBS News reports: A top California union official was charged with interfering with law enforcement operations after he was arrested during anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, according to court documents filed Monday. David Huerta, the president of the California division of the Service Employees International Union, is set to appear in court for an initial appearance on one felony charge of conspiracy to impede an officer after he was arrested Friday during protests over ICE raids. The protests lasted through…
We speak with esteemed historian scholar Ellen Schrecker about the Trump administration’s assault on universities and the crackdown on dissent, a climate of fear and censorship she describes as “worse than McCarthyism.” “During the McCarthy period, it was attacking only individual professors and only about their sort of extracurricular political activities on the left. … Today, the repression that’s coming out of Washington, D.C., it attacks everything that happens on American campuses,” says Schrecker. “The damage that the Trump…
“This is Gestapo-like behavior where plain-clothes officers wearing masks are terrorizing immigrants who are doing the right thing by going to court, following up on their immigration proceedings and trying to come into this country lawfully, which is through asylum.” […] “I was a federal prosecutor for ten years, right there. I worked with the Department of Homeland Security, I worked with ICE agents, I worked with Homeland Security’s investigations. I have never seen any plain-clothes officer wearing a…
David N. Myers writes: Many Jews, in Israel and abroad, are unable or unwilling to recognize the depths of suffering in Gaza. Rather than confront the profound moral failings of a brutal campaign that former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert recently called “a war of extermination,” they engage in acts of deflection, fastening attention on antisemitism (whose real existence they highlight to the exclusion of other factors), as well as on critics of Israeli policy whom they accuse of being…
Kateryna Odarchenko writes: In recent months, US-led efforts to initiate a Russia-Ukraine peace process have focused primarily on the issue of potential Ukrainian territorial concessions. But as negotiating teams discuss technical details and draw lines on maps, almost no attention is being paid to the desperate plight of the millions of Ukrainians currently living under Russian occupation. Throughout occupied Ukraine, the Russian authorities are seeking to consolidate their control by eradicating all traces of Ukrainian statehood and national identity while…
The Guardian reports: On the morning of Columbia University’s commencement last week, an intergenerational group of Jewish alumni gathered in the rain outside the Manhattan campus’s heavily policed gates, wearing keffiyehs and shirts emblazoned with the words “not in our name”. Two had graduated more than 60 years earlier, and one spoke of having fled the Nazis to the US as a child. Others recalled participating in Columbia protests of the past, including those that led the university to divest…
Middle East Eye reports: The markets are empty. The make-shift hospitals are bare. The water is contaminated. The aid trucks are nowhere in sight. Gaza is being starved, and rights groups say, deliberately. At least 57 children have starved to death since 2 March, and 71,000 children under the age of five are expected to be acutely malnourished over the next eleven months. In the ongoing war on Gaza, which genocide scholars and international human rights organisations have unanimously called…
Cato Institute reports: Shortly after the US government illegally and unconstitutionally transported about 240 Venezuelans to be imprisoned in El Salvador’s horrific “terrorism” prison on March 15, CBS News published their names. A subsequent CBS News investigation found that 75 percent of the men on that list had no criminal record in the United States or abroad. Less attention has been paid to the fact that dozens of these men never violated immigration laws either. Why This Review Was Needed The US government not…
Waqas Ahmed and Murtaza Hussain report: Microsoft has quietly implemented a policy blocking employee emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” or “genocide” on its internal Exchange servers, according to No Azure for Apartheid, a group of pro-Palestine Microsoft employees. The automated filter, which silently prevents such emails from reaching recipients was first detected on Wednesday—just after Microsoft’s Build developer conference faced repeated disruptions by the activist group. Microsoft has been rocked by internal dissent over its collaboration with the Israeli…