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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Trump is making himself the enemy of workers across America

Trump is making himself the enemy of workers across America

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…

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‘Worse than McCarthyism’: Historian Ellen Schrecker on Trump’s war against universities and students

‘Worse than McCarthyism’: Historian Ellen Schrecker on Trump’s war against universities and students

  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…

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Rep. Dan Goldman: ICE is engaged in ‘Gestapo-like behavior’

Rep. Dan Goldman: ICE is engaged in ‘Gestapo-like behavior’

  “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…

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Time for introspection on both sides of the Middle East conflict

Time for introspection on both sides of the Middle East conflict

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…

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Russia is erasing all traces of Ukrainian identity in occupied Ukraine

Russia is erasing all traces of Ukrainian identity in occupied Ukraine

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…

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Jewish organizers increasingly confront Trump: ‘The repression is growing, but so is the resistance’

Jewish organizers increasingly confront Trump: ‘The repression is growing, but so is the resistance’

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…

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Has Israel brought famine to Gaza by design?

Has Israel brought famine to Gaza by design?

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…

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50+ Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador came to the U.S. legally and never violated immigration law

50+ Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador came to the U.S. legally and never violated immigration law

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…

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Microsoft bans the word ‘Palestine’ in internal emails

Microsoft bans the word ‘Palestine’ in internal emails

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…

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Immigration courts are dismissing cases of those sent to El Salvador, potentially cutting off their return

Immigration courts are dismissing cases of those sent to El Salvador, potentially cutting off their return

NBC News reports: Before he was sent to an infamous supermax prison in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, Andry Hernandez Romero was waiting for an immigration judge to decide whether he would be granted asylum in the United States. And even after his deportation, Hernandez’s lawyers fought to keep his asylum claim open as a way of ensuring he didn’t disappear from the American legal system. But an immigration judge in San Diego dismissed Hernandez’s asylum claim on…

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Israeli former prime minister: ‘What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination’

Israeli former prime minister: ‘What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination’

HuffPost reports: Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he now believes his country’s relentless assault on the Palestinian people amounts to “war crimes” and must be stopped. Addressing the people of Israel in an article written in Hebrew and published by Haaretz on Thursday, Olmert, who served from 2006 to 2009, condemned current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for “waging a pointless war, without a clear goal or plan, and with no chance of success,” according to…

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Georgetown scholar was ‘chained, shackled’ in ICE detention

Georgetown scholar was ‘chained, shackled’ in ICE detention

  In their first broadcast interview since his release from ICE detention, Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri and his wife, Mapheze Saleh, spoke to PBS News’ Laura Barrón-López about Khan Suri’s recent release after nearly two months in a detention facility in Texas. The Trump administration accused Suri of “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media”– an accusation he denies. “One should, at this time, show courage, because courage is also contagious. We need to break the cycle…

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Israel ‘killing babies as a hobby’ in Gaza, says Democrats party leader, an IDF reserve major general

Israel ‘killing babies as a hobby’ in Gaza, says Democrats party leader, an IDF reserve major general

The Times of Israel reports: Left-wing politician Yair Golan faced a wave of backlash on Tuesday from across the political spectrum after he accused Israel of killing babies in Gaza “as a hobby.” Golan, a former IDF deputy chief of staff and current head of the The Democrats party, a merger of Labor and Meretz, said in an interview with the Kan public broadcaster that “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was, if…

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The Heritage Foundation’s Christian nationalist effort that claims to combat antisemitism

The Heritage Foundation’s Christian nationalist effort that claims to combat antisemitism

The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, created by the Heritage Foundation and spearheading Project Esther, is a group dominated by right-wing Christians. The ongoing assault by the Trump regime targeting Harvard University, along with other colleges and universities across America is at the core of NTFCA’s mission. Shortly before the November presidential election, Religion Dispatches reported: Following a time-honored Israel advocacy tradition, Project Esther frames its McCarthyist crusade as an effort to ensure the safety of Jews. But as Jewish Insider reported,…

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Netanyahu accused of slander after criticising Macron, Carney and Starmer

Netanyahu accused of slander after criticising Macron, Carney and Starmer

The Guardian reports: Benjamin Netanyahu was accused of slander and pursuing a war without end after he claimed the leaders of France, Canada and the UK were stoking antisemitism and siding with Hamas by demanding he end the two-month blockade of food and aid into Gaza. In what has become an extraordinary standoff with some of Israel’s closest allies, Netanyahu appeared to deliberately raise the stakes on Thursday night by accusing his western critics of abandoning Israel in a war…

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As key Israel allies threaten action over Gaza catastrophe, Washington is largely unmoved

As key Israel allies threaten action over Gaza catastrophe, Washington is largely unmoved

The Guardian reports: As Israel orders Palestinians to evacuate Khan Younis in advance of what it calls an “unprecedented attack” on Gaza, much of Washington remains largely unmoved, even as Canada and European countries threaten “concrete actions” if Israel does not scale back its offensive. Despite reports of growing pressure from the Trump administration to increase aid into Gaza, where widespread famine looms, the White House continues to publicly back Israel. National security council spokesperson James Hewitt told the Guardian…

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