Browsed by
Category: Human rights/civil liberties

AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state

AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state

Adi Robertson writes: Mark Zuckerberg wants you to be understood by the machine. The Meta CEO has recently been pitching a future where his AI tools give people something that “knows them well,” not just as pals, but as professional help. “For people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist,” he told Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, “I think everyone will have an AI.” The jury is out on whether AI systems can make good therapists, but this future is already…

Read More Read More

Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation, some Israeli officials admit in private

Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation, some Israeli officials admit in private

The New York Times reports: Some Israeli military officials have privately concluded that Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation unless aid deliveries are restored within weeks, according to three Israeli defense officials familiar with conditions in the enclave. For months, Israel has maintained that its blockade on food and fuel to Gaza did not pose a major threat to civilian life in the territory, even as the United Nations and other aid agencies have said a famine was looming. But…

Read More Read More

Americans are losing interest in Gaza at the worst possible moment

Americans are losing interest in Gaza at the worst possible moment

Zack Beauchamp writes: Israel’s war in Gaza, which has long been a moral atrocity, is on the brink of becoming unimaginably worse. Earlier this month, Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “the concluding moves” of the war in Gaza. Called “Gideon’s Chariots,” the operation’s plan calls for the mass destruction of remaining buildings in Gaza and the “conquest” of much of the Strip by Israel. The more than 2 million Palestinian civilians would…

Read More Read More

Trump administration makes a mockery of refugee status by welcoming Afrikaners

Trump administration makes a mockery of refugee status by welcoming Afrikaners

Politico reports: President Donald Trump on Monday defended his decision to take in dozens of white South Africans who were granted refugee status as his administration limits refugee admissions for the rest of the world. A group of 49 Afrikaners claiming to face discrimination and economic hardship in their home country arrived to the U.S. on Monday morning after being awarded an expedited pathway into the country by the Trump administration under a new program established earlier this year. But…

Read More Read More

To my newborn son: I am absent not out of apathy, but conviction

To my newborn son: I am absent not out of apathy, but conviction

Mahmoud Khalil writes: Yaba Deen,* it has been two weeks since you were born, and these are my first words to you. In the early hours of 21 April, I waited on the other end of a phone as your mother labored to bring you into this world. I listened to her pained breaths and tried to speak comforting words into her ear over the crackling line. During your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept…

Read More Read More

Pope Leo XIV signals his commitment to social justice

Pope Leo XIV signals his commitment to social justice

John Nichols writes: Pope Leo XIII, the leader of the Catholic Church from 1878 to 1903, came to be known as ”The Pope of the Workers” because of his groundbreaking 1891 encyclical on the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, which provided the outline for modern Catholic social justice teaching. Taking its name, Rerum Novarum, from the Latin phrase for “of revolutionary change,” the encyclical recognized that a “remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing…

Read More Read More

Americans no longer live in a full democracy

Americans no longer live in a full democracy

Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt write: Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be. Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. Rather than violently suppress opposition like Castro or Pinochet, today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines. We call this competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an…

Read More Read More

Family of Shireen Abu Akleh responds after Zeteo documentary names Israeli soldier who killed her

Family of Shireen Abu Akleh responds after Zeteo documentary names Israeli soldier who killed her

  As the Israeli military kills two more Palestinian journalists in Gaza, a new documentary by Zeteo has uncovered critical details about Israel’s killing three years ago of the acclaimed Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. The film identifies for the first time the Israeli soldier who allegedly shot Abu Akleh. We get response when we speak with two members of Abu Akleh’s family — her brother Anton and her niece Lina — as well as the documentary’s executive…

Read More Read More

Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of ‘killing the world’s poorest children’

Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of ‘killing the world’s poorest children’

The Guardian reports: Bill Gates announced plans on Thursday to shutter the Gates Foundation in 2045 and also strongly criticized Elon Musk for slashing funding to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), accusing the Tesla CEO of “killing the world’s poorest children” in new interviews. In an interview with the Financial Times published on Thursday, Gates condemned the sudden funding cuts to USAID by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), saying the cuts had led to life-saving food…

Read More Read More

Trump administration plans to send migrants to Libya where they could face forced labor and slavery

Trump administration plans to send migrants to Libya where they could face forced labor and slavery

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is planning to transport a group of immigrants to Libya on a U.S. military plane, according to U.S. officials, another sharp escalation in a deportation program that has sparked widespread legal challenges and intense political debate. The nationalities of the migrants were not immediately clear, but a flight to Libya carrying the deportees could leave as soon as Wednesday, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they…

Read More Read More

Trump’s 48-hour scramble to fly migrants to one of the most brutal prisons in the world

Trump’s 48-hour scramble to fly migrants to one of the most brutal prisons in the world

The Washington Post reports: The message from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to El Salvador’s Foreign Ministry outlined an audacious plan: The United States would be sending as many as 500 Venezuelan gang members to the Central American nation, and it planned to do so within 24 hours. The March 13 communication was part of secretive negotiations with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and served as Rubio’s formal notice that the Trump administration was sending the Venezuelans to be imprisoned there…

Read More Read More

The world is finally seeing how dangerous El Salvador’s president really is

The world is finally seeing how dangerous El Salvador’s president really is

Nelson Rauda Zablah writes: In May 2020, during the height of Covid, El Salvador was under a military-enforced lockdown. At a news conference, I asked President Nayib Bukele a straightforward question about meeting with the business community about reopening the economy. Mr. Bukele bristled and criticized the founder of El Faro, the news outlet where I work. Afterward, I received death threats from Mr. Bukele’s supporters. One that still stands out was written on Twitter by someone outside the country:…

Read More Read More

Many in Gaza face malnutrition and hunger as Israel’s blockade enters its third month

Many in Gaza face malnutrition and hunger as Israel’s blockade enters its third month

The Associated Press reports: Malnutrition and hunger are becoming increasingly prevalent in the Gaza Strip as Israel’s total blockade enters its third month. A shortage of food and supplies has driven the territory toward starvation, according to aid agencies. Supplies to treat and prevent malnutrition are depleted and quickly running out as documented cases of malnutrition rise. The price of what little food is still available in the market is unaffordable for most in Gaza, where the United Nations says…

Read More Read More

Mohsen Mahdawi: I was detained for my beliefs. Who will be next?

Mohsen Mahdawi: I was detained for my beliefs. Who will be next?

Mohsen Mahdawi writes: On April 14, 2025, I was detained during what should have been my citizenship naturalization interview. After more than two weeks of unjust imprisonment, a federal judge ruled in favor of releasing me. In a major victory for democracy, I may be the first of the many student activists who have been detained by the Trump administration to be freed from detention. The Department of Homeland Security had effectively orchestrated a trap. It dangled the prospect of…

Read More Read More

In court, Trump team backs away from its public deportation claims

In court, Trump team backs away from its public deportation claims

Aaron Blake writes: Amid all the controversy over the Trump administration’s deportations, it’s always important to emphasize where these undocumented migrants are being sent. It’s not just that the administration has deported people without legal due process; it’s that it has deported people without legal due process to a brutal prison in El Salvador. The administration says these are gang members and even “terrorists.” But its evidence has been suspect. It has made established mistakes. And a “60 Minutes” report…

Read More Read More

For the last two months, absolutely no supplies have been entering Gaza

For the last two months, absolutely no supplies have been entering Gaza

Isaac Chotiner writes: In mid-January, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, putting a temporary stop to the war in Gaza, which began after the attacks of October 7, 2023, and which has killed more than fifty thousand Palestinians. (The combined Israeli death toll from the Hamas attack and the ensuing war is around three thousand people.) Throughout the first fifteen months of the conflict, Israel’s behavior, specifically in refusing to allow sufficient amounts of aid into Gaza, drew international…

Read More Read More