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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Hundreds of pregnant women prosecuted the year after Roe v. Wade fell

Hundreds of pregnant women prosecuted the year after Roe v. Wade fell

Rolling Stone reports: At least 210 women faced criminal charges related to pregnancy, abortion, pregnancy loss, or birth in the year after the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, according to a new report from the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice. In most of the cases — 121 of the 210 — the information later used against the women was obtained or disclosed in a medical setting, researchers found. The period examined — from June 2022, when the court’s…

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Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented

Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib writes: My brother, Mohammed, has survived nearly a year of war in Gaza while working to aid its people. He has scrambled out of the rubble of an air strike that destroyed our family home, and he has seen far too many of our relatives wounded or killed. Through it all, he has somehow remained unscathed. However, he recently fell severely ill battling a hepatitis infection. Mohammed is a deputy director of programs for one of the…

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Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel’

Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel’

Ryu Spaeth writes: It was mid-August, roughly a month and a half before his new book, The Message, was set to be published, and Ta-Nehisi Coates was in my face, on my level, his eyes wide and aflame and his hands swallowing his scalp as he clutched it in disbelief and wonder and rage. At the Gramercy Park restaurant where we’d met for breakfast, Coates, now 48, looked noticeably older than the fruit-cheeked polemicist whose visage had been everywhere nearly…

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Putin regime will collapse without warning, says freed gulag dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza

Putin regime will collapse without warning, says freed gulag dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza

Carole Cadwalladr writes: The last time I met Evgenia Kara-Murza, it was a grim day in early March. The timing couldn’t have been worse. As we spoke, Alexei Navalny’s coffin was being lowered into the frozen ground in a Moscow cemetery. Meanwhile Evgenia’s husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was still incarcerated in a Siberian prison cell almost identical to the one in the Arctic Circle in which Navalny had been found dead, presumed murdered. The parallels were eerie. Because Vladimir, a journalist…

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A dramatic rise in pregnant women dying in Texas after abortion ban

A dramatic rise in pregnant women dying in Texas after abortion ban

NBC News reports: The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds. From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the…

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A plan to liquidate northern Gaza is gaining steam

A plan to liquidate northern Gaza is gaining steam

Meron Rapoport reports: The date is October, November, or December 2024, or maybe early 2025. The Israeli military has just launched a new operation throughout northern Gaza — “Operation Order and Clean-up,” we’ll call it. The army orders the temporary evacuation of all Palestinian residents north of the Netzarim Corridor “for their personal safety,” explaining that “the IDF is expected to take significant action in Gaza City in the coming days, and wants to avoid harming civilians.” The order is…

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With world’s attention shifting, some in Gaza fear they will be forgotten

With world’s attention shifting, some in Gaza fear they will be forgotten

The New York Times reports: After nearly a year of war, fear marks everyday life for Palestinians in Gaza. There is fear of the Israeli warplanes that tear through the skies and carry out deadly airstrikes. There is fear of famine with only a trickle of aid coming in. There is fear of being displaced, yet again, by Israeli evacuation orders. And now, there is increasing fear of being forgotten. International attention has been diverted, first by deadly Israeli military…

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Sheikh Omar Suleiman: ‘Republicans were vile. Democrats were absent. Palestinians were invisible’

Sheikh Omar Suleiman: ‘Republicans were vile. Democrats were absent. Palestinians were invisible’

  In the wake of a hate crimes hearing in the US Senate in which Palestinian voices were not platformed, Mehdi sat down with renowned Muslim-American scholar and pastor Sheikh Omar Suleiman. They talked about the killing of six-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi and the double standards in how that horrific murder was covered, but also of his mother’s resilience and the resilience of Palestinians in general despite Gaza. They also covered Republican Senator John Kennedy’s Islamophobic conduct: “In a hearing about…

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The Gazan infants who never saw their first birthday

The Gazan infants who never saw their first birthday

Ibrahim Mohammad writes: On Sept. 16, Gaza’s Health Ministry released a 649-page document containing the personal information of 34,344 Palestinians killed by Israel’s onslaught on the enclave over the past 11 months. The seemingly endless list is incomplete: more than 41,000 Palestinians have been martyred since October 7, according to Health Ministry figures, but many of them have not yet been fully identified. Over 11,300 of the identified victims are children, and 710 of them were killed before they turned…

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Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants are another test for America’s Christians

Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants are another test for America’s Christians

Russell Moore writes: The accusation that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city are abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs relies not on one falsehood but on a web of them. The rhetoric evokes racist tropes about “savages” who do not conform to our civilized Western world. There’s also a religious angle: the idea that Haitian refugees are voodoo occultists who might be worshipping the devil. As an evangelical Christian who actually believes in the existence of Satan,…

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Missouri high court restores abortion measure to ballot

Missouri high court restores abortion measure to ballot

The New York Times reports: The Missouri Supreme Court rejected a bid on Tuesday to throw out a question on the ballot in November that will ask voters whether to establish a right to abortion in the state Constitution. The seven-member court handed down a one-page ruling less than three hours before the state’s deadline for printing ballots for absentee voters, capping a furious few days of legal maneuvers, as anti-abortion groups and state Republicans made a last-ditch effort to…

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U.S. investigating the killing of Hersh Goldberg-Polin but not the ‘kill shot’ on Ayşenur Eygi

U.S. investigating the killing of Hersh Goldberg-Polin but not the ‘kill shot’ on Ayşenur Eygi

  Al Jazeera reports: Officials in the United States have said that Washington still does not “know with full certainty what transpired” when a US citizen was killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank last week, stressing that they were waiting for the findings of an Israeli investigation. The US on Monday also appeared to reject calls for an independent investigation into the fatal shooting of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel declined to acknowledge that…

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Daniel Levy: In the Middle East the U.S. acts in its own interests, not the interests of peace

Daniel Levy: In the Middle East the U.S. acts in its own interests, not the interests of peace

  Public anger in Israel towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war in Gaza has brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis on to the streets. But while Israelis push for a ceasefire deal that would bring captives in Gaza home, there has been noticeably little criticism of the war crimes being committed in Gaza. Richard Gizbert speaks with Daniel Levy, a former senior adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister’s office and negotiator, who knows Israeli politics from the…

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DeSantis’ election police questioned people who signed abortion petitions

DeSantis’ election police questioned people who signed abortion petitions

Tampa Bay Times reports: Isaac Menasche remembers being at the Cape Coral farmer’s market last year when someone asked him if he’d sign a petition to get Florida’s abortion amendment on the ballot. He said yes — and he told a law enforcement officer as much when one showed up at the door of his Lee County home earlier this week. Menasche said he was surprised when the plainclothes officer twice asked if it was really Menasche who had signed…

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Under cover of war, Israel is demolishing home after home in Silwan

Under cover of war, Israel is demolishing home after home in Silwan

+972 Magazine reports: Younes Odeh and his 3-year-old grandson stand atop the remains of a house in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in the shadow of Jerusalem’s Old City. “This is where he slept,” Odeh says, pointing to a pile of broken drywall and crumbled concrete — all that’s left of his grandson’s bedroom. On Aug. 27, Israeli bulldozers tore apart the house belonging to Odeh’s son, also named Younes, which he built adjacent to his father’s home in 2015. The…

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‘Beyond catastrophic’: UN issues dire warning on Gaza as Israel hinders polio vaccination drive

‘Beyond catastrophic’: UN issues dire warning on Gaza as Israel hinders polio vaccination drive

  The United Nations is warning the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains “beyond catastrophic” as more than 1 million Palestinians in Gaza did not receive any food rations in August amid Israel’s relentless assault. Israel’s 11-month campaign has killed more than 15,000 children and enabled the besieged territory’s first polio outbreak in a quarter-century. INARA founder Arwa Damon just got back from spending two weeks in Gaza, where the nonprofit currently provides medical and mental healthcare to Palestinian children. “Israel…

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