The New York Times reports: The trains from Tel Aviv were packed one evening last month when Inbal Boxerman, a 40-year-old mother of two, was blocked by a wall of men as she tried to board. One of them told her that women were not allowed on — the car was for men only. Ms. Boxerman was stunned. It was a public train operated by Israel Railways, and segregated seating is illegal in the country. The men stopping her appeared…
The Guardian reports: Racism is at the heart of the American government’s failure to tackle the growing threat of deadly heatwaves, according to the author of an authoritative new book on the heating planet. Jeff Goodell, an award winning climate journalist, told the Guardian that people of color – including millions of migrant workers who are bearing the brunt of record-breaking temperatures as farmhands, builders and delivery workers – are not guaranteed lifesaving measures like water and shade breaks because…
Tahir Hamut Izgil writes: About seven years ago, people around me started disappearing. It began slowly, quietly. The editors of a well-known literature textbook were suddenly nowhere to be found. A friend of mine left for work and never came home. My family and I are Uyghurs, and at the time we were living in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China. The political situation in our region had been growing gradually more tense for…
Greg Sargent writes: One of the more pernicious developments in our politics is the effort by red-state governors to assert outsize power over immigration in their states, in ways designed to appeal to national right-wing audiences. For instance, the state of Texas recently placed a large barrier in the Rio Grande, supposedly to keep migrants out, but actually just to send a message to Fox News viewers that the state is securing the border where President Biden allegedly refused. But…
Kourosh Ziabari writes: The Iranian government is handicapped by unrelenting sanctions that do not look as though they are going away anytime soon. The country’s economic paralysis is compounded by the inadequacies of a squad of callow officials and corrupt functionaries, whose nepotism triggers frequent scandals these days. While the sanctions have almost irreversibly insulated the national economy from the outside world and rendered Iran’s banking and financial sectors irrelevant, the iron-fisted establishment has been unable to tame its top-tier…
Diana Buttu writes: As I entered the Jenin refugee camp, a few days after Israel’s deadly assault in early July, I was overcome by the sights and smells—and by my own memories. At the camp’s entrance, garbage was piled high, the first sign of Israel’s destruction of much of the camp’s infrastructure, including its sewage lines. The smell of the garbage rotting in the hot sun, mixed with the open sewage, was overwhelming. But as I walked deeper into the…
The Associated Press reports: The Ukrainian civilians woke long before dawn in the bitter cold, lined up for the single toilet and were loaded at gunpoint into the livestock trailer. They spent the next 12 hours or more digging trenches on the front lines for Russian soldiers. Many were forced to wear overlarge Russian military uniforms that could make them a target, and a former city administrator trudged around in boots five sizes too big. By the end of the…
Vann R. Newkirk II writes: Consider the cantaloupe. It’s a decent melon. If you, like me, are the sort who constantly mixes them up, cantaloupes are the orange ones, and honeydews are green. If you, like me, are old enough to remember vacations, you might have had them along with their cousin, watermelon, at a hotel’s breakfast buffet. Those spreads are not as bad as you remember, especially when it’s hot out; add a couple of cold bagels and a…
The Daily Beast reports: Friends and colleagues of Elizabeth Tsurkov, a dual Russian-Israeli citizen who was kidnapped by an Iran-backed militia in Iraq earlier this year, are slamming what they describe as dangerous lies spreading online about the Princeton doctoral student. Tsurkov, 36, went missing in March after traveling to Iraq on a research trip for her dissertation, Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement this week, adding that she was abducted by Kataib Hezbollah, a notorious militia group…
The Guardian reports: Israel has launched a major aerial and ground offensive into the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, its biggest military operation in the Palestinian territory in years, in what it described as an “extensive counter-terrorism effort”. At least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 injured, 10 seriously, in the attack that began at about 1am on Monday, and the death toll is likely to rise, according to the Palestinian health ministry. On Monday afternoon, Israeli sources suggested…
The New York Times reports: From air and by sea, using radar, telephone and radio, officials watched and listened for 13 hours as the migrant ship Adriana lost power, then drifted aimlessly off the coast of Greece in a slowly unfolding humanitarian disaster. As terrified passengers telephoned for help, humanitarian workers assured them that a rescue team was coming. European border officials, watching aerial footage, prepared to witness what was certain to be a heroic operation. Yet the Adriana capsized…
Rolling Stone reports: Kierre Morgan has had an abortion, but it was the abortion she didn’t have that transformed her into an activist. She was 17 and in denial, at first, about being pregnant at all. Under Ohio law, she needed permission to terminate her pregnancy, and — after considering whether she could use a fake ID — she finally had a conversation with her adoptive parents. They overruled her decision. “Their options were: I could have my daughter, and…
The Los Angeles Times reports: A new Biden administration policy has dramatically lowered the percentage of migrants at the southern border who enter the United States and are allowed to apply for asylum, according to numbers revealed in court documents obtained by The Times. Without these new limits to asylum, border crossings could overwhelm local towns and resources, a Department of Homeland Security official warned a federal court in a filing this month. The new asylum policy is the centerpiece…
Matthew Duss writes: As president, Donald Trump made no secret of his admiration for repressive rulers around the world. Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to change that. He regularly criticized Donald Trump’s silence about repressive regimes and promised that a Biden administration would “hold to account those who perpetrate human rights abuses.” Since taking office he has repeated the refrain that “human rights will be the center of our foreign policy.” Not only has Biden not honored this promise,…
Mother Jones reports: After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Native Americans stood beside Black protesters in Minneapolis and called for changes to policing. Now, the Justice Department is highlighting how the city’s cops have been racist against them, too. On Friday, the department released a blistering report showing that for years, the Minneapolis police have discriminated against Native Americans as well as Black residents, creating the conditions that led to Floyd’s death. The police are much more likely to stop…
Kim Ghattas writes: The past few months have brought despair to millions of Arabs as they’ve watched the rapid and seemingly definitive restoration of an old, dictatorial order throughout a region that was not long ago full of promise. The end of the Arab Spring has been forecast many times already. Now the last stubborn buds have been crushed. Tunisia, the country that started the wave of democratic uprisings in December 2010, served for more than a decade as a…