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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Most of Iran shuts down as government grapples with protests and economy

Most of Iran shuts down as government grapples with protests and economy

  The New York Times reports: Businesses, universities and government offices stayed closed on Wednesday across most of Iran under a government-ordered shutdown, as the president struggled to address public frustration that has fueled mounting protests over the faltering economy and the government. The one-day shutdown in 21 of Iran’s 31 provinces, including Tehran, the capital, came as President Masoud Pezeshkian on Wednesday appointed a new central bank chief, the former economy minister Abdolnaser Hemmati. The president acknowledged that it…

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Trump will stop at nothing to ensure the political dominance of White people in America

Trump will stop at nothing to ensure the political dominance of White people in America

Regina Davis Moss writes: “We’ve dropped (the price of) the infertility drugs to make lots of Trump babies, I’m hoping by the midterms.” That bizarre remark was made recently by Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. After four years of the first Trump administration and nearly one year into the second, many of us have become desensitized to this kind of commentary – but not Black women. We know the quiet part spoken out…

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Marco Rubio is using real censorship to fight fake censorship

Marco Rubio is using real censorship to fight fake censorship

Mike Masnick writes: The U.S. government just banned five people from entering the country because it doesn’t like their speech. This ban, according to the State Department, is necessary to protect free speech. If that sounds insane to you, congratulations on your reading comprehension. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department announced the “Announcement of Actions to Combat the Global Censorship-Industrial Complex,” which will take “decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American…

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‘We ain’t seen nothing yet’ — Trump’s mass deportations expected to ‘scale up dramatically’ in 2026

‘We ain’t seen nothing yet’ — Trump’s mass deportations expected to ‘scale up dramatically’ in 2026

Wired reports: When Donald Trump won a second term as US president a year ago, members of violent militias and far-right extremist groups who had spent years boosting the lie that the 2020 election was rigged were ready to assist the president with delivering on one of his main campaign promises: mass deportations. “I’m willing to help,” Richard Mack, a former sheriff who founded the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, told WIRED at the time, claiming he was…

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How Trump upended the rules-based global order

How Trump upended the rules-based global order

Patrick Wintour writes: ‘The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci once wrote. “And the new world struggles to be born.” In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, “every act, even the smallest, may acquire decisive weight”. In 2025, western leaders appeared convinced they – and we – were living through one such transitional period, as the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt. During such eras, Gramsci more famously wrote, “morbid phenomena…

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Trump officials move to screen visa applicants’ social media posts for ‘anti-American’ speech

Trump officials move to screen visa applicants’ social media posts for ‘anti-American’ speech

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration is widening efforts to screen visa applicants for online speech considered dangerous and “anti-American” as the government moves to restrict legal migration and remove people from places the president has called “garbage.” The State Department earlier this month expanded new regulations requiring foreign students and people on academic and cultural exchange programs to disclose five years of their social media histories and make all of their posts public. All applicants for H-1B employment…

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Echoes of Eichmann: The industrialization of mass deportation

Echoes of Eichmann: The industrialization of mass deportation

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration is seeking contractors to help it overhaul the United States’ immigrant detention system in a plan that includes renovating industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time, according to a draft solicitation reviewed by The Washington Post. Rather than shuttling detainees around the country to wherever detention space is available, as happens now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to speed up deportations by establishing a deliberate feeder system,…

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Trump’s immigration nightmare is going to get much, much worse

Trump’s immigration nightmare is going to get much, much worse

Radley Balko writes: With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. Masked secret police now tear-gas entire city streets, jump out from unmarked vehicles to abduct and detain suspected undocumented people, and demand that foreign-looking people (mostly Latino) produce papers on demand. These deportation forces have been told by the president and his advisers to cast a wide net, that immigrants are “animals,” that the activists defending them are “domestic terrorists,” and that…

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The Gaza genocide radicalized the world

The Gaza genocide radicalized the world

Tareq Baconi writes: October 7, 2023, marked a paradigmatic rupture in how Palestine is discussed and imagined. Until that moment, international discourse had been trapped in the vocabulary of statehood and peace processes. The Palestinian question was framed as a conflict to be managed rather than a structure of domination to be dismantled, but October 7 forced the world to confront the realities Palestinians have long named: settler colonialism, the ongoing Nakba, Zionism, and Israeli apartheid. This rupture is not…

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The genocides The New York Times forgot

The genocides The New York Times forgot

Zachary Jablow writes: In the winter of 1981, six years into Indonesia’s occupation of the island nation East Timor, The New York Times Magazine published a report about the island that may as well have been written about Gaza any time since October 7th, 2023. Referring to the relatively small groups in the United States protesting their government’s role in the occupation, correspondent Henry Kamm wrote, “There is substance to these protests, even if, at their most extreme, they degenerate into hyperbole—accusations of ‘genocide’ rather…

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U.S. oil blockade of Venezuela is pushing Cuba toward economic collapse

U.S. oil blockade of Venezuela is pushing Cuba toward economic collapse

The Wall Street Journal reports: Cubans are going hungry, suffering from spreading disease and sleeping outdoors with no electricity to power fans through the sweltering nights. A quarter of the population has fled during the island’s most prolonged economic crisis. And it’s about to get worse. The U.S. is ratcheting up pressure on Havana’s key benefactor, Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s regime, which has kept the Communist-ruled nation afloat with cheap oil. Now Venezuelan oil exports are at risk thanks to…

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If you are an American who isn’t white, you are at risk of being kidnapped by federal agents

If you are an American who isn’t white, you are at risk of being kidnapped by federal agents

Adam Serwer writes: Last July, while on his way to his job as a security guard at a cannabis farm in California, George Retes was tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and arrested by federal agents conducting an immigration raid. The agents ignored the license plate on Retes’s car and the sticker on his windshield, both of which identified him as a U.S. Army veteran, and did not even bother to determine whether he was a citizen before strip-searching him and locking him up…

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Trump regime prepares sweeping crackdown on political dissent

Trump regime prepares sweeping crackdown on political dissent

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration is embarking on an expansive effort to root out what it sees as rampant left-wing domestic terrorism, raising concerns among some security experts and lawmakers that broad categories of Americans’ political speech could come under surveillance. Thursday marks a first deadline, set this month in a memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi, for all federal law enforcement agencies to “coordinate delivery” of their intelligence files on “Antifa” and “Antifa-related” activities to the FBI….

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Trump officials celebrated with cake after slashing aid. Then people died of cholera

Trump officials celebrated with cake after slashing aid. Then people died of cholera

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy This story was originally published by ProPublica On the one-month anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate. For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing thousands of programs, including ones that provided food, water and medicine around the world. They’d culled USAID’s staff and abandoned its former headquarters in the stately Ronald Reagan…

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New Yorkers band together to protect street vendors from ICE

New Yorkers band together to protect street vendors from ICE

The Guardian reports: On a December day when temperatures dipped below 20 degrees, Street Vendor Project staff walked along a busy commercial street in the Bronx, handing out “know your rights” information to vendors selling fruits and vegetables. Several vendors mentioned they were scared after watching videos of immigration raids across the city. “We used to go around helping vendors apply for permits so they wouldn’t get fined,” said Eric Nava-Pérez, Street Vendor Project’s Spanish-speaking member organizer. “But now, we’re…

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