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Hoo boy. With the approach of what bleakly promises to be "the super-Islamophobic midterms," the Bigot-In-Chief is letting his racist freak flag fly by attacking Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, whose smarts, strength, hotness, accomplished wife and Michigan win clearly terrify him. Cue charges of "communist," "man of hate," and, probs soon, AI slop featuring suicide vests. Meanwhile, El-Sayed, a far sharper tool in the shed, has embraced the charge they represent "(two) America’s": The ads write themselves.
Planet MAGA, of course, is already so delusional Trump just boasted of his "Great Poll Numbers," which now sit at rock-bottom lows of 38% to 33%. For a bunch of hacks led by a fragile narcissist who's never seen a scapegoat he didn't relish, the fantastical goes hand-in-stubby-hand with the fear-mongering: vandals in the Reflecting Pool, domestic terrorists at No Kings, migrant caravans, lunatic Bolsheviks, weird names or just brown-or-black skinned success, more terrifying to many of these losers than any threat of extremism. Enter, in peril, the high-achieving epidemiologist, health official, author and "Muslim boogeyman" El-Sayed. “Expect them to throw the whole bigoted kitchen sink at El-Sayed," says Mehdi Hasan. "This will be the anti-Zohran Mamdani campaign on anti-Muslim steroids."
Unsurprisingly, it began in earnest the minute the good doctor won Michigan's against-the-odds primary against establishment Dem Haley Stevens. He'll face off against GOP Rep. and racist ijiot Mike Rogers, who of course has rushed to call the U.S.-born-and-bred El-Sayed "anti-American" and - pulling the same juvenile "Barack Hussein Obama" crap to undermine his legitimacy - to use his full, scary, def-not-in-Kansas-anymore name Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. But Abdulrahman, who doesn't suffer fools gladly, has brutally pushed back. "With a name like mine, I never thought running for office would be possible," he said at a campaign event. But if "Mike" wants to focus on his 11-letter (a lot!) first name, he just wanted to remind him, "If you don’t know how to say it, keep the name out of your damn mouth.”
In moronic lockstep, MAGA's bigots, brown shirts and zealots have followed suit with "cartoonishly Islamophobic attacks." They use his full name and say he's a "socialist," which they can't define but anyway he isn't. Anti-trans goon Nancy Mace charges, “Every single Muslim holding public office (is) a Trojan Horse and a threat to national security and our republic," and woe is us when "our granddaughters are wearing burkas to school." Vapid scumbag JD calls him a "crazy" guy who doesn't want Trump's rip-off, oligarch-run "prosperous economy" and flings "personal insults" at Vance's family, though hours later Trump attacked El-Sayed's wife, who is U.S.-born and thus not an alleged Einstein Visa immigrant third wife who somehow after 30 years here can still barely speak English. Maybe it was an Epstein Visa?
As usual, Trump has eagerly led the racist, vulgar charge. Along with a communist man of hate, he's also called El-Sayed a "jihadist" from a rigged, "strictly Third World" state who's "full of shit." It turns out El-Sayed is also "the absolute best at casually burning Trump to the fucking ground": Asked about the barb, El-Sayed snapped back, “At least I don’t let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office." And as with another smart, quick, non-white guy who's way above his pay grade and lives rent-free in his wee puerile mind, he likes to sneeringly recite, often stumbling, the full, scary name of a guy who this time actually would be the first Muslim U.S. senator. Presumably, the ketchup really hit the White House walls last weekend when El-Sayed said he'd had "a really good conversation" with Obama about "what we need to do to win."
Above all, the bigot for all seasons pivots to the trope of anyone Arabic - El-Sayed's parents immigrated from Egypt - being anti-Semitic. "He doesn't love Jewish people," babbles Trump. "He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart." In fact, El-Sayed has plainly, repeatedly said he opposes not Jews but Israel's genocidal policies, AIPAC and the dark U.S. money that abets both: "I believe in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination for all people." That call for equality under the law has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, notes Peter Beinart; cognizant of history. he also warns that a political party or ideology willing to be "nakedly bigoted" toward any group of people, in this case Muslims, in order to maintain power would, if the politics were to shift, "do the same thing to Jews in a heartbeat."
Obviously, such subtlety is beyond the dim-witted likes of Trump and his MAGA zombies, who alone could look at Dr. El-Sayed and his (one) wife Dr. Sarah Jukaku, a psychiatrist whose parents emigrated here from India, and see a threat. Both are U.S.-born-and- raised doctors with undergrad degrees from University of Michigan, where they met, and advanced degrees from Columbia and Oxford. In his book Healing Politics, El-Sayed offers a rigorous framework for understanding systemic medical and political failure, and building conditions for lasting healing. He also calls Jukaku his “rock" and praises the "quiet confidence" that led her to work with people confronting pain. "I struggled to learn who I was,” he wrote of their earlier selves. “Sarah did not. She danced with her emotions. I wrestled with mine." The couple has two daughters.
No wonder, then, a needy, hollow rapist, con-man, bully and aspiring tinpot dictator, routinely raking in billions while kids go hungry and stuffed into a cheap tux for his fellow billionaire felons, posted a photo of himself with his tacky, mail-order, call-girl wife in a tight dress with "redacted Epstein files written all over it" - both smirking, "We're richer and be better than you and just ignore our vile name appearing in those pedo files thousands of times" - alongside the other couple, warmly smiling after a pancake breakfast in a diner, El Sayed in a t-shirt, Jukaku in a hijab so she must be a terrorist (though Trump, suspect, is wearing a cat.) The caption for the side-by-side pics, which only the spectacularly tone-deaf Trump could remotely imagine as a mic-drop: "Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s (sic).” Umm. Sure.
Kudos to El-Sayed, prince among men, who didn't even stoop to pick the low-hanging fruit of Trump's "grammatical shitbaggery" - one comment: "What a maroon" - emblematic of a proudly semi-literate GOP somehow come to power in our debased America without understanding how apostrophes work. Instead, El-Sayed went for the meat of the matter. "Yeah, he's right," he told CNN. Swiftly, he embraced the campaign-ready concept of two Americas: "Trump's vision, the one you're living in right now (in) which your overlords are two people who don’t like each other, but join in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you...Or two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, and want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family and know that family is going to have the good things."
Those "good things" - health care, good jobs, clean air and water, a relatively level playing field to replace gross inequality, a country where people can live peaceably together "with their sisters and brothers" - are what he and his wife want for their kids, and he wisely gauges most of the rest of us do too. And no, he says, rebutting GOP charges, it's not "radical" to believe people should be able to afford groceries, have health care, partake in free elections. Also, he and his wife actually "like each other," he adds; as to the couple in the "very different" America, "From what I've heard, it's a bit of a rocky road." As mid-terms loom. “They are going to try to paint me as a certain thing, (but) America is a lot bigger than (these) very small people make it out to be," he says. "They all think we won't step up and fight...We fight for each other."
@abdulelsayed They all think we won't step up and fight... They think they're the biggest, baddest bully on the playground... That they're going to show up and we're going to run away...
Last month's average global ocean surface temperature was the hottest ever recorded in the month of July, fueled in part by uniquely intense, fossil fuel-driven El Niño conditions that have wreaked deadly havoc around the world this summer.
The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said Monday that last month—which ranked as the second warmest July on record—"saw exceptionally high temperatures for the month across a large portion of the tropical Pacific, an area where El Niño conditions are present and forecast to further strengthen in the coming months." Average global sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were 20.96°C last month, surpassing the July 2023 record of 20.89°C.
"Around Europe, SSTs reached record highs for July along the Atlantic coast and western Mediterranean, associated with widespread strong or severe marine heatwave conditions," C3S said.
Brian O'Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, said the latest Copernicus data "is more than another climate milestone; it is a warning that the natural systems we depend on are being pushed closer to their limits."
"Governments have become very good at documenting these records. Now they need to become much better at safeguarding the forests, wetlands, and oceans that help regulate the climate and protect communities from the impacts of warming world," said O'Donnell. "With land and ocean temperatures across Europe breaching records, governments should be investing far more and delivering on their global commitment to protect at least 30% of land and ocean by 2030."
The new analysis was released as western Europe and other regions faced deadly heat, wildfires, drought, and other extreme weather as the international community, including the US and other leading polluters, fails to rein in fossil fuel use—and as oil and gas giants reap record profits.
“Our leaders’ response has to be swifter and stronger than El Niño," Anne Jellema, executive director of the environmental group 350.org, said Monday. "We already know that global heating is supercharging extreme weather damage, and the public wants polluters to pay for it. With Big Oil’s earnings skyrocketing while a global food crisis looms, now is the time to act. The only way to stave off a humanitarian disaster is to make those causing it pay upfront—before even more damage is done.”
Scientists have characterized this year's El Niño, which officially began on June 11, as historically strong and dangerous, earning it the informal "Super El Niño" label.
The Washington Post reported Monday that the 2026 El Niño is "on track to become the strongest ever recorded, with cascading effects on global climate peaking late this year and into next."
"El Niño’s effects have already been felt around the planet," the Post observed. "The higher frequency of heat domes worldwide, the nonstop temperature records in Peru and deadly storms in Chile can all be linked to this pattern. As can the destructive typhoons in the western Pacific Ocean and the relative calm of the Atlantic hurricane season so far."
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned in remarks to reporters last month that El Niño is no longer just "on our doorstep."
"It is inside the house—and turning up the heat," said Guterres. "We have already endured a summer of extremes—record-shattering heat domes, apocalyptic wildfires raging in Spain, France, and far beyond. Thousands of lives lost in the scorching conditions.”
“But according to the latest science," he added, "this is only a warm-up act."
The nation's largest public employees union filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Trump administration accusing it of trying to conceal a scheme aimed at privatizing the federally controlled airport screening process.
In its complaint, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) asked a federal court to force the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to comply with its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for TSA Gold+, which the union described as a "secretive push to expand the privatization of airport security screening functions."
The union originally filed its FOIA request in May, but has since received none of the records requested, although the TSA last month did acknowledge the program's existence and said that there are plans to launch it at three airports next year.
AFGE's complaint alleges that the program "would jeopardize the employment conditions of tens of thousands of TSA employees and the safety of the traveling public," while noting that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last year tried to "eliminate the collective bargaining rights of approximately 47,000 employees" before being enjoined by a court order.
AFGE also pointed to a proposal contained in the Heritage Foundation's notorious Project 2025 blueprint to "privatize the screening function" at US airports.
The union said it was demanding more information from the TSA because "of its interest in the TSA GoldPlus program, the lack of public information about the program, and the potential threat to its membership."
Everett Kelley, national president of AFGE, said that the administration appeared to be headed back toward the kind of system used before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in which airports relied on private contractors with less stringent standards for screening passengers.
"TSA has been keeping everyone in the dark about its privatization plans–TSA employees, members of Congress, airport authorities, and the flying public,” said Kelley. "Changes of this magnitude must not be made in the dark."
Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, said in an interview with The American Prospect published Monday that "nobody should be surprised" by the administration's efforts given how they were foreshadowed by Project 2025.
"This is about dismantling government everywhere, dismantling worker rights everywhere," said Nelson, who described the privatization initiative as "an insane proposal" by the Trump administration.
Chris Finlay, a TSA worker in Tampa and president of AFGE local 556, told The Guardian in an interview published Wednesday that having for-profit firms in charge of security would inevitably lead to a decay in safety standards.
"As a business, their primary goal is to be profitable," said Finlay, "and staffing is the most expensive part of that contract, so if they can reduce how much they have to pay staff, they’re going to... They’re selling the safety of the traveling public for corporate greed. That’s what is happening."
The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday launched an investigation into the Trump administration's attempt to prosecute former Olympic canoeist David Hearn for felony vandalism amid reports that the White House is pushing the Justice Department to reopen the dropped case.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) announced the new probe in a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia. Pirro, a longtime friend and ally of President Donald Trump, dropped the vandalism case against Hearn earlier this month, saying in a filing that the damage he was accused of inflicting on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool "was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism."
"Did DOJ prosecutors knowingly bring a bogus indictment?" Raskin asked in his letter. "Did [the Department of Interior] withhold key evidence to blame the disastrous reflecting pool renovation on an innocent man? Did President Trump pressure or influence either department to engage in wrongful actions against an American citizen?"
"At a minimum, it appears that members of the Trump administration were ready and willing to imprison an innocent American for a decade in a desperate effort to soothe an ex-landlord’s wounded ego about a terrible paint job and wasteful contract,” Raskin added. "We must get to the bottom of these murky waters to rid our justice system of any and all residual contamination."
"The conclusion seems inescapable that at least one, if not both, of you have misled the American public about the evidence and used it to corrupt and weaponize our justice system."
News of Raskin's investigation came shortly before The Wall Street Journal reported that "White House officials have asked the Justice Department to consider a new prosecution" of Hearn "as President Trump fumes over US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s decision to drop the case."
"A new prosecution of the defendant... would be highly unusual, especially after Pirro told a judge in surprising detail that the government’s decision to indict him on a felony charge was ill-informed," the Journal noted. "Pirro said a botched renovation, not vandalism, was responsible for the reflecting pool’s problems."
Trump publicly accused Pirro of "folding like a cheap umbrella" after she dropped the effort to prosecute Hearn, whose legal team is seeking documents to show whether Justice Department prosecutors "were candid with the grand jury" when pursuing their indictment against the 67-year-old former Olympian.
Pirro, a former Fox News host who boasted in July that she had "tremendous evidence" of Hearn's guilt, has privately blamed Burgum for the debacle.
In his letter on Tuesday, Raskin demanded that Pirro and Burgum turn over "all documents related to the decision to prosecute" Hearn as well as "all communication between DOJ, DOI, and the White House related to the prosecution." Raskin also demanded "all evidence presented to the grand jury in connection with the indictment" of Hearn, a Maryland resident and one of Raskin's constituents.
"The conclusion seems inescapable that at least one, if not both, of you have misled the American public about the evidence and used it to corrupt and weaponize our justice system against an innocent 67-year-old American citizen," Raskin wrote.
President Donald Trump raised eyebrows on Tuesday when he didn't rule out declaring a "national security emergency for elections" ahead of the 2026 midterms that would let him restrict the use of mail-in ballots and require voters to provide proof of citizenship.
Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA and an expert in election law, told The New Republic in an interview published Wednesday that simply declaring a national emergency related to election security wouldn't override states' voting laws.
"The United States Constitution does not give the president power over elections," Hasen explained. "We have a decentralized election system. Most of our election rules come from states, from state legislatures passing statutes."
Even though Trump cannot legally seize control of the country's elections systems, Hasen said, his "national emergency" declaration could be used as a tool to discredit Democratic victories in the midterms and also to more generally intimidate Democratic voters.
"He’s trying to scare people into thinking he has more power than he has," Hasen said. "That itself makes him powerful, because people are deterred by him. And maybe it deters people from showing up to vote in elections... We should not be complacent at all, even if Trump doesn’t have the power to actually do some of the stuff he’s threatened."
Hasen also speculated that Trump's executive order instructing the United States Postal Service to not deliver mail-in ballots to states that have not shared their voter data with the White House was also part of an intimidation operation.
"So everybody’s confidence in the elections goes down," Hasen said. "And it’s like, 'Why mail back my ballot if the post office isn’t going to deliver it? Why show up at the polling place if there’s going to be armed security there?' All of these things are, I think, scare tactics. And we shouldn’t give Trump the power—we shouldn’t give Trump room in our heads to panic over whether or not we're going to have free and fair elections."
In an analysis published Wednesday, progressive commentator Thom Hartmann described Trump as a "cornered rat" who will attempt any trick to maintain Republican majorities in Congress.
"It's going to be up to us and the individual states to make sure our voices are heard and our votes are properly counted," Hartmann wrote. "We should be thinking of this as an election continuity exercise that may not be necessary but, like wearing a seatbelt, could be essential if Trump tries to repeat 2020 in some way."
Hartmann also listed a number of recommendations for Democrats to combat Trump's election subversion attempts, including educating voters on the constitutional limits of the president's powers, being prepared to arrest any federal immigration enforcement officers who appear at polling locations, and encouraging early voting.
"For over a decade now, close races immediately produce Republican claims of fraud," Hartmann added. "Lawyers, election officials, and communications systems must be fully prepared to deal with lies and propaganda long before November."
A congresswoman whose parents immigrated to the United States during US-backed genocidal dictatorships in Guatemala on Tuesday excoriated a State Department video hailing the Monroe Doctrine, an imperialist policy used by Washington to declare the Western Hemisphere its exclusive sphere of influence while masking aggression as protection from outside powers.
The roughly five-minute State Department video presents the Monroe Doctrine as a continuous thread in US foreign policy from 1823 to today, culminating in January's abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. It starts with President James Monroe's warning that the Americas were no longer open to European colonization, then moves through the Spanish-American War—launched by President William McKinley on false pretenses—the Roosevelt Corollary, the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis, and finally to the Trump administration.
"American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again," the State Department said in a social media post promoting the video.
Responding to the clip, Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) said: "What a cheap piece of imperialist propaganda. The Monroe Doctrine's legacy is political instability, deep poverty, extreme migration, and colonialism throughout Latin America and the Caribbean."
Declared in December 1823 by Monroe as Spanish colonies in the Americas won their independence, the doctrine states that European powers should not establish new colonies or interfere politically in the independent states of the Western Hemisphere. While it was partly a response to European attempts to restore colonial rule in Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine also asserted US hegemony over the Americas.
Over time, the Monroe Doctrine was transformed from a warning against European imperialism into a rationale for US imperial interventions and conquest, beginning with waging war on Mexico—again, under false pretenses, this time challenged by opponents including a young congressman named Abraham Lincoln—that resulted in the seizure of more than half of Mexican territory.
The US attempted to use the Monroe Doctrine to justify acquisition of a 10-mile zone around the Panama Canal via "gunboat diplomacy" and, after the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, the right to intervene in Latin American and Caribbean countries when it judged their governments unstable, indebted, hostile, or vulnerable to foreign influence. Invasions and occupations of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua followed.
During the Cold War, successive US administrations used the largely imagined communist "threat" as pretext for CIA overthrows of democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, and other countries outside the Americas, including Iran and Congo—none of which were actually run by communists. The US also backed the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, attempts to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and terrorism targeting his regime and the Cuban people. Right-wing, pro-US military dictatorships were installed and lavished with financial, armed, and security aid, including torture training by operatives from the CIA, USAID, and other agencies.
The State Department video was not well received throughout Latin America. One Brazilian news site resented its "threatening tone," while Cuban media underscored the socialist island's sovereignty amid fears of a takeover repeatedly teased by US President Donald Trump.
In addition to illegal airstrikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean and bombing and invasion of Venezuela to kidnap Maduro and his wife, the US under Trump has deployed troops to Ecuador as part of a joint campaign against alleged drug gangs dubbed Operation Total Extermination. Trump has also ordered the military to plan an invasion to seize the Panama Canal, attack Mexico and Colombia, invade and annex Greenland, and somehow make Canada the “51st state.”
Critics and supporters alike have called Trump's aggressive policies in the Americas the "Donroe Doctrine."
All told, Trump has bombed seven countries around the world since returning to the White House and 10 nations over the course of his two terms—including Iran, where he launched an illegal war with Israel.
Respondents to international public opinion surveys have repeatedly named the United States as the biggest threat to world peace. The late former US President Jimmy Carter even called his own country the "most warlike nation in the history of the world."
The US has attacked, invaded, or bombed dozens of countries and supported most right-wing dictatorships in the world since the end of World War II. It has overthrown or attempted to overthrow numerous foreign governments and has actively sought to crush many people’s liberation movements over that same period. It has also meddled in elections in countries that are allies and adversaries alike.
"Despite what warmongers want you to believe, the Monroe Doctrine undermines the partnerships needed to confront our complex challenges," Ramirez said on Tuesday. "We must change course. We must pass the New Good Neighbor Act."
Named after the short-lived period when the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration pursued policies of nonintervention and improved diplomatic relations with Latin America in the 1930s, the New Good Neighbor Act—a resolution introduced in February by Ramirez and Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY)—calls on the US to adopt a new approach to the region based on cooperation, not confrontation.
“For more than 200 years, the United States has used the Monroe Doctrine to justify a paternalistic, damaging approach to relations with Latin America and the Caribbean," Ramirez said at the time. "As a result, the legacy of our nation’s foreign policy in those regions is political instability, deep poverty, extreme migration, and colonialism. It is well past time we change our approach."
“We must recognize our interconnectedness and admit that the Monroe Doctrine undermines the partnership needed to confront the complex challenges of this century," she added. "We must become better neighbors."
It is currently unclear which charges Mangione would plead guilty to as part of a plea agreement, according to NBC News.
Luigi Mangione is reportedly set to plead guilty to federal charges related to the 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
According to a Thursday report from NBC News, prosecutors are negotiating a plea agreement where the 28-year-old Mangione will plead guilty to at least one of the federal charges that were brought against him.
The NBC report noted that it is unclear which charges Mangione would plead guilty to, and that the defendant could reverse his plea "at any time, even during the hearing."
In a December 2024 indictment, federal prosecutors charged Mangione with two counts of stalking, one count of murder, and a firearms offense for his alleged role in Thompson's killing.
Prosecutors had initially sought the death penalty for Mangione, but a federal judge in January dismissed the murder and firearms offense, thus taking capital punishment off the table.
Mangione also faces New York state charges, the most serious of which is murder in the second degree.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had initially charged Mangione with first degree murder in furtherance of terrorism, but a New York City judge last year determined that the defendant's alleged actions did not rise to the level of terrorism and dismissed the charge.
"While claiming to protect all Americans, the administration is rolling back systems that communities have long turned to for relief.”
Eighteen months into President Donald Trump's second term in the White House, the administration has systematically gutted the infrastructure within the federal government that for decades had worked to ensure that civil rights and anti-discrimination laws were being enforced—and has turned agencies "against the communities they were meant to protect," as one researcher at Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
In a new report, the organization detailed how four key agencies have been substantially weakened since Trump took office and almost immediately, with the help of tech billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, set about slashing the federal workforce and demanding that the civil servants who remained be "fully on board" with the president's right-wing agenda.
The report, titled "Remedies Abandoned: US Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Trump Administration," explains how the US Department of Justice's (DOJ) Civil Rights Division lost about 75% of its attorneys after the White House told staff that they were not to operate independently from the president; the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education closed more than half of its regional offices and laid off nearly half its staff in one day; the Fair Housing Office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) shrank from 31 staffers to 11; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reached its lowest staffing level in over four decades.
With the federal civil rights enforcement workforce decimated, the White House has abandoned discrimination complaints at the four agencies and has carried out demands outlined in Project 2025, the right-wing policy blueprint put forward by the Heritage Foundation. In addition to pushing for the administration to reclassify civil servants like those who were pushed out of their civil rights enforcement roles, the document called for presidential control of the Justice Department and an end to "disparate impact enforcement."
In April 2025, three months after taking office, Trump signed an executive order directing all federal agencies to eliminate their analysis of disparate impact—the framework that confronts discriminatory policies based on their impacts rather than their intent—to the "maximum degree possible."
Disparate impact analysis, said HRW, "allows people to challenge hiring criteria, lending practices, school discipline policies, and housing regulations that produce discriminatory outcomes even when no one can identify a smoking gun like a policy that explicitly says 'exclude Black applicants.'"
The executive order and related directives that followed had a sweeping impact, with HUD dropping seven major housing discrimination and environmental justice cases months later, after they had been ongoing for years.
For example, the agency informed Chicago officials it would no longer monitor the civil rights agreement that had required zoning reform to end concentrated industrial pollution in Black and Latino neighborhoods.
"Department leadership said it would no longer treat environmental harms as fair housing violations in situations without explicit indication of intentional discrimination, in line with President Trump’s April 2025 order seeking to end disparate impact enforcement," reads the HRW report.
HUD has closed at least 115 fair housing complaints without issuing findings on the claims of discrimination, and career attorneys at the agency filed a whistleblower complaint last September showing they'd been barred from contacting complainants and working with the DOJ to resolve the matters.
"One of the ways we know that our democracy is functioning and healthy is that your rights don't just disappear because the political winds shift," said Trey Walk, a US program researcher at HRW.
NEW: The Trump administration has gutted federal civil rights enforcement in the United States, leaving the people the laws were built to protect without adequate remedies.
In a new report, HRW documents the administration’s efforts to unravel the work of four key agencies… pic.twitter.com/4VADDpmFDR
— Human Rights Watch (@hrw) August 13, 2026
The Education Department's OCR also appears to have resolved no racial harassment cases in 2025, despite the fact that in 2024, such complaints reached a new record among Black and Latino students.
The case of a 12-year-old boy in Lubbock, Texas, who had been interrogated by school officials without his parents present and falsely accused of a sexual offense, had been close to being resolved when the OCR office for the region abruptly closed in March 2025. When an attorney for families in Lubbock who had had open cases emailed the federal investigator who had been working on the complaints, they received an autoreply, saying the employee no longer had access to any of the case files.
"Numbers illustrate the scale of abandonment," reads the report. "With 11,985 education-related civil rights cases pending when the administration took office, OCR reached just 112 resolution agreements across all of 2025—1% of the caseload, and 78% fewer than the year before on the same budget. OCR reported no resolution agreements for sexual harassment, none for sexual violence, none for racial harassment, none for discriminatory school discipline, and none for seclusion and restraint of students with disabilities. The 2025 case resolution number is low, even compared to previous years when the agency was not adequately staffed or funded."
Walk said that the Trump administration "is targeting efforts to address discrimination without offering any alternatives. While claiming to protect all Americans, the administration is rolling back systems that communities have long turned to for relief.”
More than half of OCR's nationwide staff were among the 1,300 Education staffers whose jobs were cut in a single day in March 2025. Vince L., a career attorney at OCR who was one of 40 people interviewed by HRW for the report, said that in the administration's first weeks, he and his colleagues had received a directive essentially saying: "Stop all work. Decimate staffing. Divert resources to political witch hunts."
"Seven of 12 regional offices shut with no notice," he said. "Some people didn’t even know until their computers didn’t work. You’d come in the next morning and your badge wouldn’t work. That’s how you’d find out you were being terminated.”
Similar scenes played out at the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, where an attorney identified as Gloria A. described how the department's independence from the White House "flew out the window" early in Trump's term when lawyers were directed to carry out the president's political agenda.
“We viewed ourselves as attorneys for the United States,” another civil rights lawyer who was reassigned to complete administrative work, told HRW. “Which is different.”
A significant sign of the gutting of civil rights enforcement at the DOJ came when the agency moved to dismiss multiple consent decrees to reform police departments.
A two-year DOJ probe had found a pattern of racially discriminatory force by the Louisville Metro Police Department, where officers fatally shot Breonna Taylor in 2020, but the DOJ moved to dismiss the consent decree that had demanded reform at the police department just six months after it was signed.
A similar consent decree was dismissed around the same time, in May 2025, in Minneapolis—almost exactly five years after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer there.
"At least four other consent decrees to reform police departments across the US were dismissed in the same period," reads the report. "In each case, the department withdrew before any independent finding that the underlying violations had stopped."
HRW called on Congress to conduct oversight hearings on "the collapse of enforcement capacity at key federal agencies" and urged state legislatures to pass or strengthen disparate impact standards, create or fund state fair housing enforcement agencies with investigative authority, and create private rights of action under state law for discrimination claims previously only covered by federal enforcement.
It called on state agencies to expand intake capacity to take complaints currently not being accepted at the federal level and urged state attorneys general to consider challenging federal agency decisions, including case closure policies that have harmed state residents.
The group emphasized that it was not making formal recommendations to the White House or any federal agencies.
"The leadership of these agencies have not demonstrated good faith interest in improving anti-discrimination enforcement in the US," said HRW. "The immediate remedies lie with Congress, state and local actors, the media and civil society, and international bodies. A future administration will need to rebuild what has been dismantled by this executive branch."
A former top US intelligence official said the reliance on apparently faulty Israeli intelligence was "a great example of how we got into the war with Iran."
US and Turkish officials are reportedly suspicious that the supposed Iranian assassination plot that led President Donald Trump to make an elaborate escape from Ankara using a catering truck last month may have been a fabrication by Israeli intelligence.
Earlier this week, it was reported that Trump had to be secreted onto a nondescript plane to leave a NATO summit on July 8 after Israel passed an intelligence report to the CIA warning that Iran had planned to launch a missile at Air Force One. But new reporting indicates that neither Turkish nor American officials found the evidence all that compelling.
The alleged threat came at a highly volatile time, as the "memorandum of understanding" between the US and Iran to end nearly five months of war was on the verge of collapse, in part thanks to Israel's attempts to undermine it.
As Middle East Eye reported on Tuesday, Turkish officials suggested that the intelligence report was “probably a ruse by [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s government to portray itself as protecting Trump, derail negotiations with Iran, and undermine Trump’s apparently close relationship with [Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan].”
Turkey tightened security after US officials informed it of the plot. But after examining the details of the scheme—which purportedly involved using shoulder-fired missiles to attack Trump’s plane within a kilometer of the runway—they said they found the intelligence report highly implausible.
“Of course, we took the report very seriously and tried to assist our American counterparts as much as possible,” one person familiar with the matter said. “Yet it was very clear to us that there was no way this report was true.”
It turns out that it wasn't just Turkish officials who felt this way. The Washington Post on Wednesday cited a senior US official who said that the CIA analysts who'd received the report from Israel "did not view the intelligence as compelling and conveyed that skepticism to Trump administration officials."
Another official said the report was “Israeli-derived, not US-generated, and viewed as low confidence.” The Secret Service acted on the report anyway out of an abundance of caution.
Nevertheless, the Post indicated that there was a striking amount of doubt among US intelligence officials about the motives of one of the country's top allies, whom they suggest passed the information along to nudge Washington toward Israel's own foreign policy objectives:
Some US intelligence officials saw Israel’s sharing of the warning about threats to Trump’s life as designed less to inform than to influence the president’s decision-making and US policy in the region, a current and a former US official said. Israel views Iran as by far its most urgent near-term threat.
But it views Turkey as a medium- to long-term threat and is anxious about warming ties between Washington and Ankara, bolstered by the personal rapport between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current official said.
It “fit a broader pattern of Israeli intelligence reporting that some officials see as designed as much to shape presidential decision-making as to inform it,” the former official familiar with the matter said.
Iranian leaders have denied any attempt to assassinate Trump. As they try to push him to admit defeat in the war the US and Israel started in February and accept a series of harsh surrender terms, they are having a laugh at his reaction to what they say was a fabricated plot.
Abbas Araghchi, Iran's foreign minister, portrayed it as part of a larger pattern of the US having been misled by faulty Israeli intelligence.
Netanyahu was notably one of the driving forces behind Trump’s mistaken belief that an operation to topple the Iranian government would be quick and painless.
"The US has long miscalculated due to intelligence failures," Araghchi wrote Thursday on social media. "Case in point: The war on Iran. Now, an even bigger miscalculation on the Strait of Hormuz."
"Worse than fake news is fake intelligence," he said. "Be careful."
Joe Kent, the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, who resigned in March after accusing Trump of being manipulated into starting the war by false reports that Iran posed an imminent threat, said that “the story of Trump secretly switching airplanes is actually a great example of how we got into the war with Iran... ‘Israeli-derived, not US-generated, and viewed as low confidence’ by our own intelligence agencies.”
"It’s smart to take all threats seriously," Kent said. "But if you’re basing a decision about going to war on information from a liaison intel service or an 'ally,' it’s important to remember they are most certainly providing that information to influence us as well as inform us."
"The outbreak had a big head start, it is still way ahead of us, and we are playing catch-up," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The World Health Organization on Wednesday announced that the outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo is on pace to become the deadliest in history.
In a press conference, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the current Ebola epidemic is already the second-largest ever recorded, and "is moving faster than any previous Ebola outbreak."
"At its current pace," Tedros added, "it is on track to eclipse the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014 to 2016."
There have been more 4,400 confirmed cases and over 2,000 deaths during the current outbreak, with 80% of deaths occurring in the Ituri province in the northeastern corner of the country.
The WHO chief said he was particularly concerned that many deaths in the region are happening in communities instead of in treatment centers, which suggests there are "chains of transmission we don't know about" and need to be tracked down to contain the outbreak.
"The outbreak had a big head start," he said, "it is still way ahead of us, and we are playing catch-up."
Tedros also shared some encouraging news about the epidemic, highlighting nearly 900 Ebola patients who have recovered "even without specific therapeutics and vaccines," which he noted were still undergoing clinical trials.
"For the first time, two vaccines specifically designed against Ebola Bundibugyo virus have now entered phase one safety trials in humans," he said. "In addition, two new animal studies of the vaccine against Zaire ebolavirus—the more common species—have shown promising evidence of cross protection in animals. On that basis, WHO has recommended inclusion of the vaccine in a phase three trial, which we hope to start as soon as possible."
"All the lawyers want to know is, will there be a qualified physician on staff?" said one advocate. "The state of Tennessee has refused to answer this question."
A lawyer for Anthony Darrell Hines, a man who was convicted of the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jackson Jenkins in Kingston Springs, Tennessee, said the state's Republican governor will force a "grotesque spectacle" to move forward on Thursday by refusing to stop Hines' planned execution despite a botched lethal injection involving another death row inmate in May.
The lawyer, Kit Thomas, noted that Hines, 66, has experienced muscular atrophy after several recent strokes, has been in a wheelchair or confined to his bed for eight months, and has stiffness in his arm that forces his hand to remain clenched in a fist—medical issues that could make it challenging for physicians and staffers to establish an IV line to administer lethal drugs.
Hines' medical condition particularly raises alarm considering the Tennessee Department of Correction's attempt to execute Tony Carruthers earlier this year in an ordeal that continued for an hour and 15 minutes before a warden intervened.
An IV team and a physician, later publicly identified as Dr. Mark Fowler, attempted to locate veins in Carruthers' arms, legs, feet, shoulder, hands, and finally his neck, causing what one witness called a "bloody mess" as the inmate remained strapped to a gurney, groaning in pain.
An attorney for Carruthers described the scene as "outright barbaric."
Thomas has asked the US Supreme Court to intervene to stop Hines' lethal injection.
Gov. Bill Lee granted a one-year reprieve to Carruthers, and Fowler was deposed by attorneys—a process during which he admitted he had not placed an IV line since 2013.
Thomas said the Department of Correction had violated its own protocol by appointing an unqualified doctor to carry out Carruthers' execution, and Hines' legal team expressed concern that the state has not disclosed whether Fowler will be involved in the inmate's planned lethal injection.
Last week, the Tennessee Supreme Court rejected Hines' request to force the state to confirm whether Fowler will be administering the drugs.
"It’s particularly horrifying to think of them lifting a partially paralyzed man from his hospital bed, which he’s lived in for the last eight months, then strapping him to a gurney, while executioners attempt to establish IV access," Thomas said.
The advocacy group Death Penalty Action delivered a petition to Lee's office last week calling on him to halt Hines' execution.
Hines' legal team has also expressed concern about the leadership of Frank Strada, who oversees executions for the Department of Correction and was previously deputy director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry.
During his tenure in Arizona, the three executions that took place were "marked by prolonged and problematic attempts to establish IV access."
Thomas has also called on the state to confirm that officials have done quality control testing on the drugs scheduled to be used Thursday and ensured they were properly stored and handled. Nine Republican state senators, all of whom support capital punishment, wrote to Lee in June, urging an independent review of Carruthers' botched execution and "independent testing" of the lethal drugs the state plans to use before it attempts another execution.
"All the lawyers want to know is, will there be a qualified physician on staff? That's a very reasonable request for them to make," Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told Fox 17 in Nashville. "The state of Tennessee has refused to answer this question, and the Tennessee courts have not forced them to answer. So everyone is in the dark and concerns are mounting."
“It would be one thing if the US didn’t have an overt maritime strike campaign, but they do, and they’re posting snuff films of boats going up in flames regularly,” said one expert.
An investigation published Wednesday by The New York Times has raised fresh questions about who attacked three Ecuadorian fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean earlier this year—but for fishers and their families in the South American nation, the mystery is hardly new.
According to the Times, Ecuadorian fishers aboard the Fiorella, Negra Francisca Duarte II, and Don Maca were separately attacked by what witnesses called unidentified "gringos" using drones. Survivors said they "came under attack by English-speaking assailants wearing matching uniforms with American flag patches, but without any clear insignia to link them to an official government force."
International rights groups have called for an investigation after the Fiorella and its crew of eight disappeared in January amid Operation Southern Spear, President Donald Trump's largely ineffective campaign of extrajudicial strikes on boats that the US administration claims, without evidence, were smuggling drugs.
By the Pentagon's own admission, more than 220 people have been killed in at least 66 such strikes since last September. The US military says no civilians were killed in the strikes, a claim that anonymous government officials called "a fucking joke" and "a total whitewash."
This is a very worrying story. Ecuadorian fishermen are being attacked and killed, and the perpetrators seem to be either the U.S. military engaged in clandestine operations or an American mercenary company working for Bukele or another Central American country.
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— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) August 12, 2026 at 7:12 AM
Government officials in countries including Colombia and Venezuela, as well as victims' relatives, have contradicted the US claim. The families of two Trinidadian men killed in one strike earlier this year filed wrongful death lawsuits against the United States. Relatives of a Colombian slain in another US strike also filed a complaint at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Some of the Ecuadorian fishers featured in the new Times piece say they were seized and interrogated by the attackers before being handed over to the Salvadoran navy, which conducts long-range maritime patrols and counternarcotics operations in the Eastern Pacific and occasionally intercepts vessels.
The new Times report says that a maritime patrol aircraft based at a military facility in El Salvador repeatedly flew toward and tracked the Ecuadorian fishing boats in the days before they were attacked or disappeared. An analysis of flight data found that the aircraft's course appeared to follow the vessels over several days.
Yet the aircraft was not listed among Pentagon operational aircraft. According to the Times, it was registered to a private company whose address was a UPS store mailbox in Virginia, deepening the mystery over who was operating it—and for whom.
“It would be one thing if the US didn’t have an overt maritime strike campaign, but they do, and they’re posting snuff films of boats going up in flames regularly," Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who specializes in the laws of war, told the Times.
"And that’s what makes this even more squirrelly," added Finucane, now a senior adviser in the US Program at the International Crisis Group. “Who are these people that are operating, and under what authority? And they are using a UPS store as their company address? Come on.”
The Pentagon has denied involvement, claiming that US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) did not know about the attacks or have a role in them. But the new findings raise the possibility that the attacks could have involved a private military contractor or another force operating in coordination with Washington's expanding anti-drug campaign.
“Who are these people that are operating, and under what authority? And they are using a UPS store as their company address?"
In addition to the boat bombing campaign—which the Pentagon has replaced with the newly created Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere—SOUTHCOM has launched Operation Total Extermination, a joint counternarcotics operation with Ecuadorian forces involving the deployment of US ground troops into the Andean nation.
In one operation in the campaign, Ecuadorian soldiers raided and destroyed a dairy farm in San Martín, Sucumbíos, on March 3. Ecuador claimed the site was a traffickers’ camp, but investigations by The New York Times and, later, Human Rights Watch found substantial evidence that it was a working cattle and dairy farm with no credible evidence of a criminal connection. HRW said four workers at the farm were detained and tortured by Ecuadorian forces, and that the broader operation was carried out with US assistance.
The Times investigation published Wednesday followed months of reporting by Ecuadorian and international media and human rights groups, including HRW, on the three fishing vessels and their crews.
In April, Primicias reported growing fear among fishermen in Manabí, Ecuador's major fishing province, where crews said they had been intercepted and attacked at sea. Fishers from the Don Maca and Negra Francisca Duarte II separately described being surrounded by drones and subsequently detained by what they believed were US personnel.
Don Maca's crew told El Universo that drones bombed their boat without warning on March 26. Fishers aboard said they escaped in small boats, approached a foreign vessel for help, and were instead handcuffed and hooded before eventually being transferred to Salvadoran authorities.
El Universo also separately reported a strikingly similar account from the crew of the Negra Francisca Duarte II. Captain Hernán Flores said a drone struck the boat on March 17, setting it ablaze and forcing all 16 fishermen into the water. When they approached a nearby blue vessel seeking assistance, Flores said, armed foreign personnel pointed weapons at them, bound them, and covered their heads.
In the case of the Fiorella, Primicias and El Universo reported that two fishers who had separated from the boat in a smaller vessel saw a drone circling above shortly before they spotted smoke on the horizon. Fiorella and those aboard it have never been found.
"Nothing could be more antithetical to the free, independent press than the president charging for early access to his public announcements."
A lawsuit filed on Wednesday is challenging the legality of Truth API, a recently unveiled initiative to allow Wall Street firms to pay up to $100,000 per month in exchange for early access to potentially market-moving social media posts from President Donald Trump.
The complaint, filed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and The Intercept, alleges Truth API violates the US Constitution's First Amendment by granting insiders special access to the president's announcements.
The scheme also violates the Constitution's Fifth Amendment by "charging unreasonable sums that cannot be justified to offset the cost" of receiving the benefit of information from the president, the complaint states.
The lawsuit describes Truth API as "profoundly corrupt," given that "the president stands to gain financially by giving 'market-moving' government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company."
In establishing the plaintiffs' standing, the complaint argues that The Intercept is being put at a competitive disadvantage by the scheme, given that the news outlet is "both unable and unwilling to subscribe" to it, even though it risks "losing out on timely news to competing organizations."
Ben Muessig, editor-in-chief of The Intercept, accused the president of "trying to enrich himself by privatizing government information that he has no right to sell," while vowing that "we won't let that stand."
David Bralow, chief legal officer for The Intercept, said that "nothing could be more antithetical to the free, independent press than the president charging for early access to his public announcements," emphasizing that "public information belongs to the public."
Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at FPF, said Truth API "is so blatantly corrupt and unconstitutional that it would have been hard to even fathom just a few years ago."
"Trump’s crooked scheme is particularly outrageous," Stern added, "because, as documented by our Trump Anti-Press Social Media Tracker, he frequently uses his Truth Social account to berate journalists and even to announce his plans to sue them and criminally investigate them. Then, he makes them wait in line behind paying customers to find out about it unless they’re willing to subsidize the platform he uses to attack them."
The Intercept and the FPF are being represented in the case by attorneys from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, the Public Integrity Project, and Altshuler Berzon LLP.
Nikhel Sus, chief counsel at CREW, said his organization was "proud to represent our clients in their effort to end this corrupt and unconstitutional scheme" because "all Americans are entitled to timely access to their president’s public statements, not just those willing to pay the president’s company $100,000 a month."
Truth API has also drawn the attention of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the US House Judiciary Committee, who announced a probe into the initiative last month, describing it as an "insider-information scheme" that "will enable Wall Street to profit from the president’s frequent market-moving posts on major businesses."
"Big Tech and Big Data companies like Thomson Reuters need to decide whether profiting from government surveillance is compatible with the values they claim to hold," said one tech watchdog.
More than two dozen watchdog organizations are calling on Congress to investigate reports that the data broker Thomson Reuters is making its investigative database available to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which they warn will make Americans vulnerable to Fourth Amendment violations.
Last month, documents unearthed by 404 Media revealed:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pay data broker giant Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases of personal data—which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information—to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigate what it describes as “voters fraud” and immigration fraud.
On Tuesday, a coalition of advocacy groups, including Public Citizen, ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, sent a letter to members of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees warning about the deal.
"The reporting highlights a problem that has continued to grow in recent years: Federal agencies are purchasing access to commercially aggregated personal information that they could not otherwise obtain without judicial oversight," the letter says. "This growing practice threatens to erode the protections guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment and underscores the urgent need for Congress to close the data broker loophole."
Thomson Reuters is primarily known for its leading international news agency, but it is also a major data broker that sells access to its dozens of databases to businesses and governments.
ICE has been buying data from Thomson Reuters since 2008. But the Trump administration hopes to dramatically expand the scale of this data collection by accessing the company's CLEAR database, which compiles vast amounts of information, including addresses, phone records, utility information, vehicle registrations, license plate records, social media activity, geolocation data, and other information.
While much of this data could be acquired through other means, the watchdog groups explained that "aggregating them into searchable investigative dossiers dramatically expands government surveillance capabilities, which further run the risk of being supercharged by the rapid growth and use of artificial intelligence by the federal government."
A DHS procurement document reviewed by 404 stated that Thomson Reuters "is the only contractor able to provide ICE with a continuous monitoring and alert service for millions of individuals and entities of interest; this is essential for national security purposes.”
Thomson Reuters has denied that selling CLEAR access presents a constitutional risk, stating earlier this year that "CLEAR does not contain the types of information that law enforcement traditionally need a warrant to obtain, and CLEAR does not include information about an individual’s citizenship or immigration status."
The letter from advocacy groups also notes that the use of this technology in voter fraud investigations, in addition to immigration and national security, "demonstrates the broad range of government functions now supported by commercially acquired surveillance tools."
The documents do not make clear how ICE plans to use the data from Thomson Reuters in a voter fraud investigation.
Trump has directed the federal government to use DHS citizenship and immigration records to identify suspected noncitizen voters and commanded states—in an order that has been blocked by a federal judge—to turn over information about their voters.
While the administration says the goal is to root out noncitizen voters, voting rights advocates have warned that many eligible voters are also at risk of being wrongly purged.
As 404 pointed out, news of the agreement with Thomson Reuters came "after President [Donald] Trump held a conspiracy-laden and unhinged press conference about election security" in July, "setting the stage for potentially undermining the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections."
The letter urges Congress to hold oversight hearings examining federal agencies' acquisition and use of commercially available information from data brokers, require transparency about what data agencies are purchasing and how it's being used, and examine whether existing law surrounding data purchasing adequately protects constitutional rights.
It also calls on the government to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that would close the data broker loophole by preventing the government from buying data from private companies that it would ordinarily need a judicial warrant to obtain directly from an individual or company.
"Americans should not lose their Fourth Amendment rights simply because the government is willing to purchase its way around our rights," said JB Branch, the director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen. "Big Tech and Big Data companies like Thomson Reuters need to decide whether profiting from government surveillance is compatible with the values they claim to hold.”
"Settler violence has reached unprecedented levels," said a coordinator for the Middle East peace process. "Many incidents occurred in the presence of Israeli forces."
Home demolitions by Israeli forces; attacks on healthcare infrastructure, homes, and schools; mass displacement of Palestinians; and the expansion of illegal settlements across the West Bank have brought the occupied Palestinian territory to "the breaking point," said a top humanitarian official at the United Nations Security Council Tuesday, calling for a "coordinated international effort" to end the violent Israeli occupation.
At a meeting on the situation in the territory, Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, addressed the council as families in the town of Qusra, northern Nablus, were facing days of attacks by Israeli settlers.
That violence exemplified what the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem called an escalating "ethnic cleansing" operation that Israel's military allows.
As B'Tselem said Wednesday, settlers had established an illegal outpost in the yards of two Palestinian families' homes, “forcing the families out and taking over their homes," and the US-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had done nothing to protect the Palestinian residents.
“Israeli ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in full view of everyone,” Yuli Novak, president of B'Tselem, told Anadolu Agency, adding that the settlers' seizure of the Palestinian homes was “not an isolated incident."
Breaking the Silence, an organization run by former IDF members who oppose the occupation, explained how settlers, with the backing of the military, essentially blockade individual homes as a method of driving Palestinians out.
"Violent settlers may do the 'dirty work' of daily terror against Palestinian men, women, and children, but neither this terror nor ethnic cleansing would be possible without the army’s support," said the group. "Village after village, house after house. It keeps happening because it is policy."
At the Security Council meeting, Alakbarov said Israeli forces have killed 76 Palestinians, including 18 children, in the West Bank in 2026 so far, while children make up nearly half of the 3,800 Palestinians who have been displaced by settler attacks, demolitions, and evictions.
"One hundred and twenty-seven Palestinian communities have experienced full or partial displacement since January 2023, including 47 that have been entirely displaced, affecting more than 6,390 Palestinians," said Alakbarov. "Settler violence has reached unprecedented levels. So far this year the UN has documented more than 1,430 incidents involving Israeli settlers that resulted in casualties, property damage, or both, affecting approximately 260 Palestinian communities. Many incidents occurred in the presence of Israeli forces."
As Alakbarov spoke Tuesday, the World Health Organization warned that the West Bank has also seen an uptick in violence against healthcare infrastructure, with Israeli carrying out 83 attacks on healthcare transport such as ambulances and 11 attacks on medical centers and facilities, injuring at least 33 people and killing four. July saw a surge in healthcare attacks—a hallmark of Israel's assault on Gaza that began in 2023—with 37 strikes on infrastructure.
Settler attacks were once mainly concentrated in Area C, which comprises about 60% of the West Bank and is under Israeli control.
But Alakbarov said settlers are increasingly waging violence against Palestinians in Areas A and B, which are under the administration of the Palestinian Authority.
“The future of the region is at stake,” the UN permanent observer for the state of Palestine, Riyad Mansour, told the Security Council. “International will cannot bow before the colonial whims of the Israeli government.”
Israeli officials in recent months have advanced and approved about 12,360 housing units in settlements across the West Bank this year, with the Security Cabinet signing off on 13 new settlements in the central part of the territory last month. The move further isolates East Jerusalem, which Palestinians consider the capital of a future Palestinian state, from the rest of the West Bank.
Last year Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also signed an agreement to develop 3,400 new units in the E1 settlement, which would also cut off access to East Jerusalem. The prime minister said as he approved the deal, "There will be no Palestinian state."
The approvals of more settlement housing this year and the escalation in IDF-sanctioned violence against Palestinian communities across the West Bank "are interconnected steps, not isolated developments,” Alakbarov said Tuesday.
"The situation in the West Bank must be treated as an emergency requiring urgent action," he said. "The concern is not only the continued expansion of settlements, but the speed and systematic manner in which new facts are being created on the ground. New outposts are established, often with state support, and can be retroactively authorized or incorporated into the wider settlement system. From these outposts, settler violence and intimidation have driven the displacement of Palestinian communities."
He added that the spread of settler outposts in agricultural and grazing areas is "deeply troubling."
"Requiring only a small number of settlers, they enable control over vast areas of land," said Alakbarov. "Israeli monitoring organizations report that agricultural and pastoral outposts now exercise effective control over close to 20% of the West Bank."
Israeli forces also arrested 23 Palestinians on Tuesday, including two children, days after a large-scale operation at Qalandia refugee camp resulted in the detentions of more than 60 people.
Hannah Sulieman, deputy executive director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), emphasized that 355 Palestinian children are currently being detained in Israeli military prisons—"the highest number in eight years."
The arrests and the violence mean that for children and their families in the West Bank, "the fundamental spaces of childhood—the home, the classroom, the street, the community—are becoming increasingly unsafe," said Sulieman.
“Children in the West Bank have the same rights as children everywhere,” she said. "To live, to learn, to be protected, and to imagine a future beyond violence and fear."
Francesca Hong said she looks forward to working with David Crowley to defeat Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany in November.
Francesca Hong on Wednesday unequivocally endorsed David Crowley in Wisconsin's gubernatorial contest following her razor-close loss in the Democratic primary, a show of unity in the face of the Republican Party's extremist nominee, Trump-endorsed US Rep. Tom Tiffany.
"Congratulations to David Crowley and his team," said Hong, a grassroots candidate who lost by less than one percentage point despite a massive fundraising disadvantage. "I fully support him and look forward to working with him to defeat Congressman Tiffany in November."
Hong said she is "overwhelmingly proud" of her campaign and emphasized that her run "was not about getting one person into office."
"It is about building a movement for permanent affordability and a government that puts working people first," said Hong. "Our movement is strong, and the work isn't done."
The last 11 months have been one of the greatest joys of my life. Traveling the state, meeting people in churches and dive bars and bike races and dance parties and in their homes, and hearing about what matters most to them informed every decision we made on the trail. It will… pic.twitter.com/Navh81hgvP
— Francesca Hong For Governor (@FrancescaHongWI) August 12, 2026
Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive who suspended his campaign in early July only to reenter the primary less than a month ago with the support of outgoing Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, echoed Hong's call for party unity to defeat the GOP in November.
“Every one of us has something much bigger to unite around,” Crowley said at a press conference on Wednesday. “And that is keeping MAGA extremism from bringing the chaos we see in Washington into our neighborhoods right here in the state of Wisconsin. From the very first day I announced this campaign, I said the real threat wasn’t any of my primary opponents. The real opponent has always been Tom Tiffany. That remains true today.”
Of the more than 311,000 Wisconsinites who voted for Hong on Tuesday, Crowley said, "I look forward to earning their support."
“We may not agree on every policy," said Crowley. "We may not use the same labels, but we all want safe communities, strong schools, affordable health care, good-paying jobs, and a brighter future for all of our children."