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Two Different America's (Sic)
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...
Aug 10, 2026
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'It Is a Warning': Super El Niño Pushed Ocean Temps to Hottest on Record for July
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."
Aug 10, 2026
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Advocates Call for End of Deadly Tactic Used by For-Profit Health Insurers to Deny Treatment
A new report is making the case for ending a widely-hated and sometimes deadly tactic used by for-profit health insurers to deny needed care.
It's called "prior authorization," and it allows health insurance companies to override physicians and decide whether certain care is medically necessary before it is covered.
The policy brief, published Monday by the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), an anti-monopoly think tank, argues that the system is a massive drag on the US healthcare system, draining doctors of their time, fueling hiring shortages, and—most importantly—worsening treatable health problems for millions of Americans.
"This practice has massive financial and human costs, as I know personally from my family’s own tragic experience,” said the report's author, Hannah Garden-Monheit—a senior fellow at the AELP, whose late father was denied rehab by UnitedHealthcare after cancer forced his leg to be amputated.
"Prior authorization may have started as a narrow cost-control tool," she explained. "But it’s mushroomed into private insurers’ strategy for diverting resources from care toward their own profits. It’s time to ban prior authorization as we know it.”
The report examines how prior authorization went from a tool used sparingly to prevent payment for unnecessary treatments to what Garden-Monheit and co-author, AELP senior healthcare fellow Emma Freer, described as a "corporate care veto."
Around 1 in 5 adults with private insurance report that they or a family member had experienced a coverage denial in the past year, with 28% reporting that it worsened their health problem, according to a June survey from the Commonwealth Fund.
While insurers claim that their decisions to deny care are "evidence-based," the authors say that "in reality, the practice empowers distant corporate entities with a financial conflict of interest to override the professional judgment of physicians with firsthand knowledge of patients’ medical needs."
"There is generally little to no transparency or accountability for these decisions," the authors wrote.
While insurers claim that denials are reviewed by qualified clinicians, one survey from the American Medical Association (AMA) found that only 16% of physicians participating in peer-to-peer reviews reported that the “peer” was often or always qualified.
Garden-Monheit said United denied her father's claim multiple times, first citing his cancer diagnosis—the reason his leg was amputated in the first place—then by claiming that he had made significant enough "progress" that paying for rehab was unnecessary. The "progress" was that he "had figured out how to hop on one leg from his hospital bed to a chair."
Garden-Monheit describes how she, her father, and their care team were forced to navigate a "bureaucratic maze" by United, which ultimately led them to give up.
"At least twice, I learned of a denial only after calling United to check on the status of their request. They hadn’t even bothered with a letter," she said. "While the lines of communication felt frustratingly unpredictable, the answers always led to the same place: 'no.'"
As she explained in a recent op-ed for MS NOW: "My family’s experience wasn’t a one-off glitch. For United, the system was working as designed."
Former United chief medical officer Dr.Archelle Georgiou estimated that across just two Medicare Advantage plans from United and Humana, the companies save an estimated $100 million per year by denying claims that never get appealed. She said that's a "conservative estimate." Across the two plans, 1.75 million people were denied care, even after appeal.
While insurers pad their profits, patients suffer, the researchers found. Among people reporting a prior authorization denial, 41% said it delayed their care and 28% said their health problem worsened, according to the Commonwealth survey.
"My family’s experience wasn’t a one-off glitch. For United, the system was working as designed."
Meanwhile, the AMA survey found that 95% of physicians said that prior authorization delays care, 79% said it causes patients to abandon recommended treatments, and more than 1 in 4 doctors said it has caused a serious adverse event, including hospitalization, permanent impairment, or death.
Denied timely treatments, many patients end up paying for costly and ineffective alternatives that only make their situations worse and cause the costs to increase down the line.
"It was extremely difficult to obtain authorizations for substance abuse treatment when I covered the emergency department as a practicing psychologist," one healthcare professional, identified in the report as Nancy, said. "Other times, in my private practice, I would get authorizations and later experience ‘clawbacks’ where Blue Cross, for example, would decide the treatment was not medically necessary and take back the money already paid."
"It is impossible at times to provide sound ethical treatment and extremely hard to make a living," she said, "when reimbursement rates kept going down, and the insurance companies could take back the money they had already paid for no obvious reason.”
Prior authorization doesn't just deny care to patients. It also creates piles of paperwork for their doctors, taking away precious time that could be dedicated to their care.
The report found that physicians and their teams now spend so much on prior authorization paperwork that it consumes the equivalent of nearly 100,000 full-time physician and advanced practice clinician workloads, plus more than 213,000 clinic staff, costing as much as $32.7 billion each year. If prior authorization were eliminated, they found, it would free up enough capacity to turn a national physician shortage into a surplus.
(Graphic: American Economic Liberties Project)
A YouGov poll for AELP found that more than two-thirds of voters in both parties want legislation banning prior authorization outright. But the researchers said both the Trump and Biden administrations have enacted only minor reforms that "fail to address the structural conflict of interest that underpins the corporate care veto strategy."
Meanwhile, the industry is making the denial process even more ruthlessly efficient, increasingly deploying artificial intelligence to deny requests en masse.
According to a 2023 class action lawsuit, United's NaviHealth system used a predictive AI model to determine whether Medicare Advantage patients should receive rehabilitation care despite knowing that the model had a 90% error rate.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has expanded prior authorization for traditional Medicare through a pilot program that allows AI models to adjudicate claims in some states. In July, Senate Republicans blocked Democrats' attempt to end the pilot program.
As part of a national pro-AI strategy, Trump has also sought to preempt state laws banning the use of AI to deny care.
The AELP researchers called for a series of reforms to end prior authorization as it currently exists. Among other changes, they said decisions to authorize treatments should be made by independent third parties without the incentive to deny care, that denials must be evidence-based, that the use of AI tools to deny claims should be banned, and that physicians should review patients in person before denying their claims.
“For too long, prior authorization has allowed insurance companies to put profits ahead of patients by overruling doctors and delaying and denying essential care,” Freer said. “This status quo is failing patients, ratcheting up costs, and undermining the basis of effective, expert-informed care. It’s time to end this ‘corporate care veto’ and put medical decisions back where they belong: with patients and their doctors.”
Aug 11, 2026
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‘Twin Victories for Human Rights’ as DNC Advances Resolutions on ICE, Aid to Israel
As the war for the future of the Democratic Party rages on, progressives took steps toward a pair of key victories at the Democratic National Committee on Thursday, advancing one resolution calling to abolish the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and another in support of barring US military aid for Israel.
The resolutions, which were both introduced by Louisiana DNC member Michele Johnson, were approved during a meeting in Austin by the DNC Resolutions Committee and are expected to be put before the full committee for a vote by Saturday.
Though resolutions passed through the DNC do not bind lawmakers or presidents to take particular actions, they play an important role in legitimizing positions once confined to the margins but which are fast becoming a consensus among Democratic voters.
"While it may not actually push Congress to do something, it sends a message that we believe these things," Johnson said during an interview last week. "Ultimately, these resolutions can be used in the creation of a platform... to guide Democrats for the next four years."
The first resolution “urges Democratic members of Congress to craft legislation abolishing ICE and enacting immigration reform that provides pathways to citizenship, protects workers, and ensures dignity for all impacted people.”
If passed, it would put the party in line with the majority of its voters, 73% of whom said in an Economist/YouGov poll last month that they believe ICE should be abolished.
It's a position that has been adopted by increasing numbers of lawmakers in the party's progressive wing, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), but has been resisted by party leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).
As part of the “mass deportation” crusade during President Donald Trump’s second term, which has resulted in individuals being detained nationwide with little due process, ICE has increasingly relied on indiscriminate raids, warrantless arrests, and racial profiling while setting up a vast network of opaque detention camps with squalid conditions. Most of those rounded up have had no criminal convictions.
As of Thursday, more than 50 people have died in ICE custody since Trump retook office in January 2025, and several more, including multiple US citizens, have been shot during enforcement operations without clear justification.
The resolution "urges Democratic members of Congress to pursue civil and criminal accountability for any federal agent, attorney, or official who lied under oath, misrepresented evidence, or gave false testimony regarding DHS conduct, and to remove qualified immunity and other protections shielding DHS and ICE personnel and subcontractors who have injured protesters or journalists, fired into moving vehicles, or caused deaths in custody, whether of detained individuals, US citizens, or immigrants regardless of nationality or documentation status.“
The other resolution advanced on Thursday states that the DNC supports the "full, consistent, and impartial enforcement" of the so-called "Leahy Laws" to prevent military aid to Israel or any other countries that violate US human rights law.
These laws, named after their sponsor, former Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), state that the US cannot provide training, weapons, equipment, or other assistance to a foreign military unit when the government has credible information that it has committed a “gross violation of human rights.”
Critics have argued that former President Joe Biden violated the Leahy Laws by continuing to provide unrestricted military aid to Israel as it waged a genocidal war in Gaza and escalated its assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank during his presidency. Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeatedly balked at calls, including from within his own State Department, to enforce the Leahy Laws despite mounting evidence of atrocities.
A classified State Department report whose findings were publicized in October 2025 found that the Israeli military had committed hundreds of human rights violations that may have warranted enforcement of the Leahy Laws, including many during the Biden administration.
The resolution advanced on Thursday “calls for strengthened vetting capacity, clear remediation standards," referring to the process by which a military that violates human rights can restore eligibility for US funding, "and regular public reporting on the implementation of the Leahy Laws by the Department of State and the Department of Defense."
The resolution also "encourages Democratic members of Congress to conduct robust oversight of Leahy Law implementation and to support legislative measures that close documented enforcement gaps."
Like with ICE, a growing number of Democratic lawmakers are calling for the US to cut off support for Israel, but party leadership has been resistant. This is despite nearly three-quarters of Democratic voters saying in a May 2026 New York Times/Siena poll that they are opposed to sending more funding.
The passage of the Leahy Law resolution shows how the ground has shifted beneath the Democratic establishment since last August, when the Resolutions Committee blocked a resolution that would call for an arms embargo against Israel in favor of a more limited one pushed by DNC chair Ken Martin, calling for unrestricted aid to Gaza and a two-state solution. Martin later withdrew his resolution, leaving neither as the party's adopted position.
In April, more resolutions, which called for the conditioning of military aid to Israel and the recognition of a Palestinian state, were deferred to a working group. Another resolution condemning the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was also killed by the resolutions panel.
Sam Rosenthal, the political director of the progressive advocacy group RootsAction, attended the committee meeting on Thursday. His group promoted both resolutions, including by sponsoring a mobile billboard that circled outside the conference, which read, “HEY DNC, UPHOLD THE LEAHY LAWS. SUPPORT HUMAN RIGHTS!”
"These were twin victories for human rights, at home and abroad,” Rosenthal said of the votes on Thursday. “Approval of the resolutions for abolishing ICE and upholding the Leahy Law point the way for the Democratic Party to move in directions consistent with what voters want."
"Getting sufficient turnout from the party’s base at election time," he added, "will require a change in the approach of the party’s national leadership so that it is clearly responsive to the views of Democrats nationwide.”
Aug 13, 2026
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Human Rights Watch Details How Trump Has Gutted Federal Civil Rights Enforcement
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."
Aug 13, 2026
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US, Turkish Officials Suspect 'Plot' That Led to Trump Plane Switch Was Israeli Ruse
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."
Aug 13, 2026
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Amnesty, UN Office Condemn Israeli Settlers' Siege of Palestinian Homes in West Bank
"These criminal actions by the settlers, supported or acquiesced to by Israel, the occupying power, are making life unbearable for these Palestinian families, and are clearly aimed at forcing them to leave."
Aug 14, 2026
"The horrors unfolding in Qusra are far from an isolated incident," a leader at Amnesty International declared Friday as the Israel Defense Forces and police failed to remove Israeli settlers who have besieged Palestinian homes in the illegally occupied West Bank since Sunday.
Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty's senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, said that the events in the village over the past week "reflect the relentless escalation and expansion of an accelerating and well-documented pattern of coordinated and strategic settler terror, enabled, backed, and funded by the state of Israel, with the aim of displacing Palestinians across the occupied West Bank."
"The three families under siege have been threatened, harassed, and attacked by Israeli settlers from nearby outposts for several months," she stressed. With settlers having cut off the water and electricity, residents are "running out of food, and lack access to basic necessities," she added, and local activists have been unable to deliver supplies.
The Amnesty statement followed similar condemnation from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which said Thursday that "these criminal actions by the settlers, supported or acquiesced to by Israel, the occupying power, are making life unbearable for these Palestinian families, and are clearly aimed at forcing them to leave their homes and land. Time is running out for these three families before they are forcibly displaced."
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also said Thursday that it "condemns in the strongest terms the dangerous escalation in settler terrorism," highlighting that the attack has involved "sabotage of electricity and water networks, shooting at houses, and attempts to burn children, in systematic assaults that can only be described as terroristic, aimed at the displacement and extermination of the Palestinian people."
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Friday that "IDF and Border Police forces have attempted several times this week to evacuate the settlers, but they have remained at the site. The group initially put up a shade canopy there, despite the presence of soldiers. Border Police forces arrived at the site and dismantled the canopy, yet the settlers remained at a nearby location, waiting for the forces to leave."
Ziv Stahl, executive director of the Israeli rights group Yesh Din, told The Associated Press that "it's like a kids' game, like cat and mouse... It's clearly not a matter of capability but a matter of will."
Qusra resident Abdul Kareem Hassan similarly told Al Jazeera that "this is all a charade," and if the IDF "were serious, the whole operation would not take them one hour. We're talking about 20 settlers. If they would treat them the same way they treat Palestinians, they could finish in less than an hour."
IDF troops have long been accused of and documented not interfering with or even aiding in Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
One of the besieged homes is owned by Palestinian-American Loui Ridi, who is based in Ohio. His brother and nephew are among those trapped.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said on social media Thursday that his embassy "has been VERY involved and the IDF and Israel police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this. The actions of those doing this to this family’s home is criminal... Actions by those who carried out this horrific act of terror meant to intimidate and harass this family are disgusting. No excuse for such thuggish behavior."
Huckabee later shared a video from the scene, then claimed on Friday that Israeli "'settlers' are not the problem," and the violent ones are a "very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families and to Israel." The ambassador also pointed to The Jerusalem Post's reporting on one settlement leader, Ysrael Ganz, condemning the outpost in Qusra.
Reuters reported that Ridi welcomed Huckabee's initial remarks but also said they were not enough. He told the news agency that "we need protection. We need supplies. We need to live freely in our house."
As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, Ramiz Alakbarov, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, told the UN Security Council the previous day that demolitions of civilian infrastructure, mass displacement of Palestinians, and illegal settlement expansion have brought the West Bank to a "breaking point."
While settler attacks were once concentrated in the Israeli-controlled Area C, Alakbarov said, settlers are increasingly behaving violently toward Palestinians in Areas A and B. Guevara Rosas noted that "the homes targeted in these attacks are located in Area B of the West Bank, supposedly under Palestinian administrative control and Israeli military control, according to the classification of the Oslo Accords."
"Yet Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances trying to deliver food and water to the homes were also attacked by settlers. Despite these violent attacks, Israeli forces allowed the settlers to remain [in] close proximity to the Palestinian families' homes," she said. Sources told Amnesty that for several hours on Thursday, the IDF forced two besieged families and six neighboring households to evacuate their homes.
Al Jazeera's Nida Ibrahim similarly reported that "Israeli soldiers initially tried to move the trapped families out of their homes while settlers remained camped outside. The families refused, not trusting that the Israeli soldiers would allow them back into their homes, and were eventually grouped together in one home."
Guevara Rosas argued that "for far too long, the world has ignored the immense, unfathomable suffering of Palestinians being uprooted and erased from land they have inhabited for generations. The international community must stop treating such incidents as ‘isolated’ and instead hold Israel accountable."
"Israel, as the occupying power, has a legal obligation to protect the Palestinian population under its control and not to stand by or worse, stand with settlers—while they lay siege to Palestinian homes and cut off families’ access to healthcare, electricity, and water for days on end" she continued.
"States must end any form of direct and indirect support for Israel's unlawful occupation of the occupied Palestinian territory and its brutal system of apartheid, including its illegal settlement enterprise," said the Amnesty leader, whose group has also joined advocates and experts around the world in denouncing Israel's ongoing violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.
"This includes banning trade and investment that contribute to the maintenance of Israeli settlements, as well as ending any cooperation and assistance to entities and individuals involved in the settlement enterprise," Guevara Rosas said. "States should also show no further hesitation in imposing targeted sanctions on senior Israeli officials allegedly responsible for international crimes, including the crimes against humanity of apartheid, and forcible transfer of Palestinians in the unlawfully occupied West Bank."
She added that "it is imperative that states demonstrate unequivocal resolve by increasing protective measures for Palestinian communities at risk of displacement and using all their diplomatic and political leverage to secure the return of forcibly displaced Palestinians to their homes. Failure to act would further embolden Israel and state-backed Israeli settlers to continue their unlawful and violent actions against Palestinians, who are left unprotected and without any recourse to justice."
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Led by Mayor Katie Wilson, Seattle Celebrates Universal School Meals for All Students Starting This Year
Seattle's City Council used a budget surplus to enact Wilson's proposal to provide free breakfast and lunch to 49,000 public school students.
Aug 14, 2026
Seattle's public school students will be eating for free this year after the City Council approved $3.6 million in funding for school breakfast and lunch this week.
It was the realization of a proposal made in April by Seattle's democratic socialist mayor, Katie Wilson, to expand the city's targeted school lunch program to cover all students.
The council had rejected the proposal earlier this summer in favor of an approach that delayed the school lunch program by a year and narrowly focused on expanding access for only the lowest-income students, which opponents argued still left many hungry kids with nothing.
That plan was met with immediate backlash, and the council swiftly changed course. On Tuesday, it voted unanimously to reallocate surplus funds from an affordable housing redevelopment project to fund a universal school meal program.
In addition to providing free breakfast and lunch to Seattle's roughly 49,000 public school students beginning next month, the new program will also provide more support to low-income students during weekends and school vacations.
The program is expected to extend well into the future, with funding in 2027-28 coming from an education levy voters approved in November. After that, Washington's new "high-earners" tax is expected to kick in, and students across the entire state will enjoy free meals, though that tax still faces legal challenges.
Wilson called the plan "a tremendous victory for families across our city that will make Seattle more affordable."
The plan fulfills a key campaign promise for Wilson, who came into office in November on the same wave of progressive enthusiasm as New York City's democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
Also on Tuesday, the City Council approved Wilson's legislation banning rental junk fees—including administrative service fees, pet rent, and package fees.
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800+ USA Today Journalists Demand Paper End Deal With Palantir to Collect Reader Data
Not only does the partnership "create an inherent conflict of interest," it "fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests."
Aug 14, 2026
More than 800 unionized journalists and other media workers at USA Today Co. demanded this week that the nation’s largest newspaper chain abandon a newly announced partnership with surveillance tech giant Palantir to collect and analyze reader data, warning that the deal threatens privacy, public trust, and newsroom independence.
USA Today Co. chair Mike Reed told investors during an August 6 meeting that the company, formerly known as Gannett, is working with Palantir to “drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform" by using its software to collect and analyze reader data. Reed did not say how long USA Today had been using the software.
In a statement released earlier this week, workers represented by The NewsGuild-CWA said they were “shocked” by the company’s decision to partner with the controversial data analytics firm. Thirty-one unions representing employees across USA Today Co. publications have called on management to immediately terminate the agreement.
"We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence (AI) software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns," the union said. "Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests."
Journalists are committed to upholding First Amendment principles to serve the democratic process. That’s in direct contrast with a company like Palantir, whose cofounder, Peter Thiel, once said freedom and democracy were not compatible. newsguild.org/usa-today-jo...
[image or embed]
— The NewsGuild-CWA (@newsguild.org) August 10, 2026 at 9:02 AM
"USA Today Co. has provided minimal details about this partnership and the parameters of its agreement with Palantir," the statement continues. "We have serious concerns and questions about how readers’ personal information and data will be used under this partnership and how their data would be protected. Without answers, how can journalists encourage readers to subscribe to our news outlets?"
The journalists noted that billionaire Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—who "once said freedom and democracy were not compatible"—is responsible for products tied to human rights abuses and privacy violations.
"Technologists and even former employees have warned that it’s not far-fetched to imagine a future where Palantir’s AI technology is used to surveil American citizens and target dissidents," their statement notes. "And throughout history, journalists are often the first to be targeted."
"These concerns should be reason enough for USA Today Co. to steer clear," the journalists asserted. "This partnership with Palantir arrives as USA Today Co. executives dive headfirst into AI without sufficient regard for workers or the public after decimating newsrooms across the country."
"We will continue pushing back on ill-planned attempts to force AI into our newsrooms and onto our readers, who deserve quality, human-led journalism," they added. "We will advocate for the responsible use of new technologies when it emboldens our journalists and their work instead of shamelessly promoting AI to support profit-driven corporate edicts."
News organizations increasingly operate not just as publishers, but as data collection businesses. The USA Today journalists' concerns come against a backdrop of increasingly sophisticated tracking across digital news. USA Today Co.'s own public Data Collection Explorer shows that the company already operates an extensive system for collecting, routing, and analyzing user data across its publications and platforms, including through third-party analytics vendors.
Mike Davis, a reporter for the Asbury Park Press—a USA Today Co. newspaper in southern New Jersey—told NiemanLab that “part of the problem" with the Palantir partnership "is that we know very, very little" about how the company's software is being used.
“It’s pretty surprising that our company would unilaterally decide to bring in such a controversial partner like Palantir without providing a complete explanation to its employees, most of whom are naturally skeptical journalists," Davis said.
“An investigative reporter who keeps a ton of sensitive notes, source information, and confidential documents on their devices is going to be naturally concerned about protecting that information, and who could blame them?” he added. “It’s pretty hard to trust management’s intentions when the goalposts shift so often that there’s always a fear that what’s true today won’t be true in six months. We’ve all seen the years of disinvestment in local news, especially in the name of going all-in on AI.”
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'Too Bad for Them': AOC Responds to Right-Wing 'Freak-out' Over Decision to Freeze Her Eggs
"I go after what I want, but maybe that’s what they don’t like," said the congresswoman.
Aug 14, 2026
It's been five days since US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a potential 2028 presidential contender, went public with her decision to freeze her eggs.
But the response from right-wing influencers and operatives has already given her an opportunity to turn the discussion of her fertility into one that addresses Republican policies driving the affordability crisis, questions how committed the right really is to "freedom," and points out conservatives' hypocrisy when they urge women to "have babies younger"—while applying little of the same pressure to young men.
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced her decision to freeze her eggs last Sunday with the first in a series of Instagram videos in which her nearly 10 million followers have been able to follow along as she injects hormones and attends ultrasound appointments in preparation for the procedure—all while appearing on news programs to discuss foreign and domestic policy and talking to her followers about the side effects as well as the cost of fertility preservation treatment.
"I want you all to see that, because women can do anything,” Ocasio-Cortez, often known as AOC, told her followers. “And I think it’s badass that I’m going to be, you know, giving myself shots in the greenroom, get my glam on, roll out, talk about international events, domestic policy, elections, pop out, live my life, do my thing.”
Right-wing commentators who have bemoaned low birth rates and attacked liberal women for buying "into the feminist lie and spend[ing] their childbearing years climbing the career ladder," as podcaster Katie Miller said, immediately pounced on AOC's decision.
Allie Beth Stuckey, a popular right-wing podcaster and author of the books Toxic Empathy and You're Not Enough (And That's Okay), the latter of which warned against "the toxic culture of self-love," responded to the 36-year-old progressive congresswoman's videos with a list of reasons she should have already had children. She accused AOC of being "selfish and irresponsible" for potentially becoming a mother after 40 and said she was "glamorizing the lie that women can have it all."
Miller, the wife of President Donald Trump's homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, allowed that "we should celebrate" a woman's efforts to have children in the future, but said that “more women should get married and have babies younger," while a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, the right-wing group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, said AOC's fertility decisions were a "cautionary tale" for women.
Meanwhile, conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who is said to have considerable influence in the White House, announced that AOC had "failed as a woman" and had “wasted her entire 30s living with a man pretending to be engaged when she could have gotten married and had a baby." (It was reported this week that AOC's long-term relationship had ended.)
Some conservatives questioned whether attacking the popular, social media-savvy lawmaker over her desire to have children was a wise move for the MAGA movement, with one former Office of the Director of National Intelligence official, Alexa Henning, telling The Times in the UK that "dunking on AOC for freezing her eggs is not a winning message with women voters."
On Thursday evening, Ocasio-Cortez suggested Henning was right to be concerned, as she posted her latest Instagram video on the topic.
She said she has found "the freak-out" around her egg-freezing process to be "pretty funny," because "my choice is a threat to them."
"Despite the rhetoric they use and the bald eagles that they plaster all over the place, they actually really do not believe in a free country," said AOC. "Very aggressively do not believe in a free country, because they attack everyone who exercises their freedom to choose all sorts of lives... They attack those who choose the life that they don't lead or a life that they don't approve of."
"And people say you’re peddling this 'dangerous lie that women can have it all.' You know, maybe in life you can’t have everything, but here’s the secret: You can have a hell of a lot. And I am very grateful for my life. I go after what I want, but maybe that’s what they don’t like either," she continued, before shrugging: "Too bad for them."
AOC: I also find the freakout around it pretty funny as well. I’m not gonna lie. A commentator that was like, “What she’s doing is peddling the dangerous lie that women can have it all.” Can you believe that?
What I find funny is that my choice is a threat to them. Despite the… pic.twitter.com/rwpPL8YH0F
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 14, 2026
She emphasized that the procedure "is not a guarantee" that she'll be able to use the eggs to have children later in life, but said the process had relieved "a certain amount of anxiety or stress that can come with feeling like you are in a race against biology that men simply don't have to engage in."
She then took aim at commentators like Stuckey and Miller for directing their pronatalist pressure campaigns disproportionately at young women.
"In straight relationships, who are you supposed to be having babies with?" said AOC. "They aren't pressuring men to be ready to have a baby young, as the way that they are pressuring women to have a baby when they're young."
AOC: For all of these right-wing people who are harping about women having to and needing to have families at a young age—and again, if that’s your choice, that’s amazing—but they are doing nothing to make sure that men in their culture respect and value women.
In fact, many of… pic.twitter.com/ox70tJzth1
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 14, 2026
The congresswoman then suggested that while Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk's widow and now the CEO of Turning Point USA, recently told a crowd of young college graduates to "have more kids than you can afford," financial concerns may play a role in falling birthrates and delayed parenthood. Housing unaffordability has soared to record highs in recent years, while Trump's tariff policies and war in Iran have contributed to rising costs for groceries, gas, and other essentials. Republicans have also attacked government healthcare programs including Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies, and about a third of Americans reported cutting back on spending in order to afford healthcare last year.
"The basics are more expensive than they've ever been," said Ocasio-Cortez. "For a lot of people, we would have kids at a much younger age if the conditions were right, if women got paid equally, and if people in general were paid enough and things were affordable enough that you feel like you could comfortably provide for a child."
With her series of videos, said Amanda Litman, executive director of the political action committee Run for Something, AOC had opened up "a larger conversation on women, ambition, family, gender politics, and so much more."
Journalist Zaid Jilani suggested right-wing commentators had fallen into a trap: "Intentionally or unintentionally she got the Republicans to act really weird."
The response from influential commentators on the right "is why her allies think she could run for the White House," wrote Katy Balls, Washington editor for The Times. "Her ability to set the terms of debate and trigger the right just as Trump does the left."
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‘Waiting to Die’: Gaza Cancer Patients Dying at More Than Double the Pre-War Rate as Israel Blocks Treatment
"I am dying. There isn't a feeling for me to even feel."
Aug 14, 2026
Israel is causing a wave of preventable cancer deaths in Gaza, leaving an estimated 17,000 people with no avenue for treatment.
As Reuters reported on Thursday, Israel has destroyed the only specialized cancer hospital in the strip and is preventing Palestinians from seeking treatment outside the exclave.
The result: Doctors say that cancer patients in Gaza are dying at between double and triple the rate they were before Israel began its genocidal war there. Israel's restrictions on aid entering Gaza have made chemotherapy and other forms of treatment inaccessible.
33-year-old Khuloud Abu Sahmoud, a mother of two with ovarian cancer who spoke with Reuters, has been waiting to exit Gaza for nearly a year to receive treatment.
According to Middle East Eye, she is one of at least 4,000 cancer patients in Gaza who have been issued medical referrals to leave the strip but who have been stuck waiting for final permission from Israeli authorities.
In the meantime, her cancer has metastasized to her lungs and bones.
"I am dying. There isn't a feeling for me to even feel," Sahmoud told Middle East Eye. "Every day my disease progresses."
She said that her fingernails have all fallen out and she has been left "just waiting to die."
"The border crossing for me is the only lifeline. The only vein for me to be saved, to receive treatment abroad," she said. "I haven't taken any treatment for three months. I'm living on painkillers."
She said she made her request to travel in October 2025 after a ceasefire was reached between Israel and Hamas, which was supposed to allow for aid to flow freely into Gaza and for people to leave.
"There has been no response to any appeal so far," Sahmoud said. "We haven't received any calls."
The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli military authority responsible for administering civilian matters in Gaza, has denied that it is blocking Palestinians from receiving treatment, with a spokesperson stating that permission to travel is "wholly dependent on the receiving country's request.”
But the agency's own medical evacuation procedure requires that every patient leaving Gaza undergoes Israeli security screening and “will not be approved if there are security reasons that prevent their passage.”
Israel has also imposed strict numerical restrictions on the number of people allowed to leave through the Rafah crossing, the main exit point from the strip.
Palestinian health officials said only about 11,000 people in total—not just cancer patients—have been allowed to exit since the crossing reopened in February, an average of about 55-60 people per calendar day. This is fewer than half the number who were expected to leave following the ceasefire.
According to Reuters, "a further 20,000 patients, including 5,000 with cancer, are registered for treatment abroad but not yet permitted to leave."
All of the 36 hospitals and most primary healthcare facilities in Gaza have sustained damage from Israeli attacks, with only around half even partially functioning, according to the World Health Organization. As of the ceasefire, WHO reported that more than 1,700 Palestinian healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses, and paramedics, have been killed.
"Since the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, among the most severely affected groups by this extermination are oncology and cancer patients," said Mohammed Abu Selmia, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital, which has been repeatedly raided, besieged, and damaged, and has just recently restarted oncology services.
Selmia said this is because of the restrictions on the entry of chemotherapy treatments and Israel's destruction of diagnostic equipment, including MRI facilities.
"This group is suffering immensely," he said. "Recently, we have been recording a significant number of deaths ranging from three to five daily because patients are not receiving the chemotherapy needed to save their lives."
The official death toll from Israel's military campaign in Gaza since October 2023 sits at 73,389, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. But this only includes violent deaths from the war itself.
Independent analyses have suggested that the true death toll is much higher when factoring in those who have perished due to disease and starvation as a result of Israel's attacks on medical facilities, civilian infrastructure, and restrictions on aid.
Another cancer patient, Elham al-Skafi, said, "They stopped giving me chemotherapy because it is not available in Gaza."
"I come in to get nutritional fluids, just so I can stay on my feet, and blood transfusions," she said. "That is what is currently available. This is what I take."
She said she's had a transfer referral for over a year and a half now to leave the country for treatment.
"I am sitting and waiting," she said. "If the crossings were open, I would have left."
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Farage Has 'Beaten a Man in a Bin,' But Critics See Tough Road Ahead for Far-Right UK Politician
"Being mocked on stage by a man in a bin does not exactly provide the optics of a heroic struggle against the establishment," said one critic.
Aug 14, 2026
Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK's far-right Reform Party, has emerged victorious in a by-election in which his main opponent was Count Binface, a comedian who dresses in an oversized trashcan helmet.
However, some Farage critics predicted his victory would prove fleeting given that he now faces a renewed parliamentary inquiry into an undisclosed £5m gift he received from Christopher Harborne, a Thai-based cryptocurrency billionaire.
Additionally, rival Count Binface received 27% of all votes in the election, a record number for a parody candidate in a race that was boycotted by all major UK political policies.
Writing in The Guardian, columnist Owen Jones described Farage as "a rattled, embattled politician," noting that the Reform leader did not even attend the official results event, presumably because he found little reason to celebrate having "beaten a man in a bin."
"Being mocked on stage by a man in a bin," Jones wrote, "does not exactly provide the optics of a heroic struggle against the establishment."
Jones said that while it's too early to write Farage off, he questioned whether the Reform leader is really cut out for the long slog of parliamentary politics.
"Here is a man who appears to enjoy the high life and feel parliamentary politics damages his earning potential," Jones concluded. "He seems increasingly riled by the sort of scrutiny he has long managed to avoid. Perhaps, after a pointless triumph over a bin, he may simply decide he has had enough."
In an analysis published Friday by The Washington Post, international correspondent Steve Hendrix wrote that Farage's own party appears worried that his win over Binface will prove costly, as he "remains in danger of being overcome by the corruption accusations the special election was meant to dispel."
"Farage had meant for the election to produce a resounding endorsement by his voters, a win to be trumpeted as a rebuke to the establishment," Hendrix explained. "Instead, he skipped the traditional announcement ceremony Friday and canceled a scheduled speech."
Binface, meanwhile, declared himself the winner among "the candidates who bothered to turn up for the results" and delivered a "victory speech" in which he crowed about the record number of votes he received against the embattled Reform leader.
I came first in the Clacton by-election! Of the candidates who bothered to turn up for the results. Here is my victory speech! pic.twitter.com/PBaLO10P2j
— Count Binface (@CountBinface) August 14, 2026
"Against Nigel Farage, I've got 10,000% more votes than I got against [Labour UK Prime Minister] Andy Burnham," Binface said. "What does that tell you? Well, it tells you that Nigel, who said he didn't want to be humiliated, maybe has been... Over one and four people in this constituency would rather have Count Binface as their MP than the leader of Reform UK."
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New Trump Guidance Could 'Result in the Disenfranchisement of Nursing Home Residents'
"Another day, another Trump policy to make voting harder. His new target? Nursing homes."
Aug 14, 2026
The Trump administration's far-reaching assault on voting rights has extended to nursing homes, a group of Democratic senators warned on Thursday, pointing to federal guidance recently issued by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The guidance, released in July, removes previous recommendations on how nursing home staff can assist residents in exercising their constitutional rights and warns facility employees against violating "federal or state voting laws." The guidance points to a highly dubious Texas case in which a social worker was charged with orchestrating an election fraud scheme, even though no improper votes were cast.
In a letter sent earlier this week to CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and 11 other Democrats argued that the agency's July guidance "may intimidate nursing home staff from helping residents exercise their constitutional right to vote and ultimately prevent nursing home residents from voting."
"The nation’s 1.2 million nursing home residents face unique problems in obtaining access to the voting booth," the lawmakers added, "and must not be denied their rights because they are disabled, elderly, lack transit, or face difficulties in obtaining a ballot or voting in person."
The senators emphasized that the new CMS memo breaks with guidance issued during President Donald Trump's first term in the White House. That guidance, issued in October 2020, states that "nursing homes should have a plan to ensure residents can exercise their right to vote, whether in person, by mail, absentee, or other authorized process."
Such language is entirely absent from the new guidance, which focuses heavily on preventing voter fraud—an obsession of Trump's, despite it being extremely rare in the US.
"CMS's release of this memo is just the latest in a series of actions the Trump administration has taken to restrict vote by mail and undermine the right to vote based on unfounded allegations of voter fraud tied to the president’s denial of prior valid election results," the Democratic senators wrote in their letter. "We are concerned that by highlighting examples of prior voter fraud investigations and threatening criminal penalties on nursing home staff—many of whom are legal immigrants who have already been targeted by Trump’s immigration policies—CMS’s July 2026 guidance may intimidate nursing home staff from helping residents with the voting process."
"And the removal of guidance on vote by mail procedures, combined with specific threats to investigate nursing home staff for assisting residents who are exercising their right to vote, may deter nursing homes from assisting residents with voting by mail," they added. "Ultimately, we are concerned that the changes to CMS’s guidance will result in the disenfranchisement of nursing home residents."
Another day, another Trump policy to make voting harder.
His new target? Nursing homes.
Dr. Oz issued a memo that seems designed to intimidate nursing home staff from helping residents vote.
I’m calling on Dr. Oz to withdraw this guidance and stop impeding the right to… https://t.co/Fg4LA4pH9p
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) August 13, 2026
The Houston Chronicle, in its coverage of the new CMS guidance, spotlights the Trump administration's decision to cite the Texas case, which involved social worker Kelly Brunner.
"When Kelly Brunner was tasked in 2020 with getting the State Supported Living Center in Mexia ready to vote, she was excited to assist the residents with intellectual and developmental disorders prepare for a big election. Instead, her work as the assistant voter registrar at the facility east of Waco spiraled into a nightmare," the outlet noted. "Brunner admitted making technical errors in the complicated registration system, which were all quickly caught; no resident cast an improper vote. Yet, pushed by Attorney General Ken Paxton—who at the time was promoting President Donald Trump’s false claims of a rigged presidential election—she was criminally charged with orchestrating one of the largest election fraud cases ever in Texas."
"Brunner spent $50,000 on lawyers, pleaded guilty to minor charges to put it behind her, lost her teacher’s license and nearly her social worker’s license," the Chronicle added. "Still, she thought the episode was finally over—until... [CMS] cited Brunner as the reason it needed to officially place employees of long-term care facilities on notice that they should be on the lookout for voter fraud in the upcoming midterm elections."
Richard Mollot, executive director of the New York-based Long Term Care Community Coalition, told the Chronicle that the Trump administration's heavy focus on preventing voter fraud "will have a chilling effect" on nursing home resident voting.
"The language is important,” said Mollot. “Most nursing homes will do as little as possible; if you’re not affirmatively telling them what to do, they won’t do it."
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'Sadistic and Cruel': Democratic Lawmakers Rail Against $20 Million for ICE's Electric Shock Gloves
"This is what happens when you have an out-of-control agency that has been given billions in a bottomless slush fund by Trump and the Republican Congress," said one House Democrat.
Aug 13, 2026
Democrats in both chambers of Congress this week have joined rights advocates in forcefully denouncing plans for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to spend up to $20 million on "gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks."
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday published a notice about buying thousands of Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter (GLOVE) devices from Kentucky-based Compliant Technologies, drawing media coverage and condemnation.
"$20 million of taxpayer money for electric shock gloves?! This is horrifying and infuriating," said Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.). "It's exactly why so many... Democrats voted against billions of dollars in additional funding for ICE. This rogue agency uses cruel tactics like these and hasn't demonstrated any willingness to de-escalate—and the Trump administration refuses to rein them in."
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) similarly ripped Republican lawmakers who narrowly control the Senate and House of Representatives, stressing that they "had the opportunity to rein in" ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) but "refused."
"Instead they handed DHS BILLIONS more of your tax dollars without any constraint after the shooting and killing [of] individuals in the streets," Schiff said, referring to legislation passed in June. "Now, ICE is looking to purchase electrical shock gloves to continue terrorizing our communities. How soon will they be used to inflict further cruelty?"
Sharing a report about the planned purchase on social media, Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) wrote: "Beyond cruel. This is appalling and inhumane."
President Donald Trump's "secret police force needs to be stopped," he added. "Not a single penny for ICE."
Since returning to office last year, Trump has flooded various cities with federal immigration agents, resulting in numerous deaths and rights violations. January polling by YouGov shows that 58% of Americans describe Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics as "too forceful," 57% don't approve of how ICE is handling its job, and 46%—a plurality—support abolishing the agency.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) nodded to such findings in his response to the GLOVE notice, emphasizing that "this is just not the government people want. A government so sadistic and cruel that it delights in using your hard-earned tax dollars to buy gloves that shock people upon contact."
House Democrats also spoke out against the agency's plans, with Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost saying: "As if assaulting people and shooting people in the streets wasn't enough. Now, they're spending $20 million of YOUR taxpayer dollars on painful electric shock gloves for their masked, lawless goons. ICE must be stopped."
Describing ICE's plans as "absolutely appalling," Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) said that "this is what happens when you have an out-of-control agency that has been given billions in a bottomless slush fund by Trump and the Republican Congress."
Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) also called out the GOP: "This is what House Republicans voted for. Instead of spending your taxpayer dollars on healthcare or education, they spent it on shock gloves for masked, out-of-control ICE agents."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who is an immigrant, said: "Let's be clear about what's happening. This is an agency that has already killed more than 50 people in its custody. An agency accused of racial profiling, of blocking members of Congress from oversight visits, of terrorizing communities under the guise of enforcement. And now they want new tools to hurt people, tools designed to disrupt someone's ability to even respond."
"We are not going to look away from this," Jayapal pledged. "I will keep fighting for oversight, for accountability, and for an immigration system that treats people with dignity, not one that arms itself against them."
Noting that the agency is "known to torture and kill our neighbors," Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said, "Abolish and prosecute ICE."
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) concurred, declaring: "This is shameful! People have suffered enough from these violent ICE agents. This rogue agency must be abolished, not given more ways to hurt our neighbors and terrorize our communities."
So did Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). Calling the GLOVE proposal "terrifying, cruel, and inhumane," she said that "ICE is a rogue agency that moves with disregard for public safety, constitutional rights, and basic human dignity. If agents have gloves that electrocute anyone they touch, we're all in danger. We must abolish ICE, end qualified immunity, and protect our neighbors."
Democratic Congresswomen Delia Ramirez (Ill.) and Yvette Clarke (NY) introduced a related bill in January: the Melt ICE Act.
"Under no circumstances can DHS be trusted with electric shock gloves and the power to inflict 'sudden' death!" Ramirez, the daughter of immigrants, said Wednesday. "The cruelty of the Trump administration knows no bounds. Congress must act! Let’s pass my Melt ICE Act and dismantle DHS."
Elected Democrats' outrage over the agency's intentions came as a Democratic National Committee panel on Thursday advanced a resolution calling to abolish ICE, and New York Times reporting revealed that DHS investigated left-wing groups after CBP agents killed Alex Pretti in Minnesota.
Democrats aim to reclaim majorities in both chambers in the November midterm elections.
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ACLU Says New Flock Camera Guardrails Nothing But a 'Thinly Veiled PR Attempt'
“Transforming an exceptionally dangerous mass surveillance system into one that is fully protective of civil rights and civil liberties is a difficult, if not impossible task.”
Aug 13, 2026
The ACLU on Thursday largely dismissed new privacy measures announced by surveillance tech company Flock Safety, arguing the changes do little to address mounting concerns about the company’s sprawling automated license plate reader network and abuses of its technology by law enforcement agencies and other malicious actors.
Flock on Thursday unveiled new guardrails for its law enforcement customers, including a reduction in default license plate data retention from 30 days to seven, mandatory auditing tools designed to flag suspicious searches, and requirements that officers associate searches with case numbers.
The ACLU said the changes "seem to be a thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities’ genuine privacy concerns with its mass surveillance system with largely hollow security promises, rather than an earnest effort to address them."
ACLU senior policy counsel Chad Marlow asserted that “transforming an exceptionally dangerous mass surveillance system into one that is fully protective of civil rights and civil liberties is a difficult, if not impossible task."
"That is even more the case with a company like Flock, whose nearly $1 billion in venture capitalist funding has locked it into an operational model that seeks to trade our privacy for massive profits," he continued. “Given that Flock’s latest announcement still appears more focused on addressing a PR problem than the significant privacy and other harms its products create, we will continue to analyze the company’s proposals fairly and honestly."
Flock Safety's new guardrails come amid growing nationwide backlash against automated license plate readers (ALPRs). As more and more instances of alleged police abuse emerge—including use of Flock cameras to stalk exes, track abortion patients, target undocumented immigrants, and spy on protesters—an increasing number of law enforcement agencies are canceling or not renewing contracts with the company.
"Abuse of Flock technology, at any level, is unacceptable," Flock Safety said in its statement Thursday. "We have strengthened safeguards over the past nine years, from basic audit logs to proactive monitoring. Sixteen weeks ago, we introduced audit assistance, which detects abnormal activity and flags it for administrator review. In recent weeks, those reviews have been associated with arrests of several law enforcement officers who allegedly abused the system."
"We will now require all law enforcement customers to adopt this feature by the end of this year," the company continued. "In addition, we will institute proactive lockout. When a user’s activity meets defined criteria for abnormal behavior, Flock will automatically suspend access pending administrator review. The goal is to intervene before misuse becomes recurring or widespread."
"In July 2025, we introduced an optional case code requirement for searches," Flock noted. "Results from participating agencies have been promising, so we will now require case codes for all law enforcement searches by the end of the year. Agencies may bypass the requirement in emergencies, but every exigent search will be flagged for administrator review."
"We are not perfect," the firm added, "so we will keep listening, improving, and building a better standard for public safety technology together."
However, the ACLU analyzed Flock's announced changes and found that "the devil will be in the details":
For example, an exception to the data retention policy is something called evidence mode, which is “when a search is tied to a case number, that data is preserved instead of aging out after seven days.”... “If ‘evidence mode’ only retains hit result data that police determine may be evidence in an active investigation of a specific case, then the change may be a positive one. But if evidence mode triggers the retention of any ALPR data that is searched, then the new mode could indefinitely retain all the ALPR data Flock collects and shares nationally.”
Another “change” the company is implementing is that local police will be able to decide what types of offenses other Flock customers can search their data for... Flock has attempted this before, and the security measure failed because police were easily able to circumvent the system’s requirement that they input the purpose of their search.
Finally, Flock announced that in response to the reports of police abuse, they will now require reasons for a search, and that they plan to universally roll out its audit assistance tool to detect police misuse. Flock’s announcement fails to note how easily users have circumvented “search reason” security measures in the past or how its new policy improves the quality of the feature.
"Change may still come as Flock faces this ever-growing threat to its corporate viability," the ACLU said, "but we certainly won’t be holding our breath."
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Busting CEO Pay Curve in 2025, Musk Made Annual Salary of Average Tesla Worker Every 4.2 Seconds
The AFL-CIO report also points out that "a majority of S&P 500 CEOs made more in one day than the median US worker made in one year."
Aug 13, 2026
"Failed trillionaire" Elon Musk's $158 billion pay package at Tesla was so high that it "broke the CEO pay curve," as the nation's largest federation of labor unions underscored on Thursday in its annual report about chief executive pay.
"Including Musk, S&P 500 CEOs received $340.1 million on average in 2025, about a 1,700% increase over the previous year," explains the AFL-CIO's latest "Executive Paywatch" report. "Excluding Musk's Tesla pay package, the average CEO pay at S&P 500 companies increased 21%, from $18.9 million in 2024 to $22.8 million in 2025."
"The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio across S&P 500 Index companies was 5,387-to-1 in 2025. Musk's total compensation at Tesla was 2,522,203 times the median Tesla employee's pay in 2025," the publication continues. "Excluding Musk, the average pay ratio of S&P 500 companies increased from 285-to-1 in 2024 to 312-to-1 in 2025."
Musk became the world's first trillionaire in June, after another company for which he serves as CEO, SpaceX, went public—but as of Thursday afternoon, his net worth was estimated at around $880 billion, according to the Bloomberg and Forbes billionaire lists.
The AFL-CIO report spotlights the wealth of the world's richest man, noting that last year "Elon Musk received the median Tesla worker's pay every 4.23 seconds—less time than it takes to read this sentence," but it also stresses that he's far from alone in making exorbitant amounts of money compared with the wages of workers at the companies he leads.
"As shown in our latest Paywatch report, executive compensation has reached a new, shameful high," said AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Fred Redmond in a statement. The report points out that "a majority of S&P 500 CEOs made more in one day than the median US worker made in one year."
"Excessive CEO compensation contributes to growing economic inequality," the document says. "It creates the risk that CEOs will make short-term decisions to maximize their pay, even if it hurts the company's long-term health. And it's simply unfair to the workers whose labor generates the profit these CEOs capitalize on."
Our new Executive Paywatch report is here, and - spoiler alert - greedy CEOs are making even MORE.Top CEOs made 312x what workers make and took home an average of $22.8 MILLION per YEAR in total compensation.Read our full Paywatch report here: Aflcio.org/paywatch
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— AFL-CIO (@aflcio.org) August 13, 2026 at 12:35 PM
AFL-CIO found that the biggest ratio for executive v. worker pay was in manufacturing: Average executive compensation—which often includes not only a salary but also a bonus, stock, a retirement plan, and more—topped $696 million a year, while the typical worker made just over $93,000.
By sector, the second-highest was in arts, entertainment, and recreation, where executives were paid over $24 million while the median worker got just $24,850 annually. In educational services, average executive pay was around $50 million while workers were paid under $58,000.
The report emphasizes that like the CEOs, "2025 also was a very good year" for President Donald Trump, who returned to office in January and, according to recent federal disclosure forms, pocketed at least $2.2 billion last year—which, as the AFL-CIO found, was "a nearly 254% increase from what he received in 2024."
"Trump's 2025 receipts included $1.4 billion from the sale of $TRUMP memecoins and World Liberty Financial, his family's cryptocurrency business," the report says. "The median US worker would need to work 43,154 years to earn what Trump received in 2025."
16% of adults can’t pay all their bills in full.26% skipped medical care due to cost.23% of renters fell behind on rent in the last year.Meanwhile, CEO pay is exploding. Let’s call this what it is: greed.Learn more in our Executive Paywatch report: Aflcio.org/paywatch
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— AFL-CIO (@aflcio.org) August 13, 2026 at 2:15 PM
While gutting the federal government with help from Musk, Trump last year signed the GOP's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, cutting programs for working people to give billionaires more tax breaks—and Wednesday's release of the latest inflation figures highlighted how Americans continue to struggle with the cost of gasoline, groceries, healthcare, housing, and more.
Redmond said that "Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire. Donald Trump raked in over $2 billion since the 2024 election. Meanwhile, working Americans are struggling to feed their kids and pay their electric bills. But there's a better economy we can build for working people."
"That's why the labor movement will continue to fight for every worker to have a union contract that begins to level the playing field and ensures they take home the share of the profit they create," he added. "And it's why we are spending every day until November organizing and mobilizing 16 million union voters to elect pro-worker politicians who will work for us, not wealthy CEOs."
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