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Gus Newport, left, and Danny Glover speaking at a 2016 rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders in Oakland.
The former Berkeley mayor's record of accomplishments from civil rights activism to groundbreaking political initiatives to far-sighted community economic development programs to global solidarity and elder statesman leadership could fill volumes.
Former Berkeley, California Mayor Gus Newport, a titan of progressive politics in the late 20th Century, social justice champion who worked with Malcolm X, and a lifelong humanitarian and internationalist, died June 17 in San Francisco. He was 88.
Gus was the embodiment of the adage of a life well lived. His record of accomplishments from civil rights activism to groundbreaking political initiatives to far-sighted community economic development programs to global solidarity and elder statesman leadership could fill volumes.
“The beauty of Gus,” said actor Danny Glover in an interview, “is that I trust him to elevate our story. When you spend time with someone with Gus’s history and character and listen to his stories, you are changed. I hope that a little of my story could resonate with others the way Gus’s stories have resonated with me and so many around the world.”
As a young activist in 1962, leading the Monroe County Nonpartisan League, the largest civil rights group in his hometown of Rochester, NY, Gus shepherded the first successful police brutality case in federal court after the beating of a Black gas station attendant Rufus Fairwell who would win a financial settlement from the city.
Daisy Bates, who led the NAACP campaign to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in the late 1950s and now organizing in Rochester for the NAACP, introduced him to Malcolm X by phone. Gus and Malcolm worked to defend nine Black Muslims assaulted and arrested in a police raid on a Black Muslim Mosque in Rochester during a worship service.
When Malcolm flew into Rochester, and landed on the tarmac on a cold February day, Gus was waiting in the airport surrounded “by a lot of white men in felt hats and white shirts and ties. When Malcolm walked in and asked, ‘who is Gus Newport.’ I raised my hand and said, “I am.” He said, “Young blood, you got the best-tapped telephone in America. This is all FBI around you.”
He would go on to count Malcolm and Harlem Congress member Adam Clayton Powell as mentors. He assisted Malcolm in founding his Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU).
In February 1965, after Malcolm’s house was firebombed, Malcolm asked him to join him for a speech in Rochester about his situation. Returning to New York, “when we landed at LaGuardia, we were met by the chief of police of New York and the fire marshal. They accused him of firebombing his own home.” Four days later Malcolm was assassinated. Later Gus would help Malcolm’s widow Betty Shabazz with burial and financial support, including with a fundraiser for the family headlined by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Max Roach at the home of Sidney Poitier.
Malcolm, Gus would later say, was “the greatest person I think I ever knew,” a “great teacher” and “one of the dearest friends I ever had.”
Gus would move west after leaving a Department of Labor stint assigned to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, due to a distaste for the politics of President Nixon. A cousin helped him get work for the city of Berkeley, developing youth employment service programs and as a senior analyst in the City Manager’s office and Parks and Recreation department.
In 1979, Gus was elected Berkeley Mayor, with the backing of the progressive Berkeley Citizens Action coalition on a platform of community economic control, serving two terms until 1986. “I never aspired to run for mayor,” he would relate. “I was talked into it by John George, the first African American elected to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, and Congressman Ron Dellums. Danny Glover (who met Gus while interning with the city of Berkeley) and Harry Belafonte (who he had known in New York) helped with my campaigns.”
As Mayor, Gus would lead Berkeley to become the first city in the U.S. to divest from apartheid South Africa, the first city to create a domestic partner benefits program for LGBTQ+ families, a child care initiative to help working women, and innovative programs on affordable housing, rent control, policing reforms, environmental protections, and community development. Berkeley landlords sued to block limits on rent increases the city had enacted. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court where Berkeley was represented pro bono by famed Constitutional attorney Lawrence Tribe, “and we won.”
He was one of the first mayors in the country to ride in a Gay Freedom Day parade, in San Francisco in 1979. He also challenged U.S. immigration policy. “The wars in Central America were creating thousands of refugees,” he says, “and I gave orders to our police not to arrest immigrants because of their status.”
As a result of Berkeley and Gus’ prominent role in the broad anti-apartheid movement, he was made an honorary member of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and served on the advisory board of the US Conference on Apartheid.
When Mandela first toured the U.S. after his release from prison, Gus was invited to help host Mandela on his visit to Boston, and Glover and Belafonte “introduced me to Mandela.” Gus had worked in Boston after leaving Berkeley as the first senior fellow at the newly founded William Monroe Trotter Institute at the University of Massachusetts.
Gus spent years helping other municipalities on community development projects including in Boston, Seattle, Palm Beach FL, New Hampshire. The Boston area Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, in Roxbury, was a particular success, the only non-profit organization in the U.S. to receive the powers of eminent domain which became a national model for empowering a diverse community and sustainable change profiled in two award-winning films: Holding Ground and Gaining Ground.
He would also serve on the five-person advisory body to oversee the planning to rebuild New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and teach at Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2009, he gave the commencement speech at Heidelberg University at his alma mater in Tiffin, OH and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters.
Global peace and social justice was a life long focus for Gus. He was co-chair of the U.S. Peace Council and vice president of the World Peace Council and worked in solidarity with people’s movements, in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
He was outspoken in opposition to U.S. policies in Haiti, Cuba, and Central America. In 1985, as mayor, he visited El Salvador, along with a Jesuit priest, with representatives of New El Salvador Today, a group he helped found. “The priest drove us to Chalatenango, and we were told we would walk for an hour, but it took us six hours! When we arrived, the village had no electricity and many roofs were torn off from bombing, but they managed to create a huge sign: ‘Welcome to the Mayor of Berkeley’.”
He was also a prominent supporter of Palestinian rights, as a long time board member of the Berkeley-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. In 2019 Gus was awarded the Khalil Gibran Spirit of Humanity Award by the Arab American Institute.
During the 2016 election, Gus and Danny Glover traveled across the U.S. as national surrogates for the Presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Gus had developed a friendship with Sanders after Bernie was elected mayor of Burlington, VT in 1981. They also collaborated with the few other progressive mayors, including Chicago’s Harold Washington, at U.S. Conference of Mayors meetings. “We’d compare notes on public policy, community planning, and organizing.”
In his later years, Gus served on the leadership committee of the National Council of Elders, an organization of people over 65 dedicated to advancing civil, women’s, environmental, farm workers, and LGBTQ+ rights.
Gus maintained a connection to Oakland and the East Bay, from the early 1990s living on and off in Oakland with his longtime wife and partner Kathryn Kasch. He was on the board of the Urban Studies Council, a Bay Area regional policy and research organization, focused on addressing inequities. In one of his last roles, Gus served on Oakland’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, formed after the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
Asked what kept him working for a better world in the face of so many threats from white supremacy and assaults on democracy, Gus would say he was guided by Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision of a Beloved Community of inclusion, cooperation and justice for all which he had first imbued from his parents and grandmother. “We need to come back to what Martin called Building the Beloved Community — helping communities address education, incarceration, mental and physical health in an integrated and systematic way. If we want a better future for the next generation, we need to build a movement that is strategic and constant!”
In interviews he frequently talked about the inspiration of his grandmother who took him to concerts with Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson when he was five. “My grandmother grew up in the Jim Crow South,” he noted. “One day, after picking cotton, she came to school late and the teacher slapped her. She walked out and never went back.”
“I’m lucky enough for what my grandmother instilled in me: Don’t think you know it all, learn something new every day. I learned it by engaging with people and having an analysis and understanding the integrated role that can be played by communities, universities, government, all kinds of people. We don’t live in a community that has reached its limit as to what’s best.”
To hear Gus in his own words, watch a 2021 interview with the Berkeley Historical Society and Museum.
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Former Berkeley, California Mayor Gus Newport, a titan of progressive politics in the late 20th Century, social justice champion who worked with Malcolm X, and a lifelong humanitarian and internationalist, died June 17 in San Francisco. He was 88.
Gus was the embodiment of the adage of a life well lived. His record of accomplishments from civil rights activism to groundbreaking political initiatives to far-sighted community economic development programs to global solidarity and elder statesman leadership could fill volumes.
“The beauty of Gus,” said actor Danny Glover in an interview, “is that I trust him to elevate our story. When you spend time with someone with Gus’s history and character and listen to his stories, you are changed. I hope that a little of my story could resonate with others the way Gus’s stories have resonated with me and so many around the world.”
As a young activist in 1962, leading the Monroe County Nonpartisan League, the largest civil rights group in his hometown of Rochester, NY, Gus shepherded the first successful police brutality case in federal court after the beating of a Black gas station attendant Rufus Fairwell who would win a financial settlement from the city.
Daisy Bates, who led the NAACP campaign to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in the late 1950s and now organizing in Rochester for the NAACP, introduced him to Malcolm X by phone. Gus and Malcolm worked to defend nine Black Muslims assaulted and arrested in a police raid on a Black Muslim Mosque in Rochester during a worship service.
When Malcolm flew into Rochester, and landed on the tarmac on a cold February day, Gus was waiting in the airport surrounded “by a lot of white men in felt hats and white shirts and ties. When Malcolm walked in and asked, ‘who is Gus Newport.’ I raised my hand and said, “I am.” He said, “Young blood, you got the best-tapped telephone in America. This is all FBI around you.”
He would go on to count Malcolm and Harlem Congress member Adam Clayton Powell as mentors. He assisted Malcolm in founding his Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU).
In February 1965, after Malcolm’s house was firebombed, Malcolm asked him to join him for a speech in Rochester about his situation. Returning to New York, “when we landed at LaGuardia, we were met by the chief of police of New York and the fire marshal. They accused him of firebombing his own home.” Four days later Malcolm was assassinated. Later Gus would help Malcolm’s widow Betty Shabazz with burial and financial support, including with a fundraiser for the family headlined by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Max Roach at the home of Sidney Poitier.
Malcolm, Gus would later say, was “the greatest person I think I ever knew,” a “great teacher” and “one of the dearest friends I ever had.”
Gus would move west after leaving a Department of Labor stint assigned to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, due to a distaste for the politics of President Nixon. A cousin helped him get work for the city of Berkeley, developing youth employment service programs and as a senior analyst in the City Manager’s office and Parks and Recreation department.
In 1979, Gus was elected Berkeley Mayor, with the backing of the progressive Berkeley Citizens Action coalition on a platform of community economic control, serving two terms until 1986. “I never aspired to run for mayor,” he would relate. “I was talked into it by John George, the first African American elected to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, and Congressman Ron Dellums. Danny Glover (who met Gus while interning with the city of Berkeley) and Harry Belafonte (who he had known in New York) helped with my campaigns.”
As Mayor, Gus would lead Berkeley to become the first city in the U.S. to divest from apartheid South Africa, the first city to create a domestic partner benefits program for LGBTQ+ families, a child care initiative to help working women, and innovative programs on affordable housing, rent control, policing reforms, environmental protections, and community development. Berkeley landlords sued to block limits on rent increases the city had enacted. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court where Berkeley was represented pro bono by famed Constitutional attorney Lawrence Tribe, “and we won.”
He was one of the first mayors in the country to ride in a Gay Freedom Day parade, in San Francisco in 1979. He also challenged U.S. immigration policy. “The wars in Central America were creating thousands of refugees,” he says, “and I gave orders to our police not to arrest immigrants because of their status.”
As a result of Berkeley and Gus’ prominent role in the broad anti-apartheid movement, he was made an honorary member of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and served on the advisory board of the US Conference on Apartheid.
When Mandela first toured the U.S. after his release from prison, Gus was invited to help host Mandela on his visit to Boston, and Glover and Belafonte “introduced me to Mandela.” Gus had worked in Boston after leaving Berkeley as the first senior fellow at the newly founded William Monroe Trotter Institute at the University of Massachusetts.
Gus spent years helping other municipalities on community development projects including in Boston, Seattle, Palm Beach FL, New Hampshire. The Boston area Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, in Roxbury, was a particular success, the only non-profit organization in the U.S. to receive the powers of eminent domain which became a national model for empowering a diverse community and sustainable change profiled in two award-winning films: Holding Ground and Gaining Ground.
He would also serve on the five-person advisory body to oversee the planning to rebuild New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and teach at Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2009, he gave the commencement speech at Heidelberg University at his alma mater in Tiffin, OH and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters.
Global peace and social justice was a life long focus for Gus. He was co-chair of the U.S. Peace Council and vice president of the World Peace Council and worked in solidarity with people’s movements, in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
He was outspoken in opposition to U.S. policies in Haiti, Cuba, and Central America. In 1985, as mayor, he visited El Salvador, along with a Jesuit priest, with representatives of New El Salvador Today, a group he helped found. “The priest drove us to Chalatenango, and we were told we would walk for an hour, but it took us six hours! When we arrived, the village had no electricity and many roofs were torn off from bombing, but they managed to create a huge sign: ‘Welcome to the Mayor of Berkeley’.”
He was also a prominent supporter of Palestinian rights, as a long time board member of the Berkeley-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. In 2019 Gus was awarded the Khalil Gibran Spirit of Humanity Award by the Arab American Institute.
During the 2016 election, Gus and Danny Glover traveled across the U.S. as national surrogates for the Presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Gus had developed a friendship with Sanders after Bernie was elected mayor of Burlington, VT in 1981. They also collaborated with the few other progressive mayors, including Chicago’s Harold Washington, at U.S. Conference of Mayors meetings. “We’d compare notes on public policy, community planning, and organizing.”
In his later years, Gus served on the leadership committee of the National Council of Elders, an organization of people over 65 dedicated to advancing civil, women’s, environmental, farm workers, and LGBTQ+ rights.
Gus maintained a connection to Oakland and the East Bay, from the early 1990s living on and off in Oakland with his longtime wife and partner Kathryn Kasch. He was on the board of the Urban Studies Council, a Bay Area regional policy and research organization, focused on addressing inequities. In one of his last roles, Gus served on Oakland’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, formed after the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
Asked what kept him working for a better world in the face of so many threats from white supremacy and assaults on democracy, Gus would say he was guided by Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision of a Beloved Community of inclusion, cooperation and justice for all which he had first imbued from his parents and grandmother. “We need to come back to what Martin called Building the Beloved Community — helping communities address education, incarceration, mental and physical health in an integrated and systematic way. If we want a better future for the next generation, we need to build a movement that is strategic and constant!”
In interviews he frequently talked about the inspiration of his grandmother who took him to concerts with Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson when he was five. “My grandmother grew up in the Jim Crow South,” he noted. “One day, after picking cotton, she came to school late and the teacher slapped her. She walked out and never went back.”
“I’m lucky enough for what my grandmother instilled in me: Don’t think you know it all, learn something new every day. I learned it by engaging with people and having an analysis and understanding the integrated role that can be played by communities, universities, government, all kinds of people. We don’t live in a community that has reached its limit as to what’s best.”
To hear Gus in his own words, watch a 2021 interview with the Berkeley Historical Society and Museum.
Former Berkeley, California Mayor Gus Newport, a titan of progressive politics in the late 20th Century, social justice champion who worked with Malcolm X, and a lifelong humanitarian and internationalist, died June 17 in San Francisco. He was 88.
Gus was the embodiment of the adage of a life well lived. His record of accomplishments from civil rights activism to groundbreaking political initiatives to far-sighted community economic development programs to global solidarity and elder statesman leadership could fill volumes.
“The beauty of Gus,” said actor Danny Glover in an interview, “is that I trust him to elevate our story. When you spend time with someone with Gus’s history and character and listen to his stories, you are changed. I hope that a little of my story could resonate with others the way Gus’s stories have resonated with me and so many around the world.”
As a young activist in 1962, leading the Monroe County Nonpartisan League, the largest civil rights group in his hometown of Rochester, NY, Gus shepherded the first successful police brutality case in federal court after the beating of a Black gas station attendant Rufus Fairwell who would win a financial settlement from the city.
Daisy Bates, who led the NAACP campaign to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in the late 1950s and now organizing in Rochester for the NAACP, introduced him to Malcolm X by phone. Gus and Malcolm worked to defend nine Black Muslims assaulted and arrested in a police raid on a Black Muslim Mosque in Rochester during a worship service.
When Malcolm flew into Rochester, and landed on the tarmac on a cold February day, Gus was waiting in the airport surrounded “by a lot of white men in felt hats and white shirts and ties. When Malcolm walked in and asked, ‘who is Gus Newport.’ I raised my hand and said, “I am.” He said, “Young blood, you got the best-tapped telephone in America. This is all FBI around you.”
He would go on to count Malcolm and Harlem Congress member Adam Clayton Powell as mentors. He assisted Malcolm in founding his Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU).
In February 1965, after Malcolm’s house was firebombed, Malcolm asked him to join him for a speech in Rochester about his situation. Returning to New York, “when we landed at LaGuardia, we were met by the chief of police of New York and the fire marshal. They accused him of firebombing his own home.” Four days later Malcolm was assassinated. Later Gus would help Malcolm’s widow Betty Shabazz with burial and financial support, including with a fundraiser for the family headlined by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Max Roach at the home of Sidney Poitier.
Malcolm, Gus would later say, was “the greatest person I think I ever knew,” a “great teacher” and “one of the dearest friends I ever had.”
Gus would move west after leaving a Department of Labor stint assigned to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, due to a distaste for the politics of President Nixon. A cousin helped him get work for the city of Berkeley, developing youth employment service programs and as a senior analyst in the City Manager’s office and Parks and Recreation department.
In 1979, Gus was elected Berkeley Mayor, with the backing of the progressive Berkeley Citizens Action coalition on a platform of community economic control, serving two terms until 1986. “I never aspired to run for mayor,” he would relate. “I was talked into it by John George, the first African American elected to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, and Congressman Ron Dellums. Danny Glover (who met Gus while interning with the city of Berkeley) and Harry Belafonte (who he had known in New York) helped with my campaigns.”
As Mayor, Gus would lead Berkeley to become the first city in the U.S. to divest from apartheid South Africa, the first city to create a domestic partner benefits program for LGBTQ+ families, a child care initiative to help working women, and innovative programs on affordable housing, rent control, policing reforms, environmental protections, and community development. Berkeley landlords sued to block limits on rent increases the city had enacted. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court where Berkeley was represented pro bono by famed Constitutional attorney Lawrence Tribe, “and we won.”
He was one of the first mayors in the country to ride in a Gay Freedom Day parade, in San Francisco in 1979. He also challenged U.S. immigration policy. “The wars in Central America were creating thousands of refugees,” he says, “and I gave orders to our police not to arrest immigrants because of their status.”
As a result of Berkeley and Gus’ prominent role in the broad anti-apartheid movement, he was made an honorary member of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and served on the advisory board of the US Conference on Apartheid.
When Mandela first toured the U.S. after his release from prison, Gus was invited to help host Mandela on his visit to Boston, and Glover and Belafonte “introduced me to Mandela.” Gus had worked in Boston after leaving Berkeley as the first senior fellow at the newly founded William Monroe Trotter Institute at the University of Massachusetts.
Gus spent years helping other municipalities on community development projects including in Boston, Seattle, Palm Beach FL, New Hampshire. The Boston area Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, in Roxbury, was a particular success, the only non-profit organization in the U.S. to receive the powers of eminent domain which became a national model for empowering a diverse community and sustainable change profiled in two award-winning films: Holding Ground and Gaining Ground.
He would also serve on the five-person advisory body to oversee the planning to rebuild New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and teach at Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2009, he gave the commencement speech at Heidelberg University at his alma mater in Tiffin, OH and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters.
Global peace and social justice was a life long focus for Gus. He was co-chair of the U.S. Peace Council and vice president of the World Peace Council and worked in solidarity with people’s movements, in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
He was outspoken in opposition to U.S. policies in Haiti, Cuba, and Central America. In 1985, as mayor, he visited El Salvador, along with a Jesuit priest, with representatives of New El Salvador Today, a group he helped found. “The priest drove us to Chalatenango, and we were told we would walk for an hour, but it took us six hours! When we arrived, the village had no electricity and many roofs were torn off from bombing, but they managed to create a huge sign: ‘Welcome to the Mayor of Berkeley’.”
He was also a prominent supporter of Palestinian rights, as a long time board member of the Berkeley-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. In 2019 Gus was awarded the Khalil Gibran Spirit of Humanity Award by the Arab American Institute.
During the 2016 election, Gus and Danny Glover traveled across the U.S. as national surrogates for the Presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Gus had developed a friendship with Sanders after Bernie was elected mayor of Burlington, VT in 1981. They also collaborated with the few other progressive mayors, including Chicago’s Harold Washington, at U.S. Conference of Mayors meetings. “We’d compare notes on public policy, community planning, and organizing.”
In his later years, Gus served on the leadership committee of the National Council of Elders, an organization of people over 65 dedicated to advancing civil, women’s, environmental, farm workers, and LGBTQ+ rights.
Gus maintained a connection to Oakland and the East Bay, from the early 1990s living on and off in Oakland with his longtime wife and partner Kathryn Kasch. He was on the board of the Urban Studies Council, a Bay Area regional policy and research organization, focused on addressing inequities. In one of his last roles, Gus served on Oakland’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, formed after the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
Asked what kept him working for a better world in the face of so many threats from white supremacy and assaults on democracy, Gus would say he was guided by Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision of a Beloved Community of inclusion, cooperation and justice for all which he had first imbued from his parents and grandmother. “We need to come back to what Martin called Building the Beloved Community — helping communities address education, incarceration, mental and physical health in an integrated and systematic way. If we want a better future for the next generation, we need to build a movement that is strategic and constant!”
In interviews he frequently talked about the inspiration of his grandmother who took him to concerts with Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson when he was five. “My grandmother grew up in the Jim Crow South,” he noted. “One day, after picking cotton, she came to school late and the teacher slapped her. She walked out and never went back.”
“I’m lucky enough for what my grandmother instilled in me: Don’t think you know it all, learn something new every day. I learned it by engaging with people and having an analysis and understanding the integrated role that can be played by communities, universities, government, all kinds of people. We don’t live in a community that has reached its limit as to what’s best.”
To hear Gus in his own words, watch a 2021 interview with the Berkeley Historical Society and Museum.
"It is hard to see," said the head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, "if Israel can wipe out an entire news crew without the international community so much as batting an eye, what will stop further attacks on reporters."
Nearly two years into Israel's assault on Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces' killing of six journalists this week provoked worldwide outrage—but a leading press freedom advocate said Wednesday that the slaughter of the Palestinian reporters can "hardly" be called surprising, considering the international community's refusal to stop Israel from killing hundreds of journalists and tens of thousands of other civilians in Gaza since October 2023.
Israel claimed without evidence that Anas al-Sharif, a prominent Al Jazeera journalist who was killed in an airstrike Sunday along with four of his colleagues at the network and a freelance reporter, was the leader of a Hamas cell—an allegation Al Jazeera, the United Nations, and rights groups vehemently denied.
Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote in The Guardian that al-Sharif was one of at least 26 Palestinian reporters that Israel has admitted to deliberately targeting while presenting "no independently verifiable evidence" that they were militants or involved in hostilities in any way.
Israel did not publish the "current intelligence" it claimed to have showing al-Sharif was a Hamas operative, and Ginsberg outlined how the IDF appeared to target al-Sharif after he drew attention to the starvation of Palestinians—which human rights groups and experts have said is the direct result of Israel's near-total blockade on humanitarian aid.
"The Committee to Protect Journalists had seen this playbook from Israel before: a pattern in which journalists are accused by Israel of being terrorists with no credible evidence," wrote Ginsberg, noting the CPJ demanded al-Sharif's protection last month as Israel's attacks intensified.
The five other journalists who were killed when the IDF struck a press tent in Gaza City were not accused of being militants.
The IDF "has not said what crime it believes the others have committed that would justify killing them," wrote Ginsberg. "The laws of war are clear: Journalists are civilians. To target them deliberately in war is to commit a war crime."
"It is hardly surprising that Israel believes it can get away with murder. In the two decades preceding October, Israeli forces killed 20 journalists."
Just as weapons have continued flowing from the United States and other Western countries to Israel despite its killing of at least 242 Palestinian journalists and more than 61,000 other civilians since October 2023, Ginsberg noted, Israel had reason to believe it could target reporters even before the IDF began its current assault on Gaza.
"It is hardly surprising that Israel believes it can get away with murder," wrote Ginsberg. "In the two decades preceding October, Israeli forces killed 20 journalists. No one has ever been held accountable for any of those deaths, including that of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, whose killing in 2022 sent shock waves through the region."
The reaction to the killing of the six journalists this week from the Trump administration—the largest international funder of the Israeli military—and the corporate media in the U.S. has exemplified what Ginsberg called the global community's "woeful" response to the slaughter of journalists by Israel, which has long boasted of its supposed status as a bastion of press freedom in the Middle East.
As Middle East Eye reported Tuesday, at the first U.S. State Department briefing since al-Sharif and his colleagues were killed, spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the airstrike targeting journalists was a legitimate attack by "a nation fighting a war" and repeated Israel's unsubstantiated claims about al-Sharif.
"I will remind you again that we're dealing with a complicated, horrible situation," she told a reporter from Al Jazeera Arabic. "We refer you to Israel. Israel has released evidence al-Sharif was part of Hamas and was supportive of the Hamas attack on October 7. They're the ones who have the evidence."
A CNN anchor also echoed Israel's allegations of terrorism in an interview with Foreign Press Association president Ian Williams, prompting the press freedom advocate to issue a reminder that—even if Israel's claims were true—journalists are civilians under international law, regardless of their political beliefs and affiliations.
"Frankly, I don't care whether al-Sharif was in Hamas or not," said Williams. "We don't kill journalists for being Republicans or Democrats or, in Britain, Labour Party."
Ginsberg warned that even "our own journalism community" across the world has thus far failed reporters in Gaza—now the deadliest war for journalists that CPJ has ever documented—compared to how it has approached other conflicts.
"Whereas the Committee to Protect Journalists received significant offers of support and solidarity when journalists were being killed in Ukraine at the start of Russia's full-scale invasion, the reaction from international media over the killings of our journalist colleagues in Gaza at the start of the war was muted at best," said Ginsberg.
International condemnation has "grown more vocal" following the killing of al-Sharif and his colleagues, including Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa, and Mohammad al-Khaldi, said Ginsberg.
"But it is hard to see," she said, "if Israel can wipe out an entire news crew without the international community so much as batting an eye, what will stop further attacks on reporters."
Three U.N. experts on Tuesday demanded an immediate independent investigation into the journalists' killing, saying that a refusal from Israel to allow such a probe would "reconfirm its own culpability and cover-up of the genocide."
"Journalism is not terrorism. Israel has provided no credible evidence of the latter against any of the journalists that it has targeted and killed with impunity," said the experts, including Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.
"These are acts of an arrogant army that believes itself to be impune, no matter the gravity of the crimes it commits," they said. "The impunity must end. The states that continue to support Israel must now place tough sanctions against its government in order to end the killings, the atrocities, and the mass starvation."
Fire-related deaths were reported in Turkey, Spain, Montenegro, and Albania.
With firefighters in southern Europe battling blazes that have killed people in multiple countries and forced thousands to evacuate, Spain's environment minister on Wednesday called the wildfires a "clear warning" of the climate emergency driven by the fossil fuel industry.
While authorities have cited a variety of causes for current fires across the continent, from arson to "careless farming practices, improperly maintained power cables, and summer lightning storms," scientists have long stressed that wildfires are getting worse as humanity heats the planet with fossil fuels.
The Spanish minister, Sara Aagesen, told the radio network Cadena SER that "the fires are one of the parts of the impact of that climate change, which is why we have to do all we can when it comes to prevention."
"Our country is especially vulnerable to climate change. We have resources now but, given that the scientific evidence and the general expectation point to it having an ever greater impact, we need to work to reinforce and professionalize those resources," Aagesen added in remarks translated by The Guardian.
The Spanish meteorological agency, AEMET, said on social media Wednesday that "the danger of wildfires continues at very high or extreme levels in most of Spain, despite the likelihood of showers in many areas," and urged residents to "take extreme precautions!"
The heatwave impacting Spain "peaked on Tuesday with temperatures as high as 45°C (113°F)," according to Reuters. AEMET warned that "starting Thursday, the heat will intensify again," and is likely to continue through Monday.
The heatwave is also a sign of climate change, Akshay Deoras, a research scientist in the Meteorology Department at the U.K.'s University of Reading, told Agence France-Presse this week.
"Thanks to climate change, we now live in a significantly warmer world," Deoras said, adding that "many still underestimate the danger."
There have been at least two fire-related deaths in Spain this week: a man working at a horse stable on the outskirts of the Spanish capital Madrid, and a 35-year-old volunteer firefighter trying to make firebreaks near the town of Nogarejas, in the Castile and León region.
Acknowledging the firefighter's death on social media Tuesday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez sent his "deepest condolences to their family, friends, and colleagues," and wished "much strength and a speedy recovery to the people injured in that same fire."
According to The New York Times, deaths tied to the fires were also reported in Turkey, Montenegro, and Albania. Additionally, The Guardian noted, "a 4-year-old boy who was found unconscious in his family's car in Sardinia died in Rome on Monday after suffering irreversible brain damage caused by heatstroke."
There are also fires in Greece, France, and Portugal, where the mayor of Vila Real, Alexandre Favaios, declared that "we are being cooked alive, this cannot continue."
Reuters on Wednesday highlighted Greenpeace estimates that investing €1 billion, or $1.17 billion, annually in forest management could save 9.9 million hectares or 24.5 million acres—an area bigger than Portugal—and tens of billions of euros spent on firefighting and restoration work.
The European fires are raging roughly three months out from the next United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, which is scheduled to begin on November 10 in Belém, Brazil.
"These are not abstract numbers," wrote National Education Association president Becky Pringle. "These are real children who show up to school eager to learn but are instead distracted by hunger."
The leader of the largest teachers union in the United States is sounding the alarm over the impact that President Donald Trump's newly enacted budget law will have on young students, specifically warning that massive cuts to federal nutrition assistance will intensify the nation's child hunger crisis.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA)—which represents millions of educators across the U.S.—wrote for Time magazine earlier this week that "as families across America prepare for the new school year, millions of children face the threat of returning to classrooms without access to school meals" under the budget measure that Trump signed into law last month after it cleared the Republican-controlled Congress.
Estimates indicate that more than 18 million children nationwide could lose access to free school meals due to the law's unprecedented cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid, which are used to determine eligibility for free meals in most U.S. states.
The Trump-GOP budget law imposes more strict work-reporting requirements on SNAP recipients and expands the mandates to adults between the ages of 55 and 64 and parents with children aged 14 and older. The Congressional Budget Office said earlier this week that the more aggressive work requirements would kick millions of adults off SNAP over the next decade—with cascading effects for children and other family members who rely on the program.
"Educators see this pain every day, and that's why they go above and beyond—buying classroom snacks with their own money—to support their students."
Pringle wrote in her Time op-ed that "our children can't learn if they are hungry," adding that as a middle school science teacher she has seen first-hand "the pain that hunger creates."
"Educators see this pain every day, and that's why they go above and beyond—buying classroom snacks with their own money—to support their students," she wrote.
The NEA president warned that cuts from the Trump-GOP law "will hit hardest in places where families are already struggling the most, especially in rural and Southern states where school nutrition programs are a lifeline to many."
"In Texas, 3.4 million kids, nearly two-thirds of students, are eligible for free and reduced lunch," Pringle wrote. "In Mississippi, 439,000 kids, 99.7% of the student population, were eligible for free and reduced-cost lunch during the 2022-23 school year."
"These are not abstract numbers," she added. "These are real children who show up to school eager to learn but are instead distracted by hunger and uncertainty about when they will eat again. America's kids deserve better.
Pringle's op-ed came as school leaders, advocates, and lawmakers across the country braced for the impacts of Trump's budget law.
"We're going to see cuts to programs such as SNAP and Medicaid, resulting in domino effects for the children we serve," Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) said during a recent gathering of lawmakers and experts. "For many of our communities, these policies mean life or death."