Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has filed a complaint claiming the Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism pushed universities into massive settlements despite turning up little to no evidence of anti-Jewish discrimination on campus. Van Erem said in her complaint that the government’s probes into schools like Harvard, Brown and Columbia were “an unlawful process designed to achieve predetermined political goals.” “Columbia affiliates, from the Board of Trustees down, have actually collaborated with the federal government in these sham investigations,” says Marianna Hirsch, professor emerita at Columbia University. “These were not […]

Loui Ridi, a Palestinian American man who lives in Ohio, traveled to the occupied West Bank on Monday to help relatives defend their family home in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus. Israeli settlers have surrounded the home, which Ridi owns, for more than a week. Settlers have besieged several Palestinian houses in the village, trapping people inside and cutting off water and electricity in some cases. “I’m not getting no protection here. I still fear for my life. I still fear for my family’s life here,” says Ridi, who joins Democracy Now! from the occupied West Bank. Ridi has raised an American flag on his home and reached out to the U.S. Embassy for help. “The IDF is not even making it better here. They’re not allowing […]

Israel’s military on Wednesday admitted that its soldiers opened fire in January 2024 on a car trying to flee Gaza City following Israel’s evacuation orders. The car was carrying 5-year-old Palestinian Hind Rajab and six of her relatives. They were all killed, as were Palestine Red Crescent Society medics dispatched to rescue them. The Israeli military said it would also investigate the killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics whose bodies and crushed emergency vehicles were recovered from a mass grave in Rafah in March 2025. It made no mention of thousands of other incidents where Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli forces. “This seems to be nothing more than political theater,” says Sharif Abdel Kouddous, the Middle East and […]

U.S. Treasury to Sanction Iran and Its Trading Partners: “You Are Either With Us or Against Us”, USS Abraham Lincoln Heads for San Diego After Record Wartime Deployment, Houthis Clash with Yemeni Forces in Largest-Scale Fighting Since 2022 Truce, Sudan’s Humanitarian Catastrophe Grows as 200,000 Are Displaced by Fighting and Flooding, “The People Want the Fall of the Regime”: Tunisian Protesters Demand Ouster of Kais Saied, Human Rights Watch: Russian Mercenaries Led Massacre of Civilians in Mali Village Raid, Armed Israeli Settlers Kill and Wound Palestinians During Raid on Village Near Hebron, Aisha Wahab Wins Special Election, Becoming First Afghan American U.S. Congressmember, FBI Searches Eric Swalwell’s Home and Seizes […]

James Muldoon is a sociologist who writes about the changing nature of human-technology relationships. Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Our Relationships investigates how people form emotional attachments with large language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I., co-written by fellow researchers Mark Graham and Callum Cant and based on more than a decade of fieldwork, follows Global South workers whose knowledge and labor are the basis of AI tools and assistants. “A lot of people see artificial intelligence as something that is largely automated, frictionless, and just appears as a useful tool for us. But most of the human hours […]