April 7, 2026 ❧ Israel pushes Shiites out of south Lebanon, a tourist on trial for racism in Brazil, and Texans protest border wall construction.  

Plus: What Trump's new budget tell us, Thomson Reuters is sharing data with ICE, Mr. Noem likes to cross dress and that's okay, medical examiner rules ICE committed homicide, and ground hogs are squirrels, actually. 

Whoops! Current Affairs is postponing our guidebook launch party!

Sorry, party people—it appears we may have jumped the gun on announcing our New Orleans guide release party. We are rescheduling the event for later this year, so we'll have more time to perfect the drink menu, find a ridiculous outfit, and give far-off readers a chance to join the fun. 

Don't worry: you're still invited! We will update you as soon as possible with the new date. Until then, you can order a copy of The Current Affairs Guide to New Orleans here and start planning your next trip to America’s most magical city!

Now, the news.

❧ The News ❧

❧ THOMSON REUTERS SHARES DATA WITH ICE. The parent company of the news agency Reuters has been selling people’s personal information to Immigrants and Customs Enforcement under its subsidiary CLEAR, a data broker. Thomson Reuters had previously claimed that it only sold data in order to fight serious crimes, not facilitate deportations (we’ve heard that one before), but 404 Media has obtained documents contradicting those statements. In fact, address data from Thomson Reuters appears to have been used to feed the Palantir system ICE uses to track immigrants and plan deportations. Perhaps the most damning quote comes from Department of Homeland Security procurement documents: “CLEAR is vital to the mission-essential, time sensitive investigative work of several DHS Components as it makes it easier to locate people, assets, businesses, affiliations, and other critical facts.” Hard to talk your way out of that one. Over 200 Thomson Reuters employees have sent a letter to company leadership expressing their discomfort with sharing people’s personal data, including addresses, ethnicities, phone records, social security numbers, and more.

Art by Julia Wald from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 6, Issue 4

❧ ARGENTINIAN TOURIST ON TRIAL IN BRAZIL FOR RACIST GESTURE. In January, a 29-year-old white woman named Agostina Páez was recorded making monkey sounds and hurling a slur at waiters while vacationing in Brazil. Footage of the incident went viral online—because this is 2026—and Páez was later arrested. Brazil, a majority Black country with a long history of racial injustice, has enacted strong antiracism laws, and Páez now faces up to two to five years in prison as well as fines. Though she’s still awaiting a verdict, the internet has entered its own litigation, with people in Brazil and Argentina debating their different legal and social attitudes around race. Some Argentines are crying “woke,” and turning her case into fodder for conservative politicians (remember, this is the same country that elected Trump-ally Javier Milei as its president), while Brazil considers the arrest a point of “national pride,” according to the case’s prosecutor, Fabíola Tardin. “Brazil is being painted as this authoritarian country,” Tardin told the New York Times, “when we are only seeking justice for the harm done.”

Art by Seb Westcott from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 6, Issue 4

 ❧ Israel’s Latest Crimes Against Humanity ❧ 

❧ ISRAEL WANTS SHIITE MUSLIMS OUT OF SOUTHERN LEBANON. Israeli officials have publicly stated that they want to occupy southern Lebanon up to the Litani River—and to prohibit all displaced Shiite Muslims from returning to their homes in this region, which comprises roughly a tenth of the country. Recent reporting by the New York Times reveals the extent of Israel’s ethnic targeting: military officials are calling Lebanese town leaders and telling them to expel Shiite refugees, while allowing Christian and Druse people to remain. Fearing Israeli retaliation, local officials have complied with the request, shrinking the already-limited areas where Shiite Muslims are welcome in their own country. Meanwhile, Lebanon is already dealing with more than a million people displaced by the war. Human Rights Watch called this forced displacement a possible war crime. Among Israelis, support for the war has already significantly declined, though it’s still the majority position. In Tel Aviv, Israeli police clashed with anti-war protesters in front of the U.S. Embassy, part of an ongoing crackdown.

❧ ISRAEL MANDATES DEATH BY HANGING ONLY FOR PALESTINIANS. A new law makes lynching the default punishment for Palestinians convicted of murder with intent to “negate Israel's existence.” Life in prison will be used as punishment in only special exceptions. The bill, named “Death Penalty for Terrorists,” takes aim at Palestinians in the West Bank, excluding Israelis from the unnecessarily cruel punishment, despite the fact that Israeli settlers have killed 1,073 Palestinians in the occupied region since Oct. 7, 2023. When the bill was being passed, its biggest proponent, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, wore a noose shaped pin on the Knesset floor. “Not long ago, it was controversial to describe Israel as an apartheid state,” Current Affairs associate editor Alex Skopic writes in his latest piece. “You could be fired from your media job for saying so, as journalist Katie Halper was in 2022, or even censured by the House of Representatives, as Rep. Rashida Tlaib was in 2023. When Ta-Nehisi Coates compared Israel to the Jim Crow South in his book The Message, he was labeled an “extremist” for it. Now that Israel has passed a Jim Crow lynching law, there should be no doubt he was right. We are looking at the deliberate construction of a two-tiered punishment system, in which one ethnic group is marked for death and another is not, for the exact same crimes.”

To get a better idea of what its like on the ground West Bank, Current Affairs spoke with journalist Jasper Nathaniel, a Jewish American reporter who has made international headlines documenting the violence of Israeli settlers. You can read of the transcript of the conversation here or watch it below. 

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

What’s new in the magazine this week?

“Bitter Root” Grapples with the Horror of American Racism

Legal scholar Etienne C. Toussaint found something in the comic book series Bitter Root that he’d never encountered in his scholarship. “I discovered a visual language for racial terror that refuses abstraction. Bitter Root makes visible what law systematically obscures: the visceral reality of hate, the debates about justice that never reach courtrooms, the impossible choices Black communities face under siege. This is why this comic matters for understanding law, history, and the future of justice itself.” For the latest print edition of Current Affairs, Toussaint explores “how Bitter Root heals, through what scholars call Afrofuturism, using speculative elements not to escape history but to reveal it.” It’s a fascinating read. Check it out here. And if you haven’t subscribed to the print edition of Current Affairs yet, what are you waiting for? Sign up here.

Art by Sanford Greene from Current Affairs Issue 58, March-April 2026

❧ In More News ❧

❧ DEATH OF BLIND ROHINGYA REFUGEE LEFT BY ICE RULED A HOMICIDE. When ICE released Nurul Shah Alam from custody, they left him alone outside of a then-closed coffee shop in Buffalo, N.Y. The agency told no one—not his family, not his attorneys—his location. The temperatures were freezing, Shah Alam didn’t speak much English, and his vision was extremely impaired. Five days later, his body was found in the street. The Erie County medical examiner has now ruled the 56-year-old’s death a homicide. Shah Alam died from hypothermia and dehydration, and the homicide designation encompasses “deaths resulting from the actions of another person, including negligent acts or omissions.” DHS, unsurprisingly, called the report a hoax, but why else would a nearly blind man freeze to death in an unfamiliar place, if not because of the agents who abandoned him? A member of the Rohingya ethnic minority, a persecuted Muslim group in Myanmar, Shah Alam had only recently reunited with his wife. They had spent 12 years apart as he worked in Malaysia so he could bring his family to the U.S.

Art by Kyle Brian Prior from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 6, Issue 4

❧ TEXANS PROTEST THE CONSTUCTION OF TRUMP’S BORDER WALL. Texans love Big Bend National Park. Many have fond memories of nights spent there, near the border of Mexico, gazing at the stars under dark, dark desert skies. Some of these Texans were none too pleased to learn that Trump’s border wall will be built straight through the land, stripped of environmental protections by the Big Beautiful Bill. The new wall will disrupt ecosystems and popular outdoor recreation spots (essential for attracting tourists), destroy “thousands of years of Native American history,” and deface a sacred place with a 150-mile-long monument to fascism. Thousands gathered in protest on the steps of the state capitol over the weekend,where the outrage was demonstrably bipartisan. Brandon Herrera, a right-wing gun Youtuber and congressional candidate who attended the protest, told The Guardian, “Democrats don’t want this wall in Big Bend. Republicans don’t want this wall in Big Bend. Independents don’t want this wall in Big Bend. Sheriffs don’t want this wall in Big Bend. The tourists don’t want this wall in Big Bend. Nobody wants this wall in Big Bend.” Well then, maybe Herrera is ready to start unlearning the myth of red Texas.

Art by Harriet Burbeck from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 6, Issue 4

❧ Crooks vs. Sickos ❧

Or, what our politicians and oligarchs are up to

❧ President Trump is threatening ruinous war crimes if Iran does not agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m. tonight. By mid-day, no deal had been struck between the U.S. and Iran, and Trump is using unhinged and terrifying language in his ultimatums, warning that the “whole civilization will die tonight” if no agreement is reached. The only thing to say is what Current Affairs Editor-in-Chief Nathan J. Robinson has said all along: “The Iran War Is Unfathomably Depraved.” Unfathomably. 

Breaking: The U.S. and Iran have reached a two-week ceasefire agreement. All attacks, including from Israel, will pause and the Strait of Hormuz will reopen while the nations negotiate an end to the war. The ceasefire also applies to fighting in Lebanon according to Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who appears to have played a role in brokering the deal.

❧ The Trump administration proposed a new $2.2 trillion federal budget and its line items are a spec sheet for MAGA America. A look inside shows plans to privatize TSA, allocate $1.5 trillion dollars for defense (way, way more than any other nation), operate up to 100,000 adult beds in immigrant detention, and add capacity “to lock up tens of thousands of more parents and children.” There’s also proposals to continue “beautification” projects in D.C.—funds which some lawmakers fear will be used to continue Trump’s MAGA astroturfing of the city—and to pay for it all by cutting science and social spending, especially spending deemed woke. The budget also reveals the administration’s use of what journalist Ken Klippenstein calls a “Political Pre-crime Center.” Known as the “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center,” made up of staff from 10 federal agencies, “it is busy ‘proactively’ identifying domestic terrorists” who might be anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, espouse “extreme” beliefs on migration, gender and race, or hostile towards traditional views on family, religion and morality. You know what that means: if you have some pretty typical leftist beliefs, the government wants to keep an eye on you.

Art by Seb Westcott from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 6, Issue 4

❧ The Endangered Species Act was suspended in the Gulf of Mexico so that it did not impede oil and gas production. Also, the U.S. Forest Service was effectively neutered, moving the headquarters from D.C. to Salt Lake City and shutting regional offices. 

❧ Pam Bondi was fired. The ex-U.S. Attorney General was known for hits like not releasing the Epstein Files, threatening to open up a civil rights investigation into a person who criticized Charlie Kirk after his death, and frivolously prosecuting Trump’s enemies based on the weakest of evidence, like John Bolton, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and former FBI Director James Comey. Her firing came weeks before she was set to testify before Congress about her handling of the Epstein Files, and it looks like she won’t be able to wriggle out of it now that she’s a civilian.

Art by Seb Westcott from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 6, Issue 4

❧ Last week, The Daily Mail published pictures of Kristi Noem’s husband posing for selfies wearing feminine clothing and enormous fake breasts. The former Secretary of Homeland Security, who was not moved in the slightest when her agency left Americans dead in the street, said she was “devastated.” I wish she wasn’t, but the political project Noem so assiduously serves has a primary goal of criminalizing the exact kind of gender nonconformity her husband enjoys. The hypocrisy of the Noem household may be humiliating for its matriarch, but here’s the thing: Mr. Noem’s self expression wouldn’t have hurt a fly if it wasn’t for the public shaming and outlawing of transgender people.

❧ David Smith, a billionaire Trump ally, bought a major newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, and is using it to investigate Democrats, starting with Maryland governor Wes Moore. 

❧ Food giant Sysco has purchased Restaurant Depot, a popular restaurant supply wholesaler, giving the company substantially more control over what we eat and how much it costs.

❧ The Brightside ❧

❧ The HBO show Neighbors, which follows feuding neighborhood residents as they duke it out over noise complaints, fence heights, and sometimes nothing at all, makes a strong case for local journalism. You won’t believe what is going down at local government meetings—and thank goodness someone was there to report on it. 

❧ Lina Khan has launched the Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia University. Matt Stoller wrote about how the new center is helping to buttress and expand anti-monopoly thinking (and activity!) in the United States. 

❧ An album not available on streaming services has cracked the Billboard Top 10. Established country singer Sturgill Simpson released Mutiny After Midnight under the name Johnny Blue Skies, and debuted at number three on the charts pushing only CDs, vinyl, and cassettes. Daddy Spotify didn’t get a dime.

ANIMAL FACT OF THE WEEK

Ground hogs are actually big squirrels!

We are in the business of debunking historical myths and national delusions here at Current Affairs, cutting through the artifice to deliver you what is really real. Given our mission, it is our duty to tell you that, according to a Tufts University blog, groundhogs are actually squirrels, just really big ones. Does that mean we have to stop calling them “whistle pigs?”

Photo by Cephas, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Writing and research by Emily Carmichael. Editing and additional material by Alex Skopic, Emily Topping and Nathan J. Robinson. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.

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