❧ After a frightening week on the subcontinent, India and Pakistan have reached a ceasefire agreement, but things are still tense between the two nuclear powers. This past Wednesday, India launched a series of airstrikes against six cities across Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir—a response to an attack two weeks prior in which separatist militants killed 26 tourists, most of them Hindus from India, near the town of Pahalgam. India’s defense minister said Wednesday’s strikes killed “100 terrorists,” but Pakistan has said that only 31 civilians, including two children, were killed. In the following days, the two countries took turns firing upon each other’s military bases, including sites outside the disputed territory of Kashmir.
After four days of fighting and fear that things could spiral into a full-scale war, the two sides reached a ceasefire. Before the two belligerents had even acknowledged it, Donald Trump popped up to claim credit for reaching this ceasefire using trade diplomacy, something India has denied, instead crediting its own military might. Trump has said he hopes to end the Kashmir conflict “after a thousand years.” (It actually began in 1947, so he’s only off by about 900 years.)
At any rate, the ceasefire is fragile, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has insisted that the fighting is “only paused” and that India will “retaliate on its own terms” if there are any future terror attacks on the country. Though the ceasefire has held, there have still been strikes in both Indian and Pakistani-administered Kashmir, with both sides accusing the other of violating the agreement.
❧ In other ceasefire-related news, Trump and Yemen’s Houthi militants (Ansar Allah) announced a surprising ceasefire agreement last week after the U.S. spent two months brutally and unconstitutionaly bombing Yemen. Trump claimed that the Houthis suddenly “don’t wanna fight anymore” and had “capitulated,” though he also praised their “bravery.” But as Branko Marcetic points out for Jacobin, Trump didn’t actually achieve anything with this bombing campaign but a return to the status quo: “The key detail missing from the cease-fire agreement is any promise by the Houthis to stop attacking Israeli ships. It’s a key detail, because this was the reason Trump started bombing Yemen in the first place.”
It’s also worth pointing out that, according to the New York Times, the U.S. military managed to lose seven MQ-9 “Reaper” drones valued at $30 million a pop, which were shot down by Ansar Allah in just 30 days, along with two F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets ($67 million apiece) which “accidentally tumbled off an aircraft carrier into the sea” after the vessel “make a hard turn at sea to avoid incoming Houthi fire.” Imagine if we’d spent all that money on healthcare and education instead!
❧ After closing the door to every other refugee and asylum seeker, Trump is rolling out the red carpet for one very specific group of people: white South Africans—a group Steve Bannon very recently called “the most racist people on earth.” The Trump administration welcomed 59 Afrikaner “refugees” on a State Department-chartered flight on Monday and hosted a ceremony to receive them at the airport. The administration claims that white South Africans face severe “race-based discrimination” under the Black-majority government, primarily through land redistribution policies.
In reality, whites are still the beneficiaries of racial inequality: Despite making up just 7 percent of the population, white South Africans own about 72 percent of the country’s private farmland, as the direct result of decades-old Apartheid policies. Trump also continued to advance the bogus claim (one Joe Walsh painstakingly debunked last year for this magazine) that white South African farmers are being killed en masse.
The Trump administration has gone beyond merely giving credence to these nonsense claims. Their explicit position now is that white people fleeing very justifiable land redistribution policies are more deserving of refugee status than non-white people fleeing actualviolence and persecution—like Haitian immigrants, who Trump has accused of eating pet cats and gone out of his way to expel. There is no other description for it: this is one of the most explicitly racist policies the Trump administration has ever implemented.
SONG OF THE WEEK
“I’ve Never Met A Nice South African,” from the satirical British show Spitting Image in 1986:
AROUND THE STATES
❧ California Governor Gavin Newsom has a brilliant new strategy to eliminate homelessness… pushing cities to further criminalize being homeless. More specifically, he’s pushing them to adopt a “model ordinance” that bans public camping for more than three days in a row or setting up tents. “We want to see this model ordinance across the state of California,” Newsom said Monday. Though this model ordinance is merely a suggestion, he has said he’d strip the funding from any city that does not comply (which would, ironically, just make their homelessness problems worse).
Newsom paired this policy with the announcement of $3.3 billion in funding to provide hospital beds for mentally ill Californians on the streets, which he has dangled as an incentive for cities to adopt punitive encampment policies. But it doesn’t address the reason most Californians are homeless, which is the severe lack of affordable housing. (Truthout)
Keep in mind, Governor Newsom—whose estimated net worth is around $30 million—
likes to pull apart homeless people’s meager sleeping areas himself for photo ops.
❧ The Catholic clergy—and the Trump administration—are up in arms following a new Washington state law that requires priests to break the seal of confession to report child abuse or neglect. Most states already mandate clergy to report in cases where they believe a child is being abused, but they make exceptions for information discussed during confession, which is considered so sacred in Catholicism that priests who violate its confidentiality can be excommunicated. Washington’s law, however, does not honor this distinction, which Seattle’s archbishop Paul D. Etienne described as “a clear intrusion into the practice of our Catholic faith,” an objection that many other prominent clergy in the state share. President Trump’s Department of Justice seems to agree, announcing earlier this month that it would investigate the law as “anti-Catholic.” While religious freedom is an important concern, the Church is essentially asking for a religious exemption to obligations that other people in authority are expected to follow. Religious institutions expecting special treatment is a problem in itself, but it is especially troublesome considering the Catholic church’s long, sordid history of child sexual abuse. (New York Times)
❧ New York University’s law school has backed down after initially barring students who engaged in peaceful pro-Palestine protests from taking their exams. The school sent the 31 students, who participated in two peaceful sit-ins, emails informing them that they were “persona non grata” on campus. It initially required them to sign a “Use of Space Agreement” in which they renounced the right to protest in order to be admitted to school buildings to complete their final exams. However, the students refused to sign and the school ultimately balked, allowing them to take their exams—though they still remained banned from every building on campus besides their residences and health-related facilities. Even with that capitulation, the ban is still ridiculous. As the students have pointed out, the school has allowed similar protest tactics for other causes, like Black Lives Matter or in opposition to fossil fuels, but has made this exception to crack down on speech supportive of Palestinians. (The Intercept)
❧ The popular left-wing streamer Hasan Piker said during a livestream that he was detained this weekend by federal immigration enforcement and interrogated about his political beliefs. Piker, an American citizen and an outspoken critic of Trump and the Israeli occupation of Palestine said that he was nabbed by Customs & Border Protection at the Chicago O’Hare airport after returning from a trip to France. says he was moved into a “detention center” within the airport and questioned for two hours about his content on YouTube, including whether he supports Trump and his opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict—questions he said he answered honestly because, as a public figure, “I'm going to use the privilege that I have at that moment to try and see what they're doing.” (For the record, this was an extremely dangerous thing to do, and it’s always safest not to speak to law enforcement at all without a lawyer.)
Piker said he expected to be detained in this way at some point, since other Trump-critical social media users and content creators have reported receiving similar grillings by federal officials over their political speech. “Obviously, the reason for why they’re doing that is, I think, to try to create an environment of fear for people like myself or, at least others who would be in my shoes who don’t have the same level of security, to shut the fuck up,” Piker said. (NBC)
The full video of Piker discussing his experience on YouTube
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)
❧ Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has begun to lay the groundwork for the administration’s next assault on civil liberties: suspending the right of habeas corpus, which allows a person to challenge their imprisonment in a court of law. Habeas corpus is explicitly laid out in Article I of the Constitution and only Congress reserves the power to suspend it in times of “rebellion or invasion.”
In a speech Friday containing so many outright lies that it’s impossible to dissect them all here, Miller described the arrival of undocumented immigrants as an “invasion,” and attempted to use that to justify the suspension of this bedrock constitutional freedom. While Miller is known for his bluster, President Trump has reportedly been involved in serious talks about taking this radical step.
We should take this seriously. The Trump administration has already asserted its right to arbitrarily detain and imprison people without due process, along a willingness to openly defy courts to do it, and they have stated their clear intentions to do it to American citizens (who Trump calls “homegrowns”). Suspending habeas corpus would give this administration the license to unlawfully detain anyone they deem an enemy without due process. While the Supreme Court has upheld habeas corpus in the past (including in the oft-cited case of Lincoln suspending it during the Civil War), we need to be prepared for the worst and ready to resist if necessary.
❧ As he prepared for a tour of the Persian Gulf, the royal family of Qatar gifted Trump a $400 million jet, which Trump excitedly accepted. Trump has profited immensely from the presidency, including from foreign countries, and done so openly. But this is such a naked display of graft that it was too much even for a lot of Republicans. But Trump didn’t seem to understand why accepting such a lavish gift was unbecoming of the president: “They’re giving us a free jet,” Trump protested. “I could say, ‘No, no, no, don’t give us. I want to pay you a billion or $400 million, or whatever it is,’ or I could say, ‘Thank you very much.’ You know?” As obviously corrupt as it is, it’s understandable why he feels this way. Trump has gotten away with so much profiteering over his time in the White House, as have so many other elected officials, that he probably doesn’t see the downside.
Nothing to see here, just a regular gift. The same as a fruit basket, really.
Hoatzins, found in the Amazon and Orinoco river basins in South America, are one of the most distinct birds you’ll encounter. They are the only living birds that possess claws on their wings, an evolutionary holdover from prehistoric times. You can really see the claws in this video:
Those claws recede by the time hoatzins grow into adults, but the birds hardly cease to be weird. Adult hoatzins have blood-red eyes and chaotic orange fans that make them look like bedraggled mad scientists who just pulled a double shift in the lab.
But most of all, they smell awful. Their pungent odor is the result of their cow-like digestive system, which causes them to ferment the leaves they eat, get horrible gas, and burp out a gnarly smell. It’s so bad that humans have dubbed them the “stinkbird,” but it does have the side benefit of being so nasty that predators avoid them.
The website for the distinguished Cornell Lab of Ornithology has some very unkind words for the hoatzin, referring to it as a “large dumpy bird” that often “moves clumsily around waterside vegetation, making loud huffing noises.” Unlike those Ivy League bird snobs, we think the hoatzin is beautiful.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson,Lily Sánchez, and Alex Skopic. 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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