❧ The last remaining cancer hospital in Gaza has closed after being struck by Israel last Tuesday. The European Hospital in Khan Yunis served more than 12,000 people, including 10,000 cancer patients who are now being forced to evacuate the Strip to receive desperately needed treatment. But Israel has continually refused to let many of them — including children— leave the territory, and has denied efforts by Jordan to launch coordinated evacuations. Another delegation, which included 284 people, was evacuated by the World Health Organization, but reportedly told by the Israeli military to wait in the hospital while it underwent another round of shelling. The children who have been allowed to leave “represent just a fraction of children in urgent medical need,” according to the WHO.
In October 2023, when the Al-Ahli hospital went up in flames, killing hundreds, we were told that it was inconceivable, and even an antisemitic “blood libel,” to speculate that the IDF would do something as callous as attacking a medical facility—a claim that the Biden White House amplified. Since then, the WHO reports that Israel has struck 122 hospitals and 180 ambulances. Any pretense of concern for Palestinian life has gone out the window. Now, Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, openly announces to the world that “We are conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed,” and gets praised by Prime Minister Netanyahu. The people who called this a campaign of mass extermination and ethnic cleansing were right from the start, and those who downplayed that obvious truth will have to live the rest of their lives with the knowledge of their complicity. (Haaretz)
❧ Ukraine has now been at war for over three years and remains under martial law. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s liberal ruling Servant of the People party has used this power not just to clamp down on dissent but also to erode union power and workers’ rights. In Truthout, Theia Chatelle has a new feature on how Ukraine’s largest democratic socialist group, Sotsialnyi Rukh or “Social Movement,” has sought to oppose this rollback of rights in the courts, including a law passed in the early months of the war that allowed employers to fire workers who took sick leave or vacations and extended the work week to 60 hours.
A Sotsialnyi Rukh demonstration in support of healthcare workers.
❧ El Salvador has arrested a human rights activist, Ruth López, who was a prominent critic of President Nayib Bukele. López’s organization, Cristosal, has extensively documented the severe human rights abuses in Bukele’s extrajudicial crackdown on gang violence, during which he declared a “state of exception” allowing the nation’s security forces to detain and imprison tens of thousands of people without due process in brutal prisons. López has also been a prominent advocate for the migrants in America who were shipped into the “judicial black hole” of CECOT, El Salvador’s infamous “terrorism” prison without even being accused of crimes. López is now being held in “administrative detention” with no indication of her whereabouts from the government, apparently on charges of embezzlement— something her organization calls “a serious human rights violation under international law.” (NPR)
❧ Capuchin monkeys in Panama keep kidnapping howler monkey babies, and scientists are struggling to figure out why. Germanscientists have documented at least 11 instances between 2022 and 2023 in which male capuchins were caught on video carrying the baby howlers, a few of which appear to have died of starvation. But the motive of the male capuchins remains entirely unclear. The most obvious motive for an animal swiping the offspring of another is for consumption, but none of the baby howlers were eaten. “We’ve not seen anything like this in the animal kingdom,” said one of the researchers, Zoë Goldsborough.
The researchers are hoping that the kidnappings may have come from some sort of misguided parental instinct, since the capuchins were quite gentle with the babies. But another researcher at the same German institute, Brendan Barrett, speculated that the capuchins were just “chaos agents” and that “They're just doing it for the sake of doing it, to reduce their boredom or have something to do to fill the time and space in their lives.” We often try to emphasize in this news briefing the many ways that animals are just like us. Sometimes it means doing fun things like dancing. Other times, it just means being an asshole for no reason. (Associated Press)
❧ Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri has been released from ICE custody after he was detained for more than two months for nothing besides making pro-Palestine social media posts. The Trump administration never charged Suri, an Indian immigrant, with a crime. The Department of Homeland Security merely alleged that he had been “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” claims they never provided any evidence for, and that he had “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas.” This referred to Suri’s father-in-law, who was once an advisor to the recently assassinated Hamas leader (and former prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority) Ismail Haniyeh more than a decade beforehand. Judge Patricia Giles ruled that his detention was in violation of the First Amendment, the right to free speech, and the Fifth Amendment, the right to due process.
Suri was notably only released following a habeas petition in Virginia, which allows people in jail to challenge the legality of their confinement in court. Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts student who was detained for writing a pro-Palestine op-ed for more than six weeks, was also released following a habeas petition. But the Trump administration has been mulling the possibility of suspending habeas corpus. If they are successful, there will be little left to stop them from locking people up indiscriminately for political speech. (NBC News)
It’s a good start, but now we’ve got to free ALL the political prisoners.
❧ Oregon gave cities around the state $20 million to provide treatment to people struggling with drug addiction. But according to an investigation by the Guardian, some municipalities, including the supposed liberal haven of Portland, have been giving them to the cops instead:
[S]everal counties have put the money toward hiring prosecutors, acquiring police gadgets and police vehicles, and covering sheriff costs. Washington county, the state’s second-largest jurisdiction, budgeted twice as much of its funds for police and district attorney salaries as it did on community programs, while two other counties used the money for laser devices that are meant to detect drugs but have been criticized as useless.
❧ SAG-AFTRA, the union representing screen and voice actors, has launched an unfair labor complaint against Epic Games after it used an A.I. Darth Vader voice in the video game Fortnite. Video game voice actors have been on strike for the last nine months, with the rights of companies to use actors’ likenesses as one of the major bones of contention. SAG-AFTRA’s objection in this case is not that Epic used an artificial version of the iconic Vader voice, which belonged to the late James Earl Jones. Rather, the union objects to the use of the voice without sitting down to negotiate terms, which it says is a core part of their agreement with video game companies. (The Verge)
❧ The French Quarter has been beset by a Bubble Rebellion! It began last week when a man named Burt Benrud, the vice president of the famous Café Du Monde coffee and beignet chain, threatened to sue the owner of the MRB bar across the street, Joel Moody, over his establishment’s bubble machines. Bubbles are, of course, a harmless novelty to most, and a common sight in the French Quarter. But Benrud the beignet baron, who’d just moved in two months prior, harrumphed that one of the bubbles could wind up floating into one of his porch cocktails, or even worse, land on his shiny black Porsche SUV, which he insists on parking outside a French Quarter bar for inexplicable reasons. Benrud has called the cops on MRB more than 15 times and, despite efforts at a compromise, refused to back down on his call for the bubble machine to be taken down. So in a display of sudsy solidarity with MRB against this insufferable bubble-hating interloper, French Quarter residents filled the streets for the whole weekend for a “French Quarter Bubble Party.” (NOLA.com)
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)
❧ House Republicans are on the verge of passing yet another gigantic tax cut for the rich, which they’ll pay for by throwing millions of people off Medicaid and food stamps. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill’s new work requirements (which Nathan J. Robinson argued against on the Current Affairssite today) will throw more than 7 million people off Medicaid. The bill also introduces other paperwork hurdles that will likely lead many more people to have their benefits taken away and require states to impose new co-payments for those who remain on the program.
Millions of SNAP recipients are also likely to be kicked off by similar work requirements, which will now apply to adults as old as 64 (previously it was 54) and to parents of children older than 7 years. This will come with the hideous knock-on effect of increasing child hunger as well, since many free school lunch programs are automatically given to kids whose families receive SNAP benefits. The bill also takes a hatchet to education and green energy spending, while further blowing up the budget for immigration enforcement and the military.
This is simply a massive transfer of wealth from the poorest Americans to the richest. According to an analysis by Penn’s Wharton School of Business reported on in the New York Times:
People making between about $51,000 and $17,000 could lose about $700 on average in after-tax income beginning in 2026, according to the analysis, when factoring in both wages and federal aid. That reduction would worsen over the next eight years. People reporting less than $17,000 in income would see a reduction closer to $1,000, on average, also increasing over time, a shortfall that underscores their reliance on federal benefits…By contrast, the top 0.1 percent, including those with incomes over $4.3 million, would gain on average more than $389,000 in after-tax income in 2026, the data show.
❧ A new report reveals that many lobbying organizations that claim to represent the interests of patients are actually front groups for the pharmaceutical industry who are lobbying the Trump administration to scale back prescription drug negotiations. The report from the advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs Now identified six groups, all of which, it says were “acting as mouthpieces for the drug industry's agenda.” For instance, one of them, the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, claims to be a “nonprofit” to “advance the discussion and development of patient-centered healthcare," but every single one of its board members has ties to the pharma industry. (Common Dreams)
BIRD FACT OF THE WEEK
Aside from humans, the bowerbird is perhaps the animal kingdom’s greatest architect.
There are many different species of this colorful bird across New Guinea and Australia. But they have one thing in common: They build elaborate structures—the eponymous “bower” — to attract a mate. These are far beyond the nests that any old bird (except pigeons) can build. The bowerbird creates a palace: a sprawling fortress of arcing twigs that their object of affection can walk through in awe.
Their creation of large wooden structures puts them in the company of beavers as far as their contributions to architecture. But while beavers still have the bowerbird beat with respect to size, bowerbirds have the edge with creativity and finesse. Bowerbirds decorate their creations with baubles and tchotchkes accrued from the human world: everything from bottle caps to candy wrappers to pens, which they display one by one as part of an elaborate mating ritual.
But they are not merely assembling whatever random garbage they can find. They have a keen eye for color. Justine E. Hausheer wrote for the blog Cool Green Science that the blue satin bowerbird has a preference for blue decoration. Take a look at the astonishing assemblage of different blue objects this one managed to find:
Other bowerbirds choose different color varieties. Hausheer documented a great bowerbird who’d collected “duct tape, tin foil, a pink bra strap, purple ribbon, green cloth pegs, broken glass, candy wrappers, a baby-bottle nipple, purple flowers, green leaves, and — the pièce de résistance — a syringe.”
There are more than 20 species of bowerbird and their creations vary wildly, from the golden bowerbird’s giant pillars…
To the Vogelkop Bowerbird’s cozy flower-adorned yurt:
Video: Cornell Ornithology Lab
Perhaps one day, someone will discover the Buckminster Fuller of Bowerbirds.
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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