World-renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is 72 years old, suffering multiple health problems, and may die in prison, say legal advocates in a new request they filed today that asks the United Nations to support his release. Abu-Jamal’s legal team decided to appeal to the UN after having exhausted nearly every legal avenue for relief available in the United States.

Abu-Jamal was a Black Panther and journalist when he was convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, and he has always maintained his innocence. His death sentence was overturned in 2001, and in 2011, Pennsylvania resentenced him to life without parole. Since then, “each attempt to secure Mr. Abu-Jamal a new and fair trial has been rejected,” argues a submission his lawyer Bret Grote and others made on his behalf to the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. 

Grote told Truthout the filing, which UN rules limit to 20 pages, attempts to summarize nearly a half-century of the “failures of the criminal legal system” in Abu-Jamal’s case, including an “unfair trial, a biased appellate process, decades of surveillance and censorship, and a death by incarceration sentence that has been recognized by the United Nations as violating international human rights standards.” 

The UN determination of whether someone faces “arbitrary detention” is interpreted “more broadly” than simply being “against the law.” It also considers “elements of inappropriateness, injustice, lack of predictability and due process of law.” 

Abu-Jamal’s lawyers say he was in “continuous solitary confinement” from 1983 to 2011 on Pennsylvania’s death row, before being transferred to the general population in a state prison called SCI Mahanoy, where Abu-Jamal’s advocates say officials have denied him proper medical care. His legal team’s submission to the UN notes he was diagnosed in 2012 with hepatitis C, which caused cirrhosis of the liver, and he later “developed a painful, severe rash covering most of his body, potentially caused or exacerbated” by the disease, and then went into diabetic shock “due to untreated hyperglycemia” caused by steroid treatment for his skin condition. It also cites UN human rights experts who raised concern when Abu-Jamal was shackled to his hospital bed in 2021 while awaiting long-delayed heart surgery.

Abu-Jamal, a prolific writer who has authored 13 books, now risks losing his eyesight. 

Abu-Jamal, a prolific writer who has authored 13 books, now risks losing his eyesight. 

“I have been, for all intents and purposes, unable to read, unable to write, unable to see anything more than the masthead of a newspaper and not even its headlines; blurry television bursts of color,” Abu-Jamal revealed in a 2025 Prison Radio commentary called “Mumia’s Vision: A Message for the Movement.” He explained he had “been reluctant to talk about my eye problems” because “any sign of weakness is to be avoided at all costs” in prison, since it “brings predation.”

His legal team’s submission to the UN refers to medical records showing how in 2025 Abu-Jamal “began experiencing a common and easily treated complication of cataract surgery” that clouded his vision, and notes he continues to “suffer from multiple complex ophthalmological conditions, including proliferative diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma, that pose a significant risk of permanent blindness.” 

“He is old and he is sick,” Samah Sisay, an international human rights lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Truthout. “This is someone who should not be incarcerated.” 

The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Abolitionist Law Center, where Abu-Jamal’s lawyer Grote is legal director, have a track record of success in filing submissions before the United Nations. In 2023, they also asked the UN Human Rights Committee to review whether the U.S. was complying with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prompted it to call for “a moratorium on the imposition of sentences to life imprisonment without parole,” which opponents often call “death by incarceration” because of the lack of opportunity for review and release. 

Grote acknowledged that the UN body lacks enforcement powers but said, “We are asking for a ruling because we think the truth of what has been done to Mumia in his case needs to be exposed in the light of day.” 

In 2020, the same UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention was asked by the Lowenstein Clinic for International Human Rights at Yale Law School to review the case of Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier, saying he — like Abu-Jamal — faced health problems after nearly 50 years of incarceration. It responded in 2022 by calling on the U.S. government to “immediately” release Peltier after concluding the “cumulative effect of the procedural deficiencies” he “suffered in parole proceedings are overwhelming, rendering his continued detention arbitrary.” In January 2025, President Joe Biden commuted the rest of Peltier’s life sentence to home confinement. 

Unlike Peltier, whose conviction was in a federal court, Mumia has a state-level conviction, so Sisay says officials like the governor could ask the state for more information to address accusations made in the legal team’s submission to the UN. She notes how “international pressure, regardless of whether the U.S. claims to recognize international law, has always been crucial to movements for social justice.” For example, the U.S. has been slow to change its policies on extreme sentencing, but Sisay says “a lot of the work” that went into abolishing the juvenile death penalty or juvenile life without parole “happened through international advocacy as well as at the domestic state and federal level.” 

Compassionate release for terminally ill prisoners is another path home, but “thankfully Mumia does not have a terminal diagnosis at this point,” Grote told Truthout. 

In 2021, Pennsylvania granted compassionate release to Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, another former Black Panther Party member who was convicted of killing a police officer and spent decades in solitary confinement. But he lived just 52 days after release before he died from cancer at the age of 78, surrounded by his family. Despite his weakened state, a judge had argued months earlier Shoatz presented “an undue risk of escape or danger to the community.”

The UN has a chance to recognize how Abu-Jamal’s “continuing incarceration is in violation of international human rights norms.”

Laura Whitehorn, a former political prisoner who was incarcerated more than 14 years and co-founded the group Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), told Truthout, “Mumia’s case fits squarely into why I started RAPP with three people who served long sentences and saw the damage, and were outraged at the lack of reasoning behind long sentences for older people.” She contrasted the U.S. approach to a landmark ruling earlier this month by India’s Supreme Court, which gives states three months to create a policy for the early release of more than 5,000 prisoners who are elderly or terminally ill. 

Pennsylvania is not one of the 25 states that have enacted “second look” policies to allow judges to review a person’s sentence, so Abu-Jamal’s paths to release in the state seem limited to a request for an unlikely commutation given the politicized nature of his case, or an appeal “if new evidence justifies it,” Grote told Truthout, noting Abu Jamal’s case is 44 years old and “even more of a challenge would be finding evidence that courts would treat fairly.” Grote says the UN has a chance to recognize how Abu-Jamal’s “continuing incarceration is in violation of international human rights norms” and “offer a catalyst to the campaign to bring him home to his family and community.” 

Correction note: This article was edited to clarify that the petition for Leonard Peltier was filed by the Lowenstein Clinic for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, and that the 2023 moratorium on LWOP recommendation came from the UN Human Rights Committee.

The US is currently experiencing its largest ever recorded outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a disease caused by infection with the Cyclospora parasite. The disease is typically acquired via fecal-contaminated food or drink, and can cause explosive diarrhea and severe, lingering stomach cramps. Those who contract it generally have a terrible time. Experts have yet to conclusively identify the source of the outbreak, which continues unabated. Recent tests implicating Taylor Farms have been withdrawn as false positives, though Taylor Farms’ lettuce remains a primary suspect in the ongoing investigation. 

After presiding over the COVID-19 crisis, one might imagine a presidential administration would be eager to prevent another public health catastrophe from occurring under its watch. The Trump Administration, however, has taken pains to weaken the resilience of the already limited and chronically underfunded public health infrastructure in the US. As a result, this latest outbreak is unfolding in a system that is even more diminished and underresourced than it was in 2020.

After presiding over the COVID-19 crisis, one might imagine a presidential administration would be eager to prevent another public health catastrophe from occurring under its watch. The Trump Administration, however, has taken pains to weaken the resilience of the already limited and chronically underfunded public health infrastructure in the US.

First, it is worth noting that fecal contamination can happen when farm workers are not given adequate bathroom breaks. Rather than protecting farm workers, however, the Trump administration has made it harder for them to challenge unsafe conditions. In June 2025, the Labor Department suspended enforcement of a rule that expressly protected H-2A agricultural guestworkers from retaliation for filing workplace safety complaints or consulting with worker advocates. The administration subsequently proposed rescinding those protections altogether. 

Another example of the second Trump administration’s handiwork is their changes to the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet. FoodNet is useful because it conducts active surveillance of foodborne diseases. Rather than waiting for private laboratories to send results, FoodNet staff regularly inquire about new disease cases and conduct audits to ensure cases are not missed. This proactive, standardized approach helps public health officials identify more cases earlier than systems that wait for reports to move passively up the chain. FoodNet is a joint program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service, and the state health departments where the sites are located. There are FoodNet surveillance sites in ten states, covering 62.6 million people (Figure 1). 

Figure 1

FoodNet previously tracked cases of cyclosporiasis. In July of 2025, however, the Trump administration made FoodNet’s reporting of cyclosporiasis optional, mandating FoodNet tracking only for salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. The administration justified the change as a way to conserve resources and avoid duplication, conflating FoodNet’s active surveillance with more passive surveillance systems such as the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS). The CDC’s own surveillance manual notes that active surveillance systems have been shown to increase reporting. Other empirical research has yielded similar results, with one study finding that the rate of disease reporting doubled when active surveillance practices were used, and that the disease reports themselves were more likely to be complete than those obtained through passive reporting structures.

Unfortunately, FoodNet’s reach was already limited, covering only about 16 percent of the US population. The CDC maintains that FoodNet is not intended to detect individual outbreaks, and is geared more toward measuring disease burden over time. Rather than expanding it to make it more useful for monitoring active outbreaks, however, the Trump administration significantly weakened the program by reducing the number of diseases it was required to track, undermining even its utility as a historical dataset. This will also make it difficult to determine whether foodborne illness increased under their watch.

The changes to FoodNet did not occur in a vacuum. In February 2025, the administration eliminated the USDA’s National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which was working on best-practice guidelines to combat foodborne illnesses shortly before its dissolution. In April 2025, federal workforce cuts forced the suspension of the Food Emergency Response Network proficiency testing program, which ensured that the network’s 170 food-testing laboratories could produce quality results during an emergency. The Trump Administration also downsized the CDC’s parasite surveillance team from eleven to just three. Zooming out, important institutions have been hollowed out: the USDA has shed 24,000 workers (an almost 27 percent reduction), the CDC has lost nearly 3,000 (roughly a quarter of its workforce), and the FDA is down more than 4,000 (almost a fifth of its workforce).

Many of these cuts were initiated at the direction of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE’s handiwork should certainly allow for more efficient spread of diseases like cyclosporiasis. Given the cost of such outbreaks, however, the more economically sensible path would have been to invest in public health rather than shortchanging it. In any case, there is no evidence that the Trump administration slashed programs based on some careful cost-benefit analysis. Instead, the cuts appear to be part of the administration’s reckless and shortsighted pattern of hollowing out the federal government’s ability to serve the public. 

Cyclospora is exactly the kind of pathogen for which timely, comprehensive surveillance matters. The incubation period for cyclosporiasis is 2 to 14 days after exposure, making it difficult to track because people often struggle to remember exactly what they ate during that period. Active surveillance is better equipped to compensate for this, however, because it both picks up more cases and collects more complete records. This enables officials to identify clusters sooner despite shaky recollections from individual patients. Making active surveillance optional removed an important source of systematic, standardized data just before a major surge that has proved difficult to characterize and trace.

In public health, it is important to have robust systems in place before a crisis occurs. An outbreak that can be contained in its early stages may become difficult or impossible to control once it spreads. Yet these systems often become victims of their own success. Successful prevention means that the public never sees the disasters that were averted and may underestimate the scale of the danger those systems were designed to contain. The Trump administration appears to have doubled down on this terrible inclination, and people are paying for it with their bowels.

Suddenly, for centrists, refusing to support Democrats and withdrawing their support isn’t much of an offense, and indeed could be something worthy of “serious conversations.” 

Over the past few weeks, progressive and self-identified democratic socialist candidates are racking up major victories in New York, Pennsylvania, and Colorado, and leading in polls in Wisconsin and Michigan. In response, centrist pundits, politicians, and funders are increasingly threatening to boycott, leave, or otherwise announce their uncommitment to the Democratic Party. But unlike the Uncommitted Movement of 2024—which sought to use their leverage as voters to pressure the Biden, and ultimately Harris, campaign into adopting the both morally and politically correct position of ending support for genocide—the emerging Centrist Uncommitted movement is animated, in large part, by their support for genocide and lockstep support for Israel. 

First up is perennial centrist sage James Carville, whose claim to fame is winning an election 34 years ago and spending the next several decades occupying cable news panels or calling in from gaudy pink mansions to scold Democrats for never being sufficiently centrist. He has one note, and he was going to elevate it after the recent wave of Left electoral wins, telling his podcast listeners after Mamdani-backed candidates in New York won 8 for 8 last month, “I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the S-word: schism.” He added that some DSA-aligned candidates “have no place in the Democratic party” and, of the broader coalition: “I’m not in that fucking political party.”

Did this brazen act of disloyalty to the party result in any condemnations or scandals, like the meltdown over streamer Hasan Piker’s insistence he would not support Gavin Newsom if he won the nomination? No, because the loyalty demands only go left, never right, as we will learn. 

The loyalty demands only go left, never right.

Carville is by no means alone. CNN reported that same day that there’s apparently a brewing conspiracy on Capitol Hill for centrists, namely pro-Israel centrists, to form their own party or otherwise divorce from the Democratic Party. With the courage typical in these ideological meltdowns, these designs were, of course, leaked anonymously to a friendly outlet. “One Democratic lawmaker sitting in a battleground district told CNN,” Sarah Ferris, Ellis Kim, and Annie Grayer reported, “that they are so concerned about the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America that they have recently begun having serious conversations with donors about leaving the party altogether.”

It’s a funny formulation here by CNN: The anonymous threat is framed as being from a congressperson in a “battleground state,” implying their concern is electoral, and they are forced to respond to the organic demands of their constituents to support Israel. But then it’s immediately followed up with an acknowledgment that they’re actually taking cues from their “donors,” with whom they discussed the issue before any voters are mentioned, much less centered. 

One of the few Democrats who has the decency to make this threat publicly is increasingly right-wing and erratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who indicated last week he will leave the party over its supposedly insufficient support for Israel. 

We have evidence elsewhere of a pending Centrist Uncommitted movement backed by (far more consequentially than media whining) a donor strike—especially if anti-zionist Abdul El-Sayed wins his Democratic primary on August 4 in Michigan. “Some Jewish Democratic leaders in the state,” reports the Times of Israel, “are prepared to go even further.”:

“Several prominent Metro Detroit Jews who have traditionally fundraised for Democrats are also planning fundraisers for the presumptive GOP nominee, former US Rep. Mike Rogers, as a ‘hedge.’… Others affirmed the idea that the Jewish Democratic donor class, feeling abandoned by the party, would back Rogers.”

Other pro-Israel commentators, such as alleged gun control advocate Fred Guttenberg, have openly threatened to leave the party. 

Unfortunately @RoKhanna, this is the kind of position that will cause people like me to step away from the Democratic party. https://t.co/npdNPE4D0q

— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) July 17, 2026

After Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani secured the Democratic Party nomination for mayor of New York City last year, party leaders either dragged their feet in endorsing him or—as was the case with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—never endorsed him at all. House Minority Leader (and the House’s number one recipient of AIPAC money out of 435 members) Hakeem Jeffries made veiled mob threats for months over Mamdani’s refusal to spout pro-Israel bromides, before reluctantly being forced to endorse Mamdani days before the general election, releasing a statement with all the charm and enthusiasm of an ISIS hostage video. Other Democrats, such as New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, accused Mamdani of being a “jihadist.” 

It may seem vulgar to compare this genocidal fit to the 2024 Gaza Uncommitted Movement, but it’s a useful window into brazen hypocrisy and double standards. In retrospect, no group of people in the country were more loyal to the Democratic Party than the Uncommitted Movement, which was trying to save Democrats from themselves. Yet that movement’s acknowledgment of reality—that support for genocide would demoralize the base and reduce volunteer and GOTV energy—was framed as petulance, lack of loyalty, or a secret desire for Trump to win. Democrats were attempting to run a marathon with a rock in their shoe. The Uncommitted Movement insisted the rock must be removed. And the zionist ideologues that comprise a great deal of our media and party establishment insisted they were anti-winning the marathon. A grotesque combination of racist, stubborn, stupid, and cruel. 

Democrats were attempting to run a marathon with a rock in their shoe. The Uncommitted Movement insisted the rock must be removed. And the zionist ideologues that comprise a great deal of our media and party establishment insisted they were anti-winning the marathon.

The emerging Centrist Uncommitted movement is, of course, not motivated by any such humanitarian or practical concerns. It’s motivated by venality and pro-corporate politics, but is being supercharged by a deluded commitment to the dead-end ideology of zionism and its never-ending regime of indefensible and extreme regional violence. A goal these Uncommitted “donors” and pro-Israel electeds openly profess.

The idea that threatening to leave, or not vote for, Democrats to extract concessions from the party is a uniquely left-wing phenomenon is a popular canard but not one supported by evidence. Indeed, it’s become something of conventional wisdom that disgruntled Bernie voters sat out the 2016 election or voted for Trump or Stein, but the reality is they voted for Clinton at a rate twice that of Clinton voters supported Obama in 2008. The anti-Obama PUMA movement, or the Party Unity My Ass Movement as it was called, was far more potent than any effort for Sanders supporters to boycott the general in 2016. But it nevertheless became conventional wisdom that the latter was of greater consequence than the former. Partly this is, of course, because Obama won and Clinton didn’t, but also because the Left’s loyalty to the party is taken for granted, whereas centrists must be won over and catered to. A dynamic that, conveniently, works out well for Wall Street, Corporate America, and zionism. 

Centrists must be courted, pandered to, and their petulant threats to leave the party—in service of genocide rather than principled opposition to it—must be coddled. But those using the only lever they had to enact change in the doomed 2024 election were threatened, mocked, belittled, and turned into a punchline for disloyalty. 

Press freedom groups are issuing dire warnings on Thursday that House Republicans’ efforts to subpoena the nonprofit left-wing news organization BreakThrough News represent a dangerous new step in a McCarthyite war on political dissent.

On Wednesday, Fox News reported that BreakThrough, a New York-based outlet, was one of three nonprofits that had been issued subpoenas by the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee as part of an investigation into $39 million worth of donations from tech mogul Neville Roy Singham, a self-described socialist who has used his wealth to fund left-wing nonprofits.

In letters sent Tuesday, the committee, led by Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), said that BreakThrough, as well as two other organizations—the People’s Forum Inc., a New York-based activist hub, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—had not turned over any documents that had been requested as part of an investigation into whether rules around tax exempt status for nonprofits should be tightened to protect against foreign influence.

The committee has accused Singham, an American who now lives in Shanghai, of exploiting the tax code and using shell companies and donor-advised funds to hide foreign money that has been used to promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. It does not, however, make any specific accusation of legal wrongdoing.

The subpoena requires BreakThrough News to turn over records about its finances, foreign donors and grant recipients, fiscal-sponsorship arrangements, and communications with Singham and any foreign entities.

BreakThrough News is under attack.

The House Ways and Means Committee has made us the target of its latest witch hunt. We're not going down without a fight.

Go to https://t.co/2mYEsl3MYA and:

1- Add your name to the petition calling on the House Ways and Means Committee to… pic.twitter.com/Vr8uELkJJW

— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) July 23, 2026

In a statement on Wednesday, BreakThrough News said it was “under attack.”

“For years, Republican lawmakers have painted a target on our backs, falsely claiming that our political views and reporting are part of some foreign plot,” the outlet said. “Now, the MAGA-dominated House Ways and Means Committee has issued us a subpoena—demanding internal communications, financial records and more. Make no mistake, this is a flagrant abuse of power, and a direct attack on our work as journalists and on the First Amendment generally.”

BreakThrough said it does not receive any funding from foreign governments or institutions and that it already complies with all the tax and public reporting requirements that nonprofits have to follow.

“We are not charged with any crime, because our only ‘crime’ has been to tell the truth–by covering the activities of the Palestine solidarity movement, unmasking the truth of ICE’s terror in our streets, and exposing Washington’s crimes around the world, from Cuba to the Congo,” the outlet said. “That’s the journalism they want to shut down. Their goal is to saddle us with legal proceedings and hostile media to drain our resources and stop this important work.”

While the committee stated that they are investigating BreakThrough over its financing rather than its politics, letters sent to the organization have treated the content of its reporting as circumstantial evidence of malign foreign influence, referring to it as “anti-American” and claiming that its negative coverage of Israel was “sowing division within the United States.”

Chip Gibbons, the policy director of the free speech advocacy group Defending Rights & Dissent, told Common Dreams that the subpoena of BreakThrough was a “deeply chilling assault on the First Amendment.”

“Such tactics are, quite literally, a throwback to the House Un-American Activities Committee, which today is mostly viewed as a disgrace,” Gibbons said. “I say mostly, because just three days ago [Secretary Marco] Rubio’s State Department released a report preposterously attacking the US left, including some of these groups, as Cuban fronts that cited old HUAC reports.”

He further emphasized in a press release that there was “no plausible need” for a news organization to provide documents as part of a broad congressional inquiry.

“The only thing these groups are accused of is essentially receiving donations from a US citizen who has been the subject of an intensive campaign of demonization,” Gibbons said. “It is lawful for Americans to donate to activist causes and media projects while holding views disfavored by Congress. This is clearly not a valid legislative inquiry at all, but an attempt to intimidate and chill dissenting opinions.”

Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, agreed that “Congress shouldn’t be using a tax investigation as a pretext to dig through a newsroom’s internal communications or financial records.

“Freedom of the press,” he said, “applies to all journalists, regardless of whether politicians like their editorial slant or their politics.”

House subpoena of @BTnewsroom threatens press freedom.

We strongly urge the House Ways and Means Committee to withdraw its subpoena against BreakThrough News and stop using congressional oversight as a tool to retaliate against independent media.https://t.co/xPZgHkLPZd

— Freedom of the Press Foundation (@FreedomofPress) July 23, 2026

In what it has portrayed as a fight against “left-wing terrorism,” the Trump administration has increasingly blurred the lines between violent activity and protected political speech that they claim “incites” violence.

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, signed by Trump in September, designates large swathes of left-wing viewpoints on race, gender, immigration, and other topics as “indicators” of domestic terrorism that have been used to link entire groups of people to violent acts they themselves did not commit.

Rubio said last week that the administration would soon be designating more left-wing organizations as terrorist groups, while senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller said that the full force of the state would be used to “disrupt, identify, defund, de-bank, arrest, prosecute” those deemed to “foment” political violence, not just those who actually commit it.

He has previously pledged to use the law to “dismantle” organizations that use heated rhetoric to refer to their right-wing opponents, including calling them “fascist” or “authoritarian.”

Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, described the subpoena of BreakThrough as an extension of a “retaliatory ethos” Trump has taken towards critical journalists “with the goal of shutting down criticism and dissent.”

She told Common Dreams, “BreakThrough News is not the first, nor will it be the last, to come under official attack for bringing people alternative and useful news coverage about ICE abuses, foreign policy, Palestinian rights, and other topics.”

“Allowing a congressional committee to harass an independent newsroom with a broad subpoena sets an awful precedent,” Stern said. “If lawmakers can abuse tax oversight to single out outlets whose reporting offends them today, no newsroom in America is safe from government intimidation tomorrow.”

A Republican-controlled House committee passed legislation earlier this week that would prevent the US Labor Department from enacting federal standards to protect workers from extreme heat, a move that came amid sweltering heat across the country.

The Heat Workforce Standards Act, led by Rep. Mark Messmer (R-Ind.), passed the House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday in a 18-15 vote along party lines. If enacted, the legislation would bar the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from implementing nationwide heat protections for workers—including those proposed by the Biden administration in 2024.

The Biden Labor Department estimated that its proposed rules would protect around 36 million workers. Trump’s Labor Department has done nothing to move forward with the Biden-era proposal.

The AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the US, has condemned the GOP bill, noting that “extreme heat is one of the deadliest workplace hazards in America.”

“House lawmakers are considering legislation that would block OSHA from issuing or enforcing a federal heat safety standard,” the labor group said earlier this week. “That’s the wrong direction when workers’ lives are on the line.”

Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, a coalition of labor unions and advocacy groups wrote in a letter to members of Congress that the Republican legislation “would permanently remove the federal government’s authority to address a workplace hazard that is already resulting in worker fatalities.”

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 55 worker deaths from heat exposure in 2023, a number that safety researchers widely consider to be an undercount due to frequent misclassification or underreporting of heat-related illnesses and fatalities,” the coalition wrote. “More broadly, heat-related deaths in the United States have more than doubled since 1999, and extreme heat now claims more lives each year than any other weather-related hazard.”

“Workers have no control over extreme heat, and many are unable to refuse hazardous assignments without jeopardizing their livelihoods,” the groups added. “Congress should not respond to an escalating occupational hazard by permanently removing the Department of Labor’s authority to address it.”

The Groundwork Collaborative, Workshop, and Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy estimated in a report published earlier this year that basic, federal workplace heat protections could save up to 1,500 lives annually. The report observed that major industry groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce, have mobilized against proposed national heat protections.

“Companies like Amazon and the United Parcel Service (UPS) that employ hundreds of thousands of workers subjected to extreme workplace temperatures make public statements about their commitments to worker safety while actively lobbying to weaken or block heat regulations,” the report noted. “As extreme heat intensifies, the cost of inaction will be measured in lives lost. The question facing policymakers is no longer whether effective protections exist, but whether they have the political will to stand up to those unscrupulous employers lobbying hard to block them.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) issued a stark warning this week about a congressional measure that would merge the U.S. and Israel’s military technology industrial complexes, saying that it represents an “existential threat” to U.S. democracy.

The provision — called the “U.S.-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” or Section 219 — is included in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed the House in a 216 to 212 vote on Wednesday. Six Democrats broke from the party to vote “yes,” and seven Republicans voted “no.” The bill is still stalled in the Senate, however, after Democrats voted against its advancement last week.

The NDAA “includes a provision to merge parts of our military with the [Israeli military],” Ocasio-Cortez said in a post on social media on Tuesday. “This [provision] is an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy. Every member of Congress must vote NO.”

The provision, if included in the final bill, would entrench Israel’s enmeshment with the U.S. military, mandating cooperation with regard to technology and intelligence with Israeli forces even when the U.S. gets little in return. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has advocated for the measure as public scrutiny over the U.S.’s monetary military aid to Israel has increased amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Some lawmakers in Congress have waged a bipartisan effort for Section 219 to be stripped from the NDAA. Representatives Ro Khanna (D-California) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) have introduced an amendment to the bill to remove Section 219.

However, these efforts have been quashed by pro-Israel lawmakers, who make up the vast majority of Congress. When it published its list of proposed amendments to the bill this week, the House Rules Committee didn’t even include the Khanna/Massie proposal — barring it from being considered by the full chamber.

In a video posted to social media on Tuesday, Khanna pledged to continue to advocate for the proposal. He said that the lawmakers will now seek to fight against Section 219’s inclusion in the bill during the conference between the House and Senate, during which the two chambers reconcile differences in their versions of the legislation.

“It’s shocking that this even has to be explained. It’s about American sovereignty,” Khanna said. “We do not even have the chance to vote in the House to stop Israel and the United States from co-producing weapons.”

Last week, the House voted overwhelmingly to kill another Massie amendment to strip a State Department funding bill of $3.3 billion in military assistance to Israel. However, the measure did garner 103 votes from Democrats, marking a shift within the caucus.

Ahead of the House vote on Wednesday, progressive lawmakers vowed to vote against the NDAA due to its inclusion of Section 219.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) said the provision is an “outrageous threat to our country’s security and autonomy.”

“Americans want no part in Netanyahu’s genocidal regime. Congress cannot continue to bankroll Israel’s campaign of terror,” she went on.

“Despite Americans demanding an end to genocide, this bill deeply merges the U.S. and Israeli militaries, fuels Trump’s immoral war on Iran, and enriches billionaire arms dealers,” wrote Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan). “Hell no.”

In December 2023, former State Department official, Josh Paul told CNN anchor, Christiane Amanpour that during his tenure in the foreign service, he learned of the rape of a 13-year old boy by Israeli officers while in captivity. In response to U.S. inquiries, the Israeli Government designated the Defense for Children International, the Palestinian organization that documented the abuse, a terrorist organization.

Since then, multiple Palestinian testimonies have emerged, enough to fill the pages of reports by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Among the most harrowing incidents was a leaked video of five Israeli officers gang raping a Palestinian detainee in Sde Teiman prison. An Israeli court not only acquitted the officers, but Israeli society celebrated them as heroes and protested their trial in infamous “right-to-rape” rallies. Still, when American journalist Nicholas Kristof published his opinion essay bemoaning impunity for the systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli captivity in The New York Times, he insisted that there was “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” (The Israeli government threatened to sue the paper of record for blood libel nonetheless.)

While Kristof, the UN, and human rights organizations are right to scrutinize the lack of concern and accountability for the sexual abuse of Palestinians, they have rarely asked how sexualized violence has functioned within Israel’s wider system of conquest, occupation and domination.

On June 30, 2026, the Palestinian Feminist Collective released a report that helps rectify that elision with meticulous research and painstaking documentation.  A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence against Palestinians lays out a decades-long pattern of Israeli sexual aggression against Palestinian children, women, and men.  Harrowing as the 200-page report is, it is necessary reading for anyone concerned with human rights and gender justice. The report’s historic sweep, from the early days of the Zionist militia attacks on terrorized Palestinians, to the present day sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons, should lay to rest any attempt to rationalize the current horrors as a response to the alleged rapes by Hamas militants of Israeli citizens or worse, an issue of a few rogue soldiers. Instead, the PFC report makes clear that such violence advances the genocide of the Palestinian people.

The report revisits a 1949 case, revealed in Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s own diary, in which he describes how a platoon of Israeli soldiers kidnapped a young Bedouin girl, “in her mid-teens.” When their commanding officer gave them the choice between using her as kitchen staff or a sex slave, the Israeli officers opted for the latter. They cut her hair and washed it with kerosene, then gang raped her so violently that on the next morning the officer in charge, Second Lieutenant Moshe, “saw fit to remove her from the world.”

Gendered violence is an inherent tool of settler colonialism and is not unique to Israel. Here in the United States, another settler colonial state, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement has highlighted the impunity surrounding the sexual assault of indigenous women on reservations where overlapping US and native criminal jurisdictions have made indigenous women particularly vulnerable to sexual assault. That it remains a significantly under-resourced and unaddressed crisis is not an accident.

Similarly, Zionist ideology, as a nation-making enterprise, necessitates the dispossession of Palestinian land and, ultimately, Palestinian elimination through juridical negation — denying their right to self determination, forced removal, containment, and/or destruction.  Sexual violence is central to that effort as it both advances ethnic cleansing ambitions and shatters the social cohesion of those Palestinians who remain.

Israeli historian Benny Morris, who bemoans the fact that the 1948 Nakba did not go far enough in ethnically cleansing Palestine, noted many reported instances of rape dating to the founding of the Zionist state. He observed that “because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.” The sexual violence, like other forms of violence enacted throughout and since the Nakba, aimed  to terrorize Palestinians and compel them to leave their towns and villages in search of safety.  Official records show that the highest-ranking Israeli officials were fully aware of these abuses. The PFC report traces this history from before the establishment of Israel, into the present and intensified genocide in Gaza, to illustrate how Israel has always relied on sexual violence to advance its colonial plans. In it, we learn about the rape of civilians during the 1948 Nakba, the sexual torture of innocent prisoners in administrative detention during and in the aftermath of the 1967 War, and the rape of grassroots organizers during the Intifada, all the way to 2023–that is, before the October 7, 2023. The report also provides an analysis of the unfounded mass rape accusations against Hamas militants to demonstrate how such narratives work to further racialize Palestinian society as uncivilized and unworthy of life. 

From being used as a method to expel Palestinians from their land in 1948 to the use of gendered sexualized violence to torture Palestinian detainees and prisoners in the wake of the 1967 War, and beyond, the report shows that while sexualized violence has changed frequency and form, it has remained a feature of settler-colonial displacement and oppression.

The United States cannot treat this as someone else’s crime. US officials have been told about these abuses. US weapons and diplomatic support continue to shield the system in which they occur. Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.

A few weeks ago, we argued the Trump administration was seeking to invent new ways to punish Americans. The idea was that the authoritarian impulses of the MAGA-run government will need to dial up the cruelty in order to sow chaos and pave the way for a broader assault on democracy.

Well, this week a rule was issued by Medicare and Medicaid services that shows just how proficient the Trump administration is at inflicting pain. And the consequences for poor, seriously ill Americans could be devastating.

Before we explain the rule, it’s worth contemplating the often destructive role healthcare — both the lack of it and exorbitant costs associated with it — play in the lives of working-class Americans.

Poll after poll shows that working people rank anxiety over healthcare costs at the top of the list of high-priority concerns. Unpaid medical bills are the most likely cause of personal bankruptcy in the US. Unlike any other wealthy nation on earth, when Americans lose their jobs, they often lose access to a doctor as well.

The US healthcare system is already inherently extractive — making it even more prohibitively expensive means more people will suffer with diseases that can be cured and die from afflictions that would otherwise be treatable. All of this makes the working class vulnerable and likewise incapable of asserting their right to be healthy.

And that’s where the new rule comes in.

The government agency that administers Medicaid has created a new criterion, ‘medically frail,’ which must be met to qualify for the program without working — even if you only have weeks to live. It didn’t exist prior to the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill. 

Before that landmark legislation was signed into law, Medicaid was primarily a means-tested program, accessible to those with low enough incomes to qualify. But the new rule means even if you have pancreatic cancer, HIV, or Parkinson’s, you will have to meet work requirements to maintain eligibility, or prove you are too sick to comply. Your doctor’s opinion won’t matter. It will be up to the bureaucrats.

Essentially, this amounts to navigating a process fashioned explicitly to kick people off the program. That means filling out forms and filing papers and hoping someone sitting at a desk determines you comply with a definition critics say is vaguely written and open to interpretation.

This is all part of a scheme hatched during the passage of the massively destructive Big Beautiful Bill last year. Trump and his MAGA cohorts wanted to give a trillion-dollar tax break to the top one percent. But the cuts were projected to add trillions to an already historically high federal debt.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects the additional work rules will lead to 11.8 million people dropping Medicaid over the next decade — 7 million of whom they project will not find insurance elsewhere.

So, to conjure a so-called “pay for,” Republicans turned to Medicaid, the critical program that provides healthcare to the poorest Americans.

Simply slashing funding was politically unpalatable, even for the party best known for trying to dismantle Obamacare multiple times without providing a viable alternative. So Republicans came up with a workaround: make it more difficult to qualify.

In practice, that translated into the aforementioned new work requirements.

The medical frailty rule shows, in part, how this overarching plan will lead to fewer beneficiaries: create a complicated bureaucracy difficult to navigate, then cut people who can’t comply.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects the additional work rules will lead to 11.8 million people dropping Medicaid over the next decade — 7 million of whom they project will not find insurance elsewhere.

And it won’t be millions of idle young men playing video games and refusing to work who are affected by the new rules, as House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested. Instead, as the CBO concludes, the burdensome paperwork and subjective standards will lead to most people simply dropping out, whether they qualify or not.

Democrats are pushing back hard against the regulation. In a letter to the Health and Human Services secretary, a group of Connecticut representatives argued that the rule exceeded the intent of the law.

“The overwhelming impact of this rule is that eligible citizens will be denied Medicaid coverage, states will expend unacceptable resources processing complex paperwork, safety-net providers will be further burdened, and population health will decline,” wrote Democratic Reps. John Larson, Joe Courtney, Rosa DeLauro, Jim Himes, and Jahana Hayes.

On the House floor, Courtney said vague standards and arbitrary rules would create confusion for critically ill people without care.

“The hope was that a medical diagnosis for cancer or HIV or other serious chronic conditions would qualify for protection. Instead the rule makes clear that a cancer diagnosis will not automatically qualify for an exception. Instead the patient will have to document that the disease actually impairs their ability to work,” he said.

“This rule will create chaos and dramatically increase the number of desperately ill people who will lose their coverage.”

We reached out to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that administers both programs. They have yet to respond.

In the meantime, if you’re skeptical that work requirements are mostly aimed at reducing the number of people on Medicaid, consider what’s happening with the federal government’s primary program for distributing food aid to low-income families.

The bureaucratic demands for SNAP are so extreme that some beneficiaries have been asked to provide documentation of money obtained from panhandling.

Known as SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, it’s been a frequent target for Republicans, who argue it’s rife with fraud and abuse. Those claims are exaggerated or unfounded — but, again, the Big Beautiful Bill imposed work requirements, and the consequences have been catastrophic.

A recent New York Times article reported that since the new paperwork requirements for SNAP were instituted in Arizona, nearly 440,000 recipients have lost assistance. The piece recounts how the bureaucratic demands are so extreme that some beneficiaries have been asked to provide documentation of money obtained from panhandling.

If this is what people receiving SNAP benefits have been subjected to, imagine what’s going to happen to people who will need to navigate the new Medicare requirements while struggling with a debilitating or terminal illness.

The point is that the same burdensome processes are combining to leave some of the poorest, sickest Americans facing death without care. That’s cruelty with a capital C. The frightening part is that it seems this administration is just getting started.

The State Department has released a report that labels Cuba as the “ideological capital” of left-wing politics in a document seemingly imitating Cold War politics published amid the Trump administration’s fascistic crackdown on the left.

The 99-page report is entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” It argues that, since the rise of Fidel Castro and left-wing revolutionary thought in the Caribbean country in the 1950s and ‘60s, the country’s brand of left-wing politics “now enjoys something approaching ideological hegemony both within and beyond the West.” Though Cuba itself is a “failed state,” the report says, its political project has still spread to the point of threatening “Western civilization itself.”

The ultimate goal for the small island state is “conquering the neighboring United States,” the report asserts. “Since 1959, Cuba has been — and without fundamental, radical reforms, will always be — less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation, focused around its existential revolution against the United States,” the report says.

In reality, the report comes as the U.S. is seemingly preparing for an invasion of or assault on Cuba. For months, President Donald Trump has threatened that Cuba is “next” on the U.S. military’s hitlist. And CBS reported last week that Pentagon officials have been preparing a “range of options” including an air assault of the country — which is already on the brink after the Trump administration’s months-long total oil blockade has caused wave after wave of nationwide blackouts.

Indeed, the report hits on two of the Trump administration’s goals: the vilification of Cuba ahead of potential military action against the country, as well as the creation of a myth of an organized and violent left that is prepared to destroy the U.S., as administration officials kickstarted last week.

The sprawling document names numerous American left-wing groups, some of which have not been active or prominent in decades, as “front groups and fellow travelers” of Cuba.

This includes groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, and Cuba solidarity groups The Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples and the National Network on Cuba. The document also ties racial solidarity movements with Cuba, flimsily insinuating that Cuba is the driving force behind much of the Black Lives Matter movement and pro-immigrant, anti-ICE movements.

The report cites “examples” that are often just symbolic declarations of support for the Cuban people, taking them to improbable logical extremes.

DSA, for instance, isn’t under any control of the Cuban government, the report says. Yet, it is still a major part of the “Cuban influence operation,” the State Department claims, solely because its members espouse left-wing ideals and have expressed solidarity with the population of Cuba amid the U.S.’s sanctions regime on the country.

State Department officials also call out individual Americans who have expressed opposition to the U.S.’s policies on Cuba or otherwise participated in the Cuba solidarity movement, including prominent figures like Hasan Piker, Zohran Mamdani, Chris Smalls, Isra Hirsi, and Amy Goodman.

The report does not discuss the U.S.’s decades of meddling and suppression of Cuba’s government. In that context, the report only brings up left-wing groups’ condemnation of the failed Bay of Pigs operation and the sanctions regime as supposed proof that they are controlled by Cuba — rather than motivated by credible human rights concerns such as those raised by the United Nations.

The document is reminiscent of Cold War-era assessments and propaganda against the Soviet Union and other countries vilified by the U.S. at the time, even quoting Cold War-era reports on the supposed threat of “Communist subversion” — a key difference being that the Soviet Union was actually taking substantial action to back political movements in other countries.

At the time, President Harry S. Truman reoriented U.S. foreign policy toward combating the growing influence of the Soviet Union and China, and spoke of the need for the U.S. to combat such “aggression.” This spiraled into decades of proxy wars ranging across the world, from Cuba to Afghanistan to Korea to Vietnam, as well as the McCarthyist campaign to silence and imprison left-wing dissidents at home.

When activists in Ireland heard that Peter Thiel’s secret club, Dialog, was planning to meet in the Irish countryside, they launched a campaign to stop it. They succeeded. 

Peter Thiel is a Silicon Valley tech financier and the founder of the companies PayPal and Palantir who donated lavishly to Trump’s 2016 presidential run. In 2022, he financially backed 16 far-right congressional candidates. Thiel’s company Palantir has come under fire for supporting both the genocide in Gaza and the immigration crackdown in the United States.

Leaks about Dialog dropped in June, revealing information about Thiel’s 20-year-old elitist invitation-only organization and its planned Irish conference in August. Meeting topics included World War III, battlefield technologies, building a cult, and improving your sex life.

The meeting was to be held in the five-star Powerscourt Hotel in County Wicklow, Ireland. Several grassroots Irish groups — including Your Tech, Their Deaths and North Wicklow Against Genocide — created #DropDialog, a campaign to get the conference cancelled. They planned several protests at the Powerscourt Estate. They didn’t have to. News broke on July 3 that the event had been cancelled.

“Media reports say the genociders’ event, the Dialog conference, will not be hosted at Powerscourt Hotel,” they wrote, in a statement on the #DropDialog website. This is a victory for all people of conscience who mobilised against it and shows that direct action works! We issue a warning to any other hotel or venue on the island of Ireland who may consider hosting these individuals. Genociders, warmongers and technofascists are not welcome in Ireland. Power to the people!”

Jude Farrell is a founder of the group Your Tech, Their Deaths. She is a former Irish Big Tech worker, a human rights activist, and a mom. She’s been involved in the pro-Palestinian movement in Ireland. 

“Everything the Irish people do to support Palestine is really to help end imperialism, colonialism, oppression for everybody,” she says. 

Michael Fox spoke with Jude on July 8, as part of the Battle for Free Speech podcast. 

When they spoke, Jude had just left a protest in Dublin against the tech company Snyk Limited. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

---

Michael Fox: Tell me about this protest that you just left. Where were you just now?

Jude Farrell: Okay, so AIB [Allied Irish Banks] which is one of the largest banks in Ireland, are about to sign a contract with a tech firm called Snyk. Now, Snyk is set up by three Israeli soldiers. Not just your standard Israeli soldier, but they’re actually former soldiers from unit 8200, which is the most nefarious evil unit in the Israeli occupying army. So this information was shared with us by an employee [of AIB] about seven weeks ago, and we have been protesting since then. And we are making headway. Right now, AIB have paused the contract, but they are refusing to put in writing or make a public statement saying that they will not sign this contract with Snyk. We just need to push in a similar way that we kicked out Dialog from the Powerscourt Hotel in Wicklow last week. 

I don’t know if you know this, Mike, but the word “boycott” was actually coined in Ireland. Boycott was an individual, an Irish person, and that person actually got boycotted. So the Irish people know how to come together, use our voices, use our boycott power, close their AIB accounts, move elsewhere to non-complicit banks, and it will happen.

Michael Fox: Wow, that’s incredible. And what a great piece of history to tie it all together. What Big Tech company did you work for?

Jude Farrell: I worked for Google. I worked for Google at a time when… I don’t think they were as evil as they are now. And I worked for Google at a time when they did not use their technology for warfare or for governments. I really enjoyed my time at Google. And I am personally heartbroken at the path that they have taken, and I fully support the boycott of Google in order to support the Palestinian people.

Michael Fox: Can you tell me a little bit about your organization, Your Tech, Their Deaths?

Jude Farrell: I set up this group only about a year ago from a sense of frustration that there wasn’t enough information out there about Big Tech’s role in the genocide in Palestine, and in particular the Big Tech EU bases in Ireland. I set it up to educate people, but also to start a people-led boycott group to move people away from using the likes of Gmail, move them towards Proton. We focus on US big tech. We focus on Israeli tech. We focus on Zionist technology. And we are making an impact. 

We had heavy involvement in Drop Dialog last week. We are working really hard to get AIB Bank to drop their use of Israeli technology. It’s a grassroots led initiative, but it’s very much brick-by-brick. A small, committed group of people can impact change. And that is in Irish blood. That is in our DNA. We saw the Dunnes Stores workers, 21-year-old Mary Manning, refusing to sell a South African grapefruit. And to be honest, we’re taking the same approach with Israeli tech in Irish organizations, in Irish semi-state bodies. 

We do not want any complicit tech in Ireland, and Your Tech, Their Deaths will not stop until that’s ended.

Michael Fox: Are all of the Big Tech firms in Ireland? Is Ireland the main spot where they’re located in Europe at this point?

Jude Farrell: Yes. And they’re only here to take advantage of our friendly tax rates. It’s absolutely galling, the amount that are here, and it is galling that the Irish government continues to welcome them.

We have Chat GPT here, Open AI. We have Anthropic. The Irish government welcomed Anthropic last year with open arms. Enterprise Ireland helped facilitate them with grants and publicity. And it’s sickening to think that an organization like Anthropic can come in here, be given tax breaks, being given great publicity, and yet go on to commit the murder of over 160 schoolgirls in Minab, in Iran, but the Irish government says, “Welcome, Anthropic.”

Michael Fox: Talk to me about Dialog and this conference. How did you all hear about it? How did you shut it down? And congratulations.

Jude Farrell: Thank you. It was a huge collaborative effort. And it wasn’t just Your Tech, Their Death. There was great involvement from North Wicklow Against Genocide because this event was actually going to take place in County Wicklow in Ireland. So that group took a huge lead on it. And then there were just general Irish people that popped up, you know, ad hoc, and got involved where they could.

Michael Fox: Why were you so concerned about Dialog? What is it about Peter Thiel and this organization that should be terrifying for everybody?

Jude Farrell: I think it’s not just Peter Thiel, it’s not just Palantir, but it is the audacity and arrogance of individuals like Thiel that they think that they would be welcome in any country and come in and discuss topics such as how to build a cult and how to get through World War III, when we know that they are entirely focused on their own power and privilege. They are not using technology or data for the good of humankind. They’re only using it to fill their own coffers, and they use it specifically to oppress and control people. 

So Palantir, for example, they are now getting pushback from the UK government. So people are very slowly starting to understand the consequence of giving large nefarious organizations like Palantir access and control of individuals’ data. That data is being used to suppress, to surveil, to oppress people. It’s being used for profiteering and warmongering.

We know that they are entirely focused on their own power and privilege. They are not using technology or data for the good of humankind.

Michael Fox: What is it about Big Tech that people need to understand? And, in particular, [about] the fact that they’re moving into so many different places. They’re pushing into Ireland, they’re pushing into Europe. These are US companies, or companies, like you just said, from Israel or other places. What is it about Big Tech, and what they’re doing, that people need to stand up against and that’s so concerning?

Jude Farrell: I don’t know if America realizes how ancient the history in Ireland is with Big Tech. Google opened their first data center in Ireland before they even opened their first office here. Then they opened their EU office here. They opened it here to take advantage of our very friendly tax rates. And the thing that I really want people to understand, and I didn’t understand this myself, going back to my time working in Google in particular, is that nothing is free, Mike.

If you are being offered a tech product for free, like Gmail, like Google Maps, you have to understand that it is not free. They are taking your data. They are selling your data to third parties. They are using that data, commodifying that data, and that data is then going to come back and basically be utilized against you. So, with Big Tech in Ireland, I want people to understand that their privacy, and their security, and their ownership of their data is absolutely pivotal to their safety in the future and the safety of the next generation, as well. And I don’t think we understand that in Ireland.

And that is largely thanks to the role of the Irish government — multiple Irish governments now — acting almost as [confiders] for  agents for, unfortunately, Mike, US imperialist interests. So having Google in Ireland, or Amazon, or X, formerly Twitter, all of these large American companies, the Irish public are constantly told how lucky we are to have these companies here. We’re told how much money they’re bringing into our economy, when the reality is they are actually extracting from the Irish people, from the Irish land, all of our resources — whether it is extracting our intellect, whether it is extracting our renewable energies, they benefit more from us than we do from them. But this would be a huge lens shift for the Irish people to understand. 

But I do think that they’re starting to get it, unfortunately, because of the genocide in Palestine. So we know, for example, that Microsoft have actually held illegally surveilled Palestinian people’s data in data centers on Irish land. And that data then has been used to blackmail Palestinians, surveil, track, murder them. And then you take that even a year forward, and data like that, phone call data, that’’s now actually being used to turn into the latest LLM AI models and build voice recognition, voice profiles, to further suppress Palestinians.

But we know it will not stop in the Palestinian laboratory; this is also then being used back in the United States. It’s being used by ICE to oppress migrants and American citizens and children in the United States. So really I just want people to understand that with Big Tech nothing is free. Your privacy and your data is everything. And no, Big Tech in Ireland are not benefiting us.

Michael Fox: My podcast is very much about free speech, and looking at the different definitions of free speech and how the United States, and particularly these Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley, are trying to push this idea of absolutist free speech, even though it’s not actually absolute, but “absolutist,” for people to be able to do whatever they want to, or say whatever they want online — hate speech, whatever else. 

First off, what is your definition of free speech? And are you concerned that these Big Tech companies are trying to push their vision for the world elsewhere, as well as fueling disinformation, fueling hate speech, etc.?

Jude Farrell: Your future — America’s future — is intrinsically tied with Ireland’s future. So if you fuck shit up, you fuck it up for everybody.

And it’s the same with the United Kingdom. It’s the same with America. It’s the same with Germany. You cannot view Big Tech or freedom of speech in isolation. It would be the biggest and the most naive error for any of us to take that approach. What happens in imperialist countries like the United States trickles down to us here in Ireland. 

I’m extremely worried about free speech. But you asked me what my personal definition of free speech was. And I suppose, for me, free speech should be being able to say anything so long as it does not harm an individual. So yeah, you can have your opinions. You can even have what could be considered divisive opinions. But as long as you’re not inciting hate yourself, or inciting others to hate, then I support free speech. Of course I do. I’m Irish. We are an oppressed people still. We have six of our counties still occupied by a foreign entity. We lost our language. It was illegal to speak, to learn Irish. And that impact we see generations later, and we’re only starting to understand the impact. It’s like we’ve got a hangover from our own oppression — the silencing of our religion, the silencing of our language, of our culture.

So yeah, free speech is incredibly important in Ireland.

We’re told how much money they’re bringing into our economy, when the reality is they are actually extracting from the Irish people, from the Irish land, all of our resources — whether it is extracting our intellect, whether it is extracting our renewable energies, they benefit more from us than we do from them.

Michael Fox: Were you following Elon Musk’s role in the Belfast riots that happened recently? And can you talk to this a little bit? Because I think this is really important in terms of understanding how the social media platforms and these kind of far-right billionaire — trillionaire — activists are fueling this kind of hatred.

Jude Farrell: I didn’t follow it in depth. And even though I’m Irish, I do not presume myself to be an expert on what it is like to grow up and live in the occupied six. So I want to be really respectful of giving my opinion here. But in the social media platforms and media conglomerates in general, promoting dangerous ideologies in order to push their own ideologies and their own aims to control and suppress, it’s extremely worrying. With the Belfast riots, but also with the influence of the far right in Ireland in particular, I would say two things.

I would say that the far right is actually smaller than they even think they are. I think they’re like one of those yappy little dogs. They don’t have much power or control in Ireland yet, thankfully.

I’ll also say that I think they are purposely targeting a population on the island of Ireland, in general, that are really suffering thanks to decades worth of poor decisions from different Irish governments. There is a very big issue in Ireland with a cost of living crisis, with public transport, infrastructure, with healthcare, with education. If you look on paper at Ireland, we should be rich as fuck. And yet we are not. For all this money the imperialist asses are throwing in here, Ireland is really, really struggling.

But these social media channels, these media conglomerates, figures like Elon Musk, etc., it is very easy to put the blame on immigrants. And immigrants are not the problem. The problem is actually with allowing imperialist people to take our resources here. 

And it’s very easy for social media to target immigrants, but you can’t be Irish and be racist.

We are a nation that is built on immigration. We had to leave Ireland due to our own genocide, thanks to the British, through our own man-made famine, thanks to the British, and we went to the places like America and Australia and built those countries. You cannot be Irish and be racist. 

Fear is a very powerful thing, a powerful tool to use on social media, and Irish people are struggling. Our utility bills, our energy bills, are the highest in the EU. They’re the highest in Europe. But this is thanks to the Irish government allowing US companies to come in and build data centers here when our grid is not even capable of powering these data centers, giving US tech firms reduced energy contracts, whilst hiking energy bills for the average Irish person.

So that’s who we should be looking at. We should be looking outwards, not inwards.

Michael Fox: If you were going to speak to people within the United States who don’t necessarily understand the power these Big Tech firms have abroad, what would you tell them? Are you concerned about the impact that these firms and the spread of their agenda may be having in Ireland and in other countries all around the world?

Jude Farrell: I think I actually have some hope for Ireland around this. And I think I have hope because of generations that are younger than me. If I think back to how younger generations in America responded to TikTok being bought out by Larry Ellison, and the number of TikTok users dropping pretty sharply… I think we’re seeing similar in Ireland. So it’s not enough yet, but there is an awareness, particularly amongst younger people in Ireland, that the information that you get online from TikTok, from Google, from YouTube, from Meta, isn’t necessarily factual and isn’t necessarily well intended.

So I do have hope that people are seeing that change. I just think we need to push more within Ireland in taking the shine off these big American companies. When they came to us in the early 2000s, it was hugely exciting because Ireland has always been like the poor cousins compared to the United States or the United Kingdom. And I think we felt lucky that Google or Amazon or Twitter picked us, and I think that those companies took advantage of our low self-esteem, the fact that we haven’t gotten over our own genocide and occupation.

But there is definitely a change since… I’m sorry to bring it back again to Palestine, but there is a change since Oct. 7. Because we’re not seeing it on our own media. 

So if you think in America that what you see on, like on TV as opposed to independent journalism, it’s no different here. RTE, our national broadcaster, is heavily complicit in suppressing what has been occurring in Palestine, the language that they use to talk about the genocide. I don’t know how many years it took them to even use the “G” word, but that is no different here. But there is a movement towards independent journalism in Ireland that is reassuring. So things are bad, but I think there’s hope.

Michael Fox: Ireland is a place where you have long seen progressive organizing and people standing up. Are you concerned for the far-right wave around the world and the narratives being pushed by the right and these tech firms, and what they could mean for Ireland? Or do you think that the Irish will continue to stand up and hold out?

Jude Farrell: The far right in Ireland isn’t as big as the far right actually think that they are. And that is partly because there is a history within the Irish people, because of our own occupation in standing up for the underdog, in standing up for what is right and being very vocal when we see oppression of any kind.

Irish people, in general, are not racist. Racism, yes, can occur everywhere, and unfortunately it does occur in Ireland, but, overall, Irish people are incredibly welcoming of all nations because we’’re a nation of immigrants ourselves.

And, I think, if you look back to the fuel protests in Ireland that happened a couple of months ago… when those first occurred, there was a big push on social media from some far-right figures in Ireland. And they were trying to shift all the blame onto immigrants and certain races and refugees. The reality is the far right were silenced pretty quickly. I actually attended some of the fuel protests as a legal observer for the ICCL [Irish Council for Civil Liberties], which is a UN-recognized role where we attend protests to observe how the police in Ireland interact with protesters.

So I got to actually watch the few fuel protests from a neutral point of view, rather than being an activist. And what I actually saw was some key “far-right figures,” and I’m using inverted commas here, you know, rock up to O’Connell Street, our central street in Dublin.

And they had a couple of fangirls and fanboys around them. But, in general, they weren’t welcome. They weren’t given a huge amount of air time, because the fuel protests were about the Irish people.

And you cannot be racist and Irish. 

The fuel protests were about highlighting the terrible decisions that multiple Irish governments have made that continuously impact the standard of living of Irish people. And Irish people being any people of any color or any creed that live on the island of Ireland.

So while the far right, yes, was trying to push their own agenda around the fuel protests, the reality was it was ordinary men and women. It was farmers. It was hauliers. It was mums, dads, kids. It was the ordinary Irish people that came out and shut the country down. And I was so goddamn proud to be Irish during those fuel protests. And it terrified the government. And I’m really glad, because the government need to listen to the Irish people. And the problem is government policies. The problem is not immigrants.

Michael Fox: Why is Big Tech so concerning for you, Jude?

Jude Farrell: I’m not anti-technology. I am anti how Big Tech is currently being used to profit from war or to oppress people. If technology — in particular AI — could be used for good, if it could be used for science, if it could used be used for medical research, then I would be completely behind it. 

The challenge is the very tiny group of people that are funding and lobbying and powering AI currently, they’re just doing it to keep themselves in billionaire status, to move themselves to trillionaire status. And they’re just going to continue to grow the gap between us and them and just further oppress people, no matter what color your skin is, where you live, what your religion is.

If that type of Big Tech is not stopped, it is coming for us all.

Michael Fox: Do you think that that technology should be democratized? Do you believe that there should be a way for it to be shared equally and not be just for profit, or the insane amount of profits that we’re seeing now?

Jude Farrell: Yeah, absolutely. And I do think that governments, in particular, can make a move away from using Big Tech at a government level to open source [software]. If we have to have data centers, why can’t they be data centers for the people? AI has the potential to move humankind forward massively in a positive manner, but it does have to be for the people, by the people.

If you look at France, for example, their government has been actively working for, I think, the last 12 to 18 months on moving away from Microsoft and moving towards open source. And that’s the type of thing that Ireland needs to do. 

The Irish government is so firmly embedded with US imperialist tech that I don’t think they’d even know where to start, which is why the people in Ireland are driving change. It’s not the government. The government will consistently vote against, block, any type of movement towards a democratic, non-oppressive way of being. Whereas the Irish people like me and other members of Your Tech, Their Deaths, we’re focused on highlighting the fact that and Irish government, state and and semi-state bodies are using technologies like Checkpoint, which I know is huge in the US as well, but that wasn’t even well known in Ireland until last year. But we are using Israeli ex-IOF technology in our banking system, in our postal system, in our electricity grid, in our hospitals.

And there is no conversation about this at government level. All that push is coming from the people. And it must continue from the people, because we have to move away from complicit tech, whether it is US big tech, whether it is Zionist tech, whether it is Israeli tech. And we need to build more of our own tech — Irish tech. We need to build European tech. We need to move to open source and not have this monopoly with US big tech.

Michael Fox: Talk to me about Palestine, what these tech companies are doing there.

Jude Farrell: What we are seeing with Big Tech companies in Ireland, like Google, like Meta, like X, like TikTok, is the purposeful suppression of brown-skinned voices — in particular Palestinian voices, or individuals that are supporting the Palestinian people. We have seen data and multiple reports saying that Meta, in particular, are removing pro-Palestine content from Facebook, from WhatsApp, from other platforms, specifically at the behest of the Israeli government.

We actually have Hasbara ads paid for by the Israeli government and being funneled through Google Ireland, the EU headquarters here. To give two examples on that: We saw ads going through and the Google Ireland office where the Israeli government were paying YouTubers and placing Google ads and denying the famine that was occurring in Palestine. When we could see men, women, children, and babies dying of starvation in front of us, there were paid Google ads saying that these claims were false. More recently, we have seen the same type of ads coming out of Google — Google Ireland in Dublin — around the recent UN report showing that the Israeli occupying army were specifically targeting children, were specifically sniping children and babies. And immediately after that, we saw more Hasbara adverts coming out. 

So when you typed in “UN report on children being targeted by Israel” the first ad that came up was a paid ad thanks to Google and the Israeli government saying that the UN is biased towards Israel.

Those ads are being funneled through Ireland, even if they’re booked in a different location. I personally don’t believe they are being booked elsewhere, but even if they are booked elsewhere, they go through the books here so that Google can take advantage of our low corporate tax rate.

Michael Fox: Is there anything else to add that you think is important?

Jude Farrell: So fucking much, Mike.

I want to touch on something that I don’t think Irish people, and definitely American people, aren’t going to understand about who is operating in these large tech companies in the US and in Ireland at the trust and safety level.

These people tend to be Zionists. They tend to be ex-IOF soldiers. And they are using their positions of power in companies like Google, like Meta, like TikTok, like X to actually influence and shape what is being put out by those platforms. And they do this by flagging anything that is pro-Palestine, that is pro-Islam, and flagging these videos or comments as being antisemitic.

This is an absolute abuse of power. And what terrifies me is that we’ve seen this happening in other countries as well, like the UK, like Australia. We’ve seen the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition of antisemitism come into Australia. The Australian people trying to push back against that definition for the longest time, and, unfortunately, it came through. And the reality is that Zionism is not a religion. Zionism is a supremacist, occupying, colonizing ideology that is as dangerous and as evil as Nazism.

And it breaks my heart to see our Jewish community in Ireland, or in other countries, be in any way associated with Zionism, because Judaism is not Zionism. Yet this small, elitist, powerful, privileged group of people, particularly via Big Tech trust and safety, are using their influence to lobby tech companies, to lobby governments, to change the definition of what antisemitism is, and to actually change it to anti-Zionism.

Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and I think that is hugely concerning, and Americans and Irish people need to understand that.

We’ve seen the genocide in Palestine head into its third year now, and everybody watching it start said if we do not stop it in Palestine it is just going to continue, and it is going to spread, because evil crosses oceans. 

I don’t think people know this, but Ireland is Israel’s second biggest trading partner. It goes USA, Ireland, China. And this trade is mainly in technology. This trade is nearly entirely thanks to Intel. So you’re talking about just over, I think, 3 billion euros in exports in electronic circuits and chips. So it’s really heartbreaking to hear people say Ireland is doing such a great job of supporting Palestine. Yes, the Irish people support Palestine. But no, the Irish government does not support Palestine. The Irish government spent eight years obfuscating and silencing and in the end effectively shutting down the Occupy Territories Bill. They voted on it yesterday [July 7] to put it forward immediately with them excluding services. 

So we are basically going to ban, I think, around 200,000 worth of Jaffa oranges. I’m oversimplifying things a little bit there, but that’s essentially what we’re doing. It’s insulting. Whereas we could enact sweeping sanctions against the terror state that is Israel. And that is actually what we are meant to do under the Geneva Convention. Every state is meant to do their utmost to prevent genocide. 

Well, we are two and a half years into a genocide and we are still Israel’’s second largest trading partner, so, no, do not commend Ireland. Don’t even commend the Irish people. Yes, we are doing something, but we need to do more. What we are doing is not good enough. We are not angry enough. We are not disruptive enough. We are not willing to be as uncomfortable as we need to be, in order to actually effect change. The Irish people need to do more and the Irish government need to pull their fucking finger out.

As wildfires raged across Canada on Thursday, sending dangerous smoke across the border into major US cities, climate advocates called for accountability for the fossil fuel industry, which knew for decades that its products were largely responsible for the climate crisis, yet chose to push climate denial instead.

While fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of Canada’s boreal forests, the heating of the atmosphere due to the burning of oil, gas, and coal has made fires more frequent and extreme.

“We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil,” the youth-led Sunrise Movement wrote on social media in response to the fires.

We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil. https://t.co/nHhbDXB06X

— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) July 16, 2026

Climate Defiance agreed, posting, “Nuremberg-style trials are in order for the fossil fuel executives who knew what they were doing to our children’s futures and did anyway.”

There were 884 fires burning in Canada on Thursday, with 124 out of control, according to the country’s national wildland fire summary. Over 100 fires were raging in Ontario alone, where they have forced the evacuation of at least 15 rural communities; destroyed homes in the Indigenous community of Collins First Nation, or Namaygoosisagagun; and polluted the skies over parts of the upper Midwest and Northeastern US.

As of Thursday evening Eastern time, the four cities with the worst air quality in the world were Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Toronto, according to IQAir.

People have shared dramatic footage of the fires on social media. One video shows a train moving through a blaze near Armstrong, Ontario. Thankfully, all crew members were evacuated safely, The Guardian reported.

This is near Armstrong, Ontario.

When will the Canadian National Railway Company make a statement about this incident? pic.twitter.com/6bKJYugeR0

— Sol Mamakwa (@solmamakwa) July 14, 2026

Indigenous photographer Nadya Kwandibens shared images of flames rising over a lake with the words, “”My family hometown, Collins Ontario, is GONE.“

View this post on Instagram

Residents of the community fled the blaze in boats before the flames damaged and destroyed several homes and other structures, according to CBC News.

“Collins has burned to the ground. This is a tragedy and we are grateful that everyone got out safely,” Lise Vaugeois, the provincial representative for the region, said, as The Guardian reported. “Fires are part of a natural cycle, but the extreme temperatures we are experiencing across the county and the growing severity of weather events are indicators of climate change.”

Laura Chasmer, a professor of geography and the environment at the University of Western Ontario, noted that fires in Canada like the ones raging across Ontario have increased since 2015.

“This is associated with some of the extreme climate warming that we’ve been seeing, and the atmospheric drying of the surface,” she told BBC News.

Brandi Morin, a Cree-Iroquois-French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, noted in her Substack that Canada was warming at twice the global average. Despite this, the Canadian government has made progress on three major fossil fuel pipelines this July.

“Every barrel these new pipelines are built to move adds to the exact warming that’s turning our boreal forests into tinder,” Morin wrote.

On the other side of the border, Michigan regulators late Wednesday approved important permits from the controversial Enbridge Line 5 pipeline.

Political leaders and climate advocates responded to the fires and smoke with calls to abandon fossil fuel projects, transition to renewable energy, and hold oil and gas companies accountable for the harms they have caused.

“We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly. The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns,” the Sunrise Movement said.

We have the technology and the policy roadmap to replace fossil fuels with green energy extremely rapidly.

The only thing stopping us is a handful of billionaires getting rich while our world burns. https://t.co/6oqGxoC8m3

— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) July 16, 2026

As smoke drifted over Boston on Wednesday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote on social media: “Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal.”

Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal. https://t.co/pXo5XOOt0q

— Ed Markey (@EdMarkey) July 15, 2026

“Climate change isn’t a tragedy, it’s a crime. The fossil fuel industry are arsonists at a global scale. It’s their pollution that’s fueling these horrific wildfires,” Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, told Common Dreams. “Instead of approving new pipelines, the Canadian government should be holding the industry accountable and using their record profits to help communities on the frontlines of this crisis.”

Cuba is undergoing its biggest economic transformation in decades: private firms are back and small businesses employ a quarter of the workforce. But market reform has brought no political opening.

- 2026/08 / article

The US once supported military coups to keep Latin America under its control. Now, a weaker left and the rise of organised crime are helping the far right assert itself. This suits the White House just fine.

- 2026/08 / article

Mussolini's attack on Ethiopia in 1935 caused more than half a million deaths by the end of the Italian occupation in 1941. Why were the sanctions imposed on Italy only half-heartedly enforced?

- 2026/08 / article

Australians rejected the idea of creating the Indigenous Voice to Parliament advisory body in October 2023. Two years after this stinging defeat, the state of Victoria signed a treaty with its First Peoples.

- 2026/08 / article, 2026/08 australia

While Saudi Arabia is banking on industrial investment and the UAE on logistics infrastructure, Qatar has gone for luxury tourism to consolidate its international position and diversify its economy.

- 2026/08 / article

South Korea's rapid modernisation has brought a need for reassurance often found through shamans and their connection with the spirit world. The practitioners are reaping its economic rewards.

- 2026/08 / article

Before the Nazis came to power, Berlin was the centre of bold campaigns against state control over the body, championing abortion rights, homosexual equality and new understandings of sex and gender.

- 2026/08 / article

Europe's crystal meth trade is changing. In the Czech Republic a long-established cottage industry has given way to industrial-scale ‘kombilabs', as international organised crime groups push into a growing market.

- 2026/08 / article

There used to be no alternative to long queues for the most popular attractions at theme parks. Now, almost anywhere people have to wait, it's possible to skip to the front – for a price.

- 2026/08 / article