Last week, anti-immigrant protests in South Africa turned violent, with looting, destruction of property, and reports of 24 vehicles being burnt as tensions escalated in Johannesburg and Durban. The unrest followed growing anger over a government directive on asylum applications, which the Department of Home Affairs has since withdrawn.
The directive, issued on September 28, instructed Refugee Reception Offices (RROs) to process all asylum applications immediately. Massive queues of foreign nationals subsequently formed at immigration offices, which were met with demonstrations and violence from anti-immigrant groups.
Protests were reported in Soweto township, Johannesburg, and Durban, in KwaZulu-Natal province. Demonstrations in Durban continued for a second day, prompting police to strengthen their presence to contain the unrest. However, tensions remained high in the city and in the country.
On October 9, the director-general of the Department of Home Affairs announced the withdrawal of the directive concerning the intake of asylum applications.
The directive had been introduced following a July 7, 2026 Constitutional Court judgment that mandated that individuals could not be barred from accessing South Africa’s asylum system, even if they entered the country irregularly. According to the department, the September directive intended to guide Refugee Reception Offices in implementing the court’s order.
The department said the directive had been issued as an operational measure without the knowledge or involvement of the Minister of Home Affairs or other political office-bearers. It rejected claims that the measure had been politically motivated.
However, the department acknowledged that implementing the judgment had produced consequences that were not anticipated in the court order. These included overcrowding at Refugee Reception Offices within days of the directive’s introduction, risks to the safety of Home Affairs officials and emerging threats to public order.
The director-general said the department would begin a fresh process to determine a more appropriate and sustainable way of complying with the court order, while reaffirming its commitment to the rule of law and the authority of the judiciary.
Two days before withdrawing the directive, the Department of Home Affairs issued a statement on October 7 warning of what it described as a coordinated disinformation campaign surrounding the Constitutional Court judgment.
The department said false claims had circulated suggesting that the Minister of Home Affairs or political parties had independently decided to suspend certain asylum procedures. It insisted that the operational directive had been issued to implement a binding court judgment.
The department also rejected claims that the ruling granted citizenship to asylum seekers or automatically legalized all foreign nationals living in the country.
It warned that misinformation intended to inflame tensions and incite violence threatens public stability, urging South Africans to verify information before sharing it.
The subsequent withdrawal of the directive, however, does not reverse the Constitutional Court’s judgment. Home Affairs has said it will develop a new operational approach that complies with the ruling while addressing the challenges faced by refugee reception offices.
Last week’s violence is the latest in a wave of anti-immigrant and xenophobic mobilization that has built steadily since the start of the year. Protests broke out across Johannesburg, Durban and Pretoria in April, and anti-immigrant groups, led by the March and March movement, set June 30 as a deadline for undocumented migrants to leave the country.
On that day, police arrested hundreds during nationwide marches, and one person was shot dead in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township as residents looted spaza shops owned by foreign nationals. In the following weeks, protesters in Johannesburg went door to door, seizing foreigners from their homes, with many fleeing for safety.
On Friday, Colombian Culture Minister Paola Holguin defended the removal of more than 30 artworks related to feminist, LGTBI+ or peace themes from the National Museum in Bogota, arguing that those works are an instrument of political indoctrination.
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“The National Museum is one of the most important cultural centers in the country. It is the first institution of its kind in Colombia and one of the oldest in the Americas, whose purpose is to reflect the soul of the Nation.
The National Museum, as part of the State, has the purpose of conserving, restoring, protecting and socializing our culture. Its institutional vocation is not to serve as an instrument of political indoctrination, a focus for the dissemination of biased versions of our history, much less a multiplying medium for the government agenda,” stated the official of the far-right government presided over by Aberlardo de la Espriella.
“The National Museum CANNOT be a space for apologizing for crime or revictimization; it must observe the rights of victims to truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition. The National Museum is a space for all Colombians, which must ensure, among other things, the fundamental rights of children, which are prevalent according to Article 44 of the Constitution, and, therefore, must protect them from access to sensitive material.”
“The museology and curatorship of the different spaces under the Ministry are being evaluated and redesigned to fulfill the mission of safeguarding, researching, conserving and disseminating the cultural, historical and artistic heritage of the Nation, serving as spaces for memory, identity and social transformation,” Holguin concluded.
Las personas LGBTIQ+ no son una ideología que un Gobierno pueda sacar de una pared. Son parte de Colombia, de su historia y de sus luchas por la igualdad.
— Mafe Carrascal Rojas (@MafeCarrascal) October 16, 2026
Retirar piezas del Museo Nacional que cuentan la historia del movimiento LGBTIQ+, del feminismo y de las luchas por la paz… pic.twitter.com/VB0LtEIsWS
Legislator Mafe Carrascal Rojas’ text reads: “LGBTIQ+ people are not an ideology that a government can simply strip from a wall. They are an integral part of Colombia, its history, and its struggles for equality. Removing items from the National Museum that chronicle the history of the LGBTIQ+ movement, feminism, and the pursuit of peace is not a matter to be taken lightly.
Given that the president has announced a “cultural counter-revolution” against what he terms “wokeism,” we have reason to ask whether this is an attempt to render social struggles—and the rights won over decades—invisible. We cannot allow diversity to once again be treated as something that must be hidden.
The history of Colombia does not belong to any single president or ideological movement; it belongs to a diverse, pluralistic nation—a nation where LGBTIQ+ individuals have the right to exist, to live free from discrimination, and to have their histories and memories recognized.
The Culture Ministry and the National Museum must provide an explanation regarding the removal of these items, the criteria applied, and the measures in place to ensure this history is preserved. They will not succeed in erasing LGBTIQ+ people from the history of Colombia. Their lives matter, their struggles matter, and their rights are not up for negotiation.”
On Thursday, digital outlet La Silla Vacia reported that De la Espriella removed posters, photographs and objects from three rooms of the National Museum, related to the history of feminist and LGBTI movements, victims of political violence and the 2016 peace agreement signed between the State and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Among the pieces removed were a gay pride flag belonging to activist Elizabeth Castillo, a poster from the presidential campaign of Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, a Patriotic Union candidate assassinated in 1990, and the ‘Baligrafo,’ a pen made from a bullet with which the peace agreement was signed.
The removal of these works is part of the “Cultural Counterrevolution” announced by President De la Espriella, who ordered Holguin to remove from public spaces representations that he considers “apology for terrorism.”
Among such references are works alluding to Carlos Pizarro, former commander of the M-19 guerrilla and peace signatory assassinated in 1990 during that year’s presidential campaign.
During the administration of Gustavo Petro (2022-2026), Pizarro’s hat was declared Cultural Heritage of the Nation, but this recognition was recently suspended by a judicial decision.
La Silla Vacia noted that the order to remove the pieces came directly from the Culture Ministry and that officials participated in the selection of the elements taken down.
teleSUR/ JF
Source: EFE
Four people, including three children aged five, eight and 11 and a teacher, were killed in a shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, on Thursday, according to preliminary information from authorities. Police shot dead the 16-year-old suspected gunman, Sheila Miller, a spokesperson for the Bend Police Department, said.
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Police were first alerted at around 1 p.m. local time to a person firing shots at a car. Minutes later, emergency services began receiving multiple calls reporting an active shooting at an elementary school in the area.
Authorities initially confirmed several victims but did not provide details about their medical conditions. At least two people were taken to hospitals for emergency treatment, Miller said.
⚡️GOOD SAMARITAN with a ‘LONG GUN’ PERSONALLY KILLS the Oregon elementary school shooter
— RT (@RT_com) October 16, 2026
‘The suspect had been shot by a COMMUNITY MEMBER who had seen the suspect enter the school, pursued him into the school, and engaged him’ https://t.co/cIBxSHPop9 pic.twitter.com/xadJ6NsXEL
Silver Rail Elementary School was closed, and authorities established a designated meeting point for family members to reunite with students affected by the incident.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said she was closely monitoring the situation and praised law enforcement for its rapid response in a message posted on her official Facebook account.
The shooting comes amid a year marked by more than 350 mass shootings across the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an organization that tracks gun violence. The group defines a mass shooting as an incident in which at least four people are killed or injured, excluding the shooter.
The incident follows a shooting on Saturday in Erie, Pennsylvania, where at least eight people, including two children, were killed after a gunman opened fire before dying by suicide, according to the press release.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced on October 13 his intention to release nearly 50% of the prisoners accused of collaborating with gangs in the country. According to the president, the measure would involve early release, albeit conditional.
“We have a plan that would benefit roughly 50% (give or take) of the prisoners in El Salvador who have collaborated with gangs … In other words, early release – meaning they are guilty but are released conditionally. Released under supervision,” Bukele told the press.
In this regard, he said that his government would evaluate the situation of each detainee to keep the country free from the structural violence that has plagued it for decades: “Considering that we come from a country where violence was part of everyday life and gangs were the real government, the real dictatorship. These people lived under that yoke, but it is not the same to be among those who enforced it as it is to simply survive that reality.”
If we take into account the figure provided by the authorities (according to which nearly 100,000 people are currently detained on various charges) this could mean the release of tens of thousands of people.
Before Bukele took office, El Salvador was in the throes of a severe crisis of insecurity and violence. His administration imposed a perpetual state of emergency that began in 2022 and has led to the imprisonment of thousands of Salvadorans accused of belonging to gangs (or “maras”) that controlled large swaths of the Central American country.
And while the pacification of the streets has been celebrated by a significant portion of the population, the harsh actions of the government and its police and military forces have drawn criticism from various human rights organizations, which have accused the government of excessive use of force, mistreatment of prisoners, and the unjust detention of individuals who do not belong to gangs.
Another criticism has been leveled at the practice of mass trials, which charge and convict a large number of people at the same time. Rights groups say this has led to countless errors in the treatment of individual defendants. Added to this are allegations of arbitrary detentions, crimes against humanity, and disappearances.
The prison system implemented by Bukele in El Salvador has also faced international criticism. The Central American country became a focal point of controversy when hundreds of people deported from the United States were detained in the Salvadoran prison system, which drew widespread criticism of the Bukele government.
Bukele, however, had defended the decision and reaffirmed his alliance with the Donald Trump administration and his participation in the Washington-led geopolitical and military initiative known as Shield of the Americas.
The news of the possible release of tens of thousands of detainees sparked even more intrigue, considering that Bukele’s announcement came immediately after his conversation with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in which they discussed combating “malign foreign influence.” However, it remains unclear how the two issues are linked, according to El País.
Thanks to a 2005 DUI conviction in Pennsylvania, Edward Williams permanently lost the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. But he did not realize that until a decade later, and his confusion on that point is understandable.
The federal law that stripped Williams of his Second Amendment rights is commonly described as applying to "felons," and Williams' offense was a misdemeanor. But although his sentence did not include any time behind bars, his crime theoretically could have sent him to prison for up to five years. That was enough to trigger 18 USC 922(g)(1), which covers anyone convicted of "a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year."
When a lawyer alerted Williams to that wrinkle, which made his continued ownership of firearms a federal felony, he got rid of his guns. But he did not think that requirement was fair, reasonable, or constitutional, and this week a federal appeals court agreed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit recognized a historical tradition of disarming "physically dangerous individuals" whose possession of firearms would pose a threat to public safety. But it said Williams plainly does not fit into that category.
"The federal government spent nearly a decade trying to permanently disarm a peaceable man over a nonviolent misdemeanor—and it lost bigly," says Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, which supported Williams' lawsuit. "The government does not get to turn a nonviolent conviction into a lifetime ban on exercising a constitutionally protected right."
The 3rd Circuit's en banc decision in Williams v. Attorney General affirms a 2023 ruling by a federal judge who likewise concluded that disarming Williams was unconstitutional. It elaborates on the logic of Range v. Attorney General, a 2023 decision that restored the gun rights of a Pennsylvania man who had been convicted of food stamp fraud. In both cases, the 3rd Circuit held that applying Section 922(g)(1) to the plaintiffs was not "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation"—the Second Amendment test established by the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
Writing for the majority in Williams' case, 3rd Circuit Judge Paul Matey acknowledges that the Supreme Court has described "longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons" as "presumptively lawful." But "those longstanding customs restricted the violently dangerous (within which some felons would be included), not felons writ large," he says. "Felons were restricted because they posed a physical danger, rather than for their offense of conviction."
Matey argues that "focusing on physical dangerousness corrects the erroneous argument" that "only law-abiding and responsible citizens can exercise the rights protected by the Second Amendment"—a claim that the Supreme Court rejected in the 2024 case United States v. Rahimi. "We find no history that supports disarming irresponsible people, where 'responsible' is defined by the whim of the sovereign or the will of the majority," he says, alluding to the danger of allowing legislators to whittle away at the Second Amendment by criminalizing an ever-widening range of conduct.
Matey emphasizes "the novelty of forever restricting all felons from possessing firearms for lawful purposes." The original restriction, which Congress approved in 1938 as part of the Federal Firearms Act, applied only to violent crimes such as murder, manslaughter, rape, kidnapping, robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon. In 1961, Congress expanded the ban to cover nonviolent crimes punishable by more than a year in prison.
Williams' 2005 DUI conviction qualified for two reasons. He had a prior DUI conviction, stemming from a 2000 arrest in State College. And when he was arrested again in Philadelphia four years later, his blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.223 percent. That made his second offense a first-degree misdemeanor, which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.
Since then, Williams has stayed out of trouble. "He has done nothing violent, let alone dangerous, for over twenty years, and has held steady employment at the same job for over three decades," Matey notes. Williams drinks only occasionally, and a psychological evaluation found he "has a normal personality, without psychopathology and without addiction or violent tendencies."
The Justice Department nevertheless argued that Williams' continuing disarmament is consistent with the Bruen test, which requires historical analogs that are "relevantly similar" in motivation and scope. In making that case, the government relied mainly on early laws aimed at "habitual drunkards"—the same analogy that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected last June in United States v. Hemani, which involved the federal ban on gun possession by "unlawful" drug users.
Although the Justice Department "acknowledges it may proscribe Williams's possession of firearms only if he 'presently poses a physical danger if armed,'" Matey says, it "offers no evidence to establish this as the aim of the habitual drunkard laws." Those laws, the Supreme Court noted in Hemani, "did not seek to protect the public from violence so much as to protect habitual drunkards from themselves and their families from financial devastation."
Nor did the habitual drunkard laws permanently disarm people, as Section 922(g)(1) does. "Most statutes capped the commitment of habitual drunkards to the state inebriate asylum, prison, or hard labor to a few months or years," Matey notes. "Others provided for an indefinite period of incarceration, but had no indication that upon release individuals continued to forfeit their arms. Rather, once someone was 'safe' to 'go at large,' they were restored to the status of a full rights-bearing citizen."
Contrary to the considerations that the Supreme Court deemed relevant in Hemani, Matey says, the Justice Department "fails to show that Williams threatens to 'misuse[] a gun while intoxicated,' or that he 'poses a danger to himself or others as a result' of
alcohol abuse. In fact, much like those nineteenth-century drunkards released from custody and restored their rights, the record shows that Williams poses no present physical danger from the use of a firearm, or anything else."
The 3rd Circuit is one of three federal appeals courts that have allowed people with nonviolent felony records to argue that Section 922(g)(1) is unconstitutional as applied to them. But such challenges have been blocked in six circuits, notwithstanding compelling historical evidence that the law reaches much farther than the Second Amendment allows. So far, the Supreme Court has declined to accept any of the many petitions asking it to resolve that circuit split.
The post The 3rd Circuit Upholds the Gun Rights of a Man Who Committed a Nonviolent Misdemeanor 2 Decades Ago appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Eve Livingston sensitively draws us into the worlds of two women who share a similar past: abusive partners who committed suicide. Through powerful scene‑setting, we’re there when each woman hears the news, and we feel the complex emotions these deaths provoke. This is a difficult, complicated subject—not often tackled. Livingston bravely shines a light on how, in these particular circumstances, suicide can bring both grief and relief.
Things started as they so often do: he was older, professionally successful in a similar field to Siri’s, and there was something “magnetic” about him. There was also, she came to realise, a darkness beneath the surface. A tragic bereavement in his past had left him struggling with his mental health, something which immediately evoked sympathy in Siri and made him seem a deeper and more sensitive person, qualities she was drawn to. At the beginning of their relationship, he would often turn up uninvited to her home or events she was attending, or bombard her with messages — behaviour she now views as stalking, but found flattering in those hazy early days of a new relationship.
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