Following Hamas’ Al Aqsa Flood operation into southern Israel on October 7th, 2023, and the subsequent bombardment of the Gaza Strip, I began making month-long reporting trips to Israel-Palestine to cover different aspects of the war.

In October and November 2023, I documented a wave of settler and military violence across rural villages in the southern West Bank, resulting in the complete ethnic cleansing of more than 20 communities in less than 40 days—a campaign of violence and displacement that continues to this day.

In March 2024, I embedded myself with Jewish Israeli nationalists who saw it as their civic and religious duty to travel south to the Nitzana and Karem Shalom border crossings, where they worked to block humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza’s starving population. I accompanied them, documenting their collaboration with the Israeli military, which—despite both Israeli and international law—allowed these civilians into closed military zones to obstruct aid shipments. I conducted interviews with civilians who openly expressed their genocidal ambitions, while military reservists spoke candidly about war crimes they had committed while deployed in Gaza.

These reporting trips ended in October 2024 when I was arrested by the Israeli military and incarcerated as an “enemy of the state” for factual reporting.

Previously, Israeli politicians and Knesset members weren’t able to openly advocate for turning the Gaza Strip into an exclusively Jewish Israeli enclave while still maintaining their international image as victims and framing their military actions as purely defensive. But that was changing.

My goal was to document how the resettlement movement had evolved. Tracking its shift from a fringe effort to a mainstream Israeli political cause. I planned to follow and embed with these groups, from their settlements to their demonstrations at various border checkpoints into Gaza.

Locked in the Levant

a firsthand account of my arrest by the IDF and my incarceration and interrogations by the Israeli security services.

^substack.com

Parola filtrata: nsfw Clicca per aprire/chiudere

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55248056

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55246505

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55246889

Clergy representing six different faiths — from the First United Methodist Church to Judaism — delivered a letter to the Florida Department of Emergency Management seeking permission from the state to provide one-on-one chaplaincy services to the detainees at the detention center, a practice that’s common in most other correctional facilities in Florida.

This time, the group received a hopeful response — though there was some confusion about the type of religious services that are already taking place at the facility.

Keith Pruett, the deputy executive director of FDEM, told clergy that he thought the facility already provided religious services, according to Rev. David Williamson, who attended the letter drop-off on Thursday. Williamson said that Pruett agreed to bring up the issue with Kevin Guthrie, the executive director of FDEM, when he returns to Tallahassee.

After years of working to dismantle diversity programs, ban books and rewrite classroom curriculum, conservatives are converging on a new battlefront in their push to overhaul public education: teachers’ unions.

This spring, a right-leaning think tank called the Freedom Foundation launched the Teacher Freedom Alliance as a free, national membership program meant to incentivize public educators to jump ship from traditional teachers unions.

The group, which is headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, encourages teachers to instead take advantage of its $2 million liability insurance, professional development training and curriculum resources, including recommended learning from PragerU, a conservative group that produces free video content “upholding Judeo-Christian values.” The group is structured as a nonprofit, so it doesn't have to disclose its donors.

This Texas group aims to be a Republican option to teachers unions

The Teacher Freedom Alliance launched this spring as a free, national membership program meant to incentivize educators to jump ship from traditional unions. 

^{Taylor Goldenstein (Houston Chronicle)}

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-ukraines-european-allies-fuel-russias-war-economy-2025-10-10/

The venture capitalist has hosted and attended events and lectured on the topic for decades, going back to the 1990s, according to a report by Wired. In recent months, he has spoken to theologians and podcasters about the antichrist both publicly and in private. His beliefs are diffuse, meandering and often confusing, but one tenet he’s steadfastly maintained over the years is that the unification of the world under one global state is essentially identical to the antichrist. In his talks, he uses the term “antichrist” almost interchangeably with “one-world state”.

He believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI, and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening. Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

The political svengali and investor has been giving lectures on ‘an evil king or tyrant … who appears in the end times’

^{Johana Bhuiyan (The Guardian)}

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55244373

Months passed. Her partner was deported. In July, Pérez said, she got a call from someone in the CBP Home program telling her she’d be on a flight out of the country in mid-August. She began packing.

But as the departure date neared and the plane tickets hadn’t arrived, Pérez got nervous. Again and again, she called the toll-free number she’d been given. Finally, somebody called back to say there might be a delay obtaining the documents she’d need to travel to Venezuela.

Then there was silence. No further information, no plane tickets. Pérez registered on the app again in August, then a third time in September, as immigration arrests ramped up in Chicago.

Today, Pérez feels trapped in a country that doesn’t want her. She’s afraid of leaving her apartment, afraid that she will be detained and that her children will be taken away from her. “I feel so scared, always looking around in every direction,” she said. “I was trying to leave voluntarily, like the president said.”

Immigrants Who Tried to Self-Deport with Trump’s CBP Home App Are Stuck in America

Venezuelan immigrants signed up for a Trump-promoted app called CBP Home, which promised a safe and easy way to leave the country, and prepared to leave on their given departure dates. Those dates have come and gone. They’re still stuck here.

^ProPublica

Mark Bray, a Rutgers University history professor who wrote "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook," is relocating to Spain with his family after receiving death threats and harassment¹. The threats emerged after President Trump designated antifa as a domestic terrorist organization in September 2025, when conservative activists began targeting Bray on social media².

The Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA circulated a petition calling for Bray's dismissal, labeling him "Dr. Antifa" and claiming he was an "outspoken, well-known antifa member"¹. After Fox News contacted him about the petition, Bray received death threats, including one promising to "kill him in front of his students," and his home address was posted on social media³.

Bray, who has taught courses on anti-fascism at Rutgers since 2019, maintains he has never been part of any antifa group, saying "I do not have any affiliation with any antifa group and don't plan to"¹. His initial attempt to leave the U.S. on October 9, 2025, was blocked when his family's flight reservations were mysteriously canceled at the gate⁴, but they successfully departed the following day[^7].

He plans to teach his classes remotely for the current academic year and hopes to return to campus in fall 2026¹.

1. AP News - Antifa expert at Rutgers University says he is moving to Spain because of death threats ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
2. NJ.com - N.J. professor's attempt to flee to Spain blocked after threats over antifa research ↩︎
3. The Independent - Rutgers University's Antifa expert flees US after MAGA death threats ↩︎
4. The Guardian - US anti-fascism expert leaves country day after being blocked from flying to Spain ↩︎

US anti-fascism expert blocked from flying to Spain at airport

Rutgers University professor who published book on antifa was informed at boarding gate that his trip was cancelled

^{Edward Helmore (The Guardian)}

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/china-vs-americas-industrial-growth-2019-2024/

When the Trump administration awarded a $1.26 billion contract this summer to build and operate a new tent city detention center in Texas, it made headlines, and not just because the facility, located at the Fort Bliss Army base, was expected to be the biggest of its kind in the country. The company that won the job, Acquisition Logistics, was so small it operated out of a single-family home in Richmond, Virginia. Almost nobody had heard of it. “A random house…just won $1.26 billion from ICE,” wrote the New Republic.

As it turns out, ICE had tried to award the contract, in April, to the firm Deployed Resources. It canceled the deal days later “for convenience,” according to a government website that cited an executive order about “wasteful spending.” Such a move is extremely unusual, and some current and former ICE officials speculate that ­Deployed lost the job for political reasons. Back in 2023, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the firm had snagged no-bid contracts for immigrant detention under President Joe Biden, and that a member of its board was married to Doug Emhoff’s former chief of staff, who later joined a sister company, Deployed Services. (The DC Enquirer interpreted all of this as “Kamala’s cronyism.”) A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson dismissed the speculation, saying the contract was canceled due to an “inability to meet the specialized needs of the facility.”

How a tiny, inexperienced firm landed a $1.3 billion detention deal

To hold 5,000 human beings.

^{Mother Jones}

An explosion at a Tennessee military munitions plant left multiple people dead and missing on Friday, authorities said, as secondary blasts forced rescuers to keep their distance from the burning field of debris.

The blast, which people reported hearing and feeling miles away, occurred at Accurate Energetic Systems in rural Tennessee. The company’s website says it makes and tests explosives at an eight-building facility that sprawls across wooded hills near Bucksnort, a town about 60 miles (97 kilometers) southwest of Nashville.

“We do have several people at this time unaccounted for. We are trying to be mindful of families and that situation,” Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis said at a news conference. “We do have some that are deceased.”

https://apnews.com/article/tennessee-blast-military-explosive-plant-3c26b71217a2ebe7fb4ca4e21b4edcd7