A library in rural Alaska needed help providing free Wi-Fi and getting kids to read. A children’s museum in Washington wanted to expand its Little Science Lab. And a World War I museum in Missouri had a raft of historic documents it needed to digitize. They received funding from a little-known federal agency before the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to dismantle it last year.
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Two Human Rights Watch employees — the group’s entire Israel-Palestine team — resigned after senior staffers blocked a report calling Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees’ right of return to their homeland a crime against humanity. Jewish Currents’ Alex Kane reported Tuesday that HRW Israel-Palestine team lead Omar Shakir and assistant researcher Milena Ansari are stepping down over…
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Well-known Gaza journalist Bisan Owda has been banned from TikTok, she says, just days after the finalization of the company’s sale to U.S. investors — including a firm headed by the notoriously pro-Israel Larry Ellison. Owda announced the censorship of her account in a video on Instagram on Wednesday, saying that TikTok had banned her permanently. She had 1.4 million followers on the…
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With Iran gripped by nationwide protests that activists say have left at least 2,600 people dead, we recently spoke with renowned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, whose latest film, It Was Just an Accident, was shot entirely in secret inside Iran and won the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. The film has since been shortlisted for an Oscar in the international feature category.
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To say press freedoms in the U.S. have taken a knock during the first year of Donald Trump’s second term would be a gross understatement. Perhaps the most glaring example is the Department of Defense’s new policy requiring journalists covering the Pentagon to sign a pledge promising not to use any information that hasn’t been explicitly authorized. But the Trump administration’s attacks on a…
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A board of commissioners in North Carolina decided earlier this month to dissolve the entire library board of trustees in response to that board refusing to remove a single book featuring a transgender child character from the shelves. The 3-2 decision by the Randolph County Board of Commissioners was based, in part, on the debunked concept of “social contagion” — the belief that children…
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