Over the last two years, in an effort to stamp its ideology on the country’s premier academic and scientific institutions, the Trump administration has repeatedly moved to exert control over how grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are distributed. According to reporting by The New York Times and other outlets, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), led by Russell Vought…
Source
Germany is now facing the same systemic crisis that its leaders once diagnosed in other European countries, such as Greece, Portugal, and Spain, in the early 2010s. Economic woes and anti-immigrant sentiment have given rise to anti-establishment politics, which in turn is reshaping the country’s political landscape. Indeed, after the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party achieved a historic result…
Source
For 25 years, the US ran a parallel legal system largely for Muslims. It now reaches immigrants and the left. Less than two weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, President George W. Bush told Congress that the war on terror “begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there.” Twenty-five years later, his line reads as a confession: the war on terror was designed to have no borders and no…
Source
It was late in the afternoon when my mother told me that “they would come for us.” I was not yet 10 at the time. Climbing the stairs for a tea-time cheese sandwich, I left my brother and cousins to their football skirmish in the garden of my family’s villa in western Baghdad. Or so I remember. I saw two skyscrapers spewing smoke over New York, and my mother stone-faced before the TV. She was right.
Source
After years of organizing by a coalition of transit, environmental, and community organizing groups, the Chicago region’s transit system began an important new chapter on September 1 as the Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA). The new system was created by the NITA Act, which was signed by Gov. JB Pritzker in December 2025. The new legislation raises $1.5 billion in new revenue and creates…
Source
Before the war on Gaza began in 2023, freelance work had become a lifeline for thousands of Gazans. It was one of the few ways they could connect with the outside world and secure jobs that offered incomes several times higher than those available locally. According to the United Nations, around 12,000 people in Gaza were earning their livelihoods through online freelance work before the war.
Source