❧ Sudan has launched a genocide case against the United Arab Emirates at the International Court of Justice. The application to open proceedings, which you can read in full here, accuses the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary of committing “acts of genocide” including “murder, theft of property, rape, forcible displacement, trespassing, vandalism of public properties, and violation of human rights” against non-Arab ethnic groups, especially the Masalit people. Further, the document charges the UAE with providing the RSF “extensive financial support,” “large shipments of arms,” and even sending “its own agents to the Republic of the Sudan in order to lead the rebel RSF militia forces in perpetrating the genocide.”
The UAE has already denied the charges, calling them a “cynical publicity stunt.” But if they can be proven—and independent human rights organizations have already corroborated some of Sudan’s claims—it would be about as clear-cut a case of genocide as any judge could want. What’s more, the United States would be implicated. The Biden administration declared the UAE a “Major Defense Partner” last September and agreed to sell its leaders (along with Saudi Arabia's) up to $2.2 billion worth of U.S. weapons. If Sudan’s allegations are correct, those weapons may very well have found their way into the hands of the RSF and been used to commit atrocities. (Middle East Eye)
(Image: International Court of Justice via Twitter)
❧ Protesters are continuing to pour out into the streets of Greece to demand accountability for a devastating rail crash two years ago. Protesters believe that members of the center-right government helped to cover up the causes of the crash, which took the lives of 57 people, many of them college students, in 2023. Last week, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of Athens for a one-day general strike that essentially paralyzed the country. Since then, protesters have continued to demand an investigation into the crash’s causes. The government attributed the crash to simple “human error,” but protesters have pointed out that the privatization of Greece’s rail system following its financial crisis has led staff to be fired and safety upgrades to be neglected—something the country’s unions had warned would lead to disaster for years.
The country’s largest socialist party has introduced a censure resolution against Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, though it is unlikely to go anywhere because he holds a majority of the parliament’s 300 seats. But public outrage and distrust remain high—over 80 percent of people say they don’t believe that the government has done all it can to shed light on the causes of the crash. Meanwhile, protests have continued outside the parliament building through the week, with demonstrators hurling bombs and fireworks and getting beaten up by riot police. (Washington Post)
Hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Athens on
Friday, Feb. 28 for a general strike. (Photo: Flickr)
❧ Just months after the disaster in California, Japan has been hit with its worst wildfires in 50 years.At least one person is dead and more than 4,000 have been forced to evacuate their homes, as flames have spread across roughly 10 miles (2,600 hectares) of forest near the city of Ōfunato. This comes after Japan’s hottest-ever summer brought 8,821 cases of “extreme heat” above 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius), up from 6,692 in 2023—which was also a record, at the time. Clearly, there’s nowhere in the world that’s safe from climate change. Unless we crack down on emissions now, who knows when the next fire will strike? (Japan Times)
The Ōfunato fire, as viewed from Sakihama. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
❧ A new group called “Everyone Hates Elon” is organizing protests in Britain against Tesla and its billionaire owner. The group is behind the satirical “Don’t Buy a Swasticar” advertisements that have started popping up on trains and bus stations around London, which have gained millions of views on TikTok and Instagram. They’ve also gone to Tesla showrooms with cardboard cutouts of Musk doing his definitely-not-a-Nazi salute. According to one anonymous organizer, they’ve raised around $15,275 for causes they believe Elon would hate, including “trans people, migrants, refugees as well as groups tackling racism and fascism in the U.K.” (Pink News)
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Alabama lawmakers have voted to expand immunity for the cops. The state’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives just passed HB 202, a bill which significantly raises the bar for prosecuting police officers for misconduct, by a 75-26 vote. The legislation limits the definition of “misconduct” to violations of rights clearly spelled out in either the U.S. Constitution or Alabama’s state constitution, and it allows cops accused of violations to continue to argue for immunity as a defense to the jury when they go to trial. Since Alabama already has a serious problem with police violence, this is obviously a terrible idea. The legislators who support it barely pretend to care about justice, with Representative Rex Reynolds—the bill’s author—saying that “recruitment and retention of law enforcement officers” is his main focus. (News from the States)
❧ In Utah, labor unions have begun working on a plan repeal the state’s ban on collective bargaining in the public sector. It’s been less than a month since Governor Spencer Cox signed this reprehensible law—see the February 18 news briefing for more on that—but the pushback is already underway. A coalition of unions including the Teamsters and the Utah Education Association announced that they’ll mount a ballot referendum in 2026 to reverse the ban, saying that “we believe the public is on our side. It’ll be an uphill battle, since Utah has the toughest requirements of any U.S. state to get a measure on the ballot: 140,748 signatures, or 8 percent of registered Utah voters. But with a recent poll showing that 80 percent of Utahns oppose weakening labor rights, they have a fighting chance. (Salt Lake Tribune)
❧ Elsewhere in the labor movement, workers at three Barnes & Noble stores in New York City have won their first-ever union contract. All three stores—on Park Slope, Union Square, and West 82nd Street respectively—are now organized under the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), with a total of over 200 workers. They’ve won an immediate $4 an hour raise, with a guaranteed raise of $1 a year after that, plus health benefits and safety improvements, including paid car transport for anyone working a late-night inventory shift.
A tentative agreement has also been reached at a Barnes & Noble in Bloomington, Illinois, which is expected to be ratified tomorrow. This looks like the beginnings of another surge in unionization like the ones at Amazon and Starbucks in recent years, which is encouraging news! Maybe it’s time to talk to the staff at your own B&N about the possibility of organizing? (Publishers Weekly)
Workers demonstrate for their right to collective bargaining at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in 2023. (Image: Barnes & Noble Union via Twitter)
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Hold a “sip-in” demonstration to support Starbucks Workers United!
As it continues to fight for a contract with the company bosses, the Starbucks workers’ union wants your help. They’re asking anyone sympathetic to their mission to host “sip-ins” between March 8 and 11, with a special focus on March 11, the day before Starbucks’ annual shareholder meeting.
What is a “sip-in,” you ask? Like a “sit-in,” it’s a simple demonstration where union supporters show up to a non-union store and order drinks, often holding signs, shirts and other messages or using the name “UNION STRONG” on the order so baristas have an excuse to yell it out. The most recent one was in Dallas, Texas on February 22—and the company is clearly worried about the tactic, because they sicced the NYPD on a sip-in this January. If you’re interested in trying one out, you can find out more below:
❧ According to a new Gallup poll, only 46 percent of Americans now sympathize with Israelis over Palestinians. This is the first time since Gallup started keeping records on the question in 2001 that support for Israel has dipped below the 50 percent mark. Meanwhile, support for the Palestinian cause has risen to a record 33 percent. Of course, a constant stream of news and livestream footage of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes against Palestinians will do that.
Interestingly, the shift is even more pronounced among Democratic poll respondents. There, only 21 percent still lean more toward Israel, while Palestinians have already gained majority support at 59 percent. So for any avowed pro-Israel Democrat—like, say, Senator John Fetterman or Representative Ritchie Torres—they have to face the fact that their positions are objectively at odds with their constituents’ wishes.(Gallup)
❧ Butterflies are disappearing at a “catastrophic” rate, according to a huge new study. On Thursday, the journal Science published its comprehensive tally of butterfly populations across the United States. It found that between 2000 and 2020, their numbers have dwindled by 22 percent. The reasons it identified were many: their habitats are shrinking, global temperatures are rising, and they are increasingly being killed by toxic pesticides. It’s a worrying sign of what some scientists have dubbed a coming “bugpocalypse”—populations of fireflies, bumblebees, and other insects have also taken notable dips. It’s a frightening prospect that we can’t just ignore, since our entire ecosystem depends on pollination from these bugs. (Washington Post)
Everything you know and love depends on this little guy. (Photo: Environment America)
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What are our politicians and oligarchs up to?”)
❧ [CONTENT WARNING: Transphobia]In the first episode of his new podcast, Gavin Newsom told far-right activist Charlie Kirk that he agrees with Kirk’s transphobic bigotry. Specifically, Newsom said that it’s “deeply unfair” for transgender people to be allowed to compete in sports, a common subject of panic for the GOP, and that he was “completely align[ed]” with Kirk on that issue. He also praised Donald Trump’s transphobic “Kamala is for they/them” ads from the last election as “devastating,” and said he was frustrated to see that Harris “was in the video and expressed support” for people in prison getting transgender healthcare. He made no attempt to push back when Kirk called gender reassignment procedures “butchery” and “chemical castration,” saying only that liberals should be more “sensitized” to the concerns of Americans who hold such views.
This was an incredible capitulation to one of the worst bigots on the internet. As journalist Erin Reed points out, Kirk has previously said that “Someone should have just ‘took care of it’ the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s” when referring to trans people, all but openly calling for violence. (He also led a racist propaganda campaign against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. last year.) If Newsom was going to engage with him at all, it should have been a confrontation—not a friendly chitchat where he endorsed Kirk’s ideas on gender. By now, this kind of poisonous rhetoric is expected from the GOP. But if they claim to care about LGBTQ rights, Democrats shouldn’t be going along with it. (Erin in the Morning)
Just two guys who agree on things. (Image: Charlie Kirk via Twitter)
PAST AFFAIRS
In a 2023 article that’s aging better by the day, Stephen Prager explained why “Gavin Newsom is Not a Progressive.”
Art by Chris Matthews (not that one) from Current Affairs Magazine, Issue 10, November/December 2017
❧ Speaking of pathetic Democrats, ten especially useless ones just voted to censure Representative Al Green for protesting Trump’s speech to Congress. Green was ejected from the room after he stood up, waved his cane, and yelled that Trump has no mandate to cut Medicaid—which is true, as the American public and even Republican voters overwhelmingly oppose such cuts. Nor was Green’s protest anything new, as Marjorie Taylor Greene and other GOP representatives famously heckled Joe Biden’s speeches to Congress on several occasions. Nevertheless, House Republicans introduced measures to censure Green—and in a truly spineless move, ten Democrats from the so-called “Problem Solvers Caucus” voted with the GOP.
Among them was Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, of banana fame, and Connecticut’s Representative Jim Hines, who said that “I revere this institution” when asked to explain his vote. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with the Democrats today: revering institutions for their own sake, instead of being willing to go against them. Caring more about politeness and decorum than whether people have healthcare or not. The priorities are completely backward. (The Hill)
Really, a little shouting is the bare minimum anyone should do when people’s
medical care is on the line. (Image: PBS via YouTube)
❧ Elon Musk now wants to privatize the Postal Service and Amtrak. During a Morgan Stanley tech conference, Musk told the audience that “we should privatize anything that could reasonably be privatized,” with those two services as his first examples. He also said that the organizations need “some chance of going bankrupt” at all times to incentivize “improvement.” This is, of course, both absurd and deeply worrying, since the Postal Service going bankrupt would disrupt the functions of nearly every business, nonprofit, and government agency in the country. But beyond that, the idea that a billionaire-led government could transfer vast amounts of public property into the hands of a few investors or shareholders is just theft from the American people, with little more than a fig leaf about “efficiency” and “improvement” to justify it. (Newsweek)
❧ DOGE has also justified cutting funding to the National Institute of Health by claiming that it is wasting money on “frivolous” studies. You probably heard Trump reference cutting funds to “making mice transgender” at the State of the Union, which he used as the poster child for nonsensical government spending. It turns out that trans-ing the mice had a very legitimate purpose—to test how different hormone levels affected disease, reproductive health, and immune responses. In the Washington Post, independent journalist Benjamin Ryan discusses why “silly science” like the often derided “shrimp on a treadmill” study can actually be very important to human discovery:
Silly science is fruitful fodder for memes and snarky headlines. But more often than not, these studies are, in fact, merely baroque examples of what’s known as edge science — or research based on relatively novel ideas. Such out-of-the-box, exploratory studies typically lead to dead ends. But edge science remains the bedrock of the scientific endeavor. […]
The Ozempic revolution, after all, owes its success to research into Gila monster venom, which, following four decades of investigation, finally gave rise to the GLP-1 agonist class of drugs that hold promise in transforming public health and are already shifting the economy.
BIRD FACT OF THE WEEK
The superb lyrebird is indeed superb…at plagiarism!
Not to be confused with its cousin, the Merely Okay Lyrebird.
Lots of birds copy one another’s songs, but the lyrebird, native to Australia, takes it to an entirely new level. It is a master at perfectly mimicking the calls of other birds, no matter how complex. According to Wild Ambience, a website that documents nature sounds, “From the cackling laughter of a Kookaburra, to the strident ‘whipcrack’ of the Eastern Whipbird, Lyrebirds are so accurate that even the original is sometimes fooled…Up to 80% of the Superb Lyrebird’s song consists of mimicry, and it’s not unusual for an individual male lyrebird to have mastered the calls of 20-25 species of bird.” The website catalogs some of the most uncanny examples, in which the lyrebird perfectly copies the call of lots of wildly different birds who make wildly different sounds—everything from the screech of a Grey Goshawk to the Australian King Parrot.
But it doesn’t just rip off other birds. It’s stealing noises made by humans too! There’s a delightful video of David Attenborough paying a lyrebird a visit and watching him make the sounds of a chainsaw:
They can also mimic the sounds of camera clicks, car alarms, laser guns, and even human speech!
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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