Have YOU tried the Current Affairs 

News Briefing? 

You’ve probably noticed that this article is dated for yesterday, April 11. That’s because it’s an edition of the Current Affairs News Briefing, our email newsletter service. Every week, we pore over the world’s news outlets—from Der Spiegel, to the Tulsa World, to the Pyongyang Times—and compile the most important and amusing stories that aren’t being covered by the corporate media. Then we email them all directly to you for just $5 a month. It’s a bit like the news briefing the President gets every morning, except for good people. So, as a free sample, here’s the briefing that went out yesterday—and if you like what you see, why not subscribe today? 

AROUND THE States

❧ A Louisiana immigration judge has ruled that student protester Mahmoud Khalil can be deported on the basis of his beliefs alone. This is the argument Secretary of State Marco Rubio made in a two-page memo released yesterday, claiming that he had the authority to deport Khalil for “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements or associations that are otherwise lawful.” And today, Judge Jamee Comans allowed Rubio’s absurd power-grab to stand, calling it “facially reasonable.” Now, Khalil’s attorneys have until April 23 to request a stay of deportation, and they have also indicated they’ll appeal Comans’ ruling. There is also a separate lawsuit in New Jersey that aims to stop the deportation. But if those avenues fail, Khalil would be sent to either Syria, where he was born in a refugee camp in Damascus, or Algeria, where he holds citizenship.  

This is a terrible moment for what remains of American justice and civil rights. If someone can be deported simply for voicing opinions different from those of the State Department, that “land of the free” slogan is more hollow than ever—and Khalil isn’t the only target. The State Department has also revoked more than 800 student visas, according to Inside Higher Ed, many of them for pro-Palestine speech. This is authoritarianism, plain and simple, and it has to be fought.

ON THE GROUND

Several students had their visas revoked for undisclosed reasons this week at Indiana University, where News Briefing Editor Stephen Prager is a graduate student. The next day, hundreds of students and community members, led by IU’s graduate workers union assembled outside the campus gate, calling for the school to take action to defend them.

PHOTOS: Stephen Prager

Meanwhile in New Orleans, Current Affairs editors Nathan J. Robinson, Alex Skopic, and John Ross joined a crowd of protesters outside the ICE field office on Poydras Street to demand freedom for Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and all political prisoners. We'll continue to be in the streets in the coming weeks and months, and we'll keep you posted on the growing protest movement.

Image: Nola4palestine via instagram

In other news…

• Governor Ron DeSantis is pushing to expand child labor in Florida. A bill drafted by his office removes all regulations on the amount of time 16 and 17-year-old students are allowed to work, and removes the guarantee of meal breaks. Kids at this age are already allowed to work 30 hours a week while attending school, but DeSantis thinks they need to work more to cover labor shortages resulting from the GOP’s deportation of immigrant workers. (Miami Herald)

• FIGHTING BACK: A mother and her three children have been released from ICE custody after more than a thousand New Yorkers held a rally on their behalf, marching outside the Sackett’s Harbor home of immigration czar Tom Homan. (The Intercept)
• As other states move to restrict transgender rights, Colorado is expanding them. The House passed the “Kelly Loving Act” (named after one of the trans victims in the Club Q mass shooting), which adds misgendering and deadnaming to the state’s anti-discrimination laws and divorce custody settlement considerations and affirms the rights of trans students to be called by their preferred names and dress how they please. It’s a nice contrast to what happened in Florida this week, where a teacher was fired for calling a trans student by their preferred name. (Fox 31)
• And if you’re wondering what former U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson has been up to lately, he visited Texas this week and got bitten by an ostrich. “Cripes! Oh, fucking hell!” he exclaimed. (Huffington Post)

Video: News First 10

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

What’s new in the magazine this week?

Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson took a deep dive into one of Britain's most notorious murder cases, and found evidence that “Lucy Letby Should be Released Immediately”

Nathan also interviewed the popular physicist and science writer Sean Carroll on “How to Make Science Relevant to Everyone”

Stephen Prager explored how the Republican Party wants everyone working themselves to exhaustion in “The Grind Old Party”

And to round out the week, Alex Skopic argued that “China Knows How to Deal with its Billionaires”

❧ Less than two years into his term, Argentina’s President Javier Milei already needs an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund to keep his country’s economy afloat. Since he took office, Milei has been slashing government services and public jobs with his trademark chainsaw, which has reduced inflation but also thrown more than half of Argentina’s population into poverty. And now, it looks like all that austerity wasn’t enough to actually make the country self-sufficient, as Milei has secured a “preliminary agreement” for a $20 billion bailout from the IMF. Libertarianism: it’s bad stuff, folks! (Buenos Aires Times)

❧ In the U.K., Prime Minister Keir Starmer has finally completed his transformation into Margaret Thatcher. That’s right: the leader of the Labour Party has given the green light for police in Birmingham to declare a “major incident” and break an ongoing strike of garbage collection workers, calling the strike itself—and not the wage cuts that caused it—“completely unacceptable.” Maggie would be proud. (World Socialist Web Site)

In other news…

• Elsewhere in dystopian British developments, the UK government is creating a “murder prediction” tool that uses algorithms to pick out those most likely to be criminals. Someone should make a movie about this! (The Guardian)
  
  
• Last weekend, President Trump posted a black and white video of an American bomb dropping on a gathering of Yemenis who he claimed were Houthi militia men planning an attack. “Oops… There will be no attack by these Houthis!” he captioned the video on X. Except, there’s no clear indication that these were actually militants at all, and the Yemeni media outlet Saba reported that it was actually a religious gathering for the Muslim holiday of Eid, which marks the end of Ramadan. So it’s highly possible that Trump gloated about dropping a bomb on dozens of completely innocent people. (Democracy Now!)
• After a week of total mayhem in the stock market, Trump decided ease up a bit on the “DESTROY ECONOMY” button, at least a bit. His so-called “reciprocal tariffs,” which were placed on imports from the entire world, are on pause for the next 90 days. But he has only continued to ratchet up the trade war with China, raising tariffs on their imports to 125 percent, on top of an existing 20 percent tariff. China has responded by placing a 125 percent tariff on imports from the U.S. So in essence, the two largest economies in the world—who have in recent decades been top trading partners—now effectively have trade embargoes on one another. Probably nothing to worry about!

poll of the week

The latest survey results reveal that a majority of Americans, 53 percent, now have an unfavorable view of Israel, compared with just 42 percent three years ago. This is a pretty astonishing result in a country where those who speak up for Palestinians are criminalized and treated as antisemitic terrorists.

Our government attributes Americans’ increasing disgust towards Israel to some pernicious campaign of foreign influence. But it probably has more to do with the fact that the average week produces several headlines like this:

Headline: Al Jazeera

Headline: Common Dreams

Headline: BBC

CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What are our politicians and oligarchs up to?”)

❧ Trump signed a bunch of executive orders this week to expand the use of “beautiful, clean coal.” There is no such thing as “clean coal” (as even coal industry executives admit) — in fact, it’s the worst form of energy for the climate and causes a host of other health risks. But Trump is moving full steam ahead with slashing regulations of a fuel source that we should be working to phase out: He has halted plans to shutter coal plants, opened up millions of acres of federal lands for coal leasing, and—at the behest of his tech oligarch lackeys—called on federal agencies to assess how coal can be used to power A.I. algorithms. “We need more than double the energy, the electricity, that we currently have,” in order to power it all, Trump said. In other words, we need to cook the planet even faster so we can make more fake Miyazaki art. 

• The Supreme Court has ordered that the Trump administration must “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego García, the Maryland man it wrongly deported to its gulag in El Salvador, by Monday night. The Trump administration has admitted that it wrongly deported García, who is married to an American citizen, but earlier this week defied a court order requiring his return. The Court said that the administration could still deport Venezuelan asylum seekers as long as they give them a hearing, and only required the administration to make an effort to bring García home. But García is far from the only innocent person Trump has shipped off to a slave labor camp without due process. In fact, they are almost all innocent: 90 percent of them have no criminal charges against them at all. All of them must be returned, or there is nothing preventing the Trump administration—which has also said it wants to do this to American citizens—from doing this to anyone. (NBC)
  
  

Chart: Bloomberg

WOLF NEWS OF THE WEEK

Dire wolves are back... or are they?

If you are aware of dire wolves, it’s probably from Game of Thrones. But the wolves are actually real creatures. Or at least they were. They went extinct more than 10,000 years ago, during the Ice Age, and have remained that way until now…well, sort of…

Photo: Colossal

This week, the biotech company Colossal claimed to have made the species “de-extinct.” They announced the births of three snow white “dire wolf” pups, named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi (the latter of the three surely made anyone passingly familiar with Game of Thrones punch a hole through their wall). Colossal said it made these pups by altering gray wolf DNA. 

But as Riley Black notes in Slate, the company didn’t actually publish the research that went into their creation, so it’s hard to know what exactly they’ve produced. But what we do know is that gray wolves are substantially different from dire wolves: Their evolutions diverged more than 2.5 million years ago, and fossils indicate that dire wolves were about 25 percent bigger and stronger than the gray wolves we know today. Real dire wolves probably weren’t even white, since they lived in places far enough south that a bright white coat wouldn’t have actually been all that beneficial.

An exhibit for the La Brea Tar Pits estimating what real dire wolves probably looked like.

“What we’re really looking at,” she said, “are gray wolves modified to be dire wolves of George R.R. Martin’s books rather than living, breathing replicas of the actual prehistoric carnivores that hunted bison, horses, camels, and baby mammoths in packs during the Pleistocene.” (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Martin is also a major investor in Colossal. This man would truly rather do anything besides finishing the books!)

So, this is more savvy marketing than any great feat of conservation. In fact, it probably undermines conservation. If we can just bring old species back with a couple quick edits to an existing species’ DNA, then what’s the point of all the painstaking work conservationists do? Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. In order to stop creatures from going extinct, we actually have to try to preserve them rather than just wait around to print new ones.