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You’ve probably noticed that this article is dated for yesterday, April 4. 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 Al-Ahram, to the Pan African Review, to the Detroit Free Press—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 WORLD

❧ For the first time on record, British police have raided a Quaker house of worship. One of the famously pacifist religious group's meeting houses in Westminster was hosting an event run by the activist group Youth Demand, who were planning peaceful protests against genocide in Gaza and against climate change. According to its website, Youth Demand regularly holds “welcome nights” to educate the public on “nonviolent resistance.” 

According to the Sunday Times, more than 20 cops stormed in on March 27, “some armed with Tasers,” and handcuffed [six] women, confiscated their belongings, took them to the police station and later raided some of their student accommodation.” (As Sky News notes: “One Quaker was incensed by how the police "flooded" the building - so much so that they pointedly did not offer the officers any cups of tea.”) Here is one of organizers, 20-year-old Ella Taylor, describing what happened: 

The six women were charged with a “conspiracy to create a public nuisance,” with police citing their plans to “shut down London” with acts of civil disobedience throughout the month of April. 

The police justified this week’s arrests under a law that allows them to break up any protest deemed “disruptive” to public order. But the most disruptive acts Youth Demand have carried out in the past have been ten minute shutdowns of individual roads, which, though mildly annoying, hardly seems to rise to the level of criminal behavior. The law has also not been enforced equally. As George Monbiot noted in The Guardian, the wealthy farmers who blocked roads with tractors last year to protest a new inheritance tax were not met with any interest from the cops. The U.K. police have also dismissed the far-right anti-migrant protests, which involved multiple violent attacks, as “minimal” in danger while prioritizing peaceful anti-oil, pro-Palestine, and animal rights protests.

It’s clear who this law is meant to go after. Rishi Sunak’s Tory government introduced it at the behest of the fossil fuel industry to criminalize groups like Just Stop Oil. It has since proven useful for criminalizing protests against Israel as well. Despite having the power to do so, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has not reversed this law. In fact, they are planning to expand it to allow cops to arrest any protester near a place of worship. This has been proposed under the guise of preventing religious-based “intimidation,” but since places of worship can be found just about everywhere in urban Britain, it would make it easy to round up just about anyone. 

When you’re sending your goons to arrest people here, you’ve really gone wrong. (Image: Westminster Quaker Meeting House)

In other news…

• The Israeli military killed 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers in Gaza and buried them in a “mass grave,” which was discovered by the United Nations this week. An independent examiner has found evidence that the killings were “specific and intentional,” carried out in the style of an execution. Since it began its military campaign in 2023, Israel has killed more than 1,000 medical workers and arrested, beaten, and tortured many others. Western governments are apparently fine with atrocities like this, but protesting them can get you thrown in jail or deported without a trial. (The Guardian)
• A group of pro-Apartheid white South Africans is trying to get Trump to help them form an all-white breakaway state. White South Africans are the only group Trump supports having refugee status, so this group of Afrikaners might actually get taken seriously. (Reuters)
• An American YouTuber, who goes by the name “Neo-Orientalist,” was arrested for attempting to reach North Sentinel Island. This speck of land in the Indian Ocean is home to a group of Indigenous people that has remained almost wholly uncontacted for thousands of years and remains untouched by modern technology. The Indian government bans outsiders from visiting, mostly to keep them from spreading diseases the natives would not be immune to. Exposing the Sentinelese people to the horrors of YouTube influencers would have been far too much to bear. (BBC)

One of the few photos that have been snapped of the Sentinelese, who live in voluntary isolation from the rest of the world. (Photo: Survival International)

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

What’s new in the magazine this week?

• Current Affairs film critic Ciara Moloney reviewed this summer’s largely overlooked Trump biopic, The Apprentice, which “shows his evil as fundamentally, and terrifyingly, human.”
  

Associate editor Alex Skopic discussed the corporate media’s attempts to silence discussion of Luigi Mangione, whom the Trump administration just singled out for the death penalty this week.

Alex also took on the bizarre myth that the “white male writer” is going extinct.

Adriana Gallegos examined how American politicians focus obsessively on the so-called “middle class,” while ignoring the millions of Americans living in poverty.

Editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson interviewed labor studies professor Eric Blanc, who discussed the recent wave of unionization in America and how organized labor can win. 

AROUND THE STATES

❧ There were two special elections held this week, in Wisconsin and Florida: 

• We’ll get the bad result out of the way first: The Florida House seat left open by Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz (of leaked Signal chat fame) will now be occupied by the AIPAC-endorsed state senator Randy Fine, whose main claim to fame has been his calls for genocide against the people of Palestine. Days after October 7, Fine called the people of Gaza “animals” and called for the streets to “overflow with blood,” and has only become more unhinged since then, suggesting that there is no such thing as a Palestinian civilian, and saying that Palestinian culture “is the embodiment of evil. Destroy it all.” He’ll fit right in with many of his new Republican colleagues.
• Wisconsin, meanwhile, held a race to fill a supreme court vacancy. Elon Musk dumped $25 million into this election to help the anti-abortion and anti-union Republican Brad Schimel across the finish line. Musk, who said that the race could “determine the fate of Western civilization,” traveled to  Wisconsin, donned a cheese hat, and handed out $1 million bribes to voters. Even if he’d done his stupid “X” jump into the stands at Lambeau Field it probably wouldn’t have been enough to sway the people of Wisconsin, who voted 55 to 45 to elect the Democrat, Susan Crawford. Western civilization reportedly collapsed shortly after.

How do you do, fellow Packers fans? (Photo: America PAC on X)

TWEET OF THE WEEK

While her ex was busy trying and failing to buy an election, indie musician Grimes was occupied with other concerns: 

“NATO,” in this case, means “Nice and Tasteful Orangutans.”

In other news…

• Wired covered the creepy “Natal Conference” held in Austin, Texas, where attendees gathered for $10,000 apiece to discuss “repopulat[ing] the world.” The conference’s organizer, Kevin Dolan has described the goals of the pro-natalist movement as being “very much aligned” with the goals of eugenics.
• Oklahoma state superintendent Ryan Walters, fresh off attempting to purchase $3 million worth of Trump Bibles for the state’s public schools, is now suing the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The FFRF sent a cease-and-desist letter to an Oklahoma school district in December following complaints that the school held a “mandatory student-led prayer” over the intercom every day, which would violate the First Amendment. Walters, who previously required teachers to show their classes a video of him praying for Trump, announced that he was suing the Foundation, calling them “radical atheists,” and accusing them of trying to “erase faith from public life.” (Newsweek)
• And in a smidgeon of good news, Nevada is moving forward with a bill that would dramatically expand paid family and medical leave. More than 1 million Nevadan workers would stand to benefit from the law, which would require leave to be paid to anyone who works for a company with more than 50 employees. But business groups are fighting to kill it. (Nevada Current)

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

❧ If you saw any news from Capitol Hill this week, it was probably New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s 25-hour yap-fest. Some have described it as a “filibuster,” but that’s not actually what it was, since Booker was not blocking any specific legislation, though he did manage to stop Senate business for a day. Still, there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking up space in the Senate chamber to bring attention to the worst parts of Trump’s agenda, even just as a publicity stunt. It’s also cool that the record for the longest speech in the history of the chamber will no longer be held by segregationist ghoul Strom Thurmond, and will instead belong to a Black man, a fact Thurmond would likely have hated. 

But the Democrats who are praising this as some grand act of resistance are kidding themselves. As American Prospect editor David Dayen pointed out, they could actually grind the business of the chamber to a halt by “deny[ing] unanimous consent for everything and mak[ing] the majority walk in quicksand.” But instead, after Booker’s marathon speech concluded, Democrats, including Booker, went right back to confirming Trump’s nominees and opposed a resolution to stop Trump’s sale of arms to Israel as it moves forward with overt ethnic cleansing. 

Don't be fooled: he didn't suddenly become good. (Image: C-SPAN via YouTube)

❧ President Trump has announced a new round of tariffs on imports from all of America’s trading partners. Trump has described the tariffs as “reciprocal,” saying, “That means they do it to us and we do it to them.” But many of the countries hit by tariffs don’t actually have any tariffs on the U.S. yet. There has already been a lot of coverage on how ill-conceived all of this is: The tariffs are being imposed using highly questionable math that was likely generated by some sort of AI algorithm, and they impose duties on places with which the U.S. conducts zero trade, like the sub-Antarctic Heard and McDonald Islands, which have no inhabitants other than penguins.

But the most important thing to take away is that the Trump administration fully intends to raise prices on ordinary Americans in service of paying for a tax cut that will overwhelmingly benefit the rich. Trump’s own economists acknowledge in their math that companies will pass his tariffs onto the public. Yale’s Budget Lab estimates that the average household will lose $3,800 as a result while those at the lowest end of the income distribution will lose an estimated 4 percent of their yearly income, three times as much as the wealthiest. That’s before you even take into account that the Trump administration is also trying to implement gigantic cuts to the social safety net, including programs like Medicaid which millions of low-income Americans rely on. Whatever populist language he uses to justify this policy should be disregarded—it’s a clear campaign of class war for the rich.

Trump also reposted, well, this recently. 

❧ Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in Luigi Mangione’s case. As Ken Klippenstein writes, this is clearly part of a “politically-fuelled vendetta” by the Trump administration. In a notable contrast, the mass shooter who killed 23 people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019 was recently offered a plea deal to avoid Death Row, and Mangione is only accused of one murder, so the proposed punishment is clearly disproportionate. But late last December, the New York Post—hardly a left-wing whistleblower—reported that the DOJ has received “pressure from health insurance industry leaders to make an example out of Mangione.” It looks like they’re doing just that, and the abuse of power should be obvious to everyone. 

As klippenstein says, he's now essentially a political prisoner. (image: NYC Mayor's office)

In other news…

• While downplaying the effectiveness of measles vaccines, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has instead promoted the use of Vitamin A to combat the spreading virus. In West Texas, many children who were already infected with measles were given toxic levels of Vitamin A, which resulted in abnormal liver function requiring them to be hospitalized. (Texas Standard)
  
  

  Art by Ellen Burch from Current Affairs Magazine, Issue 51, November-December 2024

  
  
• Trump has threatened to bomb Iran if they don’t come to the table to negotiate a new nuclear deal with him. Of course, you may remember that during his first term Iran was following a deal to draw down its nuclear energy program, but Trump got rid of that deal. Now, he is threatening to potentially engulf the country in another Middle Eastern war unless they agree to provisions that he previously threw in the trash. Iran, for its part, has said it won’t negotiate with Trump directly but wouldn’t rule out doing it through Omani mediators. (Axios)

SQUIRREL FACT OF THE WEEK

Many trees are accidentally planted by squirrels who misplaced their nuts!

As they hoard food for the long winter, a single squirrel buries around 3,000 nuts each fall on average, according to Scientific American. But many of these nuts get misplaced. According to the Global Tree Initiative, scientists have estimated that they can’t find 60 to 80 percent of the seeds and nuts they bury, and those forgotten acorns and seeds grow into robust trees. Humans often treat them as vermin, but squirrels play a crucial role in maintaining the forests that we rely on for oxygen. Thank you for your service, squirrels!

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)