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November 5, 2025

Lawsuit Charges That California Law Illegally Muzzles Students and Teachers on Palestine

The new law conflates criticism of Zionism with antisemitism and punishes educators for teaching truthful information.

Beginning January 1, 2026, teachers in California classrooms will be looking over their shoulders to avoid running afoul of a frightening new “antisemitism” law. On October 7, despite widespread opposition from civil rights groups, teachers’ unions, and education advocates, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 715, which amends the California Education Code to police what teachers can teach and what students can learn about Israel and Palestine.

“This problematic classroom censorship bill silences Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, Jewish, and other marginalized voices in California public schools by shielding a foreign government — Israel — from legitimate criticism and criminalizes honest discussions on Palestine and other global human rights issues,” the Council on American Islamic Relations said in a statement.

Under this law, educators could be charged with unlawful discrimination and disciplined “if they expose their students to ideas, information, and instructional materials that may be considered critical of the State of Israel and the philosophy of Zionism,” according to a lawsuit filed on November 2 by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).

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October 30, 2025

Trump Is Moving Relentlessly Toward Illegal War In Venezuela

The Trump administration’s murderous strikes on small boats at sea constitute unlawful extrajudicial killings.

As the Trump administration continues to murder people in small boats on the high seas and mounts the largest U.S. military buildup in decades in the Caribbean, it is moving inexorably toward an all-out, illegal attack and forcible regime change in Venezuela.

Despite Team Trump’s feeble attempts to legally justify its ocean strikes, which have now killed 57 people since early September, those extrajudicial killings are also unlawful.

Donald Trump’s murderous campaign came into focus on February 20, when the State Department designated eight drug trafficking organizations, including Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations. Although the administration has attempted — so far unsuccessfully — to use that designation to justify sending immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, Trump is now invoking it in an effort to validate his illegal strikes at sea.

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October 24, 2025

Israel and US Scorn ICJ Ruling Against Starving Civilians as Method of Warfare

The World Court says Israel has a duty as the occupying power to cooperate with UN relief efforts, not impede them.

This week the International Court of Justice (ICJ or World Court) told Israel what seems obvious to any reasonable person — that it cannot starve civilians as a method of warfare. But Israel does not act in accordance with international law, as evidenced by its two-year campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, during which it has killed over 68,000 Gazans (more likely 680,000, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese said on September 15).

In its 71-page advisory opinion, issued on October 22, the ICJ reiterated that Israel is illegally occupying the Gaza Strip. The court unanimously held that as the occupying power, Israel has obligations under international humanitarian law to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Gaza, has essential supplies of everyday life, including water, food, shelter, clothing, bedding, and fuel, as well as medical equipment and services. The court also held that Israel must respect and protect all medical and relief personnel and facilities.

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October 18, 2025

Trump Admits Complicity in Genocide

In his speech to the Knesset, Trump told Netanyahu: “We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them. And we’ve given a lot to Israel … [And] you used them well.”

As Donald Trump congratulates Israel for its conduct of the genocide in Gaza, he should be charged with aiding and abetting genocide, not given the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his speech on Monday to the Israeli Knesset, Trump spent an hour bragging about how he ended the “war” in Gaza and “an age of terror and death,” declaring, “This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.”

He decried the “thousands of innocent Israeli civilians” who “were attacked by terrorists in one of the most evil and heinous desecrations of innocent life the world has ever seen; the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust,” adding, “The cruelty of October 7th struck to the core of humanity itself. Nobody could believe what they were witnessing.”

Conspicuously absent from Trump’s remarks was any reference to the ubiquitous images of the nearly 68,000 Palestinians killed (possibly as many as 680,000, U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese said on September 15), including at least 20,000 children, and the more than 170,000 injured by Israel during its two-year campaign of genocide in Gaza.

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October 14, 2025

As SCOTUS Enters a New Term, These Cases May Grant Trump Unbridled Authority

Rulings on the Supreme Court’s “emergency docket” foreshadow its abiding deference to Trump.

The Supreme Court’s new term, which began last week, presents the court with a monumental opportunity to hand Donald Trump unbridled executive authority and eviscerate the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution. The court appears poised to rubber stamp many of Trump’s worst abuses, from the imposition of massive tariffs to seizing control of federal agencies created by Congress.

Although there are 39 cases on the court’s regular docket, it has already handled nearly 30 cases with temporary unsigned orders on its “emergency docket.” In those cases, the high court granted Trump’s requests to block orders from lower courts 20 times and ruled against his administration in only three cases; the others led to mixed rulings.

Even though the cases in which the high court has already opined are not final decisions on the merits, they provide a preview of what we can expect during this term after full briefing and oral arguments.

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October 7, 2025

The Effects of US-Israel Bond are ‘Etched Into the Mass Graves of Gaza,’ International Legal Complaint Says

As the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza exceeds 67,000 and famine has reached the “catastrophic” phase, thousands of taxpayers across the country have united with Palestinian-Americans to file an international legal complaint against the U.S. government for funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

An initial petition was filed in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in Washington D.C., on May 15, 2025, by Taxpayers Against Genocide (TAG) and the National Lawyers Guild. It charged the United States with aiding and abetting Israel in its commission of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Gaza, in violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, and the Geneva Convention. The petition alleged that the U.S. violated the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man. 

On Oct. 7, 2025, the second anniversary of Israel’s horrific genocide in Gaza, the petitioners filed an amended and expanded petition with the IACHR. It includes substantial evidence of the U.S. role in the Israeli campaign of starvation and adds new Palestinian-American petitioners. It also documents the sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration against UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, officials of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and Palestinian human rights organizations for their efforts to hold Israeli leaders accountable for their grave human rights violations. 

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September 29, 2025

As UN Turns 80, Trump Continues US Violation of Charter’s Limits on Use of Force

Donald Trump has ignored UN rules about attacking other nations, but he is not the first US president to do so.

In his inflammatory September 23 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump expressed contempt for the UN, falsely claiming he had ended seven wars and stating, “I realized that the United Nations wasn’t there for us. I thought of it really after the fact … that being the case, what is the purpose of the United Nations?”

If Trump studied history, he would know the answer to that question.

Eighty years ago, after two world wars claimed millions of lives, nations around the world — including the United States — came together and established the UN system “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

The UN Charter requires that all states settle their disputes peacefully and refrain from the use of armed force except in self-defense under Article 51, after an armed attack against a UN state by another state, or when the Security Council authorizes it.

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September 22, 2025

Teachers and Unions Fight Back as UC Campuses Prepare to Fuel Trump’s Witch Hunt

A coalition of University of California faculty, students, staff, and labor unions are suing the Trump administration.

Outrage flared last week about the University of California’s capitulation to this era’s resurgent McCarthyism, as news spread that the university has provided the names of at least 160 students, faculty members, and staff at the University of California, Berkeley, to federal officials who – under the guise of investigating “alleged antisemitic incidents” – are scrutinizing people who have expressed opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Judith Butler, a UC Berkeley philosophy professor and Jewish critic of the Israeli government, said in a recent interview with Democracy Now!, “There is no good evidence that antisemitism is rampant on campus,” adding, “To take a position against genocide is certainly not an antisemitic thing to do. Most Jews are against genocide, and we were taught to be against genocide, and we were taught, as well, that ‘never again’ is a slogan that should apply to all people.” Butler noted that most of those whose names were reported to the administration had not been apprised of the allegations against them.

A Truthout analysis of a voluntary agreement signed by the University of California and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights nine months ago reveals that more such disclosures from other schools may be yet to come. In December 2024, after the election of Donald Trump but under the auspices of the outgoing Biden administration, the University of California promised to also hand over names of people who either reported or were the subject of allegations of discrimination at five other University of California campuses – UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Davis, and UC Santa Cruz.

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September 4, 2025

Federal Judge Said Trump Can’t Be National Police Chief. Will His Word Be Final?

A federal district court held that Trump “willfully” violated the Posse Comitatus Act by sending troops to enforce immigration law in L.A.

Donald Trump appears fixated on “creating a national police force with the President as its chief,” U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer wrote, holding that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles to enforce the immigration laws was illegal. Trump has already sent troops to Washington, D.C., and has also set his sights on Oakland, San Francisco, Chicago, and Baltimore.

Trump will appeal the ruling. The appellate courts will determine whether he will be allowed to use the military as his personal police force, notwithstanding the clear command of the Posse Comitatus Act.

In his 52-page decision, Breyer ruled that defendants Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the Department of Defense “willfully” violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a 1878 law that prohibits the use of the military to enforce domestic laws. The act now forbids the willful use of “any part of the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a posse comitatus [power of the county] or otherwise to execute the laws.” It only allows exceptions that are expressly authorized by the Constitution or act of Congress, such as the Insurrection Act, which Trump did not invoke.

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August 29, 2025

The Supreme Court Asks Why It Shouldn’t Gut the Voting Rights Act


We may well see the elimination of the 11 Black-majority districts — all Democratic — in GOP-controlled Southern states.

In what may prove to be the most consequential redistricting case to come before the Supreme Court, Louisiana is urging the court to gut the main provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) and ban any consideration of race in redistricting. Louisiana filed its brief after the high court on August 1 asked the parties whether compliance with Section 2 of the (VRA) violates the Constitution’s 14th or 15th Amendments. By framing that question, the court may be signaling its intention to eviscerate the VRA.

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