Sunday, May 04th
Last update07:06:21 AM GMT
It’s Jackie Robinson Day on Tuesday, with every player wearing No. 42, teams holding ceremonies, ballparks showing video tributes, and Major League Baseball reminding America that he helped spearhead the Civil Rights movement in 1947 with the integration of its sport.
Yet, here we are 78 years later, and the African-American player population on opening-day rosters and injured lists this season is 6%. There are three Black managers. There is one Black general manager.
“It’s infuriating. I think it's the new kind of antisemitism. It's just using Jews in a very cynical way.”
This is what Israeli Columbia PhD student Sahar Bostock told Zeteo regarding the Trump administration’s arrest of Palestinian Columbia undergraduate Mohsen Mahdawi on Monday. And she’s not alone in feeling this way. Students and professors spoke fondly of Mahdawi, a green card holder who was detained at his scheduled citizenship interview.
Mahdawi was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp, in the occupied West Bank. As a child, he watched an Israeli soldier shoot and kill his best friend. After arriving in the US 10 years ago, he went to Lehigh University to study computer science, before transferring to Columbia to study philosophy. While there, he organized with Palestinian and Jewish students towards peace, served as Columbia’s Buddhist Association president, and co-founded the Palestinian Student Union, alongside now-fellow-detained classmate Mahmoud Khalil.
Harvard University is very rich. On that, most people agree.
Whether it’s rich enough to get through the next four years unscathed is less certain.
On Monday, the Ivy League school’s leaders took the bold step of publicly rejecting a sprawling list of demands from President Donald Trump’s administration. Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, rebuked the government’s ultimatum, which directed the university to overhaul its admissions, hiring and teaching practices – or risk losing billions in federal funding.
“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber wrote in a public statement. “No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
The consequences of Harvard’s defiance were swift.
A Mississippi church deacon was fatally shot while trying to protect people from a dispute that broke out during an Easter egg hunt hosted by his church, witnesses and law enforcement said.
Empowerment Ministries Christian Center in Gulfport, Mississippi, identified the deacon as Eddie Shed and said he died on April 12 while trying to "save others from harm" at the church's Easter egg hunt at Jack and Florence Goldin Park in Gulfport.
The Gulfport Police Department said the shooting stemmed from a "child custody dispute" and that two people who tried to "de-escalate the fight" were hit by gunfire, as well as the suspect. Shed was pronounced dead at the scene and another person was airlifted to an out-of-state hospital.
A federal judge declined Tuesday to hold the Trump administration in contempt for failing to return a Maryland father wrongly deported to El Salvador but admonished government attorneys for failing to provide evidence of what they were doing to bring him home.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland ordered the U.S. to show what steps it is taking to comply with a court ruling to release Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who was expelled from the U.S. in March.
Xinis said Abrego Garcia's attorneys would be allowed to take the sworn testimony of government officials in the case and that the process could take two weeks.
"There will be no tolerance for gamesmanship and grandstanding," she said.
A Palestinian man in Gaza has described losing his aunt to cancer when she was denied treatment because Israel had bombed the only hospitals able to treat her illness in the territory.
Speaking to Al Jazeera earlier, Ahmad Al Najjar described the “apocalyptic conditions” created by the ongoing Israeli bombing campaign, which has included the systematic demolition of Gaza’s health system by the Israeli military.
Gaza is “not a place that you want to be sick”, said Al Najjar, explaining how the destruction of the Strip has traumatised thousands of people and stopped those with injuries and preventable illnesses in Israeli attacks from receiving treatment.
“Just by witnessing what we are experiencing in the Gaza Strip is perfectly sufficiently to wipe out the sanity of an human being,” he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused U.S. Vice President JD Vance of “somehow justifying” Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, his most critical comments about the top American politician since their heated Oval Office exchange in February.
Speaking to American news program 60 Minutes, Zelenskyy said some officials in the U.S. government were falling victim to Russian disinformation and pushing an “altered reality” about which side started the war.
“I believe, sadly, Russian narratives are prevailing in the U.S.,” he said, according to a translation of his remarks by CBS. “This speaks to the enormous influence of Russia’s information policy on America, on U.S. politics and U.S. politicians.”
The US education department is freezing about $2.3bn in federal funds to Harvard University, the agency said on Monday.
The announcement comes after the Ivy League school has decided to fight the White House’s demands that it crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations, including shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws,” said a member of a department taskforce on combating antisemitism in a statement.
The education department taskforce on combating antisemitism said in a statement it was freezing $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard.
A Massachusetts-born immigration attorney is questioning how many people are being wrongly instructed by the federal government to self-deport after she says she received an email from the Department of Homeland Security telling her to leave the U.S. “immediately” because her “parole” was terminated.
Nicole Micheroni shared the email to her Bluesky account Friday, stating that she knew it was sent to her in error and so wasn’t worried, “but what about the people the emails were actually aimed at?”
“It is time for you to leave the United States,” reads the email attributed to DHS, which has sent out similar versions to non-U.S. citizens who entered the U.S. using the CBP One mobile app. That app was set up during the Biden administration to facilitate border crossings before it was canceled by President Donald Trump.
I never took DHS's scary-sounding notice that I had 7 days to leave the country too seriously, because it was obviously some kind of mistake. But what about the people the emails were actually aimed at? Let's talk a bit about immigration "parole" and what Trump is doing here.
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