Human Rights Glance
The Justice Department released a memo this week that quietly calls into question decades of civil rights protections for Americans with disabilities and stirred fear and anger among advocates and families.
The memo, an opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, argues that states do not have to provide in-home or community-based care to people with disabilities who need support. These services allow many disabled Americans to continue to live, learn and work at home or in their own communities, among family and friends.
"It is now the position of the United States government that people with disabilities don't have a right to be part of their communities," says Alison Barkoff, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University who led disability law and policy efforts during both the Obama and Biden administrations. "I can't overstate how significant this change in position is."
DOJ memo stokes fear among disability advocates of a return to institutionalization
Israeli Strikes Kill 6, Including 2 Children And Al Jazeera Cameraman
Israeli strikes in Gaza on Saturday killed at least six people, including two children and a cameraman with broadcaster Al Jazeera, according to Palestinian health officials.
Despite an October ceasefire between Israel and the militant group Hamas, the enclave has seen near-daily Israeli attacks that have killed over 1,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The first strike on Saturday hit an apartment in Gaza City around 2 a.m., according to the ministry. At the site, an Associated Press reporter saw rubble and chunks of concrete stained with blood.
Juneteenth: How news of the Emancipation Proclamation spread through the South
Weeks after the Civil War's guns fell silent and barely two months after President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas. They had come to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, an order freeing enslaved people in seceded Confederate states. And the date they arrived — June 19, 1865 — is now remembered as the first "Juneteenth."
The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued years earlier during the war, on Jan. 1, 1863. It's the version most commonly emphasized in history books: the executive order that Lincoln himself reportedly said was "the great event of the nineteenth century" and his lasting legacy.
But word of such an order had already been circulating throughout the South for months. A preliminary proclamation, which contained much the same wording as the historic order, was issued on Sept. 22, 1862, days after the Battle of Antietam — the single bloodiest day in American military history. The purpose of it was to "warn that if the Confederate states don't return to the Union by January 1st, [Lincoln] will in fact issue a final proclamation," according to Harold Holzer, a Lincoln historian.
Not all enslaved people immediately knew about Lincoln's orders, but many learned of it while the fighting was still raging. Rumors spread through informal networks, sometimes inadvertently from slaveholders themselves, says Holzer, who directs the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York.
Slaveholders would often discuss the proclamation right in front of the people they enslaved, he says. They wrongly assumed that since enslaved people were prohibited from reading and writing, they would be oblivious to discussion of events around them.
Greek Orthodox Patriarchate denounces Israeli seizure of church land in Jerusalem
The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem has denounced the “unlawful and illegitimate” Israeli seizure of its property in occupied East Jerusalem.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Patriarchate said that it "expressed grave concern over the Israeli raid and land grab targeting its Church property in Silwan".
During the operation, which took place on Monday, “the Patriarchate’s representative was forcibly removed, his equipment was confiscated, trees were uprooted, and the property was enclosed with fencing and gates”.
It said that the disputed land, which is adjacent to the Monastery of St Onuphrius, is registered under its ownership, and warned that this seizure “sets a dangerous precedent for Church rights in Jerusalem”.
Nearly 100 UK MPs and peers urge cancellation of Israeli settlement event
Nearly 100 British MPs and peers have signed a letter calling for an upcoming London event advertising the sale of land in illegal Israeli settlements to be cancelled, warning that it could implicate the UK in international war crimes.
The Great Israeli Real Estate Event is scheduled to be held in London this Sunday, but its location is being kept secret.
Andy McDonald, an MP for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East, published the statement on X on Friday, urging the UK government to prevent the Great Israeli Real Estate Event from taking place.
"The govt has an opportunity to uphold obligations under international law and take action against Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine," McDonald wrote.
The letter, sent to Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, described the event as "firmly embedded in Israel's project of colonial expansion" as it facilitates the sale of land seized from displaced Palestinians.
‘It’s torture’: prisoners’ letters expose subterranean Oklahoma ‘dungeon’ known as the tombs
Down here in the tombs, there aren’t any windows,” writes Tremane Wood from inside his cell, in a modern-day American “dungeon” that few people have ever heard of.
“It’s really like living in cave,” he writes in another letter. “It’s dark and damp. Sometimes this place drives people mad. The hardest part is the isolation.”
Or in another: “You end up loosing [sic] track of days and nights and what day it is … It’s a real form of psychological torture that some people never come back from.”
Wood, 46, spent 17 years incarcerated in H Unit – the underground cells at the state prison in the rural town of McAlester, Oklahoma, where no natural light ever reaches.
According to prisoner letters seen by the Guardian and published here for the first time, H Unit – also known by the prisoners as the “tombs” – features a series of windowless cells that are built banked into the earth. The letters also tell of infestations of vermin, unsanitary conditions, and frequent instances of physical and sexual violence.
Israel 'emptying' Al-Aqsa facilities to undermine Waqf, watchdog warns
Israel has emptied four facilities within the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex that served as offices for the Islamic Waqf, in what a monitoring group has described as an escalating campaign against the Jordanian-backed body.
The Al-Quds International Institution, a Palestinian organisation that monitors developments in Jerusalem, said on Tuesday that Israeli authorities have used "manufactured security pretexts" to target the facilities.
According to the group, Israeli forces raided the sites in recent months, broke their locks and prevented the installation of replacements.
The facilities were then left open, while anyone attempting to enter them was expelled because they had been used for "activities that threaten security".
The four sites are the Dome of Imam al-Ghazali, located above the Bab al-Rahma prayer hall along the eastern wall of the complex; Dar al-Hadith al-Sharif in the northeastern section of Al-Aqsa; Qubbat Sulayman, an open-air domed shrine opposite King Faisal Gate; and Qubbat Musa, located near Bab al-Silsila (Chain Gate).
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