At the same time, it is important to be clear about what Mamdani’s victory does and does not suggest about progressive politics more broadly, particularly outside Democratic strongholds like New York City. First, Mamdani’s victory in no way suggests that progressives everywhere can campaign as far left as possible on divisive social issues and still break through to working-class voters. On the contrary, Mamdani’s own strategy reflects an awareness of these limits: he took care to distance himself from earlier positions, like “defund the police,” that might have diverted attention away from his core economic message.

It is impressive that Mamdani prevailed despite a barrage of attacks against him, but this hardly means that he would have been similarly effective in a purple or red district. Indeed, Mamdani overcame pushback against some of his more controversial stances in large part because the electorate he faced was quite progressive, and therefore comparatively forgiving. The Democratic primary electorate in New York City contains an unusually high share of college-educated voters, as much as 55 percent. These voters, who are substantially more progressive on social and cultural issues than noncollege graduates, make up only about 35% of general election voters in key swing states. It’s hard to imagine Mamdani overcoming the same attacks in that kind of electoral setting.

To build the national coalitions we need to stop Trumpism and deliver meaningful gains to working people, progressives still have to grapple with how to win back the many working-class voters of all backgrounds they have lost over the past decades. There is no shortcut to this struggle.

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/zohran-mamdani-national-lessons-progressive-democrats/

The Left’s best response to the birth rate crisis has two components, both of which position us advantageously against conservative alternatives while advancing our broader political project. The first component is that we must insist on a multifactorial explanation for fertility decline. Contra the Right’s simplification of the issue, many different factors converge to produce declining birth rates. Some need to be staunchly defended, and some desperately need to be fixed. That should be our line.

While we don’t know to what extent, it’s clear that birth rate decline owes partly to hard-won expanded freedoms and measures of social progress that should not be rolled back. These positive factors include expanded access to birth control and abortion, which reduces unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, and women’s integration into the public sphere, which has broken the system of spousal financial dependency in developed democracies and given women sources of self-worth beyond motherhood. Even if these changes have depressed birth rates, they are still defensible on principle and beneficial to society as a whole.

However, other major contributing factors clearly include social problems that the Left wants to fix anyway. Chief among these is the economic dimension. Poverty, precarity, economic inequality, and exploitation are already intolerable to us, because they artificially limit the life prospects of most people on Earth today. The inability to have desired children is yet another of the many profoundly painful and unfair externalities of this particular issue.

https://jacobin.com/2025/07/birth-rate-fertility-economics-conservatism/

From the first sentence to the last, the hearing was a farce. It ended with a vote of 14-2 in favor of the proposal, supported by all Jewish members of the committee — including those from opposition parties — and opposed only by two lone Palestinian MKs. The hearing was closed by committee chair Ofir Katz, of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, who called Odeh a “routine supporter of terror” and declared that he “should rot in prison.” The proposal will now pass to a vote of the whole Knesset, requiring a supermajority of 90 MKs out of 120 to finalize Odeh’s expulsion.

The intended function of the “Impeachment Law,” which passed in 2016, was clear from the outset: giving Jewish lawmakers the power to expel Arab lawmakers.

Under the law, the only reason a sitting MK can be impeached is if their actions constitute “incitement to racism” or “support for armed struggle against the State of Israel.” In other words, lawmakers who are thieves, rapists, pimps, witness tamperers or just plain corrupt, have nothing to worry about. Nor do those who call for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank or the genocide of those in Gaza; certainly, that cannot be considered “incitement to violence.”

Rather than protecting minority rights from the tyranny of the majority, an expanded panel of Israel’s High Court unanimously rejected petitions against the law in 2018, opting to empower Jewish parliamentarians — famously wise, fair, and judicious when it comes to their Arab counterparts — to remove those elected to represent over 20 percent of the country’s population.

https://www.972mag.com/ayman-odeh-knesset-palestinian-voters/

My parents came here with less than $20. They grew up poor in India, especially my father. After being displaced during Partition, his family of ten squatted in an abandoned house before “upgrading” to a one-bedroom apartment. He often went days without food. But he was lucky to have a solid education because my grandfather was a teacher who ended up starting the local public school for all the neighborhood kids.

In the United States, my dad was able to get a job within a week of arriving despite having no connections, and, on a single income, was able to afford a solid, middle-class life for me and my family. Growing up, I had everything I needed: a roof over my head, food on the table, and a great public school education in Fort Worth, Texas.

My parents’ story has always stuck with me precisely because of how common it actually was. Millions of immigrants who came here during that time had a similar story. So did hundreds of millions of Americans who, starting with the New Deal and all the way to the 1970s, accomplished one of the biggest leaps in incomes and living standards that humanity has ever seen. I’ve always been awed by that accomplishment, and the core driver of my politics and work over the last decade has been the belief that we can do it again.

https://jacobin.com/2025/07/saikat-chakrabarti-democrats-california-congress/

Israel is majorly restricting visas for UN humanitarian affairs workers seeking entry into Gaza, seemingly in attempts to deepen the humanitarian catastrophe there, after effectively barring the top humanitarian official for the region from entering this weekend.

On Sunday, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said that they will not renew the visa of Jonathan Whittall, the head of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for the occupied Palestinian territories. Whittall is being forced to leave Israel by July 29, as a result of his criticism of Israel amid its genocide in Gaza.

Israel’s envoy to the United Nations, Danny Danon, also told the UN Security Council that Israel will no longer auto-renew visas for international OCHA staff to work in Gaza. Instead, authorities will only be renewing visas on a one-month basis, with OCHA staff forced to undergo “security vetting.”

https://truthout.org/articles/israel-restricting-visas-for-un-humanitarian-workers-for-gaza-amid-starvation/

L’attesa di vita alla nascita nella Striscia è diminuita di circa 35 anni nel 2024, passando da 75,5 a soli 40,5 anni. Se confermato, questo dato non avrebbe precedenti storici recenti, nemmeno durante il genocidio ruandese del 1994. E allora, è giunta l’ora perché anche le associazioni mediche facciano sentire la loro voce

È altrettanto tremendo il fatto che Gaza ha la più alta percentuale di bambini amputati al mondo e che, secondo uno studio sui bambini che hanno vissuto il conflitto, il 49 per cento desiderava morire, il 96 per cento credeva che la propria morte fosse imminente. Infine, secondo l’Oms, l’esercito israeliano ha effettuato 720 attacchi contro obiettivi sanitari nella Striscia (125 strutture sanitarie, 34 ospedali e 186 ambulanze). Medici senza frontiere stima che in questi attacchi siano morti circa 1.400 operatori sanitari, oltre a un numero certamente superiore di malati che le strutture bombardate ospitavano.

https://www.editorialedomani.it/idee/commenti/gaza-medici-carestia-morte-aspettativa-di-vita-israele-a988pi62

According to new analysis by the Climate and Community Institute (CCI), recent increases in Pentagon spending alone will produce an additional 26 megatons (Mt) of planet-heating gases — on a par with the annual carbon equivalent (CO2e) emissions generated by 68 gas power plants or the entire country of Croatia.

With the Pentagon’s 2026 budget set to surge to $1 trillion (a 17% or $150 billion increase from 2023), its total greenhouse emissions will also increase to a staggering 178 Mt of CO2e. This will make the U.S. military and its industrial apparatus the 38th largest emitter in the world if it were its own nation. It will also result in an estimated $47 billion in economic damages globally, including impacts on agriculture, human health, and property from extreme weather, according to the EPA’s social cost of carbon calculator.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/nato-climate-change/