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/

In a damning report published in January, ProPublica dissected the many ways that the Biden administration kept shifting the goalposts in Israel’s favor after 7 October 2023. Remember the threats of sanctions against Israel for invading Rafah? (It’s a “red line,” Biden said.) Or the 30-day ultimatum placed on Israel to dramatically increase the food aid? But nothing happened. Outside briefly pausing a shipment of 2,000lb (0.9 tonne) bombs, the military hardware kept on coming.

The Leahy law requires restricting assistance to military units of foreign governments engaged in gross human rights violations. It has never been applied to Israel. In April 2024, it looked like secretary of state Antony Blinken was about to sanction Netzah Yehuda, a notorious battalion in the Israeli Defense Forces, under the Leahy law. In the end, he punted, and the battalion not only escaped US sanctions, but according to CNN, its commanders were even assigned to train ground troops and run operations in Gaza.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, told ProPublica. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/jul/06/destruction-of-palestine-is-breaking-the-world