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      Amid the anger and hate, this is the big question: can societies still summon empathy? | Keith Magee

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      Something is happening, and we see it on both sides of the Atlantic. On the surface, it is about flags, identity and political allegiance. But to me, as an American living in Britain, recent events reveal something deeper: both our societies are normalising hate ​and othering in ways that corrode not only our politics but our souls.The something is aggressions and micro-aggressions: a coarsening of everyday encounters. I have snapshots. Recently, at a celebrated creative hub in London, I twice endured blatant bias. My guests and I – the only all-Black table in the room – were left in the dark, literally. As night fell, every other table was given a lamp except ours. When I raised it with management, I was interrupted, dismissed and told it was an oversight. A Black staff member was sent to smooth things over​. An official later told me that while they had “a different view of what happened”, they accepted that this was “how [I] experienced it” and admitted it “fell short of [their] usual standards”. My Blackness was overlooked, diminished and dismissed – while whiteness was appreciated, affirmed and celebrated, in a space that loudly markets itself as a home of “belonging”.​The pendulum has swung back. Much more overt aggression is normalised in a way I haven’t seen in years. Recently in US airports and restaurants, I ​have been called the N-word: a word ​historically intended not ​just to insult, but to erase.These are not minor indignities. They are signs of a culture where suspicion and prejudice are no longer whispered but weaponised. In Colorado, three students were critically wounded after a school shooting. In Minnesota, political leaders were among those targeted in a mass attack by an assailant who compiled a sprawling “hitlist” of dozens of Democrats, though investigators noted he appeared to hold few consistent or coherent ideological beliefs. In Sweden, 10 students and staff members were killed in a tragic attack at an adult education centre in Örebro – a case in which police confirmed “there was nothing … to suggest he had acted on ideological grounds”. Here in Britain, far-right activity and asylum seeker protests have surged, fuelled by a combination of inflammatory rhetoric and relative silence from political leaders.What unites these threads is not ideology but a deficit of empathy. And without empathy, democracies falter.Martin Luther King Jr warned: “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.” Hatred, he knew, corrodes the hater as much as the hated. Love, by contrast, is the only force capable of transforming both. This is not abstract philosophy. It is lived truth.And the message of Jesus Christ was never about defending doctrines or drawing boundaries of purity. It was a message of radical love – love that crossed lines, embraced the despised and saw the soul beyond the sin. That is the love the world is starving for today.Rabbi Jonathan Sacks made the same case in his 2015 book Not in God’s Name: “We are all children of Abraham … God is calling us, Jew, Christian and Muslim, to let go of hate and the preaching of hate, and live at last as brothers and sisters … honouring God’s name by honouring his image, humankind.” His challenge was theological, yes, but also civic. Societies cannot thrive if they are built on grievance. Empathy must become a public practice woven into our schools, workplaces and laws. Politicians who thrive on division should be held accountable not only for what they say but for the cultures of cruelty they foster.Even in the US, where free speech is sacrosanct, presidents have acknowledged, rhetorically at least, that liberty cannot mean licence. “We must love each other, show affection for each other, and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry, and violence,” the Trump White House once declared. That statement should apply to every American citizen – bar none – and to every society that claims to be democratic.From Britain’s protests to the US’s violence, public theatre often drowns out deeper questions. The real issue is not which side shouts louder, but whether societies can still summon empathy in an age addicted to division. Free speech is vital for democracy – but without empathy and responsibility, it becomes a blunt instrument that wounds the vulnerable while shielding the powerful.Here in Britain, empathy would mean confronting racism where it hides in plain sight: in private clubs that celebrate whiteness while ignoring Blackness, and in everyday encounters where bias is excused as banter. It would mean reshaping our politics so grievance is not weaponised but grace is prioritised.This is not about sentimentality. Empathy is not naivety. It is an act of moral courage. It means refusing to define people solely by their worst moments. It means seeing the soul in the person across from us – even when their words wound.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI feel outraged when a waiter – or anyone – calls me a nigger, because the word is meant to erase me. But I do not feel hatred. Hatred corrodes the soul. Outrage, when held rightly, becomes the fuel for truth-telling – for refusing to allow dignity to be diminished or injustice to be normalised. My hope is that even in the face of such ugliness, we can build a society where empathy does the work that hate once claimed: binding us together, not tearing us apart.I think often of my son. He is growing up in a world more toxic than the one I inherited. He will face choices about whether to meet cruelty with cruelty or to answer it with love. What I want him to know; what I want us all to know, is that empathy is not weakness. It is strength. It is the refusal to let hate dictate who we are. In the end, it is the only inheritance worth leaving behind.I think, too, of another child: Charlie Kirk’s son in the US. One will grow up without his father; my own will grow up watching what that boy’s father stood for. Two boys, oceans apart, but inheriting the same question: will we break the cycle of hate? My prayer is that, in different ways, both will come to know this: the only way forward, the only way to heal what is broken, is love.

      Keith Magee is a theologian and author, and chairs the Guardian Foundation More

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      Chinese executive jailed for 25 years in US for trafficking fentanyl chemicals

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      A Chinese company executive has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for trafficking in chemicals used to manufacture fentanyl, the US justice department has said.Qingzhou Wang, 37, principal executive of Amarvel Biotech, a company based in Wuhan, and Yiyi Chen, 33, the firm’s marketing manager, were convicted in New York in February of fentanyl precusor importation and money laundering.District judge Paul Gardephe sentenced Wang to 25 years in prison on Friday. Chen was sentenced to 15 years in prison on 22 August.“These executives turned a Chinese chemical company into a pipeline of poison, shipping hundreds of kilos of fentanyl-related precursors into the United States, disguising them as everyday goods, and cashing in through cryptocurrency,” Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief Terrance Cole said in a statement.Wang and Chen were among eight Chinese nationals and four Chinese companies charged by the justice department in June 2023 with trafficking fentanyl precursor chemicals into the US.It was the first time the United States had charged Chinese companies for trafficking fentanyl precursor chemicals inside the United States, rather than shipping them to Mexico, the origin of most of the fentanyl found in the country.Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more powerful than heroin and much easier and cheaper to produce. It has largely replaced heroin and prescription opioids such as oxycodone as a cause of overdoses in the United States.The June 2023 indictment of the Chinese executives and companies drew protests from Beijing.“It is completely illegal and seriously damages the basic human rights of Chinese citizens and Chinese companies,” the Chinese foreign ministry said at the time. “China strongly condemns this.”Although Mexico has been the main source of fentanyl sold in the United States, Washington has increasingly focused its attention on China-based suppliers of ingredients. More

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      RFK Jr’s vaccine advisers remove prescription need for Covid vaccine, emphasizing personal choice

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      A powerful committee that advises the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccine policy voted on Friday against recommending that people obtain a prescription for a Covid-19 vaccine. However, the panel also voted to recommend that people speak with a clinician before obtaining the shot and that coronavirus vaccinations should be based on “individual-based decision making”.The votes on the recommendations came after hours of impassioned debate that, at times, devolved into confusion and apparent animosity over the committee’s procedures and the safety of vaccines. Healthcare professionals and experts following the committee’s meeting were also left deeply confused about the significance of the committee’s votes and recommendations, and whether they would make it more difficult for people to obtain Covid vaccines.The recommendation over Covid vaccine prescriptions left the panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), sharply divided, as six members voted to adopt it while six voted to reject it. The chair, Martin Kulldorff, broke the tie by voting against the recommendation.Among other votes, the committee also voted to recommend the CDC “engages in an effort to promote more consistent and comprehensive informed consent processes”, including potentially highlighting six “risks and uncertainties” around Covid vaccines. But it offered little guidance on what this wording may look like in practice. It was also not entirely clear what “individual-based decision making” – which the committee also called “shared clinical decision making” – would entail, although the committee wanted the process to be different for patients under 65 and those over 65.The committee’s recommendations can determine which vaccines are provided free of charge through the US government, shape state and local laws around vaccine requirements, and influence which vaccines health insurers tend to cover.Now, the committee’s moves are sure to further complicate the already fragmented landscape of vaccine availability.The vaccine landscape has changed rapidly since Robert F Kennedy, who has long questioned the safety of vaccines, took control of the US Department of Health and Human Services.In August, the Food and Drug Administration approved updated versions of the Covid-19 vaccine only for people who are 65 or older or for people who have a medical condition that renders them high risk. That move unleashed widespread bewilderment over whether young, healthy people can still get vaccinated against Covid.Some pharmacy chains, like CVS and Walgreens, said they would require prescriptions for the vaccine or cease offering them entirely in some states. Other states, including New York, moved to protect access to the vaccine for people who don’t have prescriptions.Kennedy fired the previous iteration of the advisory committee and instead appointed several advisers who have little to no documented expertise with vaccines, or have criticized them heavily. That lack of experience came into focus repeatedly during the committee’s two-day meeting.On Thursday, during the first day of the meeting, the committee voted to recommend that children receive multiple shots to protect against mumps, measles, rubella and varicella – or chicken pox – rather than a single vaccine. But afterward, when asked to vote on whether they would recommend that Vaccines for Children, a US government program that provides free vaccines to low-income children, continue covering the combined MMRV vaccine, many of the members seemed unsure of what Vaccines for Children was.However, they initially voted to maintain Vaccines for Children’s coverage of the combined MMRV vaccine. Then, on Friday morning, the committee voted to reverse that vote and instead eliminate coverage for the combined vaccine.The Friday meeting was punctuated by highly tense outbursts. A microphone caught one member calling another “an idiot”, although it wasn’t clear who was speaking. During one barbed exchange, one member demanded of another: “Show me that study!”At one point, a member took the floor to announce that the discussions at the meeting had demonstrated that “we are not, as a committee, anti-vaxxers”.A planned vote on the hepatitis B vaccine was also tabled after members pointed out inconsistencies in the wording of the vote and suggested that they would prefer to recommend delaying the hepatitis B vaccine until even later in a child’s life. Although voting had begun, the members ultimately decided to postpone the vote until at least their next meeting.Experts who spoke to the committee at the meeting highlighted the members’ tendency to raise hypothetical situations, opinions and anecdotal experiences, rather than focusing on data that demonstrates the safety of Covid vaccines.“Relying on case reports, anecdotes and selected basic science data – is that enough to justify a change in policy or a recommendation that limits an effective vaccine?” said Grant Paulsen, who spoke on behalf of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society.“I would encourage the committee to make decisions based on the data rather than theoretical concerns that are raised. Those are certainly valid concerns – I’m not here to dismiss them. Continued monitoring, continuing research is vital, but really should not be a barrier to families looking to access this tool to protect their children.” More

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      Judges rule against Trump administration on deporting Guatemalan children and Venezuelans

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      The Trump administration has been handed a double defeat by judges in immigration cases, barring the executive branch from deporting a group of Guatemalan children and from slashing protections for many Venezuelans in the US.A federal judge on Thursday ordered the administration to refrain from deporting Guatemalan unaccompanied immigrant children with active immigration cases while a legal challenge plays out.Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee based in Washington DC, kept in place an earlier judicial block on the policy, sharply criticizing the administration’s unproven assertion that the children’s parents wanted them deported.The administration attempted to deport 76 Guatemalan minors being held in US custody in a surprise move in the early morning on 31 August, sparking a lawsuit and emergency hearing that temporarily halted the move.The Department of Justice lawyer Drew Ensign initially said that the children’s parents had requested they be returned home, but the department later withdrew that claim. Reuters published a Guatemalan government report saying that most parents of the roughly 600 Guatemalan children in US custody could not be contacted and of those who could, many did not want their children forced back to the country.Kelly said the justice department’s explanation “crumbled like a house of cards” in light of that report.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the justice department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Kelly said some children were unexpectedly taken from their shelter beds in the middle of the night, driven to the airport and, in some cases, put on planes, leaving them worried and confused. At one shelter in McAllen, Texas, a young girl was so scared that she vomited, Kelly wrote, citing evidence submitted in the case.Immigrant children who arrive at US borders without a parent or guardian are classified as unaccompanied and sent to federal government-run shelters until they can be placed with a family member or foster home, a process outlined in federal law.Meanwhile, late on Wednesday, a federal appeals court rejected an attempt by the Trump administration to set aside a judge’s order holding that it unlawfully rolled back temporary protections from deportation granted to 600,000 Venezuelans living in the US.A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals declined to pause a judge’s 5 September ruling holding that the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, lacked the authority to end the program, known as temporary protected status or TPS.“Vacating and terminating Venezuela’s TPS status threw the future of these Venezuelan citizens into disarray, and exposed them to a substantial risk of wrongful removal, separation from their families, and loss of employment,” the panel said.The justice department has said that if a stay were denied, it might take the case to the US supreme court, which in May put on hold an earlier injunction Chen issued and cleared the way for the administration to end temporary protections for about 348,000 of the Venezuelans at issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the DHS, in a statement said the ninth circuit’s ruling “is nothing short of open defiance against the US Supreme Court”. The administration had contended the supreme court’s May decision meant Chen’s latest ruling had to be similarly paused.“Luckily for us, and for all Americans, the Ninth Circuit is not the last stop,” McLaughlin said.TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event. It provides eligible migrants with work authorization and temporary protection from deportation. The program was created in 1991 and extended under Joe Biden to cover about 600,000 Venezuelans and 521,000 Haitians. Noem reversed the extensions, saying they were no longer justified, prompting legal challenges.Chen’s decision had also applied to 521,000 Haitians. The administration did not ask the ninth circuit to put that part of Chen’s ruling on hold as a second judge in New York had already blocked the revocation of the Haitians’ status. More

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      ‘I had teachers crying’: the schools trying to plug million-dollar funding holes after Trump cuts

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      In the time it took to read an email, the federal money vanished before Eisa Cox’s eyes: dollars that supported the Ashe county, North Carolina, school district’s after-school program, training for its teachers and salaries for some jobs.The email from the US Department of Education arrived 30 June, a day before the money – $1.1m in total – was set to materialize for the rural western district. Instead, the dollars were frozen pending a review to make sure the money was spent “in accordance with the president’s priorities”, the email said.In a community still recovering from Hurricane Helene, where more than half of students are considered economically disadvantaged, Cox said there was no way they could replace that federal funding for the school system she oversees as superintendent. “It is scary to think about it,” she said. “You’re getting ready to open school and not have a significant pot of funds.”School leaders across the country were reeling from the same news. The $1.1m was one small piece of a nearly $7bn pot of federal funding for thousands of school districts that the Trump administration froze – money approved by Congress and that schools were scheduled to receive on 1 July. For weeks, leaders in Ashe county and around the country scrambled to figure out how they could avoid layoffs and fill financial holes – until the money was freed on 25 July, after an outcry from legislators and a lawsuit joined by two dozen states.“I had teachers crying, staff members crying. They thought they were going to lose their jobs a week before school,” said Curtis Finch, superintendent of Deer Valley unified school district in Phoenix, Arizona.View image in fullscreenNow, as students are back in classrooms, their school systems can no longer count on federal dollars as they once did. They must learn to plan without a playbook under a president intent on cutting education spending. For many districts, federal money is a small but crucial sliver of their budgets, potentially touching every part of a school’s operations, from teacher salaries to textbooks. Nationally, it accounts for about 14% of public school funding; in Ashe county, it’s 17%. School administrators are examining their resources now and budgeting for losses to funding that was frozen this summer, for English learners and for after-school and other programs.So far, the Trump administration has not proposed cutting the largest pots of federal money for schools, which go to services for students with disabilities and to schools with large numbers of low-income students. But the current budget proposal from the US House of Representatives would do just that.At the same time, forthcoming cuts to other federal support for low-income families under the Republican One Big, Beautiful Bill Act – including Medicaid and Snap, previously known as food stamps – will also hammer schools that have many students living in poverty. Some school districts are also grappling with the elimination of Department of Education grants announced earlier this year, such as those designed to address teacher shortages and disability services. In politically conservative communities like this one, there’s an added tension for schools that rely on federal money to operate: how to sound the alarm while staying out of partisan politics.For Ashe county, the federal spending freeze collided with the district’s attempt at a fresh start after the devastation of Helene, which demolished roads and homes, damaged school buildings and knocked power and cell service out for weeks. Between the storm and snow days, students here missed 47 days of instruction.Cox worries this school year might bring more missed days. That first week of school, she found herself counting the number of foggy mornings: an old Appalachian wives’ tale says to put a bean in a jar for every morning of fog in August. The number of beans at the end of the month is how many snow days will come in winter.“We’ve had 21 so far,” Cox said with a nervous laugh on 21 August.A funding freeze rollercoasterFragrant evergreen trees blanket Ashe county’s hills, a region that bills itself as America’s Christmas tree capital because of the millions of Fraser firs grown for sale at the holidays. Yet this picturesque area still shows scars of Hurricane Helene’s destruction: fallen trees, damaged homes and rocky new paths cut through the mountainsides by mudslides. Nearly a year after the storm, the lone grocery store in one of its small towns is still being rebuilt. A sinkhole that formed during the flooding remains, splitting open the ground behind an elementary school.As students walked into classrooms for the first time since spring, Julie Taylor – the district’s director of federal programs – was reworking district budget spreadsheets. When federal funds were frozen, and then unfrozen, her plans and calculations from months prior became meaningless.Federal and state funding stretches far in this district of 2,700 students and six schools, where administrators do a lot with a little. Even before this summer, they worked hard to supplement that funding in any way possible – applying for state and federal grants, like one last year that provided money for a few mobile hotspots for families who don’t have internet access. Such opportunities are also narrowing: the Federal Communications Commission, for example, recently proposed ending its mobile hotspot grant program for school buses and libraries.View image in fullscreen“We’re very fiscally responsible because we have to be. We’re small and rural. We don’t have a large tax base,” Taylor said.When the money was frozen this summer, administrators’ minds went to the educators and kids who would be most affected. Some of it was meant to pay for a program through Appalachian State University that connects the district’s three dozen early career teachers with a mentor, helping them learn how to schedule their school days and manage classroom behavior.The program is part of the reason the district’s retention rate for early career teachers is 92%, Taylor said, noting the teachers have said how much the mentoring meant to them.Also frozen: free after-school care the district provides for about 250 children throughout the school year – the only after-school option in the community. Without the money, Cox said, schools would have had to cancel their after-school care or start charging families, a significant burden in a county with a median household income of about $50,000.Will assistance for immigrant students go away?The salary for Michelle Pelayo, the district’s migrant education program coordinator for nearly two decades, was also tied up in that pot of funding. Because agriculture is the county’s biggest industry, Pelayo’s work extends far beyond the students at the school. Each year, she works with the families of dozens of immigrant students who move to the county for seasonal work on farms, which generally involves tagging and bundling Christmas trees and harvesting pumpkins. Pelayo helps the families enroll their students, connects them with supplies for school and home, and serves as a Spanish translator for parent-teacher meetings – “whatever they need”, she said.Kitty Honeycutt, executive director of the Ashe county chamber of commerce, doesn’t know how the county’s agriculture industry would survive without the immigrant families Pelayo works with. “The need for guest workers is crucial for the agriculture industry. We have to have them,” she said.A couple of years ago, Pelayo had the idea to drive to Boone, North Carolina, where Appalachian State University’s campus sits, to gather unwanted appliances and supplies from students moving out of their dorm rooms at the end of the year to donate to immigrant families. She’s a “find a way or make a way” type of person, Honeycutt said.Cox is searching for how to keep Pelayo on if Ashe county loses these federal funds next year. She’s talked with county officials to see whether they could pay Pelayo’s salary, and has begun calculating how much the district would need to charge families to keep the after-school program running. Ideally, she’d know ahead of time and not the night before the district is set to receive the money.Around the nationDistricts across the country are grappling with similar questions. In Detroit, school leaders are preparing, at a minimum, to lose Title III money to teach English learners; more than 7,200 Detroit students received services funded by Title III in 2023.In Wyoming, the small, rural Sheridan county school district 3 is trying to budget without Title II, IV and V money – funding for improving teacher quality, updating technology and resources for rural and low-income schools, among other uses, the superintendent Chase Christensen said.Schools are trying to budget for cuts to other federal programs, too, such as Medicaid and food stamps. In Harrison school district 2, an urban district in Colorado Springs, schools rely on Medicaid to provide students with counseling, nursing and other services.The district projects that it could lose half the $15m it receives in Medicaid next school year.“It’s very, very stressful,” said Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison school district 2. “For a while, it was every day you were hearing something different. And you couldn’t even keep up with: ‘What’s the latest information today?’ That’s another thing we told our staff: if you can, just don’t watch the news about education right now.”There’s another calculation for school leaders to make in conservative counties like Ashe, where 72% of the vote last year went to Donald Trump: objecting to the cuts without angering voters. When North Carolina’s attorney general, a Democrat, joined the lawsuit against the administration over the frozen funds this summer, some school administrators told state officials they couldn’t publicly sign on, fearing local backlash, said Jack Hoke, executive director of the North Carolina School Superintendents’ Association.Cox sees the effort to slash federal funds as a chance to show her community how Ashe county schools uses this money. She believes people are misguided in thinking their schools don’t need it, not malicious.“I know who our congresspeople are. I know they care about this area,” Cox said, adding that they care even if they do not fully grasp how the money is used. “It’s an opportunity for me to educate them.”If the education department is shuttered – which Trump said he plans to do in order to give more authority over education to states – she wants to be included in state-level discussions of how federal money flows to schools through North Carolina. Importantly, she also wants to know ahead of time what her schools might lose.As she made her rounds to each of the schools that first week back, Cox glanced down at her phone and looked up with a smile. “We have hot water,” she said while walking in the hall of Blue Ridge elementary school. It had lost hot water a few weeks earlier, but to Cox, this crisis was minor – one of many first-of-the-year hiccups she has come to expect.Still, it’s one worry she can put out of her mind as she looks ahead to a year of uncertainties.Marina Villeneuve contributed data analysis to this story, which was originally produced and published by the Hechinger Report. More

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      As boys shift to the right, we are seeing the rise of the ‘new chill girl’ | Naomi Beinart

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      Since Donald Trump returned to office, I have noticed a phenomenon at my high school that I call the “new chill girl”. A group of kids is talking casually about something. Seemingly out of the blue, one of the boys makes an off-handed joke. Maybe it’s racist or sexist or homophobic, but whatever the poison, they inject it and the group dynamic shifts ever so slightly. As a general rule, the boys continue as usual while the girls – who tend to be more politically progressive – face a choice: they can speak up, which usually results in them getting the reputation as annoying and unable to take a joke, or they can let it pass and be regarded as a chill girl who isn’t angry or woke. Since November 2024, the latter reaction has become far more common.This kind of fearful silence is becoming more common outside of high schools, too. In December 2024, Disney removed a transgender character from a new series. This April, the New York Times reported that a new Trump administration regulation bars government employees from adding pronouns to their email bios. Two days after that, Gannet, one of the US’s largest newspaper chains, cited Trump’s opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion when announcing that it would no longer publish statistics on employee diversity.This cultural shift promotes nostalgia for an earlier time, before the birth of DEI, when women wore aprons and let their husbands earn the money. As of August, the “trad wife” influencer Hannah Neeleman, better known as Ballerina Farm, has amassed 10 million followers on Instagram alone. Her videos of kneading sourdough and raising her eight kids mark a return to the ideal of women as homemakers. Last November, she appeared on the cover of Evie, a conservative magazine that openly praises Trump.This trickles down to us. In the Trump era, left-leaning teenage girls feel less comfortable expressing political views that could be derided as “woke”. This isn’t because most of them are becoming rightwing: last November, 58% of women ages 18-30 voted for Kamala Harris. It’s because the political atmosphere has changed and progressive-minded girls now feel more afraid of the consequences of speaking their minds.The girls I talked to say it’s riskier to be outspokenly blue. A high school girl reported that boys “are becoming more emboldened, more confident to make these [bigoted] jokes”. Another said that since Trump took office, casual racism and sexism have become common: “We see [the behavior] more and it’s happening to us.” Young women feel social pressure to remain passive in the face of offensive remarks. Your guy friends “will think you’re attacking them”, one girl said, adding that “it’s not worth it” to speak out against every incident. You need to “pick your battles”.A third girl added that the desire to not be known as one of those “super woke” girls is enough to make someone clamp their lips, knowing that if the girl objects, “there is no chance [boys] will ever take you seriously again.” These opinions are harsh, but they’re true. Pew Research Center reports that as of March, 45% of girls ages 13-17 feel “a great deal” of pressure to fit in socially, and as cultural conservatism grows, that changes what fitting in means. Even in comparatively liberal spaces, like my high school, girls who wince at locker room talk risk exclusion. No one wants to hang out with the stickler, so no one wants to become her. And therefore, juvenile illiberalism lives on.Trump has damaged our country in many blatant ways, but what I’m seeing is more subtle. Tectonic shifts don’t always make it to CNN. The cultural effects of this openly racist and sexist government on young people may skew gender relations as we enter the workforce, enabling sexual assault and discrimination and keeping women from positions of power. The divide between young women and young men is growing massively, with no end in sight. Trump is distorting American society, and I fear distorting us.

      Naomi Beinart is a high school student More

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      ‘We pray a visa comes before death’: Gaza’s injured children left in limbo

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      Mariam Sabbah had been fast asleep, huddled under a blanket with her siblings, when an Israeli missile tore through her home in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, in the early hours of 1 March.View image in fullscreenThe missile narrowly missed the sleeping children but as the terrified nine-year-old ran to her parents, a second one hit. “I saw her coming towards me but suddenly there was another explosion and she vanished into the smoke,” says her mother, Fatma Salman.As the parents searched desperately for their children, they found Mariam lying unconscious in a pool of blood; her left arm was ripped off, shards of shrapnel had pierced through her small body, and she was bleeding heavily from her abdomen.As well as losing her arm, the blast left Mariam with severe abdominal and pelvic injuries from shrapnel tearing through her bladder, uterus, and bowel.“Mariam needs specialised paediatric reconstructive surgery,” says Dr Mohammed Tahir, a British surgeon who treated Mariam while volunteering at al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza. “Her arm amputation is also very high and requires limb lengthening and specialist prosthesis. Without this, it will be very difficult for her to live a normal life.”View image in fullscreenMariam is one of tens of thousands of people in Gaza who have been injured by Israeli military attacks over the past 23 months, which have also killed more than 64,000, mainly women and children.Repeated military strikes and attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and Israel’s blockade of basic goods and supplies into the territory have left the health sector devastated and doctors without the means to treat the sick, injured, and famished.Since October 2023, 7,672 patients, including 5,332 children, have been medically evacuated from Gaza for urgent treatment abroad, but trying to get a medical evacuation organised and approved is a slow, arduous and heavily vetted process.So far more than 700 patients – many of them children – have died waiting for permission to be granted to leave Gaza by Cogat, the Israeli government department responsible for approving medical evacuations, according to the WHO.View image in fullscreenMariam and her family secured the offer of surgical care from a specialist team in Ohio, and the little girl waited two months to be given permission from Cogat to leave Gaza, by which time her condition had deteriorated. She was finally evacuated to Egypt but was then stuck for months waiting for her US travel documents to be processed.Then, just a few days before her appointment at the embassy in Cairo to approve her visa, the US suddenly stopped issuing visas for Palestinians – including children – to be treated in US hospitals.View image in fullscreenThe decision followed an online pressure campaign by Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer close to Donald Trump, who had posted pictures and videos of evacuated patients from Gaza arriving on US soil on social media channels, asking: “Why are any Islamic invaders coming into the US under the Trump admin?”Despite the rhetoric surrounding the visa ban – with Loomer hailing the move as a victory, saying it would stop “this invasion of our country”, the US has only accepted a total of 48 medical evacuations from Gaza, according to the figures provided to the Guardian by WHO. In comparison, 3,995 and 1,450 critically injured people have been evacuated to Egypt and the UAE respectively from Gaza. The UK has so far accepted 13.Medical NGOs say that around 20 severely wounded children have been affected by the ban, and are now stuck in transit countries with nowhere to go and with the treatment needed to save them dangerously out of reach.Since receiving the news that she had been blocked from receiving treatment, Salman has been unable to console her daughter. “She won’t leave her bed or stop crying,” she says. “Mariam had placed all her hopes of getting better on her medical treatment in the US.”A few wards down, and also now stuck in Egypt after the US visa ban, is 18-year-old Nasser al-Najjar, who can no longer bear to look at himself in the mirror.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenAfter becoming displaced, Najjar and his family were sheltering at a school in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, when it was targeted in an Israeli airstrike in January. The 18-year-old suffered devastating injuries to his face and jaw that left him completely disfigured; he lost his left eye, his nose was severed and his jaw shattered – leaving him unable to breathe, eat or speak properly.“I once took pride in my appearance but now I don’t even recognise myself,” says Najjar, his voice raspy and breathless.The teenager requires extensive reconstructive and cosmetic surgery that is not available in Egypt and doctors have warned that without the operations, his condition will deteriorate.He has been offered treatment at the El Paso children’s hospital in Texas, where specialist doctors are waiting to operate on him, but it is now uncertain if Najjar will ever be permitted to go.View image in fullscreenThe weight of uncertainty takes a heavy mental toll. Ahmed Duweik already suffers from phantom limb pain; sharp, stabbing sensations that come and go unpredictably and leave him screaming in agony. But since learning that his medical trip to the US might not go ahead, the 10-year-old has become withdrawn and emotionally unresponsive.View image in fullscreenAhmed was also asleep at home when the missiles struck the Nuseirat refugee camp in the middle of the night. During the bombing, he suffered horrific injuries with shrapnel penetrating his entire body; he was left with an amputated arm, soft tissue loss in his right thigh, and severe nerve and vascular damage.Ahmed requires complex reconstructive surgery and prosthetic fitting that are not available in Egypt. Since the attack, he has developed severe psychological trauma and is unable to sleep, waking up every night crying and screaming, clinging to his mother in fear.Doctors warn that if Ahmed’s treatment is delayed any further, his condition will continue to worsen.Dr Mosab Nasser, chief executive of FAJR Global, the medical aid organisation that managed to evacuate the children from Gaza and was due to arrange their surgical care in the US, said the visa ban had imposed an “indirect death penalty on the most innocent victims of this war”.View image in fullscreen“We’re talking about a handful of children suffering from severe, life threatening injuries,” he says. “These medical evacuations are a lifeline for these kids and we urge the US government to reject such divisive rhetoric and reaffirm its role as a temporary safe haven for those who so desperately need it.”In a statement to the Guardian, a US state department spokesperson confirmed it had paused the visas and would take the time necessary to conduct a full and thorough review, adding: “There are many countries around the world with great hospitals that should be stepping up to provide assistance, including France, Australia, UK, and Canada to name a few.”For now, a bleak Egyptian hospital has become the children’s home, where they have been stuck in limbo since the visa ban, with no designated doctors and limited specialist expertise to treat their extensive war injuries. The families are confined to small, sweltering and cramped rooms. None of them have any idea what comes next.“We feel so powerless,” says Khatib, as she sits beside her son. “All we can do is pray that his visa approval comes before death does.” More

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      How memes, gaming and internet culture all relate to the Charlie Kirk shooting

      by

      Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Dara Kerr here, filling in for Blake Montgomery, who promises he’ll come back from vacation. Meanwhile, I’m looking at the memes, gaming and internet culture behind the shooting of Charlie Kirk.The bullet that killed conservative activist was inscribed with a message: “Notices bulge OwO whats this?” The online world quickly recognized the reference. It’s a phrase used in internet culture to troll people in online role-play communities, specifically furries (a subculture that cosplays as anthropomorphic animal characters).“The phrase has been popularized not only as a way of making fun of furries and related communities for being cringe, but has also been embraced by furries as a way of owning the meme,” writes Know Your Meme, a website that documents viral phenomena. “Ultimately, the phrase is portrayed in memes as being one of the most cringeworthy things someone could possibly write to another person.”Other bullet casings recovered by law enforcement in Utah also had etched inscriptions that appeared to nod to online gaming and insider memes, which have become part of the intense social media speculation on a possible motive for the killing. One said: “O Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao”, another said: “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO.” The first message refers to an Italian anti-fascist folk song that has become a gamer reference that’s big in Twitch and Discord circles. The second message is what web culture writer Ryan Broderick calls “just boilerplate edgelord speak” in his newsletter last week titled “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme”.The final inscribed casing that law enforcement released said: “Hey fascist! Catch!” and was followed by an up arrow, right arrow and three down arrow symbols. The arrow sequence appears to reference the video game Helldivers 2, and is a set of commands used by players to release a 500kg bomb in the game.The alleged shooter, Tyler James Robinson, is a 22-year-old from a small town in Utah near the Arizona border. He is accused of killing Kirk at a campus event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Kirk was struck by a single bullet fired with a “high-powered bolt action rifle” from a distant rooftop.As the suspect was steeped in online culture, so was Charlie Kirk, who was 31. He was at the school on behalf of his conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA. He’d become known worldwide speaking about and debating others, often on his extremist views on race, immigration, gender identity and gun rights. Kirk’s rise to fame was also largely bolstered by being extremely online.As my colleague Alaina Demopoulos wrote:A key figure in Donald Trump’s success, Kirk galvanized college-aged conservatives who moved in a different ecosystem from traditional media. The decade or so between Kirk’s beginnings as a teen activist and the shooting saw the rise of Maga politics alongside the shake-up of the conventional media landscape, with Kirk playing a crucial role in both.Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 with a clear goal of making Obama era-style youth outreach work for the right, and even those who didn’t agree with his values could not deny his ubiquity on the political scene. For the young Americans who grew up watching Kirk on their screens, he was a savant at YouTube, Twitter and later X, TikTok and live events. He was like a gen Z and millennial version of Rush Limbaugh – the rightwing, shock-jock commentator who dominated US airwaves in the 1990s – even if his base had no clue who that was.Read the full story here.Whistleblowers against Meta stack upView image in fullscreenMeta was hit by two separate whistleblower claims last week. One by a group of six former and current employees, who allege the social media company has covered up harm to children on its Metaverse virtual reality devices and apps. And another by Meta’s former head of security for WhatsApp, Attaullah Baig, who alleges the company brushed aside major security and privacy flaws in its messaging app, according to the New York Times.In response to my reporting about VR devices, Meta spokesperson Dani Lever said the company has approved 180 studies related to its VR Reality Labs since 2022, which include research on youth safety and wellbeing. “These few examples are being stitched together to fit a predetermined and false narrative,” she said, adding that Meta has introduced features to its VR products to limit unwanted contact and supervision tools for parents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne of the first whistleblowers was Sophie Zhang, who brought her findings to the Guardian in 2021. Zhang documented how Facebook allowed political manipulation in more than 25 countries, which led to disastrous circumstances in several places including Myanmar, Azerbaijan and Honduras. Later that same year, Frances Haugen turned over to the Wall Street Journal reams of documentation verifying much of Zhang’s allegations and also bringing to light Facebook’s knowledge of how its social media apps harmed teens.In 2023, Arturo Bejar also went to the Wall Street Journal with evidence that Meta knew its algorithms for Facebook and Instagram were pushing content to teens that promoted bullying, drug abuse, eating disorders and self-harm.This year alone, eight more whistleblowers have come forward. Baig and the group of six former and current employees went public last week.US lawmakers are taking the allegations seriously. Politicians as disparate as Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, and Richard Blumenthal, the democrat from Connecticut, have said they see eye-to-eye when it comes to regulating Meta and other social media companies.“The details in these disclosures are hard to stomach – because they reveal such major risks to kids’ safety, and because they are so painfully familiar. Yet again, Meta is revealed to be willfully misrepresenting abuses on its platforms,” Blumenthal said of the whistleblower claims last week. “‘Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil’ is simply not an acceptable business philosophy.”Blumenthal added that he and other senators were looking forward to pushing ahead with “long overdue reform”.The wider TechScape

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