“Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time. You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine.”
The words are those of Renee Good’s wife Becca. They cut to our heart – our humanity. She was shot in the face by an ICE agent, who then muttered: “Fuckin’ bitch.” The murder of this 37-year-old mom as she tried to drive around the ICE guys who stopped her is national news, of course. Almost everyone has seen at least one of the many videos of the incident and, you might say, the national dialogue about virtually anything else has been put on hold.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested, detained, deported, and/or imprisoned many people that it has unilaterally determined to be undesirables. At first, they claimed they would deport only criminals, but it has already gone beyond that. We at the Free Press consider every person who has been sent to the Tecoluca (El Salvador prison), Guantanamo naval base, or detained in other prisons throughout the country to be innocent until proven guilty. We will include students who have been expelled for protesting genocide. It appears the government will revoke Visa's to get rid of undesirable students. This article will be updated as long as is necessary.
Feminism has a crucial role to play in modern life, but I sometimes wish it would leave our fairy tales alone. The results of its revisionist meddling are too often unconvincing and unsatisfying.
Remember last year’s Maleficent? It turned an age-old story on its head by revealing that the fairy (Angelina Jolie) who turned a princess into a “Sleeping Beauty” was not evil at all. No, she was merely wronged and misunderstood. Worst of all, we learned that the somnambulant princess could not be awakened by a kiss from the handsome prince, but only by a motherly peck from that same fairy.
How heartwarming. And how utterly unromantic.
Thank goodness Disney’s new live-action version of Cinderella doesn’t wear its feminism on its sleeve. It has nods to modern sensibilities, to be sure, but they’re handled with a lighter touch.
In recent weeks, the United Arab Emirates has begun to put forward an initiative concerning the management of civilian affairs in the Gaza Strip after the war through organizing economic and service sectors, managing markets and commercial activities, and establishing logistical centers for distributing goods within the Strip.
What is striking about this initiative is that it was not presented within a comprehensive Palestinian or Arab framework but rather through direct talks with the United States and Israel, in a clear attempt to obtain their political and security approval. This suggests that the administration of Gaza is a matter to be decided in consultation with the occupying power and its main ally, not with the people of the land themselves.
On Tuesday, Feb. 3. at 11:59 pm, 15,000 Haitian immigrants are set to lose their "Temporary Protected Status" in Springfield, Ohio (population 60,000). Local residents are preparing for a 30-day ICE surge - even though conditions in Haiti are more dangerous than ever, thousands of children could be separated from their parents, and the Haitian community has helped fuel the small town's economic comeback. We stood up for Springfield, Ohio, when JD Vance and Donald Trump lied about Haitians who live and work there during the 2024 campaign, and we're doing it again now. Join us to hear from local residents and legal experts, help raise funds for local groups providing direct support to Haitian families in Springfield, and take action, no matter where you live.
Amid widespread revulsion at the behavior of the second Trump administration and its Republican loyalists, there is a curious tendency to blame Democrats for the slide of the United States toward fascism. As one enraged commentator put it recently, “the Democrats” have “let us down day by day by day.”
But, in fact, “the Democrats”―at the grassroots and at the federal government level―have repeatedly displayed overwhelming opposition to the rightwing Republican onslaught. By contrast, Republicans have almost uniformly backed Trump’s priorities. Indeed, the gap between the two parties on most key issues has been enormous.