Opinion
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.
I looked into Tariq Ali because the Rolling Stones wrote Street Fighting Man about Tariq. I felt intrigued why a legendary Rock’n’Roll band wrote a song about a revered Pakistani British Intellectual who opposes Colonialist genocide. I wrote about You Can’t Please All, and The Extreme Center because Tariq Ali’s politics and knowledge seemed Democratic Solicialist/ Palestine and the current fascism relevant.
For this column: I accomplished a New Years ambition. I read Verso Books Tariq Ali’s Street Fighting Years, An Autobiography of the Sixties. The Hip Hop music journalist found an intersection of Rock’n’Roll and Hip Hop.
There is a peculiar kind of sociopathy required to wake up, order an overnight package, and decide that the same model should be applied to human beings. Yet, this is exactly the "business" I.C.E Director Todd Lyons proposed during a “Border Security Expo” in Phoenix: a hub-and-spoke network of mega-warehouses where the "product" is a human being.
Todd Lyons stood at that podium back in April and talked about moving human beings from Point A to Point B in forty-eight hours like he was pitching a logistics contract. Internal documents — leaked, obviously, because nobody’s proud enough to put their name on this in the light of day — outline their plan for a “feeder system.”
Even when you begin to think that it can’t get any worse with Donald J. Trump as President of the United States the Orangeman does something that is so stupid and so reflective of a man who thinks only about himself that it makes one’s shudder in disbelief. Last week included some completely bizarre performances that could lead to nuclear war while also falsely promoting that our leader is a “man of peace.” That is in spite of the fact that it has become hard to imagine that Trump can even pronounce the word “peace” without an interpreter or the five letter word flashing up in boldface on his teleprompter screen. Let’s start with several recent developments about which there can be no real debate, though motive and expectations can be reasonably disputed. Consider for a moment the performance of a man who knows little beyond how to curse and harangue those who disagree with him as well as any skill beyond how to scribble a version of his own name in large letters with a marker pen.
According to Amnesty International, USA, 248 brave and courageous journalists have been killed for documenting the atrocities in Gaza. Make no mistake: The deliberate targeting and killing of journalists by the Israeli Death Forces (IDF) constitutes war crimes under international humanitarian law.
No, those journalists are not members of Hamas as Israel frequently claims. That's a malicious lie. Israel's war minister's ban on foreign journalists entering the Gaza Strip remains in place because their entry would endanger Israeli soldiers.
However, two of the world’s leading news networks, CNN and the BBC, have revealed the inner workings of those outlets’ newsrooms from October 7 onward, alleging pro-Israel bias in coverage, systematic double standards, and frequent violations of journalistic principles. In several cases, they accused senior newsroom figures of failing to hold Israeli officials to account and of interfering in reporting to downplay Israeli atrocities. In one instance at CNN, false Israeli propaganda was put on air despite advance warnings from staff members. Source: Al Jazeera, October 5, 2024
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and local advocates are defending Ohio’s child care system after comments from the Trump administration accusing another state of child care fraud.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said states would need to provide “justification” proving that federal child care funds are being spent on “legitimate” entities. The comments followed fraud allegations in Minnesota related to the state’s child care programs, stemming from a YouTube video by a right-wing social media influencer. The allegations particularly targeted child care centers run by Somali citizens of the state.
The allegations led the Trump administration to freeze federal funding going to the child care sector in Minnesota, which owners and Democrats in the state said would cause major problems in an already struggling sector.
For the most part, 2025 was a very good year for me. I took a trip to Chicago, and I saw the Cubs. I spent a couple of weeks with good friends in Southern California and got to see pelicans and sea lions. I went to Boston and attended the convention for the National Cartoonists Society for the very first time in my life, where I got to see old friends and make a lot of new ones. I spent a few days in New York City. And at the convention for the Association of American Cartoonists, I won the Rex Bab Memorial Award.
And then I had a stroke. And maybe this is partly why my doctors and nurses thought I had a very positive attitude throughout the process, because I don't think the stroke ruined my year. That's why I wouldn’t call it a setback. If nothing else, I learned from the stroke that a shit ton of people love me.
And the stroke did not stop me from cartooning. If anything, it caused a slight pause. When I asked readers on Facebook to pick their favorites of mine from the year, they collected cartoons before and after the stroke.
Karl Marx has been famously quoted as referring to religion as the opiate of the masses. His point being that religion, offering a future, better life in the by and by, narcotized people to endure the difficulty of their lives and work, rather than rising to demand change in the here and now. Religion now lacks the force or mass participation of the past, but it’s also pretty clear to me that it has been replaced as the critical agent for peoples’ pacification by the ubiquity of smartphones.
It’s impossible to ignore, so don’t tell me that you haven’t noticed this phenomenon as well. Some might argue that this is a teen issue. There’s heavy breathing around the United States about blocking cellphones from schools and classrooms and the reported benefits of these restrictions in attention and participation. Others might claim this is a relief from boredom. Waiting for airplanes or in lobbies almost anywhere these days, I sometimes find myself counting the number of people, old and young, who are buried deep in their phones. It’s always a majority, and frequently it’s nearly unanimous, as I find myself an outlier.
When 43 y/o Mohammad Faraj from the pan-Arab media outlet Al Mayadeen made a family trip for the holidays to visit his family on December 12 in Jordan with his Lebanese wife Rania Abi Jema, he was arrested more than a week ago upon arriving at Amman’s airport from Beirut without any publicly stated legal grounds.
His wife is also a journalist employed by Al Mayadeen TV and is being held at the General Intelligence Department without legal representation or to establish the reason for his detention and was unable to see him. Faraj was also denied family visits - without legal representation or to establish the reason for his detention, according to the Committee to Protect Journalist.
The detention of Mohammad Faraj is a serious violation of human rights and a direct attack on freedom of the press, which seeks to silence voices committed to the truth and to the struggles of the peoples. The freedom of Mohammad Faraj is an imperative that cannot wait and for this reason, the Network of Intellectuals, Artists, and Social Movements in Defense of Humanity denounces his disappearance.