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They don't need a warrant
Friday May 9th, 2025 at 1:57 AM

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‘Utterly traumatised’: anger at ordeal of UK woman accused of illegal abortion | Women | The Guardian
Friday May 9th, 2025 at 1:52 AM

The Guardian
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When Nicola Packer took a pregnancy test in November 2020, as the country was in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, she did not even believe she was pregnant.

Aged 41 at the time, she thought it more likely that she was perimenopausal, but had been feeling under the weather and when her friend – with whom the pregnancy had been conceived – suggested she took a test, she only did so to “prove him wrong”.

When the test, bought from a chemist around the corner, came back positive, she was “shocked”, but was never in any doubt about what to do. She had never wanted children, and immediately sought a termination.

Under emergency provisions introduced during the pandemic – which were later made permanent – abortion pills could be dispatched by post, following a remote consultation, in pregnancies up to 10 weeks’ gestation.

She took the pills, thinking, as her defence barrister, Fiona Horlick KC, told Isleworth crown court, “that she would only see blood clots to look into the toilet bowl”, but to her shock, hours later, she delivered “a small but fully formed baby”.

This in itself was a traumatic event for Packer, but it would pale in comparison to what followed. She attended A&E at Charing Cross hospital, bleeding and in shock. Staff told her she was in the wrong hospital and to go to Chelsea and Westminster instead, but did not provide an ambulance and left her to make her own way there.

She had brought the foetus with her, but did not immediately tell staff that she had taken abortion medication, because she feared it would affect the care she received.

When she later admitted that she had taken the pills, informing a midwife who had told Packer “she was there to care for her, that her safety was their priority and that whatever happened they were there to support her”, the police were called in.

Uniformed officers arrived at the hospital, and Packer, still recovering from surgery after the birth, was arrested. She was taken into custody and her computers and phone were seized.

It was the start of an ordeal that would stretch for four and a half years, culminating in her standing in the dock, giving evidence as part of her two-week trial.

For periods of the trial Packer was able to stand with composure and a sense of quiet pride. Often, however, this was stripped away under a barrage of deeply personal questioning, as the prosecution asked her to relive one of the worst days of her life, scrutinising every detail she said she could not recall.

Though she seemed steady and stoic at times, she would sometimes give way to tears. When she gave evidence, Packer was joined in court by a small group of friends, who held her hand as she walked into the courtroom and escorted her out whenever she left, be it at the end of the day, or to take a break from her interrogation.

At one point, the presiding judge was forced to send the jury away and reprimand Packer’s support group for tutting too loudly and rolling their eyes during a particularly intense, and in their eyes inappropriate, line of questioning.

As the trial came to a close, addressing the jury of three men and nine women for the final time, Horlick said her client was still “utterly traumatised”.

“The facts of this case are a tragedy but they are not a crime,” she said.

While the prosecution may be over, Packer, now 45, will be irreparably changed by the ordeal. The most private details of her life were aired in public – her medical history including past terminations, her sexual preferences, a tragic baby loss in her family, and even intimate photographs of her – shown by the defence to the jury to prove that she did not look pregnant.

In the coming days, there will be questions asked of the Crown Prosecution Service, which brought the case to trial despite Judge Edmunds KC urging the CPS to review whether there was a public interest in trying the case “four and a half years after events”.

At a pre-trial hearing, Edmunds, the recorder of Kensington who presided over the case, said there was a “heavy burden” on the prosecution, particularly given backlogs in the courts system.

Jonathan Lord, an NHS consultant gynaecologist and the clinician in charge of Packer’s care while working at MSI Reproductive Choices, said: “This was a vindictive and brutal prosecution in which the CPS weaponised victim-shaming. Wholly unnecessary details of Nicola’s relationships and sex life were prominent in the prosecution’s opening statement, made in the full knowledge they would be widely reported in the press.

“The police played several recordings of her confidential medical consultations in open court.

“CCTV footage was shown of her arriving at A&E in considerable distress. Packer had to show the court intimate photographs of herself in her defence, all while sat in a packed courtroom as the jury viewed the images. No woman should ever have to endure institutionalised public shaming and humiliation, let alone in 2025 in England.”

The case has furthered calls for a change in the law, which could come as soon as this summer, with two backbench Labour MPs set to lay amendments to the criminal justice bill, seeking to decriminalise abortion.

One of the MPs, Tonia Antoniazzi, who spent a day in court during Packer’s trial, said: “It must be an immense relief for Nicola to have avoided conviction, but it is completely unacceptable that she was forced to endure the indignity and turmoil of a trial. Having met Nicola at the crown court recently, I have seen firsthand the devastating impact that this cruel and unnecessary investigation has had on her life over the last four and a half years.

“The true injustice here is the years of her life stolen by a law written decades before women had the vote, for a ‘crime’ which doesn’t even apply in two nations of the United Kingdom.

“Nicola’s experience, in her own words, includes being taken from her hospital bed to a police cell, denied timely access to essential medical care, and spending every penny she had on lawyers defending her case. This is utterly deplorable, and it is not justice. I do not see how this law can be defended any longer.”

Lord said: “Every agency Nicola needed turned against her. In this, as in other cases, the teams charged with treating, protecting and safeguarding vulnerable women and girls have done the most harm, breaking confidentiality and treating victims as criminals.

“The issue is not simply that Nicola had the misfortune of encountering some callous organisations or individuals, but that our current abortion laws directed and encouraged the actions taken against her.

“The law is causing life-changing harm to the women involved, and in some cases their children too.

“What’s happening, the horrific way the women and their children are being treated – including those with premature labours and natural later pregnancy losses – is a national scandal.”

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Globalization did not hollow out the American middle class
Thursday May 8th, 2025 at 10:08 PM

Noahpinion
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For years, I’ve been calling for the U.S. to promote manufacturing. When Americans started getting excited about reindustrialization, I cheered. I was a big supporter of Joe Biden’s industrial policy, and I even praised Donald Trump for smashing the pro-free-trade consensus in his first term.

Trump’s tariffs haven’t changed my mind about any of that. Yes, the tariffs are a disaster. But they’re not a disaster because they promote manufacturing; indeed, they are deindustrializing America as we speak, by destroying American manufacturers’ ability to leverage supply chains and export markets. When America has finally realized the futility of Trump’s approach, it will be time to turn once again to the task of reindustrialization — in fact, that task will be even more urgent, given the damage that Trump will have done.

And yet at the same time, I think there’s a misguided narrative about globalization, manufacturing, and the American middle class that has taken hold across much of society. The story goes something like this:

In the 1950s and 1960s, America was a smokestack economy. Unionized factory jobs built a broad-based middle class, and we made everything we needed for ourselves. Then we opened up our country to trade and globalization, and things started going downhill. Wages stagnated due to foreign competition, and good manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas. American cities hollowed out, and we became a nation of winners and losers. The college-educated upper middle class thrived in their professional jobs, while regular Americans were forced to fall back on low-wage service work. Eventually the rage of the dispossessed working class boiled over, resulting in the election of Donald Trump.

You can see this narrative at work in Joe Nocera’s recent much-discussed post in the Free Press:

No one anymore, on the left or the right, denies that globalization has fractured the U.S., both economically and socially. It has hollowed out once-prosperous regions like the furniture-making areas of North Carolina and the auto manufacturing towns of the Midwest. It has been a driver of income inequality…Trump owes much of his political success to the fury that these realities aroused in working-class Americans.

“My dad ran factories in the Detroit supply-chain orbit,” Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar told me recently. “In the 1990s, the factories started shutting down. And when I would go home in the 2000s, half of my high-school classmates were on opioids.” She added, “The economic theories didn’t connect with the real world.”

Which raises an obvious question: Why did so many economists, policymakers, and journalists like me refuse to acknowledge the problems with neoliberalism for so long? Why were we so quick to label anyone who even flirted with the idea that maybe the U.S. should be protecting its industrial base, just as other countries did, as a Pat Buchanan-like fool?

One big reason was the most basic one: It meant low prices. Companies could keep their costs low by using China’s (and Mexico’s) comparative advantage: cheap labor. At the same time, companies like Walmart and Costco could buy goods directly from Chinese manufacturers, which invariably had lower prices than comparable American goods.

And you can see the narrative at work in a recent series of tweets by Talmon Joseph Smith:

Like all such narratives, this one consists of layers of myth wrapped around a core of truth. But not all grand economic narratives are created equal — in this case, the layers of myth are thick and juicy, while the core of truth is thin and brittle. Everyone knows about the China Shock paper and the collapse of manufacturing employment by about 3 million in the 2000s. That’s the core of the story, and it’s very real. But there are a lot of big important economic facts that place that story in perspective, which most of the people talking about this topic seem not to know.

Ultimately, the trade-driven collapse in manufacturing was only a small part of the economic story of America over the last half century.

Pundits and politicians alike talk incessantly about the flood of cheap Chinese goods into America. But overall, this is a small percent of what we buy. The U.S. is actually an unusually closed-off economy; as a fraction of GDP, imports are much lower than in most rich countries, and lower even than China:

Trade deficits are an even smaller amount of GDP. U.S. imports of manufactured goods minus exports are equal to about 4% of GDP per year. Our trade deficit with China is about 1% of GDP.

In terms of imported components, America manufactures most of what it uses in production. China’s exports to the U.S. are actually more likely to be intermediate goods rather than the consumer goods we see on the shelves of Wal-Mart — another thing the typical narrative misses. But even so, China makes only about 3.5% of the intermediate goods that American manufacturers need:

So if we eliminated trade deficits, would it reindustrialize America? Even assuming that we replaced the imports 1-for-1 with domestically made goods, the impact on manufacturing’s share of U.S. GDP would be fairly modest. Here’s Paul Krugman:

Last year the U.S. ran a manufactures trade deficit of around 4 percent of GDP. Suppose we assume that this deficit subtracted an equal amount from spending on U.S. manufactured goods. In that case what would happen if we somehow eliminated that deficit?

Well, it would raise the share of manufacturing in GDP — currently 10 percent — by less than 4 percentage points, because manufacturing firms buy a lot of services. A rough estimate is that manufacturing value-added would rise by around 60 percent of the change in sales, or 2.5 percentage points, implying that the manufacturing sector would be around a quarter larger than it is.

So even under the optimal scenario, if we totally eliminated the U.S. trade deficit, manufacturing would go from 10% of U.S. GDP to 12.5% — about the same as its share in 2007, and still far less than Germany, Japan, or China:

You can also see from this chart that other countries haven’t necessarily done an amazing job of protecting their industrial bases, as Nocera claimed; the manufacturing share of GDP is drifting down everywhere.

And this chart is also a hint that trade deficits and manufacturing aren’t as tightly linked as most people seem to think. France has become steadily less manufacturing-intensive since 1960, despite the fact that it historically had very balanced trade, and even ran big trade surpluses in the 90s and 00s. Meanwhile, out of all the countries on the chart, Japan has done the best job of preserving its manufacturing share since 2010, despite running a trade deficit over that time period.

So while we tend to focus a lot on the impact of trade on U.S. manufacturing, the truth is that there are much bigger forces at work there. Most of what the U.S. consumes is made here, and most of what the U.S. produces is consumed here, and eliminating trade deficits wouldn’t change either of those basic facts.

Americans, as a people, are startlingly rich. This isn’t just true because a few very rich people pull up the average. If you take median disposable household income, the U.S. comes out way ahead of the pack:

Note that this includes taxes and transfers, including in-kind transfers like government-provided health care.

Other countries may have protected their manufacturing sectors, but middle-class Americans are richer than the middle classes in other countries.

And middle-class Americans’ income has not been stagnant over the years. Here’s real median personal income, which isn’t affected by the shift to two-earner families:

This is an increase of 50% since the early 70s. I wish it had been more, of course, and it has its ups and downs, but 50% is nothing to sneeze at.

As for middle-class wages, they’ve grown less than incomes, since some of the increased income has been in the form of corporate benefits (health care, retirement accounts), investment income, and government benefits. But they have still grown:

Wage growth has resumed since the mid-1990s, despite increasing trade deficits. Note that the China Shock, which threw millions of manufacturing workers out of their jobs, utterly failed to stop wages from resuming their upward climb. Wage stagnation and hyperglobalization just don’t line up, timing-wise. Jason Furman has another good chart that shows this very clearly:

A lot of commentators have gotten so used to the idea that incomes are stagnant that they have trouble believing this data is correct. But as Adam Ozimek points out, the Economic Policy Institute — a pro-union think tank that frequently complains that wages are too low — chooses a very similar measure for median wages. EPI writes that wages “have not been stagnant”, but “have…been suppressed”.

And when we look at the lower percentiles of the wage distribution — the working class and the poor — we see that they’ve grown even more strongly, by over 40% since 1996:

A $4/hr. raise (adjusted for inflation) might not sound like a big deal, but for a poor person it’s pretty huge.

Of course, as Autor et al. show in their famous “China Shock” paper, the harms from Chinese import competition were concentrated among a few workers in a few regions. 2 million workers were only 1.5% of the U.S. workforce at the time, but for that 1.5%, being thrown out of good manufacturing jobs was a heavy blow.

But even in those unlucky regions, the negative effects don’t look to have been permanent. Jeremy Horpedahl points out that wages for the poor in Flint, Michigan and Greensboro, North Carolina — two areas that Nocera claims were “hollowed out” — have actually increased, while middle-class wages have risen in the latter:

And when we look at median income, the two areas look like they’ve recovered their economic health over the last decade:

(Nor is this a composition effect from people moving out; Flint’s population has held roughly steady, while Greensboro’s population has continued to increase smoothly.)

How are the American middle class and working class prospering, if the good manufacturing jobs of yesteryear are all gone? Talmon Joseph Smith scoffs at “service economy jobs”, and Autor et al. find that manufacturing workers displaced by Chinese imports often took crappier, lower-paid jobs in the service sector.

But that describes the 2000s. The 2010s and 2020s have been very different. Deming et al. (2024) show that over the last 15 years, the boom in low-skilled service-sector jobs has gone into reverse, and Americans are instead flooding into higher-skilled professional service jobs:

“Go to college” turns out to have been good advice. The boom jobs of the new era are in things like management, STEM, education, and health care:

It took a couple decades, but we’re finding that Bill Clinton was right — the average American is smart and competent enough to do knowledge work. And it’s being reflected in wages and incomes.

Now, none of this is to say that manufacturing is unimportant. It’s important for national defense, obviously. I also think it’s important for building a balanced, well-rounded economy — adding high-tech manufacturing on top of America’s knowledge industries would make us even richer, and would help us pump up exports and take advantage of multiplier effects. Manufacturing is also ripe for a productivity boom after decades of stagnation.

But the master narrative of protectionism is simply much more myth than fact. Yes, Chinese import competition hurt America a bit in the 2000s. But overall, globalization and trade deficits are not the main reason that manufacturing’s role in the U.S. economy has shrunk. Nor has globalization hollowed out the middle class — because in fact, the middle class has not been hollowed out.

Once we accept that this common protectionist narrative is deeply flawed, we can begin to think more clearly about trade policy, industrial policy, and a bunch of other things.

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How I Got This Baby: Going a Decade Without a Period
Thursday May 8th, 2025 at 12:46 PM

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Scholasticide: The Ongoing Colonial Attack on Palestinian Higher Education by Mazin Qumsiyeh and Rasha Ali
Wednesday May 7th, 2025 at 9:40 PM

Science for the People Magazine
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Scholasticide: The Ongoing Colonial Attack on Palestinian Higher Education

By Mazin Qumsiyeh and Rasha Ali

Vol 26, No 3: Palestine

Al-Azhar University main building during destruction (Source: WAFA Palestine News & Info Agency)
Al-Azhar University main building during destruction (Source: WAFA Palestine News & Info Agency)

Settler-colonialism seeks to weaken Indigenous communities, in part by preventing intellectual development.1 Attacks on Palestinian educational institutions are as old as the formation of Israel. In 1948, Palestinian colleges and most Islamic and Christian educational institutions inside what later became Israel, were destroyed.2 Between 1948 and 1967, development of higher education was suspended throughout historic Palestine, and when it started to evolve again in the 1970s, it came under attack by Israeli occupation authorities.3 Many attacks took place during the First Intifada, between 1987 and 1991.4 Attacks on education (including higher education) is dubbed “educide,” “epistemicide,” or “scholasticide” and is understood in the context of the colonial “logic of elimination” of Indigenous people.5

The Recent Scholasticide Episode Starting in Gaza

The Gaza Strip is located on Palestine’s southern Mediterranean coast, and shares borders with Egypt on Palestine’s southwestern corner. Over two-thirds of its 2.3 million people are refugees ethnically cleansed from areas that became “Israel” in 1948.6 The Strip was intentionally de-developed, economically evolving into a “concentration camp,”  an “open-air prison,” or “laboratory.”7

In Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip in the past 20 years—in 2008-09, 2014, 2020, and 2021 (indeed, since the start of the occupation in 1967)—Gaza’s educational system suffered greatly, largely due to the difficulty of reconstruction resulting from either Israel’s blockade of the Strip, or direct efforts to stop reconstruction.8 The attacks that started October 7, 2023 have been worse than earlier attacks and have not yet ended.9 There are pending cases of genocide and grave breaches of international law at the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court, which also involve deliberate attacks on higher education.10 Examples include videos and images showing Israeli troops rigging explosives inside universities and cheering as they blew up.11

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has bombed all eleven of Gaza’s universities: the Arab College of Applied Sciences, the Islamic University of Gaza, the Palestine Technical College, the Al-Aqsa University, Al-Azhar University, the Al-Quds Open University, the University College of Applied Sciences, the University of Palestine, Israa University, the University of Gaza, Palestine College of Nursing, and the Arab College of Applied Sciences. The Israeli onslaught has destroyed campuses, prevented students from accessing education, killed >650 university students and 111 faculty and staff from higher education institutions.12

The dead include Professor Sufian Tayeh, President of the Islamic University of Gaza, UNESCO chair in astronomy, astrophysics, and space sciences in Palestine; Dr. Ahmed Hamdi Abo Absa, Dean of the University of Palestine’s software engineering department (following three days of custody), shot and killed by Israeli forces as he was leaving his campus building; Muhammad Eid Shabir, former president of the Islamic University of Gaza, a virologist and immunologist, assassinated by Israeli military forces; and Refaat Alareer, renowned poet and Professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, killed alongside members of his family.13

Israel’s attacks since October 7 have not been limited to the Gaza Strip. The West Bank has been subjected to a lockdown, severely restricting movement between cities. West Bank universities have had to rely on online teaching.14 Israeli leaders are threatening to repeat what they have done in the Gaza Strip in other areas like the West Bank and Lebanon. As of this writing, it is not clear in what direction the Israeli scholasticide is heading.

Al-Azhar University main building after destruction (Source: The Palestinian Information Center)
Al-Azhar University main building after destruction (Source: The Palestinian Information Center)

How Higher Education Institutions Adapt and How They May Be Resuscitated

Pursuing education and building society are considered acts of resistance under Israeli occupation.15 In the course of previous uprisings, accompanied by Israeli attacks on higher education, institutions developed methods of education as ‘resistance tools.’ For example, when universities were forcibly closed during the 1987–91 Intifada, many universities held clandestine courses in teachers’ homes, mosques, and other community locations. Beginning with the 2000-2005 uprising, Palestinian higher education adapted to stressful situations by taking courses online.16 Higher education has been viewed through a nationalist lens, crucial for the achievement of national goals such as the Right of Return, liberation, and self-determination.17 Following Israel’s latest attack, faculty at Birzeit and Bethlehem Universities have issued a specific program of action.18

While there are limits to what can be done for academia in Gaza in light of repeated attacks, some things can be done and have been done in the past to recuperate.19 Here are some actions that we propose are possible for universities outside and within Palestine:

  • Universities play a significant role in fostering capacity building, resilience and persistence (sumud) in preparation for what would be their normal role of helping economic development.20
  • Scholars around the world have become involved and this must continue and expand.
  • Some groups offer safe haven for scholars at risk.21
  • Israeli universities are complicit and should be boycotted.22
  • There are many universities around the world that succumb to Zionist intimidation and try to limit free speech and assembly or even expressions of support for Palestinian human rights.23 This must be challenged.
  • Struggle to end the conflict based on justice and human rights including the right to education: Rebuilding cannot happen logically under continued occupation/colonization and repeated attacks on the Gaza strip.24
  • Build hope via restructuring of educational systems (at all levels including higher education) in ways that instill pride in our heritage and in our struggle and hope for a future of freedom and self-determination. This includes working to encourage collective work, volunteerism, innovation, and creative thinking,
  • Educational institutions at all levels should offer holistic and community–based solutions.25
  • A Palestinian multi-university should be established to help formulate a new national agenda and connect and ensure complementarity of Palestinian higher education so that when one part is under attack, other parts of the networked system can carry on.26
  • While distance education is useful in some circumstances, it has to be structured well to produce the most effective result.27 Further, there has to be a systematic approach to building capacity for digital education.28

The systematic crimes of Israel’s occupation have a broader goal of ethnic cleansing and erasure of Palestinian national identity.29 Yet, despite the difficulties, there are many avenues for challenging this aspect of colonization. Palestinians value education. After every episode of colonial onslaught (after fourteen uprisings/intifadas), they have always managed to reconstruct and rebuild.30 The same will happen in the wake of Israel’s current assault on Gaza. Like South Africa’s response to the Soweto uprising, Israel’s current war on Gaza and the West Bank may be its last.

Acknowledgment: We are grateful to David Kattenburg for comments and edits on the manuscript.

Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, Bethlehem University, Bethlehem, Palestine

Notes

      1. Tejendra Pherali and Ellen Turner, “Meanings of Education Under Occupation: The Shifting Motivations for Education in Palestinian Refugee Camps in the West Bank,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 39, no. 4 (Sept 2017): 567-589, https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2017.1375400.
      2. Adel Manna, The History of Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period, 1700-1918 (A New Reading). (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1986).
      3. Penny Johnson, “Palestinian Universities Under Occupation,” Journal of Palestine Studies 15, no. 4 (Autumn 1986): 127-133, https://doi.org/10.2307/2537026; Christa Bruhn,“Higher Education as Empowerment: The Case of Palestinian Universities,” American Behavioral Scientist 49, no. 8 (April 2006): 1125-1142, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764205284722; Keith Hammond, “Palestinian Universities and the Israeli Occupation,” Policy Futures in Education 5, no. 2 (June 2007): 264-270, https://doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2007.5.2.264; Anwar Hussein, Shelley Wong, and Anita Bright, “History and Impact of Israeli Siege and Attacks on Education in Gaza, Palestine,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
      4. Yamila Hussein, “The Stone and the Pen: Palestinian Education During the 1987 Intifada,” The Radical Teacher 74 (2005): 17-22; Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment. (London: Pluto Press, 2012).
      5. Nadia Naser-Najjab, “Palestinian Education and the ‘Logic of Elimination,’”Settler Colonial Studies, 10, no 3 (2020): 311-330; Nour Naim, “Israel’s War on the Education Sector in the Gaza Strip,” Arab Center Washington DC, March 20, 2024, https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/israels-war-on-the-education-sector-in-the-gaza-strip; Lindsey Suha Hennawi, “Education as Resistance: Detention of Palestinian University Students Under Israeli Occupation and Palestinian Political-Cultural Responses,” BA thesis, (Boston College, 2011).

      6.Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006).

      1. Khalid Manzoor Butt and Anam Amid Butt, “Blockade on Gaza Strip: A Living Hell on Earth,” Journal of Political Studies 23, no. 1 (2016): 157-182; Sara Roy, “De-development Revisited: Palestinian Economy and Society since Oslo,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 28, no. 3 (1999): 64-82; Yves Winter, “The Siege of Gaza: Spatial Violence, Humanitarian Strategies, and the Biopolitics of Punishment,” Constellations 23, no. 2 (2016): 308-319; Alison Caddick, “Gaza and the Unspeakable,” Arena 16, no. 1-4 (December 2023); Roald Høvring, Hovring, “Gaza: The World’s Largest Open-air Prison,” Norwegian Refugee Council, April 26, 2018, https://www.nrc.no/news/2018/april/gaza-the-worlds-largest-open-air-prison/; Gary Fields, “Lockdown: Gaza through a Camera Lens and Historical Mirror,” Journal of Palestine Studies49, no. 3 (2020): 41-69; Muhammed Yasir Okumuş, Reviewed Work: Gaza: A History by Filiu Insight Turkey 20, no. 3 (Summer 2018): 302-304; Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison On Earth (Oxford: Oneworld, 2016); Darryl Li, “The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement,” Journal of Palestine Studies 35, no. 2 (2005): 38-55.
      2. Wadee Alarabeed, “The Myth of Gaza’s Reconstruction: The Rise and Fall of Reconstruction Space Under the Israeli Siege,” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 19, no. 1 (January 2024): 110-116.
      3. Akihiro Seita, and Ghada Al-Jadba, “Gaza is Facing a Humanitarian Catastrophe,” The Lancet 402, no. 10414 (November 2023): 1745; Martin Shaw, “Inescapably Genocidal,” Journal of Genocide Research (January 2024): 1-5.
      4. Mohammed Nijim, “Genocide in Palestine: Gaza as a Case Study,” The International Journal of Human Rights27, no. 1 (November 2020): 165-200; Shaw, “Inescapably Genocidal.”
      5. Brendan O’Malley and Wagdy Sawahel, “Can Higher Education in Gaza Survive Israel’s War on Hamas?” University World News January 28, 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240128063555120#.
      6. Rabia Ali, “‘Scholasticide:’ How Israel is Systematically Destroying Palestinian Education in Gaza”. Anadolu Agency,February 12, 2024, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/education/-scholasticide-how-israel-is-systematically-destroying-palestinian-education-in-gaza/3135127#; Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, “Israel Kills Dozens of Academics, Destroys Every University in the Gaza Strip,” EMHRM, January 20, 2024, https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6108/Israel-kills-dozens-of-academics,-destroys-every-university-in-the-Gaza-Strip; Neve Gordon and Lewis Turner, “Academics Have a Duty to Help Stop the ‘Educide’ in Gaza,”. University World News, February 27, 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240227095745252#:~:text=In%20addition%20to%20hundreds%20of.
      7. Scholars Against the War (SWAP), “Toolkit International Action Against Scholasticide,” Scholars Against the War on Palestine, February 14-29, 2024, https://scholarsagainstwar.org/toolkit/; O’Malley and Sawahel, “Can Higher Education Survive?”
      8. Tahani Aldahdouh et al., “Development of Online Teaching Expertise in Fragile and Conflict-affected Contexts,” Frontiers in Education 8, (2023): 1242285.
      9. Hennawi, “Education as Resistance”; Qumsiyeh Popular Resistance.
      10. Smith, M. and Scott, H., 2023. Distance education under oppression: The case of Palestinian higher education. Education Sciences, 13(7), p.729.
      11. Bruhn, Higher Education.
      12. Mazin Qumsiyeh, “Assault on Education,” Popular Resistance [blog], December 1, 2023, https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/12/assault-on-education.html..
      13. Mona Jebril, “Between Construction and Destruction: the Experience of Educationalists at Gaza’s Universities,” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 53, no. 6 (2023): 986-1004; Sansom Milton, Ghassan Elkahlout and Sultan Barakat, “Protecting Higher Education from Attack in the Gaza Strip,” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 53, no. 6 (2023): 1024-1042.
      14. Sam Abd and Sam Alfoqahaa, “Economics of Higher Education Under Occupation: The Case of Palestine,” Journal of Arts and Humanities 4, no. 10 (2015): 25-43.
      15. See Scholars Against War, https://scholarsagainstwar.org/; Scholars for Palestine, https://www.scholarsforpalestine.org/; British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), https://bricup.org.uk/; Gazan Student Support Network, https://www.gazanstudentsupport.org/; https://pssar.ca/; Writers Against the War on Gaza, https://www.writersagainstthewarongaza.com; Academics4Peace, https://www.academicsforpeace.org/; Middle East Studies Association, https://mesana.org/advocacy/committee-on-academic-freedom; Palestinian Students & Scholars at Risk (PSSAR) Intiative, https://pssar.ca/; Architects for Gaza Education, bit.ly/AFG_CALL; Gaza Virtual University, http://gazavu.org; Scholars against the War on Palestine. See also this statement from Palestinian Higher Education Institutions and others (https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/12/assault-on-education.html). Links to online resources available at SftP magazine online.
      16. Examples include NIAS Safe Haven Fellowship, https://nias.knaw.nl/fellowships/safe-haven-fellowship/; Scholars at Risk Network, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/; Scholars at Risk Program at Harvard University, https://harvardscholarsatrisk.harvard.edu/; Compostela Group of Universities Scholars at Risk, https://web.gcompostela.org/scholars-at-risk-sar/; OxPal, https://oxpal.org/about/. Links to online resources available at SftP magazine online.
      17. David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and Conor McCarthy, Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel, (London: Zed Books, 2020); David Lloyd and Malini Johar Schueller, “The Israeli State of Exception and the Case for Academic Boycott,” Journal of Academic Freedom 4, (2013): 1-10; Ashley Dawson and Bill V. Mullen (Eds), Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities, (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020).
      18. Mary Jo Nadeau and Alan Sears, “The Palestine Test: Countering the Silencing Campaign,” Studies in Political Economy, 85(1): 7-33; William Robinson and Marysam S. Griffin, We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2017); Jumana Bayeh and Nick Riemer, “Palestine Solidarity and Zionist Backlash in Australian Universities,” Middle East Critique 33, no. 3 (April 2024): 435-448.
      19. Alarabeed, “Myth of Gaza’s Reconstruction; Sansom Milton, Ghassan Elkahlout, and Saba Attallah, “Shrinking Reconstruction Space in the Gaza Strip: Rebuilding after the 2021 and 2022 Wars”, Conflict, Security & Development 24, no. 1 (March 2024): 49-78.
      20. Kamal Badrasawi, I.O. Ahmed, and Iyad Eid, “Exploring Ways to Provide Education in Conflict Zones: Implementation and Challenges,” Intellectual Discourse 26, no. 2 (January 2018): 567-594; Milton et al., “Protecting Higher Education,” Milton et al., “Protecting Time and Space.”
      21. Khalid Shabib, “From Higher Education in Historic Palestine Towards a Pan-Palestinian Higher Education,” Contemporary Arab Affairs 14, no. 3 (2021): 21-54.
      22. Denise Whitelock et al., “Capacity Building for Digital Education,” Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 39, no. 2 (2024): 105-111.
      23. Drita Sulejmani, “Ethnic Cleansing and Colonization in the Case of Historical Palestine: Comparative Analysis from 1948 to Today,” JUSTICIA–International Journal of Legal Sciences 7, no. 11 (2019): 52-60.

      30. Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance

The post Scholasticide: The Ongoing Colonial Attack on Palestinian Higher Education appeared first on Science for the People Magazine.

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Newark Airport flight delays: Air traffic controllers warned of safety issues | CNN
Wednesday May 7th, 2025 at 9:32 PM

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CNN  — 

Air traffic controllers repeatedly rang the alarm about critical safety issues and faced telecommunications outages affecting Newark Liberty International Airport starting last summer – months before widespread delays and flight cancellations at the airport this week, a CNN review of safety reports, air traffic audio and other records found.

One controller wrote in a previously unreported statement in August that only luck had prevented a “catastrophic mid air collision” after a communications breakdown that occurred as multiple planes were routed into the same area to avoid thunderstorms.

And several times over the last year, Newark approach controllers lost radar or radio service, leaving them unable to talk with planes they were tracking. “We just lost all frequencies and communications here,” one controller told pilots in November, according to recordings of air traffic audio.

Those problems appear to have culminated in a loss of radar and radio at the air traffic site for about 90 seconds last week – an episode that led to multiple controllers taking trauma leave from work and resulting in the ongoing Newark meltdown.

Now, controllers and aviation experts say that officials should have heeded the earlier warnings about problems with the intricate and delicate system that guides planes through one of America’s busiest airspaces. Those issues appear to have been exacerbated when Newark’s approach controllers were moved to Philadelphia last summer.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said one Newark approach controller who has worked in air traffic control for more than 20 years and requested to remain anonymous because he is a current employee. “We’re playing Russian roulette.”

For decades, air traffic controllers at a facility on Long Island oversaw flights heading to and from the New York City region’s three major airports, John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark. But the site had struggled with a lack of staffing in recent years, part of a broader shortage of controllers that has hit airports around the US.

In July, the Federal Aviation Administration relocated about two dozen controllers overseeing flights heading to and from Newark. Those controllers shifted from the Long Island facility to a new site in Philadelphia. The change was opposed by some controllers, but the FAA said at the time that it would help address the staffing problems and growing air traffic congestion.

Within weeks, at least a half-dozen controllers reported what they described as serious safety issues caused by failures to collaborate between the two locations about 100 miles apart.

They described the incidents in reports filed with NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System, which allows employees in the aerospace industry to anonymously flag safety issues. The reports don’t include identifying information about flights or when exactly incidents happened – and the details in the reports have not necessarily been verified by government investigators.

Still, the reports paint a dramatic picture of controllers seriously worried by what they described as concerning safety practices.

During one incident in August, an air traffic controller with 13 years of experience said that both the Long Island-based controllers overseeing LaGuardia airport and the Philadelphia-based controllers overseeing Newark had re-routed pilots through the same area to avoid thunderstorms. Because controllers overseeing the two airports no longer work “in the same room,” they were struggling to coordinate, leading to an “incredibly dangerous” situation, according to the report.

“The fact that there was no catastrophic mid air collision is nothing short of luck, as these aircraft were converging at high speeds at the same altitude in between dangerous thunderstorms off their left and right sides,” the controller wrote.

Sending the Newark controllers back to Long Island is “the only way to fix the many safety hazards that are attributed to splitting apart this air traffic operation,” they argued.

Another controller at the Long Island site said in a report that the FAA had only provided controllers a single, short briefing on their colleagues’ move to Philadelphia, and that officials had told their team there would be no change to their operations. But on the first day reporting for duty under the new setup, the controller realized that they had to change the way they inputted handoffs of responsibility for aircraft – potentially leading to errors during busy time periods, the report said.

“I am absolutely dumbfounded,” the controller wrote. “The FAA should be utterly ashamed of themselves for failing to properly brief controllers about this change… Not having the EWR controllers in the same room as us is a significant detriment to safety and efficiency.”

A third controller wrote in August that multiple aircraft had entered the airspace overseen by the Long Island facility without the Newark controllers in Philadelphia flagging the flights to their colleagues under a typical procedure.

Moving the controllers “has caused an extremely dangerous situation in the extremely complicated NYC area airspace,” wrote the controller, who had 18 years of experience. “The former EWR area needs to be moved back” to the Long Island facility, they added.

At least one pilot also complained about the impact of the move. In describing an aborted landing at Newark in August, the pilot wrote that having controllers for the airport based in Philadelphia “unnecessarily introduces additional workload for pilots and increases the chances of errors occurring.”

Timothy Johnson, a senior assistant professor of aviation at Hampton University and a former air traffic controller and training manager for the US Air Force, reviewed the reports for CNN and said they should have been a “red flag.”

“I’ve seen firsthand how critical proximity is in maintaining smooth operations,” Johnson said. “When you remove controllers from a shared space — especially in airspace as layered and time-sensitive as the New York metro area — you lose rapid verbal coordination and the kind of instant problem-solving that keeps traffic flowing safely.”

In a statement Wednesday, the FAA did not respond to the criticism from controllers and experts, but said that it was taking “immediate steps to improve the reliability of operations” at Newark by boosting controller staffing and upgrading technology at the Philadelphia location.

While most of the safety reports came within a few weeks after the move to Philadelphia, the new air traffic control site also faced repeated communications outages in the following months, according to audio and other records.

The controllers still rely on radar in Long Island that transmits data to Philadelphia via telecommunications lines. Two air traffic controllers told CNN that the feed had failed at least twice and potentially three times after the move.

FAA air traffic control alerts show the airport repeatedly faced delays that were attributed to equipment or communications problems. In late August, Newark had a ground stop “due to continued equipment issues,” according to an alert. The following month, another ground stop alert cited “equipment / outage” and noted that officials were “evaluating potential radar outage.”

One of the radio outages appears to have taken place on November 6, when controllers overseeing Newark went silent for more than two minutes, according to air traffic audio from the website <a href="http://LiveATC.net" rel="nofollow">LiveATC.net</a> and first published in November by the YouTube channel VASAviation. Several pilots noted that they weren’t hearing anything from controllers who were supposed to oversee their approach to the airport. “We have no answer,” one pilot said, adding that “it seems like he’s not talking to anyone.”

Once their radios came back on, controllers appeared to be unsure whether pilots could hear them or not.

“We just lost all frequencies and communications here,” one controller said, later adding, “listen up everybody, real careful – anybody besides United 1560, 1043 or 2192, is there anybody else that can hear me on this frequency?”

One controller who was overseeing the Newark approach at the Philadelphia site that night told CNN there was “mayhem” as controllers scrambled to warn other nearby airports about a FedEx plane that had overshot its Newark flight path into the busy LaGuardia airspace. He said he still has nightmares about all the scenarios that could have unfolded during the outage.

In a statement, FedEx said its crew “complied with air traffic control instructions before landing safely,” adding that the company is “committed to maintaining the highest safety standards.”

Michael McCormick, an aviation professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said these communication failures are much more concerning to him than the reports made during the summer of the relocation – which he chalked up largely to growing pains.

The November outage should have “been a warning,” McCormick said. “To lose radio communication for several minutes would mean that something needs to be looked at and looked at in detail and resolved.”

The repeated communications problems continued into the new year. In February, an FAA alert stated that “users can expect arrival delays / airborne holding into the Newark Airport of up to 45 minutes due to frequency and communication line issues.” Another alert about delays due to “communications issues” was issued in early April.

Finally, on April 28, the Newark controllers lost radar service for about 90 seconds and were unable to communicate with pilots for about a minute, a source with knowledge of the situation told CNN. The breakdown was caused by failures in the copper wiring that transmits information from Long Island to Philadelphia, a separate source said.

After the incident, at least three controllers, one supervisor and a trainee took 45 days of mental health leave. That led to even more significant understaffing at the Newark approach control site, requiring airlines to delay or cancel hundreds of flights over the last week – and turning a situation that had been causing consternation in the insular air traffic controller community into a national headache.

The FAA said in a statement Wednesday that it plans to add three new “high-bandwidth telecommunications connections” from New York to Philadelphia, replace copper lines with fiber-optic technology, and deploy a backup system to provide more speed and reliability. In the longer term, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has promised a complete reconstruction of the nation’s air traffic control system that he says will be more reliable than the current antiquated technology.

But Johnson, the aviation expert, said that the FAA should re-evaluate the decision to move controllers to Philadelphia in the first place.

“This current configuration appears to be increasing complexity without a sufficient safety margin,” he said. “Relying on human heroics to patch over structural vulnerabilities is not how we maintain safety.”

The Newark approach controller who was on duty during the November incident told CNN he works in constant fear of a fatal crash under his watch. He said the FAA ignored warnings about the safety issues, and he argued that the failures could have been avoided if the agency had listened to controllers who had objected to the move.

“At the end of the day, I just want equipment that works,” he said. “I don’t want to kill people. That’s my biggest fear.”

CNN’s Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Aaron Cooper, and Pete Muntean contributed to this report.

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