Amnesty International on Thursday reported that a whistleblower inside Morocco’s intelligence service helped reveal a vast surveillance apparatus targeting journalists, activists and dissidents. Commenting on the increasingly hostile environment for freedom of expression in the country, Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, stated: Morocco has wholly embraced techno-authoritarian practices, acquiring a wide range of surveillance [...]

2 October 2026: International Day of Non-Violence A retired social worker stands outside a courthouse holding a handwritten sign. Elsewhere, 13 people block the entrance to a federal building and wait to be cited. Neither raises a hand against anyone. Both acts fit within a long tradition of civil disobedience built around breaking a rule [...]

California and six other states sued President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought on Wednesday, alleging the administration unlawfully impounded congressionally appropriated funds. The suit also seeks to block the administration’s proposed rescission of an additional $810 million in federal funds. California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed the complaint in [...]

The US District Court for the Northern District of California on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump’s $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers, marking the second time a federal court has enjoined enforcement of the policy. Applauding the court’s decision, Steve Bressler, senior legal adviser at the group Democracy Forward, stated: [...]

The UN Working Group of Experts on People from African Descent warned on Wednesday that migrants from the African continent and diaspora face racism and discrimination throughout their journeys, attributing this mistreatment to discriminatory migration policies implemented worldwide. The UN experts stated: For Africans and people of African descent, freedom of movement continues to be [...]

UN experts on Wednesday called on Pakistan to immediately release human rights lawyers Imaan Mazari-Hazir and Hadi Ali Chattha and to drop all charges against them, which they say have no justifiable basis. Mazari-Hazir and Chattha were re-arrested on September 17 on charges relating to an alleged illegal protest in March 2025. The arrest took [...]

Tennessee governor Bill Lee on Thursday announced a pause on remaining scheduled executions in the state after Christa Pike, who was to be executed on Wednesday for her role in a 1995 murder, survived the two doses of lethal injections. After being administered two dosages of pentobarbital, a drug used in single-drug executions where a [...]

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) released a new report Wednesday finding that more than one in five households surveyed in Lebanon said their children went to bed hungry in the two weeks before interviews conducted in July. The report, entitled “An Enduring Nightmare,” documents the toll on children’s access to food, healthcare and education in an active conflict [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Wednesday condemned the detention of South Sudanese political commentator Samuel Peter Oyay, who has been held in a prison in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for one year without charge. Joey Shea, senior UAW researcher for HRW, spoke on the UAE’s policies of repressing dissent, stating: The UAE government’s zero-tolerance [...]