Rachel Strohm

‘The most bitter news’: Iran reels as more than 100 children reportedly killed in school bombing The building appears to be among many devastated in Trump’s ‘major combat operations’ as long expected attacks arrive

“Iran reels as more than 100 children reportedly killed in school bombing”

The United States armed and funded Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.

Now such atrocities are being inflicted on Iran’s people, but this time the United States is a full participant.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

The government of Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian described the killing of the supreme leader as a ‘criminal attack’ that would not go ‘unanswered’.

Follow our live blog for more updates and analysis: ft.trib.al/8j6wHWI

We learned nothing from our experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

• This is a war of choice, not necessity. The U.S. and Israel initiated strikes on Iran without a direct, imminent threat. That makes this a discretionary conflict, and history shows wars of choice often come with long, unpredictable tails. • Escalation is almost guaranteed. Iran has been preparing for this day since the 12-day war. Retaliation is likely to take place not just directly, but asymmetrically, potentially igniting multiple fronts at once. • Regional conflagration is a real possibility. If Hezbollah fully engages from Lebanon, if militias strike U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, or if the Houthis escalate in the Red Sea, this stops being a bilateral conflict and becomes a region-wide war stretching across the Middle East

Global economic shockwaves are likely. Iran sits along the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes. Even limited disruption could spike energy prices, fuel inflation, and rattle global markets. • U.S. forces across the region are exposed. American troops and assets in Iraq, Syria, the Gulf, and at sea are within reach of Iranian missiles and drones. What starts as a targeted strike campaign could quickly put thousands of U.S. personnel at risk. Even @realDonaldTrump admitted that American blood could be spilled. • Long wars reshape politics at home. Sustained conflict risks war fatigue, domestic division, and political backlash in the U.S. and Israel — especially if casualties rise or objectives become unclear.

Senior expert on Iran at @crisisgroup.org Ali Vaez.

This stunt where ICE releases people far from home with no proper clothing and no way home should be treated as attempted homicide. In this case, actual homicide. These cases are not accidental or based on misunderstandings. They are deliberate attempts to inflict bodily harm.

I don't think anyone pretending there isn't an effort underway by Republicans to eradicate trans people from public life can be taken seriously at this point.

This cannot be constitutional. An obvious equal protection violation given that if they knew who to send letters to they could just as easily have issued replacement licenses

Justice Department withheld and removed some Epstein files related to Trump An NPR investigation finds the public database of Epstein files is missing dozens of pages related to sexual abuse accusations against President Trump.

An NPR investigation finds the public database of Epstein files is missing dozens of pages related to sexual abuse accusations against President Trump. n.pr/4qTItsU

Kenya More than 600 Kenyans in Cambodia, who say they were victims of human traffickers, have appealed to the courts in Nairobi to force their government to bring them home. Cambodia's interior ministry said it recovered them during a crackdown on online fraud centers run by organized criminals. According to the Kenyans, they were tricked into traveling to Cambodia with the promise of legitimate employment but were then made to work in heavily-guarded compounds where they were subject to attacks and abuse, including stabbings. Cambodian authorities have given them until February 28 to leave the country or face potential imprisonment but they say they cannot afford flights back to Kenya.

This is also the political economy of digitalisation.

NEW: Local officials blocked from visiting migrants at Portsmouth airport who were stranded on ICE deportation plane for 14 hours.

Full writethru with new images:
gillianbrockell.ghost.io/breaking-sha...

Lithium Plume in Our Atmosphere Traced Back to Returning SpaceX Rocket Space junk returning to the Earth is introducing metal pollution to the pristine upper atmosphere as it burns up on re-entry, a new study has found.

Hey, so all those rocket launches people love cheering on are probably destroying the upper atmosphere. Repairing the ozone layer in the 90s is one of our all-time great achievements as a global civilization; private rocket men seem intent on reversing that.

The Trump Administration Is Ending Aid That It Says Saves Lives The State Department will let lifesaving projects expire because “there is no strong nexus between the humanitarian response and U.S. national interests,” according to an internal email.

Quietly, the Trump administration is now ending even the life-saving aid that they had promised would be preserved

Reporting from @hana-kiros.bsky.social

www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

A Pictorial History of Africa: Insights from Ancient Figurative Art. While travelling through West Africa between 1908 and 1910, the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius visited the city of Ife (in S.W Nigeria), where he had heard accounts of a remarkable statue of the se...

A Pictorial History of Africa: Insights from Ancient Figurative Art.

www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/a-pictoria...

Gaza’s environmental apocalypse: ‘What we have left is not soil, it’s contaminated waste’ A toxic mix of 61 million tons of debris, 100,000 tons of explosives, and chemicals leaked into the earth has destroyed arable land, water and air quality. Any recovery is expected to take decades

english.elpais.com/internationa...

Special Saturday Triad: What I Saw at the Battle of Minneapolis The national media has moved on. Minnesota is still under siege.

"You now live in a country where volunteers deliver babies at home, in secret, off the books, because mothers fear that if they go to the hospital, they will be abducted by masked, armed agents of the state while giving birth. This is not a hypothetical."

A lot of people, including me, were wondering how an IRB could ever approve this study.

The answer is that no IRB did. The person who “signed off” on approval from the only ethics board that reviewed it had resigned three years earlier. His signature was used without his knowledge.

An ICE agent shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a US citizen and San Antonio resident, in March 2025. Then ICE and the Texas Department of Public Safety covered it up. He was 23 years old. I am calling for a full investigation into this shooting, including why there was an 8-month cover up.

The Most Surveilled Place in America “The idea is that if enough people get hurt, they’ll stop coming.”

for that series, i reported on CBP’s. ash surveillance apparatus in the sonoran desert, and its “prevention through deterrence” strategy, which funnels migrants onto dangerous routes—and which predates DHS by more than a decade:
www.theverge.com/c/23203881/b...

A Fatal ICE Shooting Occurred in Texas Months Before Renee Good’s Killing

At this point, we should just assume they’re lying. But by their own account the kid had no record. US citizen. At the very least, it looks like multiple policy violations — they surrounded the car, fired into a moving vehicle, killed him through the driver’s side window.

Two issues I'm pondering. One is that you can't move this many people without inflicting tremendous physical and psychological harm on those deported and on society itself. The second is that left in place for years, mass detention on a whole new level will be normalized. It rarely vanishes. [1/3]

@polphilpod.bsky.social argues that the anti-trans, anti-immigration moves of Starmer/British Labor are the logical extension of the popularism/centrism strategy advocated by many center-left U.S. Democrats. newrepublic.com/article/2068...

Needless to say, there’s no way this scale is consistent with lawful due process — Trump is only hiring 100 new immigration judges. These concentration camps are intended to be so awful that detainees “voluntarily” agree to self-deport to end the trauma. More: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/accountabi...

In the concentration camp universe, this is what's known as a filtration camp. A government preemptively takes a whole class of people to interrogate and detain extrajudicially in order to inflict duress on them while arbitrarily assessing their (supposed) culpability.

Mike Spagat's study published in the Lancet estimates the IDF killed 75,200 people in Gaza from October 2023 to January 2025, indicating a 40% undercount by the health ministry.

This is in line with several other studies (eg Max Planck).

Kennedy Allies Target States to Overturn Vaccine Mandates for Schoolchildren

Crude cancer deaths have risen, as the chart shows. But that mainly reflects how we now live long enough to get cancer. That's partly due to vaccines--another RFKJr target. Kudos to the NY Times for following the largely unseen state-level anti-vaxx campaign.

Chart from Our World in Data shows that the crude death rate from cancer has risen from ~150/100,000 in 1990 to about 180/100,000 today--but that the more meaningful age-standardized rate, the weighted average of the age-specific mortality rates, has fallen from ~150/100,000 to about 80/100,000. In other words, more people are overall dying from cancer, but that's because we now have so many old people in society who have lived long enough to get cancer.

The most infuriating part of RFKJr's demolition of the US biomedical research complex is that it is slowly whittling down our most critical health problems, cancer being the most important example. The US age-standardized cancer mortality rate has fallen by ~40% since 1990.

On January 10, 2026, while driving back to work after getting lunch with his father and cousin, a car quickly passed O., sped up, then stopped in front of him. (Id. ¶ 3.) A few men in civilian clothes stepped out of the car and asked for his identification. (Id.) The men threatened O.—if he did not get out of the car, they would force him out. (Id.) O. exited the car and was told he was under arrest. (Id.) The men handcuffed him and did not allow him to bring his phone. (Id.) O. felt like he was being kidnapped. (Id.) The men detained O., his father, and his cousin, taking them all to Whipple. (Id. ¶ 4.) At Whipple, there was “food scattered on the floor, the floor was sticky with mud, and everything stuck to your shoes.” (Id. ¶ 5.) The space was so cramped that sometimes there was no space to sit on the floor. (Id.)

The horror stories rolling in from Minnesota are just the tip of the iceberg. This 20-year-old, who's lawfully present in the country, was arrested for being Latino, then jailed in a filthy cell where he couldn't even sit down. 18 days of illegal detention. democracyforward.org/wp-content/u...

Federal judge rules Kilmar Abrego Garcia can’t be re-detained by immigration authorities A federal judge has ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot re-detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia because a 90-day detention period has expired and the government has no viable plan for deporti...

Judge rules Kilmar Abrego Garcia can’t be re-detained by immigration authorities

New from me.