“The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the murder conviction of Alex Murdaugh, who was convicted in March 2023 of double homicide of his wife and son. The court ordered a new trial, saying that Mary Rebecca ‘Becky’ Hill, who served as the court clerk in Colleton County, exercised ‘improper external influences’ during Murdaugh’s first trial. Murdaugh’s attorney Dick Harpootlian said in a statement that Murdaugh will remain in custody. The state supreme court voted unanimously on the decision. ‘Although we are aware of the time, money, and effort expended for this lengthy trial, we have no choice but to reverse the denial of Murdaugh’s motion for a new trial due to Hill’s improper external influences on the jury and remand for a new trial,’ their ruling said.” (05/13/26)
Source: Brennan Center for Justice
by Michael Waldman
“The late 19th century was a dismal time in American politics. Corruption ran rampant. Congress was governed by staunch partisan loyalties and nail-biting majorities. And redistricting, instead of being confined to after the census every 10 years, was a tool of manipulation and partisan hardball. ‘From 1872 to 1896,’ a political scientist reports, ‘at least one state redrew its congressional districts each year.’ Of course, that era was marred by another phenomenon — one too familiar to us today. It saw a swift rollback in voting rights and representation for the newly freed Black population of the South. In 1875, after the Civil War and the adoption of the 15th Amendment, seven Black men served in the House, and one sat as a senator. Terrorism, political cowardice, and racial backlash ended Reconstruction. By 1902, Congress was once again all white.” (05/13/26)
“Doctors who examined Nobel Peace laureate and activist Narges Mohammadi more than a week after she collapsed at a prison in Iran say she needs months of treatment, her foundation said Wednesday. An angiography procedure showed two of her main arteries have significant blockage and that her vascular disease has significantly deteriorated since she last had the procedure in 2024, the foundation said in a statement. Mohammadi, 53, was urgently transferred from prison to a hospital in northwestern Iran on May 1 after she fell unconscious. She was released on bail nearly 10 days later and transferred to a hospital in Tehran where her specialists examined her. The attending physician said her blood pressure continues to fluctuate, in part due to damage to part of the brain that is responsible for such regulations. The doctors recommended an eight-month treatment course in an environment ‘free from external stressors, where she can receive permanent care and long-term treatment.'” (05/13/26)
“On April 1, 114 guests and 61 crew members, unaware of the presence of a killer virus among them, boarded the MV Hondius. That ship has earned the moniker ‘Ship of Fools.’ Because of the top brass’s reckless disregard of infection control principles, the ship’s passengers and thousands of people around the world have been exposed to the rare Andes strain of the hantavirus, a disease found in rat urine and feces, and which has a 40% mortality rate. Among the passengers who boarded that day was a 70-year-old birdwatcher who had spent his final days ashore traipsing through an Argentinian dump covered with rat feces and looking for rare birds. He was looking for species, not feces, but it’s the feces that did him in.” (05/13/26)
“A survivor of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse has told how the late sex offender sexually abused her while he was under house arrest for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Roza, who was recruited from Uzbekistan as a teenager by Epstein’s associate and modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, spoke publicly for the first time alongside a number of victims in a field hearing that was organised by House Democrats. She told the session that she was introduced to Epstein by Brunel in July 2009, was offered work by Epstein ‘to help me with my financial troubles,’ and he later subjected her to rape over a period of three years. Democratic lawmaker Robert Garcia said the unofficial hearing was held in West Palm Beach, Florida, because it was ‘where Epstein’s crimes first came to light.'” (05/13/26)
“‘It just shouldn’t be this hard,’ Abdul El-Sayed, the insurgent candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, says to a packed Mumford High School auditorium in Detroit’s northwestern corner. ‘Shouldn’t be this hard to afford a second bag of groceries … to get your kid to a doctor or to pay your taxes and know that that money’s gonna be spent on you and your kids instead of dropping bombs on other people and their kids’. El-Sayed is here with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who’s passing through town on his ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ tour, and state Rep. Donavan McKinney. El-Sayed is locked in a tight three-way race with establishment picks for Michigan’s open seat, a must-win for Democrats hoping to reclaim the chamber, while McKinney is running to unseat incumbent Democratic Congressman Shri Thanedar (MI-13), one of the body’s richest members, whom McKinney has called a ‘cardboard cutout of a congressman.’ Sanders has endorsed both.” (05/13/26)
“Meta Platforms said Wednesday it’s rolling out an ‘incognito’ mode for WhatsApp users to have private conversations with its AI chatbot, a move intended to ease privacy concerns about sensitive information that users share in chats. The social media company said in a blog post that incognito chat mode provides a way to have private, temporary conversations with Meta AI, its artificial intelligence assistant that’s been available on WhatsApp for a few years. Messages will be processed ‘in a secure environment’ that even Meta can’t access, won’t be saved by default and will disappear when exiting a session, Meta said. Generative AI systems have been dogged by privacy concerns because the large language models that underpin these systems are trained on vast troves of data, sometimes including personal information provided by users themselves in their conversations with AI chatbots.” (05/13/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Jamie Beran & Rabbi Jill Jacobs
“When thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents invaded Minneapolis this past January, Twin Cities residents, and people across the country, jumped into action, trailing these agents, organizing major protests, and dropping off food and supplies to those understandably afraid to leave their homes. Both of our organizations, too, took action. Bend the Arc: Jewish Action leadership traveled to join a clergy day of protest alongside close partners in Minneapolis, and T’ruah sent some 50 rabbis to support dozens of their colleagues who live and work there. Lay people and clergy alike similarly stepped up in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and other cities targeted by major Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Minnesotans successfully diminished the massive ICE takeover of their city. This is a testament to the power of citizen organizing and action.” (05/13/26)
“One gauge of a society’s level of interpersonal trust lies in how much the central government shares power – with local authorities, courts, private citizen groups, and others. For the last 16 years in Hungary, such trust has been evaporating. An increasingly authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, had been centralizing power and creating ‘us versus them’ polarization around often-fabricated issues. On Saturday, all that changed with the swearing-in of a new prime minister, Péter Magyar. His broad-tent Tisza party won big in elections a month ago. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Magyar pledged not to rule over Hungary but to ‘serve’ it – through reconciliation, inclusiveness, and democratic renewal. ‘We are going to remake the constitutional system so that such a concentration of power can never happen again,’ he declared.” (05/11/26)
“After British troops had beaten German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s tank forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt on November 4, 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared, ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.’ The same might now be said about humanity’s struggle to defeat the dire threat of global climate change caused by our never-ending burning of fossil fuels. The illegal war of aggression on Iran, abruptly launched on February 28, 2026, by the governments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, has indeed provoked a global energy crisis of a unique kind.” (05/12/26)
