Democracy Now! Productions

Yemen’s Houthi rebels are warning shipping companies that their tankers risk being attacked if they use Saudi Arabian ports. This comes after the Houthis announced the closure of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to Saudi ships in retaliation for the kingdom’s blockade on Yemen. Two oil tankers that were reportedly loaded with Saudi crude oil en route to China and India on Tuesday were forced to divert toward the Suez Canal.

In Gaza, the Israeli military is moving to quickly build a giant barrier separating the portion of the Gaza Strip it controls from the rest of the enclave. In recent months, more than 23 kilometers, about 14 miles, have been constructed. Israel currently controls just over 50% of the territory. This comes as an Israeli airstrike killed a family of six, including four children, in Gaza City Tuesday. Since last October’s so-called ceasefire, more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks.

In Kenya, Pan-African feminist educator and advocate Njoki Njehû passed away at her home in Nairobi Saturday. She was a committed Kenyan grassroots organizer and activist who played a pivotal role building the Fight Inequality Alliance movement. Njehû notably led the “50 Years Is Enough” campaign in the United States, marking the 50th anniversary of the World Bank and the IMF, denouncing their neoliberal policies and catastrophic impacts on communities in the Global South. The Fight Inequality Alliance said in a statement, “Njoki was a visionary leader whose wisdom, conviction, and generosity shaped our movement in countless ways across Africa and globally.” Click here to see our interviews with Njoki Njehû over the years.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing civil rights and anti-discrimination laws, has ended a decades-old requirement for private sector employers to collect demographic data in the workplace, slashing a policy that had been in place for more than 60 years. The EEOC’s Republican majority voted 2-1 Tuesday to rescind the data collection requirement. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas is a Trump ally and outspoken critic of diversity, equity and inclusion policies. The EEOC was created under the 1964 Civil Rights Act establishing protections that prohibited discrimination based on race, gender, sex, national origin and religion. Kalpana Kotagal, who is the sole Democrat left on the EEOC since Trump overhauled the agency, said, “Today, the commission discusses whether to turn back time to a period before the civil rights movement, kneecapping its ability to protect workers.”

In India, police have detained Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the country’s largest opposition party, the Congress party, as student-led protests against the government continue. Gandhi and other opposition leaders were arrested during a sit-in outside right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s residence on Tuesday. Demonstrators were condemning the brutal crackdown on student protesters. This is a lawmaker with the opposition Congress party who spoke through a police van’s window after being arrested.K. Suresh: “We are protesting in front of the prime minister’s office, prime minister’s residence, because our students were brutally attacked. And that’s our students very cruelly attacked yesterday by Delhi police. Honorable prime minister is not saying anything. Honorable home minister is not making any statement. So hundreds of students, they are in the hospital.”

In Lebanon, three villages in the south of the country will be the first to implement the framework agreement brokered between Israel, Lebanon and the U.S. Under the deal, the Israeli military is set to retreat from areas it occupies in southern Lebanon to allow the Lebanese military to take over and oversee the disarmament of Hezbollah. This is Ali Allaw, who is a resident of the southern Lebanese town of Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh.Ali Allaw: “We are waiting for the army’s decision to allow the residents to enter the town, as the army promised that once the engineering regiment finishes its work, the residents may be allowed to enter. But so far, as we’ve been told, the engineering regiment hasn’t finished yet because there are explosive devices and unexploded ammunition.”Meanwhile, President Trump on Tuesday said he would allow U.S. carriers to resume direct flights to Lebanon — more than 40 years after the U.S. suspended the route following the hijacking of a U.S. passenger plane back in 1985.

The Trump administration arrested a record more than 43,000 immigrants in the month of June, the highest number since Trump returned to office. That’s according to an analysis by The Guardian, which reports more than 65,000 immigrants are estimated to be in ICE detention, while the Trump administration has deported more than a half a million immigrants since January of last year. The majority of immigrants targeted by Trump officials have no criminal record. In related news, Time magazine reports the Trump administration is planning to expand immigrant detention across over a dozen locations nationwide, including the Virgin Islands and Guantánamo Bay, the U.S. military base in Cuba. This comes as Citizens Bank has announced it will officially begin to cut ties with two of the nation’s largest private operators of ICE jails — GEO Group and CoreCivic — amid growing calls to boycott the bank over its financing of the two for-profit prison companies. Click here to see our interview on the subject.

The U.S. is continuing to strike Iran for an 11th straight day. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday revealed the cost of the war on Iran has soared to over $37 billion during an appearance before the Senate Appropriations Committee. However, independent estimates and media reports based on internal leaks suggest the true figure is much higher. Hegseth is now seeking $80 billion more from Congress, including $67 billion for the war on Iran. “You’re requesting billions of dollars in supplemental funding for a war that you said would last for weeks and that the president has no plan or ability to end,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, during the hearing. “You are asking for unlimited money for bombs when people can’t feed their families.”

On February 28, the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, missiles landed on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in the Iranian city of Minab, in a civilian area near the Strait of Hormuz. At least 121 schoolchildren were killed along with 26 teachers. Forensic Architecture and Sky News analyzed the attack, finding that the neighborhood was bombed a second time while families and rescuers were still on the ground. The Trump administration has repeatedly refused to take responsibility for the school strike, with President Trump even suggesting that images of the destruction were AI-generated. “There were images and videos available from the time of the strikes,” says Samaneh Moafi, assistant director of research at Forensic Architecture. “A second wave of strikes hit, and it’s in these ones that we do see the profile of a Tomahawk. And the only party within the war that has this missile is the U.S.”

Andrew and Tristan Tate have been arrested in Miami after British authorities issued new rape and sex trafficking charges against them. The brothers, dual British-U.S. citizens, are prominent in the far-right, hypermasculine online community known as the “manosphere.” They previously lived in Romania, where in 2023 prosecutors filed a criminal indictment against them for human trafficking, while Andrew faces a rape charge. Despite the charges, they were freed from travel restrictions in Romania early last year after White House officials reportedly took an interest in their case. “Andrew Tate has become a really important political force for the MAGA movement,” explains Heidi Blake, a reporter for The New Yorker. Despite the Tate brothers’ popularity with prominent figures in the U.S. right wing, including Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk, Blake says the fact that the extradition request has been greenlit by the State Department suggests the Trump administration won’t be protecting the Tates. Blake’s recent investigation, “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse,” documents the Tate brothers’ systematic exploitation of women over the past decade. “What I was hearing from women I spoke to was an incredibly similar description of the way Andrew Tate would assault them, by choking them either 'til they passed out or ’til they couldn't breathe, raping them,” says Blake. “Often they describe being beaten over the head, as well, during these assaults.”