Rahim Kurwa

It's publication day for Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing, available in paper & free .epub! It traces a century of struggle over Los Angeles' periphery, culminating in the use of policing to expel and repress Black tenants. Here's a look at its chapters:

Ohio’s crackdown on Medicaid fraud cuts off care for some disabled people As President Donald Trump promises a war on bad actors ripping off social welfare programs, people with legitimate needs say they have become collateral damage. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

A new survey of 1,000 American adults found that the strongest supporters of transgender sports bans are not the people who admire women most: they are the people who hold the most hostile views about women. www.helenwebberley.com/news/transge...

We published this story late Friday afternoon amid an avalanche of news so I’m reposting it now because Kohen Wiley’s life mattered more than a box of diapers.

Over 294,250 families in Gaza don't have any sort of shelter that can protect them from winter storms. Available shelter supplies can reach just 18% of those in need, as the Israeli government is currently blocking 8,600 emergency shelter kits from entering Gaza.

I'm going to try to do this cleanly. Today's right wing governments are networked to each other. Those networks are well-documented. You can read about them in books. Following the elections in one node of that network is good practice for understanding the U.S. node.

"The system that begins with a phone number being put into a computer system ends with an entire family crushed under the rubble." Eyal Weizman on NAZA in @lrb.co.uk:

New paper surveys thousands of residents in six cities (Berlin, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Paris) and finds that centrists/moderates are the most anti-housing development www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

When people like Anne Applebaum talk about the far-right they don't mean the Middle East because they exceptionalize the region so much that its developments exist outside time. The region is filled with far-right leaders that she happens to support.

Mysha Qureshi, a South Asian UT junior, said students are paying attention to the “shift” on campus. She is concerned that by not calling out the racism toward students, UT is allowing a “hostile” environment toward students of color to grow. “They are not protecting us, Qureshi said.

“The only way to understand [Biddy] Mason’s emancipation was to begin, not with a person, but with a network: the hidden history of Southern California’s Underground Railroad,” Kevin Waite. @laist.com: laist.com/news/la-hist... #BiddyMason

Picked up the new Biddy Mason book at Sunday's talk at the Homestead Museum. At the event, Jackie Broxton, of the #BiddyMason Foundation, gave out free copies of Mason v. Smith court case. Author Kevin Waite will be at @vromansbookstore.bsky.social on Thursday: vromansbookstore.com/event/2026-1...

NEW: At least 18 voting centers in Alaska Native communities have not opened despite early voting having already started in the state last week. “There is no legal excuse for the failure to open these sites,” one state senator wrote to the Alaska elections chief.

With 83% of the vote counted nationwide, Lula has stretched his lead to 2.8 million votes. That's a lead of 51.4% to 48.6%. That puts him on track for a victory that could be larger than his 1.8% win four years ago, which would be an immense comeback. He's even up in Minas Gervais now, by 0.6%.

Storaging the Homeless: A Report for Housing Justice Organizers challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/2026/10/12/s...

Startling stat — a police officer in a small Texas town handed arrested and handed over immigrants to ICE at such volume that the total number is the equivalent of 10% of his town's population. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/m...

You Can’t Evict a Movement Housing Justice and Abolitionist Futures in New York's Chinatown www.pennpress.org/978151283037...

“On March […], on the […] of Ramadan, during year one of our genocide, on the day you abstained, and the resolution passed, a legislative absolution in which I and my family tree were non-binding— / and with the aid of your AI eye in the sky, Israel killed Hussein.”

“As Omar noted in the interview, the Homeland Security Investigations agents would actually have more access to information related to her emigration and naturalization at their office than they could possibly find at her home.”

Gaza Needs Us — Help Families Survive chuffed.org/project/help...

Support Khaldoun and his family in Gaza chuffed.org/project/supp...

Help Omar and his family rebuild their lives chuffed.org/project/help...

Officer who shot and killed Black toddler in Mississippi resigns from police force

The ultimate tendency of Trumpism is to transform citizenship into a privilege granted or withdrawn at the sovereign’s discretion. Now that ambition is being directed against a sitting member of Congress. https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/whats-at-stake-in-the-ilhan-omar-case/

In memory of: Inaam Yousef Mahmoud Madi / انعام يوسف محمود ماضي Age: 70 We will not forget you.

Again I say, the scam economy is consuming the political will to fight authoritarianism.

Just as a private equity firm buys out a corporation and strips it for parts, a consultant class is raiding the Democratic Party and getting “generationally wealthy” along the way New from me and @adambonica.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/2163...

"...10-year-old Abdul-Rahman Awad succumbed to wounds he sustained last Monday in an Israeli strike near al-Saroukh junction... ...citizen was killed & another one was injured in an Israeli drone strike in the al-Mawasi area..." english.palinfo.com/news/2026/10... #GazaNews #Israel #News #Zionism

Trump: "People will make millions of dollars by turning others in"

New book of possible interest to IEHS members: The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West by Kevin Waite www.ucpress.edu/books/the-bo...

NEW POLLS: A majority of likely voters in six states expected to decide control of the US Senate - Georgia, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas - support Senate measures to block the transfer of bombs to Israel.

“Raises questions”?? In this Kavanaugh Stop, ICE agents swerve to hit a US citizen, knock him off his bike breaking his arm, tase him, cuff him as he screams in pain, blame him, lie about everything, threaten to charge him for damage to their SUV. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/u...

“What we see happening now is a kind of hollowing out of the content of immigration court while maintaining the facade of a judicial process,” said one of the authors of the report. https://www.washingtonsun.com/immigration/researchers-immigration-dismantled-system

Pleased to share the amicus brief we filed before the US Supreme Court in the Mi Familia Vota case. The case threatens to allow SCOTUS to implement many of the worst features of the SAVE Act and deserves your attention www.brennancenter.org/media/16412/...

"placing hope in lawyers as agents of social change is to a significant extent misplaced insofar as it fails to account for how their agency is itself constituted and constrained by structures in which historically sedimented relations of production and power are already inscribed."

The last legal path to desegregate schools is on the line here. SCOTUS took a case that could doom any race-neutral plan (lotteries, zones, income preferences) aiming to improve diversity, even when courts find no group was proportionally disadvantaged. Voluntary desegregation would virtually end.

How big are LASD deputy gangs? A lawsuit points to 271 employees with potential gang tattoos. A former LASD lieutenant’s lawsuit reveals new details about an internal investigation into the ‘Regulators’ and ‘Spartans’ gangs. lapublicpress.org/2026/10/la-l...

Incentivizing Trump voters to call in their suspicions about about black and brown people? What's the worst that could happen?

The Mississippi AG says police are justified for killing a baby because someone thought his mother shoplifted diapers that she paid for. The police have refused to release body cam footage. Fuck everything about this story.

In memory of: Mohammed Farid Mahmoud Qandil / محمد فريد محمود قنديل Age: 24 We will not forget you.

ICE arrested a 56-year old green card holder, i.e. a lawful permanent resident, and detained him in the Rio Grande Processing Center, where he died. www.texastribune.org/2026/10/19/t...