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Alex Kerchner

@akerchner.bsky.social
490 followers 930 following 52 posts

PhD candidate in comparative/American politics @PUPolitics, alum @nyulaw, @uw. Text analysis, elections, democracy, R, baseball, transit

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Reposted by Alex Kerchner
Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 02/06/2026
After ICE deported Wendy Hernandez Reyes, it turned her 3-year-old son Orlin over to her sister’s estranged partner, who tortured Orlin and beat him to death. I can’t say what I think should happen to those responsible without violating this website’s TOS. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...
Because the service had been arranged last minute, the funeral home on a busy street in Atlanta could only offer them one hour.
Orlin wore a long-sleeved shirt and a tan vest with a striped bow tie and matching pants.
The clothes concealed his injuries. A new teddy bear was tucked beside him.
Embroidered into the satin lining of his casket was "Principito," or "Little Prince."
His full name was embossed on the coffin:
Orlin Josue Hernandez Reyes.
McCaffrey and Hernandez's sister had to hold Hernandez up as she walked trembling toward her son. Once she regained the strength to stand, she stood over him and stroked his face and chest.
"I never wanted to leave you," she whispered repeatedly. "I wanted to bring you with me.
My son."
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Popehat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
This is extremely lawless and corrupt by the Trump DOJ. So, par for the course. The presumption of regularity is a joke now, and federal prosecutors won’t recover the esteem they had from federal judges for a generation. (Which, actually, is fine.)
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David Gilbert @davidgilbert.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
NEW "We even have to include a tabletop exercise of me getting arrested" — Maryland's elections administrator Election directors across the US are preparing for everything from ICE showing up at polling locations to officials being arrested during November's midterms www.wired.com/story/electi...
wired.com
Election Officials Are Getting Ready for ICE to Show Up at the Polls
The Trump administration keeps threatening to send federal agents to oversee elections. State and local officials are preparing, and even gaming out what happens if they're arrested.
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NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Whether it's Donald Trump seeking to imprison journalists or a couple of NYU students telling Jeremy Peters they don't like Jonathan Haidt, both sides have adopted a totalitarian attitude towards free speech.
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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
This is a real and repeated problem and it’s so easy to fix for a marginal additional cost! Just randomise ballot order!
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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Breaking: it turns out that a strategy that literally every political scientist went 'No, don't do that. That's nuts!' is, in fact, nuts.
ft.com
UK elections: Reform surges in English local elections
Nigel Farage’s party has won about 300 seats in early results
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Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
now thats an anecdote with a punch, from Gillian Tett www.ft.com/content/c0ae...
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Duaa Eldeib @deldeib.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
This was a hard story to report. Newborns who don’t get a vitamin K shot are 81 times more likely to develop a condition where they bleed uncontrollably. But more and more families are declining the shot. And babies are dying. www.propublica.org/article/more...
propublica.org
Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth
A lifesaving injection given at birth to prevent severe bleeding has become collateral damage of the anti-vaccine movement.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 06/05/2026
and again, all of this is happening in the name of “equal protection”
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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
One of the most amusingly petty things Justice Alito does is to put deadlines on administrative stays *only* when he is deeply *unsympathetic* to the applicants. He did it in the 2023 mife case and the 2024 SB4 immigration case; and he did it today. In all other cases, his stays are indefinite:
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Evan Bernick, a finite mode with a smol hooman and a lorg floof @evanbernick.bsky.social · 03/05/2026
chief legal and political correspondent for CBS and editor of SCOTUSblog, respectively, in case anyone is interested
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 03/05/2026
relatedly i strongly believe — and i think there is even research to this effect — that people are routinely told that affirmative action or DEI is to blame for their professional or academic failures to avoid having to confront them with the realities of their performance
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Wrote a piece for @slate.com on how our theories of partisan polarization gave the SCOTUS majority more intellectual cover to kill the VRA slate.com/news-and-pol...
The ruling also rests on a methodological error that would earn a failing grade in a graduate statistics course. The court treats race and party as competing explanations, as if controlling for one neutralizes the other. But for millions of American voters, race explains party affiliation.
The vast majority of Black Americans did not randomly sort into the Democratic Party.
Already trending blue since the New Deal, they were pushed fully into the Democratic Party by Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Republicans' Southern Strategy over the decades since. To "control for partisanship" when assessing racial gerrymandering is to erase the very mechanism through which racism travels. Consider the analogy of a court ruling that a company didn't discriminate by gender in pay because, once you control for being a manager or executive-positions from which women were systematically excluded — the gap disappears. Or that if you exclude people with high blood pressure, then a high sodium diet appears to have no effect on your risk of stroke.
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Gravel Influencer @gravelinfluencer.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
You should watch the video. He accelerated pretty damn quickly into the student.
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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
In my view, the question is what it does it mean for the United States to be a lawyerocracy and juristocracy to a degree that is virtually unique in the developed world? What sort of benefits does that confer, and what kind of costs does it impose?
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Kevin Morris @kevintmorris.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
It gets worse: Not only has the turnout gap grown. It was pushed up in most places once covered by Section 5 BY SHELBY. Alito, presumably, knows this. It was published in a top poli sci journal and blasted from here to kingdom-come by BCJ (open access: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... )
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Given the argument that ended the VRA, I think it’s time liberals did some self reflection about the now decades long obsession with partisan polarization as the problem, as opposed to authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, and racism
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Kevin Morris @kevintmorris.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
I am unspeakably angry about this turnout gap figure, and it gives insight into the whole ballgame for gutting the VRA. Alito points out that Black turnout exceeded White turnout twice in 5 elections. The argument is garbage 1/x
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Michael McDonald @electproject.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
This is perhaps the most significant Supreme Court race-related decision in modern history. While people will focus on Congress, this decision will dismantle thousands of districts electing representatives of minority communities at the state and local levels
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Bruce Larson @brucelarson.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
That Brin can spend $57 million trying to block a California billionaire tax makes a good case for the billionaire tax.
nytimes.com
Sergey Brin Moves to the Right, With a ‘MAGA Girlfriend’ by His Side
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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 24/04/2026
The thing to remember is Georgetown doesn't enforce orthodoxy and restrict free speech. So there people doing lots of different kinds of work. This center is run by two law school professors, and the report is by a visiting fellow. Attributing one report to a whole university is sloppy journalism.
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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
“My understanding is that there were students in my section who, through Fed Soc, had clerkships lined up the fall of 1L,” Kaufman said. “There is no liberal student for whom that’s the case.”
thecrimson.com
Conservative Judges’ Early Hiring Fuels Two-Track Clerkship System at Harvard Law | News | The Harvard Crimson
Federal judges — particularly those aligned with the conservative legal movement — are increasingly recruiting Harvard Law School students during their first year, accelerating a clerkship hiring proc...
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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 14/04/2026
Nope. Nope. Nope. This post is just two false statements.
Strong political parties that bend the rules to entrench their power and succumb to corruption are a consistent feature of democracy qua democracy. And if your entrenched ruling party can lose everything in a wave election, you are not living in an authoritarian state.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
I too have written about white conservatives in southern state legislatures rushing through bullshit changes to the law just to thwart the advancement of literally one black man, but I'm a historian who writes about the Jim Crow era South and not a reporter discussing current fucking events there.
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
one kinda of sanewashing thing the media did repeatedly for Trump over the years is describing him as an "isolationist" or "america first" while knowing trump's actual foreign policy is just a different alliance — not with other nations, but with a network of far-right parties around the world
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Adil Haque @adhaque.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
"The Times’s analysis shows that the damage was often caused by strikes in crowded neighborhoods" "In most instances examined by The Times, the intended target of a strike was not clear. In some cases, schools and health care facilities ... were directly hit." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 09/04/2026
Our PhD student Kennedy Orwa, who studies applications of AI to health care, was hastily deported today to Kenya along with his 13-year-old son without opportunity to speak to legal counsel. King 5 reports that he held a valid visa that was rescinded without explanation.
king5.com
UW graduate student deported through SEA as protesters demand answers
A union representing University of Washington graduate student workers says Kennedy Orwa’s student visa was rescinded without explanation.
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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
Also of note, Iowa paid Chris Rufo—perhaps the leading propagandist for the current assault on higher ed, an unqualified hack and admitted fabulist—$34,000 to speak. It's embarrassing that any higher ed institution would invite him, especially when they are cutting departmental budgets.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
Trump/Vought are planning to eliminate the program that oversees social science funding from the National Science Foundation, and they are not going to wait for Congress to weigh in because they have already shown they believe they have the power of the purse. bsky.app/profile/lizn...
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Many pundits seem to earnestly believe survey experiments are so externally valid that if Kamala Harris had “replaced racial preferences in small business loans with preferences for low-income applications” she would’ve won in a landslide
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Jamison Foser @jamisonfoser.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
the nyt will put a team of eleven journalists, three data visualization specialists, and a half dozen oxen on every story about some Ivy league sophomore getting glares in the cafeteria for calling for repeal of the 19th amendment but they can't afford a headline writer who knows what NATO is
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Pam Davis-Kean, PhD @umpamdk.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...
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Nick Bednar @nicholasbednar.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
If you have never read Herbert Kaufmann's The Forest Ranger, it is one of the absolute best books in public administration. It gives you an appreciation for what the agency does and how it does it. Incredible loss to our capacity to manage federal lands.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
The Forest Service has been an extraordinary public organization. The Trump administration is trying to dismantle it. open.substack.com/pub/morethan...
open.substack.com
BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service
The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
I’m so glad somebody directly estimated this. It’s even more extreme on a per capita basis. The average American retiree gets more than 10x more public spending than the average young person.
門份
Penn Wharton Budget Model
UNIVERSITY of PENNSYLVANIA
Q
Home Estimates Data v Learning v Blog About v Contact v
Table 1: FY 2025 Federal Outlays by Age Group
Age Group
Amount ($ Billions)
Share of Total Outlays
Share of Age-Assignable
Memo: Per Capita
Children & Young Adults (<26)
$448.9
6.4%
10.3%
$4,300
Working-Age Adults (26-64)
$1,220.2
17.4%
27.9%
$7,300
Retirees (65+)
$2,708.6
38.6%
61.9%
$43,700
All Ages Residual
$2,632.2
37.5%


Total
$7,010.0
100.0%
100.0%

• Notes, sources & data
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Michael C. Dorf @dorfonlaw.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Don't get me wrong: I'm relieved that this case is shaping up as either 8-1 or 7-2 against the Trump executive order. But the case is a gift to the Supreme Court. By rejecting an outlandish position, it will earn credibility as apolitical, even as the Overton window moves far to the right.
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John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Excellent Bouie piece on the birthright case. Especially how it points out that every academic backing Trump has either explicitly rejected Trump’s take in the past or somehow written extensively on the 14A without raising it (and implicitly rejecting it)… and have no new evidence now. Gift link:
nytimes.com
Opinion | The Birthright Con
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
So what this describes is ethnic cleansing www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/w...

But behind the scenes, Israeli officials have conveyed a more targeted message.

In private calls to local leaders across southern Lebanon, Israeli military officials have assured several Christian and Druse communities that they could remain in the evacuation zone. They have pressed them, however, to force out any Lebanese from neighboring Shiite Muslim communities who have sought refuge among them as Israeli bombardment flatten Shiite towns, according to local Christian, Druse and Shiite leaders who spoke to The New York Times. The Shiites make up the majority of southern Lebanon.
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
CA’s $20 fast food minimum wage raised fast food prices by only 3%. The reason minimum wage increases keep not reducing employment and barely increasing prices is monopsony power. www.nber.org/papers/w34990
The Effects of California's $20 Fast Food
Minimum Wage on Prices
Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards, Jonathan Meer &
Joshua D. Nguyen
WORKING PAPER 34990
DOI 10.3386/w34990
ISSUE DATE March 2026
We analyze the effect of California's $20 fast food minimum wage (Assembly Bill 1228), enacted in September 2023 and implemented in April 2024, on consumer prices using the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Indices for food away from home across 21 metropolitan statistical areas. Food away from home prices in California's four in-sample MSAs increased by 3.3 to 3.6 percent relative to 17 control MSAs through December 2024. Our estimates are stable across a number of specifications. Placebo tests on price indices for goods and services that were not affected by the policy, including food at home, show no differential increases in California's MSAs.
The price increases we estimate likely arise in part from spillovers to the full-service sector, as well as changes in the production functions and product quality choices of limited service restaurants.
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 31/03/2026
ProPublica spoke to dozens of people who’ve worked on U.S. immunization programs. They shared a pit-of-the-stomach dread that future American children will fight for their lives against infections that have long been preventable. By @sheinvestigates.bsky.social
propublica.org
How Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Vaccine Agenda Risks a Resurgence of Deadly Childhood Plagues
The health secretary is spreading doubts about vaccine safety and considering changes that could prompt manufacturers to flee the U.S. market. History has shown how plagues from the past can roar back...
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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
Four-byline alert: 🚨 “.. A broker for Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, attempted to make a big investment in major defence companies in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran, according to three people familiar with the matter.” www.ft.com/content/744e...
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The New York Times @nytimes.com · 30/03/2026
The Israeli Parliament appeared ready on Monday to enact a death penalty that would in practice apply only to Palestinians convicted of deadly acts of terrorism, not to Jewish extremists, handing the country’s far right a long-sought victory.
nyti.ms
Israel to Vote on Death Penalty Targeting Palestinians Guilty of Lethal Attacks
The bill is broadly popular and expected to pass. Critics say it would strip away many of the safeguards intended to preserve due process, including the possibility of a pardon.
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
They think everyone else is a clout seeker as void of moral commitments as they are. Not that these moral commitments are always good, mind you. But they can’t even imagine their existence, for better or worse.
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Joe Adalian @tvmojoe.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
The NYT says today’s #NoKings protests had “no shortage of skeptics,” and then quoted exactly one of those skeptics: The chairman of the Ole Miss College Republicans (as of 2025.) But of course, the Times doesn’t ID him as such. He’s just a Concerned Youth.
The marches had no shortage of skeptics.
In Oxford, Miss,, Cass Rutledge, a first-year law student at the University of Mississippi, walked through the No Kings protest and around the town square on Saturday and questioned why people thought Mr. Trump was acting like a king.
"He is, you know, a duly elected president who won the popular vote and the electoral college in a landslide," Mr. Rutledge said.
"And so I'm a little bit confused on how he's acting differently than any other president."
He pointed to the stalemate in Congress over the SAVE America Act, the Republican-driven bill to tighten voter identification and registration rules, which Democrats have called an attempt to suppress turnout based on false claims of voting fraud. Mr. Rutledge said that Mr.
Trump was "going through the process" to try to get the legislation passed.olemiss.collegerepublicans • Follow The University of Mississippi - Ole Miss
Cass Riledge
Chairman

59 likes
olemiss.collegerepublicans EXEC SPOTLIGHT: Meet Cass Rutledge, Chairman of the Ole Miss College Republicans. He is a senior Public Policy... more
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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
Between medicaid cuts and restricting the immigrant doctors who actually serve rural areas, I've never seen a political movement so laser focused on killing their most loyal voters.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
If the estimates were right, there were about 9 million people at No Kings rallies today. That would mean this protest was THIRTY TIMES AS LARGE AS THE TEA PARTY PROTEST which we were told, over and over again, was a massively important sign that US politics had shifted dramatically to the right
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Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Oh my God. "The Eighth Circuit does not apply—and has specifically rejected—a heightened standard for mandatory injunctions." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
In their opposition, Defendants argue that a heightened mandatory injunction18 standard applies because Plaintiffs are asking the Court to mandate certain affirmative action, like preventing transfers within 72 hours of detention, providing unmonitored calls, and timely updating the ODLS. (ECF No. 149 at 11.) This portion of their brief misstates the law and is riddled with misreadings and misquotations.19

19 Perhaps most egregiously, Defendants twice quote Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota v. Rounds, 530 F.3d 724 (8th Cir. 2008) (en banc), for the propositions that: (a) mandatory injunctions are “particularly disfavored,” and (b) Plaintiffs must show a likelihood of success on the merits by a “heavy and compelling weight of evidence” rather than a fair chance of success. (ECF No. 149 at 11, 13.) Neither of these quotes appear in Planned Parenthood, nor in any Eighth Circuit case the Court has found that addresses injunctions. Even under the most charitable of readings, Planned Parenthood cannot possibly stand for such a proposition; the case discusses the heightened burden that applies to enjoining state statutes and does not involve mandatory injunctions at all. Planned Parenthood, 530 F.3d at 730. This portion of Defendants’ brief included other mis-citations as well. (Tr. at 268–70.) The Court questioned Defendants’ counsel at the hearing and received unsatisfactory responses. (Tr. at 265–68.)
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Claire Zagorski, PhD, MSc, EMT-P @clairezagorski.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
57 of my fellow students were arrested, academically disciplined, and barred from campus 2 weeks before finals. And then the visas of some of those students were quietly revoked. And then the DEI office was killed. And then we watched our mentors’ grants evaporate over “woke”.
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The Guardian @theguardian.com · 25/03/2026
No Israel prosecutions for killing Palestinian civilians in occupied West Bank since start of decade
theguardian.com
No Israel prosecutions for killing Palestinian civilians in occupied West Bank since start of decade
Dozens of former Israeli military, police and spy chiefs describe situation as ‘organised Jewish terrorism’ * Middle East crisis – live updates Israel has not prosecuted its citizens for killing Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank since the start of this decade, , a Guardian analysis of legal data and public records show, creating impunity for a campaign of violence. Attacks have spurred former prime minister Ehud Olmert to call for an intervention by the international criminal court (ICC), to “save the Palestinians and us [Israelis]” from state-backed settler violence, carried out with the complicity and sometimes participation of the police and military. Continue reading...
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