speaking out

Marcelo Gomes da Silva walked across the stage to receive his diploma from Milford High School on Sunday with an enormous sense of gratitude. "Definitely an important day and an amazing day in my life," he smiled.

It was exactly one year ago when 19-year-old Gomes da Silva was detained for several days by ICE and eventually released. The agency said that Gomes da Silva's father was their intended target, but they arrested the teen instead because his student visa expired and he was in the country illegally.

His detainment sparked outrage in the community and drew national attention. On Sunday, he thanked his school and his community for their support. "I am most grateful for my community. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't be here today. I wouldn't be graduating. I could possibly have been in Brazil or anywhere else," he said.

Members of the scientific community have been raising concerns about the paper since immediately after it was published. Top and other scientists wrote about some of its methodological issues within days of publication. In an email, Top said in the six years since then, the paper had been cited in other studies and used to justify changes to vaccine policy and undermine confidence in vaccines, “likely contributing to decreased vaccination rates and outbreaks of serious preventable infections, like measles and whooping cough”.

Top called for the publisher and editors to conduct a thorough review of the peer review process and their response to the previous complaints, and to commit to improving the timeliness of their response in future.

“My name is Marwan Abdelhamid,” he said. “Born in Jerusalem, raised in Gaza. Left it at seven and haven’t been back since. This is the story of so many Palestinians.” He sounded a little nervous, but it soon dissipated. On stage, he marshalled that same mischievous energy that runs through everything from his social media clips to his music videos. In between songs, he addressed the crowd, bringing it back to the fraught political moment, to Gaza. Often, he told them, he would be told: “Shhh, don’t talk about Palestine.” Often, he admitted, he asked himself how he could be singing and dancing when his people were dying. But joy in our culture was our right, he said.

Knocking on strangers’ doors on a warm May afternoon in Trenton, New Jersey, Adam Hamawy did not seem fazed when more than a few went unanswered.

It’s his first time running for office, but this is an area where he has experience. After returning from a medical mission in Gaza in 2024, Hamawy went to Washington to describe the crisis – which he viewed as a US-funded genocide – to lawmakers, only to encounter “too many doors that were closed, that didn’t even want to listen”.

One of the few representatives on Capitol Hill who met with him was his own: Bonnie Watson Coleman, who has served New Jersey’s 12th congressional district for more than a decade.

When she announced her retirement in November 2025, after six terms, Hamawy decided it was no longer enough to seek the attention of those elected to serve in Washington – and launched his campaign to join them.

In six months, Hamawy has gone from a political nobody to, deemed by most measures, the frontrunner in a crowded race, endorsed by prominent progressive and Democratic figures including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Tammy Duckworth. His work history has driven him to call for Medicare for All, advocating for sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel, and the abolition of ICE – and to say openly he cannot support the Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.

You may have heard that the Boss has been opening his concerts on the Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour with a call to action for Americans to save their democracy. “We live in dangerous times,“ he says, before singing a cover of the song “War.” “War. What is it good for? Nothing.”

In a time when far too many people are afraid to speak up, Springsteen’s candor is profoundly moving and reassuring—even when he performs songs that reflect on dark moments, like “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote in response to the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown in Minnesota.

When he Googled, he found that lawmakers in his state had paved the way to make the Port Washington project a reality. The deal between Port Washington and Vantage gave an estimated $458m in tax breaks to the developer over 20 years to fund infrastructure for the project, with the city not seeing any of that tax revenue during that period.

“It was shocking,” Berens said.

That’s when he decided to do something he had rarely done before: discuss politics in his videos. He used his platform to address one of the more polarizing issues in contemporary life: what AI portends for Americans.

He channelled his outrage at lawmakers in Port Washington, a historic city on the banks of Lake Michigan and once home to thriving fishing and shipping industries. In a contentious vote last August, officials there approved the initial $8bn datacenter campus despite strong resistance from residents. (The project later expanded to a $15bn joint venture with OpenAI and Oracle, one of the Trump administration’s showcase “Stargate” megaprojects.)

“I was shocked at how many people I saw speak against this [at public meetings he watched online] and then to see a unanimous vote for it,” Berens said. “It just felt like an imbalance of democracy.”

The video went viral, garnering more than 2.5m views on YouTube alone. Berens’s inbox was soon flooded with messages of support from Wisconsinites of all political stripes – self-declared Maga supporters, avowed socialists and everyone in between – sounding the alarm on datacenters.

Democratic state representatives in Minnesota staged an overnight sit-in in their house chamber on Thursday after the Republican speaker failed to put a gun violence prevention bill up for a vote.

Samantha Sencer-Mura, a Democratic representative from Minneapolis, first announced the plan on Wednesday from the floor of the state’s house of representatives, giving the speaker, Lisa Demuth, a candidate for governor, 24 hours to give the bill a vote before the sit-in would start.

The sit-in began around 9pm local time. Lawmakers intend to stay until the house comes back in session, which is set for Saturday at noon.

The Minnesota senate, controlled by Democrats, narrowly passed the gun violence prevention omnibus earlier this month. The house, where there is a 67-67 vote tie and a Republican speaker in charge, has so far not taken up the bill.

The push for new gun laws came after a school shooting at Annunciation Catholic church last August, where two students were killed and others injured during a school-wide mass. Minnesota also saw the killings of state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the shootings of state lawmaker John Hoffman and his wife, last summer.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the erasure of American history in favor of a whitewashed authoritarianism. The American people began to preserve the truth of who we have been. Volunteers worried at the potential loss of National Park Service information created the Save Our Signs project, a crowd-sourced archive of photographs from National Parks. Historians appalled by changes to the Smithsonian created Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, similarly documenting changes to the Smithsonian. One of its leaders, James Millward, is a scholar of Chinese history and is concerned that “history being snipped and clipped and disappeared” looks a great deal like the methods of the Chinese Communist Party. Sitting next to Trump’s portrait in the Portrait Gallery, he handed visitors copies of the old text until guards closed the exhibit.