Daily Brief Audio Series
Content warning: graphic descriptions make this a difficult – but necessary – read.
When the bombing started at two in the morning, Shaima was at home with her husband, and three of their four children.
About half an hour later, explosions ripped into the building, killing her husband and two of their kids, one son and one daughter.
Shaima was also badly injured. Her left leg was on fire. She describes how her flesh was melting before her very eyes, how fat was dripping, “as if it was a barbecue,” she says.
Thrown down to the floor, she was just able to reach a water container that had been knocked to the ground nearby. She scooped water from it on to her burning leg.
It took paramedics a long time to find Shaima under the rubble, but as soon as they did, the first thing she said was: “I’m pregnant, save the baby.”
This testimony comes from Human Rights Watch’s new report on pregnancy and maternal health in Gaza under Israeli assault. It’s our first ever report on pregnancy in war zones.
You may think you already understand that pregnant women and girls face additional dangers in conflict areas. You perhaps think you can guess about appalling sanitary conditions and the lack of food, staff, medicines, and live-saving machines, like incubators.
OK, if you feel that way, don’t read the 50-page report. Just watch the five-minute video of Shaima relating her story of the bombing, her attempts to get medical attention, the stillbirth, and her escape from Gaza.
It’s probably not like most Gaza-related videos you’ve seen recently. It’s not showing the horrors people face in a bombing as it happens. It’s not focused on dramatic scenes of buildings collapsing and terrified people running for cover. It’s not sweeping shots of rubble as far as the eye can see.
For the most part, the five-minute video is simply Shaima, sitting upright in a clean, modern hospital bed in Qatar – after more than 40 operations to save her leg and treat other injuries – calmly explaining what happened to her and her family.
And the new video also explains the contexts.
Israel’s military offensive in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, has severely harmed the healthcare system there.
Israeli authorities have also unlawfully restricted humanitarian aid and medical supplies to people in Gaza, amounting to collective punishment, which is a war crime.
Ceasefire or no ceasefire, as the occupying power in Gaza, Israel has a legal obligation to uphold the right to the highest attainable standard of health for people living in the area, including pregnant women and girls, and their children.
However, two new Israeli laws coming into force this week will make that much more difficult. Among other things, the laws will essentially block the Gaza-related work of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
UNRWA provides water, food, shelter, and other vital services to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, including pregnant women, nursing mothers, and newborn children.
Watching Shaima’s story, you understand why Israeli authorities should be facilitating the urgent restoration of healthcare in Gaza. Instead, Israeli authorities are moving in the opposite direction.
Today marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp and extermination camp, and International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Nazis murdered some 1.1 million people at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Second World War, mostly Jews (about 1 million), but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and others.
As dignitaries from around the world gather at the site for the anniversary today, The Guardian writes that, “Auschwitz-Birkenau has become an abiding symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of 6 million European Jews, looming large in the world’s collective memory as the embodiment of where hatred, racism and antisemitism can lead.”
But it doesn’t seem to be looming as large in the world’s collective memory as it should.
In a new survey across eight countries in Europe and North America, surprising numbers of adults said they had not heard of the Holocaust. Younger people, ages 18-29, seemed most unaware, with the number of such folks in France at a jaw-dropping 46%.
Last week, at the US presidential inauguration, Elon Musk gave a Nazi-style salute. Twice. Neo-Nazi groups and other white supremacists in the US and elsewhere celebrated it as a clear sign of support for white supremacist ideology. Particularly in the context of his repeated public backing of far-right parties, it’s hard to see the gesture as anything else.
Afterwards, Musk – the richest man in the world and now head of the new US Department of Government Efficiency, established by President Trump, himself known for pushing white supremacist ideology – tried to say that what everyone saw wasn’t what everyone saw.
A quote from George Orwell’s 1984 seems appropriate here:
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Amy Spitalnick of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs in the US rightly said: “The salute [by Musk] itself should be enough to warrant condemnation and attention.”
She added that extremists see an action like this and “take it as license for their own violent extremism.”
On this day, International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the struggle between memory and forgetting goes on – and memory seems to be losing.
There was good news and bad news about our global climate this week.
First, some good news – because a lot of readers probably need a bit of good news this week. According to the climate think tank Ember, the European Union generated more electricity from the sun than from coal in 2024 (11% vs 10%). What’s more, wind power tops natural gas (17% vs 16%).
These are milestone developments and represent an encouraging trend as humanity faces the global climate crisis. A quick review of the science explains why.
Global temperatures have been rising because humans keep pumping greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere, in particular carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
Oil, gas and coal had been just sitting there, holding carbon in the ground and not hurting anything, for millions of years. Then, we humans came along and extracted and burned them, releasing that carbon into the air.
Higher global temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels are driving the global climate breakdown. This is affecting millions of people around the world in the form of extreme weather, food insecurity, and more. And producing energy from fossil fuels is dirty business, with air pollution having a massive toll on the health of nearby communities.
Generating more of the electricity we need using renewable power sources like solar and wind, and generating less by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, signals the EU appears to be generally moving in the right direction on this. They need to move much faster, but emissions are decreasing.
So, yes, good news.
However, regular readers of this Daily Brief know all too well how the old “good news, bad news” thing goes...
The bad news is, world temperatures are still rising: 2024 was the hottest year on recordglobally. Last year was also the first to see average global temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
That figure – 1.5 degrees Celsius – is important, because that was the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the landmark international treaty aiming to limit the rise of global temperatures. It was humanity’s target, and we just blew right past it.
And the bad news keeps coming…
As part his pile of damaging new executive orders, US President Donald Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, as he did in his first term as president. He also said he would declare a national energy emergency and increase oil and gas production in the United States.
That’s terrible news for us all, of course, and the ramping up of production will hit communities on the fencelines of oil and gas facilities even harder. Remember the Daily Brief’s look at Cancer Alley, for example.
Simply put, Trump’s moves run counter to reality and common sense. The actual emergency is the climate crisis, a global problem that requires global solutions, especially now that earlier targets were missed. The very last thing governments should be doing right now is putting more greenhouse gases into the overheating atmosphere.
Governments have a human rights obligation to address climate change. They should be phasing out fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy. Some governments seem to be aware of reality and are acting accordingly. Others not so much.
Almost immediately after being sworn in as US president on Monday, Donald Trump rapidly issued one executive order after another.
As far as human rights are concerned, it was like turning on a firehose of terrible policies, soaking to the bone anyone who still had even the slightest hope that Trump’s second term might not be as awful as his first.
This Daily Brief will no doubt be looking at some of these policies in the coming weeks and months, but right now, here’s an overview of some of the more troubling ones.
First, a set of immigration-related executive orders has trashed the right to seek asylum in the US and other forms of humanitarian protection.
It’s important to recognize here that, despite all the campaign rhetoric about “illegal immigration,” Trump is also attacking legal pathways. The online app asylum seekers had to use to make appointments with US authorities, CBP-One, has been disabled.
Even recognized refugees who were on their way to the US – people fleeing war and persecution who have already been security cleared by US authorities – will be blocked from entry.
As part of his overall anti-immigrant push, Trump is also trying to restrict birthright citizenship, by which anyone born in the US automatically becomes a US citizen. Other orders use war language to try to justify involving the US military in civilian immigration enforcement. There will also be increased use of immigration detention and fast-track deportation without due process.
All that covers just some of the new executive orders targeting migrants and asylum seekers.
Other presidential decrees target transgender people. Once again, they are prohibited from serving in the US military. In an even nastier new policy, transgender people are preventedfrom even being acknowledged as transgender by the US government.
Moving from the domestic to the international, Trump also issued a number of executive orders that will have grim global impact.
He’s called a pause on US foreign development assistance. This will have far-reaching consequences for international humanitarian and development aid, disrupting vital life-saving assistance to millions of people. It will also put many human rights defenders around the world and the people they help protect at greater risk, because they depend on that support for their work.
In a move that affects everyone on the planet, Trump has also withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Accords. This could increase climate-related devastation on people and communities in countless places.
The executive orders keep coming; the firehose keeps gushing. This short review hardly covers a small fraction of it.
There’s far more to look into, and this newsletter will be doing so in the coming months: not only the awful policies and their damaging impacts, but also, hopefully, some solutions.
I was faked in a nasty video made with AI, and it’s sort of been bothering me ever since it happened late last year.
The perpetrators used my Daily Brief videos to create a fake version of one. Their purpose was pretty clear: they were trying to whip up hatred against refugees in Europe. It was full of lies about Ukrainian refugees, in particular, and had a far-right edge to it, aiming to get people in Europe more fearful and hateful of them. They had me saying all kinds of craziness.
I don’t know who did it, of course, but I’m guessing it was someone supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – to try to denigrate Ukrainians in the eyes of people in the EU and to disrupt EU sympathy for Ukrainians and Ukraine generally, perhaps.
The quality of the video is not very high. Yes, it looks like me doing one of my daily videos, but my accent is weird, the lip sync is off, and the message is hateful, incendiary, and ridiculous.
That is, it’s ridiculous to anyone familiar with me, with my Daily Brief, or with Human Rights Watch.
To you who know me and my organization, you know we’re not going to be bashing refugees or spouting far-right hate. I mean, really, it’s just nuts.
Yet, thousands of people viewed the fake video, and you can bet few viewers will know the difference, especially as the video was posted in far-right circles, where Human Rights Watch’s authentic material probably doesn’t have much reach.
It’s the first time it’s happened to me, but it’s not a first for HRW generally. Our video work has been misused like this before. As our regular readers and viewers should know, if anyone is ever in any doubt about the authenticity of an HRW publication or video, you can always check our website, including the Daily Brief archive pages specifically.
I’ve been reflecting on this incident over the past month or so to try to understand what it means.
First, forget “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…” as Oscar Wilde said (or copied from someone else). These are far-right folks using HRW’s brand and people who generally hate HRW for saying things like, refugees are human and have rights.
Still, it says something about the power and respect HRW has, even among people who don’t like us.
But it’s creepy, and it bothers me.
Honestly, I suspected something like this would happen with the Daily Brief eventually. With all that video material available online, I figured someone would one day feed it into AI for their own purposes. It just happened sooner than I imagined.
The use of AI is spreading rapidly. Its impacts can undermine our words. I thought I was prepared for it to happen to me. I wasn’t.