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Since February 10, graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) have been engaged in a wildcat strike—a strike unauthorized by their labor union—to press for a cost of living adjustment (COLA) to their salaries. UCSC students and faculty suffer from one of the most expensive and tight housing markets in the country. The graduate student workers, along with faculty and undergraduate students, are sending an urgent message to the administration: the cost of living in Santa Cruz has become unbearable.

continue to congregate on the lush green lawn at the base of campus daily at 7:30am. Supporters provide free food and water, legal and medical support and play English, Spanish and Arabic music around the clock. Their actions, such as teach-ins and guest lectures, are bringing together diverse groups from across campus and highlighting shared grievances among students, faculty and staff at the university. As of this moment, graduate students at UC Santa Barbara voted to go on a full teaching strike on February 27, while students at UC Davis voted to begin withholding Winter quarter grades on the same day to demand a COLA and in solidarity with UCSC.

While all graduate student TAs are facing a precarious situation, international students are particularly vulnerable. In a February 7 email from the UCSC office of International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS), international students were “reminded [of] the conditions of their immigration status.” The letter stated that while participation in the strike is not a violation of the students’ immigration status, “any actions that result in student discipline or arrest may have immigration consequences, both on your current status and on possible future immigration applications you may make in the United States.”

Qatar has not simply spent money to import and train a soccer team: It has also redefined the very idea of citizenship. Like most states in the Persian Gulf, Qatar is a majority-foreigner country. There are only about 300,000 actual Qatari passport holders out of a population of nearly 3 million. Pathways to citizenship are notoriously exclusive, and only 50 new citizenships can be granted per year to those personally approved by the emir of Qatar himself. Yet 10 of the 26 players on Qatar’s national soccer team are naturalized citizens. To comply with FIFA regulations, the entire team consists of Qatari citizens. But these naturalized soccer players are not quite immigrant-origin  national heroes, in the vein of Zinedine Zidane or Zlatan Ibrahimovic. These immigrant players all carry “mission passports”—documents that confer citizenship for the purposes of sports competition

Tibetans in exile have been granted pseudo-passports—but not citizenship—by India. Residents of American Samoa are “U.S. nationals” not possessing the full rights of citizenship. The disintegration of Yugoslavia left thousands of Roma people stateless. Issues of statelessness and ambiguous citizenship are universal in any part of the world which experiences crisis and conflict.

that Qatar has redefined the very nature of citizenship—without fanfare, controversy, and with the sole goal of appeasing FIFA nationality regulations—takes this story of temporary citizen soccer players beyond the realm of Gulf labor exploitation

Jürgen Scheffran, a professor of geography at the University of Hamburg, has been investigating whether climate change makes armed conflict more likely for more than a decade. In 2012, he worked on a team that analyzed all 27 empirical studies investigating the link between war and climate change.“Sixteen found a significant link between climate and conflict, six did not find a link, and five found an ambiguous relationship,” he told me. He described these numbers as inconclusive. Trying to prove that climate change is linked to war, he said, would be like trying to prove that smoking causes cancer with only one available case study.

there is only one world, and not a million worlds, in which the temperature is rising, and you cannot associate a single event—like a single hurricane or a single conflict—to climate change. It’s a statistical problem, and we don’t have enough data yet

the U.S. Department of Defense already considers global warming a “threat multiplier” for national security. It expects hotter temperatures and acidified oceans to destabilize governments and worsen infectious pandemics

a major new survey by Pew Research Center also finds deep divisions in Israeli society – not only between Israeli Jews and the country’s Arab minority, but also among the religious subgroups that make up Israeli Jewry.

Nearly all Israeli Jews identify with one of four categories: Haredi (commonly translated as “ultra-Orthodox”), Dati (“religious”), Masorti (“traditional”) or Hiloni (“secular”)

secular Jews in Israel are more uncomfortable with the notion that a child of theirs might someday marry an ultra-Orthodox Jew than they are with the prospect of their child marrying a Christian

President Emmanuel Macron’s administration has just released a new report on the memory of colonization and the Algerian War, firmly placing the presidential seal of approval on a woefully one-sided document.

The report is already hugely controversial because of what it has failed to recommend: an apology. Despite losing the jewel in their empire following more than a century of lethal subjugation, including nonstop crimes against humanity, the French apparently do not think they were barbaric enough to show any contrition.

Introducing the new 146-page document, a spokesman for Macron was adamant that there would be “no repentance, nor apologies.” The express political purpose of this statement was ostensibly to prevent history being used to open up further division. But in reality, it allows France to evade responsibility.

The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60% in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83%. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.

As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.

For most of human history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north.

by the end of this century, Africa will be the only continent experiencing population growth. Thirteen of the world’s 20 biggest urban areas will be in Africa — up from just two today — as will more than a third of the world’s population.

Set to become the world’s most populous city, Lagos faces all the challenges rapid growth poses, which can be boiled down to one: planning. Can solutions outpace the weight tens of millions of new inhabitants will place on a city that is low-slung and dense, situated on polluted lagoons and rivers, and short on public services?

Khartoum, Sudan: Unstable states like Sudan crumble first in their hinterlands, and in those moments of crisis, cities are beacons of safety, places for people to regroup, build new identities and forge political movements — even revolutions — that aim to bring peace back to places they had to abandon.

Egypt’s Immigration Minister Nabila Makram said Aug. 1 that she seeks to help young Egyptians living abroad not to be intellectually influenced by thoughts against their homeland

the ministry will be offering free courses on national security for Egyptian academics and students at Egyptian embassies abroad. These courses aim to introduce young Egyptians to the development projects the Egyptian state is undertaking as part of its 2030 vision and to improve the image they have of their homeland.

She said that the ministry is focusing on and interested in young Egyptians ages between 20 and late 30s as well as students abroad. She noted that these young Egyptians play a major role in refuting false news and rumors about the Egyptian state, and added that they play a role in raising awareness among their peers about the achievements and national projects of the Egyptian state.

While it is natural be outraged by the locking up of children in Donald Trump’s United States or the criminalization of rescues in Italy during Matteo Salvini’s reign as interior minister, this deadly game is sadly not just being played by a few erratic and callous politicians. Rather, it is systematic.

For many years now, a key part of the game has been to get poorer neighbors to do the dirty work of deterring migration

outsourcing of migration and border controls represents a spectacular own goal not just in humanitarian terms, but also politically

Thirty years of war in Afghanistan have left Iran with perhaps the largest urban refugee population in the world. More than 1m Afghans are registered as refugees in the Islamic Republic, which is also home to another 1.5m-plus illegal Afghan migrants. But a mixture of Iran’s worsening economic malaise and its government’s policies has prompted an exodus of Afghans back home or westward to Turkey and Greece. Some 200,000 of them are reckoned to have gone back in the past seven months; 5.7m—15% of Afghanistan’s population—have returned in the past ten years, most of them during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that began in 2005

During the Soviet invasion of 1979, hundreds of thousands of Afghans fled to Iran, though it was itself in the throes of revolution. For a decade they were ignored by the government, denied dignified work and often derided in the press as violent criminals and drug dealers. During the “construction period” of the 1990s under Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s presidency, the government sought to naturalise them

Children of an illegal immigrant have no legal status, barring them from education and health care

The Russian government, much less the Assad regime, has never been a reliable partner for peace in Syria. But even after Russia’s alleged bombing of the aid convoy, U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration is still plowing its energies into a deal that aims to work with the Russian government.

The Obama administration has viewed the Syrian crisis through the lens of counterterrorism. But diplomatic failures such as this one continue to embolden extremist actors like al Qaeda, which has purposely presented itself as a reliable and necessary opposition ally, seemingly dedicated only to the cause of ridding Syria of the Assad regime. By so deeply embedding within Syrian revolutionary dynamics and claiming to fill the vacuum left behind by insufficient foreign support or protection, al Qaeda’s narrative is constantly strengthened by perceptions of American inadequacy. Thus, U.S. failures do not exist in a vacuum — our adversaries quickly translate them into their own victories.

the Russian government is not the key to controlling the Assad regime’s heinous behaviors. For a week straight, the Syrian government consistently ignored Moscow’s demands and destroyed a cease-fire deal that had been largely of Russia’s making. The regime also reinforced its troop positions around Aleppo and amassed forces opposite the strategic northern town of Jisr al-Shughour, and its aircraft were blamed for bombings around Aleppo, north of the city of Homs, and in parts of southern Daraa governorate. And after the Assad government declared the cease-fire over, Russia ferociously destroyed an aid convoy intended for 78,000 civilians

A brief history lesson should suffice to demonstrate the Assad regime’s lack of counterterrorism qualifications. This is the government whose intelligence apparatus methodically built al Qaeda in Iraq, and then the Islamic State in Iraq, into a formidable terrorist force to fight U.S. troops in that country from 2003 to 2010

Trump’s suggestion to partner with Russia in “smashing” the Islamic State is little more than a non sequitur, given Russia’s near-consistent focus on everything but the jihadi group

contrary to an increasingly popular narrative, fighters in these vetted groups are not, with very few exceptions, handing over U.S. weapons to jihadis, nor are they wandering off to join the extremists themselves. The cornerstone of the CIA effort has been to supply rebel groups with U.S.-manufactured BGM-71 TOW anti-tank guided missiles, which have ensured that the moderate opposition has remained a relevant actor in the conflict. Thus far, according to publicly available information, at least 1,073 TOW missiles have been sent to Syria and used in combat, only 12 of which have changed hands and been used by nonvetted groups — amounting to an impressively low proliferation rate of 1.1 percent

an estimate of the direct and indirect Israeli income from the occupation. Nobody could seriously question the existence of such revenues: From the Israeli companies directly involved in excavating and selling natural resources from the occupied territories – the most prominent example being Ahava beauty products (report, PDF) and a recent Supreme Court ruling even allowed mining Palestinian land in order to satisfy the need of the growing Israeli real-estate market – to the captive market the Palestinian represents for Israel (household Israeli brands can be found anywhere in the West Bank and Gaza). Water is one of the much-needed resources in the Middle East: No less than 80 percent of the Mountain Aquifer – located underneath the West Bank – is used by Israel and the Israeli settlements, and only 20 percent goes to the Palestinian population. (The average Israeli’s water consumption is 3.5-times that of a Palestinian’s.) Still, the main economic benefit Israel draws from its control over the West Bank is hidden in plain sight – we are talking the most expensive, most desired resource here: land.

Parts of the West Bank literally became the new suburbs of Tel Aviv.

with very few exceptions, Jerusalem is also expanding north, east and south, almost exclusively beyond the Green Line. Currently, half a million Jews live in the occupied West Bank, many of them in government-subsidized projects in the Jerusalem area. One could only imagine the cost of the same projects if they were to be located in proper Israel, especially if the proximity to the metropolitan centers was to be kept