A new report is making the case for ending a widely-hated and sometimes deadly tactic used by for-profit health insurers to deny needed care.

It’s called “prior authorization,” and it allows health insurance companies to override physicians and decide whether certain care is medically necessary before it is covered.

The policy brief, published Aug. 10 by the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), an anti-monopoly think tank, argues that the system is a massive drag on the U.S. healthcare system, draining doctors of their time, fueling hiring shortages, and—most importantly—worsening treatable health problems for millions of Americans.

“This practice has massive financial and human costs, as I know personally from my family’s own tragic experience,” said the report’s author, Hannah Garden-Monheit—a senior fellow at the AELP, whose late father was denied rehab by UnitedHealthcare after cancer forced his leg to be amputated.

“Prior authorization may have started as a narrow cost-control tool,” she explained. “But it’s mushroomed into private insurers’ strategy for diverting resources from care toward their own profits. It’s time to ban prior authorization as we know it.”

The report examines how prior authorization went from a tool used sparingly to prevent payment for unnecessary treatments to what Garden-Monheit and co-author, AELP senior healthcare fellow Emma Freer, described as a “corporate care veto.”

Around 1 in 5 adults with private insurance report that they or a family member had experienced a coverage denial in the past year, with 28% reporting that it worsened their health problem, according to a June survey from the Commonwealth Fund.

While insurers claim that their decisions to deny care are “evidence-based,” the authors say that “in reality, the practice empowers distant corporate entities with a financial conflict of interest to override the professional judgment of physicians with firsthand knowledge of patients’ medical needs.”

“There is generally little to no transparency or accountability for these decisions,” the authors wrote.

While insurers claim that denials are reviewed by qualified clinicians, one survey from the American Medical Association (AMA) found that only 16% of physicians participating in peer-to-peer reviews reported that the “peer” was often or always qualified.

Garden-Monheit said United denied her father’s claim multiple times, first citing his cancer diagnosis—the reason his leg was amputated in the first place—then by claiming that he had made significant enough “progress” that paying for rehab was unnecessary. The “progress” was that he “had figured out how to hop on one leg from his hospital bed to a chair.”

Garden-Monheit describes how she, her father, and their care team were forced to navigate a “bureaucratic maze” by United, which ultimately led them to give up.

“At least twice, I learned of a denial only after calling United to check on the status of their request. They hadn’t even bothered with a letter,” she said. “While the lines of communication felt frustratingly unpredictable, the answers always led to the same place: ‘no.’”

As she explained in a recent op-ed for MS NOW: “My family’s experience wasn’t a one-off glitch. For United, the system was working as designed.”

Former United chief medical officer Dr. Archelle Georgiou estimated that across just two Medicare Advantage plans from United and Humana, the companies save an estimated $100 million per year by denying claims that never get appealed. She said that’s a “conservative estimate.” Across the two plans, 1.75 million people were denied care, even after appeal.

While insurers pad their profits, patients suffer, the researchers found. Among people reporting a prior authorization denial, 41% said it delayed their care and 28% said their health problem worsened, according to the Commonwealth survey.

Meanwhile, the AMA survey found that 95% of physicians said that prior authorization delays care, 79% said it causes patients to abandon recommended treatments, and more than 1 in 4 doctors said it has caused a serious adverse event, including hospitalization, permanent impairment, or death.

Denied timely treatments, many patients end up paying for costly and ineffective alternatives that only make their situations worse and cause the costs to increase down the line.

“It was extremely difficult to obtain authorizations for substance abuse treatment when I covered the emergency department as a practicing psychologist,” one healthcare professional, identified in the report as Nancy, said.

“Other times, in my private practice, I would get authorizations and later experience ‘clawbacks’ where Blue Cross, for example, would decide the treatment was not medically necessary and take back the money already paid.”

“It is impossible at times to provide sound ethical treatment and extremely hard to make a living,” she said, “when reimbursement rates kept going down, and the insurance companies could take back the money they had already paid for no obvious reason.”

Prior authorization doesn’t just deny care to patients. It also creates piles of paperwork for their doctors, taking away precious time that could be dedicated to their care.

The report found that physicians and their teams now spend so much on prior authorization paperwork that it consumes the equivalent of nearly 100,000 full-time physician and advanced practice clinician workloads, plus more than 213,000 clinic staff, costing as much as $32.7 billion each year. If prior authorization were eliminated, they found, it would free up enough capacity to turn a national physician shortage into a surplus.

A YouGov poll for AELP found that more than two-thirds of voters in both parties want legislation banning prior authorization outright. But the researchers said both the Trump and Biden administrations have enacted only minor reforms that “fail to address the structural conflict of interest that underpins the corporate care veto strategy.”

Meanwhile, the industry is making the denial process even more ruthlessly efficient, increasingly deploying artificial intelligence to deny requests en masse.

According to a 2023 class action lawsuit, United’s NaviHealth system used a predictive AI model to determine whether Medicare Advantage patients should receive rehabilitation care despite knowing that the model had a 90% error rate.

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has expanded prior authorization for traditional Medicare through a pilot program that allows AI models to adjudicate claims in some states. In July, Senate Republicans blocked Democrats’ attempt to end the pilot program.

As part of a national pro-AI strategy, Trump has also sought to preempt state laws banning the use of AI to deny care.

The AELP researchers called for a series of reforms to end prior authorization as it currently exists. Among other changes, they said decisions to authorize treatments should be made by independent third parties without the incentive to deny care.

That denials must be evidence-based, that the use of AI tools to deny claims should be banned, and that physicians should review patients in person before denying their claims.

“For too long, prior authorization has allowed insurance companies to put profits ahead of patients by overruling doctors and delaying and denying essential care,” Freer said.

“This status quo is failing patients, ratcheting up costs, and undermining the basis of effective, expert-informed care. It’s time to end this ‘corporate care veto’ and put medical decisions back where they belong: with patients and their doctors.”

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In a July 28 social media post, CNN host Jake Tapper highlighted the DOD’s silence about the school attack, noting that “the White House and Pentagon have so far refused any accountability or transparency.”

Tapper then posted a timeline of accumulated evidence that the U.S. was responsible for the deadly strike, while also including a quote from Rachel VanLandingham, a retired official from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG), who said “it’s atrocious that we haven’t had an acknowledgment, an explanation, and an apology yet” from the Pentagon.

Earlier this month, CNN reported that the investigation into the school bombing was essentially complete, and it found that U.S. military commanders “bypassed warnings” indicating that their database of strike targets inside Iran was badly out of date shortly before authorizing the attack on the building.

Two of CNN’s sources said senior commanders ignored the warnings out of “expediency,” as they did not want to significantly delay providing target lists during the outset of the war, which Trump illegally launched in February without authorization from the U.S. Congress.

A group of experts at the United Nations last week renewed calls for the U.S. to release the findings of its probe into the school bombing, noting that the U.S. has “obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”

“Five months following the school bombing in Minab, the U.S. and Israel have not made any findings public, raising valid questions regarding the impartiality, effectiveness and transparency of any investigation that may be underway,” they said. “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

Two weeks ago, a group of 25 Democratic U.S. senators sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pressing him to release the results of the Pentagon investigation and to submit to Congress a “prevention and remediation plan that identifies the specific corrective actions the Department will take to ensure this does not happen again.”

“The United States military has a legal and moral obligation to take all feasible precautions to prevent civilian harm,” the senators wrote. “When a U.S. strike kills civilians, the Department owes Congress, the American people, and the victims’ families a clear accounting of what happened and a credible plan to prevent future failures.”

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A senior medical official in the Gaza Strip sounded the alarm on July 21 over a dramatic rise in miscarriages in the Palestinian exclave, with nearly 4,000 cases reported during the first half of 2026 amid Israel’s ongoing genocide.

Gaza Medical Relief Director Bassam Zaqout said that 3,958 miscarriages were recorded in Gaza during the first half of this year—an increase the doctor called “unprecedented,” and a serious risk to the health of pregnant women and their unborn fetuses.

Zaqout cited the soaring miscarriage rate to factors in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, including the destruction of the strip’s infrastructure, unsanitary living conditions in camps for forcibly displaced Palestinians—where numerous babies have died of hypothermia—lack of hot water and hygiene supplies, and relentless terror caused by Israel Defense Forces bombing.

The Gaza Health Ministry documented 921 miscarriages and 2,004 live births in April. This staggering ratio—460 miscarriages for every 1,000 live births—is more than double that in neighboring nations Israel and Egypt.

Live births have also dropped dramatically in Gaza this year, from 5,210 in January, to 3,433 in February, 3,233 in March, 2,004 in April, and just 1,701 in May 2026, according to the ministry.

Last month, the Gaza Center for Human Rights said that the alarming rise in miscarriages is due to the systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, repeated attacks on hospitals, and widespread deprivation of food, medicine, and essential medical services amid 33 months of what United Nations experts and others have described as a genocide.

The Gaza Center for Human Rights said the following factors are the most significant drivers of the miscarriage crisis:

• The widespread destruction of hospitals, primary healthcare centers, maternity wards, and fertility clinics;

• Repeated attacks on medical personnel, including the killing, detention, and targeting of healthcare workers;

• Mass malnutrition caused by Israel’s siege;

• The collapse of maternal and child healthcare services; and

• Restrictions on the entry of essential medicines and medical supplies needed by pregnant women and newborns.

The center also noted that Article II of the Genocide Convention—the legal basis for the South Africa-led genocide case against Israel currently before the International Court of Justice—includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” in its definition of the crime.

United Nations officials and other experts have accused Israel of “systematically” using reproductive, sexual, and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians in Gaza and committing “genocidal acts” by deliberately destroying reproductive and healthcare facilities in the strip.

There has also been a documented surge in birth defects among Gaza newborns.  According to the Gaza Health Ministry, congenital anomalies doubled in 2025 compared with 2022.

Experts attribute the increase to many of the same factors driving miscarriages, pointing to contaminated water and widespread malnutrition, including the former famine that killed at least hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, many of them children and infants.

Zaqout warned that Gaza’s health crisis is worsening as severe shortages of medicines, equipment, diagnostic tools, and laboratory supplies persist amid the strip’s heavily damaged healthcare infrastructure and ongoing siege. He also noted the epidemics of diseases such as chickenpox, waterborne illnesses, and respiratory infections.

Numerous Palestinian women have lost their pregnancies due to direct acute trauma inflicted by Israeli bombs and bullets, which have often also killed would-be mothers. Israeli invaders have also ordered the evacuation of Gaza’s hospitals, forcing staff to leave prematurely born babies to die and decompose in incubators.

A United Nations commission of inquiry reported last month that approximately 30% of the more than 73,000 Palestinians killed during Israel’s 33-month war on Gaza were children—many of whom were deliberately targeted. Israeli forces have killed more than 21,500 Gazan children, including 1,022 babies, since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack, according to the Gaza Government Media Office.

The United Nations Children’s Fund has called Gaza “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.”

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Ultra-processed foods are industrially formulated with added sugar, artificial sweeteners, additives and flavorings to be highly rewarding and even addictive. They can alter the brain’s reward pathways the same way that other addictive substances do, making them challenging to consume in moderation.

In fact, a body of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that some ultra-processed foods (UPFs) can be as addictive as cigarettes and cocaine. 

Several major food brands were once owned by the world’s largest tobacco companies. Evidence suggests the same tactics used to formulate and market cigarettes were used in the creation of food products.

Finding the bliss point

Manufacturers of ultra-processed foods often seek to find the most alluring combination of salt, sugar, and fat in their products. This point of perfection is known as “the bliss point,” a term coined by American market researcher and food scientist Howard Moskowitz in the 1990s. 

“The bliss point is just that sensory profile where you like food the most,” Moskowitz, who is known for his work on soft drinks and pasta sauces, told RetroReport. “There is no one bliss point. There are groups of bliss points.” Manufacturers usually work to locate the bliss point through rigorous focus-group testing, alongside the use of psychological research. 

The bliss point triggers dopamine—a neurotransmitter in the brain that is responsible for feelings of pleasure and well-being—to spike, then crash. This brings about good feelings, then bad feelings, and generates the craving to feel good once more.

How ultra-processed food manufacturers addict consumers

Food companies not only research taste, but also consumers’ responses to color, smell, and “mouth feel” of products. And sometimes food scientists tweak a specific ingredient in products, like the salt, sugar, or fat itself, Michael Moss writes in his book, Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. For example, food scientists have changed the shape of fat globules to improve how products feel in the mouth. And they’ve ground salt finer, which helps the flavor hit the taste buds faster for an “improved flavor burst.”

“One hallmark of addiction is the speed with which substances hit the brain,” Moss explains in his 2021 follow-up book, Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addiction. “Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain.” Along with speed, “addiction is also deeply enmeshed with memory, and the memories we create for food are typically stronger and longer lasting than any other substance. Childhood memories of food can wield an uncanny power over our eating habits for the rest of our lives.” 

Today, about 57% of the calories American adults consume come from UPFs. That percentage rises to 67% in American children. 

The continuation of this article will be published in an upcoming edition of The Final Call. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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Around 200 graduating students at Stanford University in California walked out of the June 14 commencement speech by Google CEO Sundar Pichai to protest his company’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.

With graduating students across the country booing commencement speakers who mention artificial intelligence, Pichai was careful to avoid discussing the historically disruptive—and potentially apocalyptic—technology during his speech, even joking about the difficulty of doing so given his job and the fact that his name can’t be spelled without the “ai” at the end.

It was an apparently wise decision, especially given a recent interview in which he opined that humans aren’t “evolved” enough to fully understand the profound technology shift AI is driving.

However, protesting students were already walking out and chanting, “Free, Free Palestine!” by the time Pichai started speaking. Students waved Palestinian flags and blew whistles as they marched out of the venue.

Protesting students condemned Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud-computing and AI contract signed in 2021 between the Israeli government and Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The deal prohibits Google or Amazon from refusing service to the Israeli government, military, or intelligence agencies.

The Project Nimbus contract sparked the #NoTechForApartheid campaign, in which disaffected tech workers and dozens of advocacy groups rose up against Big Tech’s complicity in Israeli human rights crimes in Palestine and Google’s violation of its own AI principles.

“Shout out to all the graduates who walked out today. To all the graduates who chose conscience rather than comfort, we thank you,” Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—which organized the protest with No Tech for Apartheid—said in an Instagram post.

“Today, Sundar Pichai was met with the sight of hundreds of students who showed they could not be allured anymore with the talk of a dollar or rapidly expanding AI,” SJP continued. “We know about the crimes of Google in collaborating with Israel, [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and companies like Palantir.”

“Today, we denied the speech of a genocidal company’s CEO,” the group added. “We walked towards our People’s Commencement. We started imagining a better future for our education.”

Sunday’s walkout followed similar demonstrations at Stanford’s previous three commencements over the university’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protests as Israeli forces killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened around 2 million Gazans, with full U.S. government support.

Earlier this year, a judge declared a mistrial in a case involving five current and former Stanford students who, in 2024, occupied the university president’s office to protest the Gaza genocide and demanded the school divest from companies supporting Israel’s military.

The June 14 protesters also decried Google’s contracts with ICE and other Department of Homeland Security agencies.

For the third year in a row, Stanford grads held a “People’s Commencement.” This year’s featured Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University Palestine defender imprisoned for more than 100 days last year by the Trump administration’s ICE.

“What good is education if it teaches us how to succeed and not how to care?” Khalil said during his speech. “What good is knowledge if we lack the courage to act from it?”

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The U.S. military on May 29 bombed another boat it claimed was smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing three more people in what experts say is an illegal campaign whose death toll has now topped 200.

U.S. Southern Command said in a statement that “Joint Task Force Southern Spear,” the nine-month campaign ordered by President Donald Trump, “conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations.”

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” SOUTHCOM added, providing no evidence to support its claim.

“Three male narco-terrorists were killed during this action. No US military forces were harmed. SOUTHCOM is unwavering in its commitment to applying total systemic friction on the cartels.”

The May 29 strike brought the number of people killed during Southern Spear to 202 in at least 60 strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.

The Trump administration has tried to justify the strikes by claiming that the U.S. is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels. Many legal experts disagree.

Former longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth wrote on X: “Now more than 200 Trump summary executions—blatant murders.”

“Legal experts agree: The Trump-ordered strikes on suspected drug boats are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians—even suspected criminals—who do not pose an imminent threat of violence,” Roth said in a separate post.

Just Security editor-in-chief and New York University School of Law professor Ryan Goodman said that the “overwhelming consensus of experts, myself included, assess these to be murder because no armed conflict” is occurring, adding that they would be a “war crime if it were armed conflict.”

Goodman said that, with 200 people killed, the strikes raise the question of whether the U.S. is committing a “crime against humanity.”

The boat strikes were fraught from the start. In the first known attack, U.S. forces killed nine people in an initial strike and then two men clinging to the boat’s wreckage in a follow-up bombing.

The bombings have drawn widespread condemnation, including from Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who accused the U.S. of “murder,” and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was abducted during a U.S. invasion in January and imprisoned in the United States on dubious narco-terrorism charges.

Regional leaders and relatives of survivors say that at least some of the victims of the U.S. bombings were fishermen with no ties to narco-trafficking.  In January, relatives of two Trinidadian fishers killed in the strikes filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit in Massachusetts.

The bombings have terrorized fishing communities along the Caribbean and Pacific coasts to the point where many people have given up the only means they had of supporting their families.

Congressional war powers resolutions aimed at reining in Trump’s ability to extrajudicially execute alleged drug traffickers in or near Venezuela failed to pass the Senate last October and the House in December.

“Not only are these killings illegal, they are immoral. People of good conscience cannot allow this to continue, yet Congress has so far failed to halt, or even slow down, this lethal and unlawful campaign,” Amnesty International USA national director for government relations Amanda Klasing said in a statement May 27.

“Lawmakers must do everything in their power to halt this campaign and hold everyone responsible, accountable for their role in these extrajudicial killings,” she added.

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Testimonies published May 26 from activists, journalists, medical professionals, and others who took part in the latest international flotilla attempting to break Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza called for an investigation into U.S. complicity in their illegal high-seas abduction and alleged torture, sexual assault, and other abuse by Israeli forces.

“As testimonies from the 428 participants illegally kidnapped by the Israeli regime continue to surface, the United States’ critical role in the abuses and torture of humanitarian volunteers and journalists has become undeniable,” Global Sumud Flotilla’s (GSF) media team said in a statement.

“This role goes beyond the State Department’s diplomatic shielding and the U.S. Embassy’s refusal to assist American families seeking information,” GSF continued.

“It includes the very ship on which volunteer participants were illegally detained and tortured, and the weapons used to inflict life-threatening trauma against them.”

That vessel, the amphibious landing ship INS Nahshon, was built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding in Louisiana and was fully financed by the U.S. government.

GSF activists first became aware of what they now call the “torture boat” when it was used to detain members of the previous Gaza-bound flotilla, dozens of whom required medical attention for broken ribs, noses, and other injuries inflicted by Israeli forces.

This time, according to GSF, “detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container. Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalized each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.”

Flotilla participant Yassine Benjelloun described his mistreatment by his Israeli captors.

“All of a sudden I hear, ‘Welcome to Israel.’ And I start getting hit, like first hit on the head, second hit in the ribs, then I fall, then they kick me,” he said. “What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”

Dr. Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician aboard the flotilla, documented 35 GSF members with fractured or dislocated bones, as well as severe head injuries including concussions and eye or ear trauma, and 14 cases of sexual assault.

“Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people,” Jihan said. “But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and most horrible feeling that I have. It was so devastating.”

Dr. Jihan said she was shoved, struck, punched, kicked, and choked by her captors, who forcibly stripped off her hijab.

In addition to the ship, the weapons used against the civilian flotilla members were also made in the USA. “Stun grenades and metal-bearing projectile rounds were identified by manufacturer markings as products of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS),

A brand of the Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based weapons manufacturer Combined Systems Inc. (CSI),” GSF said. “These weapons were fired at close range in enclosed spaces against participants who were sitting down or trying to sleep, a direct violation of the manufacturer’s own usage guidelines.”

GSF argues that “none of this was accidental.”

According to former State Department official Josh Paul—who resigned in protest in 2023 over U.S. arms transfers to Israel as it began waging a genocidal war against Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack of October 7 of that year—“Under U.S. law, arms transfers must only be made for purposes authorized by law.”

“INS Nahshon’s use by Israel to conduct an illegal seizure in international waters, and then to act as a base for the torture and sexual assault of foreign civilians, including Americans, who had broken no laws, and were acting from conscience to serve an urgent humanitarian need, plainly and grievously violates those terms,” he continued.

“When this sale was authorized, U.S. officials will have asked themselves how Israel might use this platform,” Paul added. “The basis on which they should have denied this transfer has been there since at least the Mavi Marmara incident …

But is now more clear than ever, and the lesson here is a simple one: that anything we transfer to Israel, Israel will find a way to misuse—whether it is a bomb, a bulldozer, or a boat.”

Paul was referring to the May 2010 raid on one of the first Gaza Freedom Flotilla convoys, during which Israeli forces killed nine volunteers aboard the MV Mavi Marmara, including Turkish-American teenager Furkan Doğan.

“While international law has been flagrantly violated and legal proceedings are now active in Türkiye, Italy, and Spain, with Italian prosecutors opening an investigation into kidnapping and sexual assault, the U.S. government continues to look away,” GSF said in regard to the latest flotilla.

Americans aboard past Gaza flotillas said the Trump administration failed to provide any consular support during their abduction and abuse. This time, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee—a Christian Zionist who has denied the very existence of the Palestinian people—joined senior officials from other countries in condemning Israel’s abuse of abducted flotilla members.

GSF said May 26 that “the Israeli regime continues to commit genocide using U.S.-built ships and U.S.-made weapons. The torture of U.S. citizens and humanitarian volunteers with American-made tools is not an anomaly. It is the direct outcome of unconditional U.S. support for a regime continuously committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

That support includes tens of billions of dollars in armed aid during the Biden and Trump administrations, which both also provided diplomatic cover for Israel, including vetoes of numerous Gaza ceasefire resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council.

Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians in Gaza—including thousands of people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble—while forcibly displacing, intentionally starving, or sickening around two million others.

Israel’s actions are the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case filed by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 other nations. The International Criminal Court has also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation.

Last year, a UN panel of experts said that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a conclusion also reached by numerous governments, human rights groups, jurists, and scholars—including prominent Israeli and other Jewish Holocaust experts.

Flotilla participants have stressed that their ordeal pales in comparison to the plight of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children imprisoned by Israel, often without charge or trial under the country’s administrative detention regime.

Israeli authorities are investigating the deaths of dozens of Palestinian prisoners, some of whom were allegedly tortured to death and executed. Others have allegedly been subjected to widespread rape and sexual abuse in Israeli detention.

“What GSF participants survived for days, many Palestinians endure indefinitely without lawyers or consular access,” the flotilla organizers said.

GSF is calling on the U.S. government to take actions, including the investigation of Israel’s use of US-origin arms and other equipment to abuse American citizens, a suspension of arms transfers to Israel pending the outcome of the probe, and “end unconditional military and diplomatic support for a regime committing genocide.”

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A Tennessee man set to be executed on May 21 got a temporary reprieve—but not due to any intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court. As reported by The Associated Press, the execution of Tony Carruthers was called off after medical officials struggled to locate a vein during the scheduled lethal injection procedure.

After the failed execution, Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee ordered a one-year stay for Carruthers, who has been on death row for three decades after being convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1996.

Maria DeLiberato, an attorney representing Carruthers, told the AP that she saw her client “wincing and groaning” during the botched procedure, which she described as “horrible” to watch.

DeLiberato, who is also senior counsel at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, later issued a statement describing the execution attempt as “outright barbaric,” and reiterated demands for state investigators to examine potentially exculpatory forensic evidence before proceeding with any future attempt.

“We are incredibly relieved Gov. Lee issued a reprieve,” DeLiberato said. “We will also continue to push the governor to use this moment to allow the forensic testing that should have happened long ago. Tennessee cannot continue torturing a man while refusing to answer serious questions about his innocence.”

The ACLU on May 20 had called for the U.S. Supreme Court to block Carruthers’ execution until all potentially exculpatory evidence had been fully examined.

Lucas Cameron-Vaughn, legal director of the ACLU of Tennessee, said the state had a duty to ensure that it had convicted the right man, and he pointed to troubling aspects of the case that should give courts pause before signing off on his execution.

“Mr. Carruthers was forced to represent himself at trial, and now faces death based on flimsy circumstantial evidence, and unreliable witnesses,” Cameron-Vaughn said. “Forensic evidence the state refuses to test could change everything.”

Laura Porter, executive director for U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty, argued that the botched execution shouldn’t just give Carruthers a one-year reprieve, but should push the U.S. to end capital punishment all together.

“Tennessee has effectively made the case against the death penalty,” said Porter. “They forced Tony Carruthers to represent himself at his own capital trial, failed to test DNA and fingerprint evidence and now they have failed to execute him. It is time to end the death penalty.”

Stacy Rector, executive director for Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, described the failed execution as “horrifying but not surprising,” adding that her organization “has sounded the alarm for years about the serious problems with lethal injection and urged our state toward greater transparency so these problems can be addressed.”

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A United Nations expert on May 19 delivered a report offering evidence of systemic torture, brutality, and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli captivity.

Alice Jill Edwards, the UN special rapporteur on torture, said she had gathered substantial evidence of torture and sexual violence committed by Israeli authorities against Arab citizens of Israel as well as Palestinian detainees from Gaza and the West Bank.

After Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, Israel not only launched a military assault on Gaza but also introduced emergency detention measures that Edwards argued “exposed Palestinian detainees to torture, potentially unlawful deaths, incommunicado detention, and degrading conditions.”

Among other things, Edwards’ report documents nine allegations of “rape, attempted rape, and threats of rape”; 11 allegations of “beatings, grabbing, electrocution, or mauling by dogs” of male detainees’ genitals;

23 allegations of “beatings with weapons or other objects, kicking, and punching”; five allegations of electrocution by electric batons or other devices; and four allegations of forced kneeling for periods lasting up to a full day.

The report also notes that 94 Palestinians died in custody from October 2023 through August 2025, although it acknowledges that “a lack of transparency into the cause of these deaths makes it unclear which deaths are attributed to natural causes or unlawful conduct.”

However, the report cites a review of 10 postmortem examinations of detainees who died in Israeli custody, which found signs of physical abuse in five cases, and signs of bruising “consistent with beatings and use of restraints” in two cases.

“Findings also included multiple rib fractures, hemorrhages on the skin and near internal organs, and lacerations of intra-abdominal organs,” the report adds.  “One case documented intracranial hemorrhage resulting from a head injury apparently sustained during arrest.”

Edwards said that the sheer volume of torture and abuse allegations documented in the report cannot be written off as the work of rogue actors.

“It is my view that the number and cruelty of allegations compiled portray gross disregard by Israel of its duty to treat all detainees humanely and without discrimination,” she said, “and this has encouraged, tolerated, and condoned torture and ill-treatment, at times with support at ministerial and functional levels.”

The descriptions of torture in Edwards’ report echo recent reporting by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote that his interviews with Palestinian detainees revealed “a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, woman, and even children—by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”

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The Producer Price Index (PPI), which measures wholesale prices paid by businesses, posted a year-over-year gain of 6% in April, the largest yearly increase since December 2022.

Energy prices, which have surged since Trump launched an unprovoked war with Iran in late February, played a large role in raising wholesale costs, as the report finds “more than three-quarters of the broad-based increase in April can be traced to a 7.8% jump in prices for final demand energy.”

However, energy prices aren’t solely responsible for rising wholesale prices, as the so-called “core” PPI, which excludes the costs of food and energy, posted a yearly increase of 4.4% in April, the largest since February 2023.

PPI is seen as an important gauge of future inflation for consumers, as companies typically pass the costs they pay for inputs onto consumers in the form of price increases.

As explained by Groundwork Collaborative in a social media post, the wholesale costs measured by PPI “are what companies pay before they jack up prices on the rest of us.”

“What’s in the pipeline now is headed straight for your grocery bill and gas tank,” Groundwork Collaborative added. “The pain isn’t over. It’s just beginning.”

CNN economics reporter Elisabeth Buchwald similarly predicted more hurt for U.S. consumers in the coming months, arguing in a May 13 article that a 6% increase in PPI shows “the pain will not be short-lived.”

“Even if the United States were to reach a deal with Iran today, it would still take months for shipments of oil held up by the blockade of the crucial Strait of Hormuz to reach American soil,” Buchwald explained.

“And even then, it would likely be months—or potentially years—before Americans see gas prices return to levels before the war.” The May 13 PPI report came one day after the Consumer Price Index showed that consumer prices in April rose by 3.8%, the largest yearly increase since May 2023.

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) reacted to the latest inflation data by ripping into the president’s policy decisions, including the Iran war and the global trade war he started shortly after returning to office last year.

“The only thing Trump has made great again is inflation,” Boyle, the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, wrote in a social media post.

“His disastrous policies—from his tariff taxes to his war in Iran—are making life even more expensive. We shouldn’t be surprised the guy who managed to bankrupt a casino isn’t an economic mastermind.”

Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) linked the increased prices to Trump’s desire to have Congress spend $1 billion of taxpayer money on his proposed White House ballroom.

“Oregonians need real relief from these high costs at the store and the pump,” wrote Dexter. “We must stop the war in Iran and refuse to pay for presidential vanity projects. Oregon families want peace. They need a break, not a ballroom.”—Brad Reed, CommonDream.org

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