What does Israel do with these bodies? In her book Over their Dead Bodies, Meira Weiss—who served as an officer in the Israeli military before becoming the head of the Israeli Forensic Institute between 1988 and 2004, then pivoting to academia—writes that during the first intifada, the Israeli army gave license to the state’s main forensic institute, called Abu Kabir, to harvest “organs from Palestinians using a military regulation that an autopsy must be conducted on every killed Palestinian.” The policy of performing an autopsy on all Palestinians killed “politically” (i.e., by Israelis) during the first intifada was also a carryover from their colonial patron: the British during the Mandate period required autopsies on all “suspicious” Palestinian deaths. These, back then, were conducted by a British surgeon. During the first intifada, Israel insisted on its doctors conducting them, infrequently permitting international pathologists to participate in high-profile cases. The autopsies, Weiss writes, were “accompanied by the harvesting of organs” and sometimes used for medical training. Later, as with the destruction of medical infrastructure in Gaza, Israel continued to test the limits of what it could do. The answer, it seems, is whatever.

After the bodies and their organs are taken, according to Weiss, “[Israel’s] skin bank and other organ banks [use] these organs for transplantation, research, and teaching medicine.” The skin—the eager medical student will tell you—is the largest organ in the body, and Israel has the largest skin bank in the world. It has existed since 1986 and was founded jointly by its military medical corps and ministry of health. Skin grafting falls under the practice of the trauma surgeon and is used primarily to “treat burn victims incurred at war or during mass casualty incidences”; Israel also provides skin to patients injured outside these contexts. In 1931, the chief Jewish rabbi of Palestine claimed that the prohibition against desecrating the dead was “unique to Jews. . . . gentiles [had] no reason to be particularly careful about avoiding [it] if there is a natural purpose for doing so, such as medical reasons.” In the years since, there had been disagreement in Israel about how and when it is religiously permissible to desecrate, in the name of science, the Jewish corpse. Traditionally, a body should go into the earth whole and stay there. Nonetheless, today Israeli medical schools acquire enough bodies for their trainees.

Examining the bodies returned to their people after the most recent so-called ceasefire, Palestinian doctors noted that, in some bodies “the rib cage and ribs were clipped with a sharp saw—a medical saw, a bone saw—and the sternum, along with the central part of the ribs, [were] lifted to allow for the removal of the heart and lungs without damage to the organ being taken.” Organ procurement, with few exceptions like skin and cornea, requires that the body be either alive—via brain death—or just-dead—via circulatory death. It is plausible that some Palestinian prisoners’ torture led to brain death. It is also possible their torturers felt no need to wait. Palestinian witnesses have reported that some prisoners were alive at the time they were taken for organ extraction. In one batch of bodies, the organs removed were those commonly transplanted: heart, liver, lungs. The transplant surgeon waits for a person to die; the soldier can’t. The settler surgeon wields his mastery over the body to serve the state. Here, the surgeon acts as—is—a soldier.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/im-not-done-with-you-turfah

"At the center of Lewis’s platform is an unapologetic embrace of public ownership. He proposes a national network of publicly owned grocery stores to counter oligopolistic price gouging, alongside public banking, public telecom options, a wealth tax, and a Green New Deal–style industrial strategy. His grocery proposal envisions dozens of warehouses and retail outlets operating as a nonprofit public option—unionized and subsidized—to lower food prices by as much as 30 to 45 percent at a relatively modest fiscal cost. On housing, he calls for a public developer to build large-scale nonmarket and cooperative housing rather than relying on private developers whose incentives maintain scarcity. On climate, he insists the federal NDP must be unequivocally committed to phasing out fossil fuels and investing in public renewables, electrified transit, heat pumps, and a modernized grid—tying climate action directly to cost-of-living relief and job creation. For Lewis, these proposals are not radical abstractions but practical responses to systemic market failure."

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/canada-lewis-ndp-leadership-election/

China’s economic policy in 2026 emphasizes caution and stability, prioritizing “high-quality development” over rapid growth. Despite strong manufacturing output, export resilience, and GDP growth around 5% in 2025, the economy faces persistent structural imbalances, including overreliance on exports, weak domestic consumption, and prolonged deflation.

The government is pursuing measured interventions, such as targeted subsidies and selective support for the property sector, while maintaining expansionary fiscal and monetary policies within strict limits. These steps aim to stabilize the economy rather than spark a new growth cycle, reflecting a deliberate shift from the old growth model toward qualitative objectives.

Long-term challenges remain significant. China’s shrinking population, overcapacity, and geopolitical tensions—particularly with the U.S.—pose constraints on sustainable growth. Leaders must balance caution with boldness, using the country’s structural strengths to address these imbalances, or risk short-term stability hardening into permanent limitations on China’s economic future.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-economic-policy-must-address-entrenched-imbalances-by-lee-jong-wha-2026-01

In Toronto, the municipal government has expanded “bubble zones” around synagogues and other institutions in response to protests against the marketing of West Bank settlements, such as those organized by Israeli real estate promoter Gidon Katz. These zones prevent demonstrators from approaching certain locations, often based not on actual threats of violence but on subjective fears of potential harm. While some incidents of assault have occurred at real estate events, police reports show that counterprotesters, not demonstrators, were more often the aggressors, and violent anti-Jewish incidents at places of worship are rare in Toronto. Despite this, local authorities have justified these expansive restrictions as necessary for community safety.

The bubble zones effectively restrict constitutionally protected freedom of expression and assembly in areas where opposition to Israeli settlement policies is expressed. Data from 2018 to 2024 show that anti-Jewish violent assaults are lower than anti-Muslim, anti-Black, and anti-LGBT assaults, and most anti-Jewish assaults occur on streets rather than at religious or cultural institutions. Surveys suggest that fears among Jewish residents are largely linked to emotional attachment to Israel and political criticism of its policies rather than immediate physical threats. This indicates that the bylaw responds more to perceived symbolic threats than to real danger.

https://jacobin.com/2026/01/toronto-protest-israel-free-speech/

The world feels unsettled, as if history itself were changing tempo. The familiar landmarks of the modern age are blurring, slipping away, and the stories we once told ourselves about progress and power no longer map cleanly onto the terrain before us. What we are living through seems, with each new day, less like a passing rearrangement of power, less like a momentary realignment of nations. We sense something deeper and more enduring: a transformation whose outlines we are only beginning to discern. History no longer feels like something unfolding behind us but something rushing toward us, urgent and impossible to ignore.

[...] China now accounts for more than half of the world’s installed solar and wind capacity combined. Roughly three-quarters of all renewable energy projects currently underway worldwide are either in China or being driven by Chinese contractors. About 30% of global emissions come from China, but so too does much of the growth in decarbonization technology. China has transformed the global energy transition by demonstrating that massive and rapid deployment could make renewable energy cost-competitive worldwide.

[...] That historical chapter may now be closing. China appears to have found that path. The system powering its success is an extraordinarily intricate alloy of Confucianism, Leninism, technocratic authoritarianism, state capitalism, and market mechanisms. Yet based on the many conversations I’ve had with Chinese intellectuals, they now recognize that China has attained wealth and power in a distinctly Chinese way. If Levenson’s framework is correct, we are witnessing not merely China’s rise but its graduation from the central quest that defined its modern history.

[...] What might have been another season of U.S. introspection has morphed into something more acute: the painful recognition that another system, however flawed, has delivered results on a scale that the United States has not. This is to me, as an American, a source of not inconsiderable anguish. I take no pleasure in witnessing what my country has become—a nation I love, torn apart by political tribalism so intense and so toxic that I fear it may be beyond repair, at least in the coming, and critical, decade. But confronting this crisis requires looking squarely at what seems so unsettling about China’s success. As Chas W. Freeman, a retired senior U.S. diplomat, has observed, “Americans now exhibit an odd combination of self-doubt, complacency, and hubris”— a mix that has prevented the kind of clear-eyed assessment the moment requires.

[...] Consider what China’s trajectory means for countries across the Global South that were told for decades there was only one path to prosperity: the Washington Consensus path of privatization, deregulation, and democratic governance. China offers proof that another model can work: state-led development, long-term planning, massive infrastructure investment, and selective integration with global markets, all while maintaining political autonomy. Whether one admires this model or not, its success cannot be denied, and its implications ripple far beyond East Asia.

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-great-reckoning/

The peasant way of life is a critical buffer against climate change. Peasant villages recycle biochemical waste back to the land; many peasants also supply their nutritional needs from their own farms. Peasants, who directly manage about 10 per cent of the land on Earth – an area five times larger than all towns and cities – supply a countervailing principle to corporate extractionism and short-termism. They also preserve critical local knowledge of land and weather systems, and the interactions of plants and animals. The peasantry is one of humanity’s most crucial economic, social and ecological resources, and we need to invest in it if we are to flourish. Affluent and innovative, this class will insulate us from more extreme degradation of natural systems. Impoverished and terrorised, it will be forced, in the end, to leave the land en masse, with manifold catastrophic consequences.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-planet-and-human-social-life-depend-on-peasant-farmers

Of the American elite who see continuing value in literate thought, they are, for the most part, happy to create a society where a small “cognitive elite” dominate the rest. Poor kids spend an extra two hours on the black mirror every day, while rich people send their kids to private schools where no electronic devices are allowed, as Mary Harrington recently explained in the New York Times. Controlling the media effect is possible even in America; we have simply reduced it to a class privilege. I love the First Amendment and abhor censorship, and yet I have reluctantly come to believe that the Great Firewall of China will be a long-term benefit to that country. What China shows us is that, contra the whole line of technology-first scholarship following McLuhan, it’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters. China is not a utopia, but its citizens have a brighter future than ours, and they will be able to read about it, thanks to a sociopolitical system that still sees literacy as necessary and retains primacy over private capital.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/we-used-to-read-things-in-this-country-mccormack