“Deeply troubling… disheartening” and a contradiction of Israel’s vows not to extend a “perpetual occupation”– the latest State Department statement condemning a new Israeli settlement is its strongest language yet.

An all-women crew sailing toward the shores of occupied Gaza were taken into Israeli naval custody this afternoon, ending their month-long sea voyage to “break the siege on Gaza.” The Israeli military said the vessel was still in international waters at the time of the “uneventful” interception, around 35-nautical miles from the Israeli port of Ashdod.

As many readers have noticed the comment section is still not working properly. The short version is that we have been having a problem with one of the databases that the site runs off of since moving the site to a new server. Our tech support staff is working to fix the issue as quickly as they can.

Pro-Israel activists at a NY synagogue say that 10 percent of Americans love Israel, another 10 percent don’t, and the 80 percent in the middle can be reached via progressive messaging aimed at stopping BDS. But the Jewish participation in the ’60s civil rights movement is not going to thrill young people today.

As human rights activists and organizations, we must be more careful in the way we articulate reality through the terminology we use. If Palestinian civil society seeks to struggle against the process of forcible displacement, we should not stratify our people, but rather use language to build a common struggle against a colonial project that aims to erase the presence of the indigenous Palestinian community. We should not, even indirectly, support this kind of destruction of the Palestinian people while accepting the division made by the colonial power. We have to control our own discourse, to challenge the Israeli narrative’s local and international dominance.

The man who filmed the 2014 choking death of Eric Garner at the hands of New York police was sentenced to four years in prison on gun possession and drug sales charges, arrests he and his supporters claim are in retaliation for his smartphone recording of the controversial killing. Orta’s sentencing comes as Black Lives Matter activists are making deeper connections with advocates for Palestinian rights. In an interview with Mondoweiss in September, Orta offered his thoughts on the similarities between the civil rights struggles in Palestine and the United States: “It’s very important to document police brutality and spread the word, and keep witnessing.”

Katie Miranda introduces us to S.T.F.U., a robot programmed to decipher political doublespeak. Its work is never done.

Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, a documentarian, asked Middle East mediator Dennis Ross a question about state terrorism at a Kansas City Public Library speech last May, and was arrested by security officers hired by the Jewish Community Foundation. A library official stood up for Rothe-Kushel and was arrested and injured.

Billionaire Israeli businessman Dan Gertler is partly responsible for the misery in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the New York Times leaves him out of coverage of a bribery scandal, though other business journals cite Gertler’s role.

Ma‘an News has collected data regarding every person who has died as part of the ‘Jerusalem Intifada’. Of the 274 individuals that have been killed between Oct. 1, 2015, to Sept. 30, 2016: 235 were Palestinians (85.8 percent of deaths), 34 were Israeli (12.4 percent), and five (1.8 percent) were foreign nationals.