Fifteen months after the US Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, overturning fifty years of abortion rights, millions of American women and girls face deteriorating access to reproductive health care.

This is the finding of a group of human rights experts, communicated in a recent letter to the US government.

Abortion services are now banned in fifteen US states, and sharply restricted in seven. So are a host of other fundamental rights, the experts say: to privacy, bodily integrity, autonomy, freedom of thought and conscience.

Disadvantaged women and girls have been especially hard hit. Health care providers have been chilled, even in States where abortion is still legal. Threats of violence are common.

And, law enforcement officials are using electronic data to track and pursue women.

Reem Alsalem was the lead author of the letter. Alsalem is Special UN Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences. I reached Reem Alsalem in Amman, Jordan. Listen to our conversation. Tap the podcast play button on top, or go here.

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It’s that time of year again – time to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of 9-11.

Also time to commemorate the first 9-11, fifty years ago.

On September 11, 1973, in a brutal coup backed by the CIA, Chile’s democratically elected socialist leader, Salvador Allende, was ousted, then killed. Over the following weeks, a hundred thousand Chileans would be detained in Santiago’s national stadium. Thousands were tortured, killed outright or disappeared.

All under the beneficent gaze of the Nixon Administration and its foreign policy chief, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

North of the US border, Canadian officials were also pleased. Indeed, in cooperation with Washington, Pierre Trudeau’s government helped destabilize Chile’s economy. Yves Engler has written extensively about Canadian involvement in the Chilean coup. Here and here and here.

Engler is a Montreal-based writer and political commentator.

Listen to our conversation. Tap the podcast play button on top, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Imagine an entire nation of imprisoned people. Thousands behind bars. Millions more within their own communities, hemmed in by walls, checkpoints and armed colonists, and a panoply of regulations restricting their movement; constantly surveilled; their most intimate details and relationships digitized; blackmailed into informing on each other.

Instructions to Bethlehem Palestinians (David Kattenburg)

This is the situation in Israeli-occupied Palestine.

The numbers are startling. Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, in 1967, almost a million Palestinians have been jailed – most of them inside Israel, in flagrant breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Tens of thousands without charge; and children, routinely subjected to what experts call torture.

In a recent report to the UN Human Rights Council, Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in occupied Palestine, laid out Israel’s carceral system in graphic detail – a system she says has turned occupied Palestine into a “constantly surveilled open-air panopticon.”

Listen to our conversation. Tap the podcast play button on top, or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.