The Iran Football Federation wants FIFA to prevent any “ceremonies or promotional activities” in support of the LGBTQ+ community at a much discussed “Pride Match” between Egypt and Iran on Friday in Seattle, as well as restricting symbols or representations of the Pride movement at Lumen Field.

Since Seattle was confirmed to have a June 26 World Cup fixture, the city’s host committee has been preparing activations to mark the occasion, with the match at Lumen Field fixed as Egypt vs. Iran following the draw last December. The Seattle FWC26 committee’s website has a page dedicated to the Pride Matchday and it is holding a Pride Match Day press briefing on Thursday.

FIFA told The Athletic on Wednesday it is permitting rainbow flags at all of its World Cup matches this summer.

French authorities said hospitals in and around Paris were overwhelmed amid a record-breaking heatwave, adding that consumption and sales of alcohol would be banned from Friday.

“We are reaching a saturation point in hospital facilities,” Paris police prefect Patrice Faure said, adding that “the number of hospitalisations keeps increasing.”

Alcohol consumption and sales will be banned in the French capital from Friday, he said.

In the months leading up to New York’s primary election, the 32-year-old political newcomer Darializa Avila Chevalier faced a barrage of negative ads. Super Pacs supporting her opponent – the veteran incumbent Adriano Espaillat – spent millions trying to stop her. And as an endorsement from Avila Chevalier’s fellow Democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, boosted her odds, the attacks turned racist, with false accusations suggesting she was lying about her Dominican ethnicity.

But on Tuesday, Avila Chevalier defied predictions and seized a stunning win in New York’s 13th congressional district, which spans upper Manhattan, including Harlem, and parts of The Bronx – with more than 49% of the vote. If she wins the general election in November, she will be the first Dominican woman elected to Congress.

During her victory speech, at a jubilant watch party at a popular Puerto Rican restaurant uptown, Avila Chevalier called the result “a new dawn” for her district.

“I have faith in the future that I know we are stepping into today,” she said. “No longer will we accept the politics that throw scraps at us and act like we should be grateful for them.”

Avila Chevalier’s win marks a remarkable achievement for an unabashedly pro-Palestinian doctoral student and community organizer with no prior experience in office.

It also cements the role of New York’s mayor as a formidable kingmaker for the left, and that of the Democratic Socialists of America – which backed both Mamdani and Avila Chevalier – as a surging force in US elections. All three congressional candidates backed by the mayor (in what some observers had viewed as a gamble) won seats on Tuesday, as did nine out of 10 of DSA’s candidates.

Mamdani, who joined Avila Chevalier in ads and on the campaign trail in recent weeks, had reportedly pledged to back Espaillat before reversing course and supporting Avila Chevalier – a move that earned him criticism from several politicians, some of whom accused the mayor of being untrustworthy. Of Avila Chevalier, Mamdani said that he could think of “no one better than someone of clarity, of conscience and of conviction to be the next congressperson” for the district. “Now that language of hope is a language of fact,” he said of her win.

Avila Chevalier, the daughter of working-class Dominican immigrants, grew up “pretty poor”, as she put it, in Florida before moving to New York to attend Columbia University, where she was active organizing to end sexual violence on campus and in support of Palestine and Black students. She was recruited to run for Congress by Justice Democrats, the same political group that backed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her own historic upset of an establishment Democrat a decade ago. Avila Chevalier has been described by some as “like AOC, but to the left”.

“We are very lucky to have a principled leader and someone who understands who it means to be a leader carrying for their whole constituency,” wrote Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota representative and another history-making progressive, in a post following Avila Chevalier’s win. “Congratulations sis and welcome to Congress!”

Pennsylvania’s Chris Rabb and New Jersey’s Adam Hamawy, two other leftists who recently won Democratic primaries, also congratulated her. “So thrilled that we have proven once more that there is no such thing as progressive except for Palestine,” said Hamawy.

Like fellow leftists, Avila Chevalier has campaigned on universal healthcare, stronger protections for renters, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and banning big Pacs from elections. She repeatedly accused Espaillat, a Dominican immigrant who was formerly undocumented, a five-term congressman, and the chair of the congressional Hispanic caucus, of having achieved little for his district and being beholden to wealthy donors, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), which in May reportedly poured $650,000 into a Super Pac opposing Avila Chevalier.

She made “babies, not bombs” the signature pledge of her campaign.

New York’s 13th district is home to mostly working-class Black and Hispanic communities, and includes Washington Heights, the neighborhood where Espaillat grew up, and that boasts the largest Dominican population outside the Dominican Republic. But the district has grown younger and more diverse in recent years.

Avila Chevalier, who served as the area’s organizing lead for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, first developed the idea of running a challenger to oust or push Espaillat on his positions by noting growing frustrations in the district with his lack of response to Israel’s war in Gaza. DSA also saw an opening there as upper Manhattan became its fastest-growing chapter following Mamdani’s win.

“I think it’s time that we have a politics that actually invests in life, not just as rhetoric, that we put our money where our mouth is, that our budget reflects those values, and that we see our resources come back to our communities to fund our schools to fund housing for all, to make sure that we are investing in all the social safety net programs that allow us to lead dignified lives,” she told the Guardian in a recent interview. “You just have to look around our district and ask: have things gotten any better in the nine years that he’s been in office?”

On the campaign trail, Espaillat regularly invoked Avila Chevalier’s lack of experience. “Getting results in Congress is not a PhD program,” he said. But it’s her support for Palestine, where in her 20s she spent a summer which she described as deeply formative, that has earned Avila Chevalier widespread criticism and accusations of antisemitism. She was challenged on her participation in an 8 October 2023 pro-Palestinian protest in Times Square that some viewed as condoning Hamas violence, with Espaillat accusing her of celebrating the death of Israeli civilians immediately after the attack.

Avila Chevalier pushed back against her critics by saying she “would never celebrate the death of any human being” and that she attended the rally because she knew Israel’s response to the attacks “would be an outsized reaction that would cause the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people”. Conversely, she criticized Espaillat for failing to do anything to support his constituent, the Palestinian Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, who was held by ICE for three months last year and became the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech.

Avila Chevalier also came under scrutiny over resurfaced old social media posts disparaging Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, which she said she regrets and has matured from. In interviews, she at times came off as testy and defensive.

But many of the attacks on her were aggressive and personal.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Avila Chevalier, who is Afro Latina and converted to Islam in recent years, faced racist and Islamophobic abuse, with a former senior aide of her opponent accusing her of wanting to make Washington Heights “a bastion of the Haitian, Muslim community allied to [Mamdani]”.

On social media, false claims that Avila Chevalier is Haitian – an attempt to further stoke division between Dominicans and Haitians, who share the island of Hispaniola, via anti-Haitian racism – went viral, prompting condemnations from several elected officials, including Espaillat.

Hours before her stunning win she addressed the racist attacks against her in a video posted on social media.

“I’m proud to be part of a generation of Dominicans and New Yorkers who reject racism and divisive politics and who fight for a future of solidarity and dignity for us all.”

Photo by Pete Alexopoulos on Unsplash

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Last month, the Texas Republican Party held its biennial convention at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, where over 4,000 delegates assembled to elect new leadership, adopt an official platform, and set legislative priorities for the upcoming legislative session. Delegates overwhelmingly elected D'Rinda Randall as the new state party chair, carrying 25 of 31 Senate District caucuses in what political scientists described as a further rightward shift driven by the MAGA wing's primary victories. The platform attracted national attention, but one section of it went unnoticed: a set of anti-trans provisions that, if enacted, would be among the most draconian in the country—including a ban on all gender-affirming care up to the age of 26 that extends to legal name changes, an absolute prohibition on transgender people working or volunteering in public schools, and a ban on private businesses expressing any support for transgender people.

"Gender Identity Ideology in Schools: The official position of the Texas schools shall be that there are only two genders: biological male and biological female, which are immutable and cannot be changed. We support the total prohibition of so-called social transitioning. We oppose transgender normalizing curriculum, library materials, and pronoun use. We support the prohibition of transgender individuals from serving in any school district positions, including in volunteer roles, and mandate the exclusive use of pronouns corresponding to a person's biological sex at birth.”

Plank 116 of the platform goes on to call for banning any curriculum, library materials, or extracurricular offering that "adopts, supports, or promotes gender fluidity or transgender ideology" and prohibiting school staff from "engaging in sexualized drag activities, crossdressing, or transgenderism."

The platform also calls for the criminal prosecution of parents of transgender youth under child abuse statutes—something Governor Abbott has already attempted, directing the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate families of trans children in 2022. Plank 150 states: "Any agency, individual, or other entity promoting, performing, or facilitating gender-transitioning or gender-modification of a minor child shall be criminally prosecuted for child abuse and exposed to civil actions, enjoying no immunity regardless of profession, relation, or standing." Importantly, the platform does not stop at minors. Plank 149 extends its prohibitions to legal adults as old as 25, banning all gender-affirming "medical or mental health intervention for persons between the ages of 18 and 26," including not just surgery, puberty blockers, and hormones, but even "assigning name and/or pronoun changes.”

See the section of the platform here:

The platform also targets the private sector. Under the heading "Religious Freedom for Business," Plank 203 calls for removing laws that "force business owners and employees to violate their conscience, sincerely held beliefs, or core values"—providing legal cover for businesses to discriminate against transgender people. But for businesses that want to be supportive, the platform offers no such freedom. Plank 203(c) goes further than any state party platform in the country, calling for an outright ban on businesses expressing support for transgender people:

Lastly, the platform does not just target transgender people—it targets LGBTQ+ people broadly. Its section on homosexuality opens with a declaration that would not be out of place in the 1950s: "Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice." Plank 152 endorses conversion therapy for people of "any age with identity disorder or unwanted same-sex attraction"—a practice condemned by every major medical organization in the country. Plank 208 declares the party is "opposed to same-sex parenting, intentionally subjecting a child to the loss of their biological father or mother, and other non-traditional definitions of family." And Plank 211 calls for nullifying Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, stating it "has no basis in the Constitution." Taken together, the platform reads as a blueprint for rolling back not just transgender rights but decades of LGBTQ+ civil rights progress.

“I think the most concerning part is that the Texas GOP wants to cut off mental health support for trans people between the ages of 18 and 26. Because of AG Ken Paxton’s aggressive weaponization of the law, Texas is already the only state that bars that kind of mental health care from trans minors in direct violation of the Supreme Court’s recent conversion therapy ruling. Having been personally affected by the prohibition a couple years ago, it gives me chills to think of what will happen if the ban is extended even further,” says trans journalist Aleksandra Vaca, a resident of the state, in a quote provided to Erin In The Morning.

Many of these provisions are not new. The 2024 Texas GOP platform already declared homosexuality "an abnormal lifestyle choice” and already called for criminalizing anyone who facilitates youth transition. However, it is clear that the policy platforms are escalating in the Texas Republican Party. And the party has a track record of turning its platform into law—SB 14 banned youth care in 2023 and SB 8 restricted bathrooms in 2025. Transgender people in Texas, meanwhile, have to sit and wait to see which draconian policy from the platform gets implemented in 2027 due to a party that seeks to make the conditions of life impossible for transgender people.

By photographer @[email protected]

Mustafa Taha Mustafa al-Khatib, 32, was shot several times in the chest, head and hand during a raid on the village of Sarta, west of Salfit, according to his uncle, Yaseen al-Khatib.

Yaseen told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that Mustafa was slow to answer the door because he had been sleeping.

When he woke up, he tried to get dressed, but Israeli soldiers forced open the front door, stormed into his bedroom and opened fire on him.

He said Israeli forces prevented residents from reaching Mustafa to provide first aid. He later died of his wounds. After the troops withdrew, paramedics were able to enter the area and transfer him to the hospital.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has voted to drop the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, saying it had a “chilling effect” on free speech in the workplace.

Doctors from across Britain backed the motion at the BMA’s annual conference on Tuesday, amid growing concerns that healthcare workers are being punished for expressing views on international conflicts.

The motion called on the doctors’ union to “provide urgent guidance and support to members who face disciplinary action or professional detriment for expressing legitimate political views or ethical concerns about international conflicts, including Palestine/Israel”.