civil

RIYADH: Saudi civil defense issued an emergency alert for ‌the ‌south western ‌province ⁠of Khamis Mushait to ⁠warn of potential ⁠danger ‌for the ‌fourth time ‌in ‌24 hours.

The civil ‌defense posted on X ⁠shortly ⁠after saying the danger has passed.

The General Directorate of Saudi Civil Defense said: “The danger has been lifted from Khamis Mushayt Governorate. For your safety, continue to follow the instructions of the Civil Defense and completely avoid gatherings and photography. In case of emergencies, call the number (998).”

Yemen’s Houthis said on Tuesday they had attacked an airbase in the area, which lies in the south of the Kingdom.

Houthis attacks have left more than 70 people injured, including women and children, a military spokesman said on Tuesday, adding that the Kingdom would take measures to counter the militia.

The spokesperson for the Coalition to Support Legitimacy in Yemen, Maj. Gen. Turki Al-Maliki, described the Houthi escalation and attempts to target Saudi territory and infrastructure as “dangerous,” saying they demonstrated the group’s “hostile and irresponsible” approach.

Al-Maliki said the latest attacks targeted civilian and economic sites in the Saudi cities of Abha, Khamis Mushayt, Jazan and Najran, resulting in 73 civilian injuries.

The spokesperson added that the coalition’s joint forces would take all necessary operational measures to deter the Houthis and confront what he described as their hostile approach.

The Saudi Cabinet on Tuesday said the Houthis had committed a heinous act of aggression against civilian and economic targets, and directed that the highest level of medical care and attention be provided to those injured in the terrorist attacks.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry condemned the attacks, stating the Kingdom will not tolerate any attack targeting its territory and resources, as it reserves the legitimate right to take the necessary measures to defend its sovereignty.

The UN also condemned the cross-border attacks by the Houthis.

“We condemn the Houthi cross-border attacks against multiple sites in southern Saudi Arabia, which affected civilian and energy infrastructure, and express deep concern over reports of civilian injuries,” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters, citing an escalation in hostilities in recent days.

The EU also urged the Houthis to “end all attacks” after strikes on Saudi Arabia.

GCC Secretary-General Jasem Al-Budaiwi condemned the Houthis for targeting southern Saudi cities.

Pakistan also condemned the strikes, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif writing on X: “I condemn in the strongest terms the cowardly attack by Houthis targeting civilian and energy facilities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which left many people injured. Pakistan stands in unwavering solidarity with the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the brotherly people of Saudi Arabia.

“Such dastardly attacks threaten innocent lives as well as regional peace and security. We reaffirm our steadfast support for the Kingdom’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity, and pray for the swift recovery of all those injured,” he added.

Joining the condemnation, Algeria criticized the attacks — which injured civilians, including women and children — and expressed its full solidarity with Saudi Arabia.

In a statement, the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs affirmed Algeria’s strong condemnation and described the attacks as a violation of the Kingdom’s sovereignty and a threat to its security and stability.

Somalia also strongly condemned the attacks. In a statement, its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation said that the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure constitutes a dangerous escalation and a grave violation of international law, expressing its full solidarity with Saudi Arabia.

WASHINGTON — Thousands of protesters are rallying Friday on the National Mall in support of voting rights and racial justice ahead of the midterm elections, following a wave of changes to voting laws and redistricting that civil rights groups have condemned as detrimental to Black Americans.

The 2026 “Defend the Vote” March on Washington, organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, echoes the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march. The event follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark April decision in Louisiana v. Callais that reinterpreted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, allowing Southern states to redraw their congressional maps in a way that erodes equal representation in Black communities.

“We’ve been doing these marches for years, but this is probably the most important because this is the first year we are marching that the voting rights bill has been nullified by the Supreme Court,” Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“Marches are designed to grab attention and then go into the trenches and organize around that,” he said.

The march opened with prayer and statements from Interfaith Alliance representatives. They spoke on diversity, equity and inclusion practices, voting rights and systemic racism.

“Creator of all, let us draw on each other, with love and mercy, and hold each other up as we march, wipe each other’s tears, heal each other’s wounds,” Ambereen Kahn, an Interfaith Alliance representative, said. “Most compassionate, protect our leaders who guide, instill in their hearts the values of our shared humanity.”

This year’s march, which Sharpton’s group is co-hosting with King’s Drum Major Institute, a progressive think tank and community action group, features dozens of speakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

Sharpton said thousands of civil rights activists from across the southeastern U.S. were traveling to the capital by bus for the rally.

Event echoes iconic Lincoln Memorial rally

On Thursday, Courtney Pope, 48, was marching across the King Bridge to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. But on Friday, she and other members of the National Handmaid Army were at the Washington march with plans to travel to New York and New Jersey over the next few days.

For Pope, the rally is about finding community alongside promoting voting rights.

“I know that we’ll only be successful if we band together despite our differences,” Pope said.

Friday’s event harkens back to King Jr.’s historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, when more than 200,000 people gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. That march, an inflection point in the Civil Rights Movement, came at a fraught moment for the country, when economic headwinds, civil unrest, political division and the Vietnam War bitterly divided Americans.

Sharpton said the Trump administration’s immigration policy for Haitians and white South Africans, as well as cuts to social programs like Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s health subsidies, are unifying policies for this year’s ideologically diverse march attendees. But the redistricting efforts by Republican-led states set to reduce the number of Black lawmakers in Congress loom large over Friday’s march.

“This march is about people who refuse to be counted out. When the courts and the legislature broke apart District 6, they did not just redraw lines,” Rep. Cleo Fields, D-La., said in a texted statement. “They told hundreds of thousands of Black families from Baton Rouge up through the Delta that their voice could be taken away at any moment.”

Fields was the central character in the Supreme Court decision that hollowed out the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The court ruled that his district, created just one term ago to permit a second majority-Black district in a state where Blacks make up 33% of the population, was unconstitutional because it relied too heavily on race.

The court has held that maps can be redrawn for partisan reasons.

Louisiana’s legislature rushed to redraw the district after the high court’s decision, reshaping Fields’ district to cluster it around predominantly white communities in the Baton Rouge area and southern Louisiana.

Fields has opted not to seek reelection to Congress and instead is pursuing a seat in the state Senate.

“The people taking part in this historic march are answering back, and history will remember that they did,” Fields said.

Embattled Black lawmakers see need for continued rights push

Rep. Shomari Figures, an Alabama Democrat whose majority-Black district was targeted by the state’s Republican-led redistricting effort, said the original voting rights fight required local movements, national figures, lots of coordination and strategy. He sees this year’s march as a continuation of that legacy.

“My district includes Montgomery, which was the birthplace of it all. It started with a bus boycott in 1955 and that, ultimately, morphed into a broader struggle for civil rights and led to a more broad Civil Rights Movement,” Figures told the AP.

“It led to a Civil Rights Act, led to the Fair Housing Act, led obviously to the Voting Rights Act, and the voting rights movement,” Figures added.

Ahead of Friday, organizations participating in the march, including the NAACP, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and Black Voters Matter, filed new claims in federal court in their existing lawsuit against President Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting. The Supreme Court cleared a path Monday for possible implementation of the order, though it remains unclear how much can be put in place before the midterms.

“We will not stand idly by while the voices of the people are silenced,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement Thursday. “We must protect every eligible citizen’s right to cast their ballot.”

Brown and Junkroski write for the Associated Press. AP writers Gary Fields in Washington and Kimberly Chandler in Montgomery, Ala., contributed to this report.

Much may depend on whether US courts side with Uefa over its requests for disclosure of evidence related to the FFE plan. It is seeking information from Fifa, Thrive Capital – the venture capital firm earmarked as the lead investor in FFE – and its founder Josh Kushner, along with former Formula 1 chief Greg Maffei, who is described as “the key commercial adviser” on the proposed deal. In the case of Thrive and Kushner, Uefa’s lawyers say they are seeking subpoenas for “the production of documents and communications and for deposition testimony”.

Although Kushner, who is the brother of US president Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is yet to comment, some legal experts believe he could successfully challenge and block a subpoena request by arguing that the details of the deal need to remain confidential to protect his business interests and future investments. Kushner has recently agreed a deal to buy basketball’s Los Angeles Lakers for a record £9.3bn.

It is unclear how long this process could take, or whether Uefa will secure the evidence it needs to support its claim that the World Cup was deliberately undervalued at about £15bn. Nor is it clear whether it will ultimately follow through on its threat to lodge a criminal complaint in Switzerland.

How confident Uefa would be of criminal charges being brought is also highly uncertain. In 2002, in echoes of the current disunity, several Fifa executive committee members filed a criminal complaint against former president Sepp Blatter with a Zurich court, external. The public prosecutor took no action, while Blatter denied wrongdoing. Last year, a long-running attempt by the Swiss Attorney General’s Office to prosecute Blatter and former Uefa president Michel Platini ended with both men being fully cleared of corruption charges.

Perhaps aware of the challenges its legal action could face, Uefa has in the meantime pledged to “secure fundamental reform, restore proper limits on presidential authority and ensure that Fifa is once again governed as an institution – not around one individual”, while demanding “a genuinely independent external review of FFE”.

Given the support he retains in South America, Africa and parts of Asia, and how he has survived everything Uefa has thrown at him in recent weeks, many still expect Infantino to remain in power and seek re-election for a fourth term in the spring. Uefa has warned that, should he do so, it will “join forces with its partner confederations to ensure that member associations are offered a credible alternative – one committed to integrity, accountability, development and genuine institutional change”.

But how likely is it that a unifying challenger will emerge? And how can the game avoid a repeat of such a crisis in future?

Court order rules that Pentagon acted illegally, punishing AI company for criticism of government.

A United States judge has blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of technology company Anthropic.

In a 59-page written order issued on Thursday night, District Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Department of Defense had acted illegally when it designated the company a supply chain risk to national security.

The decision marks the latest turn in the Claude maker’s high-stakes fight with the US military over artificial intelligence safety on the battlefield. The government is expected to fight the ruling.

The judge’s order rebuked the Pentagon, saying it had targeted and punished Anthropic for the company’s public criticism of the Defense Department’s stance on AI deployment on the battlefield.

“The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” Lin, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, wrote.

Autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance

Anthropic’s lawsuit in a California federal court alleges that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he designated the company a national security supply-chain risk.

Hegseth’s move, which blocked Anthropic from military contracts, followed the company’s refusal to allow the military to use its Claude AI models for US surveillance or autonomous weapons.

Anthropic argues that AI models are not reliable enough for autonomous weapons and opposes domestic surveillance. The Pentagon maintains that private companies should not constrain military action.

Executives have said the ban could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business.

During a hearing on July 30, Lin described the government’s position as “really troubling” and “at odds … with the First Amendment”, adding that the record had “gotten worse for the government” over time.

In the same hearing, Department of Justice lawyers argued that the nature of AI models is “so staggeringly enormous and opaque” that the Pentagon cannot evaluate them like physical hardware.

First use of obscure statute

Anthropic welcomed the ruling, stating it remained “focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology”.

The designation was the first time a US company has been publicly labelled a supply-chain risk under an obscure procurement statute aimed at protecting military systems from foreign sabotage.

In its lawsuit, Anthropic alleged the government violated its constitutional rights to free speech and due process by retaliating against its views on AI safety without allowing it to dispute the claim.

The lawsuit called the decision unlawful, unsupported by facts, and inconsistent with the military’s past praise of Claude.

There was no immediate comment from the Pentagon on the ruling.

According to a new report, the United States federal government has taken a massive step back from its role in protecting civil rights across the country.

On Thursday, the nonprofit Human Rights Watch issued a 112-page analysis of the government’s civil rights activities from January 2025 through the start of 2026, a period that captures the opening months of President Donald Trump’s second term.

The report concludes that the federal agencies responsible for stopping discrimination have largely been gutted of their staff.

Additionally, top-down directives by Trump have de-emphasised the federal government’s role in protecting civil rights across the country, according to the group.

“While claiming to protect all Americans, the administration is rolling back systems that communities have long turned to for relief,” Trey Walk, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Which agencies did the report analyse?

The report examines four key agencies within the federal government dedicated to civil rights.

They include the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department, the Fair Housing Office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Human Rights Watch spoke with current and former federal workers, lawyers, complainants and community groups who had been involved in cases alleging discrimination.

It also reviewed court filings and federal agency directives that illustrated the pivot in priorities under the second Trump administration.

What is the history of civil rights enforcement in the federal government?

The federal government’s role in civil rights protections goes back centuries, starting with the US Constitution.

In 1791, Congress ratified an addition to the country’s founding document that established civil protections like the freedom of religion. Those first 10 amendments became known as the Bill of Rights.

Over the decades, more amendments were added, most notably after the US Civil War, to guarantee rights like equal protection under the law.

While the Constitution contains explicit language about religion and race, critics point out that there is no language that confers equal protection based on sex or gender.

The history of the Department of Justice is closely entwined with the need to enforce civil rights law after the Civil War.

Created in 1870, the department addressed several needs, including a push to professionalise and centralise the country’s federal law enforcement. But it also helped prosecute violent white supremacist groups at a time when local authorities, particularly in southern states, sometimes refused to.

The US Civil Rights Movement, starting in the 1950s, also spurred a surge in federal infrastructure. It was the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for instance, that established a dedicated civil rights division within the Justice Department.

How did federal policy change under Trump?

Trump’s second term ushered in a backlash towards policies broadly considered to be part of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” movement, or DEI.

That movement gained popularity in the early 2020s, particularly after the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, sparked a public reckoning over racial inequality.

Trump, however, has called DEI “racially discriminatory”. During his campaign for a second term, he argued that there was a “definite anti-white feeling in this country”.

Since starting his second term, Trump has sought to undo policies that his administration argues give unfair advantages to demographics like women and minorities.

In addition, federal agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division suspended certain cases they were pursuing, including some involving sexual harassment and transgender rights.

New investigations were opened instead, including against the footwear giant Nike, which was accused this year of discrimination against white employees.

In May 2025, the Department of Justice also announced it would halt investigations and reform agreements involving police departments accused of racial discrimination.

Such measures had been taken in places like Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, after public outcry over the police killings of unarmed Black people, including Floyd.

What did the Human Rights Watch report find?

The report chronicled an overall weakening in the federal bodies designed to protect civil rights.

Job cuts and resignations were part of that trend. The Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, for instance, boasted about 365 lawyers in January 2025, when Trump took office.

By the end of that year, three-quarters of those lawyers had left the agency, an exodus driven by what Human Rights Watch called a “coordinated effort to undermine career staff”.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department told Al Jazeera its Civil Rights Division “remains dedicated to protecting the rights of all Americans”.

The department also said it had added 100 personnel since the 2025 departures.

According to the spokesperson, the Civil Rights Division is currently focused on “protecting religious liberty, Second Amendment rights, and women’s and girls’ spaces, standing against illegal race-based policymaking and DEI, and defending parents’ fundamental right to direct their children’s upbringing and education”.

What other offices were affected?

Other agencies in the Human Rights Watch report likewise saw a decrease in their ranks as well as a reduction in their civil rights work.

The Office of Fair Housing went from 31 staffers to 11 by mid-2025. Some 115 complaints prepared by the office and referred to the Justice Department for possible legal action were quashed, according to the report.

At the Department of Education, the Office for Civil Rights initially had 568 workers across 12 offices when Trump took office in 2025. Within a few months, seven of those offices were shuttered, and half of the civil rights-related workers were gone.

Between May and September 2025, the office dismissed about 90 percent of the nearly 10,000 complaints it received, a higher rate than it would have in the past, the report said.

What has been the impact of these changes?

Human Rights Watch found that many victims and communities grappling with discrimination no longer had the benefit of a federal agency to help them in their cases.

One community housing group told Human Rights Watch that the Department of Housing and Urban Development no longer responds in a timely fashion to reported instances of anti-LGBTQ discrimination.

Some federal agencies also appear to have walked away from their role in monitoring discrimination and overseeing reforms around the country, according to the report.

The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has a long history of investigating discrimination claims and working with school districts to enact change.

But Human Rights Watch observed that the office has largely stopped dealing with complaints under Trump.

While the Office of Civil Rights required policy changes or monitoring in response to 336 cases in the first half of 2024, only 59 cases received such a remedy over a similar period in 2025.

In Springfield, Massachusetts, for instance, parents complained after white students held a mock “slave auction” on the social media platform Snapchat, where they bid for the sale of their fellow Black students. That case is no longer being pursued by the Office of Civil Rights as of last year.