Who is Pope Leo XIV?

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After the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Ras Baraka, was arrested Friday for protesting outside of a new immigration detention facility, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official is threatening to arrest three more elected officials who were present. Mother Jones

There is a telling rumor in Berlin political circles. Upon his appointment as leader of Germany’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in 2022, Friedrich Merz was gifted a copy of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) by his conservative colleague Wolfgang Schäuble, the veteran former finance minister and then president of the German parliament. A dismayed Merz is said to have handed back the book shortly after, exclaiming: “But this is a novel — what am I supposed to do with this?” Jacobin

Is the Democratic party losing touch with working class voters? It’s hardly a debatable claim anymore. Exit polls from last November’s presidential election reveal that a commanding plurality of voters with incomes under $50,000 – 49%, in fact – voted for Trump, compared to just 48.5% for Harris. ... Democrats need to focus on regaining their lost mantle as the “party of the working class” – the image they projected beginning with FDR and the banner they proudly carried for decades after World War II. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC are all avidly promoting this view. CounterPunch

Mahmoud Khalil's letter to his newborn son: Deen, my heart aches that I could not hold you in my arms and hear your first cry, that I could not unfurl your clenched fists or change your first diaper. I am sorry that I was not there to hold your mother’s hand or to recite the adhan, or call to prayer, in your ear. But my absence is not unique. Like other Palestinian fathers, I was separated from you by racist regimes and distant prisons. The Guardian