After just seven months in the role, the president of one of the foremost US literary organisations resigned last week over what he described as the unfair treatment of Palestinians compared to Israelis and Jewish Americans.
Dinaw Mengestu, a celebrated Ethiopian-American novelist, exited the top job at Pen America on Thursday after the group published a report about the emotional toll on Israeli and Jewish-American writers after the fallout from Israel's nearly three-year-long genocide in Gaza.
Many reported losing jobs or career opportunities.
Mengestu wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday that "it is not about different opinions" or "different experiences", but rather "PEN America's ongoing failure to defend free expression fairly and equitably", as it keeps producing work that "supports suppression through bigotry and indifference".
That suppression, he described, comes from undermining the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which he maintained is also a form of protected free speech under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.




When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Alina Holovko, a resident of Dnipro, spent her days organizing volunteers to assemble Molotov cocktails as Russian forces threatened to reach the city. She and other volunteers founded Dobra Sprava, a humanitarian organization that evacuates civilians from frontline communities.
Sam Neill, a smoothly elegant and versatile actor whose career moved from art film to blockbuster as he dodged velociraptors in "Jurassic Park" to playing Holly Hunter's husband in "The Piano," has died. He was 78.
One of the strictest abortion bans in the country will be on the ballot this November after Idaho’s secretary of state certified a ballot measure on Monday that would reverse the state’s abortion ban that prohibits the procedure at all stages of pregnancy.
Donald Trump has approved a sharp reduction in the size of two national monuments in Utah held sacred by many Native Americans, in the latest move to open US public land to corporate developers and the oil and gas industry.
An ICE officer has fatally shot a man in Maine during what authorities described as a routine removal operation, the state’s attorney general’s office confirmed on Monday afternoon. Here’s what we know so far:





























