This narrow lane is a busy cut-through and we often have to stand to one side because of the traffic. Between the passing places the verges are uncut, and their flowers have grown tall after spring’s heavy rainfall. Either side is hedged and the more interesting flora is in the north‑facing verge, separated from a narrow band of woodland by a deep ditch. The trees are mainly Scots pine and beech, from which a chaffinch calls insistently on this sunny morning.

The flowers of wood avens shine a deep lemon yellow, their stems arching over freshly green grasses. There’s a delicate tracery of leaves from herb robert, dandelions going to seed and the clear white stars of stitchwort. Clambering stems of bush vetch entwine with emerging brambles; the petals of this common legume are a dirty purple, a smudgy colour that is hard to define. Bright meadow buttercups stand tall and, later on, there’ll be meadowsweet and knapweed.

Other wildflowers like this shady spot: honeysuckle, woodruff, nettles and nipplewort. So much to notice in just a few paces – but then we see it, illuminated in a patch of dappled light: a bird’s nest orchid growing perilously close to the road. This curious plant, nationally and locally rare, has a pale beige colouring that makes it easy to overlook as dead or dying.

Named for its nest-like tangle of roots, Neottia nidus-avis has clusters of dull brown hooded flowers. Being parasitic on the mycorrhizal fungi associated with tree roots, it has no need for leaves or chlorophyll. It often gains its nutrients from beech trees – and there on the other side of the hedge is a large beech whose roots run under the verge. The orchid’s more usual habitat is the deep leaf litter and shade that we can glimpse through the hedge.

That mass of nest-like roots stores food, building up energy over a decade until the orchid blooms, which is why its appearance is such an event. We’d heard about it from a keen-eyed friend who notified the county recorder for South Northumberland. It joins the scattering of Tyne Valley records held by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland. And it’s something that couldn’t have happened if the road verge had been cut.

Much of this year’s clay-court season had been a miserable experience for Carlos Alcaraz. He was sidelined from three of his four planned tournaments with a forearm injury and hampered in the one event he did play. His fitness struggles raised further questions about whether his body can withstand the pressure his all-action playing style imposes on it and he arrived at Roland Garros without much match practice or rhythm.

It takes a special talent to enter a major tournament with such difficult preparation yet still manage to compete with sufficient quality and conviction to keep on winning under pressure. This time, after five turbulent, tension-filled sets, the Spaniard emerged after four hours, 19 minutes with a 6-3, 2-6, 5-7, 6-1, 6-2 win over the fourth seed Alexander Zverev and his first French Open title.

By triumphing in Paris, Alcaraz has now mastered every surface at 21 years old, winning on the hard courts of the US Open in 2022, the lawns of Wimbledon in 2023 and now on the red clay here. He is the youngest man in history to win a major on all surfaces, a record previously held by Rafael Nadal at 22 and a feat that has only been achieved by seven players. Now a three-time grand slam champion, he moves level with Arthur Ashe, Andy Murray, Stan Wawrinka and Gustavo Kuerten.

This tournament will also be remembered for Zverev being in the midst of a public trial in Berlin for allegedly physically assaulting his ex-girlfriend, Brenda Patea, who is the mother of their child, Mayla.

The trial opened in Berlin on 31 May, where the court was told that Zverev was accused of pushing and strangling Patea after an argument at a Berlin flat in May 2020. He denied the allegations.

A week later, before his semi-final against Casper Ruud, the lawyers of Zverev and Patea agreed to an out-of-court settlement. The court officially declared no verdict, with no ruling on the allegations and no admission of guilt from Zverev.

After a slow start from both players, Alcaraz, the third seed, took control. He dictated the vast majority of rallies with his forehand and he made use of his all-court game in the swirling wind by peppering Zverev with drop shots and closing down the net. Alcaraz’s level dropped at the beginning of the second set, though, and as he struggled to find his range, Zverev’s improved serving and consistency allowed him to level the set.

Just as Alcaraz seemed to have found his rhythm again, striking the ball sweetly to build a 5-2 third-set lead, Alcaraz’s nerves took over and a composed Zverev rolled through five consecutive games to establish a two-sets-to-one lead.

To his immense credit, Alcaraz immediately shrugged off the third set, responding with an excellent return game to break serve at the start of set four. Having already requested pickle juice to address potential cramping, Alcaraz received a medical timeout at 4-1 in the set for his left leg. After the break, he continued to pound the ball from the baseline, maintaining his momentum to see out the set.

As they stepped up for the final set, tension radiated from both sides of the court. It was Zverev who first succumbed to the moment. While he handed over his service game at 1-1 with four pitiful errors, in the very next game Alcaraz plotted an incredible recovery from 0-40 down, closing out the hold with a spectacular backhand drop-shot winner.

Alcaraz’s miraculous hold for 3-1 included a controversial overrule from the umpire on break point, which the Hawk-Eye line-calling system, used only by television networks, ruled out. The shot, however, was well within Hawk-Eye’s margin of error, meaning it is unclear if the ball was actually out.

With the momentum behind him, Alcaraz refused to let up as he closed out another spectacular triumph. The intention he played with after trailing by two sets to one underlined the difference between the Spaniard, with his two grand slam titles before this match, and Zverev who, at 27, has been chasing his first major win for over half a decade.

“I want to be one of the best tennis players in the world, so I have to give an extra in those moments in the fifth set, I have to show the opponent that I am fresh, I’m like we are playing the first game of the match,” said Alcaraz.

With a third major title in as many years, Alcaraz will leave Paris having further elevated his status in the sport. He continues to establish himself as a winner, no matter his struggles, injuries and sometimes his own turbulent form.

He has again proved that his generational talent is matched by a level of self-belief and big-match temperament that will carry him to even greater victories in the years to come.

An appellate court has ruled that Texas cannot ban books from libraries simply because they mention “butt and fart” and other content which some state officials may dislike.

The fifth US circuit court of appeals issued its decision on Thursday in a 76-page majority opinion, which was written by Judge Jacques Wiener Jr and opened with a quote from American poet Walt Whitman: “The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.”

In its decision, the appellate court declared that “government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree”.

It added: “This court has declared that officials may not ‘remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the idea contained in those books and seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.’”

The appellate court’s latest decision follows a federal lawsuit filed in 2022 by seven Llano county residents against county and library officials for restricting and removing books from its public circulation.

The residents argued that the defendants violated their constitutional right to “access information and ideas” by removing 17 books based on their content and messages.

Those books include seven “butt and fart” books with titles including I Broke My Butt! and Larry the Farting Leprechaun, four young adult books on sexuality, gender identity and dysphoria – including Being Jazz: My Life As a (Transgender) Teen – and two books on the history of racism in the US, among them Caste and They Called Themselves the KKK.

Other books targeted by the ban were In the Night Kitchen, which contains cartoons of a naked child, as well as It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, according to court documents.

The books were removed after parents complained, with library officials referring to the books as “pornographic filth”.

In its majority decision, the overwhelmingly conservative appellate court ordered eight of the 17 books to be returned, including Being Jazz: My Life As a (Transgender) Teen, Caste and They Called Themselves the KKK.

Wiener wrote how a dissenting opinion from the Donald Trump appointee Kyle Duncan “accuses us of becoming the ‘Library Police,’ citing a story by author Stephen King”.

“But King, a well-known free speech activist, would surely be horrified to see how his words are being twisted in service of censorship,” wrote Wiener, whop was appointed during George HW Bush’s presidency.

“Per King: ‘As a nation, we’ve been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn’t approve of them.’ Defendants and their highlighters are the true library police.”

Wiener also said that “libraries must continuously review their collection to ensure that it is up to date” and engage in “removing outdated or duplicated materials … according to objective, neutral criteria”.

In a report released last October, the American Library Association found that Texas made the most attempts in the US to ban or restrict books in 2022. In total, the state made 93 attempts to restrict access to more than 2,300 books.

A wave of book banning has also emerged in Florida as part of the culture wars of the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, on “wokeism,” a term meant to insult liberal values.

In January, a Florida school district removed dictionaries, encyclopedias and other books because the texts included descriptions of “sexual conduct”.

Meanwhile, in 2022, a Mississippi school district upheld the firing of an assistant principal after he read a humorous children’s book, I Need a New Butt, to his students.

Alan Hansen, the legendary former Liverpool and Scotland defender, is seriously ill in hospital.

Liverpool confirmed the news on Sunday afternoon and the club are providing support to the family of the 68‑year‑old, who retired in 1991 to begin a hugely successful career as a television pundit.

“The thoughts and support of everyone at Liverpool FC are with our legendary former captain Alan Hansen, who is currently seriously ill in hospital,” a statement read. “The club is currently in contact with Alan’s family to provide our support at this difficult time, and our thoughts, wishes and hopes are with Alan and all of the Hansen family.

“We will provide any further updates as we receive them in due course, and we request that the Hansen family’s privacy is respected at this time.”

Hansen joined Liverpool from Partick Thistle in 1977 and won three European Cups, eight league titles, two FA Cups and three League Cups in 620 appearances for the Anfield club before retiring in March 1991 because of injury.

The man known as “Jockey” also won 26 caps for his country and played at the 1982 World Cup in Spain, having made his international debut in 1979. He is widely recognised as being one of the finest centre-backs of his generation, combining ­excellent strength, speed and awareness with supreme composure in and out of possession.

After he hung up his boots Hansen became a regular on the BBC, ­appearing on Match of the Day as well as the broadcaster’s live ­coverage, establishing himself as a respected and charismatic voice on the game. In that role, however, he is perhaps best known for claiming “you can’t win anything with kids” after Manchester United’s 3-1 defeat against Aston Villa on the opening day of the 1995-96 Premier League season and after Alex ­Ferguson had fielded a team containing a host of raw, young talent including Gary Neville, Nicky Butt, Paul Scholes and, from the bench, David Beckham. United went on to win the Double that season.

Hansen retired from punditry in May 2014 and has largely lived a quiet life since. He is married and has two children.

Famous for its lush vineyards and cherished local wineries, Napa valley is where people go to escape their problems.

“When you first get there, it’s really pretty,” said Geoff Ellsworth, former mayor of St Helena, a small Napa community nestled 50 miles north-east of San Francisco. “It mesmerizes people.”

What the more than 3 million annual tourists don’t see, however, is that California’s wine country has a brewing problem – one that has spurred multiple ongoing government investigations and created deep divisions. Some residents and business owners fear it poses a risk to the region’s reputation and environment.

At the heart of the fear is the decades-old Clover Flat Landfill (CFL), perched on the northern edge of the valley atop the edge of a rugged mountain range. Two streams run adjacent to the landfill as tributaries to the Napa River.

A growing body of evidence, including regulatory inspection reports and emails between regulators and CFL owners, suggests the landfill and a related garbage-collection business have routinely polluted those local waterways that drain into the Napa River with an assortment of dangerous toxins.

The river irrigates the valley’s beloved vineyards and is used recreationally for kayaking by more than 10,000 people annually. The prospect that the water and wine flowing from the region may be at risk of contamination with hazardous chemicals and heavy metals has driven a wedge between those speaking out about the concerns and others who want the issue kept out of the spotlight, according to Ellsworth, a former employee of CFL.

“The Napa valley is amongst the most high-value agricultural land in the country,” he said. “If there’s a contamination issue, the economic ripples are significant.”

Employee complaints

Both the landfill and Upper Valley Disposal Services (UVDS) were owned for decades by the wealthy and politically well-connected Pestoni family, whose vineyards were first planted in the Napa valley area in 1892. The Pestoni Family Estate Winery still sells bottles and an assortment of wines, including an etched cabernet sauvignon magnum for $400 a bottle.

The family sold the landfill and disposal-services unit last year amid a barrage of complaints, handing the business off to Waste Connections, a large, national waste-management company headquartered in Texas.

Before the sale, Christina Pestoni, who has also used the last name Abreu Pestoni, who served as chief operating officer for UVDS and CFL, said in a statement that the company’s operations met “the highest environmental standards” and were in full legal and regulatory compliance. Pestoni is currently director of government affairs at Waste Connections.

In her statement, she accused Ellsworth and “a few individuals” of spreading “false information” about CFL and UVDS.

But workers at the facilities have said the concerns are valid. In December of last year, a group of 23 former and then-current employees of CFL and UVDS filed a formal complaint to federal and state agencies, including the US Department of Justice, alleging “clearly negligent practices in management of these toxic and hazardous materials at UVDS/CFL over decades”.

The employees cited “inadequate and compromised infrastructure and equipment” that they said was “affecting employees as well as the surrounding environment and community”.

Among the concerns was the handling of “leachate”, a liquid formed when water filters through waste as it breaks down, leaching out chemicals and heavy metals such as nitrates, chromium, arsenic, iron and zinc.

In the complaint, the employees also cited the use of so-called “ghost piping”, describing unmapped and unquantified underground pipes they said were used to divert leachate and “compromised” storm water into public waterways, instead of holding it for “proper treatment”.

Several fires have broken out at the landfill over the last decade and concerns have also been raised about the facility’s handling of radioactive materials.

Even the “organic compost” the UVDS facility generates and provides to area farmers and gardeners is probably tainted, according to the employee complaint, which cites “large-scale contamination” of the compost.

“These industrial sites are affecting the environment and residents of Napa Valley,” former UVDS employee Jose Garibay Jr wrote in a 2023 email to Napa county officials. “Also, the biggest revenue for the wine country could be tremendously affected; the wine industry, tasting rooms, wineries, hotels, resorts, restaurants, and local businesses.”

Pestoni did not respond to a request for comment. Other representatives for CFL, UVDS and Waste Management also did not respond to requests for comment.

“Both UVDS and [CFL] have no business being in the grape-growing areas or at the top of the watershed of Napa county,” said Frank Leeds, a former president of Napa Valley Grapegrowers who runs an organic vineyard across from the UVDS composting operation. “There are homes and vineyards all around that are affected by them.”

Leeds co-owns a vineyard near UVDS with his daughter, Lauren Pesch; Pesch said she had deep concerns about water contamination from CFL and has seen pipes from the UVDS property carrying liquid into the creek next to her vineyard.

But the wine industry itself more broadly has not expressed public concern, and when asked for comment about the issues, there were no replies from Napa Valley Grapegrowers, Napa Valley Vintners or California Certified Organic Farmers.

Michelle Benvenuto, executive director of Winegrowers of Napa County, said she was “not knowledgable enough on the details of this issue” to comment.

Anna Brittain, executive director of the non-profit Napa Green, a sustainable wine-growing program that lists UVDS as a sponsor, also said she was not aware of concerns about contamination held by any members.

More than a dozen Napa valley vineyards or wineries did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment.

Toxic PFAS found

Clover Flat Landfill opened in 1963, and together with UVDS provides a range of valuable services to the community, according to the facility websites, including collecting and capturing methane gas to convert to electricity. It provides enough energy to power the equivalent of 800 homes and operates with “net zero” emissions, according to the website.

As previously revealed by the Guardian, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has listed CFL as one of thousands of sites around the country suspected of handling harmful per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

After a request from regulators for an analysis of leachate and groundwater samples at the landfill, Pestoni reported to the California regional water quality control board in 2020 that a third-party analysis had found PFAS in all the samples collected.

PFAS are human-made chemicals that don’t break down and have been linked to cancers and a range of other illnesses and health hazards. Levels of PFOS and PFOA – types of PFAS considered particularly dangerous – were detected in the landfill’s leachate at many times higher than the drinking-water standard recently set by the EPA.

In early 2023, the San Francisco Bay regional water quality control board sampled a creek downstream from CFL for eight PFAS, identifying multiple PFAS compounds in each sample, according to an email from water board inspector Alyx Karpowicz to Waste Connections.

“There are detections in the creek of the same compounds detected at the Clover Flat landfill,” Karpowicz informed the company.

When asked about the results, a spokesperson for the water board said the PFAS concentrations in the creek samples were low enough that “chronically exposed biota are not expected to be adversely affected and ecological impacts are unlikely”.

The site has racked up a number of regulatory violations and left at least one state investigator worried about “long-term stream pollution”.

In a 2019 report, a California department of fish and wildlife officer determined that the landfill had “severely polluted” both streams that flow through the landfill property with “large amounts of earth waste spoils, leachate, litter, and sediment”. There was “essentially no aquatic life present”, the investigator noted.

Heavy metals also are present in “alarmingly high detection” levels at the landfill, said Chris Malan, executive director of the Institute for Conservation Advocacy, Research and Education, a watershed conservation non-profit in Napa county.

Last year, CFL settled a case brought against it by the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, which said its discharges were harming aquatic life and endangering people who use the Napa River for recreation. CFL agreed to implement new erosion-control measures, and to take action if testing showed contaminants above certain levels, among other measures.

Also in 2023, the state fined it roughly $620,000 for discharging “leachate-laden” and “acidic” water into one of the streams, among other violations.

Last fall, a group of water board officials visited the landfill to hunt down the “ghost piping” alleged in the worker complaint. They reported in an October 2023 email that they discovered an array of pipes, and a culvert, that require further scrutiny, the email said.

There remains an “ongoing investigation” into environmental concerns tied to CFL and UVDS, according to Eileen White, executive director of the San Francisco Bay regional water quality control board.

Separate from the environmental investigation by state and local officials, the US justice department has issued subpoenas for information from UVDS as well as from more than 20 other companies and individuals in the region. That investigation appears to focus on local political connections and contracts, not environmental concerns.

Little public pushback

Ellsworth, the former mayor, is among a small group of community members who have tried taking their own actions against UVDS and CFL.

In February of 2021, dozens of residents voiced complaints about odors, noise and light pollution from UVDS at a virtual meeting. Some initiated litigation, but were unable to fund an ongoing legal battle and dropped the effort.

Ellsworth maintains that Napa valley’s wine industry prefers any contamination concerns be kept quiet.

“We tried to talk to the Napa valley wine industry trade organizations. They completely stonewalled us,” he said. “Everybody’s afraid to speak up or is too apathetic or doesn’t want to see it.”

This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group

When the Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah arrived at a Manhattan cafe on Thursday afternoon, he had just learned that his article had been reinstated in the Columbia Law Review. After a weeklong censorship controversy, the prestigious journal’s website was back online, too.

The law school journal’s faculty and alumni board had shuttered the website for most of the week rather than publicize Eghbariah’s 105-page article, titled Toward the Nakba as a Legal Concept. In it, he proposed a new framework to explain the complex, fragmented legal regimes governing Palestinians. He wanted to bring the word Nakba – which translates from the Arabic as catastrophe, and is better known for describing the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 – to the center of a new legal conversation.

Wearing a white T-shirt and linen pants and sipping iced coffee, he reflected on an extraordinary week that saw his legal theories – ordinarily the stuff of arcane law school debates – ignite emotive conversations about the legitimate bounds of debate about Israel and Palestine.

What’s more, it wasn’t the first time his ideas were deemed too dangerous to publish by the Ivy League.

He had worked on his contribution for almost half a year, finding a home for it at the Columbia Law Review after a shorter web piece he had written for the Harvard Law Review had been blocked at the last minute.

He was proud of his scholarship but found it dangerous that the content of his article had become secondary to what he saw as the manufactured controversy of its censorship. “Now, we have to debate about my right to say what I want to say instead of debating about what I actually said,” he told the Guardian.

“I felt convinced by my work if it’s generating this repression,” he said. Ultimately, the story led to headlines in major newspapers, and a PDF of the article was posted widely on social media, getting far more readers than is typical for legal scholarship. “People can see through these authoritarian tactics and reject them. The censorship in this case is actually counterproductive.”

When Eghbariah woke up on Monday morning, his article was online. “It was supposed to be a very exciting moment,” he recalled.

But soon, the journal’s website was inaccessible – “under maintenance”, it said. It turned out the law review board had taken it down. “It was very alarming that they would go to that extent,” he said.

Eghbariah, a Harvard Law School doctoral candidate, had been splitting his time between Massachusetts and Haifa, Israel, when he formulated the ideas driving his scholarship. He was working for the legal organization Adalah, where he has represented Palestinian clients in the Israeli judicial system – some in Gaza, others in the West Bank or East Jerusalem, still others citizens of Israel. He has worked on a landmark case about Israel’s cyber unit, which works with social media platforms to censor speech, and fought to reunite families separated by these different legal regimes. He realized that each time he and colleagues brought a case forward, they had to figure out which legal framework applied.

It is variegated, by design. “You have an invisible map in your head where you know what laws to invoke depending on the case,” Eghbariah said, “and this is not intuitive at all.”

Different legal systems apply to Palestinians living under Israeli rule or in neighboring Arab states or elsewhere. “It’s kind of a system of domination by fragmentation,” he explained. “We become trained in doing these legal gymnastics, and flipping from one framework to the other, without sometimes even reflecting about the nature of this.”

To articulate that fragmentation in his legal research, he realized he needed a new terminology. Just as the genocide convention emerged after the Holocaust, and the word apartheid entered everyday speech amid South Africa’s systemized segregation, Eghbariah was finding that analogies to other seemingly comparable situations were insufficient. In the article, he argues that the term Nakba, in use by Palestinians for decades, encapsulates the layered and overlapping legal entanglements of Palestinian life in the absence of self-determination.

The Nakba of 1948, he says, is not a historical artefact. His grandparents survived the Nakba and it informs Eghbariah’s research. Like many Palestinian scholars, he views Israel’s war on Gaza as part of a continuing Nakba to destroy Palestinian life on the land Israel seeks to control. “It’s an organic framework that has been developed in Palestine to reference the ramifications and ongoing nature of the Nakba of 1948,” Eghbariah said. “What the genocide moment and discourse did to that is that it actually made me think about it in legal terms.”

The article lays out the concept, and as he develops the idea further in his dissertation, he hopes it could have practical ramifications for outstanding disputes over matters like Palestinian property rights and the status of refugees. This is how laws in the US have often developed: scholars put out a new approach in a law review, practitioners try it out, and it can lead to case law or legislative efforts. “Those ideas get refined in the process,” Diala Shamas, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the Guardian. “It’s provocative, and it’s exactly what scholarship should be doing. It’s exactly what Palestinian scholars need to be doing.”

After Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel and amid Israel’s military campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, the student editors at the Columbia Law Review contacted Eghbariah. No Palestinian author had previously contributed to the journal.

His draft went through “at least” five edits, he says, with extensive feedback from about a dozen editors at the student-run journal, as he added 427 footnotes to the piece. But in early June, on the eve of the article’s publication, the publication’s alumni and faculty board urged the student editors to postpone Eghbariah’s piece or pull it from the journal entirely.

Student editors told the Intercept that the article had been extensively vetted according to procedure. Some, however, “expressed concerns about threats to their careers and safety if it were to be published”, the Associated Press reported. The students went ahead with publication against the board’s wishes. The board said in a statement published when it restored the website that it had “received multiple credible reports that a secretive process was used to edit” the article, and that was its reasoning for taking the journal offline.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at the university, wrote that “nuking the website is a drastic, extraordinary step that requires much more justification than has been supplied by the directors thus far”.

The board never spelled out why it pulled the piece, beyond what it called an opaque editorial process – a description the student editors disputed. But for non-scholarly audiences, Eghbariah’s word choice may have seemed inflammatory. In the piece, he defines Zionism as inextricable from the Nakba and builds on the legal scholarship of apartheid and genocide. Its table of contents was itself arguably provocative, with the header “Zionism as Nakba”.

It echoed another episode from November, when the Harvard Law Review blocked publication of an earlier version of the article that it had commissioned from Eghbariah, after the law review president reportedly expressed safety concerns tied to the piece. That version of the piece later appeared in the Nation magazine.

“What is so scary about Palestinians having the right to narrate their own realities?” Eghbariah said. Student-run law review journals rarely if ever hear from their outside boards. “It’s unprecedented to even interfere in editorial processes,” he said. There have been no substantive or factual contestations of the claims of the Columbia Law Review article.

One of Eghbariah’s advisers at Harvard Law School is the prominent academic Noah Feldman, author of the new book To Be a Jew Today. He has called Eghbariah “one of the most brilliant students I’ve taught in 20 years as a law professor”. He declined to provide comment on the law review article, but said he “certainly” stood by his assessment of Eghbariah’s talents.

Eghbariah hopes the fracas around his article could bring more attention to the violence against Palestinians and what he describes as a genocidal campaign.

“There is a continuum between the material reality in Gaza and shutting down these debates,” he said. “They’re not separate issues.”

In many ways, Shahad Darwish’s life in Michigan is just like anyone else’s. The 23-year-old is studying for a master’s degree in psychology at a local university and helps out at her family’s jewelry business.

But in other ways, it’s very different: Darwish is one of about 3,000 Michigan-based Sabean Mandaeans, followers of John the Baptist – and one of the oldest surviving gnostic religions in the world.

Every July for 36 hours, Darwish and her family observe the Mandaean new year holiday – karsa – where followers stay indoors at home and are forbidden from using running water. She prays daily and once a week goes to the mandi, the Mandaean place of worship where she volunteers. She’s learning to read, write and speak the Mandaean language.

“It’s an important part of our upbringing,” she said.

Mandaeans – who do not consider themselves Christians despite John the Baptist’s reverence for Jesus – lived mostly in towns and cities of southern Iraq, their important religious and cultural customs centering on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

But wars in Iraq, including the US-led invasion there in 2003, changed that. About 85% of the community’s estimated population of 70,000 Mandaeans have fled the country, with many moving to neighboring Syria.

“Four guys came to my store [in Baghdad] and stole everything and told me I have to pay [them] otherwise my family and I would be kidnapped,” said Shahad’s father, Bashar Harbi Darwish, who fled Iraq with his family in 2006.

A civil war in Syria that followed a popular uprising in 2011 forced many to move again. This time, they went to Australia, Europe and North America.

Today, Darwish runs a jewelry store in Warren, a suburb of Detroit, where he’s a leading member of one of the largest US-based Mandaean communities.

Despite the traumas it has endured, for him the community is in the midst of a revival.

“After we fled Iraq, we established more than 80 associations all over the world,” Darwish recounted recently. “The number of baptisms we do in Europe every year is maybe 10 times what we did in Iraq before 2003.

“There are five or six Mandaean schools teaching the new generations in Australia, the US and Europe.”

A festival held in Michigan in the summer of 2023 attracted more than 500 Mandaeans from across the US and Canada, and about 150 baptisms were held. The Mandaean community’s religious head, Sattar Jabbar Hilo, flew in from Baghdad to oversee a host of important ceremonies.

That fuels further involvement, according to Bashar. “They want to be baptized and married by the top sheikh,” he said. “It’s a big thing for your reputation.”

He said that to ensure the long-term viability of the community, the Mandaean Association of Michigan had taken measures to involve the community’s younger members.

“Our board of directors is mostly made up of young people, most of them have degrees – they have the ability to do more for our community,” he said.

But while getting out of Iraq and Syria has saved lives, others argue the resettlement strategies adopted by countries receiving Mandaeans has created new problems for the community.

About 15,000 Mandaeans are now thought to live in Australia and Sweden, respectively, with about 12,000 to 15,000 in the US. Several thousand more have been resettled across the Netherlands, Denmark, Canada and elsewhere.

For many now in the US, a new life has oftentimes meant being relocated hundreds of miles from the nearest community members.

“[The US government] saved us from the Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq, but you distributed us to 35 different states,” Suhaib Nashi, the president of the Mandaean Society of America, said. “The families are safe, but how can they maintain their traditions when there are three families in Ohio or Oklahoma?”

He added that the community had been cleansed having survived invasions, wars and forced conversions in Iraq for more than 2,000 years, all the while keeping alive the theology of the Sumerians – the earliest known literate society – with whom they identified long before John the Baptist became their central prophet. He said he had asked US immigration officials: “Don’t distribute us like sand in the air.”

These and other threats to the community’s future, such as forbidding Mandaeans from marrying outside the religion, have roiled fierce internal debate.

“There are the conservative and reform sides conflicting now, and there’s no clear vision of what comes next because this is a fundamental issue,” Nashi said.

Despite the relative calm in Iraq, the Mandaean community, which is thought to number about 7,000 to 10,000 people mostly in the southern regions of the country, continues to be targeted for violence. In March, an attack injured two Mandaeans and damaged a house of worship in Maysan province.

Back in the US, Mandaeans have recorded some measure of success in altering resettlement policies. About 1,500 individuals have been able to move together to the city of Worcester in Massachusetts.

And in Michigan, baptisms are now regularly held in the Clinton River, north of Detroit.

Michigan’s community is preparing for another major gathering in July that is expected to attract Mandaeans from as far away as Sweden, with the number of planned weddings expected to nearly double from six last year.

The change in the air is palpable, Shahad Darwish said.

“In the past two years I’ve noticed the younger generation becoming more involved; they’re showing up to events more, creating new events,” she said. “People hang out at the bowling alley or meet at each other’s houses.

“Before, it wasn’t really like that.”