AL JAZEERA

Disgruntled TikTok users are flocking to the platform which is promising a ‘transparent tech’ experience.

UpScrolled, a social media application created by Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian entrepreneur Issam Hijazi, has surged in popularity across several countries, including the United States, as many users looked for an alternative to TikTok, which was formally taken over by US-backed investors and companies last week.

With Larry Ellison, the owner of Oracle, who is a staunch supporter of Israel and a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, acquiring a stake in TikTok’s US-based entity, social media users have expressed concerns about censorship of pro-Palestine posts on the popular app. TikTok’s global operation will still be run by its Chinese owner, ByteDance.

On Wednesday, TikTok permanently banned Emmy Award-winning journalist and Al Jazeera contributor from Gaza, Bisan Owda, sparking outrage and boycott calls from her supporters. The app has also been accused of content censorship around unprecedented ICE violence in the US.

UpScrolled, which was founded only a year ago, surprisingly climbed to the top spot of US app downloads this week, ranking number one in the “social networking” category of Apple’s App Store free apps by Wednesday. It was also among the top apps downloaded by Apple users in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

The app, meanwhile, is gaining thousands of new downloads as disgruntled TikTok users flock to the platform, pulled by its promise of “transparent tech”. The flood of new users momentarily crashed the platform’s servers over the weekend, UpScrolled reported.

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DEMOCRACY NOW

A new ProPublica investigation reveals new details about a sprawling ICE detention complex where families describe horrific conditions inside, such as being served contaminated food, with children and parents at times finding worms in their meals. Lights are reportedly left on for 24 hours a day. South Texas Family Residential Center, in the town of Dilley a few dozen miles from the southern border with Mexico, detains an estimated 3,500 people, more than half of them children. “I have never felt so much fear to go to a place as I feel here. … Once I go back to Honduras, a lot of dangerous things could happen to my mom and I,” a 14-year-old detained at Dilley, Ariana Velasquez, told ProPublica. There are also mounting reports of psychological abuse by guards, some of whom have allegedly threatened families with separation. “Many of the children who are now being sent there are being arrested by ICE around the country, and some of them, like Ariana, have been living [in the U.S.] for years,” says Mica Rosenberg, investigative reporter at ProPublica.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Nermeen Shaikh, with Amy Goodman.

“The Children of Dilley.” That’s the title of a new ProPublica investigation into the South Texas Family Residential Center, a sprawling ICE detention complex in the town of Dilley, a few dozen miles from the southern border with Mexico. It’s run by the private prison company CoreCivic. Dilley was first opened by the Obama administration in 2014.

In a moment, we’ll be joined by a ProPublica investigative reporter who went inside Dilley. But first we turn to the voices of two children held inside. This is a 9-year-old girl from Venezuela, Susej Fernández, speaking to ProPublica, describing what life is like for her at Dilley, where she’s been held for over 50 days.

SUSEJ FERNÁNDEZ:

hhHonestly, honestly, I don’t feel good, because there’s always, always an officer around, like, bothering me. I can’t go anywhere. And if I need to go to the bathroom, they won’t let me, because I have to go with my mom. So it’s annoying, and I just have to stay in my room.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is 14-year-old Ariana Velasquez reading a letter she wrote while detained at Dilley. She’s a high school student from Honduras who’s lived in the United States with her mom for seven years.

ARIANA VELASQUEZ: Hello. My name is Ariana V. I’m 14 years old, and I’m from Honduras. I’ve been detained for 45 days, and I have never felt so much fear to go to a place as I feel here. Every time I remind myself that once I go back to Honduras, a lot of dangerous things could happen to my mom and I. My younger siblings haven’t been able to see their mom in more than a month. They’re very young, and you need both of your parents when you’re growing up. Since I got to this center, all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Those were the words of Ariana Velasquez, a 14-year-old girl from Honduras detained at Dilley.

We’re joined now by ProPublica investigative reporter Mica Rosenberg.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mica. Tell us more about Ariana’s story and the children detained at Dilley whom you spoke to.

MICA ROSENBERG: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

And I think one of the main takeaways here is that children who are at this center — in the past, the center had mainly been used to hold families who were recently crossing the border, many who — since the Obama administration, it’s been open, and families were coming there in the hopes of coming into the United States for the first time. But now there’s been a real shift, because border crossings have dropped to record lows, and many of the children who are now being sent there are being arrested by ICE around the country. And some of them, like Ariana, have been living here for years. You know, they speak perfect English, as you heard. They were detained sometimes in the middle of their school years. And in some cases, they’re now entrenched American lives. In the case of Ariana, she has two younger U.S. citizen brothers and — a brother and sister, a kindergartner and a toddler, who were not sent to the detention center. So, she was — she and her mother were separated from them.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Mica, about CoreCivic running Dilley? And talk about who is profiting financially from the locking up of children.

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Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian geopolitical journalist and author with decades of experience covering global power shifts, energy politics, and Eurasian integration. A seasoned foreign correspondent, he has reported from across Asia and Europe. He is a permanent columnist at The Cradle.

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by DEAN BAKER

Before I go further here, let me qualify everything I’m saying here with a warning: I have no crystal ball from which to give people investment advice. However, I do know logic and arithmetic, apparently unlike Donald Trump, so I can draw out some hypothetical situations, which is what I do below.

There has been much discussion, both here and around the world, of the possibility of a flight from the dollar. This has always been a serious risk since Donald Trump took office, but the risk increased enormously from his deranged rant at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. 

Virtually everyone who was not on Trump’s payroll acknowledged that the speech was both scary and incoherent. He made threats to our allies, boasted about imposing tariffs based on personal whims, and displayed an extraordinary ignorance of major world events. With Trump commanding extraordinary powers as president as a result of a docile Republican Congress and servile Supreme Court the United States does not look like a good place to park your money.

There have already been some prominent instances of pension funds pulling their holdings out of Treasury bonds and other US assets, but this is the less important part of the story. Most of the money at risk of leaving the United States is not held by public pension funds which may announce their decision to make a political point. 

Rather, most of the money at risk of fleeing is held by private corporations and banks, and wealthy individuals, who would pull their money out of the United States because they think that Donald Trump’s America is a bad investment. There are literally trillions of dollars that could be leaving.

To correct one of the silly things often said by people who should know better: No individual, bank, or corporation is asking where to park one, two, or three trillion dollars. This scenario is supposed to leave them paralyzed in any effort to leave dollar assets, because there is no good alternative country where they can park $4 trillion.

But that is not how the financial system works. The big investors are asking where they can park $10 billion, $50 billion, or $200 billion, and the answer is there are plenty of places where this sort of money can be placed with reasonable safety, including the European Union, Brazil, China, India, the United Kingdom and Canada. A flight from the dollar running into the trillions would be the result of tens of thousands of decisions to pull millions or billions of dollars out of dollar denominated assets.

I don’t know if we are seeing the beginning of this sort of flight, but if we are, we can say with some degree of confidence that the dollar, along with the US stock and bond markets, are headed lower. If that is the case, there is an obvious strategy for people in the United States: join the flight

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by KATHY KELLY

January 29, 2026, marks the second year since the Israeli military, using U.S. provisioned weapons, murdered Hind Rajab. Had she lived, this little Palestinian girl who liked to dress up as a princess would now be 7 ½ years old. An Israeli Defense Force unit fired a barrage of missiles at the car in which she and her relatives were fleeing from an Israeli military invasion of their neighborhood.

The family’s fatal ordeal began on January 29, 2024, in Tel al-Hawa, an area south of Gaza City, when Israeli forces ordered Hind’s family to evacuate from their home. Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, and an older sibling set forth on foot. It was raining heavily, and Hind’s mother didn’t want her walking through the storm. Hind joined her aunt, uncle, and four cousins as they fled by car from invading Israeli forces. Hoping to reach a shelter at the Al Ahli hospital, Hind’s uncle sought advice from the Palestine Red Crescent office about what route would be safe to take. But before they could find refuge, the Israeli military fired on their car, immediately killing Hind’s aunt, uncle and three of her cousins.

Her surviving cousin, fifteen-year-old Layan, was able to re-connect, by phone, with relief workers at the Palestinian Red Crescent office. That conversation ended when Layan screamed that the tank was very near and the relief workers then heard an explosion. Hind watched in horror as Layan was killed. The relief workers called Hind. The utterly frightened girl answered, and they urged her to remain hidden in the car and try to be calm. Rescuers would come, they said. But it would be suicidal for relief workers to set forth without first coordinating with the Israeli military. It took several hours for the Israeli military to give clearance for two ambulance workers to travel the approved route, an eight-minute drive, in hopes of rescuing Hind.

Surrounded by the corpses of her family members, Hind pleaded with the Red Crescent workers to come soon. “I’m so scared,” she told them. “Please come.”

But when the rescuers were within 162 feet of the vehicle where Hind was trapped, Israeli tank fired missiles assassinated them.

Hind’s voice continues reaching people. Three award winning films have told her story, awakening consciences, worldwide, to Israel’s ongoing genocide.

Hind’s voice echoes, tragically, in the pleas of Palestinian children today who face torture and death at the hands of Israel’s genocidal policy makers and militarists. Palestinian children living in makeshift tents, soaked and chilled by winter storms, long for relief. Hind’s pure innocence speaks for them, also, these little ones who could never be mistaken for criminals or security threats, little ones who beg for warmth and protection. The vocabulary changes slightly: Please come. I’m so cold. Please come. I’m so sick.

Yet trucks laden with relief supplies remain blocked, at the border crossings, while children who are near death suffer under tortuous conditions.

More than 100 children are reported to have died in Gaza since the October 2025 ceasefire.

A January 26, 2026 UNICEF report notes that Israel’s relentless attacks have decimated water and sewage systems in Gaza. Since the onset of winter, heavy rainfall has caused unsafe water to flood densely populated areas where people are crowded into makeshift tents. The grounds become muddy, making hygiene nearly impossible as people sleep in saturated clothes and bedding. Storms have collapsed tents. Fuel for generators is scarce, and there has been no central electricity for over two years.

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by CHRIS HEDGES

Trump’s Board of Peace is an intricate play to maintain hegemony in the face of China’s rise, sparking talk of “a new world order” — but is the rules-based international order really worth saving?

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

As U.S. hegemony continues to dwindle, Donald Trump and his international allies are making preparations to maintain some grip on world power. One of these methods includes the “Board of Peace,” which was ostensibly created to reconstruct Gaza, but has demonstrated yet another attempt by Trump to undermine international law.

Yanis Varoufakis, the Secretary-General of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), the former Finance Minister of Greece and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism joins host Chris Hedges to discuss what the Board of Peace really means and how it relates to Trump’s larger geopolitical goals, including one seeking to curb China’s rising influence on the world stage.

When it comes to the European Union, Varoufakis explains that European nations are “freaking out about the Board of Peace not only replacing the United Nations, but also targeting them. And this is what they get for ignoring the very clear signs that Trump was sending their way, that he’s out to get them, that he’s no longer interested in having vassals that think that they are part of a Western multilateral design… it seems to me that the Donald Trump policy is forcing his allies, so to speak, firstly to accept that the genocide will continue. Secondly, not to dare say anything about it. And third, go into these spasms of quasi-autonomy.”

As for China, Varoufakis says that Trump understands that the U.S. will have to coexist with the East Asian nation but must also to rein in the Europeans while maintaining control of the Western hemisphere, likening the tentacles of the American empire to a bicycle wheel. “The bicycle wheel has a hub in the middle and it’s got spokes… you can break one or two or three spokes and the wheel still works,” Varoufakis says. “As long as you are the hub and you negotiate with each spoke separately, you keep them separate and you don’t allow them to get together and negotiate with you collectively, then you can extend your hegemony and make a lot of money in the process.”

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by WALDEN BELLO

The choice is socialism or barbarism, and the latter has a head start.

Ever since the 1990s, when to the longstanding cooptation of the Western working class by social democracy was added the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the saying has been popular among the chattering classes that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” As McKenzie Wark has noted, there was this weird consensus among both its partisans and its critics that “Capital is eternal. It goes on forever, and everything is an expression of its essence.”

Lately, however, there have been attempts to meet the challenge of imagining the end of capitalism.

How Will Capitalism End?

One of the early efforts was the 2014 essay titled “How Will Capitalism End?” by Wolfgang Streeck, the eminent former director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Taking the bull by the horns, Streeck asserted, “I suggest we think about capitalism coming to an end without assuming responsibility for answering the question of what one proposes to put in its place. It is a Marxist—or better: modernist—prejudice that capitalism as a historical epoch will end only when a new, better society is in sight, and a revolutionary subject ready to implement it for the advancement of mankind.”

Streeck’s angle of approach to the question was quite original, one derived from his familiarity with the work of the great Hungarian sociologist Karl Polanyi. This was that capitalism had been so successful in commodifying everything—or converting not only land and labor but also formerly fenced off areas like knowledge, public infrastructure, and the environment into commodities for market exchange—that it was eliminating the very social, cultural, and political conditions needed for its reproduction. A central assertion was that the demands of profit-making had become so intense that capital was destroying the very basis of sustainable capital accumulation—labor—by pushing down living standards in the center economies while allowing only extremely low wages in the economies of the Global South to which it had fled.

Streeck was one of the first to advance the idea of a “polycrisis,” that is, that owing to capitalism’s ability to erode the traditional brakes put on its ability to transform everything into commodities, crises were breaking out along different dimensions of societal existence, and these crises had a negative synergy, enhancing the impact of one another and thus magnifying their collective impact. These interacting crises were producing what Streeck called the “five disorders”—economic stagnation, oligarchic distribution, the annexation of the public domain to private property, corruption, and global anarchy.

Delinking Accumulation from Social Reproduction

Richard Westra advances a similar argument in his book The Political Economy of Post-Capitalism. Capital accumulation can only take place if the profits extracted in the production process are devoted not only to capitalist consumption and investment but part of it is channeled into wages that enable those that produce surplus value to physically reproduce themselves. He agrees with Streeck that the social conditions for the reproduction of the labor force are disappearing at a global level, as capital flees to the poorer countries to avoid the high wages of workers in the advanced economies while paying the bare minimum to workers in the Global South.

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by JAMIE DAVIS SMITH

The past has shown that nontraditional measures like brothels, beer and lipstick can tell us a lot about the economy’s health.

While some people anxiously watch the stock market for signs of a recession, others look for more subtle cues that the economy is in trouble.

One of them is Catherine De Noire, a manager of a legal brothel, a Ph.D. candidate in organizational psychology and an influencer. When business at her brothel unexpectedly dips, De Noire takes it as a sign that the economy is in trouble.

Although De Noire is based in Europe, she believes that economic upheaval in the United States “triggers huge uncertainty” across the pond because of America’s global influence. De Noire first noticed a decline in business right after Donald Trump was elected in November 2024, as Americans and the rest of the world anticipated upheaval.

Strippers in the U.S. are also feeling the pinch. Dancer and influencer Vulgar Vanity said that when she first started dancing in 2022, she could earn six figures just by dancing during a handful of big events in Austin, such as the Formula 1 Grand Prix and South by Southwest music festival. This year is different.

“I didn’t even bother working South by Southwest because the first Friday night I attempted to work, I walked into a completely empty club and didn’t make any money at all,” she said.

Vanity also says that many of her regular customers aren’t tipping at all or tipping less than half of what they used to. She is quick to point out that she is just one dancer and “obviously not an economist,” but she notes that other dancers and tipped workers are also hurting. Her theory is that her customers are no longer tipping as generously because of rising costs and economic uncertainty. Vanity is worried that this means we are on the verge of a recession or full-blown depression.

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by RINA CHANDRAN

The company’s CEO says users are flooding the platform after the sale of TikTok in the U.S.

Within hours of the deal for TikTok’s U.S. operations being announced last week, Issam Hijazi noticed a big uptick in users to his social media platform UpScrolled. That stream of disgruntled users fleeing TikTok over censorship concerns turned into a flood this week, crashing UpScrolled’s servers.

UpScrolled, launched last July, supports text posts, photos, short-form videos, stories and other features. It claims to be a platform with “no censorship” and “no shadowbans.” On Monday, it ranked among the top 10 free apps on Apple’s App Store, and No. 2 among social network apps. It hit more than 1 million users from just 40,000.

“You all showed up so fast our servers tapped out,” UpScrolled said in an Instagram post on Monday. “We’re a tiny team building an alternative to the platforms that stopped listening to you. Right now, we’re scaling and running on caffeine to keep up with what YOU started. Bear with us. We’re on it.”

Under the deal for TikTok’s operations, three managing investors control 50% of the new U.S. entity: Oracle Corp., private equity firm Silver Lake Management, and Abu-Dhabi-based investment company MGX. Since the deal was finalized, #TikTokCensorship has been trending on other platforms, with users claiming that TikTok is suppressing or delaying videos about Palestine, as well as the fatal shooting in Minneapolis of a man by federal immigration officers.

UpScrolled is backed by the Tech for Palestine incubator, an advocacy project that helps fund tech initiatives to support the Palestinian cause. Hijazi, a Palestinian-Australian, spoke to Rest of World on the sidelines of a conference on Saturday.

You saw a big jump in users after the TikTok deal was done. Why do you think that happened?

With the deal being signed, people thought, okay, that’s it, we’re not going to be on TikTok anymore. Content moderation on TikTok is gonna change. It has already changed. I know a lot of pro-Palestinians began to get warnings; began to see their content being moderated. Their reach has been really suppressed. This started a long time ago, but it has been more severe in the past few days. In the past few days, we grew by 30,000-40,000 users. Most users are in the U.S, followed by Europe, UK, Australia, with the rest from everywhere else.

What led you to build UpScrolled?

I worked for big tech companies. And then the genocide began [the Israeli offensive following the October 7, 2023 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas was declared a genocide by a United Nations commission]. I couldn’t take it anymore. I lost family members in Gaza, and I didn’t want to be complicit. So I was like, I’m done with this, I want to feel useful. I found this gap in the market, with a lot of people asking why there is no alternative to the Big Tech platforms for their content, which was getting censored. So I thought, why don’t we build our own? I just rolled up my sleeves, and built it.

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by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear Reader,

In 1804, Alexander Hamilton—founding father, architect of American finance, a man whose face would one day adorn the ten-dollar bill—stood on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River and allowed Aaron Burr to shoot him. Hamilton, by most accounts, had intended to throw away his shot, to fire into the air. He went to Weehawken, a town in New Jersey, not to kill but to show his willingness to be killed. His honour demanded it. He died the following afternoon, leaving behind a wife, seven children, and a young nation that would spend the next two centuries trying to make sense of such transactions.

What Hamilton died defending was a phantom—a wound that existed only in the minds of those who believed in it. Honour, unlike property or physical safety, cannot be touched or measured. It is purely consensual, a shared hallucination that acquires lethal force only when enough people agree to treat it as real. The anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers, studying Mediterranean societies in the mid-20th century, observed that honour functioned as a kind of credit system: a man’s worth was not what he possessed but what others believed he possessed. The duel, then, was a public audit, a demonstration that one’s credit remained good.

The practice of duelling gradually disappeared from Europe and North America by the late 19th century—a movement from what sociologists call “honour cultures” to “dignity cultures”, in which individuals are expected to shrug off insults rather than answer them with violence.

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