Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a mem-ber of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) We Should All Be Concerned About What’s Happening in India
By Arman Khan, Mr. Khan, a former executive editor at Vogue India, wrote from Mumbai, India, May 1, 2026
Allie Sullberg
A standup comedian in India posted a seemingly harmless Instagram reel in March, parodying Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s overly familiar behavior when he meets foreign leaders — the prolonged bear hugs, the verbal fumbles, the nervous bursts of laughter.
A couple of weeks later, after the video had amassed millions of views, it was blocked by Instagram. The same day, on X, several other accounts popular for their political satire and memes were blocked under Indian government pressure after they criticized Delhi’s handling of a cooking gas shortage caused by the U.S.-Iran war, or otherwise poked fun at Mr. Modi.
Satire, it seems, is the latest target of the Modi government’s systematic muzzling of public discourse in the world’s largest democracy. Since his Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014, it has steadily eroded civil liberties and increased its grip across all layers of society, including neutering legacy media that has historically demanded government accountability. Now it is tightening control of the digital commons, weaponizing the threat of legal liability to ensure compliance from Big Tech players eager to maintain access to India’s massive user base.
The worldwide reach of platforms like X, Instagram and Facebook makes what’s happening in India a global concern. Mr. Modi’s government is building a potential template for other countries that seek to restrict online self-expression.
The Indian government’s main weapon is the Information Technology Act. Originally enacted in 2000, it empowers authorities to take down online content deemed to pose a threat to Indian sovereignty, security, public order or foreign relations. It has been used over the years by various Indian administrations to target content critical of them.
Mr. Modi’s government has wielded the act with increasing frequency and strengthened it in recent years with a series of amendments.
His administration has now proposed new ones that take even more explicit aim at ordinary internet users who post — or merely share — online content on news and current affairs. That means if I, as an independent journalist, put up an Instagram reel critical of Mr. Modi’s policies, the post — and perhaps my account — could be blocked. Both the platform and I could face legal repercussions. The Press Club of India and the Internet Freedom Foundation have warned that the amendments will have far-reaching consequences on free expression and social media platforms in India.
This is a logical extension of the ruling party’s throttling of free speech. Its intimidation of the once-rambunctious traditional Indian media has left bloggers, YouTube content creators, independent journalists and the average internet user to fill the gap in holding the government accountable. Now we, too, are being targeted.
In 2021 the government ordered Twitter to shut down accounts that criticized Mr. Modi over unpopular new agricultural laws and related widespread protests by farmers. The laws were eventually repealed. Two years later, the government blocked online access to a BBC documentary critical of Mr. Modi. Lately, the policing has intensified: Last year, a 19-year-old college student was arrested after sharing a post that questioned the official narrative of India’s brief military conflict with Pakistan in May 2025, and in the last few months new cases have resulted in independent digital news outlets and popular satirists being purged from social media.
This is sending a chill through society, forcing citizens to weigh whether speaking out is worth the risk. For many, it isn’t.
The stakes are particularly high for Muslims like me, who face constant pressure in Mr. Modi’s Hindu-chauvinist India to prove our patriotism even as the ruling party weakens our voting rights and otherwise marginalizes us. When I share a political post on Instagram, it is nearly always followed by a panicked call from my parents, worried about the legal repercussions. Every word I write, including in this essay, is tinged with fear. Like many others, I have become less vocal on social media. With each passing day, our voices are diminished.
Free speech in India is far from being completely extinguished. The political opposition proved its resilience in the 2024 elections in which Mr. Modi’s party lost its parliamentary majority, and someday, Mr. Modi will be gone. But even more liberal future governments might find it hard to resist the machinery of silence being installed.
And what’s happening in India may not stay in India. Freedom of online expression has been under long-term strain globally even in democracies like the United States, where the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to squelch critical news coverage and satirical content, and where Silicon Valley executives have shown an increasing willingness to please the president.
India is showing where this leads: Even in the world’s largest democracy, when people are afraid to express themselves, they don’t.
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2) Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and the Profitable Business of Peace
By Linda Kinstler, May 1, 2026
Photo illustration by Chantal Jahchan
When President Trump announced, last Friday, that Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff, his special envoys for peace missions, would be returning to Pakistan over the weekend to resume peace talks with Iran, the news was taken as a sign that the war might in fact be nearing an end. Stocks closed at record highs and relief from rising gas prices seemed in reach. That the two businessmen were merely boarding a plane seemed to calm the addled market.
Less than 24 hours later, Trump told the media that Kushner and Witkoff’s trip was off. “Nope, you’re not making an 18-hour flight to go there,” he said he told the two men as they were preparing to leave. He referred to Kushner and Witkoff — his son-in-law and his longtime business associate — as “my people,” a nod to the strange role they have taken on as civilian proxies for the president. There is a long history of moguls and financiers meddling in matters of state, but Trump has taken the intermingling of private interests and public affairs to a new extreme.
Over the past year, Kushner and Witkoff have crisscrossed the globe as White House emissaries: They have met with Hamas and with Vladimir Putin, with Volodymyr Zelensky and with Iranian negotiators. Their near-universal presence at high-stakes negotiations suggests that Kushner and Witkoff, New York real estate developers who are now executive members of Trump’s Board of Peace, have been almost single-handedly tasked with realizing Trump’s desire to be remembered as the “president of peace.”
But these are businessmen first and diplomats second. Their approach to peacemaking is abundantly evident in the settlements they have brokered thus far. The October cease-fire between Israel and Hamas opened the door to Kushner’s aspiration to build a shiny special economic zone where there are now 60 million tons of rubble — with human remains and unexploded ordnance trapped inside. In this vision, the economic zone will house data centers, skyscrapers and advanced manufacturing and run on cryptocurrency. Their draft proposal for a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine included a provision that the United States would receive “50 percent of profits” from the “venture” of rebuilding Ukraine’s destroyed infrastructure. Their view seems to be that peace is an asset to be leveraged and maximized.
On the sidelines of the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace in February, Witkoff announced an agreement between the United States and Pakistan to redevelop the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, just weeks after the Pakistani government signed a deal with a company affiliated with World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm run by Witkoff’s and Trump’s sons. In the months since, Pakistan has become one of the primary mediators between the United States and Iran.
The apparent entanglement of Kushner’s and Witkoff’s business interests and their public roles — and the many unanswered questions about their personal legal and financial status, as well as that of the Board of Peace itself — is both a cause and a symptom of the near-complete “fusion of peace and corporate governance,” as the scholar Teresa Almeida Cravo describes it, that has come to define Trump’s second term.
While both men are presidential appointees who do not draw a salary from the federal government, they are supported by an entirely new White House office that uses public funds. Witkoff has submitted a financial disclosure report that lists his extensive holdings around the world, but Kushner has not. (He told “60 Minutes” in January that “what people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships.”) Instead, Kushner has continued to raise funds for his investment firm, Affinity Partners, seeking $5 billion from Middle Eastern governments even as he participates in peace talks in the region. Saudi Arabia, one of his largest investment partners, urged the Trump administration to continue fighting Iran until the regime is destroyed.
The creeping privatization of both war and peace has been underway for some time. But Trump has pushed this trend to its logical conclusion: His administration has turned the delicate practice of peacemaking, previously handled largely by experienced diplomats, mediators and specialists, into a business for a select few stakeholders who are bound together by a thicket of financial affiliations and conflicts of interest.
Private Peace Entrepreneurs
In his inaugural address to the Board of Peace, Trump said that among the organization’s many functions would be “looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly.” His message was that the board intended to strengthen the U.N. rather than supplant it. “Someday, I won’t be here,” he said. “The United Nations will be.”
The visual and legal language of the Board of Peace tells a different story. Its logo looks as if the U.N. logo had been dipped in gold vermeil, with the globe rotated to center the United States. The U.N. Charter explicitly states that the organization exists to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.” The founding charter of the Board of Peace promises to “restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace,” and neglects to mention the principle of sovereignty or human rights.
Diplomats and scholars alike widely believe the United Nations is in need of reform. The Security Council has long been deadlocked, and the organization’s many commissions, agencies and funds have often fallen short of their lofty goals. The appointment of Iran as chair of the 2023 U.N. Human Rights Council Social Forum was, for many observers, a grave indicator of how far the organization had strayed from its founding charter.
In one sense, the creation of the Board of Peace might be viewed as an attempt to bring long-awaited reforms to the U.N. and to the web of international treaties and arrangements it supports, to jolt a sclerotic system back to life.
After all, contemporary international law owes much to another enterprising businessman who sought to reshape the world order. At the start of the 20th century, Andrew Carnegie, motivated by the belief that humankind had advanced beyond using physical violence to settle disputes, devoted much of his time and wealth to creating a “league of peace” that sought to alleviate rising tensions in Europe and, ideally, eliminate the possibility of war. Carnegie financed the construction of the Peace Palace in The Hague, now the seat of the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. He represented the United States in diplomatic negotiations and lobbied foreign governments as a private citizen. His wife believed that he never recovered from the heartbreak of watching World War I unfold. He died in 1919, just after peace had been restored.
Carnegie stands out as the most prominent in a long line of businessmen who took it upon themselves to work to broker international agreements. These “private peace entrepreneurs,” as the scholar Lior Lehrs calls them, conducted “unofficial peace diplomacy” on behalf of their nations. The German shipping magnate Albert Ballin and the financier Ernest Cassel tried to broker peace between the U.K. and Germany before World War I; the Irish businessman Brendan Duddy was a critical back channel between Britain and the I.R.A. during the Troubles; Gavin Relly, the head of the mining company Anglo American, led a group of businessmen to meet with the African National Congress before the end of apartheid in South Africa.
Each had personal and financial interests in bringing these conflicts to an end, but these precedents now seem almost quaint. Carnegie’s vision of peace — premised upon the rule of law, the peaceful settlement of disputes and the preservation of national self-determination — doesn’t bear much resemblance to what’s on offer from the Trump administration. Rather than give away their wealth to build the international legal system, emissaries of the Board of Peace have been enriched by their relation to the White House. Their proposals for the extraction of wealth from war-torn regions have not received the consent of the governed in any real sense, and far from buttressing the institutions of international law, the administration has repeatedly tried to dismantle them.
The Normal Rules Do Not Apply
For the time being, the board’s logo stands for little more than the idea that the politics of peace can be married to capital interests and the belief that this alignment stands to benefit everyone involved. Kushner and Witkoff’s fellow executive board members include Martin Edelman, a corporate lawyer with extensive ties to the upper echelons of the United Arab Emirates, and Marc Rowan, the chief executive of Apollo Global Management. In May 2025, Apollo invested $100 million in the Witkoff Group; Edelman is the general counsel of G42, an A.I. company controlled by the U.A.E.’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. A New York Times investigation found that Tahnoon was involved in a deal that netted $2 billion in 2025 for World Liberty Financial, the crypto company owned by Trump’s and Witkoff’s sons.
In his January executive order establishing it as a public international organization, Trump wrote that the Board of Peace is covered by the International Organizations Immunities Act, which prohibits employees or agents of an international organization (and their immediate family members) from being sued for “official work.” But that same law defines an international organization as an entity that results either from a treaty or from an act of Congress — neither of which is true of the board.
“They didn’t send the Board of Peace charter to the Senate for advice and consent to a treaty, and there are no statutes that authorize U.S. participation,” said Michael Mattler, a former assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs at the State Department. Trump authorized U.S. participation in the board unilaterally and established himself — in his private capacity — as chairman, with no limits on his term. “This is an organization composed of states, but that by its own rules gives a private individual a controlling role,” Mattler said. That makes it a “uniquely structured organization,” he said, compared with other international groups.
Lawmakers are noticing the murky legal status. Several Democratic congressional investigations are looking into both Witkoff’s and Kushner’s financial records and international relationships. In mid-April, four Democratic senators announced a probe of the Board of Peace’s proposal to create a stablecoin for Gaza, pointing out that a number of its executives, including Witkoff and Trump himself, could stand to profit.
In a letter addressed to Kushner announcing a House Judiciary Committee probe of his dual role as an investor and a “volunteer” government representative, Representative Jamie Raskin wrote, “You cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own.” By continuing to do so, Kushner was effectively insisting “that the normal rules do not apply to you,” Raskin argued.
Under the Trump administration’s privatization of peace, the “normal rules” no longer exist at all. Yet exceptional wars require exceptional solutions. If the Board of Peace does bring stability and governance to embattled regions, it’s of course possible that in some quarters, all its flaws will be forgiven. An imperfect peace, or a fragile cease-fire, is better than nothing, even if survivors find themselves returning to territories that have been stripped of their autonomy and natural resources — if they are able to return at all.
But even this grim vision of peace still seems a long way off given the recent record of the Trump administration’s diplomacy. Some 800 people have been killed in Gaza since the October cease-fire; a settlement between Russia and Ukraine has only become less likely since the United States relaxed sanctions on Russian oil because of its war on Iran; ongoing negotiations with Hamas have repeatedly broken down; Kushner and Witkoff’s previous meetings with mediators on Iran have failed, by some accounts because they did not fully grasp the intricacies of nuclear issues, and the deal on the table would fall short of the administration’s stated goal of preventing Iran from ever producing a nuclear weapon.
Rising energy prices have begun to strain American households, but Trump and his “people” aren’t feeling the squeeze. Witkoff has said he is in the process of divesting from his real estate and crypto holdings; in 2024, Kushner said he would “try to pre-emptively avoid any conflicts of interests.” But both men have seen their wealth grow significantly since Trump returned to office. And the peace they have long promised remains out of reach.
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3) Pentagon Makes Deals With A.I. Companies to Expand Classified Work
The agreements with six technology companies come amid the Defense Department’s dispute with Anthropic.
By Julian E. Barnes and Sheera Frenkel, May 1, 2026
Julian Barnes and Sheera Frenkel have been reporting on the Pentagon’s work, and disputes, with artificial intelligence companies.
Anthropic and the Pentagon have been locked in a debate over whether the company’s A.I. model could be used to pilot autonomous drones or work on domestic surveillance. Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The Pentagon announced on Friday that it had reached deals with some of the technology industry’s biggest companies in an effort to expand the military’s artificial intelligence capabilities and increase the number of firms authorized to be on classified networks.
The companies, according to the Defense Department, agreed to allow the Pentagon to employ their technology for “any lawful use,” a standard resisted by Anthropic, which was initially the only artificial intelligence model available on classified markets.
The Pentagon had previously confirmed deals with Elon Musk’s xAI, OpenAI and Google. In addition the Pentagon said it had reached deals with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Nvidia and Reflection AI, a start-up.
“These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an A.I.-first fighting force,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
The Pentagon did not specify how it would use the new A.I. tools but said the agreement would help service members make faster and better decisions.
“Access to a diverse suite of A.I. capabilities from across the resilient American technology stack will give war fighters the tools they need to act with confidence and safeguard the nation against any threat,” the Pentagon said.
Defense Department officials hope the new deals will push Anthropic to drop its reservations about the military’s broad “any lawful use” standard.
President Trump has ordered the government to cut ties with Anthropic, but for now the company’s technology remains on classified networks and intelligence analysts still depend on the firm’s models. While the Pentagon wants to quickly move to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, there have been growing pains and technical problems.
Anthropic and the Pentagon are currently in federal litigation over the Defense Department’s decision to label the company a supply chain risk, a novel use of the government’s power to raise concerns about how corporations build their products.
White House officials, impressed and worried about the power of Anthropic’s newest model, Mythos, have been pushing for a compromise that would end the company’s feud with the Pentagon, or at least allow other parts of the government to work with the firm.
The deal with the companies was reported earlier by Bloomberg.
A Pentagon official said the new agreements would help prevent “vendor lock” and ensure that the military would not have to depend on any one company. The military also wants firms to agree to a single standard, and has been loath to give firms contractual guarantees about how their models will be used.
Anthropic and the Pentagon have been locked in a debate over whether the company’s Claude model could be used to pilot autonomous drones or work on domestic surveillance. The Pentagon says it does not intend to use the model for either of those activities, but the two sides have not agreed on contractual language, or if it is even necessary.
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4) U.S. to Withdraw 5,000 Troops From Germany, Pentagon Says
Officials announced the decision after President Trump expressed annoyance with the German chancellor’s remarks about the Iran war.
By Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper, Reporting from Washington, May 1, 2026
Members of the Army participated in a military exercise in Hohenfels, Germany, on Thursday. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Pentagon officials said on Friday that they were pulling 5,000 troops from Germany and would redeploy them to the United States and other posts overseas.
The Defense Department is also canceling a plan developed under the Biden administration to place a missile-equipped artillery unit in Europe.
The moves will return U.S. forces in Europe to the level they were in 2022, before Russia began its war in Ukraine, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the planning process. Last year, the Pentagon redeployed a brigade in Romania and did not send replacement forces.
Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that the withdrawal would be completed over the next six to 12 months.
“This decision follows a thorough review of the department’s force posture in Europe and is in recognition of theater requirements and conditions on the ground,” he said.
The Defense Department — particularly during both of President Trump’s terms — has for several years considered decreasing the military presence in Germany. But senior defense officials privately made it clear that they wanted the move to be seen as a punishment for Germany, whose recent comments about the U.S. war in Iran have annoyed Mr. Trump.
Earlier this week, Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said Iran had “humiliated” the United States, and he questioned how Mr. Trump planned to end the conflict.
“The Americans obviously have no strategy,” Mr. Merz said.
Mr. Trump then took to Truth Social, his social media site, to vent.
“The United States is studying and reviewing the possible reduction of Troops in Germany, with a determination to be made over the next short period of time,” he wrote on Thursday.
Later, he added: “The Chancellor of Germany should spend more time on ending the war with Russia/Ukraine (Where he has been totally ineffective!), and fixing his broken Country, especially Immigration and Energy, and less time on interfering with those that are getting rid of the Iran Nuclear threat, thereby making the World, including Germany, a safer place!”
On Friday, while announcing the decision, a senior Pentagon official said that Germany’s failure to contribute to the Iran war effort had frustrated the United States, and that the country’s rhetoric was inappropriate and unhelpful.
The announcement, and the criticism of Germany, represents a shift for Pentagon officials, who recently had praised Germany’s efforts to increase military spending and take over more of the burden of supporting Ukraine.
Even if the Pentagon pulls 5,000 troops out of Germany, the country would still host the second-largest U.S. troop presence in the world, at more than 30,000, behind only Japan.
Defense officials say the United States depends on its bases in Germany to stage many of its operations in the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
The Iran war has made that clear. Many U.S. troops evacuated from bases in the Middle East that were targeted by Iran were moved to Germany. And many of the U.S. troops wounded in the war have been taken to Germany — to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center near Ramstein Air Base — for treatment.
The U.S. military’s Africa Command and European Command are also headquartered in Germany.
Defense officials said the reduction would not directly affect Landstuhl or other medical facilities in Germany where U.S. troops receive care.
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5) America Will Pay Dearly for Its Energy Arrogance
By Gregory Brew, May 2, 2026
Dr. Brew is a historian of international energy and U.S.-Iranian relations and a senior analyst at the Eurasia Group.
Flo Meissner
In January 1980, President Jimmy Carter made a bold promise: If any foreign power tried to dominate the Persian Gulf or the region’s vast oil reserves, it would be met with American military force. By guaranteeing the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz over the next 45 years, America signaled to the rest of the world that oil from the Middle East, even with all its volatility, was a secure bet.
In just two months, the United States has transformed from a bulwark of the international energy system into its biggest source of insecurity. And while America may emerge relatively unscathed from the energy crisis it started by going to war with Iran, the long-term implications for its oil-based economy could be profoundly destabilizing.
The global oil economy is, in many ways, an American creation. In the early 20th century, major American companies discovered oil throughout Latin America and the Middle East and, for a time, dominated the oil industries in those regions. The United States was the world’s largest oil producer and consumer throughout the first half of the century.
After the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United States led efforts to create the International Energy Agency, through which major industrial economies coordinated their energy policies. Washington also helped push for the formation of a global system of strategic oil reserves and other measures meant to improve the resilience of the global energy economy. By the time of the so-called Carter Doctrine, it was clear to the United States that its national security hinged on access to Persian Gulf energy, which then supplied 25 percent of U.S. imports.
This imperative to defend access to Middle East oil has been weakening, however. Since 2010, a boom in U.S. oil and gas production has reduced the nation’s dependence on imports. By 2020, Gulf oil met less than 10 percent of America’s oil consumption, creating an understandable belief in some circles in Washington that the United States no longer needed to remain embroiled in Middle East affairs. Donald Trump took this idea further, introducing in his first administration the more dubious notion that the United States was now “energy independent,” and immune to oil shocks.
From this belief came a dangerous new confidence: Far from depending on the global oil market, the United States could now shape it in ways that served its geopolitical interests. It deployed sanctions aggressively against opponents — Russia, Iran and Venezuela — to limit their ability to sell oil. The United States has also threatened to place harsh tariffs on Canada, which is today the single largest source of its oil imports.
From sanctions and tariffs, the Trump administration has moved to seizing tankers in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, arresting the president of Venezuela and launching an air campaign against Iran aimed in part to, in Mr. Trump’s words, “take the oil” by installing a more compliant regime.
The war against Iran has not proven as successful as the operation in Venezuela. And once the United States was apparently unwilling to keep protecting the passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the global economy was thrown into turmoil.
For the United States, the short-term effects of the tightening of the world’s oil supply may be manageable. With so much oil of its own, America won’t face the same kinds of shortages and price spikes that affect other nations. But the idea that this country is immune is a mistaken one. The United States still imports roughly one-third of all the crude oil it consumes. The domestic price of oil products like gasoline is affected by changes in the global price, and the global market will be shaped for the rest of the year, if not longer, by the disruptive effects of this war.
More significantly, the collapse of the Carter Doctrine undermines the security of the global oil economy. Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens, markets will remain on edge, waiting to see if Iran closes it once more. Oil coming out of the Gulf will be viewed as more risky — and likely more expensive as a result. Countries will almost certainly rethink their energy security plans and shift their economies away from dependence on imports, including of oil and natural gas.
This could prove to have the most profound consequences for the United States. Under President Trump, America has seemingly embraced its status as a petrostate, dropping incentives and programs to encourage the growth of renewable sources of energy like wind and solar. Right now, there’s a market for our oil and gas, and for the short term that won’t change, since uncertainty over the Gulf makes the United States a more attractive source of supply.
But in the medium to long term, this crisis will create greater uncertainty over the stability of these energy sources. More countries will pursue alternatives, including clean energy technologies where China has a decisive edge. The United States could see its export market diminish as demand for oil and gas slows, threatening a trillion-dollar domestic industry and the thousands of jobs it provides. American consumers could also be stuck with polluting fuels prone to price spikes while the rest of the world moves on.
The American preoccupation with producing, consuming and controlling oil may ultimately prove a misplaced priority: a scramble to control the energy resources of the 20th century, as the rest of the world embraces the cleaner technologies that will power the 21st century. And while the relevance of the Carter Doctrine may have declined, the stability it represented will be sorely missed.
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6) Rural America Is Getting Blindsided by Something New
By Rotimi Adeoye, May 2, 2026
Mr. Adeoye is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of American Pursuit, a newsletter on politics and policy.
Ian Foster-Dimino
Rural America has long been where the rest of the country sends what it doesn’t want nearby: prisons, power plants, landfills. These days, two more intrusions have been added to the list: immigrant detention centers and data centers.
In December, Larry Bender, the supervisor of Tremont Township in Schuylkill County, Pa., learned to his great surprise that the federal government had purchased the largest commercial property in the township: a 1.3-million-square-foot warehouse that had been a Big Lots distribution center. It would now be used for immigrant detention.
Tremont is home to about 300 people. The facility was designated for up to 7,500 detainees. Given the social, economic and environmental impact, you might think the government would have provided residents and public officials with advance notice. But the deed was recorded before Mr. Bender said he even knew a sale was in the works.
Something similar occurred last year when Delsia Bare, whose family owns farmland in Mason County, Ky., learned that an unnamed technology company had filed an application to rezone 2,000 acres surrounding the family land for artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company had approached her family to sell some of its land, but the family ultimately declined to do so. Ms. Bare found out about the full scope of the plan when the company’s zoning application appeared in public records. The company had kept things under wraps by having landowners as well as town officials sign nondisclosure agreements.
In both cases, the transaction was intended to be finished long before the people who would have to live with the consequences could ask questions about what was being planned.
Congress should address this problem. Specifically, it should require companies planning large-scale facilities to publicly disclose who they are and what they intend to build before they seek to change how the land is used, and to notify local governments before acquiring property in their communities. Rural communities wouldn’t necessarily get to veto a project, but they deserve to know and understand what is coming before it arrives.
The same principle applies to federal agencies. Before acquiring property in a community, they should be required to notify local governments that a purchase is coming and identify what the property will be used for. Those requirements wouldn’t stop a data center or a detention center from being built. But they would stop it from being built in secret.
Mr. Bender, a Trump supporter, told me that he believes detention centers must go somewhere, and he stressed that he isn’t sure he opposes the facility in Tremont. But there are important issues that should be debated earlier in the process. Tax revenue, for example: When the government purchased the warehouse from Big Lots, which was the only significant commercial taxpayer in Tremont, the township stood to lose about $200,000 a year in revenue and the local Pine Grove Area School District stood to lose more than $500,000.
There are also environmental considerations. Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, though a supporter of President Trump’s federal immigration enforcement, has opposed the Tremont facility on infrastructure and local impact grounds. Gov. Josh Shapiro, who also opposes the facility, warned that it could quickly deplete the water reservoir serving the surrounding area.
Though the federal government now says it plans to try to address those concerns, they could and should have been raised and debated before it acquired the property.
In Mason County, Ms. Bare said that the unnamed A.I. company offered her family $26 million for roughly 550 acres of her family’s farmland — an astonishing figure that was 10 times the market-rate price. She initially accepted the offer, she said, having been led to believe by local officials that the power of eminent domain gave her little choice. But she later ended up backing out of the deal. “Some things do not have a price,” she told me, “and the land that we’re using to eat off of as a nation and as a planet, there’s just no way that you could replace this soil.”
By the time Ms. Bare backed out, the company had moved on to her neighbors, using nondisclosure agreements to keep everyone else in the dark — including about its identity.
Rural America is going to be forced to accommodate more of these facilities, and the scale of what is underway makes transparency requirements even more urgent. Congress gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement $45 billion for detention expansion last year, and by January the detained population had risen roughly 80 percent, from fewer than 40,000 people last year to about 72,000. As for data center land transactions, they are averaging 224 acres per year, up 144 percent since 2022.
Local resistance to large development is sometimes dismissed as NIMBYism, and much of that criticism is fair. When communities use dated zoning laws to block affordable housing or renewable energy projects that are badly needed, the label fits. But NIMBYism requires knowing something is coming and choosing to fight it. A farmer who walks away from a $26 million offer is not blocking affordable housing. A township supervisor who learns only after the deed was recorded that his community’s commercial tax base has been sold to the federal government never had the chance.
Nicol Turner Lee, the director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, has researched how data centers and large federal facilities arrive in rural communities. Both, she said, come backed by enormous funding and a regulatory environment that tends to clear local participation out of the way. “There really isn’t a substantial notice period to do the type of environmental and economic analysis to determine if a data center is actually right for your community,” she said.
The same is true of federal facility acquisitions. “The political pressure that this administration has placed on companies to build either data centers or detention centers is so real that communities have been reduced to collateral damage,” she said.
Rural communities are often fighting both kinds of facilities simultaneously, often without knowing who they are fighting or why, because neither the federal government nor private developers are currently required to tell them anything before the decisions are made. Requiring disclosure and giving communities time to respond would give the people who have to live with those decisions a seat at the table before a deed is signed.
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7) Ruling by Ruling, the Supreme Court Is Undoing the Civil Rights Movement
By Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan, May 2, 2026
Mr. Bowie and Ms. Renan are the authors of the forthcoming book “Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People.”
Photo illustration by Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times
With its decision this week in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court gutted a core part of the Voting Rights Act, Congress’s landmark prohibition on voting rules that have the effect of excluding people of color from the political process. In doing so, the court has, not for the first time, claimed an authority to reject laws passed by Congress in service of equal justice and a free society.
And it has effectively killed the Second Reconstruction, the mid-20th-century civil rights revolution. In the face of this decision, Congress must once again defend democracy from a hostile court. A plan of action already exists.
When the Supreme Court challenged the first Reconstruction 150 years ago, abolitionists and Republicans in Congress debated measures ranging from declaring certain federal laws beyond judicial reach to changing the number of justices. The partial measures they enacted saved Reconstruction — for a time. But more relevant for us today are the comprehensive reforms they proposed but never fully enacted. These reforms offer us and our representatives in Congress the tools we need now.
In the era surrounding the Civil War, opponents of slavery confronted a Supreme Court that was threatening their life’s work. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857, the court declared unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise — a congressional statute banning the spread of slavery in federal territory. A decade later, the court similarly menaced the Reconstruction laws that Congress was enacting to begin the project of multiracial democracy amid the wreckage of the former Confederacy.
But Congress did not submit to this judicial rule. Members of an ascendant Republican Party decried a court “inflated with supremacy” and declared that whenever a decision is, “in the judgment of Congress, subversive of the rights and liberties of the people,” it is the “solemn duty of Congress” to override it. In 1862, Congress and President Abraham Lincoln enacted legislation that banned slavery in places the Dred Scott decision had protected it. Congress also drafted the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, all of which advanced Congress’s goals of freedom and political equality while empowering Congress to enforce its terms by “appropriate legislation.”
When the postwar court appeared likely to challenge legislation Congress considered “appropriate” to enforce these amendments, Congress changed the size of the court. The House of Representatives then passed a bill that prohibited the court from invalidating any federal law without the concurrence of two-thirds of the justices. Representative John Bingham of Ohio, the primary author of the 14th Amendment, insisted that such a requirement was necessary to prevent a second Dred Scott decision. Some members agreed but pushed for a unanimity rule (concurrence among all the justices) instead.
In the Senate, the author of the 13th Amendment, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, proposed that Congress declare its Reconstruction Acts “political in their character, the propriety or validity of which no judicial tribunal is competent to question.” As the threat from one pending Supreme Court case became urgent, Congress enacted a narrower but decisive measure stripping the court of appellate jurisdiction over the particular challenge before it.
That strategy worked. Disciplined by Congress, the court declined to interfere with its abolition or Reconstruction Acts. As federal prosecutors and lower courts enforced these statutes, over 750,000 Black Americans voted for the first time. Black men even took seats in Congress, where they helped draft and pass the nation’s first national voting rights laws.
But Congress — distracted by postwar problems and a fiendish president, Andrew Johnson — did not take up the more enduring court reform proposals that were then before it. In the 1870s, the court re-emerged to finish what it had started. Seizing for itself the power to decide the meaning of the amendments Congress had just drafted, the court announced that it was not “appropriate” for Congress to ban lynching, racial discrimination by businesses or widespread disenfranchisement. A century-long era of Jim Crow emerged.
As Frederick Douglass lamented at a mass meeting of Black voters in 1883, by claiming the power to invalidate acts of Congress and then using that power to undermine federal civil rights laws, the court had become “the autocratic point in our National Government.”
For the century that followed, the court narrowly interpreted the Reconstruction amendments to permit any voting restriction it did not think had the intent to racially discriminate. It upheld almost every scheme Southern states adopted to disenfranchise Black residents, including literacy tests.
But the civil rights movement proved that the supremacy of the court was not permanent. On the urging of organizers like John Lewis, Congress repudiated the court’s narrow vision of its legislative power. In what President Lyndon B. Johnson called a “triumph for freedom,” the Voting Rights Act of 1965 interpreted the Reconstruction amendments differently from the court, enforcing them to ban literacy tests and establish a preclearance regime to prevent states from cycling through one suppression mechanism after another.
The Voting Rights Act helped unleash a Second Reconstruction with a surge of Black voter registration and representation. But in the years that followed, the court regressed. In a 1980 decision called City of Mobile v. Bolden, the court read the Voting Rights Act to require proof of discriminatory intent — collapsing the statute back into the court’s stingier understanding of the Constitution. Congress responded in 1982 because, as Congress understood, in a world where architects of suppression keep their motives off the record, an intent requirement guarantees impunity. Instead, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to overrule Bolden and set an effects test — something that could be detected and fixed — instead.
One person who objected to Congress’s response was Justice William Rehnquist, who spent his career arguing that Congress lacked authority to enforce the Reconstruction amendments beyond the court’s own cramped readings. His former law clerk, a young lawyer named John Roberts, carried that project into the Reagan administration by unsuccessfully urging the administration to block the 1982 legislation.
Mr. Roberts eventually replaced Justice Rehnquist on the Supreme Court and followed his mentor in seeking to restore a premise Congress had long repudiated: that the best meaning of the Reconstruction amendments is found not in the statutes Congress enacts to fulfill their promise, but in the late-19th-century court opinions that defied Congress’s first efforts. In Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, the Roberts court dismantled the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance mechanism. This week’s ruling finishes the job.
If Congress does not respond, we know how this story will end. But just as we can learn from the consequences of acquiescing to the Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretation, we can also draw upon the tools past Congresses have offered for how to build a more democratic constitutionalism. In that version, constitutional meaning is determined not by unelected judges but by we the people and our representatives through federal lawmaking.
Rejecting the court’s supremacy, Congress should reaffirm its own interpretation of the Reconstruction amendments by statute — as the 1862 Congress did after Dred Scott and the 1982 Congress after Bolden. Congress could declare, for example, that constitutional democracy demands a new Voting Rights Act that deploys proportional representation to end partisan gerrymandering or that rejects the unrestricted flow of money in politics. To make its interpretations stick, Congress should enact measures like those suggested by its predecessors.
As the founding generation of Republicans understood, the Constitution explicitly empowers Congress to regulate the court. By contrast, the document says nothing about the court’s claimed authority to regulate Congress. Instead, the court’s alleged authority to defy and second-guess acts of Congress has been sustained only because the American public has so far been willing to tolerate this judicial rule — a choice that can be unmade.
Lincoln understood the stakes of this choice when he warned at his inauguration in 1861 that if “vital questions affecting the whole people” are to be “irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” then “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”
We must not cease to govern ourselves.
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8) Maduro Is Gone. Venezuela’s Many Problems Are Not.
U.S. officials say they will “unleash prosperity” by commandeering the oil industry. Many people in Caracas say it will take far more than that.
By Max Bearak, Photographs by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez, May 2, 2026
Max Bearak reported this article over a week in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.
People riding on a crowded bus during rush hour in Caricuao, Venezuela. A one-way bus ticket costs around $0.15 — about half of the nation’s hourly minimum wage.
Venezuela can seem to be a place of dissonant extremes.
Since the United States swooped in and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, in January, the country’s politically connected elite have talked of an economic revival, driven by President Trump’s promises to “unleash prosperity” by commandeering Venezuela’s beleaguered oil industry.
At the same time, hundreds of political prisoners, many gaunt and traumatized after years of abject conditions in fetid jails, have been released. Most are terrified to speak about their ordeals lest the government, essentially unchanged except for the loss of Mr. Maduro, come back for them. Hundreds more remain locked up.
But between the blessed and the cursed there is a yawning middle ground where nearly all other Venezuelans — professors, doctors, bricklayers, street vendors — spend their days sifting through the rubble of an obliterated economy. For this sizable slice of the population, U.S. intervention has changed little so far and holds only a faint prospect of anything better.
On a recent day, four professors of politics and economics gathered for coffee around a plastic table on the campus where they teach, the Central University of Venezuela in the capital, Caracas. They recounted how a downward economic spiral over the course of Mr. Maduro’s 13 years in power had pushed them into poverty.
“In the last five years, the currency devalued so much that my salary equaled four dollars a month. Which is to say, I forgot I had a salary,” said Pedro García, 59, who now heads a union of retired professors.
Over time, he said he canceled more of his classes to sell bits of home-cooked food to people stuck in lines for subsidized fuel at a gas station outside his apartment. Then he sold his mother-in-law’s bed, and her freezer, and his bicycle. His pension is a pittance — “not enough to keep me from dying of hunger,” he said.
His colleague, Carlos Hermoso, an economist, leaned in, furrowed an eyebrow and said that the U.S. promise to reinvest proceeds from Venezuelan oil it sells back into the country could give the illusion of “growth,” but that it would be a “mirage” for the vast majority of Venezuelans.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I hope that the United States turns Venezuela into its factory in its competitive war with China,” Mr. Hermoso said, taking pains to clarify he would never entertain such a wish if the straits were not so dire. “That would be a step forward for us.”
The Trump administration says that it has started sending millions of dollars in sales of Venezuelan oil to the government in Caracas and that it would “assure these funds are spent transparently and for the benefit of the Venezuelan people.”
Rebuilding the oil industry alone, however, could cost more than $180 billion and take more than a decade, according to analysts at Rystad Energy, a research firm, and even then the country would produce less than it did at its peak in the 1990s.
The value of Venezuela’s currency, the bolívar, has continued to drop since Mr. Maduro was ousted, falling by at least 36 percent since January, leaving the monthly minimum wage at the stupefying level of 27 cents.
While the United States has intervened in Venezuela’s economy, it has not stepped in to prop up its central bank’s hard currency reserves like it recently did for Argentina.
On Thursday, Venezuela’s leader, Delcy Rodríguez, announced that while the minimum wage would remain the same, workers would be ensured bonuses that added up to $240 a month. Independent studies show that for food alone, a Venezuelan family of five would typically need to spend $610 per month.
The public coffers remain largely empty, and basic services like transportation, education and health are hollowed out. Nearly eight million Venezuelans fled over the course of Mr. Maduro’s dozen years in power, and very few have seen enough hope in his replacement to want to return.
Venezuela’s transition is still in its early stages and reversing years of decline will not be quick or easy.
But for now pessimism dominates.
One morning in Caricuao, once considered a desirable bedroom community in Caracas set amid greenery out near a zoo, a line to board rickety buses ran hundreds of people deep. Many of the buses were welded together: a Dodge cab to a Chevy chassis.
The queue passed under a station for the city’s metro — once seen as South America’s best — but over the course of the entire morning commute that day, not one train came.
Despite the indignity, it was a scene of order and calm. Or perhaps it was resignation.
Yelmira Jiménez, the head of a bus drivers’ association in the area, said the lines were always long because most buses were stuck in lines of their own at gas stations. Drivers can spend days waiting to reach the pumps.
She explained that Venezuela’s government had imported 7,000 Chinese buses in 2011, and in 2015, it opened a half-billion dollar plant for a Chinese company to manufacture them locally. But mismanagement and corruption had forced the plant to close just years later.
With the local currency falling in value, few drivers could afford repairs, let alone regular maintenance. They were piecing together what they could.
“Look at the passengers packed like sardines — every dream has been robbed from them, even though this is supposedly an oil-producing country,” she said. “The single thing that’s changed since they took Maduro is I feel more comfortable talking to a gringo journalist.”
In the impoverished hillside neighborhoods that encircle Caracas, the despair is more acute. Residents described schools with only one teacher for every age group, stores lacking any fresh produce, years spent searching and failing to find a job. Petty criminals had left the country, some residents said, because there was so little left to rob.
According to a rare study on poverty in the country conducted by Andrés Bello Catholic University in 2024, three-quarters of the population lacked sufficient income to meet daily needs and more than half experienced what the study called “multidimensional poverty” that looks beyond income to include education, housing and employment.
In a study by the same university a decade earlier, around when Mr. Maduro took power from his predecessor Hugo Chávez, both of those numbers were roughly 50 percent lower.
Many said they saw the situation as a corruption of Mr. Chávez’s legacy by Mr. Maduro. Ana Bracho used to work as a minor functionary in the government, and had Mr. Chávez’s likeness tattooed on her wrist. Her neighborhood had enthusiastically supported the socialist revolution in the 1990s and 2000s.
A few years ago, she quit her job and got the tattoo scrubbed and replaced with one of a flower. She said her increasingly public criticisms of Mr. Maduro meant that socialist party functionaries in her neighborhood prevented her from gaining access to welfare programs that provide basic food staples and cooking gas.
“Back in the day, the slogan used to be, ‘Together, everything is possible,’” Ms. Bracho said. “I guess everything included robbery and malnutrition. Unemployment until death — that’s what we have.”
The four professors gathered over coffee seemed to concur. The sheer volatility of the economy, the dearth of formal jobs, the decade-plus of mass emigration — it all seemed too much to comprehend, even to lifelong scholars who study those same questions. In any case, who had the time to keep track? They were all hustling to make ends meet.
For many, the dream of escaping the grind is a recurring one. Nélida Salazar has given up on it for herself, but she invests everything in her youngest son, Santiago Jesús Díaz, 15, who has been showing promise as a baseball prospect. He wants to be a major league right fielder.
To afford a training academy, the occasional new mitt and an athlete’s diet for her son, Ms. Salazar has sold everything of value that she owned. Her husband and eldest son contribute nearly everything they earn as police officers.
She makes candies at home and earns a couple of dollars a day selling them. When she cannot afford fresh eggs for her son to eat, she pulverizes discarded egg shells into a kind of protein powder. She avoids opening her refrigerator when he is home because its emptiness makes her cry and she can sense his awareness of the immense pressure on him to succeed.
“When I pray, I say, ‘Please, God, give me work, give me work, give me work,’” she said. “If someone said, come clean my house, clean my toilets, I would. But there’s no one asking.”
Isayen Herrera and María Victoria Fermín contributed reporting.
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9) What to Know About the Mideast Standoff
Negotiations to end the war are at an impasse over Iran’s nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz, which remains mostly shut.
By The New York Times, Published April 26, 2026, Updated May 3, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/26/world/middleeast/us-iran-peace-talks-pakistan.html
Supporters of Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, at a government-organized march in the capital, Tehran, on Wednesday. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Negotiations to end the war with Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz are still at a standoff, after President Trump suggested he was likely to reject Tehran’s latest proposal, a day after he had rejected an earlier one.
“I will soon be reviewing the plan that Iran has just sent to us, but can’t imagine that it would be acceptable,” he said on social media on Saturday, adding that Iran had not “yet paid a big enough price for what they have done.”
Two semiofficial Iranian news outlets reported earlier on Saturday that Tehran had sent a 14-point proposal to Pakistani mediators in response to a nine-point U.S. proposal, but they offered few details about what it said. It was the latest exchange in a dizzying saga of diplomatic efforts.
On Thursday evening, Tehran had sent a proposal to the mediators, state media reported. Mr. Trump rejected that offer on Friday, saying, “I’m not satisfied with it,” without elaborating on what his objections were — comments that echoed what he had said about yet another earlier proposal.
The two sides remain at an impasse, and Mr. Trump called off talks in Islamabad last weekend. He has repeatedly insisted that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, while Iran has rejected American proposals that it suspend its nuclear program and hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
Without a clear way forward, the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively shut. Both the U.S. Navy and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have stringently limited which ships can use the waterway, reducing the flow of oil, natural gas and other crucial materials out of the Persian Gulf to a trickle and causing ripple effects for the world economy.
On Saturday, a senior Iranian general said that renewed confrontation between Iran and the United States was possible, according to a report from the Fars news agency. In comments to reporters on Saturday night, Mr. Trump also suggested it was possible that military strikes could resume.
What’s the latest?
Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, issued a rare statement on Thursday vowing that Iran would manage the Strait of Hormuz under “new legal frameworks” and retain its nuclear capabilities.
“The bright future of the Persian Gulf region will be a future without America,” said Mr. Khamenei, who has been in hiding since the war began.
Shipping companies fear that Iran has mined the main channels in the strait and could attack commercial vessels. That has deterred most of the hundreds of ships in the Persian Gulf from trying to leave.
Earlier in the week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed the suggestion that Iran could eventually make money from the strait, after Iran included a plan to charge fees to passing tankers in a proposal last weekend.
“This is not the Suez Canal, this is not the Panama Canal, these are international waters,” said Mr. Rubio, adding that the United States would not tolerate a “system in which the Iranians decide who gets to use an international waterway and how much you have to pay them to use it.”
In an earlier offer, Iran proposed suspending uranium enrichment for five years, followed by five years of very low-grade civilian enrichment. Under that proposal, half of Iran’s 972-pound stockpile of highly enriched uranium would have gone to Russia, an ally, and the other half would have been available to international inspectors.
The United States, which has demanded that Iran suspend all nuclear activity for 20 years and hand over its highly enriched uranium, rejected the offer.
Pakistan has been mediating between the United States and Iran to try to end the war. After a first round of negotiations collapsed, Mr. Trump said last week that he was maintaining the U.S. naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz and indefinitely extending the cease-fire.
Iran’s nuclear program
Iran insists it has a right to enrich nuclear fuel under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that he will not allow Iran to possess a nuclear weapon. But he is also confronting the complicated legacy of his decision, eight years ago, to cancel what he has called “a horrible, one-sided deal” to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.
That Obama-era agreement — formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A. — would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. After Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree, leaving them closer to producing a bomb than ever before.
Much recent attention has focused on Iran’s half-ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level close to what is typically used in atom bombs. The majority of it is thought to be buried in a tunnel complex that Mr. Trump bombed last June. But those 970 pounds of potential bomb fuel represent only a small fraction of the problem.
Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the estimated size of Israel’s arsenal.
Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Mr. Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal.
A clash of negotiating styles
Mr. Trump views himself as the master of coercive diplomacy, forcing his opponents to capitulate quickly to American demands or face the threat of attack.
In dealing with Iran over the past six weeks, he has discovered that he is up against a nation that prides itself on resilience and delay.
“Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran’s leadership is stubborn and tenacious,” said Robert Malley, who negotiated with the Iranians in the lead-up to the 2015 nuclear deal and again in a failed effort by the Biden administration.
Leo Sands, Farnaz Fassihi, David E. Sanger and Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.
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10) Israel Said It’s Applying the Gaza Model in Lebanon. This Is What the Devastation Looks Like.
By Samuel Granados, Abdi Latif Dahir and Sanjana Varghese, May 3, 2026
An entire street is leveled. Houses and shops are flattened, including a popular cafe. This is what is left of the town of Bint Jbeil, just a couple of miles from the Israeli border, nearly two months after Israel relaunched its ground offensive in southern Lebanon.
The destruction of this town, a Hezbollah stronghold, is repeated again and again across southern Lebanon, a lush region of undulating vistas, where Israel has razed border villages as part of an effort to lay the groundwork for a larger occupation.
The approach, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said, was modeled on tactics the military used in Gaza, where the Israeli military reduced entire neighborhoods, buildings and streets to rubble.
After the war between Israel and Hezbollah reignited in early March, when Hezbollah attacked Israel in solidarity with Iran, Israel established a several-mile-deep “buffer zone” that it says it will continue to occupy until the threat from Hezbollah is contained.
An analysis of satellite images, along with photos and videos shared online and verified by The New York Times, shows the scope of that campaign. Widespread demolitions have flattened expanses of at least two dozen towns and villages near the border, with damage to government offices as well as civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals and mosques.
Villages are now blurred into ash, with the white of rubble marking town after town.
“I feel like I am going to break from anger and sadness,” said Nabil Sunbul, 67, who works in a bakery in the town of Bint Jbeil. He has now fled to Beirut with only a few belongings.
Satellite imagery shows that the area where Mr. Sunbul lives and works has been severely damaged, though it was unclear whether his home was completely destroyed.
Since the war began, Israeli strikes have killed more than 2,600 people in Lebanon, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, including journalists and medical workers, and destroyed infrastructure such as bridges and gas stations. More than a million people have been displaced. The fighting has continued despite a U.S.-mediated cease-fire, which has now been extended through mid-May.
The Israeli military says it is targeting infrastructure and positions belonging to Hezbollah. The Iran-backed group has launched hundreds of drones, rockets and anti-tank missiles at Israel and has killed at least 17 Israeli soldiers since early March, according to the Israeli military.
Legal experts and human rights activists say targeting civilian infrastructure or destroying it without a valid military justification constitutes a war crime. They also expressed concern over Israeli officials’ statements that they would model the destruction in southern Lebanon on Gaza, given the scale of devastation and loss of life in the strip.
“Deliberately and extensively destroying civilian objects or property, absent any military justification for wanton destruction, is a war crime,” said Ramzi Kaiss, the Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The Israeli military said its troops were operating “in accordance with international law,” and that its directives permit the demolition of structures used for Hezbollah’s military purposes or when deemed operationally necessary.
One video circulating on social media and verified by The Times showed an excavator destroying solar panels near the village of Debl in late April. The solar panels supplied the town with electricity and powered the water station, according to Lebanon’s state news agency.
The Israeli military said in a statement to The Times that such actions did not meet the standards it expected of its soldiers. “Following an inquiry into the incident, command measures were taken against the reserve soldiers involved,” the statement said, without elaborating on what those measures were.
Across southern Lebanon, many towns were already devastated during the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2024. More than 10,000 structures, including homes, mosques and parks, were damaged or destroyed in at least 26 municipalities, according to Amnesty International.
The destruction now appears far more extensive, with fresh rubble visible in satellite imagery spanning wide swaths of terrain.
“Our home was the fruit of our lives’ work,” said Fatima Abdallah, 46, a mother of five from the town of Houla near the Israeli border, who is now staying in a tent inside a stadium in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. Satellite images show her town was heavily hit, and her home, which she and her husband built two decades ago, appears to have been destroyed.
Videos show Israeli soldiers are using similar methods of destruction to what they employed in Gaza, including the use of controlled demolitions, in which soldiers enter the targeted structures to place explosives.
Soldiers then pull the trigger from a safe distance, said Barbara Marcolini, a visual investigator with Amnesty International who previously worked for The Times. The blasts send plumes of dust and debris skyward. As a result, entire streets are now moonscapes of white rubble and shattered concrete, with little left to mark where homes or businesses once stood.
Israel says its operations are aimed at dismantling Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, which it says is embedded in civilian areas. Hezbollah has long denied placing military assets among civilians.
Other videos and photos, including photos taken from the Israeli side of the border, show demolitions being carried out by bulldozers and excavators in heavily damaged areas.
Experts say this mirrors what Israel did in Gaza, leaving vast areas uninhabitable and preventing those displaced from returning home.
“This is basically the same pattern that we documented back in Gaza, then in southern Lebanon. And now it’s southern Lebanon again,” Ms. Marcolini said. “It is a strategy that they have, and they have been doing this consistently throughout the region.”
There is damage across the south, but the most severe destruction in the south is concentrated in Shiite villages. Shiites, who are from the same sect as Hezbollah, form the majority of the population in southern Lebanon, though some towns in the no-go zone near the border are predominantly Christian or Druse. Israel has told some Christians and Druse they can stay if they expel Shiite Muslims from southern towns.
Satellite imagery shows a stark contrast between these areas. In images taken near the border in April, the majority-Shiite villages of Aita al Shaab and Hanine appear as expanses of gray rubble, while far less damage is visible in the nearby predominantly Christian village of Rmeish.
For the families who fled, there is no clear sense of when they will return. For now, they rely on messages and calls from displaced friends and neighbors, piecing together fragments of news about what remains of their homes and lives.
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Abdallah invoked a Lebanese phrase — “with stones, not with people” — to express that although their home had been reduced to rubble, her family members were at least unharmed.
“Only Allah can compensate us,” she said.
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11) Behind Voting Rights Case, a Clash Over the Reality of Racism
The Supreme Court ruling said there must be proof that a racial group was “intentionally” disadvantaged. The dissent called it “well-nigh impossible.”
By Richard Fausset, May 3, 2026
In 1965, the year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, it did not take much detective work to discover how some of the South’s most powerful white politicians felt about their Black neighbors.
Senator James Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi who wanted to kill the landmark legislation, once openly stated that Black people were an “an inferior race.” During his 1963 inauguration speech, Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, a Democrat, infamously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
These days, such racism, at least when directed at Black people, is rarely openly expressed by white Southern politicians, who consider it to be immoral, bad politics, bad manners — or all of the above.
But a question central to the Southern experience lingers: Has anti-Black racism eased, or has discrimination against African Americans simply become more subtle, disguised as a web of rules embedded in regular partisan politics?
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court strode once again into this fraught territory with a decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act, the law that allowed many Black Southerners to finally participate in American democracy after decades of systemic oppression and exclusion.
At issue was the way in which the courts should determine whether a legislative map is racially discriminatory. Writing for the six-judge conservative majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito stated that from now on, anyone who wished to challenge a map on such grounds must show proof that the map makers had “intentionally” drawn legislative districts to disadvantage a given racial group.
In a blistering dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the liberal minority, argued that under the ruling, a plaintiff would have to show “that the legislators were ‘motivated by a discriminatory purpose,’” which was contrary to the “clear text and design” of the Voting Rights Act.
Congress has long known, she wrote, that trying to find smoking-gun evidence of racist motives is “well-nigh impossible.”
Indeed, such proof may be harder than ever to find. For Gerald A. Griggs, a civil rights lawyer in Georgia, the old measures of racism — some stomach-turning tally of crosses burned, of people lynched — does not apply so much anymore. Mr. Griggs, who is Black, said that subtler discriminatory forces have “gotten into the system and corroded the arteries of the system,” and will require particularly nuanced legal challenges to “ferret out.”
“What we’re dealing with now is less overt racism,” said Mr. Griggs, a past president of the Georgia N.A.A.C.P.
Some Black Southerners still feel that kind of racism deeply. But proving it in a courtroom is another matter.
The Supreme Court’s requirement that there must be some proof of an intent to discriminate has taken form in other areas of the law — with serious implications in the South and beyond, said Stephen B. Bright, who teaches law at Georgetown and Yale.
Mr. Bright, the former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, noted that in a closely watched capital punishment case in 1987, the court rejected the appeal of Warren McCleskey, a Black man who had been sentenced to death in Georgia for killing a white person.
Mr. McCleskey’s lawyers presented the court with a study of the state’s justice system showing that a defendant who had been accused of killing a white person in Georgia was four times as likely to receive a death sentence as someone who had killed a Black person. But the court ruled that this was not enough to help Mr. McCleskey. To win his case, the court said, he needed to show that he had been personally subject to discrimination.
The problem of “proving” racial discrimination has also bedeviled the South when it comes to racially lopsided juries, Mr. Bright said. In a 1986 case, Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court established that a judge must find “purposeful discrimination” to determine that racial discrimination had been present in the jury selection process.
“You have to prove that the prosecutor, in using peremptory strikes, intentionally discriminated,” Mr. Bright said. “You can’t possibly know that unless the prosecutor tells you.”
This is one reason, he said, that all-white juries remain common in many parts of the South — “even in places with very substantial African-American populations.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday nullified a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana, one of two in the state. The district, long and intermittently bulbous, had been created by state lawmakers who felt pressured by the courts to draw a map that carved out two districts with a majority of Black voters, in order to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.
Justice Alito, writing the decision, made the case that the South had come a long way since 1965, particularly on Black voter participation, an assertion that is highly contested.
“Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana,” he wrote.
Some conservative African Americans this week welcomed the ruling, viewing it a fitting response to real racial progress in the United States. To them, the Voting Rights Act, which often forced state legislatures to draw majority-minority districts around the country, had merely put Black Americans into archaic race-based boxes.
Among those approving of the ruling was Josh Williams, a Republican state representative of a majority-white district in Ohio.
“The idea that Black Americans need special districts carved out just for them is complete nonsense,” Mr. Williams posted on social media this week, noting that he was currently running for Congress in a district that is also majority-white. “It’s a violation of the law and blatantly unconstitutional.”
Wednesday’s ruling is of a piece with the Supreme Court’s decisions to move to what some justices have called a “colorblind Constitution.” In 2023, the court effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing, “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”
The second Trump administration, meanwhile, has used its executive power to try to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the public and private sectors.
The stakes in the voting-rights case, Louisiana v. Callais, are arguably bigger, potentially reconfiguring the very architecture of national political power just as a polarized country is barreling toward the midterm elections. Some states are already considering whether to redraw their maps.
The ghosts of the past still inform Southern politics at the most elemental level. Decades ago, many Black voters migrated from the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, to the Democratic Party, impressed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign to usher in a new era of civil rights. Today, many Black Southerners are committed Democrats.
Many white Southerners were coaxed away from the Democratic Party, starting in the 1960s, thanks in part to a Republican “Southern strategy” that exploited their resentment over Mr. Johnson’s push for civil rights and desegregation. Today, many white Southerners are committed Republicans.
In today’s redistricting efforts, it has been a struggle, at times, to tease out whether a redrawn electoral map is a result of partisanship or old-fashioned racism. Complicating matters is the fact that the Supreme Court, in 2019, ruled that federal judges have no power to hear challenges to gerrymanders carried out purely for partisan advantage.
Stephen Menendian, an academic researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, has described the mess as “the problem of entanglement.” In a 2023 law review article, he warned of a big risk: “that unconstitutional racial gerrymanders will escape judicial review under the cover of partisanship.”
The court’s conservative majority sees it the opposite way. In the opinion, Justice Alito wrote that plaintiffs could challenge a partisan gerrymander by claiming it is actually a racial gerrymander. Mr. Alito warned that litigants should not be able to get around the rules “by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.”
Quin Hillyer, a white conservative opinion writer who lives in Alabama, believes that these days, Republican map makers would welcome any Black voters into a district if it would bolster their party’s strength.
“If there were an enclave, or a neighborhood, that was 100 percent Black, but that voted 80 percent Republican,” he said, “I think that the white Republicans would gladly take those people.”
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12) Lauren Sánchez Bezos and the Fashion End Times of ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’
By Robin Givhan, Ms. Givhan is a contributing Opinion writer, May 3, 2026
Photo illustration by The New York Times
When I look at photographs of Lauren Sánchez Bezos I see someone who loves fashion, although not at all in the way I do. My affection for it is rooted in respect for its beauty and creativity and in a fair amount of skepticism because of its stumbling acceptance of its social responsibilities. Her version of fashion exudes personal indulgence and broad disregard.
A plutocrat by marriage, she represents the industry’s ultimate customer, with its ever-rising prices and shrinking sales. Fashion is pricing all but the most astoundingly wealthy out of the market.
In the just-opened film “The Devil Wears Prada 2” Justin Theroux plays a dastardly acquisitive tech titan named Benji Barnes, with clear echoes of her husband, the billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Barnes character happens to have a girlfriend who might remind you of Mrs. Sánchez Bezos. Their thirst for clout helps drive the film’s plot.
On Monday, Mr. Bezos’ real-life hundreds of billions of dollars will propel Mrs. Sánchez Bezos up the grand Fifth Avenue staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, past a gantlet of photographers and into the Costume Institute Benefit, better known as the Met Gala, over which she and he will preside as honorary co-chairs. The institute’s exhibition this year, “Costume Art,” is made possible by the Bezos largess. But the couple is so broadly unpopular in the fashion world and beyond that there were calls for a boycott of the gala.
Beyoncé is also supposed to be there, serving as an official co-chair, along with Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Condé Nast’s chief content officer, Anna Wintour. But Mrs. Sánchez Bezos is the star of the Met Gala because she represents what fashion, buffeted by social and technological change, has surrendered to: economic inequality in human form, with pink, glossy lips, cinched up in a couture corset.
Taste is one more part of the culture for ruthless tech titans to attempt to optimize for their benefit. With Ms. Wintour’s determined gatekeeping and the Costume Institute’s intellectual concerns about human creativity, the Met Gala is the perfect laundromat for soulless tech money.
Both “The Devil Wears Prada” and its sequel stage fictional versions of the Met Gala for the cameras and star Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, a fictional version of Ms. Wintour. The first film captured the fabulousness of the fashion world. It also worked to give viewers the sense that its haughty, judgmental inhabitants were hard at work helping to make small lives feel bigger by the decisions they made huddled in a room going through “a pile of stuff.”
I think about how the sharp-tongued Miranda might view Mrs. Sánchez Bezos: A corset? In an evening gown? Groundbreaking. The sequel depicts Miranda with her power and influence slipping. She’s confronting the same tidal wave of financial challenges that the real-life fashion ecosystem is navigating.
Onscreen, the upheaval comes by way of data-driven technology, an awkward tycoon with no sense of style and the fashion-loving woman he aims to please. As Stanley Tucci’s character, Nigel, says, he’s reduced to creating “content that people scroll past as they pee.” In real life, fashion magazines — and publications in general — are in trouble, and they’re hoping the right billionaire will bail them out. (The Bezoses have been rumored to be considering buying Condé Nast, Vogue’s parent company; when asked about it, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos told the writer Amy Chozick in The Times, “I wish!” and then, “No.”)
With her donations, scholarships and grants, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos offers the industry some support beyond her expensive shopping habit. The Bezos Earth Fund awarded $34 million in grants to institutions developing environmentally neutral fabrics, and she directed $6.25 million from the Earth Fund to the Council of Fashion Designers of America to support innovation and education in sustainability. The industry readily grabs on. Some people are betting that she’s the right billionaire.
According to Ms. Chozick’s recent profile of her, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos just wants to be happy. And whenever she steps in front of cameras, dressed in a remarkable array of finery, she looks delighted. In an era of extreme economic inequality and financial instability, when California is looking to institute a billionaire tax and a tax on second homes in New York City is under consideration, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos moves about with ostentatious pleasure. She counts her 10-figure blessings, and wears her windfall on her back for all to see.
Her taste veers outside a palette of beige and gray cashmere — the approved sensibility of well-mannered, quiet money. She is willing to flash a wide smile or offer a pouty stare for the cameras rather than stare them down with an expression of bashful reserve or detached ennui, which is what serious women are supposed to do. She does not have the body of a 6-foot-tall 12-year-old boy, which is how high fashion still insists on defining an elegant female physique.
She defies these expectations — something that could be lauded. But she simply embraces a different cliché, an extreme version of femininity that’s defined by a snatched waist and a cantilevered bosom.
She laments how little the public really knows about her. But provided the opportunity to tell her critics more, she refrains.
“I am not talking politics,” she told The Times. “No, no, no, no, no. No way.”
It’s reasonable to believe that since she sat in a place of honor behind President Trump during his inauguration, she might have a few thoughts about the current administration. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, who once worked in broadcast news, acknowledged the importance of journalism but offered no thoughts on her husband’s drastic staff cuts at The Washington Post, which he owns (and where I used to work).
But she is willing to express her exasperation that the white lace bra readily visible under the Alexander McQueen suit she wore to Mr. Trump’s swearing-in caused an online kerfuffle. She defines the problem as a scandal about lace, not her disregard for the dignity of an official function.
To draw the cameras, it helps that she has hired one of the best stylists money can buy, Law Roach, and collected an impressive array of very expensive stuff. She’s done so from a feast of options. Costume not as art, but as merchandise. Perhaps she even scrolled past some of it while she was indisposed. As Miranda deftly shivved a would-be white knight, “You’re not a visionary; you’re a vendor.”
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos’ clothes don’t demand that the public pay attention to her story. Or even the stories of the designers she wears. Or really, even fashion.
She has assembled a tote board of Bezos wealth. And if it tells any story at all, it’s his.
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13) Rich People Didn’t Look Like This Before
By Amy Odell, April 30, 2026
Ms. Odell is the author of the Back Row newsletter and “Anna: The Biography.”
Lola Dupre
If you spend enough time around the very rich these days, it’s clear. People didn’t look like this before because people naturally can’t look like this.
Models in a Paris Fashion Week show for the luxury brand Matières Fécales last month caricatured the 1 percent by wearing prosthetics that resembled post-op faces, including grotesque under-eye bulges, skin pulled up from their temples and lips that appeared unnaturally inflated and stitched at the edges. “South Park” depicted Kristi Noem with a face so Botoxed, it melts off and scurries away. From the Met Gala to the Oscars and every red carpet in between, these rich faces are everywhere.
A “rich face” is stretched taut, often incapable of varied expressions and plumped with filler or implants or a person’s own grafted fat. Once, this face belonged to a villainous class of elites in sci-fi depictions of a dystopian future. In “The Hunger Games,” residents of the capital city who revel in luxury and excess at the expense of other impoverished districts often wear sculpted, altered faces. In “Doctor Who,” a wealthy socialite from the distant future has gone through so many face-lifts that she becomes little more than a stretched face on a thin sheet of skin mounted on a frame, maintained with constant moisturizer.
The ultrawealthy seem less and less concerned with hiding their excesses. They’re richer than ever, and figures like Lauren Sánchez Bezos and President Trump give them permission to flaunt their neo-Gilded Age spoils. After all, the unspoken appeal of cosmetic work is that it’s not just about looking “better” or “fixing” something or trying to remain competitive in ageist workplaces. It’s about indulging in a particular kind of experiential self-care that is infinitely customizable and accessible to only a select group. It signifies extreme wealth and belonging to an elite, all-powerful clique that gets to operate under a different set of societal norms and rules.
Status signaling used to be the purview of the $18,000 cocktail dress or the $50,000 designer bag. Now, the small number of Very Important Clients who account for 40 percent of luxury sales seem to be shifting more of their highly desired dollars to their faces. Today’s cleverly marketed aesthetic treatments include “global facial micro-optimization,” which involves numerous procedures to tweak everything from eye tilt to the way light reflects off the jaw, and costs between $150,000 and $300,000. There are also “forever 35,” “Diamond mini” and “weekend” face-lifts. Plastic surgeons in Washington are navigating a surge in requests for “Mar-a-Lago face.”
The masses want in. Millennials who say they cannot afford homes are spending on their faces instead. Magazines such as Vogue and Allure are no longer just advising readers on nail polish colors and designer sandals for spring, but also when — not if — they should get face-lifts. Rhinoplasties, face-lifts and blepharoplasties (eyelid surgeries) were the three most popular facial procedures of 2025, and the number of facial procedures overall increased by around 19 percent. The luxury sector, meanwhile, contracted by 2 percent last year.
Designer fashion seems to be viewed as more cringe than cosmetic procedures — a feeling that the journalist Sujata Assomull calls the “luxury ick.” Many designer brands raised prices significantly in recent years, at around twice the rate of inflation, without any apparent improvement in quality. (A Chanel flap bag can now cost upward of $11,000 — almost double what it did in 2016.) And some have been caught up in sweatshop scandals. The Row’s sample sale in New York City inspired a slew of viral parody videos. The thriving market for secondhand goods, dupes and counterfeits dim the glamour of it all. And when brands like Celine and Chloé are reissuing old handbag designs, why bother shopping for something new?
In earlier decades, the roles were reversed: Plastic surgery was a punchline. “I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware,” Joan Rivers once joked. Now Ms. Rivers seems ahead of her time. Procedures are a sign of making it in the most Kardashian-coded way — get rich, then buy a face. Stars such as Kris Jenner go viral for their cosmetic work. Asked if she’d had “the seemingly ubiquitous new style of face-lift,” Jennifer Lawrence told The New Yorker, “No. But, believe me, I’m gonna!”
Social media has turbocharged the normalization of cosmetic work. One plastic surgeon said that his Gen Z patients take selfies at their appointments “as if it’s a concert or a ‘get ready with me’ video. They want everyone to know.” Like haul vlogs, it’s a way to say, “Look what I just bought.”
Of course, rich face has regional variations. Bravo’s “Real Housewives” from the Upper East Side and the Hamptons have a subtler look than their counterparts on Netflix’s “Members Only: Palm Beach,” who dream of access to Mar-a-Lago. Whether stars admit to their work or not, endless internet speculation provides valuable P.R. to both them and the surgeons who treat them. Many of these doctors — such as Steven Levine, who lifted Ms. Jenner’s face — are celebrities themselves. All of this media hooks viewers by inviting them to wonder when lips were last injected and if jawlines look more “snatched” than they did the previous week.
Sometimes, of course, procedures can go wrong. Sharon Osbourne once called a face-lift “the worst thing that I ever did,” and said that she “looked like Cyclops.” Khloe Kardashian has said that filler made her look “crazy.”
Designer bags may be silly, overpriced and quite often unethically made. But at least there’s little to no chance they will disfigure you. Perhaps the risk of a grisly outcome is part of the appeal for the ultrawealthy, who have the ability to pay for the best care, along with more treatments if things go wrong. The luxury of viewing your face-lift less as a major, potentially ruinous surgery and more as a routine to-do list item is the ultimate status symbol.
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14) Abortion Providers Forced to Adapt After Court Blocks Pill Access by Mail
The Fifth Circuit court’s ruling, which is being appealed, reinstates a requirement that patients visit a health care provider in person to obtain mifepristone, upending abortion access in the United States.
By Maggie Astor, Chris Hippensteel and Pam Belluck, Maggie Astor reported from Washington, May 2, 2026
If the court’s temporary ruling stands, patients would have to make an in-person visit to obtain the abortion pill mifepristone. Hannah Yoon for The New York Times
More than a hundred reproductive health physicians were gathered in Washington, D.C., on Friday afternoon, listening to an update on the shifting legal landscape of reproductive health care.
The presentation was delivered by Molly Meegan, the chief legal officer of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who had no idea that another ruling on the abortion pill mifepristone had arrived as she spoke, temporarily blocking the drug’s prescription by telemedicine and delivery by mail.
“This is not a ruling based in evidence, science or best interests of women,” she said, after learning of the decision by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
The order is already being challenged, but if the Supreme Court lets it stand, it would upend access to a means of abortion that has been steadily growing in recent years. The ruling has also thrust abortion into the national spotlight in advance of the midterm elections, as organizations that provide and support abortion services and those that oppose abortions unleashed a flurry of responses.
“This decision represents the most sweeping threat to abortion since the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” said Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. “If allowed to stand, it would severely restrict access to mifepristone in every state, including those where abortion is broadly legal and where voters have acted to protect abortion rights.”
Louisiana, which has a near-total ban on abortion, went to court to stop distribution of the drug by mail. The appeals court said that while that lawsuit proceeded, the Food and Drug Administration needed to reinstate a requirement that patients visit medical providers in person to obtain mifepristone.
A mifepristone manufacturer filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court on Saturday asking it to restore full access to mifepristone. A second mifepristone maker said it would file a similar appeal. The Trump administration has so far declined to comment on the ruling or what steps it might take.
Anti-abortion groups celebrated the ruling. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called the court’s decision “a huge victory for victims and survivors of Biden’s reckless mail-order abortion drug regime.”
Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said in a news release that the ruling “recognizes that the FDA cannot simply sweep legitimate safety concerns aside in favor of politics.”
Abortion opponents have argued that the F.D.A.’s decision to allow abortion pills to be available by mail posed safety risks to women and violated the sovereignty of states that had banned abortion. Major medical organizations and supporters of reproductive rights have pointed out that more than 100 studies have found the pills to be safe and effective, with serious side effects being rare.
Medication is now the method used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States, and is typically delivered in the form of a two-drug regimen through the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
The first of those drugs is mifepristone, which was approved in 2000, and blocks a hormone needed for a pregnancy to develop. The second drug, misoprostol, has many other medical uses and was not affected by the Fifth Circuit ruling.
Typically, misoprostol, which causes contractions similar to a miscarriage, is taken 24 to 48 hours after mifepristone. But several providers said they were prepared to continue telemedicine services prescribing only misoprostol, which can be used on its own for abortion, although it is considered somewhat less effective and more likely to have side effects.
Earlier on the day of the ruling, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York had announced an expansion of its telemedicine abortion service. After the Fifth Circuit decision, the organization said it would continue to provide telehealth abortion with misoprostol.
“In the wake of yesterday’s harmful decision by the Fifth Circuit, Planned Parenthood Direct is mailing misoprostol-only prescription kits,” said Jacquelyn Marrero, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of Greater New York.
Telemedicine abortion has steadily increased since the F.D.A. began allowing it in 2021. As of the first six months of 2025, more than one-fourth of abortions in the country were provided via telemedicine, according to a report from a reproductive rights research group.
Although abortion is currently banned or restricted in 20 states, over 100,000 patients per year in those states have been receiving pills through the mail. Those pills are prescribed and shipped by medical practitioners in states that have abortion shield laws. Officials in those shield-law states are prevented from obeying subpoenas, extradition requests and other legal actions that states with bans take against abortion providers.
The laws are being tested by several cases that are expected to lead to a constitutional showdown over whether states must honor one another’s abortion laws. Some abortion providers said they had anticipated the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, given the court’s conservative leanings, and many had already developed contingency plans.
Julie Burkhart, who runs Wyoming’s only abortion clinic, said that the Fifth Circuit’s ruling was “devastating, but it’s not surprising.” Ms. Burkhart said her clinic had temporarily suspended telehealth medication abortion appointments in response to the decision, but hoped to quickly reopen them.
“We’re trying to move very quickly to get something into place so we can have that continuity of care, but we want to be also thoughtful and intentional, so that we are giving the best possible care to our patients,” she said.
Dr. Angel Foster, co-founder of The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, which operates under that state’s shield law, said in a statement that her organization was consulting legal experts about the ruling’s implications and that the group would “do everything in our power to continue providing care to people in all 50 states.”
Dr. Jodi Abbott, a specialist in high-risk pregnancies who is a consultant to the Massachusetts project, said that like some other providers, the organization would shift to prescribing and mailing only misoprostol for abortions. “We have no concerns about its safety or efficacy,” Dr. Abbott, who is also a clinical professor at Boston University, said of using misoprostol alone. “But we also know it’s not optimal.”
Kate Zernike contributed reporting.
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