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The Bay Area Demo Legal Collab and friends are hosting a Grand Jury education and training event. Join us for a political history of how Grand Juries are used for political repression, hear from Grand Jury resisters and learn how to plan for repression for yourself and your community.
In the Bay Area there have been recent FBI visits, Grand Jury subpoenas and investigations into our political movements. If you are contacted by the feds or other law enforcement agencies you should exercise your rights and reach out to legal support:
· You do not have to open your door or let FBI or other agents into your home without a warrant.
· You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney: you do not have to talk to FBI or other agents or answer their questions. It can be dangerous to do so. Say, "I do not want to answer questions without my lawyer. Please slip your card under the door and my lawyer will call you."
· For legal help, call the Bay Area Federal Defense Line, 415-285-1041 and someone will return your call within 48 hours.
The Bay Area Federal Defense line can help connect you to a lawyer if you are contacted by agents related to progressive political activism. It is sponsored by the Bay Area Demo Legal Support Collaborative- a joint effort of Legal Solidarity Bay Area, NLG-SF, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, Anti-Repression Committee, and Oaklaw.
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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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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
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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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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols 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) ICE Killed Him. A.I. Helped Turn Him Into a Folk Ballad, Fast.
A.I. is helping people write corridos within hours, accelerating a tradition of memorializing tragedy through song.
By Sasha von Oldershausen, Photographs and Video by Antranik Tavitian, Reporting from Austin, Aug. 3, 2026
The melancholic songs began to appear on social media just days after an immigration agent fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo while he was on his way to work in early July.
One such melody, or corrido, the more-than-century-old Mexican tradition of creating narrative folk ballads, was made by Jaime Velasquez — with a little help from A.I.
Mr. Velasquez, 42, had grown up in Houston’s close-knit, heavily Latino, Magnolia Park neighborhood. Mr. Araujo was killed there during a traffic stop on July 7. That sense of solidarity made Mr. Araujo’s death especially painful.
“It’s like somebody took my uncle or my dad,” Mr. Velasquez said. “Even though I don’t know the family, it touched me. It touched my heart.”
He began jotting down the details of the shooting gathered from news broadcasts. Then he wrote a corrido, in Spanish, from Mr. Araujo’s perspective. The lyrics included:
It was early on the morning of July 7th,
roosters were crowing and the sun was rising,
when I left my home filled with love and hope …
Once he’d finished writing, he used an A.I. song generator called Zona to compose the tune.
“It lets you put instrumentals on it and choose a voice,” he said.
Within seconds, the software had produced a finished corrido that he shared on Facebook. Two days after Mr. Araujo was killed, the corrido was already echoing through the Magnolia Park neighborhood, blaring from car stereos.
For generations, corridos have helped Mexican and Mexican American communities make sense of violence, injustice and loss on their own terms. Now the centuries-old tradition is colliding with a modern reality: high-profile immigration arrests and shootings, A.I. that can create songs in seconds and social media that can spread them before the deaths have been investigated.
Since the mid-19th century, corridos have functioned as a form of news, preserving the version of events remembered by communities rather than authorities.
“It was news as the public experienced it — not the way that official channels were going to report about it in newspapers,” said Teresita Lozano, a ballad scholar at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, whose work explores the intersection of immigration politics and corridos.
The corrido tradition traces its roots to the Spanish romance ballad, which colonizers brought with them to Mexico. The music emerged as a distinctly Mexican form as tensions mounted along the Texas-Mexico border after the Mexican-American War in the mid-1800s.
The thousands of corridos written since then resemble an alternative history of the border, documenting moments of violence, injustice and loss.
When Texas Rangers descended upon the small border village of Porvenir in 1918, killing 15 unarmed Mexican American men and boys, members of the community memorialized the massacre in a corrido. They did the same after Esequiel Hernández, a high school sophomore, was shot and killed by U.S. Marines patrolling the Texas border in 1997.
Mr. Araujo’s death, scholars said, fits squarely within that tradition.
“This is a community reacting in the way it has been doing it for over a hundred years,” said Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta, a leading corrido scholar at San Diego State University.
“The corrido tradition still serves that purpose,” he added. “To communicate indignation.”
What has changed, thanks to technology, is the speed at which these corridos are made.
Ms. Lozano noticed the proliferation of A.I.-assisted corridos on social media following Charlie Kirk’s death in September 2025.
“I remember them popping up really quickly,” she said, “and I was thinking, ‘Is it even possible for someone to write it this quickly?’”
In the past, a corrido’s reach was constrained by geography, radio DJs and the recording industry. Today, a new corrido can be recorded, uploaded and shared across platforms like TikTok and YouTube within hours.
Mr. Araujo’s death has left a scar across Houston’s East End. A father of three U.S.-born children who spent 35 years building homes around the city, he was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer during an operation aimed at another man. His story has turned into something more than one family’s tragedy; it’s a communal loss that has long inspired people like Mr. Velasquez to write corridos.
“He was a hard-working man who went out every day for his family,” said Mr. Velasquez, who owns and operates a mobile collision repair business in Houston. “That’s what I do every day.”
Norma Galo Medina, who lives in North Carolina, was similarly moved to create a corrido following Mr. Araujo’s death.
“I felt a great deal of sadness and shock,” she said. “What we immigrants are living through in this country made me think about the importance of honoring his memory.”
She spent two sleepless nights writing the lyrics, then used an app called BandLab to create a musical arrangement.
“I told it I wanted regional Mexican music — a sad, mournful norteño corrido,” Ms. Medina said.
She adjusted the instrumentation and chord progressions. Then she recorded herself singing, using A.I. to alter her range.
“I used a male voice so it would sound stronger,” she said.
She shared the corrido in a TikTok post that has since been viewed more than 40,000 times. Ms. Medina said she was overwhelmed by the response.
The corrido genre has seen its share of reinvention. Contemporary artists like Peso Pluma and Junior H have popularized “corridos tumbados,” or trap corridos, which fuse the traditional narrative ballad with hip-hop and trap influences. Traditionalists have questioned whether these trap corridos qualify as corridos at all.
Andrea Daniela, a mariachi alternative artist originally from Magnolia Park, whose own work blends corridos and spirituality — a style she calls “corridos metafísicos,” — believes that A.I. crosses a line.
“A.I. can’t replicate presence,” she said. “A.I. can’t replicate my passion, my heart.”
Mr. Ramírez-Pimienta, the corrido scholar, is not convinced this new technology poses an existential threat to the art form. When commercial records and radio became dominant, he said, corridos that once stretched seven or eight minutes long were truncated to fit the constraints of a three-minute recording.
“Despite all the technological advances, the genre is still here,” Mr. Ramírez-Pimienta said. “It still serves a purpose.”
Ainara Tiefenthaler contributed reporting.
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2) How the War in Iran Is Complicating Trump’s Agenda at Home
As President Trump heads to the West Coast to talk to Americans about the economy, the war in Iran is driving up costs and polls show the already unpopular conflict is losing support.
President Trump has been the only president in the modern era to take the country to war without the support of the American public. Pete Marovich for The New York Times
The war in Iran, along with a cycle of threats and walk-backs, has upended President Trump’s domestic agenda at a dire political moment.
Americans are facing rising gas prices; Republicans in Congress are being forced to fund and defend an unpopular war that they never voted to approve; and with the midterm elections looming, polls show cratering support for a war that has no end in sight.
Mr. Trump will hit the road this week for a swing through the West Coast to talk about the economy and sell his agenda to the American people. Here are three domestic hurdles Mr. Trump is facing because of the war.
Pain at the Pump
Mr. Trump’s war in Iran has driven up the cost of oil around the world, and Americans are paying, on average, more for gas than they have since 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Gas prices on Monday were at a national average of $4.10 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club. The increase has raised the cost for drivers by more than 37 percent since the war began at the end of February. And it compounds a cost-of-living crisis caused by persistently high inflation that Mr. Trump struggled to address before the war even started.
Mr. Trump has asserted that oil prices per barrel have been far lower than expected because of the conflict, and that gas prices will “drop like a rock” when the war ends.
On Monday, Mr. Trump tried to pass the blame on to oil companies, boasting in a social media post that they had grown much more profitable as a result of his policies.
In a social media post, and in an Oval Office appearance, he cited Chevron and Exxon for record profits, and suggested they should ease prices for the public. “That goes for other Oil Companies as well,” he wrote, “and get your consumer (retail!) Oil Prices DOWN, NOW!”
Plummeting Polls
Mr. Trump has been the only president in the modern era to take the country to war without the support of the American public.
In the most recent Quinnipiac University poll, 60 percent of voters said they opposed military action against Iran, a slight uptick since May. And in a recent CNN/SSRS poll, 74 percent of Americans — including about 43 percent of Republicans — said the war in Iran had not been worth the cost in terms of the financial burden or American casualties.
Despite the fact that Mr. Trump ran on getting and keeping America out of wars, the conflict has now lasted far longer than his promise of “four to five weeks,” and it has killed 18 U.S. service members.
Mr. Trump has dismissed the pains being experienced from the war, saying they are temporary. And he has downplayed the number of American troops’ deaths by comparing them to casualty counts of past wars like Vietnam.
On Monday, Mr. Trump wrote that he believed that any polling showing discontent was “the Radical Left’s Fake Poll numbers.”
Political Risks
As Republicans face a tough midterm in a matter of months, even Mr. Trump’s closest allies have intensified their calls for a clear end to the conflict.
“We got to wrap it up,” Speaker Mike Johnson said last month, as the United States launched a fresh barrage against Iran, signaling the collapse of a temporary cease-fire.
Mr. Trump went to war without the authorization of Congress, an issue that came to a head in recent weeks as members have been asked for billions more in funding. Last week, Senate Republicans declined to limit Mr. Trump’s power to continue the war, but days later many complained that they were unsure where the conflict was headed.
“I don’t know whether the president should start a new bombing campaign again, because I don’t have the military intelligence,” Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, said on Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Now, that’s a problem, too, because it’ll cause a lot of pain. It’ll cause energy prices to go up, and a lot of inflation for the American people. They’re all hellish choices.”
Democrats are already employing their strategy to use Republicans’ support of the war against their opponents in upcoming races.
In Maine, Majority Forward, a major Democratic group, has spent more than $1.5 million on ads accusing Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, of giving Mr. Trump a “blank check” for the war, according to an analysis by the media tracking firm AdImpact.
Ruth Igielnik, Katie Rogers and Jess Bidgood contributed reporting.
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3) Uber’s Strategy for Fighting Sexual Assault Suits: ‘What Were You Wearing?’
The ride-hailing giant promised to handle legal claims “in a way that is best for the survivor.” Its lawyers are pursuing a far more aggressive strategy.
By Emily Steel, Aug. 4, 2026
You can send the reporter tips at nytimes.com/tips.
max-o-matic
A 24-year-old woman logged onto a videoconference from her bedroom in Florida on a Friday morning in April 2025 to face a deposition in her lawsuit against Uber.
Her driver had already pleaded guilty in criminal court to raping her vaginally, anally and orally while she was unconscious during a ride in Tampa one night in 2021. He was in prison, serving a 10-year sentence. The woman, identified as Jane Doe in court documents, was suing Uber in civil court for negligence, arguing that the company should have done more to screen and supervise the driver, a man with prior violent felony convictions.
Publicly, Uber proclaims itself to be a company devoted to handling sexual violence in a “survivor-centric” and “trauma-informed” way, supporting survivors and treating them with dignity. After years of fielding reports of sexual misconduct, the company developed instructional videos for drivers that stated, “Sexual violence is never the survivor’s fault.”
But in court filings, Uber argued that Ms. Doe had “conducted herself in a negligent and careless manner” and “contributed to causing her own injuries.” And it said Ms. Doe’s claims of pain and suffering were “unrelated to the at-issue accident.”
Now, during her deposition, Uber’s lawyer Taylor Silverberg zeroed in on Ms. Doe’s behavior on the night she was raped. Ms. Silverberg asked Ms. Doe exactly how much Tito’s vodka she had drunk, how many milligrams of Adderall she had taken and whether she had “felt regret” about mixing the two. And she asked Ms. Doe what she had been wearing. “Can you describe the dress?” Ms. Silverberg said. “Were you wearing heels or boots or flats?”
Ms. Silverberg also probed Ms. Doe’s childhood, asking if she had felt abandoned by her father or degraded by her mother.
She pushed Ms. Doe for details about consensual sex and asked whether she had previously been sexually abused or had sex in exchange for money. That is when her lawyer ended the deposition.
“I am not anywhere near done,” Ms. Silverberg protested. “It’s her lawsuit, and I have an obligation to defend my client to the best of my ability,” she added.
Later, she offered an apology: “I know this is hard for you, Ms. Doe. I am sorry. I really am. But ——”
“I’m grateful it is ending,” Ms. Doe said, interrupting. “This kills me,” she added.
Uber’s approach in Ms. Doe’s case is part of its defense strategy as it battles thousands of lawsuits from passengers accusing the company of failing to protect them from sexual violence they said they had suffered during rides, according to thousands of pages of court records, including deposition and trial transcripts.
More than 4,000 lawsuits have been filed, so many that thousands were combined to streamline procedural matters. Most remain in the early stages. The New York Times reviewed documents from the three cases that reached trial and about a dozen others that have advanced to the stage when the parties start exchanging documents and conducting depositions.
The litigation has revealed a clear pattern: Uber’s lawyers scour women’s private communications, medical records, therapy notes and other sources for sensitive details, including other sexual assaults, childhood abuse and domestic violence. They grill the women about those issues, their sex lives and their behavior on the night of the incident.
In one case, Uber petitioned a judge to force a woman to turn over details about sexual abuse she experienced as a child by a family member and family friend. In another, Uber compelled a woman to undergo a psychiatric exam to investigate other sexual assaults she had reported. And in another, a lawyer for Uber asked a woman whether she had been wearing underwear on the night in question and if she had become “extra sexually active” after the Uber incident.
At trial, the company has put a spotlight on the women, their choices and their credibility. Uber’s lawyers have argued that the women’s past traumas or use of drugs or alcohol made them unreliable narrators. They have suggested that the women consented to the encounters, or that they never happened. And they have asserted that even if an assault occurred, something else was the true cause of her pain.
Uber’s strategy contradicts its own stance as a champion in the fight against sexual violence and reflects the business calculations of a $145 billion publicly traded company facing an avalanche of litigation.
Uber has long said it treats all survivors with respect and compassion, including when they sue. The company has struck partnerships with leading anti-sexual assault groups, and it has committed more than $15 million to organizations fighting gender-based violence.
And a training guide for Uber’s customer service agents who handled reports of sexual violence instructed them to “recognize and interrupt victim blaming attitudes,” stating that people rarely lie about sexual assault and that victims do not provoke attacks by what they wore or how much they drank, according to a copy.
How Uber’s lawyers question women about their outfits
Examples from depositions in four different cases:
California
August 27, 2024
Q: Do you know if you had the bikini on at that time?
Florida
December 16, 2024
Q: And what were you wearing?
A: Um, the planned outfit was joggers. But I don’t remember the top. I do remember the sneakers because the police took them away, and I really liked them.
Florida
April 4, 2025
Q: Do you have a recollection of what you were wearing that evening: your outfit, your shoes, your bag?
Missouri
January 17, 2026
Q: And what were you wearing that night of the incident?
A: I don’t know what I was wearing on the top half of my body, but I know I was wearing a skirt.
Q: Do you remember which skirt you were wearing?
A: No, I don’t. Before this incident and there’s a lot of picture proof of this, I wore almost only skirts. Afterwards I started wearing pants.
Q: Do you remember if you were wearing a long skirt or a short skirt?
A: It was probably short.
Q: Do you remember if you were wearing underwear?
“I’ll be the first to say that our adversarial legal system can be particularly tough for survivors,” Uber’s chief legal officer, Tony West, said in a statement.
“I’ve made clear to my legal team that they must always treat survivors with respect, compassion, courtesy and dignity, and that’s exactly what I’ve seen them do,” he added. “Defending the company in a lawsuit and treating survivors with humanity are not mutually exclusive; we must do both.” Mr. West declined to be interviewed.
Katie Waitzman, Uber’s chief deputy general counsel, said in a statement that Uber had a “right and responsibility” to defend itself against lawsuits, which vary widely in severity and validity and included about 30 cases dismissed for fraud.
In multiple statements, lawyers for Uber said their questions about women’s past trauma as well as what they were wearing, drinking or how they acted had been intended to gather and evaluate specific facts — not to blame, shame or suggest they had done anything wrong. Ms. Silverberg acted “with skilled, ethical and professional representation consistent with the law,” her law firm, Bowman and Brooke, said.
The Times previously found that Uber received a report of sexual violence in the United States almost every eight minutes, on average, from 2017 to 2022, a rate far higher than what the company had disclosed. Uber maintains that a vast majority of rides are safe, with 99.9 percent occurring without an incident of any kind.
Legal and sexual violence experts said Uber’s tactics go beyond simple fact-gathering and force the women to relive not just the incident in question but also the most painful moments of their lives. This is likely to re-traumatize the women, they said, and intimidate many into settling their claims, or to avoid suing the company at all.
The approach also has “a deep irony at its core,” because the company has long marketed itself as one of the safest ways to get around — especially after a night out, said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a legal ethics professor at Stanford Law School.
“Uber’s strategy recycles an old and ugly script: If a woman drank, if she rode alone, if it was late, if her memory is imperfect, then maybe she is to blame,” Ms. Engstrom said. “But those are precisely the circumstances when Uber told consumers its service was supposed to protect them.”
For decades, defense lawyers routinely questioned sexual assault accusers about their sex lives, mental health and alcohol consumption to characterize them as promiscuous and unstable. That started to change in the 1970s, as state and federal lawmakers began passing rape shield laws that restricted evidence about an accuser’s sexual history at trial.
The lawsuits against Uber are civil disputes, seeking to hold the company accountable for corporate safety issues.
While some involve drivers who were criminally convicted, many do not. Criminal cases require prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, which can be difficult with sexual assault cases when defendants argue the encounter was consensual. The standard of proof in civil court is lower, requiring juries find that the plaintiff’s claim is more likely true than not.
Most of the women suing Uber are seeking compensation for pain and suffering, which means that a key legal question is how much the incident caused their distress compared with other events in their lives. That line of inquiry is common in personal injury cases. In the Uber suits, it has opened the door to an expansive investigation into past trauma, including sexual assault.
Interrogating drinking
California
August 12, 2024
Q: Got it. Did you want to take an Uber because you thought maybe there was some chance you were over the blood alcohol limit to drive?
Florida
April 4, 2025
Q: Were you taking shots and chasing, or were you doing mixed drinks?
A: Just straight up pulling.
Q: And what was your chase?
A: I think we had Sprite or something. I can’t remember the exact. But I’m assuming it was some bottle of soda or something. I don’t know. I don’t recall.
Q: Did you have a sip of any other type of liquor, wine, beer, any other type of alcoholic beverage?
A: No, not that I recall.
California
July 18, 2024
Q: OK. And do you remember how much you had to drink?
FLORIDA
December 16, 2024
Q: Do you know how many High Noons you had that night?
MISSOURI
January 17, 2026
Q: Do you recall how many drinks you had?
A: No.
‘Turning the Lights On’
When Mr. West joined Uber as chief legal officer in 2017, the company was plagued by scandal, including for how it dealt with sexual violence. One case involving a rape by a driver in India made global headlines after revelations that executives had obtained and mishandled the victim’s medical records, thinking the assault may have been a conspiracy hatched by a rival.
Mr. West, a former Justice Department official and brother-in-law of Kamala Harris, painted himself as a champion of women who had fought sex crimes as a federal prosecutor and worked on legislation aimed at protecting women from violence.
The same month that Mr. West started at Uber, in November, two passengers sued the company, claiming they were raped by their drivers. Uber tried to force the claims into arbitration.
Several more women joined the suit, and in April 2018, they wrote an open letter, pleading that the company allow them to sue in open court. It was the height of #MeToo, and the use of forced arbitration in sexual misconduct cases was a central issue, with critics decrying it as a tool to silence victims and protect abusers.
The next month, in a blog post titled “Turning the Lights On,” Mr. West said Uber would no longer require arbitration for individual sexual assault or misconduct claims.
“We always want to try to resolve these, these claims in a way that is best for the survivor,” Mr. West told “CBS This Morning” in 2018. “If you can’t do that then we want to make sure that we try to litigate these as fairly as possible,” he added.
For years, Uber settled sexual assault lawsuits long before trial. Some executives worried that the company could be perceived as attacking victims if it fought lawsuits in court, according to three people briefed on the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
But it soon became clear that the move to end forced arbitration had unleashed a wave of lawsuits. Litigation costs mounted as cases increased, the people said. That coincided with a collapse of revenues during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Internal discussions shifted: Uber could save millions of dollars if it fought back, the people said.
The company did not respond to questions about when or how the strategy changed.
Sex, Drugs and Trauma
Uber’s defense kicks into gear long before a case goes to trial. The company uses the discovery process to delve into the plaintiff’s most painful moments.
Uber has sought documents about past sexual assault, medical records about diagnoses in the five years before the incident, as well as anything that detailed instances of depression, anxiety or trauma. It also has asked for social media communications related to the women’s mental or emotional state.
In one case, Uber combed through years of a woman’s gynecological records, psychiatric intake forms, therapy notes and other documents, finding references to her birth control, heavy menstrual periods and bowel movements — as well as to childhood abuse, concussions, suicide attempts and other sexual assaults.
Depositions allow the company to investigate these issues further.
“Other than the deaths of your four family members that we spoke about earlier, was there any other traumatic event that happened to you in high school?” a lawyer for Uber asked one woman.
“When you say you ended up with a black eye — and I’m sorry, this is unfortunately questions I have to ask — are you saying,” a lawyer for Uber asked one woman about her spouse, that he “hit you in the eye?”
Uber also has deposed the women’s friends, parents, spouses, exes and therapists, according to transcripts reviewed by The Times.
When friends, family and therapists are deposed
November 21, 2024
Q: And in the years that you and your wife were either dating or married, has your wife ever been unfaithful?
Q: Had you known Ms. Doe to invite strangers up to her apartment when she was drinking?
July 23, 2025
Q: Has Ms. █████ ever told you about the instances in which she was physically beaten?
May 28, 2025
Q: Did you suspect that the plaintiff may only know how to interact with men in a sexual way? I mean, she’s got sexual assault starting junior high, high school, college.
During some of those depositions, Uber’s lawyers have revealed sensitive information. In one, a woman’s father, from whom she is estranged, learned that she had been sexually abused as a child and had an abortion, her lawyer said in court filings.
“What discovery in these cases entails is brutal for someone who is contemplating coming forward, especially against a defendant with resources and lawyers who will comb through everything, ask for everything,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at Northwestern University who focuses on sexual violence.
Ms. Waitzman, Uber’s chief deputy general counsel, said that it was “standard practice” to dig into pre-existing trauma. “When plaintiffs claim damages for emotional injuries, and assign 100 percent of those injuries to the Uber-related incident despite evidence to the contrary, we have to pursue that line of inquiry, albeit reluctantly,” she said.
On Trial
Uber tested out its defense in front of jurors during the first three sexual assault lawsuits that went to trial.
In all three, Uber sought to include evidence about other sexual assaults the women had reported. Judges limited how much could be discussed, to varying degrees.
The first, in California last September, involved a woman identified as Jessica C. who testified that during a ride in 2016 her driver pinned her down, kissed her, groped her and tried to take off her pants.
Alli Brown, a lawyer representing Uber, put a spotlight on Jessica’s choices, including that she did not report the incident to Uber at the time. Ms. Brown also excavated painful moments from Jessica’s past, detailing childhood abuse, suicide attempts and other trauma.
“Having a history of trauma like that can affect the way you perceive the world,” Ms. Brown told jurors during closing arguments, citing testimony from Jessica’s psychiatrist.
The second trial started in Arizona in January. Jaylynn Dean testified that her driver raped her during a ride in November 2023, while she was “dozing in and out of consciousness.”
Kim Bueno, another lawyer representing Uber, called attention to the driver’s side of the story, telling the jury that “in his heart” he believed that the encounter was consensual.
“He said she was wanting to do it and was encouraging this situation,” she said.
Ms. Bueno challenged Ms. Dean’s claims that she had been too intoxicated to consent to sex, arguing that Ms. Dean appeared “lucid” in video footage shortly after the ride. In graphic detail, she went through Ms. Dean’s history of sexual assault and other traumas.
Ms. Dean’s lawyers urged jurors to focus on other testimony from the driver, who said during his deposition that Ms. Dean had told him that she was “very drunk” when she entered his car. In his deposition, the driver said that he “had a responsibility to make sure that she is in a right frame of mind to give consent, and I didn’t do that.”
In the third trial, in North Carolina in April, Brianna Mensing testified that her Uber driver grabbed her upper, inner thigh and asked if he could “keep it with him” during a ride in March 2019.
Uber’s lawyer, Ms. Brown, described the allegation as a brief leg touch and said the driver denied it. Ms. Brown focused on Ms. Mensing’s history of substance abuse, saying the ride occurred “during the height of her drug addiction.”
During each trial, lawyers for the women accused Uber of shaming and blaming them.
“What kind of evidence does Uber need to actually believe a woman?” William Smith, a lawyer for Ms. Mensing, said during closing arguments. At trial, Ms. Brown and Ms. Bueno said that they did not intend to shame the women.
Uber won the first case but lost the next two. All are being appealed. After both defeats, a company spokesman said the plaintiff won far less money than she could have. The jury awarded Ms. Dean $8.5 million, for example. She had been seeking $144 million.
In an interview, Ms. Dean said that she was proud to hold Uber to account but that its courtroom tactics added trauma — beyond the pain of reliving the Uber incident.
“Focus was shifted away from the actual assault and on to my choices,” she said. “It just made me feel like coming forward was a mistake.” When she returned home to Oklahoma, she said she needed to take a break from nursing school.
In a statement, Ms. Bueno and Ms. Brown, partners at the prominent law firm Kirkland & Ellis, said that they have an “ethical and professional obligation” to examine the credibility of each claim.
“We believe we performed our jobs as defense lawyers, and perhaps more significantly, our responsibility as women lawyers in these trials with a deep regard and appropriate deference not just to the seriousness of the allegations but also the impact of the trial on both these plaintiffs and women more generally,” they said.
Uber recently agreed to settle hundreds of lawsuits, including some nearing trial.
With others, it continues to fight — even in cases when drivers have been criminally convicted.
A woman in Texas claims that Uber was negligent after a driver forced her to perform oral sex while driving down the highway. In a criminal trial, a jury found the driver guilty, sentencing him to 11 years in prison. The conviction was affirmed on appeal.
The woman’s lawsuit is scheduled for trial in October. Uber has referred to the assault as an “alleged incident” in court documents. During a hearing in June, a judge asked Uber’s lawyers whether the company would contest that the sexual assault happened.
“We certainly don’t know enough at this stage,” responded Geoffrey Wyatt, a Kirkland & Ellis partner representing Uber. “Having a criminal trial transcript is a nice start to understanding the factual allegations in the case,” he added. “That’s all it is. It’s just a start.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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4) 100 Animals and Plants Just Got Some Much-Needed Help
A new fund called the Phoenix Species Project will provide $200 million to help pull imperiled wildlife back from the brink of extinction.
By Catrin Einhorn, Aug. 4, 2026
Some of the imperiled animals included in the Phoenix Species Project. Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark
The Trump administration is rolling back protections for endangered species. Countries around the world are failing to deliver on their conservation commitments. Corporations are backpedaling on environmental pledges.
Still, 100 imperiled animals and plants got some good news on Tuesday.
A new fund called the Phoenix Species Project said it would pump $200 million into efforts to pull these animals and plants back from the brink of extinction and even restore them in the wild. It’s among the largest philanthropic funds focused entirely on species recovery and it stands out for both the scope and specificity of the wildlife included.
The project is a collaboration between Re:wild, a nonprofit group co-founded by the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and the Bezos Earth Fund, a private foundation created by Jeff Bezos, the billionaire behind Amazon.
The move comes amid alarming declines in global biodiversity, meaning the variety of life on the planet. Species and ecosystems are shrinking as humans plow, pave and mine the earth’s land, pollute its rivers and pull fish from its oceans. Climate change is adding new pressure. Human consumption — of food, energy and countless material goods — is ultimately to blame.
The hundred species were chosen because they were near extinction, had local organizations already working to save them and represent a diversity of habitats, countries and types of species.
There’s the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander in North Carolina, whose already dwindling habitat was largely leveled by mudslides from the remnants of Hurricane Helene in 2024. There’s a charming plant in South Africa called the fuzzy belly button whose sudden popularity as houseplants, particularly in East Asia, has driven it to near extinction in the wild. And there’s the bowmouth guitarfish in the Indo-Pacific, which looks like a cross between a ray and a shark and is killed for its prized fins.
“Even species down to very small numbers have been able to recover with the right resources, the right partners on the ground,” said Wes Sechrest, co-founder and chief executive of Re:wild.
For some species, the money will unlock resources that should make recovery relatively straightforward, Dr. Sechrest said. Others, like Mexico’s vaquita porpoise, face far more challenging paths.
Julia P.G. Jones, a professor of conservation science at Bangor University in Wales whose research seeks to make environmental efforts more effective, welcomed the sizable donations. And she said that broader, system-level changes were also needed to ensure that wild nature and people can thrive into the future.
“While species conservation can win some battles, we risk losing the war without bigger changes to how we use our environment,” Dr. Jones said.
Take Mr. Bezos’ company, Amazon. Last week, it reached No. 1 on the Fortune Global 500 list of the largest companies. But its enormous sales are helping fuel the very problems that conservationists are left trying to solve.
“Amazon, like other big multinational corporations, is driving habitat loss and extinction through massive consumerism,” said Brian O’Donnell, who runs a nature advocacy group that has received money from the Bezos Earth Fund. He emphasized his admiration for the people there, praising their good work and noting his excitement for this latest effort.
“Does it fully offset their responsibility?” he continued. “No, but this is a really cool fund that is super needed.”
Amazon’s emissions have been going up in recent years, even though it helped start the Climate Pledge in 2019, promising to reach net-zero emissions by 2040. A spokesperson for the company said supply chain emissions and artificial intelligence were largely responsible for the rise but said Amazon remains committed to achieving its pledge.
The Bezos Earth Fund declined to make Mr. Bezos available for an interview. Tom Taylor, who worked at Amazon as a senior executive for more than 20 years and is now chief executive of the Bezos Earth Fund, acknowledged that companies must do far more to improve sustainability.
At the same time, he noted that consumers play an important role. Yes, Amazon makes it easy to buy stuff, he said, “but each of us individually have responsibility to make the decisions we make.”
Beneath the economic and political dynamics are the local groups fighting to stave off extinctions, who say this influx of money is going to make a big difference.
For the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, it will mean boosting numbers in a captive breeding program and restoring habitat lost to the storm and invasive tree diseases so that the salamanders can be returned to the wild, said JJ Apodaca, executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, which will be receiving a grant from the new fund.
“It gives us a real chance of success that we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” Dr. Apodaca said.
For the fuzzy belly button plant, a succulent that has lost more than two-thirds of its population to harvesting since 2019, when it became very popular abroad, the money will allow conservationists to breed more plants in captivity, buy trail cameras for security and fund work with communities so the plant can be returned to the wild without getting overharvested again, said Domitilla Raimondo, the threatened species program manager at the South African National Biodiversity Institute.
“They’re not as charismatic as a panda bear or a rhino, so they don’t tend to get the love and attention that other species get,” she said. “What is really great about this Phoenix recovery plan is it’s giving equal love to different species.”
Still, it includes only three invertebrates, among them a snail in Tahiti, and no insects.
Vivek Menon, chair of the Species Survival Commission at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said the 100 species were a “fantastic first step” and emphasized the need to scale quickly.
More than 11,000 species are classified as either critically endangered or extinct in the wild on the I.U.C.N. Red List, the leading global scientific authority on the status of species. Almost 40,000 more are endangered or vulnerable.
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5) The U.S. Relies on Family Caregivers. Millions of Them Are Kids.
The modern health care system requires the work of caregiving to fall to whoever else lives in a household — even if they’re kids.
By Helen Ouyang, Photographs by Stephanie Sinclair, Aug. 5, 2026
SuSann Forman-Ferreira, 74, and her eighth-grade grandson and caregiver, Zion Zebedee Hedgepeth, at their home in Boca Raton, Fla., in June.
Isabella Myricle Robinson was 15 and hanging out in her bedroom, surrounded by her stuffed Hello Kitty dolls, when she heard her mother, Rosa Seda, cry out. She raced into her mother’s room and found her lying on the floor. Rosa didn’t seem to be breathing. “Mama, wake up!” Isabella screamed. She shook her mother’s head from side to side and told her to breathe. “I honestly thought that she was gonna pass away right there,” she says. Rosa had collapsed after her doctor called her with bad news: Her breast cancer had spread to her brain.
By then, Isabella had already been caring for her mother for a year and a half. “It all went downhill from 14,” she says. After Rosa’s right breast was removed, Isabella would skip school to milk the tube that drained her post-op fluid, even as she feared pulling the tube out. She would change Rosa’s bandages and help her bathe, sort her pills morning and night and spray the bathroom with Lysol so her mother wouldn’t pick up an infection. At Rosa’s medical appointments, where Isabella took notes, she learned how cancer spreads. “I don’t even know how that physically is possible to have cancer in your bloodstream,” Isabella told me. “But that’s what the doctors say.”
In 2024 and 2025, Rosa had two operations on the tumors in her brain, leaving Isabella to tend to new surgical wounds and make sure her mother didn’t fall. Isabella scheduled Rosa’s doctor appointments and filled out medical forms.
Though Isabella’s father slept in their apartment’s living room — her parents had divorced years earlier, but he moved back in after Rosa’s initial diagnosis — he was in poor health himself and away at work much of the time. And because Isabella’s three grown siblings all lived elsewhere (two were in the military), they were unable to come home regularly. The only time she received any sort of outside assistance was after her mother was hospitalized for severe dehydration and near kidney failure. The hospital arranged a month’s worth of weekly visits by a physical therapist to get Rosa walking again.
Isabella, who lives outside Atlanta, is one of an estimated four million children in the United States caring for an adult family member who is sick or disabled or old, according to a 2025 report from AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving. That figure is an extrapolation from surveys of adult caregivers that include only children who are reported as additional helpers; it doesn’t capture those who provide care by themselves or attend to siblings with medical needs. Sociodemographic shifts will undoubtedly push their numbers higher: Members of the baby boom generation are aging into the years when they are likely to need daily assistance at home, while increased housing costs are packing more families into multigenerational homes.
The health care system is adding to these pressures. Financial incentives are shortening hospital stays, and services that used to be provided on the wards are left to those at home. “People are being discharged without the resources they need to be able to care for their loved ones,” says Michelle Bolden, a nurse who founded the nonprofit Call for Caring. “We send them home to manage Foley catheters or wounds or g-tubes — all types of things. And there’s minimal amount of training that’s done.”
Federal cuts to Medicaid, the country’s main payer for long-term aid at home, will force some people from the program and reduce home care for others. And even for those who remain eligible — or who can pay for it themselves — support may be elusive: Last year, the home care waiting list for Medicaid beneficiaries alone topped 600,000. Nearly one-third of all home care aides, who typically make less than $17 an hour, are immigrants, and the Labor Department projects about 766,000 openings every year. Inevitably the work falls to whoever else lives in the household — even if they’re children.
“Something that has been a detriment to the kids is this whole perception of the ‘sandwich caregiver,’” Melinda S. Kavanaugh, a professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told me. Kavanaugh was referring to an all-too-familiar figure: the middle-aged American woman simultaneously looking after her aging parents and her young kids. But this prevailing image of who counts as a caregiver makes it harder to see those who don’t fit that picture — especially if they’re children.
Children in this role not only have different worries — in Isabella’s case, turning in her algebra homework, making it to practice with her majorette team — they also lack access to the state or federal resources available to their adult counterparts. This invisibility, the result of societal blind spots, leaves them with few places to turn.
Growing up as a caregiver shapes a child’s life in all kinds of ways. But it is at school where this responsibility tends to inflict the greatest toll. At Charles R. Drew High School in Riverdale, Ga., where Isabella is a student, she missed 12 days during her freshman year; as a sophomore, she missed 38 days. By the time I met her, when she was a junior, she had missed 17 days her first semester. The calculation for her was simple: School mattered; her mother mattered more. “I know my grades suffered,” Isabella, who wants to be a veterinarian, told me. “But my mom needed me.” She eventually left the majorette team because rehearsals and games lasted into the evening — and that meant leaving her mother alone for too long.
Isabella’s experience is not atypical for children who have to care for a family member. A 2024 study in Rhode Island found that about 14 percent of the state’s students reported that their absences from school were because they had to look after someone. Nationally, teen caregivers are about 8 percentage points less likely to be enrolled in school at all.
Those caregiving students who remain in school tend to be less engaged and spend about 45 fewer minutes per day on educational activities; not surprisingly, they get worse grades. Caregiving youth also grow up to be adults with lower levels of education, even after controlling for socioeconomic status and other demographics.
Yet in many schools, no one is trained to identify caregiving as something that can add significant stress to a student’s life. Drew High School’s principal, Tangela Benjamin, told me that for years she was unaware of the problem. Then on a September morning in 2024, as she greeted students passing through the lobby metal detector, one girl was pulled aside by a security officer; when she was cited for wearing a midriff-baring top, the girl flung herself to the floor and screamed, “I can’t take it anymore!” Afterward, in Benjamin’s office, the student confided that she was overwhelmed by having to care for her grandmother. Benjamin calls that moment her “awakening.”
The awakening didn’t come with remedies, though. “I felt helpless,” Benjamin says. It’s no mystery to her why students miss school to care for someone at home: “Just straight up poverty,” she says. “My kids are dealing with more poverty than most.” (At Drew High School, all students are eligible for free lunch.)
The rise of remote schooling, spurred by the pandemic, can also make caregiving easier to miss — and harder to relieve. I met an anxious teenage boy who recently switched to virtual school, motivated in part by being able to care for his bedridden mother. Going remote enabled him to help her more, but it also meant that, while at home and not in a school, there was no designated stretch of the day when he was off duty.
Because of the symptoms caused by her brain tumors, Isabella’s mother was no longer able to continue at her warehouse job packing sunglasses. The disability benefits didn’t improve their circumstances much, as Rosa’s private insurance gave way to Medicare. Their food stamps were reduced to $63 a month from $536. (They have since increased to $110.)
Isabella coped, in part, by writing poems in a red notebook:
Speechless, she lost her words
out of words, she felt hopeless
she doesn’t know what to say
what step does she take?
At school, she also turned to her health care sciences teacher, Ericka Collins. “She’s been in the health care field so long that she’s understanding what I’m going through,” Isabella says. After one of Rosa’s surgeries, Isabella sought Collins’s advice. “Is my mom supposed to be in pain this long?” she asked.
Sometimes, Collins says, she went into an empty classroom and screamed in frustration at Isabella’s situation. Other times she cried. Or prayed. Collins, like Benjamin, felt helpless. “Barring getting totally involved in going to their house,” she says, “what can you do?”
Earlier this year, I accompanied Pilar Brugman, a family specialist for the American Association of Caregiving Youth, the only organization in the United States dedicated to directly serving children caring for sick, disabled or elderly family members, to a rusty mobile home in northern Palm Beach County, Fla. Brugman was checking on Kristen Quiroga Rivera, who was 13, and her brother, Jusseth, who was 17. Their mother, Olga Rivera, was on dialysis, suffered from diabetes and had recently had both of her feet partially amputated. (Their father died from a stroke more than a year earlier.)
Olga referred to Kristen as “a little nurse.” She bathed Olga and checked her blood pressure morning and night, giving her an extra pill when it was too high. She disinfected and wrapped her feet. When Jusseth was around, he sometimes cooked for the family.
Brugman arrived at the family’s home with a $25 Walmart gift card. “We are not teachers, we are not police,” Brugman told me. “We never ask, ‘Hey, are you illegal or not?’ We ask, ‘What is it you need?’”
Brugman had been helping complete paperwork for social service agencies for the family and trying to arrange tutoring and therapy for Kristen. On this Thursday in January, Brugman coached Olga through the process of reapplying for the disability benefits Jusseth was supposed to receive for his A.D.H.D.
When I asked Kristen about her caregiving, she replied, “To be honest, I think I’m starting to hate it.” She wanted to confess something else, too: “Sometimes I’m selfish,” she whispered. “Sometimes when my mom calls at night, I pretend I’m asleep, because I just want to go to bed and I want to be left alone.”
A.A.C.Y. contracts with a home aid agency to offer respite from caregiving and organizes events — museum trips, ice-skating outings, overnight camps — so these youngsters can meet one another, take breaks from their duties and just be kids. When it became clear that Olga’s jerry-built wheelchair ramp was too unstable and their home was falling into disrepair, a staff member rallied her church to help: A dozen churchgoers arrived on a Saturday and went about fixing and cleaning.
The program, which was started in 2006, was born out of a set of questions that its founder, Connie Siskowski, a nurse who was working toward a Ph.D., added to a survey distributed throughout Palm Beach County. The responses revealed an entire population of caregiving youth. They weren’t doing well: Two-thirds missed school-related activities, failed to complete their homework or had their studies interrupted. Siskowski recalls that education officials could not easily ignore the findings, so she was welcomed into the school district, the nation’s 10th largest, to try to help.
While A.A.C.Y. works in Palm Beach County schools to identify caregiving students — its direct services are offered only in this district — home visits are central to its operation. A.A.C.Y. has served more than 3,000 children, who typically stay with the program for longer than five years. But not all families let its staff past their front doors. “They don’t want to get in trouble,” says Thamar Mathias, who came to A.A.C.Y. from an agency under Florida’s Department of Children and Families. As a family specialist for A.A.C.Y., though, she can “maybe help avoid it getting to the point where the state has to intervene.”
The state had intervened already once with Zion Zebedee Hedgepeth, when he was born, removing him from his mother because she tested positive for drugs. I met him when he was an eighth grader, and his paternal grandmother, SuSann Forman-Ferreira, who adopted him, was doing her best to keep the state from taking him away again. She saw A.A.C.Y. as an ally in this effort.
These days, Zion is most worried about SuSann’s driving, which is why he has designated himself the passenger-seat “driver” on all her medical appointments. He laughed as he explained to his A.A.C.Y. family specialist, Kayli McBean, that he could “get a fake license” if only he could grow a mustache. McBean knew deeper feelings lurked beneath the jokes. “Zion belittles a lot of the things he does,” she told me — something she discovered after she started visiting his home.
SuSann, who is 74, has suffered five strokes and three heart attacks. During McBean’s visit, while Zion was at school, SuSann mentioned that she had fallen three times in the last month but refused medical attention. “I know if I go to the doctor, they’ll hospitalize me,” she told McBean. Then where would Zion go?
The boy was having problems at school. “The main thing is that he worries about you,” SuSann recalled his pediatrician saying. After that, SuSann promised herself that she would never let Zion see her cry. So she cries to McBean instead.
“Sometimes I don’t even let him know how bad I’m feeling every day before he goes to school,” SuSann said.
“You’re stronger than you think,” McBean said. Then she pointed out how Zion helps her.
“I don’t want that,” SuSann replied, through tears.
“When he talks about you, his face lights up,” McBean said.
Later, a school administrator called about Zion’s makeup courses. “Based on the number of classes he failed, he’s going to be doing it for a long time,” the administrator told SuSann.
Still, if Zion stays in A.A.C.Y.’s program, he is very likely to graduate from high school. Over the past decade or so, A.A.C.Y.’s efforts have produced a 98 percent graduation rate. (In Palm Beach County during this period, it was under 90 percent.) Recently, SuSann, unable to keep up with home payments, has been thinking about moving up the coast, closer to her sister. But that would mean leaving behind the services that A.A.C.Y. provides, which don’t extend beyond the county.
“Family caregivers are not controversial,” says Elizabeth Olson, a leading researcher on young caregivers and a geography professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But once you talk about kids being involved, all of a sudden it’s a controversy.”
Such controversy exists, in part, because of the complexity of child protection laws in the United States. Currently, 42 states consider a parent’s disability as a reason to terminate parental rights. Lawmakers, says Kavanaugh, of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “don’t know how to wrap their minds around how to support a kid that’s not part of the foster care system.”
Another factor contributes to keeping these children under the radar: Identifying those who care for family members can also mean having to reckon with child labor laws. “If we are to acknowledge these children as caregivers, then we’re also maybe by default acknowledging that children are working,” Kavanaugh says. “And we don’t want that.”
It’s not as if these children are being routinely screened for in medical settings, either. Julie Belkowitz, a pediatrician and professor at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me that when she shares research on caregiving youth with other doctors, the response, no matter their specialty, is consistent: “Wow, I never really thought about it before.”
“Little is known” about these children, the Government Accountability Office wrote in a report last year. While the report acknowledged this population’s “unique challenges,” it offered just one recommendation, a clarification on a federal government website stating that some resources for adult caregivers could potentially be extended to those under 18. A 17-year-old might count, that website now suggests — “if state law allows.”
This falls short, Olson says, because it doesn’t force people to ask: “What could we do as a country? What should be the minimal expectations for us?” Instead, it just says, as she put it, that if you want to create a program for caregiving youth, “you might be able to come here for resources — good luck.”
In the absence of any meaningful federal framework for these children, Rhode Island is trying to build something of its own. The Rhode Island Department of Education, in partnership with A.A.C.Y. and academic researchers, recently rolled out the country’s first statewide initiative to support caregiving students when it updated graduation requirements for the class of 2028 to focus on student readiness — a shift that allows schools to accommodate students whose home obligations might otherwise hold them back.
This February, RIDE gave recommendations to its educators, like naming a point person, for example, so students aren’t forced to repeatedly explain their situation to a rotating cast of adults. Educators can also offer more flexible schedules and provide credit for work done outside the classroom. And RIDE plans to use a nearly $6 million federal mental-health grant for these students, including training school psychologists on their specific needs. Schools need to serve caregiving students too, says Stephen Osborn, the RIDE official leading the effort. “Not just have kids who are taking eight A.P.s because they don’t have any adult responsibilities.”
Before the initiative, teachers would come into Mary Watkins’s office at Davies Career & Technical High School in Lincoln, R.I., where she’s the superintendent, and say, “I have a situation.” Nobody even had the proper vocabulary to describe it. “Now someone comes in and they’re like, ‘I think I might have a student who may be a caregiving youth,’” Watkins says.
In July, California passed a law recognizing caregiving youth, directing its Department of Education to develop guidance on ways schools may support them. But even with educators’ best efforts, schools still can’t overcome what is, at its core, a larger societal challenge. “There’s only so much schools can do,” says Emma Armstrong-Carter, a developmental psychologist and professor at Tufts University who’s collaborating with RIDE.
Saul Becker, one of the world’s foremost researchers on caregiving youth and a professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, in England, finds it “shocking” that A.A.C.Y. still mostly stands alone in the United States. Elsewhere in the world, caregiving children are formally recognized and met with services. “If you get into any taxi now in the United Kingdom and say, ‘Have you heard of a young carer?’ they will know exactly what I’m talking about,” Becker says. Children who care for family are identified by local authorities, which gives them rights to assistance. Similarly, Australia’s government has set expectations for public service agencies to take young carers into account. And in Sweden, when an adult is sick, health workers are supposed to find out what burdens fall on any children at home.
Experts point out that helping care for family members isn’t necessarily a sign of household pathology. Children in these situations can feel pride and gain resilience; they learn skills and often end up in health-related fields. But such outcomes can sound like a comforting fiction when responsibilities become too heavy, a way of valorizing a burden that American society hasn’t managed to alleviate. In Sweden, by contrast, children might “do small things,” says Pauline Johansson, a health care professor at Linnaeus University, but not at the expense of school, friends or leisure; when that happens, they are relieved of their duties, even if that means sending aides into the home. “If you can’t take care of yourself, public service should take that responsibility,” she says.
This February, Isabella was particularly stressed, but not about Rosa. “My mom is OK,” she texted me. “My dad, on the other hand, not so much.” Her father, who tends to be quiet about his health, went into cardiac arrest outside a grocery store. Bystanders who administered CPR saved him, but his heart stopped several more times in the ambulance and hospital. By the time he was sent home, his heart was so damaged that he had to wear a medical vest that would shock him if he went into an abnormal rhythm — yet another piece of equipment for Isabella to learn. “It is a lot of information,” she told me.
After her father’s hospitalization, Isabella was more exhausted: “I come home and just sleep, mainly, and do my homework when I need to.” Making up assignments was challenging, particularly in her literature class. At one point, she had fallen so far behind that she was running the numbers on whether a C grade was still within reach, but she didn’t feel comfortable opening up to that teacher. She was also unable to practice her majorette skills. “I might pick my dancing career back up, like when I go to college,” she told me, seemingly unfazed.
Then in March, Rosa found out that a new tumor was growing in her skull. So far, radiation has kept it at bay. She hopes to avoid surgery again.
More recently, Isabella switched jobs, going from Chick-fil-A to a shoe store in the mall, her income necessary “to keep the roof over our heads,” a phrase she seems to have borrowed from Rosa. For the past few years, while her classmates looked forward to graduation, she sometimes wondered if her mother would still be around for it. But she didn’t expect to be caring for her father too. “It is the reality that I am living,” Isabella said. “So I basically have to deal with it.”
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6) After Trump’s Board of Peace Made a Plan for Gaza, the Bombings Grew Worse
President Trump announced a proposal aimed at achieving the disarmament of Hamas and an Israeli withdrawal. Israel ramped up attacks on the Palestinian enclave.
By Isabel Kershner and Adam Rasgon, Aug. 5, 2026
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, and Adam Rasgon from Tel Aviv.
A mass funeral n Gaza City on Tuesday for 112 people whose bodies had been pulled from rubble in recent weeks. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Soon after President Trump announced a new plan last week to deliver peace and security in Gaza, the Palestinian enclave instead experienced a spike in deadly Israeli bombings, which threatened to undermine hopes for long-awaited progress.
On Sunday, Israeli strikes killed 18 people, according to the health ministry in Gaza, making it one of the deadliest days there since a troubled cease-fire came into force in October. Gaza health ministry data from the conflict does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Israeli strikes a day earlier killed at least two people and damaged warehouses for medical supplies, Palestinian officials said. And on Monday, the Israeli military struck a car on a beachside road, killing two, according to Gazan officials. No new Israeli strikes have been reported in Gaza since Monday evening.
With many of the plan’s details still unclear, including a timetable for the Hamas disarmament at its heart, the 15-point plan released by Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace — which also calls for an Israeli withdrawal and a new administration in Gaza — risks being undone before the specifics are worked out.
On Monday, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office, Doron Spielman, pushed back against the terms of the agreement, which Israel had not signed. “The version that has been made public does not reflect Israel’s positions,” he said in a statement. He added, “Israel has conveyed its comments and concerns on the proposed framework to our American counterparts.” He said the concerns centered on the issue of Hamas disarmament.
Nickolay E. Mladenov, a veteran Bulgarian diplomat who is the Board of Peace’s high representative for Gaza, leveled rare criticism at Israel over its attacks.
“Two days of strikes across Gaza have killed civilians and destroyed medical supplies that people depend on,” he said in a statement posted on social media on Sunday. He said that the attacks came after “intense efforts” by the mediators to reach a deal and that he and his team were “working around the clock with the parties, mediators and regional partners to de-escalate.”
In a joint statement on Monday, three countries that have served as mediators — Qatar, Egypt and Turkey — condemned what they described as “the ongoing Israeli violations” in Gaza.
Hamas said in a statement that “entire families” were wiped out on Sunday, and it accused Israel of “a deliberate escalation” aimed at blocking the plan.
The Israeli military has said that its strikes in recent days have targeted Hamas fighters and weapons infrastructure. It also said it had taken steps to mitigate harm to civilians.
Since the October cease-fire, Israel has steadily stepped up attacks across the Gaza Strip. In July, the military carried out almost daily strikes and named at least 50 militants it said it had eliminated, including what it said were Hamas members who had participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel that killed about 1,200 people. That attack ignited the war in Gaza, which has left more than 70,000 dead, according to officials, and much of the enclave in ruins.
On Tuesday, a mass funeral was held in Gaza City for 112 people whose bodies had been pulled from the rubble in recent weeks, according to Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for the civil defense, which operates under the Hamas-run interior ministry.
Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst and a former Israeli military intelligence officer specializing in Palestinian affairs, said it was “no coincidence” that Israel had recently increased its pace of attacks.
Israel was either showing it did not care about the agreement, he said, “or there was a fear that the point may come where the United States tells Israel to stop” and the military was striking while it still could.
On Sunday night, Mohammed Dahlan, an influential Palestinian exile and a confidant of the president of the United Arab Emirates, wrote on social media that Jared Kushner, a son-in-law and an aide to Mr. Trump, had provided assurances that he reached an agreement with Israel that it would cease its strikes. But shortly thereafter, he edited the post, deleting the reference to an agreement, and said Mr. Kushner had conveyed he was “working with the Israeli side to stop the attacks on Gaza.”
Negotiators on the Board of Peace described the new agreement with Hamas, announced by Mr. Trump last week, as a “road map” intended to cement the fragile cease-fire, disarm Hamas, secure a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and enable a return to normalcy for the population and the start of reconstruction.
But key questions immediately arose over whether Hamas and Israel would carry out the agreement. According to the text, the parties were given two weeks to determine a schedule, which an international verification committee could extend.
Stark differences have already emerged over sequencing, among other issues. The agreement with Hamas stipulates that Israel must initially fulfill its obligations under the October cease-fire deal, which called for an immediate suspension of Israeli attacks.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had pledged total victory over Hamas, along with its dismantlement. He said on social media on Tuesday that Israel would not pull back from its current positions in Gaza before Hamas had completely disarmed.
Hamas, for its part, has long touted armed struggle against Israel as the core of its ideology. The group’s weapons have so far helped it keep power in Gaza, though Hamas has said it is willing to hand over the administration of the territory to a committee of Palestinian technocrats working under the Board of Peace’s supervision.
Palestinian analysts said Israel’s continued airstrikes in Gaza strengthened Hamas officials’ argument that Israel will press its military campaign even if the group agrees to disarm.
“They’re saying: ‘Look, I told you so,’” said Akram Atallah, a Palestinian columnist who is originally from Gaza and lives in London. “They feel like Israel is proving them right.”
Hamas now says it agreed to relinquish its “heavy weapons,” in part on condition that Israel commits to halting attacks and withdrawing. The group has found itself with few regional allies, and most of its senior leaders in Gaza have been killed.
In an Instagram post on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu said, “We’re not withdrawing from our current lines until Hamas is totally disarmed.”
Mr. Spielman, the Israeli government spokesman, said that over the past eight months, according to Israeli intelligence, “Hamas has used the cease-fire to rearm, recruit thousands of additional terrorists, rebuild its military infrastructure and prepare for further October 7-style massacres.”
The 15-point plan has left elements of disarmament vague. It calls for a “gradual, sequential and timebound manner” for decommissioning and storing heavy weapons, with the timetable yet to be determined.
The agreement, however, adds that, at the “end of the process,” only the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the group of Palestinian technocrats hoping to take over governing under the Board of Peace’s administration, will “hold, control or store weapons in Gaza.” No weapons will be handed to Israel or non-Palestinian parties.
The Board of Peace has tried to downplay the differences. After Mr. Mladenov and other board members met on Monday with Mr. Netanyahu, the board said in a post on social media that it and Israel “share a common understanding of the ultimate objectives.”
“The goal is clear and is not in question: the complete decommissioning of weapons in the Strip and the transition away from rule by the gun to civilian governance,” the board’s statement said. It added, “Reaching it will be a process.”
In Gaza, residents expressed doubts that Israel and Hamas would carry out the agreement, stoking fears the population could be left in limbo indefinitely.
“We’re worried nothing will change,” said Saed Abu Aita, 46, who is from Jabaliya, in northern Gaza. His two daughters were killed in an Israeli strike early in the war, he said, and he and his surviving family remain displaced in a tent in central Gaza.
For the past two years, Mr. Abu Aita said, he has been trying to gain permission to leave Gaza and reunite with his brother in France. The latest agreement has done little to make him want to stay put.
“We’re not reassured about the situation at all,” he said.
Heedo Abu Laban, Iyad Abuheweila and Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.
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7) Extreme Weather Brings Fierce Winds, and Gentle Hugs, to Sesame Street
An episode this week focuses on the dangerous effects of warming, without mentioning climate change.
By David Gelles, Aug. 5, 2026
No place is safe from climate change these days. Not even Sesame Street, where sunny days used to sweep the clouds away.
On Monday, a fierce storm tore through the set of the 57-year-old children’s show, knocking over lampposts, blowing out windows and scattering debris around Oscar the Grouch’s trash can.
The fictional cloudburst was part of a special episode, “Storm on Sesame Street,” created to help children make sense of the extreme weather that has become increasingly common across the world as the planet warms.
In the show, viewable on Netflix and PBS Kids, Elmo, Big Bird, Bert, Ernie, Grover and Snuffleupagus prepare for an incoming storm, then assess the damage after the clouds clear.
Left unaddressed in the episode was where all this extreme weather is coming from, and why it’s increasing. There was no mention of climate change, let alone the fossil fuel emissions that are the main driver of global warming.
Rocio Galarza, vice president of U.S. educational programs for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind the show, said the Sesame Street team was well aware of the overwhelming scientific evidence showing that human activity is dangerously warming the planet.
“Definitely, that’s what the science shows,” she said. But the focus of the episode, she said, was on how a child would experience extreme weather.
But the episode also arrives at an uncertain and politically charged moment for PBS, which has been home to Sesame Street since 1969.
Last year, President Trump signed an executive order seeking to eliminate funding for PBS and NPR, which the order cited as “biased media.” Two months later, Congress voted to claw back roughly $500 million in annual funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization that distributes federal money to NPR and PBS.
The episode aired as wildfires were raging in the Pacific Northwest, Canada and Europe, and as violent storms and floods have recently battered the Northeast. Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are at a record high, driving up global temperatures.
President Trump has called climate change a hoax and his administration has rolled back a host of environmental regulations, decimated funding for climate science and scrubbed mentions of climate change from government websites, among other moves.
The special has been in the works for more than a year and came in response to the growing number of extreme weather events hitting the United States and other countries around the globe.
The Sesame Street team was struck by the fact that children born in 2020 will experience up to seven times more extreme weather than children born in 1960.
“We know that this topic is something that families are thinking about,” Ms. Galarza said. “What we wanted to do was look at what are the strategies that could actually be used in a variety of situations.”
In the episode, as the storm bears down on Sesame Street, Elmo helps his father distribute food and water to neighbors, Snuffleupagus preaches the virtues of hugs, and Bert and Ernie offer shelter to a menagerie of barnyard animals. After the storm, Elmo and the gang survey the wreckage and plan recovery efforts.
“The idea is that Elmo is helpful, that Elmo is brave and courageous, and that it’s OK to be scared sometimes,” Ms. Galarza said.
At the end of the episode, the recording artist Post Malone appears and sings “we can go through something hard, but I know we’ll make it through ‘cause you will always be there for me and I’ll be there for you.”
The intention, Ms. Galarza said, was to help children understand the values of preparedness and rebuilding, and to explore some of the questions they might have.
“What do we do now? Can I, as a 3, 4, 5-year old, be part of the rebuilding process?” she said. “Children do have those questions.”
Harriet Shugarman, director of ClimateMama, a nonprofit organization aimed at helping parents communicate with children about climate change, said not addressing climate change directly was an appropriate choice by the episode’s creators.
“We don’t have to name it for children that young,” she said. “There are children all over the U.S. right now who are experiencing flooding and fires and storms, and that show shows them that they can be empowered, and that it’s OK to feel fear and express that, too.”
This isn’t the first time that Sesame Street, which airs in 190 countries, has addressed big storms.
In 2001, the show aired an episode in which Big Bird’s nest gets destroyed by a hurricane and the community comes together to rebuild it. Ms. Galarza said that episode remained in high demand, with local stations asking for it after disasters including Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012.
Other programs for young viewers have directly taken on climate change. “Octonauts: Above and Beyond,” a spinoff of a BBC program, explicitly dealt with global warming. And some shows aimed at older children, including “Molly of Denali,” also produced by PBS, have focused on issues like the thawing of permafrost.
Still, a 2022 report from the Aspen Institute found that just 1.4 percent of more than 660 episodes of children’s programming the organization reviewed included content about climate change.
Sesame Street has addressed other weighty subjects, including death, addiction, racism and incarceration. And that’s made it an occasional target of conservatives.
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, assailed the show in 2021 for promoting the Covid-19 vaccine. Last year, Representative Mary Miller, Republican of Illinois, was angered that the show celebrated Pride month, prompting her to write on X that “PBS is shamelessly grooming our children while collecting taxpayer dollars. This is evil and should infuriate every parent in America. DEFUND!!”
When the funding cuts were announced last year, Sesame Street posted a statement on X.
“For more than 50 years, Sesame Workshop has been proud to partner with PBS to bring learning and joy to children across America,” it read, alongside an image of Big Bird and Snuffleupagus. “Generations of children have benefited from the public investment that has enabled PBS to do such important work, and the need remains.”
Ms. Galarza said Sesame Workshop had some funding that had been previously allocated, but was facing an “anticipated shortfall.”
Sesame Workshop also lost substantial funding it had been receiving from the United States Agency for International Development, leading it to close its offices in Bangladesh and Iraq.
In addition to this week’s episode, the Sesame Street team developed work sheets for children on what to do in a tornado, blackout or fire, as well as guides for parents.
The organization also secured grants from Ford Motor Company and Amazon to assemble and distribute thousands of kid-friendly “go bags” that include backpacks, blankets, toothbrushes and stuffed animals.
Ms. Galarza said she hoped the episode and the go bags would help children understand that at the end of the day, everyone was dealing with climate change together.
The Sesame Street storm special succeeded in making a frightening topic less daunting, Ms. Shugarman said.
“They’re giving parents ways to help through these really scary moments, and show that there are ways that kids, through hugs and songs, can manage through these disasters,” she said.
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8) He Had Tenure. The New School Laid Him Off Anyway.
The professor, a longtime critic of the university, was among 19 educators who lost their positions as the institution navigated financial woes.
By Sharon Otterman, Aug. 5, 2026
Sanjay Reddy had figured that being a tenured economics professor at the New School would shield him when he accused the university of bureaucratic bloat. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Professor Sanjay Reddy had been bluntly critical for years about how his university, the New School in New York City, managed its finances. He had thought that his status as a tenured professor of economics would protect him.
It didn’t.
He was laid off in June, along with 18 other New School professors, nine of whom also had tenure. The layoffs are part of an ongoing restructuring at the New School that administrators have said will rescue it from a crisis ignited by shrinking enrollment and crippling deficits. Sixty-eight staff members were also let go. Dozens of additional faculty members have left through buyouts and early retirements, which has shrunk the full-time faculty to 387 professors from 430 a year ago.
The dismissals represent the latest round of turmoil at the downtown Manhattan institution, which was founded as the New School for Social Research in 1919 by progressive professors as an alternative to traditional universities. The New School, which has about 8,500 students, has long struggled with finances, but its latest solution, some professors say, puts its legacy and future as a social science research institution at risk.
The firing of professors amid a larger reorganization has become increasingly common at American universities, particularly since the coronavirus pandemic, said Deepa Das Acevedo, a law professor at Emory University and author of “The War on Tenure.”
Universities, she said, are increasingly acting like other employers, finding “complicated and sometimes pretextual reasons” to fire employees, even those with tenure.
“What we’re seeing at the New School is emblematic of the rising pressures on higher education as a labor market and as an industry,” she said.
The New School’s handling of the layoffs has raised questions among hundreds of prominent professors around the United States and world. They wrote a letter calling on administrators to be more transparent about how the decisions were made.
Professor Reddy’s case is “particularly concerning,” said the letter; Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning Columbia University economist, is the lead signatory. “The criteria used in selecting faculty and staff for termination have not been adequately explained to the wider academic community,” the letter said.
Professor Reddy, 55, stands out because he was the only economics professor to be terminated. His department is not among the roughly two dozen programs being closed or redesigned. In The New York Times and elsewhere, Professor Reddy had repeatedly been quoted as blaming the university’s financial woes on administrative bloat and bad real estate deals, challenging the official line that the defining problem was a faculty that cost too much.
“I felt, and this was probably naïve and misguided, that I should be able to use tenure in this way,” he said in an interview. “This is what tenure is for. It’s within my professional competence as an economist.”
He was stunned, he said, when he was given two options: step down by July 1 and sign a nondisclosure agreement in exchange for 11 months’ severance, or be terminated, with his last day in December. He chose the latter.
Richard Kessler, the New School’s provost, declined to comment on Professor Reddy’s situation, citing privacy rules. But he said that the university had determined that the economics department, which has nine full-time faculty members, “has more teaching capacity than we have need for.”
He defended the layoff decisions as a whole. About 30 additional professors at the university who could have been laid off, he said, were found new positions instead.
“It was a remarkably extensive, and I feel, without any qualifications whatsoever, thoughtful process,” he said.
Paul Kottman, a tenured comparative literature scholar and the chair of the master’s program in liberal studies at the New School, was also terminated. He was asked to continue leading his program until his last day in December. The program, he said, had just received praise in a review process, as did his leadership of it.
The layoffs could set a dangerous precedent, Dr. Kottman said, particularly because they are happening in the center of New York City at an institution known for its commitment to academic freedom. “If my tenured position didn’t protect me, then who does it protect?” he said.
In an interview, Mr. Kessler said that the New School felt it had the right to fire tenured employees, even if their department or program wasn’t ending, because it was reorganizing the entire institution.
Before July 1, the New School consisted of four colleges. Now, Parsons School of Design and the College of Performing Arts have become a single, arts-focused college. A second college merges the New School for Social Research, which is the academic graduate school, and the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, the undergraduate college.
The new structure is designed to reduce costs and increase collaboration, said Mr. Kessler, a musician who was formerly the dean of the performing arts school.
There’s disagreement over whether such a restructuring permits the broad firing of tenured professors. The American Association of University Professors, a nonprofit organization, has shaped the national norms of tenure since 1940. It holds that tenured professors, unless they are being fired for cause, should be let go only in the case of a financial emergency, and only as part of the elimination of their academic program or department.
“A bureaucratic restructuring that leads to the selective elimination of faculty members really puts academic freedom in jeopardy,” said Mark Criley, a senior program officer in the association’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance. It particularly imperils professors “who have displeased administrators or trustees or donors,” he said.
But tenure norms are not laws, and the New School said it was abiding by its faculty handbook, which states that tenured faculty may be let go if there are “serious financial considerations or curricular change(s)” that require the university “to discontinue an academic department/program or college/school.”
Professor Reddy, who has been a faculty member for 17 years, disputed that interpretation. “They’ve used a very innovative and elastic legal theory, a heroic legal theory, you might say, to justify this,” he said.
Nearly all of the terminated faculty members were at the New School for Social Research and at Eugene Lang, because they have had larger enrollment declines than the arts-focused schools, Mr. Kessler said. The university has also paused nearly all Ph.D. admissions, which most affects the social research graduate school.
The History Department is among the most affected: Three professors were laid off, and two are taking early retirement under pressure, said Jeremy Varon, one of the retiring professors. Five professors will remain — “not enough to competently deliver a curriculum,” Professor Varon said.
Mr. Kessler said the cuts reflected that the university had already shifted toward art and design. Between 70 and 80 percent of students are coming to the New School “for some form of design education or creative education,” mostly at Parsons, he said.
Yet most tenured and full-time professors, who are more expensive to the university, work in the social sciences and liberal arts. Parsons, by contrast, relies heavily on part-time adjunct instructors.
“At some point in time, any organization has to take steps to bring the expenses in line with the revenues and also figure out how to plan for the future and essentially invest in strength,” Mr. Kessler said.
Koray Caliskan, a sociologist at Parsons who teaches strategic design and management, saw the restructuring in a positive light. The social sciences, he said, aren’t being lost at Parsons, because they are part of the curriculum for design students. The sweeping redesign of the colleges, he added, could open the way for innovative new doctoral programs.
But Judith Friedlander, a former New School dean and the author of a history of the institution, described the restructuring as a frontal attack on the university’s progressive, social research core.
“It no longer represents what this institution stood for and was about,” she said.
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9) ICE Threatens Sheriffs With Prosecution Over Access to Inmates
In a new tactic, federal immigration officials recently started saying they would criminally charge the elected county sheriffs in Minneapolis and Chicago.
By Ernesto Londoño and Hamed Aleaziz, Aug. 5, 2026
Ernesto Londoño reported from Minneapolis. Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy.
Tom Dart, the sheriff of Cook County, Ill., left, and Dawanna S. Witt, sheriff of Hennepin County, Minn., have both been given warnings, conveyed in a series of letters that federal agents began hand-delivering in early July. Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press, Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Federal officials recently started threatening to seek criminal charges against two elected county sheriffs who have declined to give immigration agents broad access to inmates subject to deportation.
The threats to prosecute the two sheriffs, in Minneapolis and Chicago, cities that have experienced some of the most intense immigration enforcement of the Trump era, are a new salvo in the president’s campaign against state and local officials who refuse to embrace his administration’s crackdown.
The warnings have been conveyed in a series of letters that federal agents began hand-delivering in early July to Sheriff Dawanna Witt of Hennepin County, Minn., which includes Minneapolis, and Sheriff Tom Dart of Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago. Both are Democrats.
The letters assert that failing to hand over inmates being sought by immigration agents could lead each elected official to be charged in federal court with witness tampering, a felony. The New York Times reviewed the letters.
Legal experts say it would be difficult if not impossible for federal prosecutors to charge the sheriffs with witness tampering, let alone prove the elements of that offense. But the threats are part of the Trump administration’s effort to portray so-called sanctuary jurisdictions as obstacles to the president’s mass deportation campaign. The Justice Department has sued several local governments over their unwillingness to cooperate on immigration enforcement.
Federal judges in Illinois and Minnesota have dismissed two lawsuits in which Sheriffs Witt and Dart were defendants, ruling that the Constitution gives states and cities the authority to refrain from assisting with immigration enforcement.
Sheriff Witt said the threat of prosecution — which has not been previously reported — would not lead her to rescind the department’s longstanding policy, under which requests from ICE seeking to take custody of inmates are honored only if there is a warrant from a judge.
“It’s a scare tactic,” Sheriff Witt said in an interview last week. Speaking in her office in downtown Minneapolis, which faces the federal courthouse, Sheriff Witt all but dared the federal government to make good on its threat.
“I don’t want to be arrested,” she said. “But they know where I am. Come and get me.”
Matt Walberg, a spokesman for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the largest jail in the Midwest, confirmed that Sheriff Dart also began receiving letters from ICE last month threatening to charge him with witness tampering.
In an emailed statement, the Department of Homeland Security said the letters were an effort to compel “sanctuary politicians” to hand over dangerous criminals so they can be deported.
Patrick Royal, a spokesman for the National Sheriffs’ Association, said on Monday that the group was not aware of any other sheriff having been threatened with criminal charges over access to inmates subject to deportation.
The extent to which jails work cooperatively with immigration agents varies widely around the country. The issue became a flashpoint after President Trump returned to the White House last year having promised to begin the largest deportation push in history.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, has argued that immigration enforcement could be done more safely and efficiently if all local jails turned over any inmates in the country illegally and being sought by ICE. He cited lack of cooperation from certain jurisdictions as a justification for the crackdowns the administration began last year in Chicago and the Twin Cities.
“If you want less officers in the street, then let us in the jail,” Mr. Homan said early this year.
Many state and county detention facilities in Republican-led states have struck agreements with ICE, making them force multiplier in the push to ramp up deportations.
Others, including several in Democratic-led states, cooperate routinely in some ways, for instance by turning over inmates convicted of serious crimes to ICE. Illinois has a state law that sharply limits the extent to which local officials can assist with immigration enforcement.
Whatever a particular jurisdiction’s level of cooperation, legal experts said they doubted the warning conveyed in the letters, which ICE referred to as “immigration subpoenas,” was a credible legal threat.
Ryan Wood, a former ICE lawyer who also served as a senior immigration judge in Minnesota until last year, said the agency has broad subpoena powers to compel people to testify and to turn over documents. But ICE subpoenas cannot be used to force a local official to transfer custody of an inmate, he said.
“It’s a creative use or misuse of the subpoena power that they have, which I’ve never seen before,” Mr. Wood said.
Former federal prosecutors who reviewed the letter said that refusal by a county official to turn over custody of an inmate does not meet the elements of the federal law against witness tampering, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
“Whatever one’s position on immigration policy, I see no plausible interpretation of the witness tampering statute that reaches these facts,” said Joseph H. Thompson, a former federal prosecutor who served as acting U.S. attorney in Minnesota last year. “I doubt any serious prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Hoang Bui, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, declined to say whether ICE had sought the office’s input before threatening to prosecute Sheriff Witt, whose office often partners with federal agencies on weapons and narcotics cases.
Sheriff Witt, who is running for re-election in November, faced extraordinary pressure from the White House during the immigration crackdown last winter because she oversees Minnesota’s largest jail.
At its height, she briefly pondered making a politically unpopular concession to cooperate with ICE, thinking it could give the Trump administration a face-saving excuse to end an operation that left two American citizens dead and touched off nationwide protests.
Yet Sheriff Witt said she now feels more confident than ever that her agency should play no role in immigration enforcement. Her jail is a pretrial facility, which means that transferring inmates to ICE stands to disrupt state prosecutions. Additionally, she said, the perception that local law enforcement officials work closely with ICE undermines public safety because it makes many reluctant to report crimes, a concern that has been echoed by other local law enforcement leaders.
Sheriff Witt said that the threat of prosecution had been unnerving for her and her relatives, who in recent weeks have grown fearful when they can’t reach her on the phone promptly. Whether or not it’s legally sound, she said, it does not feel like a hollow threat in this era.
“Because they have done things none of us would have ever perceived the federal government to be doing,” she said.
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10) A Senate panel, in a party-line vote, holds Fauci in contempt of Congress.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, August 6, 2026
The Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday approved a resolution holding Dr. Anthony S. Fauci in contempt of Congress for his refusal last week to answer questions from the panel, whose chairman, Senator Rand Paul, has said repeatedly that he wants to see Dr. Fauci in prison.
The vote, along party lines, clears the way for the committee to recommend that the Justice Department prosecute Dr. Fauci for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena, a misdemeanor under federal law. But that does not mean the department will take up the case.
For a contempt resolution to carry the force of Congress, the full Senate must adopt it; in that case, it would be sent to the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., who could then present a case to a grand jury. But contempt resolutions require a 60-vote majority, and with 53 Republicans in the Senate, adoption is highly unlikely.
“The chair directed Anthony Fauci to answer. He refused,” Mr. Paul, a Kentucky Republican, said at the outset of Thursday’s session. “That is what we are voting on today — not his opinions, not his policies, not anything he said from the podium six years ago. We are voting on whether a witness who has received the benefit of a federal pardon can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence.”
Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the committee, accused Mr. Paul of conducting a “rushed investigation” without Democrats’ participation. He warned that if the committee approved the resolution holding Dr. Fauci in contempt, it would discourage others from testifying in the future.
“This committee should not damage its future investigative authority to advance the chairman’s yearslong campaign against single individuals,” Mr. Peters said.
The vote followed another twist in Republicans’ investigation of Dr. Fauci. On Wednesday night, Senator Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said he had received a copy of Dr. Fauci’s government-issued cellphone. “Hopefully this device will address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week’s hearing,” Mr. Johnson wrote on social media.
Thursday’s vote represents only part of Dr. Fauci’s travails on Capitol Hill. Representative James R. Comer, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said after last week’s hearing that he would be “asking Dr. Fauci whether he stands by his previous testimony to our committee.”
Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, also vowed after last week’s hearing to investigate Dr. Fauci.
Mr. Paul has accused Dr. Fauci of funding research in China that led to the coronavirus pandemic, and lying about it to Congress, accusations that Dr. Fauci has vigorously denied.
Dr. Fauci, who appeared under subpoena, invoked his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent more than 100 times in last week’s hearing, as hostile Republicans battered him with questions about matters including the origins of Covid-19 and whether he used his position to enrich himself by enlisting staff and colleagues to nominate him for cash awards.
Dr. Fauci received a “pre-emptive pardon” from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. but it covers only his activities from 2014 through Jan. 19, 2025, Mr. Biden’s last full day in office. His allies said that if he testified and made a misstep, he would open himself up to possible perjury charges. Republicans on the panel said the pardon protects him so he was ineligible to take the Fifth.
On this issue, legal scholars disagree. Some said his invocation of the Fifth was proper because he was legally vulnerable. Others said the pardon offers him immunity.
Republicans on the homeland security panel said that Dr. Fauci, who made a short statement before invoking his Fifth Amendment right, cannot both testify and refuse to testify at the same time.
There is precedent for Congress holding a government official in contempt for invoking the Fifth Amendment after initially testifying. In 2013, Lois Lerner, an Internal Revenue Service official, appeared before a House committee under subpoena and insisted she had not misled Congress in previous testimony.
Like Dr. Fauci, she then refused to answer questions. Ms. Lerner was promptly suspended from her job, and in 2014, the House voted along party lines to hold her in contempt of Congress. But in 2015, federal prosecutors refused to prosecute her, saying they did not agree with House Republicans who said that by making her initial statement, Ms. Lerner had waived her Fifth Amendment right.
Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, who was the sole Republican to question Dr. Fauci gently at last week’s hearing, raised the Lerner case at the end of the session, suggesting that the homeland security panel needed to at least consider having a contempt vote.
“The parliamentary question that I think we’ve got to be able to deal with is: Is this consistent with Lois Lerner?” Mr. Lankford asked.
Two advisers to President Trump who served in his first administration, Stephen K. Bannon and Peter Navarro, each spent four months in prison in 2024 for failing to comply with congressional subpoenas. But rather than invoke the Fifth Amendment, Mr. Navarro and Mr. Bannon simply did not show up to testify.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a former constitutional law professor, said that Mr. Paul has already tainted a prosecution by asserting he wanted to see Dr. Fauci in prison, while at the same time trying to force him to testify.
“I do have some sense of the ethics of a legislative investigation,” Mr. Raskin said. “It just would never occur to me to go around saying a witness should be in prison and then try to prevent them from invoking their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination over the very matter I’m claiming is criminal.”
Thursday’s vote was the culmination of a yearslong battle between Mr. Paul and Dr. Fauci, who served for nearly 40 years as the government’s top infectious disease expert and was well-regarded by both parties until the coronavirus pandemic turned him into a symbol of government lockdowns.
Mr. Paul has zeroed in on whether Dr. Fauci knew the pandemic started in a laboratory and misled the public and Congress about it. There is no proof of that. Dr. Fauci has said repeatedly that he is open to the idea of a lab leak but he believes the pandemic was natural in origin.
Dr. Fauci, 85, did not help his own cause by keeping a personal journal on a government computer, in which he chronicled not only the pandemic response but also his own media appearances and friendships with celebrities.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave the journal to Mr. Paul, who made more than 1,100 pages of it public in the run-up to last week’s hearing. Republicans used it to portray Dr. Fauci as a self-absorbed narcissist, as his admirers noted that he is hardly the only official in Washington to have a big ego.
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11) Wars, Wildfires and Migrants Leave Europe Straining for Control
A brutal summer has exposed how much pressure European countries are under from forces largely out of their grip: war in Iran and Ukraine, record heat and more.
By Michael D. Shear, Aug. 6, 2026
Michael Shear often writes about the challenges facing European countries as they are forced to rely less on support from the United States.
Firefighters in Lanton, a town southwest of Bordeaux, France, last week. Pierre Crom/Getty Images
Once again in recent days, Europe has seemed to be watching from the sidelines as its destiny is shaped by outside forces.
Would President Trump choose to restart a massive war with Iran and drive up the cost of oil? Would global warming drive wider and worse wildfires, even as several already raged across the continent? Would a sudden, unexplained surge of people across the Moroccan border into a Spanish exclave — almost all of whom were immediately sent back — divide the bloc’s leaders and fuel the far right?
It has already been a brutal summer for Europe: two wars, record heat, rising inflation and deep anxiety about food, energy and security. The back-to-back crises are prompting calls for joint action, urgent Zoom meetings between different groups of presidents and prime ministers, and political hand-wringing in parliaments from Poland to the United Kingdom.
But like so much else that has happened in the past several years, many of Europe’s challenges are out of its control.
The Iran war — a conflict that most of Europe never wanted — has disrupted life across the region, driving up the price of gas, groceries and travel. The continent’s leaders have pledged to help secure the passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz once the fighting ends. And yet, they seem destined to hear about the next stage of the war from Mr. Trump’s social media feed.
Europe has been unable to resolve the war in Ukraine after more than four years of bloodshed. Its achievements in cutting emissions to combat climate change are overshadowed by the actions of the United States and China. The future of A.I. is being shaped largely elsewhere. Right wing populism has risen, fueled by migration, inequality and misinformation.
“No matter how you look at it, measure it, this is a difficult, unsettling time for Europe,” said Richard Haass, who served for two decades as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He said Europe is partly a victim of circumstance, but also is responsible for its lack of authority over its own fate.
“It’s not just that they’ve under-spent, but they’ve underorganized themselves when it comes to their own security,” he said. “It’s essentially a bystander, with few exceptions, to the A.I. competition. That’s not something that was done to Europe by the United States or China. That was something that was done by Europe to itself.”
On many fronts, Europe has acted.
When Russia invaded Ukraine more than four years ago, Europe and Britain immediately took steps to support Ukraine, including sending billions of dollars in aid, imposing sanctions on Russia and welcoming millions of Ukrainian refugees into their countries through special programs.
After Mr. Trump re-entered the White House in 2025 and signaled a warmer stance toward President Vladimir V. Putin, Britain, France, Germany and other European nations formed the “Coalition of the Willing” to try to protect Ukraine’s interests in any peace deal, and worked behind closed doors to reconcile the Ukrainian and American presidents. Those efforts helped prevent Mr. Putin from cutting a deal with Mr. Trump at Ukraine’s expense.
But while the coalition has repeatedly stated that “no arrangements regarding European interests and security can be negotiated without Europeans,” that has proved difficult to enforce. Time and again, Mr. Trump has sidelined America’s allies in favor of direct — and largely fruitless — talks with either Russia or Ukraine.
“For years, European leaders have spoken about strategic autonomy and Europe’s emergence as a serious security actor,” Lesia Ogryzko, the director of the Sahaidachnyi Security Center in Kyiv, wrote for the Atlantic Council. “The coming months may provide the clearest test yet of whether those ambitions are realistic.”
They have had less influence over the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, even though its effects are felt keenly across the continent. Europe’s vocal opposition to Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war enraged the American leader and soured trans-Atlantic relations.
In April, partly as an effort to repair relations with Mr. Trump, Britain and France announced an effort to organize a military operation that could help protect free and open travel through the Strait of Hormuz once a lasting cease-fire was agreed to. But the on-again, off-again fighting between the United States and Iran has made it too dangerous for the operation to begin. Diplomats from several European countries said the possibility that they will send military ships to help remove mines from the strait or escort tankers is essentially on hold until it becomes clear whether the war is truly on pause.
Mr. Trump has threatened in recent days to dramatically escalate strikes on Iran if the regime does not agree to open the strait. On Tuesday, the president told Fox News that Iran would be “hit very hard” if the crucial waterway was not opened very soon.
Even as the Iran crisis has continued, wildfires have been raging across Europe, where swaths of bright red on the weather maps indicated the unprecedented heat waves that have become increasingly frequent.
For most of the past two decades, European countries have mostly been in agreement about the dangers posed by climate change and have acted to cut emissions and invest in renewable energy. But since Mr. Trump’s arrival in the United States, they have been at odds with one of the world’s largest polluters, making their efforts to confront the changing climate more difficult.
Now, it is clear that countries in the region are facing the consequences of global warming, with average temperatures rising faster than on any other continent. Britons are living through the driest July in nearly two centuries. Fires have displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain. In Greece, firefighters died battling blazes that are yet to be fully controlled.
The surge last week of tens of thousands of people into Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory on the North African coast, raised the possibility of a new crisis that is testing European unity on one of the region’s most potent political issues.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s left-wing prime minister, has become famous for his welcoming approach to some migrants, particularly workers from Latin America. But he has taken a tougher approach with people attempting to illegally cross Spain’s borders with Morocco. He cracked down on the arrivals in Ceuta quickly with his country’s military, and most were sent back over the weekend. A floating barrier is being set up near a sea wall between the two countries.
The incident exposed tensions within the European Union that have grown deeper in recent years, as far-right parties including the Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally have seized on fear of migrants as a way to energize political supporters. Almost two dozen E.U. countries lashed out at Spain in the hours after the migrants arrived in Ceuta, with some calling for suspending the country from the bloc’s free-movement zone. Mr. Sánchez responded by calling those nations “selfish.”
Some analysts noted that the lack of solidarity with Spain at a time when it faced an external threat was an indication of the difficulty that the continent has in projecting authority on the global stage.
Mr. Haass, of the Council on Foreign Relations, said he thinks the lack of unity underscores the fundamental problem for Europe as it seeks to shape its future.
“The whole,” he said, “is much less than the sum of its parts.”
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12) Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left
One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.
By Shane Goldmacher, Aug. 6, 2026
Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent who has been covering the Democratic Party’s efforts to win back power in 2026.
The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful defeat of the year.
Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.
“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism.
Dr. El-Sayed’s win was not the blowout that some pre-election polls had predicted. But his narrow nomination in one of the country’s signature swing states still represented a critical moment for the party’s middle, which had previously sought to cast the far left’s successes as contained within the country’s most urban and liberal corridors.
Their fear: Dr. El-Sayed was paving a path for a progressive to seize the party’s presidential nomination in 2028 — and then go on to lose the general election.
“It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states,” Mr. Cowan added.
Most party leaders — from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York to former Vice President Kamala Harris — quickly embraced Dr. El-Sayed’s Senate candidacy, given the stakes of the Michigan seat at the play. But some moderates see the emerging left as a danger.
The fact that Democrats recently put Michigan in the early lineup of presidential nominating states — a race just 18 months away — only heightened the significance of Dr. El-Sayed’s victory.
For now, the next big test is only a week away. In Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist and state assemblywoman representing the progressive hotbed of Madison, has emerged as the party’s front-runner for governor in another key battleground race.
Mr. Cowan said the $15 million his group would spend through 2028 was not directed at individual candidates. Instead, the group plans to target the Democratic Socialists of America movement, which he believes poses a “mortal danger” for Democrats.
He said the effort would include opposition research into D.S.A., polling, social media programs and educating Democratic activists and leaders. It would target both proud democratic socialists and those such as Dr. El-Sayed, whom he derided as performing the “D.S.A. dodge” — flirting with democratic socialists enough to get their organizing manpower and support while remaining distant enough to avoid the explicit label.
How this discrediting campaign will affect the current midterm cycle — potentially undercutting Democratic nominees in swing-state races and undermining the party’s chances of retaking Congress — remains unclear.
Centrist Democrats say their purpose is to make progressives understand the risks of some of the more radical planks of the official D.S.A. platform: defunding the “Department of War,” taking “steps toward fully abolishing the police and prison system,” enacting “reparations” and establishing a 32-hour workweek.
“The upside of being associated with more extreme movements is you get attention and real and perceived energy and outsider status,” said Liam Kerr, the co-founder of another centrist group called Welcome PAC.
Mr. Kerr said that the far left was currently receiving all of those benefits without “the baggage” of particular positions — a dynamic he hoped would shift with added attention.
On Wednesday, one progressive Democrat who won his party’s House nomination distanced himself from the D.S.A. Will Lawrence, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement who defeated two more moderate Democratic rivals in Michigan on Tuesday, said he allowed his D.S.A. membership to lapse in the last month. Mr. Lawrence, 35, now faces a Republican incumbent, Representative Tom Barrett, in one of the country’s premier battleground districts.
Whatever comes next, Dr. El-Sayed’s triumph was a watershed moment for the progressive movement, a statewide success in Middle America that could not easily be dismissed. This was not Zohran Mamdani’s win over Andrew Cuomo in New York City, or a congressional primary win in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Philadelphia or Denver.
After all, the party establishment had the one-on-one race it had wanted against Dr. El-Sayed. The state’s Democratic governor delivered a late endorsement of Representative Haley Stevens, the moderate alternative. And Ms. Stevens enjoyed a gargantuan advertising advantage that swelled into the tens of millions of dollars.
More than $32 million of that money came from a super PAC linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which signaled that it would continue opposing Dr. El-Sayed through the fall.
Dr. El-Sayed has made running against AIPAC a centerpiece of his candidacy. On MS NOW on Wednesday, he said the links between Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were “inextricable.”
“Netanyahu is a big reason why they’ve gotten so aggressive and, frankly, so bloodthirsty under his reign,” Dr. El-Sayed said.
Progressives have not won every race this year. On Tuesday, Cori Bush, a left-wing former congresswoman, lost badly in her bid to win back her old seat.
But they have won convincingly in enough places — including Graham Platner’s Senate nomination in Maine before his withdrawal — to put the party’s establishment on its heels.
“The Democratic Party is now Blockbuster,” Van Jones, the Democratic commentator and former Obama administration official, said on CNN on Tuesday. “These kids are Netflix.”
Colin Mortimer, the director of the centrist Center for New Liberalism, said that moderates needed to stop tempering their tone to appeal to voters sick of the status quo.
“It seems to me a lot of energy is on the left, but the big energy we are seeing from the base of the Democratic Party is just a rejection of the establishment and a rejection of incumbents,” Mr. Mortimer said.
He pointed to some upcoming races as key tests where it was younger center-left candidates doing the challenging of older incumbents, including the bid of Representative Seth Moulton, a moderate, to unseat Senator Ed Markey in Massachusetts, as well as Luke Bronin’s challenge to Representative John Larson of Connecticut.
Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, sharply disagreed.
“They’re missing the plot,” Mr. Mitchell, who spent the last week campaigning in Michigan, said in an interview. “There is a populist insurgency taking place in this country.”
Moderates, he said, were misreading the room if they did not believe voters were animated by specific ideas as much as tenor. “I can tell you what they’re missing,” he said. “They’re missing a point of view.”
Or as Hasan Piker, the lightning rod live-streamer who campaigned in Michigan with Dr. El-Sayed, said in a text message on Wednesday, “70 million dollars worth of smears couldn’t make up for a lack vision demonstrated by the establishment dems.”
With a signature fitted V-neck black T-shirt, Dr. El-Sayed built his successful campaign with a call-and-response set of catchphrases that captured the scope of his ambitions: “Money out of … politics. Money in your … pocket. Medicare for … all.”
Some Democratic strategists hoped he would focus, in particular, on the second of the three in the coming months as polls show that voters are ready to punish President Trump and his party for failing to bring down cost.
Republicans appeared most eager to frame the race around crime, linking Dr. El-Sayed to past movements and comments about defunding the police or prisons. Chris Gustafson, a spokesman for the top Senate Republican super PAC, previewed that line of attack, calling Dr. El-Sayed “a dangerous threat to the safety and freedoms of every American.”
The contours and coalitions of the Stevens-El-Sayed primary are likely to provide a road map for progressives who decide to run for president. Dr. El-Sayed campaigned with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and featured them both prominently in his closing ad.
The Senate primary was not the first time that Michigan opted for a left-wing candidate in a marquee contest. In 2016, the state delivered an upset win for Mr. Sanders in his presidential primary against Hillary Clinton, who went on to lose Michigan that November to Mr. Trump.
The Michigan Senate race of 2026 was already a must-win for Democrats if they hope to wrest control of the Senate from Republicans this fall. At the same time, for Mr. Schumer, Dr. El-Sayed would add to the ranks of Democrats opposed to him as a leader.
It is also a must-win for progressives aspiring to prove they can succeed not just in primaries but also in crucial and competitive general elections.
For now, the party’s moderate wing was hoping to learn lessons after a painful defeat.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Mr. Kerr said. “It’s a tough but necessary time.”
More on the 2026 Midterm Elections
· Divided Democrats: One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.
· Election Deniers Hold Key Roles: These officials, who have supported President Trump’s false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, oversee or help administer elections in counties across the nation where competitive House and Senate races will determine control of Congress.
· Texas Senate Race: Both the Republican candidate, Ken Paxton, and Democratic candidate, James Talarico, are seeking to win over voters with competing proposals on tax, housing and health care that are aimed at lowering household costs.
· Chuck Edwards: The Republican lawmaker from North Carolina said that he was dropping his re-election bid, after the House Ethics Committee had recommended that he be censured for “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers.” Now, just over 12 weeks before Election Day, Republicans are scrambling to find a candidate.
· Michigan Primary: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic primary race for Senate, giving progressives a test for the fall. William Lawrence, another progressive democrat, defeated two moderate candidates to challenge a vulnerable Republican incumbent in a House race. Representative John James, a two-term congressman from suburban Detroit, won the Republican nomination for governor and will face Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state.
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13) Insults, Expletives and Fat-Shaming: Vance Trolls Critics on the Right and Left
The vice president has dispensed with the decorum and restraint of his predecessors to directly take on opponents and journalists on social media with sometimes profane and often personal jabs.
By Peter Baker, Aug. 6, 2026
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered or interviewed 10 vice presidents. He reported from Washington.
Vice President JD Vance has shown an appetite for conflict online, going after “idiots” and “scumbags” who anger him. Credit...Alex Kent/The New York Times
It was hardly the first time that someone on social media called someone else fat. But it may have been the first time that a vice president of the United States did so.
Peeved at a conservative columnist who criticized his position on Iran, Vice President JD Vance jabbed on Wednesday at his physical appearance. “If you’ve ever met him in person,” he wrote on social media, “it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”
In an era when playground insults pass for political dialogue, few have leaped into the online flame wars with more gusto than Mr. Vance. The first millennial vice president has long dispensed with the decorum and restraint of his older predecessors to go after the “idiots” and “scumbags” who anger him, from the “limousine socialists” on the left to the “disgraceful” conservatives on the right.
He works, of course, for the master of the personal put-down, and perhaps that explains Mr. Vance’s emergence as one of the administration’s chief trolls. But even if he hopes to impress President Trump, Mr. Vance also appears to have a natural appetite for conflict, the product of a generation that grew up with gladiatorial political instincts. It is not enough that someone else may be wrong about policy or politics; they must be stupid, mendacious, vile or, yes, even overweight.
“Vice President Vance’s willingness publicly to disparage others in personal terms stands apart from the behavior of modern vice presidents during the last half-century,” said Joel K. Goldstein, a scholar of the vice presidency at the St. Louis University School of Law. Whatever his motivation, Mr. Goldstein added, “it departs from the norms associated with the office and undermines the goal of promoting rational public discourse.”
Mr. Vance’s advisers and allies see it differently, of course. By engaging with critics, however disparagingly, they argue that he is demonstrating the sort of accessibility and authenticity Americans are craving, at least Americans of a particular stripe. He has himself been the target of plenty of ugly attacks and should be free to push back. Those who see his tone as uncouth, they say, are the same pompous elites who have similarly tut-tutted Mr. Trump for more than a decade.
“I tend to err on the side of openness,” Mr. Vance told NBC News early last year. “That’s probably a generational thing, right? I come from a very tech-forward generation.”
Still, even Mr. Vance has evinced some concern with his online habits. In May, he told NBC that he had given up social media for Lent, deleting the app for X, formerly called Twitter, from his phone. “It’s one of these things where not having that as a distraction, I think, has made me much more productive,” he said.
But he said that living “in such a crazy bubble” meant that social media gave him a chance to have unplanned interactions with people. “I think one of the good things about social media is that it actually exposes you to unfiltered raw opinions, and that’s one of the things that I need to hear as a political leader,” he added. “So I will definitely reinstall it, but I’ve enjoyed my little break from it.”
A spokesman for the vice president, who declined to comment on the record, said Mr. Vance’s words to NBC still stood but that did not mean he would not engage online with supporters and critics alike.
What makes Mr. Vance’s combative tone online so striking is that it comes in contrast to other venues where he projects a more thoughtful, measured demeanor. His new book, “Communion,” released in June, offered an introspective look at his journey from evangelical Christianity to atheism to Catholicism. To promote it, he even went on ABC’s “The View” for a vigorous but civil interview with the mostly liberal hosts.
One of the hosts, Joy Behar, even said afterward that Mr. Vance had a sense of humor and that, while she disagreed with him on issues, he should run in 2028 because he would stop being so caustic. “I think if he were president, he’d go back to being a kinder person,” she said. “Trump is the one who’s not kind.”
Vice presidents have often played the role of attack dog, traditionally freer to be more aggressive than the presidents they served. The most vituperative vice president of the modern age was surely Spiro T. Agnew, who eagerly served as President Richard M. Nixon’s pit bull against perceived enemies like liberals (“pusillanimous pussyfooters”), journalists (“nattering nabobs of negativism”) and antiwar protesters (“an effete corps of impudent snobs”).
But he never had access to the bullhorn of social media. And his successors have generally taken a less abrasive, even stodgy approach, attacking opponents, yes, but steering away from the kind of personal denigration that Mr. Vance favors. Even Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s first vice president, maintained an old-fashioned disciplined dignity throughout his four years in office, in sharp contrast to Mr. Vance’s bring-it-on feistiness.
“It’s childish behavior that is unbecoming of the office,” said Kevin Kellems, who was communications director for Vice President Dick Cheney. “He’s behaving like a high school jock trying to win over the temporary young fun friends.”
Jamal Simmons, who served in the same role for Vice President Kamala Harris, said Mr. Vance appeared to be auditioning for Mr. Trump’s support for a presidential run in 2028.
“I would guess this is the culture of Vance’s boss in grading his performance,” Mr. Simmons said. “In the Trump administration, everybody has an audience of one, and you get rewarded for being pugilistic and snarky.”
Mr. Vance certainly has the pugilistic, snarky part down. Never much of a turn-the-other-cheek kind of guy, he issued blast after blast through most of last year and into early this year until his Lenten break from social media. What makes him different from Mr. Trump, who regularly attacks friends and foes alike online, is that Mr. Vance directly responds to critical messages and gets into back-and-forth arguments with other posters.
“I have an extraordinary tolerance for disagreements and criticisms from the various people in our coalition,” he wrote last year about attacks on Tucker Carlson’s son Buckley, who works for the vice president. “But I am a very loyal person, and I have zero tolerance for scumbags attacking my staff. And yes, *everyone* who I’ve seen attack Buckley with lies is a scumbag.”
He does not hesitate to go after journalists who annoy him. Terry Moran, the former ABC News correspondent, is “a leftwing radical,” he claimed. Josh Kraushaar of the Jewish Insider, he wrote, is either “the biggest hack in Washington” or “the dumbest journalist in Washington.”
Nor does he hesitate to take on fellow Republicans. David Reaboi, whose X biography describes him as a “right-wing Twitter pugilist,” is, according to the vice president, a “loser” for suggesting that Mr. Vance’s team was leaking to the news media about Iran peace talks. Right-wing influencers like Laura Loomer, Mr. Vance wrote, are “disgraceful actually” for “attacking the administration and sowing division” in a dispute about how much to focus on abortion.
He also has little filter when it comes to profanity. “I hate this smug, self-assured bullshit,” he wrote of a podcaster who called Trump supporters “very, very dumb.” He declared a Wall Street Journal story reporting that Mr. Trump sent a bawdy letter to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to be “complete and utter bullshit.” To Democratic senators grilling Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, he wrote, “You’re full of shit and everyone knows it.”
After he deleted his app for Lent, Mr. Vance’s social media feed turned more conventional, evidently maintained by his staff. For the past couple of months, it broadly praised Mr. Trump, boasted about the vice president’s anti-fraud efforts, said nice things about Mr. Vance’s wife, praised Mr. Trump some more, offered support to political allies, gave updates on Iran talks and praised Mr. Trump even more.
But then this week, the authentic Mr. Vance was clearly back online, lashing out at Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and columnist for The Washington Post who has been one of the leading voices on the right supporting Mr. Trump’s war against Iran.
In a scathing column last week, Mr. Thiessen blamed the vice president for the failed memorandum of understanding with Tehran and said Mr. Vance “publicly undermines the president” by seemingly contradicting Mr. Trump’s stated policy. “Perhaps it’s time for the president to take the advice of those who have delivered him success in Iran — not those like Vance who have failed him,” Mr. Thiessen wrote.
A few days later, Mr. Thiessen jumped into an unrelated social media thread over affordability — specifically the price of burritos. Responding to a post quoting a university student complaining that it costs too much to buy Mexican fast food, Mr. Thiessen wrote: “Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.”
That was when Mr. Vance jumped in, suggesting that Mr. Thiessen had gone back for seconds in the cafeteria too often. Some commenters online came to Mr. Thiessen’s defense by recalling that Mr. Vance, who by his own account lost 30 pounds between 2022 and 2024, was not always so svelte himself.
Mr. Thiessen did not respond to messages requesting comment, and Mr. Vance’s office declined to elaborate.
An ally of the vice president said the columnist had it coming. “It’s neither appropriate nor constructive for self-described ‘Republican’ commentators like Marc Thiessen, who earns an absurd living promoting war after war on television, to use their platforms to dismiss the economic anxieties of young Americans,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a former Trump campaign aide.
He added: “I support elected officials who speak the truth. The vice president was right: Marc Thiessen appears to be severely obese. He should lay off the burritos.”
But don’t expect Mr. Vance to lay off the social media.
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14) America’s Most Divisive Historian Gets a New Biography
Dave Zirin traces the radical career of Howard Zinn, whose “A People’s History of the United States” has sold millions of copies.
By Adam Hochschild, Aug. 3, 2026
Adam Hochschild’s most recent book is “American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.”
The historian Howard Zinn in 1984. Credit...Marilyn Humphries/Alamy
Few, if any, American historians have been more celebrated and reviled than Howard Zinn (1922-2010). His “A People’s History of the United States” is praised in the Oscar-winning movie “Good Will Hunting” and featured in episodes of both “The Sopranos” and “The Simpsons.” Officials in two states tried to ban the book. Donald Trump has attacked “propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn.” The right-wing firebrand David Horowitz compared “A People’s History” to “Mein Kampf.” The books about Zinn range from the journalist Dave Zirin’s admiring new biography, “The People’s Historian,” to bitter attacks (“Debunking Howard Zinn”) and an attack on the attackers (“Zinnophobia”).
There are good reasons Zinn’s “A People’s History” has sold more than four million copies since it was first published in 1980. It introduced readers to figures like the socialist activist and presidential candidate Eugene Debs, the labor organizer Big Bill Haywood, the anarchist Emma Goldman, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the slave revolt leader Nat Turner who were mentioned only briefly or not at all in the ponderously upbeat textbooks of half a century ago.
The book sees Columbus’s arrival through the eyes of the Arawak Indians. It attacks Columbus’s biographer Samuel Eliot Morison for emphasizing the explorer’s devout faith and skipping quickly over his massacres. It sharply questions whether World War II was entirely a “good war,” given Allied bombings of civilians, a Jim Crow U.S. military, American support for restoring the British and French colonial empires, and more.
“A People’s History” has been criticized, in part correctly, for many things, including not keeping up with new scholarship, idealizing Native Americans, seeing Christianity mainly as a tool of conquest, being too tough on Abraham Lincoln and, more generally, for viewing all of U.S. history as struggles between oppressors and oppressed.
Zinn cites Albert Camus to the effect that in a world of victims and executioners one must choose sides. True, but most people and groups don’t fit neatly into one of those categories. Nonetheless, “A People’s History” has left its mark for the better on many an American textbook written since.
In “The People’s Historian,” Zirin, who knew and worked with Zinn in his last years, does a lively job of portraying the historian’s deeply engaged life. Zinn’s politics came not from books — there were none in his immigrant parents’ cold-water tenement flat — but from his life.
He was born into the now shrinking Jewish working class. At 18, he became a union laborer in a Brooklyn shipyard. He saw combat as a bombardier in World War II, and went to college on the G.I. Bill, loading trucks at night. After completing graduate school at Columbia, he received a single job offer, from Spelman College, for Black women, in Atlanta. It was 1956, the civil rights movement was underway, and from that point on he would mix teaching and writing with activism.
Zinn was arrested many times, at both civil rights protests and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. He helped plan the curriculum for the Freedom Schools that friends of his in the civil rights movement set up in Mississippi in 1964 and taught at the schools and in prisons. He helped the fugitive antiwar priest Daniel Berrigan find a hiding place. He and his wife stashed in their home some of the Pentagon Papers secretly copied by their friend Daniel Ellsberg before Ellsberg made them public.
Moreover, Zinn was forced out of Spelman, which wanted to produce well-mannered, closely chaperoned middle-class women, not the future civil rights activists Zinn mentored — who included Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman. At Boston University, where he later taught for more than 20 years, he clashed with the conservative president, John Silber, who was horrified that this outspoken radical had somehow gotten tenure on his faculty.
Zirin’s book evokes these battles well but falls short of being a judicious assessment of his subject. In Zirin’s eyes, Zinn was always right, and he energetically rebuts fellow historians on both the right and left who criticized his work. The biography also tends toward clichés and overstatements. Zinn’s bomber crew had to “wake up before the crack of dawn” and in his late 80s, Zinn was still — Zirin uses the phrase three times — “sharp as a tack.” And can it really be said that Boston in the 1970s “reeked of provincialism and prejudice”?
Whatever Zinn’s shortcomings, he had an enormous positive impact on his readers — and in an age when there are ever fewer serious readers. He and his collaborators found creative ways to spread their message, including in an anthology of voices from American history’s underdogs, and in a widely seen play and film based on that material.
The immense popularity of “A People’s History” revealed an embarrassing vacuum in the way American history has long been taught — something that will still be worth pondering and repairing long after the fractious commemoration of our 250th birthday is behind us.
THE PEOPLE’S HISTORIAN: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn | By Dave Zirin | Dutton | 308 pp. | $32
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15) A Trans Woman Pulled a Gun and Started a ‘Stand Your Ground’ Debate
Gun-friendly Wyoming has a “stand your ground” statute that allows people to use force to defend themselves. So why is a trans woman being prosecuted after being shoved to the ground?
By Jack Healy, Reporting from Laramie, Wyo., Aug. 6, 2026
“I had to defend myself,” said Rihanna Kelver, who pulled out a gun outside the Crowbar & Grill in Laramie, Wyo. Daniel Brenner for The New York Times
When Rihanna Kelver goes on road trips or ventures out alone to photograph the rural night sky, she often packs a small teal handgun. Being a transgender woman in Wyoming is not easy, she said, but owning a gun sure seemed like it would be.
Then one night last September, Ms. Kelver, 28, drew her gun after she had been pushed down in the street during a brief confrontation with three men in the college town of Laramie, according to police reports and surveillance video. Wyoming’s “stand your ground” law is supposed to offer legal protections to gun owners who draw in self-defense, yet Ms. Kelver was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and possession of a deadly weapon with unlawful intent, charges that carry up to 15 years in prison.
The case has touched off an impassioned debate in one of the country’s most gun-friendly, staunchly Republican states about whether the Second Amendment applies when the person holding the gun is transgender.
“I had to defend myself,” said Ms. Kelver, who transitioned as a high schooler in Laramie and has been an outspoken activist for trans rights. “I don’t know how it wasn’t reasonable, given the dangers and threats trans people hear every day.”
The county attorney in Laramie said gender and sexual orientation had played no part in his decision to prosecute the case, and a judge found there was enough evidence to take it to trial.
Ms. Kelver says she would not have been charged if she had been a biological female shoved to the ground by a group of men.
Interest in guns and firearms training soared in L.G.B.T.Q. communities after President Trump’s 2024 election win, as Americans who had never previously considered owning a gun worried about political violence or losing their rights to a more aggressive second Trump presidency.
Then last August, a 23-year-old trans woman killed two children in a shooting spree at a Minneapolis church, prompting a wave of right-wing figures to call transgender people mentally ill and violent, and question whether they should be allowed to own guns at all.
Ms. Kelver said she grew up around guns and went target shooting with her grandfather in Colorado. A friend gave her the .380 subcompact pistol that fit neatly into a hip pack a few years ago after some men in a pickup truck harassed her as she took photos at night in a deserted stretch of Wyoming.
Wyoming’s permissive gun laws made that simple. Wyoming does not require gun owners to register their weapons and allows people to carry firearms concealed or in the open without a permit. The state’s Firearms Freedom Act declares that guns made and kept within state lines are exempt from federal regulations, and its “stand your ground” law allows people to use force to defend themselves if they reasonably believe their safety is threatened. The law says they do not have a duty to retreat if they are not the initial aggressor.
Laramie, a city of 30,000 where bike shops and galleries put rainbow stickers in their windows and Pride Fest fills a park every year, is still living in the shadow of Matthew Shepard. In 1998, Mr. Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, was brutally beaten by two men and left tied to a fence in a field, bringing an avalanche of outside scrutiny and soul-searching crashing down onto Laramie.
Ms. Kelver’s supporters around town worry that the case could divide the town anew, undercutting years of progress and reopening old wounds.
“They’re charging Rihanna because she’s a trans woman,” said Nichol Bondurant, a high school teacher who dressed in white as a wide-winged angel in the wake of Mr. Shephard’s murder to thwart anti-gay protesters who flocked to Laramie then. “Gun rights don’t say you have to fit a political affiliation.”
The divisions preceded Ms. Kelver’s case. Wyoming’s Republican-dominated Legislature has passed a law restricting bathroom use by transgender people, curtailed gender-related health care and required parental notification if a student wants to use a different name or pronouns. But many elected leaders in Laramie — including the county prosecutor — are Democrats and have opposed such measures.
Ms. Kelver said she did not usually carry her gun in Laramie. She moved there when she was 11, went to high school there, ran for the local school board at 18 and now works at a local bar and grill.
But on Sept. 13, she had felt uneasy after being harassed by an acquaintance, she said, so she tucked her gun onto her hip when she left for a night shift at the Crowbar and Grill, a pizza-and-beer spot where banners for Black Lives Matter and L.G.B.T.Q. rights hang beside the American flag.
Ms. Kelver said she had two shots at the bar, then went outside to smoke a cigarette before her shift at about 10 p.m. One man in a group of three shouted a profanity directed at the Crowbar, according to court records, and Ms. Kelver said that the man, Scott Durham, also yelled an anti-gay slur, though he denied that to the police.
Ms. Kelver, upset, walked up to the men and asked, “What did you just say?” according to police reports. Surveillance video from a downtown camera shows her walking into the street toward the men, one hand on her hip by the pack that held the gun. Seconds later, Mr. Durham pushed her away, and Ms. Kelver stumbled and fell onto her back.
The moment she hit the pavement, she drew and racked the gun and pointed it. She did not fire. The three men walked away, and Ms. Kelver got up and collected her belongings that had scattered in the street. The encounter was over in about 10 seconds.
The confrontation occurred in the tense atmosphere just three days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Mr. Durham blamed her for inciting the confrontation, telling a police officer, “I’m not trying to start a fight,” according to body camera videos. None of the men were charged, and they were allowed to leave after giving their accounts to the police.
Mr. Durham is listed as the victim in police reports. In a brief telephone interview, he said the episode had been “mis-portrayed and misconstrued” in news coverage that began with an article in The Laramie Reporter and quickly spread on social media. He declined to comment further.
Ms. Kelver said she injured three vertebrae when she hit the pavement and had to walk with a cane for months.
Her lawyer, Andrew Holcomb, has filed a motion to dismiss the case based on Wyoming’s “stand your ground” law.
“She doesn’t pull a gun till she’s on her back with three guys around her,” Mr. Holcomb said of Ms. Kelver. “She only used the force that was necessary to stop the attack.”
Ms. Kelver also faces a misdemeanor charge for initially telling the police that she had brandished a knife, not a gun. In an interview, she said she had been shaken up and confused immediately after the confrontation and had misspoken.
As news of the incident spread online, critics blamed Ms. Kelver for inciting the conflict, saying she was wrong to approach the men in the first place. Some derided her appearance and gender identity. But Ms. Kelver has also found support in Laramie, where friends held a benefit concert to raise money for her legal defense.
Ms. Kelver said she rejected a plea deal that would have spared her from jail time but stripped away her gun rights. She is set to go to trial in November.
“I’m not going to roll over,” she said. “I’d rather lose fighting.”
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16) When a Texas School Police Officer Got ‘Riled Up’ Over a Defiant Teen
The incident, one of thousands of times that school officers in Texas have used physical force in recent years, underscores long-held concerns about policing in schools.
By Clare Amari, Photographs by Meridith Kohut, Aug. 6, 2026
This article was reported in collaboration with The San Antonio Express-News as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
Officer Marc Laue was seething.
Minutes earlier, while patrolling the hallways of Judson High School in Converse, Texas, he had confronted a 15-year-old accused of pushing an assistant principal. The teenager, Jeremiah Johnson, cursed at the officer and walked away.
Officer Laue grabbed repeatedly at Jeremiah’s arms and backpack, body camera footage of the encounter shows. When the boy pushed away, the officer wrapped his arms around him and took him to the floor.
Now Jeremiah was handcuffed in the school’s cramped police office. As another officer tried to lower Jeremiah into a chair, Officer Laue rammed his fists into the boy’s belly.
“Sit the fuck down!” Officer Laue shouted.
Since 2022, when a gunman killed 21 people at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas has spent billions of dollars installing police officers at public schools. Under state law, officers are supposed to stay out of “routine student discipline.” But over the past few years, they have used physical force in thousands of cases, including to stop seemingly minor misbehavior.
The incident at Judson High offers an extraordinary glimpse into a confrontation gone wrong. What makes it so unusual is that the student and the officer, as well as a teacher, discussed it with a reporter. The 33-minute episode, from November 2023, was also captured on body camera footage, which was reviewed by The New York Times and The San Antonio Express-News.
The case underscores a concern that has been raised by parents and advocates since schools began stationing law enforcement on their campuses: that officers might clash with vulnerable students, derailing their lives.
Ian Adams, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina who reviewed the footage for The Times and The Express-News, called it “horrific.” The way Officer Laue shoved his fists into Jeremiah, Mr. Adams said, went beyond the bounds of “normal policing.”
As Jeremiah folded into the chair, he gasped. “I can’t even breathe,” he said.
Officer Laue yelled at him to shut up, using an expletive. Then, he smacked Jeremiah on the side of the head.
A principal’s accusation
That morning, Elizabeth De Alba, an assistant principal, contacted Officer Laue over her walkie-talkie. The two met up in a crowded hallway, his body camera footage shows.
“He pushed me,” she told the officer, pointing out Jeremiah, who was walking ahead of them in a black sweatshirt, his hood up.
Jeremiah grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the eastern edge of San Antonio. His parents used drugs, records show, so his great-aunt and -uncle, Debra and Calvin Johnson, adopted him when he was a toddler. They raised him alongside nine other children.
The Johnsons described Jeremiah as a quiet, serious child who sang in the choir at his family’s Pentecostal church. He enjoyed school, but struggled with his class work. In eighth grade, school officials determined he had a learning disability, records show.
Jeremiah liked typical teenage things: video games and action movies; teasing his sisters and doting on his baby niece. But by the time he enrolled at Judson High, he had been in several fights and was introduced to a gang by his older, biological brother.
He first crossed paths with Officer Laue in February 2023, when he was a freshman. The officer restrained him to keep him from fighting with another student, police records show. The next week, Officer Laue received a tip about two photos on social media that showed Jeremiah in a bedroom holding a gun, according to the records. Jeremiah had it for protection from a rival gang, he told a reporter in a recent interview.
Nine months later, Ms. De Alba accused Jeremiah, then a sophomore, of pushing her in the hallway. So Officer Laue navigated his way through a crowd of students to confront him, the footage shows.
1 minute 30 seconds later
The teenager met the officer with profane language and racial slurs.
Officer Laue told Jeremiah he was under arrest, and moved to cuff him. But the boy wrenched free, knocking the officer’s body worn camera to the ground.
Ms. De Alba, a former reserve police officer, picked it up. She filmed the struggle, holding the camera upside down.
Officer Laue, 6-foot-2 with a sturdy frame, kicked Jeremiah’s legs out from under him. The teenager, nearly as tall but thin, fell backward.
The officer straddled him; when a second officer arrived, they put Jeremiah in handcuffs and then hoisted him up.
They led the boy toward the school police office. “Let’s go,” Officer Laue said.
From Combat to the Classroom
A few minutes later, Officer Laue stood over Jeremiah, berating him. He taunted him for crying. He told him he would go to jail and stay there.
“That’s your future,” Officer Laue said.
The episode inside the office was captured entirely on the second officer’s body camera. That officer, Richard Radziski, repeatedly urged his colleague to calm down. Five times, he raised his hand and signaled Officer Laue to stop. But the disparagement continued.
At one point, Officer Laue accused Jeremiah of assaulting a school administrator. Jeremiah insisted he had not, and urged him to check the school surveillance cameras.
“You think I believe you over her?” Officer Laue asked.
Jeremiah shook his head. “Of course you don’t,” he answered.
Officer Laue, then 41, had been working for the school district police department for two years. It was his first job in law enforcement, and like all new officers, he went through the police academy. He received the 20 hours of state-mandated training specific to school policing. (Texas’ training is half the minimum recommended by the National Association of School Resource Officers.)
Before policing, Officer Laue served in the U.S. Army. He enlisted in 2004, records show, and during his nine years of service he deployed twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. For a time after his discharge, he operated technical equipment in the West Texas oil fields.
In an interview earlier this year, Officer Laue told The Times and The Express-News that he had thought his military experience would give him an advantage in law enforcement. But initially, he found Judson High unnerving. The crowded hallways made him “a little agoraphobic,” he said.
Still, he enjoyed mentoring students. Some, he said, had even asked him to come to their graduations.
When asked about the incident with Jeremiah, Officer Laue said that he had “put pressure on his midsection” only to get him into the chair.
He acknowledged that he had been “riled up” in the office, but could not say why.
“I don’t get that mad very often,” he added.
‘I Got You’
Inside the school that day, word was spreading that Jeremiah had been tackled and handcuffed. His physical education teacher, Kirk Logan, raced to the school police office as soon as he heard.
On his mind was the history of violence between police officers and Black people like Jeremiah and himself, he said in an interview.
“I’m not going to let it get there,” he recalled thinking.
Mr. Logan had a friendly relationship with Jeremiah — they talked often about music, sports and making good choices. He had recently served on a school committee that drew up a set of disability accommodations for the teen, records show. Such Individualized Education Program documents, known as I.E.P.s, are used for many students in public schools.
Part of Jeremiah’s plan advised school employees to avoid “power struggles” and to let him cool down if he got upset. It is unclear if that document, which was finalized days before the incident, was provided to Officer Laue.
When Mr. Logan arrived in the school police office, Jeremiah rose from his chair, footage shows. He begged the teacher to call his mother.
“Sit down or I’ll put you down!” Officer Laue shouted.
Mr. Logan positioned himself between Jeremiah and the officer.
He cupped the back of Jeremiah’s head. “Hey, Jeremiah,” he said, touching his forehead to the boy’s. “I got you.”
Several minutes later, Ms. De Alba arrived and shared her account of what had happened: She said that she had caught Jeremiah skipping class and suspended him, and then he pushed her.
Jeremiah interrupted, saying he had not skipped class. “When did I push you?” he asked.
Officials for the Judson school district did not provide any surveillance footage of the interaction between Ms. De Alba and Jeremiah to The Times and The Express-News, saying its release would compromise campus security.
Ms. De Alba and Officer Radziski declined to comment for this article. Both still work for the school district, payroll records show.
‘An ugly day’
Jeremiah was charged as a juvenile with assault and resisting arrest. The assault charge was later reduced to making a threat, court records show. He was put on probation, which was extended after he was caught smoking marijuana and repeatedly broke his evening curfew. At one point, he had to wear an ankle monitor, he said, which he hid under his pant leg around his classmates.
He stopped going to school last fall. Now 18, Jeremiah says he no longer hangs out with the boys in the gang. He spends his free time playing games on his phone and listening to songs by Lil Poppa and NBA YoungBoy, who rap about betrayal and feeling misunderstood.
He recently got a job washing dishes — a step toward getting his life together. He wants an apartment and to be able to support himself. More education may be in his future, but he does not plan to return to Judson High.
Since the episode with Officer Laue, he said, he has a visceral reaction to seeing police officers on the street. “I just go into shock,” he said.
His takeaway from what happened? Officers “show no mercy.”
Officer Laue said that he had been reprimanded for yelling at Jeremiah and ordered to take an anger management course. A district spokeswoman declined requests for an interview and did not respond to written questions about the encounter.
In an email, the spokeswoman said that the district “takes all matters involving student safety and student concerns seriously” and is “committed to continuously reviewing its practices.”
The only record in Officer Laue’s personnel file that the school district released was his resignation letter. He left a year and a half after the incident.
He told The Times and The Express-News that he did not like policing and that he is now an emergency medical technician. “It’s more of a feel-good profession,” he said. “I don’t have to be mean to people.”
The officer added that he had “nothing against” Jeremiah and hoped he was doing well.
After the arrest, he recalled, he watched surveillance footage of the interaction between the teenager and Ms. De Alba. Based on what he could see in that video, it appeared Jeremiah “might have brushed past her,” Officer Laue said.
“I wouldn’t have called that an assault,” he said.
Had he seen the footage before confronting Jeremiah, he said, he would have turned him over to a school administrator and declined to press criminal charges.
Looking back, he added, the whole situation could have unfolded a lot differently. “I wish we didn’t have an ugly day,” he said.
Asher Lehrer-Small contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Noyes contributed research. Produced by Rumsey Taylor.
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