Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a mem-ber of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) What to Know About Orphines, a New Class of Deadly Opioids
The drugs are 10 times more dangerous than fentanyl. They are showing up in street drugs in the South and the Midwest, and will most likely spread to other regions.
By Jan Hoffman, May 4, 2026
A Knoxville, Tenn., police officer at the scene of a suspected overdose last month. The greater Knoxville area has seen a startling spike in overdose deaths driven by the presence of orphines. Brett Carlsen for The New York Times
Since last fall, new and deadly synthetic opioids called orphines have begun appearing in street drugs in the United States. They are far more potent than fentanyl but cannot be detected by standard toxicology tests.
Orphines are still much less common than fentanyl, but they are proliferating quickly. As of last month, they have been found in 14 states, mostly in the South and the Midwest. Law enforcement officials and public health officials are trying to assess the gravity and endurance of the threat they pose.
Here are answers to some basic questions.
What are orphines?
They are a class of opioids that was created in the 1960s by Paul Janssen, a Belgian doctor and pharmacologist, whose teams investigated rapid, safe pain relievers for surgery. As part of that effort, they also developed fentanyl.
Dr. Janssen and others discovered that orphines had life-threatening side effects such as acute respiratory depression and were highly addictive. Within a few years, the research on them was halted.
Researchers characterize orphines as 10 times more powerful than fentanyl, even in quantities no greater than a few sand-size grains. They can be lethal with stunning speed, with victims slumping over abruptly, respiration shutting down, chest walls rigid. Sometimes the classic signature of overdose, “the foam cone” — froth from the nostrils and mouth — does not even have time to bubble up.
Fentanyl Overdoses: What to Know
Understand fentanyl’s effects. Fentanyl is a potent and fast-acting drug, two qualities that also make it highly addictive. A small quantity goes a long way, so it’s easy to suffer an overdose. With fentanyl, there is only a short window of time to intervene and save a person’s life during an overdose.
Stick to licensed pharmacies. Prescription drugs sold online or by unlicensed dealers marketed as OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax are often laced with fentanyl. Only take pills that were prescribed by your doctor and came from a licensed pharmacy.
Talk to your loved ones. The best way to prevent fentanyl use is to educate your loved ones, including teens, about it. Explain what fentanyl is and that it can be found in pills bought online or from friends. Aim to establish an ongoing dialogue in short spurts rather than one long, formal conversation.
Learn how to spot an overdose. When someone overdoses from fentanyl, breathing slows and their skin often turns a bluish hue. If you think someone is overdosing, call 911 right away.
Buy naloxone. If you’re concerned that a loved one could be exposed to fentanyl, you may want to buy naloxone. The medicine can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose and is often available at pharmacies without a prescription. Narcan, the nasal spray version of naloxone, has received F.D.A. approval to be sold over the counter.
Still, it is possible for people overdosing on orphines to be revived with naloxone, the opioid reversal medication. But numerous doses may be required, many more than the one or two doses typically needed for fentanyl.
Why did orphines start showing up in United States?
Orphines are among the synthetic opioids that started to appear in the street drug supply in the wake of global crackdowns on fentanyl.
In 2018, the Drug Enforcement Administration issued a temporary ban on all fentanyl-related substances, called analogs. That same year, an article in The Journal of Medicinal Chemistry addressed the challenge of developing opioids without toxic side effects and offered orphines as cautionary examples. It described them as dangerous, because they are so powerfully addictive and may affect breathing.
Researchers speculate that rogue chemists, seeking illicit drugs that can evade international drug laws, may have been inspired by the article to develop orphines. By 2019, brorphine, an early orphine, was detected in Europe.
Around that time, another class of cheap, synthetic opioids called nitazenes had been circulating in Europe and the United States, alarming law enforcement and public health officials. But in July 2025, China, a key manufacturing source of chemicals for nitazenes, banned them.
Nitazenes began to fade but, within months, orphines popped up in the American illicit drug supply.
In what form are orphines sold?
The most common orphine is an analog called cychlorphine (also known as N-propionitrile chlorphine). It seems to be circulating in counterfeit pills or as a powder, bulking and boosting fentanyl. Overdoses and fatalities may occur because the user did not know that the intended drug — such as the stimulant methamphetamine — had been adulterated with the orphine.
Cychlorphine is so new, so difficult to seize that researchers believe it is often being delivered by international mail. In addition to the United States, it has been detected in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, France and Germany, where, cheap and available, it has been nicknamed “poor man’s fentanyl.”
There are indications in Europe that cychlorphine is being used on its own, not just to adulterate other drugs. Medical examiners in the United States are starting to surmise this as well because a few overdose fatalities do not test positive for conventional illicit drugs, like fentanyl and benzodiazepines. When further toxicology tests have been done, cychlorphine shows up as the only deadly drug on board.
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2) Guns vs. Butter—It’s Our Choice
By Bonnie Weinstein, May/June 2026
In an April 2, 2026, New York Times article titled, “Five Takeaways From Trump’s Address on Iran,” by Luke Broadwater and Tyler Pager, Trump declared:
“Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”
This declaration exposes the essence of capitalism— nothing is more sacred than private profits and massive accumulation of wealth—even if it means bombing the world back to the stone age.
And in an April 3, 2026, New York Times article titled, “Trump’s Defense Spending Request Could be Offset in Part by Steep Cuts to Domestic Programs,” by Tony Romm:
“With the United States at war with Iran and embroiled in conflicts around the world, the White House said on Friday that it would ask Congress to approve about $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year. If enacted, that amount would set military spending at its highest level in modern history. The request, which arrived on Friday as part of President Trump’s new budget, would amount to a roughly 40 percent bump from what the United States spent on the Pentagon this fiscal year. The administration said it would couple the proposed increase with a call for $73 billion in cuts across domestic agencies, including the elimination of some climate, housing and education programs. … Some of the proposed cuts would target programs that serve minority groups and their communities, under the presumption that the spending—meant to expand access to lending, bolster minority-owned businesses and combat housing discrimination—is ‘woke,’ ‘weaponized’ or facilitates ‘cultural Marxism.’ … The administration signaled it would reserve its most significant increases for law enforcement, including more than $40 billion for the Justice Department, a 13 percent increase.”
Just how wealthy are the wealthiest 0.1 percent?
A March 2, 2026, New York Times article by Katie Benner and Steven Rich, titled, “Five Takeaways on America’s Boom in Billionaires” included these facts:
· Supercharged by Trump-era tax cuts and other policies that favor the rich, America’s wealthy minority has more power over the country than at any time in the last century.
· The richest Americans saw their net worth soar by 120 percent from 2017 to 2025
· The top one percent of American households, which have a minimum net worth of $11.1 million, now collectively own about $25.6 trillion worth of stocks and mutual funds, the same amount as the remaining 99 percent of the country, according to the Federal Reserve.
· Of the $25.6 trillion worth of stock owned by the one percent, more than half is in the hands of the top 0.1 percent.”
· And as for corporations, “Typically, fewer than one percent of corporations now account for more than 90 percent of corporate profits.”[1]
But let’s put these figures in perspective
As of March 2026, there is a record-breaking 3,428
billionaires worldwide, according to Forbes’ 2026 World’s Billionaires List.[2] That’s only 3,428 people—from the capitalist class—that owns the wealth of the entire world! That’s 3,428 people in power over 8.3 billion[3] people who actually do the work to create all that wealth!
As of early 2026, the United States has the highest number of billionaires in the world, with a record high of 989. Another recent report indicates that number could be as high as 1,135, with a combined net worth of roughly $5.7 trillion. The U.S. leads billionaires globally ahead of China and India, with the majority concentrated in California.[4]
And what about millionaires?
As of late 2025/early 2026, there are approximately 58 to 60 million millionaires worldwide out of 8.3 billion people. This affluent group represents about 1.5 percent of the global adult population. The United States leads significantly with over 22–24 million millionaires, accounting for roughly 40-41 percent of the global total. The top countries with the most millionaires are the U.S. (23.8M), China (6.3M), France (2.9M), Japan (2.7M), and Germany (2.7M).[5]
And what does world capitalism plan to do with all this wealth?
According to an April 5, 2026, New York Times article by Sheera Frenkel, Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano, titled, “Mutually Automated Destruction: The Escalating Global A.I. Arms Race:”
“Russia, China and the United States are all building A.I. arms as a deterrent and for ‘mutually assured destruction,’ Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s founder, said in an interview in February. The buildup has been compared to the dawn of the nuclear age in the 1940s, when the atomic bomb’s destructive power forced rival nations into an uneasy standoff, leading to more than four decades of nuclear weapons brinkmanship. But while the implications of nuclear weapons are well understood, A.I.’s military capabilities are just beginning to be known. The technology—which does not need to pause, eat, drink or sleep—is set to upend warfare by making battles faster and more unpredictable, officials said. … Even as the specifics of the technologies remain veiled, the intentions are clear. In 2017, Mr. Putin declared that whoever leads in A.I. ‘will become the ruler of the world.’ Mr. Xi said in 2024 that technology would be the ‘main battleground’ of geopolitical competition. In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed all branches of the U.S. military to adopt A.I., saying they needed to ‘accelerate like hell.’”
The capitalists’ only goal is to build up their global war machines in competition for the world’s resources—so that the most powerful military will rule the world. The USA is already at the top of that list, and it certainly intends to remain at the top at any cost—including bombing the world back into the stone age.
But who creates the wealth that this tiny, capitalist minority owns and controls?
The vast majority of the workers of the world—we, the 8.2 billion rest of humanity—workers and professionals of all kinds—farmers, teachers, doctors, nurses, health workers, builders, shippers, delivery workers, rail, bus, train and airplane workers, factory workers, restaurant workers, sales people—everyone who must collect wages to live, we are the ones who create all the wealth in the world. The capitalists—the tiny minority of humanity—own the means of production and all the wealth and profits created by our labor.
We get only a small portion of the wealth we create by our work, and we have to fight tooth and nail to get barely enough to feed and house ourselves and our families.
And all over the world, masses of people are being bombed, starved and driven from their homes by this tiny minority of wealthy despots who steal the resources of the world only to blow it up again to protect their dictatorship over the wealth that we create—all 8.2 billion of us.
We can be divided no more!
The capitalist minority has done a great job of pitting worker against worker everywhere and for every reason they can think of—race, religion, national origin, language, sexual orientation, economic standing, education—any kind of difference they can think of to divide us and keep us ignorant of the tremendous power we can have if we had democratic control over the means of production and all the wealth we create.
If we are united, we have the power to end private profits for capitalists altogether—to take the ownership of the means of production out of their hands and into our hands and for the good of all.
The world has no use for capitalism whatsoever. We have no use for war, borders, armies, or police—we could share the wealth of the world equally.
With a completely democratized workforce—we can make sure everyone has all the necessities and joys of life—housing, healthcare, education and ample free time to explore all our talents to the fullest.
We can do away with the production of war machines and turn our production towards supplying the needs of all based upon freedom, democracy and economic and social equality and rational planning.
We, all 8.2 billion of us, can create the kind of world we want to live and raise our children in. We know how to create the things we need and want—things of quality for everyone. All we have to do is end the capitalist dictatorship—and leave all the decisions to us, the majority of humanity.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/business/dealbook/corporate-profits-record.html
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2026/03/10/2026-worlds-billionaires-list-facts-and-figures/
[3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#:~:text=World%20Population%20Clock:%208.3%20Billion%20People%20(LIVE%2C%202026)%20%2D%20Worldometer.
[4] https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/what-we-know-about-americas-billionaires-1-135-and-counting-98d22268
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millionaire
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3) No Kings
A Socialist Viewpoint Editorial
By Carole Seligman
The No Kings protest in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Saturday, March 28, 2026.
An estimated eight million people attended the March 28, 2026, No Kings protest demonstrations that took place in over 3,100 towns and cities across the United States as well as in some other countries. This was probably the largest mass demonstration in U.S. history, and it was a profound rebuke to President Trump and the government as a whole, especially the Republicans who have supported Trump’s reactionary agenda wholeheartedly. But the Democrats did not escape the ire of masses of the millions of demonstrators who were angry about the new war on Iran as well as the attacks, arrests, and deportations of immigrants, the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Keith Porter Jr. and Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, the deaths in immigrant detention jails, the heavily armed occupations by ICE agents in L.A., Chicago, and especially Minneapolis, and the threats to continue these occupations in other cities.
It is critically important that a mass movement in the streets to oppose this war on Iran is built, and the No Kings protests were a good start for that endeavor. Likewise, the massive, localized response to the arrests, detentions, and deportations of thousands of immigrants by masses of mobilized people, especially in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Los Angeles, and Chicago, is setting the example for the country as a whole of what must be done in all communities. The No Kings mobilizations all across the country was a big supportive boost for those actions as well.
While it is true that organized Democratic Party elected officials, leaders, and operatives supported the March 28 actions, and are in leadership roles in Indivisable, 50501, ACLU, and other liberal organizations, I don’t think you can say that they were in tight control of the No Kings actions. In many areas, speakers sharply criticized both Republicans and Democrats for ineffective response to Trump, for enabling the genocide of Palestinians, for providing huge military budgets for war, for applauding the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, for threats to “take” Cuba, for failing to protect voting rights and the courts. While the No Kings protestors were unanimously in opposition to Trump and his cabinet, large numbers of protestors on March 28 were protesting the U.S. government as a whole—both capitalist political parties, the whole administration, both houses of Congress, and courts—that have allowed the administration to enact part of the Trump agenda, particularly the Supreme Court.
So, while the No Kings protests are definitely not advocating a new independent political party nor a socialist revolution—both of which are needed to begin to solve the escalating problems of capitalism—they definitely are important indicators of mass opposition to the system and a willingness to march in the streets for change.
True, Democrats will try to make the midterm congressional elections the focal point for ongoing opposition to Trump, but there is a real desire by masses of working-class people to act and not just vote.
This is the time to promote the ideas of working-class independence from the political parties that are controlled by the billionaires. It is also the time to promote united mass action against war and for the human rights of immigrants, of women, of Black and Brown people, and the working class as a whole.
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4) Supreme Court Temporarily Restores Access to Abortion Pill by Mail
A lower-court ruling had reinstated a Food and Drug Administration requirement that patients visit a health care provider in person to obtain mifepristone.
By Ann E. Marimow, Ann E. Marimow covers the Supreme Court, May 4, 2026
The Supreme Court on Monday restored nationwide access to a widely used abortion medication in a temporary order that will, for now, allow women to once again obtain the pill mifepristone by mail.
In a brief order, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. paused a lower-court ruling from Friday that had prevented abortion providers from prescribing the pills by telemedicine and shipping them to patients, causing confusion for providers and patients. The one-sentence order imposes a pause until at least May 11. He requested that the parties file briefs by Thursday, and then the full court will determine how to proceed.
The state of Louisiana sued the Food and Drug Administration to restrict access to mifepristone, saying the availability of the medication by mail has allowed abortions to continue in the state despite its near-total ban.
Medication is now the method used in nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States, and is typically delivered in the form of a two-drug regimen through the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Friday’s ruling from the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily reinstated an F.D.A. requirement that patients visit medical providers in person to obtain mifepristone while the litigation continues. That rule was first lifted in 2021.
Two manufacturers of mifepristone, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, on Saturday asked the Supreme Court to intervene. In court filings, they said the Fifth Circuit ruling would cause chaos for providers and patients — and upend a major avenue for abortion access across the country. About one-fourth of abortions in the United States are now provided through telemedicine.
Justice Alito’s order, known as an administrative stay, was provisional and expected, but an important interim step for women seeking to obtain mifepristone in the next week. The order does not signal how the full court may eventually handle the case.
Justice Alito acted on his own at this stage because he is the justice assigned to handle emergency applications from the region of the country covered by the Fifth Circuit.
The Trump administration has defended the F.D.A. in court, but has not said whether it supports keeping in place the regulations that make it easier for women to obtain the pills. The F.D.A. is conducting a review of mifepristone, and the administration had asked the lower court to put the litigation on hold until that review is complete.
The case over access to the abortion pill puts the Trump administration in an awkward political position in the lead up to the midterm elections because many of President Trump’s allies and supporters oppose abortion. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the F.D.A., declined to comment on Saturday, citing the “ongoing litigation.”
After the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to eliminate the nationwide right to abortion, Republican-led states like Louisiana imposed strict bans. In response, many Democratic-led states passed shield laws that protect abortion providers who prescribe pills by telemedicine and send them to patients in states with abortion bans.
Louisiana and abortion opponents have asserted in court that the F.D.A.’s decision to allow abortion pills to be available by mail posed safety risks to women and increased health care costs for states that had banned abortion.
Major medical organizations and supporters of reproductive rights have pointed to more than 100 studies that have found the pills to be safe and effective, with serious side effects rare.
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5) Trump Promised Transparency in Venezuela, but Oil Secrets Linger
Trump officials and their Venezuelan allies have promised a new era of accountability to unlock Venezuela’s immense oil wealth. But the country’s oil industry remains a black hole.
By Anatoly Kurmanaev, Photographs by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez, May 5, 2026
Anatoly Kurmanaev has reported on Venezuela’s oil industry for 14 years.
Cardon Refinery in Punto Fijo, Falcon, Venezuela. Venezuela’s oil industry is undergoing rapid change as it shifts toward attracting U.S. investment.
U.S. and Venezuelan officials have promised a new era of accountability for Venezuela’s lucrative oil industry after the downfall of President Nicolás Maduro.
President Trump said the United States would control Venezuelan oil sales. Venezuela would submit monthly budgets to the White House, the Trump administration said, and the United States said it hired auditors to check receipts.
Venezuela’s new leader and Mr. Trump’s ally, Delcy Rodríguez, said the public could trace every oil dollar on a new website.
None of these initiatives, however, have thus far shed light on where Venezuela’s oil money has been going, prompting questions about the political will in Washington and Caracas.
Yet even with the best intentions, Washington’s plan to show how and where Venezuela’s oil riches are being spent would be a gargantuan task. Decades of plundering have left Venezuela with an opaque and deeply corrupt oil industry, which Ms. Rodríguez had largely failed to solve during her previous role running the national economy.
For every two dollars that Venezuela earned selling oil earlier this decade, one dollar was stolen, internal documents and official statistics show.
The stakes are even higher today. For Mr. Trump, his plan to unlock Venezuela’s massive oil potential with $100 billion of American investment hinges in part on convincing U.S. oil executives that his administration can establish the rule of law.
For Ms. Rodríguez, assuring Venezuelans that the oil industry, a core part of the country’s national identity, benefits many and not just the few is vital to improving her long odds of winning a competitive presidential election that the United States is pushing for next year.
It’s unclear how much corruption Ms. Rodríguez would tolerate in order to keep her grip on the government, which remains filled with Mr. Maduro’s apparatchiks and their businessmen patrons.
During Mr. Maduro’s 13-year rule, Venezuela’s omnipresent state oil company, known as PDVSA, had become his family’s personal estate, allowing relatives and cronies to sell oil at highly preferential terms. The patronage greased the wheels of the ruling apparatus, ensuring its loyalty to Mr. Maduro, who survived multiple crises before being captured in January by U.S. Special Forces.
The opaque oil trading schemes continued right up to Mr. Maduro’s fall, and some beneficiaries have kept quietly doing business with PDVSA under Ms. Rodríguez, according to internal documents and interviews with Venezuelan oil officials and people close to the industry.
The questionable deal making is testing her promise to make a clean break with Mr. Maduro’s economic policies, which she has blamed for Venezuela’s prolonged financial crisis.
These previously unreported documents provide a rare glimpse of the scale of graft during Mr. Maduro’s final years, which were shaped by an economic standoff with the United States and mounting repression at home.
The documents and interviews also show the central role played by a relative of Mr. Maduro, Carlos Malpica Flores, who several Venezuelan oil officials and industry insiders have described as the guardian of the Maduro family’s wealth. The people interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals.
The Trump administration imposed sanctions on Mr. Malpica, 53, in December, claiming he had “facilitated the continued corruption of the Maduro regime.” Mr. Malpica did not respond to questions sent through a business partner and two relatives.
PDVSA documents show that shell companies controlled by Mr. Malpica and other businessmen close to Mr. Maduro exported oil worth $11 billion in 2021 and 2022 without paying anything to the state company. That amount represented half of all of Venezuela’s oil revenues in those two years, statistics from the country’s central bank show.
The off-the-books oil sales appear to have violated Venezuelan law at the time, which gave PDVSA sole custody of the country’s oil wealth.
Since Mr. Maduro’s removal and the imposition of U.S. control of Venezuela’s oil exports in January, Mr. Malpica appears to have lost access to crude sales, according to people close to the industry. But the people, as well as a senior Venezuelan oil official, say Mr. Malpica continues profiting from his companies that run oil fields, provide services to PDVSA and ship oil products locally.
Venezuela’s government did not respond to requests for comment. The Trump administration declined to comment publicly for this article.
An administration official said Venezuela’s government was providing commitments that funds were being properly spent.
A senior State Department official, Michael Kozak, told Congress last month that the U.S. government hired KPMG, a global financial services firm, to audit Venezuela’s oil sales, adding that the firm will provide reports at a later, unspecified date. Venezuela’s central bank said last week that it separately hired another auditing firm, without providing additional details.
The story of Mr. Malpica, 53, epitomizes the transformation of the Venezuelan economy into a personal fief of the Maduro family, a system still partly in place despite a leadership change.
A former bus driver and union leader, Mr. Maduro lacked the technical understanding of Venezuela’s byzantine economy when his cancer-stricken mentor and predecessor, Hugo Chávez, bequeathed him the presidential office in 2013.
Mr. Maduro needed allies to run the country. And those people needed to be loyal to him, not to Mr. Chávez, a self-styled revolutionary who commanded his followers’ adoration. Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, a senior politician in her own right, embarked on creating a new elite.
Among Mr. Maduro’s recruits was Ms. Rodríguez, a lawyer from a prominent leftist family.
Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores also began appointing dozens of relatives without any apparent qualifications to public posts, where some remain today.
One relative was Mr. Malpica, a nephew of the first lady, who at the start of Mr. Maduro’s term convinced the president to let him manage dealings with the oil sector, according to senior officials at the time.
Mr. Malpica’s career quickly took off. Months after talking power, Mr. Maduro appointed him to the board of Venezuela’s development bank, known as Bandes. Soon after, he became the national treasurer and PDVSA’s head of finance.
The positions gave Mr. Malpica unchecked access to Venezuela’s oil wealth, which he continued to exploit after leaving the public sector in 2016 and becoming a PDVSA subcontractor and oil buyer.
In late 2022, PDVSA’s board met to take stock of years of unpaid oil bills left by Mr. Malpica and other Maduro confidants, according to the meeting’s presentation seen by The Times. The board counted nearly 240 oil tankers that left without payment between 2019 and 2022, costing the Venezuelan state $13 billion.
The board voted to effectively write that money off, the presentation shows.
Months later, Ms. Rodríguez took charge of PDVSA after orchestrating the downfall of her predecessor Tareck El Aissami, a protégé of Mr. Maduro who is on trial on corruption charges. Under her management, PDVSA’s most blatant irregularities, such as unpaid oil sales, largely stopped.
But Mr. Malpica and other businessmen close to Mr. Maduro continued receiving preferential access to oil, showing the limits of her initiatives.
In 2023, for example, a shell company connected to Mr. Malpica became the second largest exporter of Venezuela’s crude, just behind Chevron, a multinational firm that has produced oil in Venezuela for a century, the documents show.
Copies of some of the contracts show that the shell company, China-registered Hangzhou Energy, received oil from PDVSA on highly favorable and unusual terms despite not having any history of business activity. A contract for 2022 shows that Hangzhou was allowed to sell about a tenth of the country’s export volumes that year in return for providing the government with an unspecified amount of “humanitarian aid.”
It is unclear how much aid Hangzhou eventually delivered or what it included. Ostensibly set up in response to American sanctions, oil-for-food deals similar to the one obtained by Hangzhou became a major source of corruption during Mr. Maduro’s final years, siphoning billions of dollars from the state at a time of humanitarian crisis, according to the U.S. government and investigations by a Venezuelan news outlet, Armando.Info.
An email to Hangzhou’s operations manager, Zhang Junling, went unanswered.
Though Hangzhou’s legal representatives were ostensibly in China, in practice it was Mr. Malpica and a partner, Ramos Carretero, who represented Hangzhou in meetings with PDVSA, according to several PDVSA officials and people in Venezuelan oil industry, implying the two men were the company’s ultimate beneficiaries.
Hangzhou also had other unusual and lucrative payment arrangements.
Most oil buyers had to pay PDVSA in dollars. Hangzhou, however, paid Bandes, the development bank, in bolívars, the local currency, according to PDVSA documents, internal messages seen by The New York Times and interviews with Venezuelan oil officials.
The scheme defied the basic reason nations export oil: to obtain hard currency for imports.
Venezuela’s controlled currency rate meant that buying oil for undervalued bolívars and selling it to Chinese refiners for stable currencies such as dollars would allow Hangzhou’s owners to reap a huge profit.
And Venezuela’s runaway inflation meant that any bolívars that Hangzhou ended up depositing in Bandes, an opaque institution tied to Mr. Malpica, became practically worthless.
Mr. Malpica’s close relationship with Mr. Maduro and his wife helped him survive PDVSA’s periodic purges, which have landed four of its recent presidents and dozens of executives in jail, including most of those who signed contracts with Hangzhou.
Mr. Malpica also managed to strike up a friendship over the years with Ms. Rodríguez, according to several people who know both of them well. This connection appears to have spared him thus far from the new president’s housecleaning, which has led to dozens of Maduro relatives being fired or ostracized.
Several oil businessmen close to Mr. Maduro have been detained since his capture, but so far none has been publicly charged with any financial crimes.
The oil industry accountability website, called Transparent Sovereignty, promised by Ms. Rodríguez in January today displays a single entry.
The website says that the government sold $300 million-worth of fuel oil in March, which was used to increase the minimum wage.
The website did not say who bought the oil or for how much.
Mariana Martínez contributed reporting from Caracas.
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6) U.S. Military Strikes Boat in Caribbean, Killing 2
The aerial strike raised the death toll to at least 187 in the U.S. campaign against boats the Trump administration accuses of smuggling drugs.
By John Yoon, May 5, 2026
An image from a video released by U.S. Southern Command showing a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel conducted by Joint Task Force Southern Spear. Credit...U.S. Southern Command
The U.S. military said on Monday that it had struck another boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing two men as part of a campaign against people the Trump administration accuses of smuggling drugs by sea.
The strike was ordered by Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean, the command said in a statement.
The two deaths raised the overall toll to at least 187 in the U.S. campaign against boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. There have been more than 50 strikes since the campaign began in September.
The command released video showing a projectile flying toward a boat at sea. Citing unspecified intelligence, officials said the vessel was engaged in drug trafficking along known smuggling routes and that the strike killed “two male narco-terrorists.”
Experts in the use of lethal force have argued that the strikes are illegal because the military is not permitted to target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if they are suspected of engaging in crimes. The Trump administration has not provided evidence of drug smuggling.
The White House has said that the killings are lawful. The Trump administration said in a notice to Congress that President Trump had “determined” that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that crews of drug-running boats are “combatants.”
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7) What a Bike Ride Showed Me About Apartheid’s Legacy
A New York Times reporter joined a group of cyclists on a route meant to break down Cape Town’s lingering racial and economic barriers.
By John Eligon, Photographs by Tommy Trenchard, May 5, 2026
John Eligon rode a bicycle for the first time in years to report this story from Cape Town.
Members of Young Urbanists cycle through a “buffer zone” of undeveloped land during an event designed to raise awareness of the divisive legacies of apartheid planning in Cape Town.
We were nearing the end of our 10-mile journey when we turned off a chaotic six-lane road and onto a quiet bicycle lane bordering a canal. This was as serene as the roughly hourlong bike ride had been, from the hustle and bustle of downtown Cape Town to the fringes of Langa, a township in South Africa.
But the stench of the trash-filled canal cut through the idyllic atmosphere. The grass along the path was patchy and unkempt. Instead of a place to slow down and soak in the peace and quiet, I wanted to pedal out of there as quickly as possible.
In March, I joined a group bike ride organized by Young Urbanists, a nonprofit that promotes redesigning urban spaces in ways that narrow the racial, social and economic disparities lingering from South Africa’s former apartheid system.
The ride started on a Sunday afternoon on Bree Street, a vibrant stretch of central Cape Town with restaurants, tall buildings and all the amenities you’d expect in a modern city. It ended in Langa, one of many outlying townships where the white-led apartheid government forced Black South Africans to live.
Along the winding route, I saw formidable physical and psychological barriers left over from a system of intense racial segregation. Even though apartheid ended three decades ago, none of those barriers have easy solutions.
But there were signs of progress.
The quiet yet smelly canal was once a lifeless buffer zone that apartheid officials created to separate Langa and Athlone, a township designated for colored South Africans, a multiracial ethnic group established by the apartheid government. In the past two years, the city opened a bridge over the canal, making the area easier to traverse.
Roland Postma, 30, who leads Young Urbanists, said his organization had proposed revamping the stretch by repaving the pedestrian and cycling lanes, installing proper lighting and putting in a soccer field to attract more residents. An overhaul of this area could resemble an earlier stretch in the ride along the Liesbeek River in a more affluent area.
“Apartheid was not just about dividing Black and white,” it was also about divestment, Mr. Postma said.
During the ride, we traveled along decrepit, apartheid-era infrastructure largely created to maintain segregation. We climbed over bridges, rolled over train tracks, ducked beneath freeway overpasses and hugged the shoulders of wide thoroughfares as cars whizzed past. As we left downtown Cape Town, the bright-green bicycle lanes gave way to faded white lines forming narrow bike paths that drivers pretty much ignored.
Historians say that the apartheid government tore through small, neighborhood streets to build grand thoroughfares that Black and colored workers used to travel in and out of the city as quickly as possible, as they were not allowed to live in the city. On Klipfontein Road, cars moved so fast along six lanes of traffic that my bike sometimes wobbled as they raced by.
We used a bridge to cross over one of the national freeways to reach Langa. At the top of the bridge, Mr. Postma pointed out that there was an express bus lane on one side of the freeway but not the other. The side with the express lane went toward central Cape Town, he said, the implication being that businesses wanted workers to get to the city quickly, but did not care how long it took them to get home.
When we arrived at our destination in front of an art gallery on Lerotholi Avenue in Langa, a fellow rider showed me just how choked off the township was from the communities around it. He used a map on his phone to drop a pin on a school in the neighboring, upper-middle-class suburb of Pinelands. The school was just over a half mile away, but because of a highway, a wall with barbed wire and railroad tracks separating Langa and Pinelands, it would take six miles to walk there.
Of all the remnants of apartheid that I saw, what struck me most were the psychological ones. For many Capetonians, riding a bike to a township would seem like a risky move. As we rode, drivers occasionally honked when we crept into the road, even when it was legal for us to do so. One minibus taxi conductor admonished us for not riding single file, even though we were about two dozen riders.
Some cyclists said that the infrastructure developed during apartheid had created a car-first mentality among South Africans. Urban activists say they’re trying to change that mind-set. They’ve erected large planters and bright yellow bollards to create pedestrian and bike lanes and slow traffic.
They’ve organized street shutdowns in downtown Cape Town and Langa that transform stretches of road into buzzing pedestrian-only piazzas, where South Africans gather freely, regardless of race. And they’ve invited people to take a bike ride that many typically would not entertain.
“Just to show that it’s possible,” said Phano Liphoto, a member of Young Urbanists, at the end of our ride. “Let’s just use what we have and then build from there.”
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8) I’m a Doctor. Here’s What A.I. Cannot Do.
By Danielle Ofri, May 5, 2026
Dr. Ofri is a primary care physician in New York and the editor in chief of Bellevue Literary Review.
Aldo Jarillo
As soon as I spotted my patient in the waiting room, I knew that I’d be admitting him to the hospital. His breathing wasn’t necessarily heavy, but there was something in the contour of his respirations that caught my eye. Or maybe it was the expression on his face — eyes more quizzical than crinkling, lips more decisively hewn than usual.
Every doctor and nurse has had this experience — a glance at a patient and the instant recognition that something has run amok in his or her physiology. This is especially common in primary care medicine, where we know our patients for years, sometimes decades. We know their gait, their heart murmurs, their blood counts. And we know when something is amiss.
Like most doctors these days, I’ve been incorporating medical artificial intelligence tools into my practice. It’s become so easy to type in a quick description of an 86-year-old male with heart failure, diabetes and gout — toss in some test results, and see what the bot spits out. I appreciate that A.I. can expeditiously outline next steps for the clinical evaluation, or provide suggestions for rarer diagnoses or spit out a feisty appeal letter for an insurance denial. But the problem is that A.I. is evaluating only some statistical average of 86-year-old males with heart failure, diabetes and gout. It is not assessing that one specific 86-year-old man with these conditions whom I am looking at across the waiting room.
There’s an ocean of distance between the “patient” that A.I. is analyzing and the patient that the human doctor or nurse is assessing. Navigating the gap is something writers also grapple with. When making a diagnosis, as it were, of good writing to publish in the literary journal I edit, I look for characters that are fully realized, with physicality that is palpable and an emotional complexity both visceral and vivid. These details aren’t always made explicit, but pieced together in hints and subtle cues. What I’ve realized over the years is this is not so different from what a doctor has to do when assessing her patient’s health.
This is the inherent limitation of A.I. in medicine. It’s simply impossible — at least for now — for these tools to truly see the multidimensional patient. A.I. can’t know how the agony of a child estranged by substance use affects the blood pressure. It can’t factor in the economic and social crosscurrents that bear on medication adherence. It can’t account for the simmering grief of a lost spouse that influences a patient’s health decisions far more than any clinical guideline.
So while A.I. is a useful tool, particularly for pattern recognition and data organization, the “patients” it manages feel like stock characters who share check-box traits with actual patients in the same way a Harlequin romance heroine shares the same number of limbs as Anna Karenina. A.I. might be quick to spit out a treatment plan, and it might even be correct, but a clinician must decide how to make that treatment work for the specific person sitting in front of her, or whether to even treat at all. Such decisions do not readily follow an algorithm.
It’s easy to be book smart — our A.I. tools and databases may already have a monopoly on information processing — but it’s far harder to be wise and know how to apply the trove of knowledge at our disposal. As we train the next generation of doctors and nurses, we can worry a bit less about the smarts (they’re all smart enough, and they can look up whatever they need to know), but we have to help them cultivate the wisdom of what to do with all those facts, and how to guide individual patients through their very particular maelstroms of illness.
Understanding complexity of character is why medical humanities are arguably as important as A.I. skills for these rising clinicians. A.I. is optimized to provide us a seemingly certain answer, but clinical medicine is anything but certain. Grappling with ambiguity, uncertainty and contradiction is exactly where the humanities excel, and exactly why A.I. can’t supplant the totality of medical care.
I admitted my patient to the hospital for his heart failure, but it turned out that his kidney function had significantly worsened, both likely precipitated by a wrenching family
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9) White House Insists Iran War Is Over, Even While Missiles Fly
The White House is turning to rhetorical leaps as President Trump tries to put the biggest political crisis of his presidency behind him.
By David E. Sanger, May 5, 2026
David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents in more than four decades at The New York Times. He has written about efforts to destroy or contain Iran’s nuclear program for more than twenty years.
When the cease-fire in the war with Iran went into effect a month ago, President Trump was pretty direct that if the Iranians failed to end their nuclear program, or to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the bombers would be back in the air. “If there’s no deal, fighting resumes,” he said, making it very clear this was just a pause.
But it turns out, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that the war actually ended at some point after the cease-fire took hold, or so he told reporters at a news conference at the White House on Tuesday. “The Operation Epic Fury is concluded,” he said. “We achieved the objective of that operation.” The effort to reopen the strait, Mr. Rubio said, is entirely a defensive and humanitarian operation that would result in direct military exchanges with the Iranians only if U.S. ships came under fire.
Later on Tuesday, Mr. Trump announced that he was pausing even that effort — which was only one day old, and had succeeded in getting just a few ships freed — “for a short period of time,” citing what he said was “great progress” toward an agreement with Iran. But he kept the American blockade in place, part of a strategy of maximum economic pressure.
Still, Mr. Trump’s suspension of the effort to guide ships out of the strait seemed to contradict the administration’s stated position that it was intolerable for Iran to block an international waterway, and that only the United States had the ability to force it open again.
For the White House, the insistence that the war was over was the latest rhetorical leap in an effort to put a war that has created the greatest political crisis of Mr. Trump’s presidency in the rearview mirror. But the mere proclamation does not make it true. Missiles were still flying. Both sides insist they control traffic in the waterway.
And despite Mr. Rubio’s declaration that the objectives of the war have been accomplished, they clearly have not. In the 38 days of intensive combat operations, the United States hit, by the Pentagon’s count, about 13,000 targets. But destroying targets was not the only point. Mr. Trump himself described his objectives in the early hours of Feb. 28, when he told the country, in a video he had recorded earlier, that he had five major goals.
The first, of course, was to ensure that Iran can “never have a nuclear weapon.” But he went on to add that the United States had to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and their launchers, sink its navy, end its support of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and, finally, create the conditions for the Iranian people to topple their government.
“Your hour of your freedom is at hand,” he said at the time.
The Iranian Navy is clearly gone, as Mr. Trump often notes. But that is the only one checked off the list. So far, Iran’s nuclear stockpile has not been touched and there is no agreement, at least yet, to ship it out of the country or to dilute it so that it cannot easily be used to manufacture weapons. While intelligence estimates differ, the U.S. assessments suggest that more than half of Iran’s missiles and launchers survived. It is too early to tell about support of the proxy groups, which were shredded by Israeli attacks.
And Mr. Trump has abandoned talk of changing the country’s leadership, suggesting at one point that he never called for it. At other moments he has maintained that regime change already happened, citing the emergence of a new supreme leader and other officials, replacing those who were killed. To most Iran experts — and many in the American intelligence agencies — that is a change of personnel.
Nonetheless, both Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio have many reasons to declare that Epic Fury ended at some undefined date in the recent past. Congress was getting increasingly restive about the War Powers Act, which demands a vote of approval by Congress after American troops are involved in combat for more than 60 days. His political base has fractured on the question of whether Mr. Trump has dispensed with his own promise to get America out of lengthy wars. And Mr. Trump delayed his trip to China once to make sure that the war was over, that the United States was victorious and that the strait was open before he touched down in Beijing. That trip is now scheduled for next Wednesday.
Mr. Trump’s language has changed, too, though even he has not gone so far as to declare that the operation is ended. He cannot quite seem to keep himself from describing the current situation as a war, even if he has begun to back away. “Our country is booming now, despite the fact that we’re in a — I call it a miniwar,” he said at a White House event for small businesses on Monday.
In other speeches, he has interspersed the word “war” with other, more benign descriptions: Attacking Iran was an “excursion,” he said. At another point he described it as a “detour,” making it sound more like a weekend drive across the Middle East that hit some traffic.
While it all sounds like politically convenient wordplay, any real declaration that the battle is over represents a fundamental change in strategy, even for a war in which the White House seemed to be making up its next move day by day. For the past nine weeks American military power, and the prospect that it could resume, was the leverage Mr. Trump celebrated as the steel behind negotiations. Nothing would focus Iranian minds, he suggested, like the prospect of further destruction.
Indeed, when negotiations over the future of the nuclear program broke down in late February, the American bombing was designed to force Iran to make concessions.
But the bombing campaign, while deadly and destructive, did not alter Iran’s fundamental positions, at least yet. And the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ success at sealing off the strait — bottling up tankers and cargo ships and sending oil and fertilizer markets into a frenzy — changed the dynamic. Mr. Trump’s frustration was clear: He threatened even heavier strikes — and attacks on power plants — if Iran refused to relent, lashing out with expletives on social media.
The Iranians ignored it, then a few days later Mr. Trump warned, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Then came the cease-fire.
But Iran’s restraint fell apart after Mr. Trump on Sunday announced a new operation to guide ships through the narrow strait, on a pathway that had been declared free of mines. Iranian forces shot at two ships the following day, but the missiles were intercepted by American forces. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that since the cease-fire took effect, Iran had attacked U.S. forces more than 10 times, but that the attacks were “all below the threshold of restarting major combat operations at this point.”
General Caine added that defining that threshold was “a political decision,” meaning it was Mr. Trump’s decision. And Mr. Trump, pressed a few hours later to explain where he put that threshold, told reporters, “You’ll find out, because I’ll let you know.”
“They know what to do,” he said of the Iranians. “They know what not to do.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday morning that the new military effort to guide merchant vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be understood as a completely separate enterprise, and a temporary defensive effort.
“We’re not looking for a fight,” said Mr. Hegseth, who only a few weeks ago was celebrating American firepower against Iran and urging “maximum lethality.” But he noted that U.S. warships shot down cruise missiles and drones that Iran fired at the ships and commercial vessels, and that Army Apache helicopter gunships also sank six Iranian military speedboats that threatened the vessels.
(Mr. Rubio compared the boats to Boston Whalers, small, ubiquitous speedboats. He said those that were struck “sit at the bottom of the sea, along with the rest of Iran’s navy.”)
Now the administration has moved from declaring that military strikes would change Iran’s leaders to insisting that it is really economic cutoffs that will do the trick. Mr. Rubio said the United States was now cutting off revenue that keeps together “whatever remains of their frail economy.”
And he called the Iranians pirates. “You can’t have a situation in which the straits are closed to everyone else, but they benefit from the piracy — that can’t happen,” he said. Only the United States, he said, had the power to open the Strait of Hormuz “as a favor to the world.”
“Frankly, we are the only ones that can,” he said. “If we live in a world where a rogue state like this Iranian regime is allowed to claim as a new normal control over an international shipping lane,” he added, “it will not be long before you see that happen in multiple shipping lanes around the world.”
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10) What to Know About the Mideast Standoff
President Trump paused a plan to help ships exit the Strait of Hormuz just a day after it began, sowing confusion about his goals and next steps in the war with Iran.
By The New York Times, Published April 26, 2026, Updated May 6, 2026
A billboard in Tehran depicts the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with a banner reading, “At the Breaking Point.” Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
President Trump said on Tuesday that the United States would pause efforts to help commercial ships exit the Strait of Hormuz, reversing course just a day after the initiative began.
Mr. Trump provided few details of his latest about-face. He said the decision was taken because negotiators had made progress in talks to end the war with Iran, which has effectively blocked the strait, a critical shipping route, since the conflict started. He also said it followed a request from Pakistan, which has been a mediator in talks, and other countries. It was not immediately clear what, if any, progress had been made.
Oil prices fell after the announcement. But Mr. Trump has repeatedly changed his position since the United States and Israel launched a military offensive against Iran in late February, consistently sowing confusion about his war aims, unsettling investors and roiling global energy prices.
Here is what to know about the negotiations to end the war.
What’s the latest?
American officials have said the cease-fire that the United States and Iran agreed to about a month ago remains intact, despite recent developments that have threatened to reignite the conflict.
Since Mr. Trump on Sunday announced the effort to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil supply transited before the war, Iran has attacked ships and commercial vessels. Iran has also fired missiles and drones at the United Arab Emirates, an American ally. The United States has sunk Iranian military speedboats that it said were threatening commercial vessels.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a news conference on Tuesday that the latest strikes did not threaten the cease-fire, adding that the effort to guide merchant vessels through the strait was a “defensive” initiative separate from the war.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a news conference at the White House later on Tuesday that the initial part of the war ended when the truce was signed and attempts to fully reopen the strait were a humanitarian operation. The United States was the only country capable of forcing Iran to lift its near blockade of the waterway “as a favor to the world,” he said, after allies rejected American attempts to convince them to police the waterway during the war.
But the Trump administration’s messaging has shifted from earlier in the conflict, when the president and senior officials insisted that military strikes would lead to regime change. Now, the rhetoric has changed to focus on increasing the pressure on Iran’s fragile economy to achieve that objective.
As recently as Saturday, Mr. Trump said he would most likely reject Iran’s latest proposal to end the conflict, saying on social media that Tehran had not “yet paid a big enough price for what they have done.”
Two semiofficial Iranian news outlets reported earlier on Saturday that Tehran had sent a 14-point proposal to Pakistani mediators in response to a nine-point U.S. proposal, but they offered few details about what it said.
Could the conflict escalate?
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said on social media that the United States could resume military strikes if Iran failed to agree to a deal to end the war.
The president’s latest threat was issued after reports that the countries were nearing a deal to end the war. Ebrahim Rezaei, an Iranian lawmaker and spokesman for the parliamentary national security committee, said that the published details about a potential deal, which were first reported by Axios, were “more a list of American wishes than a reality.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly insisted that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. Iran has rejected American proposals that it suspend its nuclear program and hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
Iran previously proposed suspending uranium enrichment for five years, followed by five years of very low-grade civilian enrichment. Under that proposal, half of Iran’s 972-pound stockpile of highly enriched uranium would have gone to Russia, an ally, and the other half would have been available to international inspectors.
The United States rejected the offer.
After the first-round negotiations, mediated by Pakistan, collapsed last month, Mr. Trump extended the cease-fire indefinitely and said the U.S. naval blockade of the strait would remain.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said on Sunday that Washington had given its “response to Iran’s 14-point plan to the Pakistani side” and that the Iranian side was reviewing it..
Despite the efforts by American officials in recent days to downplay the possibility of an escalation, uncertainty over any deal has persisted in the absence of the Trump administration or Iran releasing more details about negotiations.
Shipping companies also fear that Iran has laid mines in the strait’s main channels and could attack commercial vessels. That has deterred most of the hundreds of ships stranded in the Persian Gulf from trying to leave.
Iran’s nuclear program is a stumbling block
Iran insists it has a right to enrich nuclear fuel under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that he will not allow Iran to possess a nuclear weapon. But he is also confronting the complicated legacy of his decision, eight years ago, to cancel a deal to curtail the nuclear program.
That Obama-era agreement, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. After Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree.
Much recent attention has focused on Iran’s nearly half-ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level close to what is typically used in atom bombs. Most of it is thought to be buried in a tunnel complex that the United States bombed last June. But those 972 pounds of potential bomb fuel represent only a fraction of the problem.
International inspectors say that Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons.
Mr. Trump views himself as the master of coercive diplomacy, forcing his opponents to capitulate quickly to American demands or face the threat of attack.
In dealing with Iran over the past six weeks, he has discovered that he is up against a nation that prides itself on resilience and delay.
“Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran’s leadership is stubborn and tenacious,” said Robert Malley, who negotiated with the Iranians in the lead-up to the 2015 nuclear deal and again in a failed effort by the Biden administration.
Ravi Mattu Leo Sands Farnaz Fassihi David E. Sanger and Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.
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11) John Roberts Believes in an America That Doesn’t Exist
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, May 6, 2026
Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” President Lyndon Johnson declared as he signed the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965. “This act flows from a clear and simple wrong,” he continued. “Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote.”
And so it did.
The Voting Rights Act put the final nail in the coffin of American apartheid and opened the door to something that looked worthy of the name democracy. It brought a flowering of political participation, not just in the states of the former Confederacy but also throughout the country, as disadvantaged and disenfranchised Americans took advantage of new rules and protections to fight for and win political power. Latinos, Native Americans and other ethnic and linguistic minorities all won greater access and influence under the act and its subsequent amendments and reauthorizations.
The change was most transformative, of course, for Black Americans, who seized the passage of the law to win local, state and federal representation at numbers not seen since Reconstruction. In 1964, there was just a handful of Black officeholders at any level of government in the South. By 1980, hundreds of Black Americans had won local and state office.
With that said, it took a major amendment to the Voting Rights Act and a Supreme Court decision to give Black Americans the opportunity to win more than token representation in Congress. In 1982, Congress reauthorized and amended the V.R.A. to combat disparate impact in voting and electoral outcomes. Four years later, in 1986, a unanimous Supreme Court declared that the Voting Rights Act forbade voting schemes that impaired the ability of “cohesive” groups of language or minority groups to “participate equally in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice.” Following this decision, states across the country — especially in the South — used the 1990 census and redistricting to create majority-minority state legislative and congressional districts where Black voters could elevate Black lawmakers and officials to federal office.
At the 10th anniversary of the act in 1975, there were 17 Black members of Congress, up from six in 1965. All of them served in the House of Representatives. At the 20th anniversary in 1985, there were still only 20 Black Americans in the House (and none in the Senate). By 1995, however, there were 43 Black Americans serving as voting members of Congress, including one senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. This, even after the Democratic Party suffered its largest congressional defeat of the postwar era. Nonetheless, it would take another 20 years before Black Americans’ share of the House approximated their overall share of the population.
With its decision in Louisiana v. Callais last week, the Republican-appointed supermajority on the Supreme Court has delivered the latest in a string of decisions — stretching back to Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 — that have weakened the Voting Rights Act’s ability to stop racial discrimination in voting and to secure fair representation in both Congress and state legislatures. Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservative justices have sidelined lawmakers, invented doctrines and ignored their own rules and procedures in a relentless drive to trim the Voting Rights Act beyond all recognition.
In this case, the court gave Republican-led states in the South the tools necessary to destroy majority-minority legislative districts under the guise of partisan gerrymandering, newly blessed by the court as a legitimate aim of state lawmakers. In concurring opinions, the conservatives say that this is a blow to equal protection — a step on the path to a “colorblind Constitution” that has put an end to a “disastrous misadventure” in voting rights jurisprudence.
As a tool, the majority-minority district functions as a prophylactic — an obstacle to politicians who might want to undermine or eliminate minority representation for invidious reasons. As long as those districts exist, these communities — formed by historical circumstance and shaped both by past discrimination and present-day disadvantage — will have some representation in their state legislatures and in Congress. It is less likely that they’ll be ignored, neglected and left to fend for themselves.
Descriptive representation, as it is known, is not perfect; race alone does not guarantee that a lawmaker will act in the interest of his or her community. But the record suggests that in places where racial polarization is the norm, where the legacy of Jim Crow segregation shapes the political and social landscape, the opportunity provided by a majority-minority district can mean the difference between some representation and none at all.
For the Roberts court, however, these districts are little more than a “racial entitlement,” to borrow a phrase from Justice Antonin Scalia. In the court’s view, you may have the right to vote, but you do not have the right to representation, and certainly no right to representation that supports “racial classification” — as if the government is the reason that Black Americans see themselves as a discrete and particular community — or outweighs a state’s purported right to engage in partisan gerrymandering.
In the name of a colorblind Constitution and the equal protection of the laws, then, the Supreme Court has given the green light to a gleeful attempt to end Black political representation at the state and federal level. And as long as there isn’t clear evidence of intentional discrimination — a standard that would have been difficult to prove at the height of Jim Crow, which rested on the same fiction of facial neutrality — it passes constitutional muster. In fact, lawmakers in Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi are already planning special legislative sessions to apply the court’s ruling and erase the majority-minority districts in their states.
At a minimum, the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution were written, passed and ratified to end the subordination of Black Americans and ensure their representation in the political community. It is perverse that this Supreme Court has used both amendments to facilitate what might become the largest reduction in Black representation at the federal and state level since the end of Reconstruction and the “redemption” of the South. Words meant to secure the political equality of all Americans are being raised as weapons to deprive them of just that.
Here, we see the problem with conservative “colorblindness.” A constitution that doesn’t see color — a constitution that treats all classifications as one and the same in a country defined by its sordid history of racial subordination — is a constitution that cannot see group inequality. And worse, it is a constitution that reifies this inequality through its willful blindness to the plain realities of our society. Liberty for those who profit from the cruel legacies of our past, endless struggle for those crushed under their weight.
Speaking in 1883, after the Supreme Court nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Frederick Douglass cried out for a court that would be as “true to the claims of humanity” as it “formerly was to the demands of slavery”: “I say again, fellow citizens, O for a Supreme Court which shall be as true, as vigilant, as active and exacting in maintaining laws enacted for the protection of human rights, as in other days was that court for the destruction of human rights!”
Nearly a century later, Justice Thurgood Marshall, rebuking colleagues who would uphold racial disadvantage in voting as long as it was done with a patina of neutrality, warned the court that “manipulating doctrines and drawing improper distinctions under the F14th and 15th Amendments, as well as under Congress’s remedial legislation enforcing those amendments, makes this court an accessory to the perpetuation of racial discrimination.”
One imagines that both Douglass and Marshall would say much the same if confronted with the handiwork of Roberts and his court.
It took more than half a century after Plessy v. Ferguson to get a court that was willing to enforce the Reconstruction amendments and use them to expand the substance of American freedom, not curtail it. For all our current setbacks, however, we live in a very different world than we did in the past. We do not need to wait a lifetime for change.
If the Supreme Court is going to act as a partisan institution — as a super-legislature whose judgments override the decisions of voters on the thin basis of ideology — then the only path worth taking is to discipline and transform the court with all the tools Congress has at its disposal under the Constitution.
Beyond court reform, Americans have to reacquaint themselves with constitutional thinking — with the idea that we, the people, make constitutional meaning. To the extent that the Supreme Court claims broad authority to say what our Constitution means, it is in large part because we have given this authority to them through our indifference.
It may be that the first step in truly reining in the court is to remember that the Republic — and the Constitution that brought it to life — is meant for us. It is ours to interpret and ours to transform.
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12) You Can’t Be Born Here. You Can Only Die.
By Jessica Grose, Opinion Writer, May 6, 2026
When Bonner General Health stopped providing labor and delivery services in 2023, the families of Sandpoint, Idaho, were devastated. Jen Jackson Quintano told me that back in 2014 she had planned on a home birth, but it was not progressing, and her midwife took her to Bonner General, where she had a C-section. It went so well, she became friends with her obstetrician.
If you’re a pregnant woman in Bonner County, in the northern panhandle of the state, your options for receiving prenatal and postpartum care and giving birth are quite limited. If you want to get an ultrasound, you are probably driving nearly an hour to Coeur d’Alene, or over an hour to Spokane, Wash. That’s in good weather. But try navigating a bumpy dirt road and mountain passes, which sometimes close, in an ice storm, while in labor.
As a result, many pregnant women in the area are either opting for planned home births with midwives, or, if it’s possible, they are booking short-term rentals or staying with family near hospitals with obstetric units. If a planned home birth goes sideways, fast, some of these women may end up in Bonner’s emergency room, which no longer has obstetricians nor pediatricians to manage neonatal resuscitations. Some of them are buying helicopter insurance in case they need to be airlifted.
Quintano, who is a progressive activist, gathered birthing stories from other community members when Bonner closed its labor and delivery unit three years ago. Without having Bonner’s obstetric care available, “I likely never would have tried to start a family knowing that all my prenatal appointments were over an hour away,” a woman named Jonell said as part of the collected stories.
The closure of rural labor and delivery units is not just a northern Idaho problem. According to a 2024 report on maternity care deserts from the March of Dimes, “In 1,104 U.S. counties, there is not a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician.” This is also not solely a recent problem, though it will be worsened by cuts to Medicaid by the Trump administration. The federal Rural Health Fund, which seeks to modernize ailing country hospitals, among other improvements, will not offset these cuts by much.
I’d describe it more as a slow-rolling disaster that is picking up speed across the country.
Over 130 rural labor and delivery units have closed since 2020, per the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a nonpartisan policy organization. Women who live in rural areas (that are not adjacent to urban areas) without hospital-based obstetric care are more likely to have preterm births and less likely to receive adequate prenatal care, according to a 2018 investigation published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They are more likely to give birth in emergency rooms that are not set up for obstetric emergencies.
I have now heard stories from across the country of women giving birth on the side of the road or in their cars because they did not make the long journey to the hospital in time.
The existential pain of losing birth services
As I was reporting this article, I heard from mothers, physicians, nurses, midwives and doulas living in rural areas from Maine to Oregon. They described the same interwoven set of dynamics making it hard to keep rural labor and delivery units open. The first issue is the aging population of rural America, which means fewer babies, and less revenue. Rural hospital administrators say that if a labor and delivery unit drops below 200 births a year, its financial viability is endangered, and it may no longer be able to guarantee the safety of its maternity care.
Maternity care tends to be a financial loser at urban hospitals, too, because insurance reimbursement rates for it are not great. But higher-volume procedures compensate for the losses. And if a city hospital ends labor and delivery services, a prospective patient’s travel time to another hospital tends to be far shorter and less perilous.
Still, when any hospital loses obstetric services, it puts pressure on the closest hospitals. Patients now wait longer to see providers, and I heard anecdotes about women having to give birth in the hallways of hospitals because there was no bed for them.
Richard Leidinger is the medical director of surgical specialists at Northern Light Health in Presque Isle, Maine, part of Aroostook County. Half of the county’s obstetrics departments have closed in the past 10 years. So Leidinger’s hospital, which has one of the two remaining units in a county larger than Connecticut, is seeing women who “have had no prenatal care and arrive in active labor on our doorstep with no warning.”
Keeping staff at rural hospitals is a huge problem in many medical specialties, because doctors and nurses often prefer to be closer to the amenities of more populous areas. Elizabeth Khan, a primary care physician who was formerly based in sparsely populated Mendocino County, Calif., and also gave birth while living there, said that the closest obstetrician to her hospital “was an hour and a half drive through the mountains from us” while some of her patients have to drive four hours to San Francisco, where she now lives, to see a neurologist.
Katy Backes Kozhimannil, a co-director of the Rural Health Research Center at the University of Minnesota, told me that when a community loses its labor and delivery unit, that loss is about so much more than just some medical procedures — it becomes existential. We all have a story of where we were born, she told me.
“What does it mean to live a good life in a place?” Kozhimannil mused. “It feels like there is a deep loss in a community if you can’t be born there — you can only die.”
Cutting red tape, increasing reimbursements
The good news is that there are many common-sense, bipartisan policy solutions to this problem, and there is both state and federal legislation in the works aimed at some of the obstacles to rural woman getting quality care.
“The simplest solution is for health insurance plans (both commercial insurance and Medicaid) to pay adequately for labor and delivery services. ‘Adequately’ means enough to cover the lowest feasible cost of delivering high quality care in that community, not some amount that might be adequate, on average, for large hospitals,” said Harold Miller, the president and chief executive of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. Because there are fewer deliveries at small hospitals, there needs to be a higher payment per delivery to keep them afloat.
Miller also explained that ideally hospitals should be receiving what’s called a standby capacity payment from each health insurance plan, a payment that would “support the minimum fixed costs of maintaining labor and delivery staffing in that community regardless of how many births there are.” After all, he said, we don’t fund fire departments based on how many fires there are every year.
There is a bill sitting in Congress called the Rural Obstetrics Readiness Act that would provide grants to rural hospitals for equipment and emergency obstetric training for physicians. I heard from many family medicine doctors who said that it would be useful to have additional obstetrics training, since they are providing cradle-to-grave care in many hospitals in rural America. This doesn’t fix the problem of keeping staff in rural areas, but it’s something.
Another policy solution, which some states have already taken steps to institute, is unbundling Medicaid payments for prenatal, birth and postpartum care. In many states, Medicaid reimbursement is a one-time payment for everything. In practice this can result in a delay in reimbursement or in hospitals potentially seeing no money at all if someone receives prenatal care from their obstetricians but delivers in another setting. By reimbursing on a fee-for-service plan, small rural hospitals can see more funding for what they are providing.
There also needs to be better reimbursement for and easier access to midwives and doulas, who are providing essential care to rural women. I spoke to Sara Fichtenbauer, who is planning a home birth for her third child in Chippewa Falls, Wis. She told me she is paying $6,000 out of pocket for midwife care, and she isn’t sure she’s going to get reimbursed — she’s still filling out paperwork. California recently passed a law that cut some of the red tape for midwife-run birthing centers to help ease the burden of maternity deserts. This isn’t a cure-all, though, because midwives cannot perform C-sections, and sometimes infants really need a NICU, and fast.
The babies are going to keep coming whether there’s a labor and delivery unit to care for them. There is no shortage of ideas, nor of passion for fixing this problem. The issue is the political will and the slow pace of legislative solutions.
Leidinger, the hospital medical director in Presque Isle, told me that he served at a combat surgical hospital in Iraq, and he also treated patients in rural Guatemala. What he is seeing now in Maine makes him think that we’re headed in the direction of those levels of medical care.
This shouldn’t happen in the richest country in the world, Leidinger said. And I couldn’t agree more.
End Notes
· I didn’t even have space to get into the way abortion bans are part of the rural maternity care story in red states. Jen Jackson Quintano told me that her obstetrician in Idaho was Amelia Huntsberger, who left the state to practice in Oregon. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, all four of Sandpoint hospital’s obstetricians left because they felt they could no longer safely practice in Idaho, Huntsberger told Oregon Public Broadcasting last year. From August 2022 to December 2024, Idaho lost nearly 35 percent of its obstetricians.
· Foreign physicians are a vital piece of the rural medical work force, and the Trump administration’s travel ban prevented many of them from coming to this country. As of last week, that ban has been reversed for doctors. But foreign physicians who are practicing here have already suffered. According to Miriam Jordan in The Times: “Ezequiel Veliz, a family doctor from Venezuela who fell out of legal status and whose new visa had not been processed, was detained by federal agents on April 6 at a checkpoint in Texas. He was released 10 days later.” I would imagine this kind of thing has a chilling effect on doctors who would have otherwise been excited to come to the United States.
· I’m not usually into romance novels but I decided to try “An Academic Affair” by Jodi McAlister after I saw it recommended in the very fun newsletter “Links I Would Gchat You if We Were Friends.” It is a totally delightful and low-stakes book about two academics jockeying for jobs in a dying industry, with an archetypal enemies-to-lovers plot.
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13) A Look Inside the Case That Enshrined Political Power for Billionaires
After Watergate, Congress tried to curtail the role of money in politics. But a pivotal Supreme Court case nipped it in the bud. Years later, new details are emerging on how wealthy Americans were conferred with a “right to spend” on elections.
By Danny Hakim, May 6, 2026
A landmark Supreme Court case laid the groundwork for the tremendous amounts spent on today’s elections. Keystone Press Agency/ZUMA Press Wire, via Reuters
For a brief moment in American history, the rich didn’t control politics.
Back in 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress passed new campaign finance restrictions that would have largely eliminated the ability of wealthy people to buy elections. In addition to donor disclosure rules and contribution limits, the new legislation capped so-called “independent expenditures” on behalf of political candidates at $1,000 a year. There were even curbs on what rich people could spend to get themselves elected.
David Koch, a wealthy industrialist, was enraged.
“I have the right to spend whatever I choose to promote what I believe,” he later wrote, adding that the law “makes my blood boil.”
Flash forward to the 2024 presidential campaign. Six of the nation’s wealthiest billionaires spent more than $100 million apiece to help get another billionaire, Donald J. Trump, elected president. Independent expenditures by wealthy outsiders for the first time in history exceeded what the candidates’ own campaign committees spent, a New York Times analysis showed. Mr. Koch’s brother Charles was among 300 billionaires and their families who accounted for 19 percent of all contributions in federal elections.
So what happened?
A Supreme Court decision that most Americans probably never heard of. Fifty years ago, in a case called Buckley v. Valeo, the court upheld many aspects of the post-Watergate campaign finance law, clearing the way for public financing of presidential elections and empowering the new Federal Election Commission.
But it eviscerated other parts of the law, leaving the rich with their own set of rules. The court ruled that wealthy Americans could spend unlimited amounts of money to independently support candidates and causes they favored.
Later cases, like the better-known Citizens United decision, opened the doors even further. But it was Buckley that established the nation’s modern, muddled campaign finance system, and Buckley that allowed the Koch brothers to build a right-wing political money machine that rivaled that of the Republican Party itself.
The case is as relevant as ever. Since taking office, Mr. Trump has celebrated billionaire donors at a White House dinner and raised unprecedented sums for a lame-duck president.
Interviews with surviving Buckley combatants and a review of archival records from the Library of Congress, the National Archives and three universities, as well as other available documents and research, explain how post-Watergate legal and political currents upended a momentary defeat for the wealthy, creating an environment where a single donor can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a favored candidate.
What it shows is that the legal assault on the most expansive campaign finance legislation in the nation’s history was engineered not just by well-funded right-wing activists, including the Koch-backed Libertarian Party. It was also pushed by some liberals and the American Civil Liberties Union, who agreed with conservatives that the right to spend money on behalf of candidates and causes was an essential element of free speech.
Gerald R. Ford, who had inherited the presidency after Richard M. Nixon resigned, had felt obliged to sign the legislation. But documents show that his administration nonetheless worked to undermine the law. One midlevel State Department official, Francis L. Kellogg, was even among a small group of people who financed the litigation against it, archival records show.
Robert Bork, the Ford administration’s hard-line conservative solicitor general charged with defending the law in court, privately referred to the statute, the Federal Election Campaign Act, known as FECA, as “fecal matter.” Records have shown that Mr. Bork helped devise an unorthodox strategy that allowed the administration to submit dueling briefs, both supporting and undercutting the 1974 amendments to the law that were at issue.
The Washington law firm of Covington & Burling took the case pro bono. But expenses were also covered by a small group of bankers, oilmen and industrialists who appear in the archives of the lead plaintiff, Senator James L. Buckley of New York, who was a standard-bearer of the Conservative Party in New York, founded in the 1960s amid dissatisfaction with the G.O.P.
Senator Buckley’s private files, at St. John’s University in Queens, include copies of thank-you notes to moneyed donors to the litigation effort, including Boeing and G.D. Searle, the pharmaceutical company that developed the first birth control pill. Individual contributors whose names appear in fund-raising ledgers include the Texas oilman Perry Bass; John C. Whitehead, who would soon become co-chairman of Goldman Sachs; and Thomas S. Murphy, who once controlled ABC.
The Libertarian Party joined Senator Buckley as a litigant; Charles Koch cut a $10,000 check to the party right before it paid its share of legal expenses, and included checks from his brother David and their mother as well. He was regularly kept apprised of developments in the case by the party’s leadership, archival records show — though in a statement, a spokesperson said that Mr. Koch “was not involved in this litigation” and his contribution had been directed generally to the party.
One of the most instrumental supporters of the legal challenge was John Bolton, who would have a long history in politics and diplomacy and went on to become President Trump’s national security adviser, and, after he was ousted, one of his critics. He was subsequently indicted by the Trump Justice Department and has pleaded not guilty.
At the time, Mr. Bolton was only recently out of Yale Law School, and pushed Covington & Burling, where he’d joined as a new associate, to take on the Buckley case.
Today, Mr. Bolton concedes that campaign finance is as deep a problem as ever.
“The system now is such a wreck that nobody would have put it in place,” he said in an interview. “In fact, that was one of our thoughts. If we could blow enough holes in it, the whole thing would have to come down.”
But that is not what happened.
‘Post-Watergate Morality’
The Watergate scandal emerged after operatives of Mr. Nixon’s re-election campaign were caught breaking into Democratic Party headquarters in 1972. Revelations followed about secret Oval Office tapes and funds laundered by the Nixon campaign through a Mexican bank.
Then came a “spasm of post-Watergate morality,” as the Washington Post columnist David Broder put it.
But not long after President Ford signed the campaign finance legislation, Mr. Bolton, new to Covington, received a call from David Keene, an aide to Senator Buckley and a future president of the National Rifle Association.
Mr. Bolton learned during the call that Senator Buckley had taken an interest in potential litigation over the new law.
“I consider this challenge to be one of the most important projects I have undertaken since coming to Washington,” the senator wrote in a 1975 letter to potential donors.
The new campaign finance law limited House candidates to expenditures of $140,000 for both the primary and general elections, about $900,000 in today’s dollars, which is less than half of the average spent by winning congressional candidates today.
It also limited independent expenditures: Even interest groups could not spend more than $1,000 promoting a specific candidate, at a time when a full-page ad in The Washington Post cost $6,971.04. That raised hackles on both the right and the left.
“A thousand dollars may well have been too low,” said Fred Wertheimer, who was legal counsel for Common Cause when it intervened in the case, in a recent interview. But on the other hand, he said, “a system of unlimited contributions is inherently corrupt.”
For the Koch brothers, the issue at hand was their inability to continue infusing large amounts of money into the Libertarian Party, which favored an end to most government regulation.
They and many other hard-line conservatives had felt betrayed after the Nixon administration imposed wage and price controls and abandoned the gold standard, leading them to back third parties. In a 1975 letter to fellow oil executives, Charles Koch lamented that Republicans “were no better allies in the fight for free enterprise than the Democratic Party.”
Third-party supporters believed the new legislation favored the two large parties and their extensive donor networks. David Koch, who died in 2019, called the new law “an act to preserve the two-party monopoly.”
Mr. Bolton volunteered to join the Buckley legal team, successfully pitching it to Covington. Mr. Keene worked on assembling a coalition. He reached across the aisle, recruiting Eugene McCarthy, an anti-Vietnam War Democrat who later ran for president. But his biggest get was the New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. The A.C.L.U. had already been skirmishing in court over Nixon administration attempts to use campaign finance laws to block the A.C.L.U. and other groups from running advertisements on the Vietnam War and other issues.
“Keene was the guy who at some point calls me and says, ‘Well, we’re thinking of challenging the whole ’74 amendments. You guys want to?’” recalled Ira Glasser, the former head of the A.C.L.U. “I loved the whole idea, because my position was: It had to be made clear that this was not a liberal versus conservative issue, that this is an issue of speech that affected everybody.”
The case was the first of the year to be filed in the Federal District Court in Washington, in January 1975.
Mr. Bolton likened the motley assemblage of plaintiffs to “the bar scene in Star Wars.” Joel Gora, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who worked on the case, recalled that “every time we met they would razz me about the A.C.L.U. position on affirmative action.”
The opposing lawyers were even more unlikely bedfellows. One of Mr. Nixon’s most bungled acts was known as the Saturday Night Massacre, on Oct. 20, 1973, when he ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor. The attorney general and his top deputy refused, resigning in protest. That left Mr. Bork to carry out the order.
Mr. Bork and Mr. Cox now found themselves on the same side of the Buckley case. But only technically. Mr. Bork loathed the campaign finance legislation. But because the president had signed it, the Justice Department released a supportive brief. However, the department also filed an unusual second brief raising constitutional concerns about contribution and spending limits, reflecting Mr. Bork’s view.
The chairman of the F.E.C., Thomas B. Curtis, whose agency was created by the law, was not pleased.
“Where is the vigorous defense when the chief defense counsel seeks to carry water on both shoulders?” he wrote in an October 1975 letter to the Justice Department.
Other lawyers took the lead in defending the law, including Mr. Cox, who intervened on behalf of Senator Edward Kennedy, a proponent of the campaign finance legislation, and Lloyd Cutler, a future White House counsel
Mr. Bolton credited Ralph K. Winter Jr., the lead lawyer and one of Mr. Bolton’s former professors at Yale, with developing the case’s main legal theory, an argument that became known as “money is speech.” It held that preventing people from spending money to express their political views violated their constitutional rights.
In August 1975, a ruling came down in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia largely upholding the legislation; an appeal was quickly lodged with the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in November.
The justices’ views did not track along simple ideological lines. Justice Byron White, a Kennedy appointee, felt that limiting spending was critical; otherwise, “you can get and spend all the money you want,” according to notes kept by Justice William J. Brennan Jr.
But five other justices were First Amendment hard-liners, from William Rehnquist, a conservative future chief justice, to Harry Blackmun, a liberal stalwart. Mr. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, both liberals, contemplated supporting Justice White, and Congress, in curbing spending. But the archives show that both feared giving the government the ability to silence groups like the NAACP, where Justice Marshall, the first Black justice, had served as lead counsel.
“On the one hand, there’s this huge concern about corruption in government,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “On the other hand, there are these very powerful First Amendment arguments that had not ever been really considered by the court.”
‘The Current World’
Even as the justices were deliberating, the Libertarian Party was exploring whether the Kochs could test the new campaign finance limits by donating $25,000 to the party itself, rather than to a specific candidate. Mr. Bolton, who also did legal work for the Libertarian Party, helped devise a plan to put a $25,000 contribution from the Kochs in escrow while they awaited word on whether it would be legal, a gambit ultimately rejected by Charles Koch.
On Jan. 30, 1976, the court handed down its decision, a 6-to-2 ruling that upheld the law’s limits on contributions to political campaigns, its disclosure requirements and the new program for public financing of campaigns. But the justices ruled 7 to 1 against limits on how much people could spend on their own campaigns, or on independent expenditures on behalf of other politicians they hoped to see elected.
Three years later, David Koch seized on what he called, in a letter to fellow Libertarian Party members, “the best loophole the Supreme Court gave us.” The rich could spend on their own campaigns without limit. He offered himself as running mate to the party’s 1980 presidential candidate, Ed Clark.
“I have no particular expertise in politics, campaigning or running a campaign,” he explained in the letter. But he did have a very large wallet.
The Libertarians — who were calling for abolishing the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all income taxes — captured just over 1 percent of the vote. The Reagan campaign took advantage of the new loopholes and organized independent campaign committees, including one led by Mr. Keene that ran a $1 million campaign to persuade Southerners to abandon Jimmy Carter, who was soundly defeated.
The Kochs pivoted in the years that followed, reimagining political power as a vertically integrated business, leveraging all that was made possible by Buckley. They began underwriting favored professors and university programs as test wells for ideas like climate change skepticism and hostility to regulation. They backed think tanks like the Cato Institute to refine those ideas, and interest groups to spread them.
They pioneered efforts to overhaul the judiciary and, finally, anointed certain politicians to advance their ideas, including candidates like Mike Pence and the former Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker. In the 2024 election cycle, the Koch political influence machine spent nearly $550 million.
But it was Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who officially spent about $300 million on a single candidate, Donald Trump — not counting the “dark money” donations that the Supreme Court’s later decisions did not require him to disclose. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” Mr. Musk boasted.
It was the culmination of the court’s half-century of reshaping of the nation’s campaign finance system. Few are pleased with the situation as it stands.
“Sure, it bothers me to see these half a dozen people giving a ton of money,” Mr. Gora, the former A.C.L.U. lawyer, said, reflecting on his group’s role in Buckley. But spending limits don’t prevent billionaires from pushing their agendas, he added. They can just buy newspapers or social media platforms.
Some who backed Buckley find themselves on the wrong side of a billionaire president, including Mr. Bolton. Covington & Burling has been targeted by the Trump administration for its work with Jack Smith, the former special prosecutor who twice indicted Mr. Trump.
Mr. Bolton’s position on Buckley has not changed. No one side of the nation’s political divide benefits more than the other from the ability of wealthy donors to move elections, he said.
“We’ve never had anything like Trump, that’s for sure, but the fact is that big money is more evenly divided than people think, and I think it’s especially true now,” he said.
Campaign finance records back Mr. Bolton up. A Times analysis showed a vigorous foray by Democrats into anonymous big-money donations in 2024, helping give former Vice President Kamala Harris a financial edge over Mr. Trump.
But if billionaires are not necessarily tilting power to one party or another, they do hold enormous sway over the two-party system in general. And that goes back to Buckley.
“If those justices had been aware then of what we now face, my guess is that we would have had the opposite result,” said Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago and co-editor of a new book of Buckley scholarship. “They weren’t imagining the current world.”
Steven Rich contributed reporting.
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14) Storm Season Is Here and the National Weather Service Is Short Handed
After deep cuts last year, the agency is hiring hundreds. But fears linger that it isn’t equipped for imminent tornado and hurricane threats.
By Scott Dance, Judson Jones and Amy Graff, May 6, 2026
The reporters have been tracking changes in National Weather Service staffing levels and forecasting activity across President Trump’s second term. They welcome confidential tips at nytimes.com/tips.
The National Weather Service is struggling to recover from last year’s deep staff cuts, raising doubts among some meteorologists about whether the agency is ready for severe storms or hurricane season, which starts next month.
One key facility in Oklahoma that leads tornado forecasting and warnings has an unusual five open positions, its website shows. Others around the country will lose meteorologists temporarily as officials shuffle them to cities that will host World Cup soccer games in June and July, according to an internal email reviewed by The New York Times.
The agency’s roster of more than 2,500 scientists shrank by about 15 percent last year through firings and early retirements. The Weather Service’s data and expertise forms the backbone for all kinds of forecasts, including those shared by television meteorologists and smartphone apps.
The government has been trying to hire back to reverse the damage. In the last six months, officials have hired more than 200 meteorologists and hydrologists — scientists responsible for issuing forecasts and warnings of imminent tornadoes, floods and other severe weather. Neil Jacobs, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the Weather Service, told a House committee this week that the agency had recently extended job orders to another 206 potential new staffers.
But internal agency data reviewed by The Times show that as of early last month, the work force of meteorologists and hydrologists was about 300 fewer than it had been in late 2024.
Those who remain have struggled to keep up with the workload, Ken Graham, the Weather Service’s director, told The Times in an interview in late January. Mr. Graham said then he hoped a reorganization still in its early stages would help.
“People are burning out,” Mr. Graham said.
The Weather Service posted job listings last week with a goal of adding 145 additional entry-level meteorologists across the country over the next five months, said Kim Doster, a Weather Service spokeswoman. Mr. Graham told agency staff in an email sent last week and reviewed by The Times that more hiring would follow. But bringing new employees on board and training them takes months, delaying the arrival of reinforcements, meteorologists said.
“Preventing and recovering from burnout takes time, but recent hiring has helped spread the workload,” Ms. Doster said. “As with many public safety roles, being a meteorologist can also be a demanding and stressful job, but our forecasters are dedicated and skilled professionals whom the public and our partners can continue to rely on.”
As storm risks ramp up and the World Cup and hurricane season approach, meteorologists remain concerned about whether some local offices have the bandwidth to keep up. The plan to shift more forecasters to World Cup host cities could boost the safety of tens of thousands of people gathering at outdoor stadiums during stormy summer months, but it could also raise the risk that severe weather warnings are delayed — or missed altogether — elsewhere, current and former staffers said.
The result of all this churn is that the ranks at the Weather Service are generally less experienced. As of last month, the average tenure was 15 years, compared with more than 25 years a decade ago, according to staffing data and agency data.
Alan Gerard, a meteorologist who spent 35 years at the Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory before retiring early last year, said the agency is showing some signs of inexperience. Some warnings have appeared overly cautious, Mr. Gerard said, while others were incomplete — such as when no tornado watch was issued when a deadly March tornado hit a part of southern Michigan.
“It seems like there is almost like a crisis of confidence,” Mr. Gerard said. “There are certain events where there are a ton of warnings being issued and then other events where you can see slow warnings and late warnings.”
The Weather Service offices that were forecasting that March tornado outbreak were fully staffed and issued tornado warnings when severe weather threats materialized, Ms. Doster said.
Observers also said the talent pipeline at the Weather Service was broken after younger scientists were fired last year, among the thousands of government employees still in probationary employment status whose jobs were cut by the administration.
“By getting rid of all the younger people and then all the experience and then only leaving the people in the middle, this is going to cost a tremendous amount to build the agency back while also trying to modernize,” said Victor Proton, a meteorologist who took a buyout to leave the Weather Service in April 2025 after 28 years at the agency.
Staffing shortages last year contributed to a decline in launches of weather balloons, which carry devices that collect wind and temperature data that is fed into supercomputer weather models to guide simulations of future conditions. While a handful of offices have continued skipping some of the twice-daily weather balloon launches this year, Ms. Doster said that’s because of equipment issues and helium shortages, not staffing.
Over the last several months, a new vision for the agency has begun to emerge: A tiered staffing approach that shifts employees away from more rural areas with quieter weather to locations where the most people and property frequently face severe weather threats.
Some officials called the cuts ordered by Mr. Trump’s administration and the subsequent attempt to rehire an “opportunity” to reconsider the organization’s fundamental operations.
“Not every office has the same workload,” Mr. Graham said in January. “I can beef up some of the offices that have the highest workload, keep everybody 24/7, but eliminate some of the burnout that we have in the busiest offices.”
But efforts to turn that vision into reality have been slow, despite steps to help the agency hire faster than usual.
After months of lobbying by Mr. Graham — and the urgency of July 4 floods that took Texas Hill Country by surprise and killed dozens of children at a summer camp — Mr. Trump last summer exempted Weather Service employees from a federal hiring freeze. That order also gave Mr. Graham a new level of hiring authority, allowing him to bypass normal protocols and select new staffers himself.
For example, at the American Meteorological Society conference in Houston this past January, Mr. Graham hired four people on the spot. Even during the 43-day federal shutdown last fall, the Weather Service continued to post job openings.
Still, many offices remain hollowed out because the agency shed staff so fast last year that the pace of hiring has not been able to replace workers as rapidly. At the Storm Prediction Center — responsible for forecasting tornadoes, hail, severe winds and wildfires — five critical roles are currently vacant, according to the center’s website. It had previously been rare for even a single vacancy to linger at such a prominent post.
Low morale even prompted Mr. Graham to return to the front lines of forecasting, stepping up in March to help issue warnings as severe storms swept through the Washington, D.C., area. He told staff it was “to show my support for the entire N.W.S. team,” according to Christopher Vaccaro, an agency spokesman.
Otherwise, Mr. Graham said he is focused on rolling out plans not just to hire more scientists, but to reshape the agency for a new era of weather volatility, using ideas he was pursuing even before Mr. Trump took office. The agency is moving forward with long-planned efforts to embed meteorologists in state and local emergency operations centers where officials make decisions on everything from school closings to travel bans to evacuation orders.
“It’s not a plan on a shelf,” Mr. Graham said. “We’re doing it.”
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15) Illinois State Police to Investigate Fatal ICE Shooting
Officials said they were examining the shooting of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez last summer during a Chicago-area crackdown on illegal immigration.
By Mitch Smith, Reporting from Chicago, May 6, 2026
A memorial for Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, who was shot by an ICE agent in Franklin Park, Ill., last year. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The state police in Illinois said on Tuesday that they were investigating the fatal shooting of a man by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent last summer in suburban Chicago.
The shooting of the man, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, who was from Mexico, came in the midst of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration in the Chicago area, and it immediately drew outrage from residents and local officials.
Federal officials claimed that Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez, who they said was in the country illegally, drove a Subaru into officers and dragged an officer while fleeing a traffic stop in Franklin Park, Ill., near O’Hare International Airport. The agency said one officer had been severely injured.
But video of the shooting, which took place on Sept. 12, raised questions about aspects of that account.
Footage reviewed by The New York Times showed Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez attempting to flee from officers. But it did not show Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez, 38, hitting an officer with his car, and an officer was heard on one of the videos saying his own injuries were “nothing major.”
Department of Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond for a request to comment on Tuesday night about the Illinois State Police investigation. Federal officials also did not immediately respond to questions about the status of the officer who fired or of any internal investigations into the shooting.
The investigation of Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez’s death, and any attempt to bring criminal charges, could face several hurdles.
Law enforcement officers have wide latitude to use deadly force in situations in which they reasonably fear that they or someone else is at risk of death or significant injury. And the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause bars the state prosecution of federal officers in a broad range of circumstances.
Melaney Arnold, a spokeswoman for the State Police, said in an emailed statement on Tuesday night that the Franklin Park Police Department had requested the state investigation. Once it is finished, she said, the findings will be turned over to the county prosecutor’s office. She declined to comment further.
The police chief in Franklin Park, a Chicago suburb with about 18,000 residents, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The shooting of Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez was one of several events during the immigration crackdown in the Chicago area that raised questions about how federal agents were using force and interacting with residents.
While the Trump administration described the campaign, known as Operation Midway Blitz, as essential for public safety, state and local officials dismissed it as politically punitive and constitutionally dubious.
As masked agents deployed tear gas and made hundreds of arrests, federal judges raised concerns about their tactics, their use of force, their justification for locking up immigrants and the conditions under which those immigrants were being held. The courts also blocked an attempt by President Trump to deploy National Guard troops on the streets of Chicago.
In addition to the shooting of Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez, federal agents shot and wounded a woman, Marimar Martinez, during the campaign. Federal charges against Ms. Martinez were later dismissed.
Last week, a state commission in Illinois released a report that described Operation Midway Blitz as a “whole-of-government approach to suppress opposition and pressure Illinois because of its immigrant-friendly policies, under the guise of achieving mass deportation.”
Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat who is thought to be weighing a run for president, named Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez and Ms. Martinez in a statement after that report was released. He expressed hope that “law enforcement agencies will review this evidence and take any steps in their power to deliver justice to Illinoisans.”
In Minnesota, where federal agents shot three people during a subsequent immigration crackdown, federal officials have resisted sharing with their state counterparts information as basic as the names of the agents who fired.
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16) Neil deGrasse Tyson: Give Us the Aliens
By Neil deGrasse Tyson, May 6, 2026
Dr. Tyson is an astrophysicist and the author of “Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter.”
Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
Ever since childhood I’ve wanted to be abducted by aliens. Now, as a professional astrophysicist armed with the knowledge of the size, age and composition of the cosmos, I know that nothing prevents any of us from imagining a universe teeming with life.
So the impending release of U.S. government files on aliens and U.F.O.s is a good thing, even if it feels like a distraction from other important files we’ve all been waiting to be disclosed. I expect the alien files will be anticlimactic. After a parade of alien insiders and whistle-blowers testified under oath to Congress in 2023, 2024 and 2025, what’s left to learn?
Personally, I’d be delighted if the files were accompanied by an actual alien. Alive or dead or undead. Preferably alive. Is that too much to ask for?
The whistle-blowers have already told us about the crashed flying saucers, extraterrestrial bodies and alien technology in our possession — hidden in undisclosed places. Not only that, but secret files have been declassified before. A 2017 headline in this newspaper was unambiguous: “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” And who could forget the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which studied more than 12,000 U.F.O. sightings from 1952 until the project was terminated in 1969, with the goal of assessing threats to national security.
What’s clear, however, is that if an authentic alien walked out of the halls of Congress, nobody would ever again have to ask if you “believe” in aliens, just as nobody questions the existence of elephants. An alien of the alien files could become the literal elephant in the room.
Without good evidence of what actual aliens look like, we’re stuck imagining them. And imagine them we do. IMDb, an online database about entertainment, lists hundreds upon hundreds of films, TV shows, video games and documentaries about aliens — both friendly and evil. Mostly evil.
Disappointingly, in nearly all these portrayals, these aliens look a lot like us. They’re humanoid, with a head, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a neck, shoulders, a torso, arms, fingers and legs. Remember that most life on Earth, with which we have DNA in common, looks nothing like us or any vertebrate animal. So we should expect aliens with no DNA in common — or no DNA at all — to look at least as different from humans as humans and other life-forms on Earth (like jellyfish or termites) look different from each other.
The only thing that would shock me about a living, declassified alien is if most Hollywood depictions ended up being right, violating everything we know about biodiversity on Earth and across the universe.
We care a lot about what aliens look like, but we don’t pay nearly enough attention to what we might look like to them. If an alien emissary landed in Los Angeles, for example, its first impression might be that Earth’s dominant life-form is the automobile. The city is heavily crisscrossed by major freeways, many of them 12 lanes wide. People line up in their cars on slow lines to obtain fast food handed through a window. They consume the food while still seated, never exiting their vehicles. Some of the larger life-forms on the freeway carry multiple automobiles within them. To the aliens, these car haulers are surely pregnant.
Assuming on arrival that the alien knew we were human, it would probably want to meet the person in charge. Who exactly would that be? The president? The prime minister? The pope? Or would it be a multibillionaire or captain of industry? Not knowing anything in advance about human civilization, but picking up clues from our cultural norms before arrival from leaked radio waves, an alien might instead expect to meet Ryan Gosling, Taylor Swift or Oprah Winfrey.
If we look more deeply into our own alien stories, there’s a persistent plotline that aliens are evil and want to kill us all. I suspect those fears are based not on what we believe about aliens but on what we know about humans.
In the history of our species, there’s no shortage of technologically advanced cultures that commit rampant violence against less-advanced ones. Within what we call civilization, humans oppress — or kill — one another over which creator of the universe they worship, or who they sleep with, or what side of an arbitrary line on Earth’s land masses they’re born, or how absorptive their skin is to sunlight, or what set of sounds comes out of their mouths.
Upon bearing witness to our irrational ways, any visiting alien that might have accompanied the release of the alien files surely long ago escaped back home to report, “There’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth!”
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