Support Palestine Solidarity Activists Against Grand Jury Phishing Attempt
By Popular Resistance
On October 16th, former Palestine Action US activists Sophie Ross and Bridget Shergalis were served subpoenas to be witnesses for a federal grand jury in New Hampshire. These came three days after the FBI surrounded Bridget’s house in an attempt to question her, which she did not agree to. Sophie and Bridget have publicly stated that they refuse to testify in this grand jury, and will respond “in solidarity with each other and whoever they have been ordered to provide testimony on”. Those who resist grand juries often face imprisonment and long-term state harassment; yet it is the duty of every political activist to refuse to hand over information to the state.
We are aware that this grand jury has been convened in regards to the November 2023 protest against an Elbit Systems weapons factory in Merrimack, New Hampshire. Sophie and Bridget, alongside two other activists, received misdemeanor charges and a 60-day jail sentence for their participation in this action. More details on the target of the grand jury have not yet been given. The grand jury investigatory process is profoundly secretive, and frequently used to criminalize, intimidate, and network-map political movements.
We condemn these subpoenas, and all information-gathering tactics by the state. We agree to defend the targeted activists against imprisonment and other forms of state repression. Preventing genocide is a moral duty and a reasonable action to take. We must reject any attempt by the state to vitiate our movement.
Sign on using this form to show your support.
We ask that individuals, organizations, and other political bodies sign onto this statement as a show of support, and to circulate it to other organizations who support protests against the genocide of the Palestinian people.
We ask that you encourage your organization to write a statement of support of Sophie and Bridget, and email it to stopfbi@gmail.com.
Signers
Organizations:
Al-Ahrar Palestinian Prisoner Support Toronto, Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), CODEPINK, Committee to Stop FBI Repression, Community Liberation Programs, Community Movement Builders, Demilitarize Western Massachusetts, Diaspora Pa’lante, Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), Jericho Movement, Labor 4 Palestine, Masar Badil – Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, National Lawyers Guild (NLG), Palestinian Assembly for Liberation, Popular Resistance, River Valley Anti-War Committee, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Secours Rouge Toulouse, Southern New Hampshire Democratic Socialists of America, Tariq El-Tahrir Youth and Student Network, Third World Solidarity Front, Women United Against Genocide, Socialist Viewpoint
Individuals:
Ambrose C, Aslynn Romano, Bradly Conway, Calla Walsh – Independent Journalist, Dani Silva- SNH DSA, Eileen Weitzman- Movement lawyer, Jakhi Isaiah, Jon Blanchette- SNH DSA, Julie Glass, Lydia Alexander, Tania Cregger, Bonnie Weinstein
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
 ‘Freedom Zone’ launches important human rights event October 30 Global Festival in Support of Russian Political Prisoners _________________________________________________________ THE LOCATIONS: Berlin, Munich, Warsaw, New York, Minnesota, Budva, Melbourne, Helsinki, Haifa, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Vilnius, São Paulo, Florianópolis, Batumi, Tbilisi, Belgrade, Riga, Paris, Yerevan, Milan, Vienna, London, Madrid THE AUDIENCE: Anyone concerned about political prisoners in Russia
Lectures, auctions, letter evenings, film screenings and other events will take place in more than 20 countries, including the US, Brazil and Australia, demonstrating worldwide solidarity with the prisoners of the Russian regime. Speakers in different cities will include such well-known opponents of the Putin regime as Daria Serenko, Mikhail Lobanov, Sasha and Nadezhda Skochilenko, Ivan Philippov, Alexey Ponomaryov and other prominent Russian exiles. Funds raised will go towards supporting political prisoners, covering the costs of legal representation, visits from loved ones and other needs. It is also possible to join the international campaign by making an online donation. This global festival will be a tangible expression of opposition to lawlessness in Russia and support for its victims. Let’s show that we stand shoulder to shoulder with those who have been unjustly convicted! ______________________________________________ ‘Freedom Zone’ was founded by Kseniia Kagarlitskaia, daughter of political prisoner Boris Kagarlitsky. Since 2024, the organisation has been holding charity events (festivals) abroad to raise funds for political prisoners in Russia, raising awareness of the unlawful persecution and inhumane prison conditions faced by people in the Russian Federation, as well as campaigning for the release of political prisoners. Website: https://freedom-zone.com/festival Contact: Kseniia Kagarlitskaiazona.svobody@gmail.com +38268347993 Telegram @pruesha ___________________________________________________________________ Donation link: https://buymeacoffee.com/zonasvobodk 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 *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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)
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Dr. Alter 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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Articles
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
1) Hospitals Brace for Medicaid Work Rules and Deep Funding Cuts
Health systems are racing to guide millions of patients through new eligibility hoops, slated to go into effect Jan. 1.
By Christopher Rowland, Published Nov. 11, 2026, Updated Nov. 12, 2026
Eskenazi Hospital in Indianapolis is dispatching teams into the city’s low-income neighborhoods to help educate patients on keeping their Medicaid coverage. Lee Klafczynski for The New York Times
Hospitals across the country are mobilizing an expansive outreach effort in an attempt to ensure that roughly 19 million patients do not lose their insurance coverage under new Medicaid work rules that begin in January.
Saying the requirements are generating widespread anxiety and confusion, health care executives are using a variety of methods to help guide the Americans who will be affected. They are deploying staff and volunteers to contact patients with text messages, phone calls and offers of help.
The rules dictate that able-bodied adults without young children either work, volunteer or attend school or job training for at least 80 hours a month. Republicans included the rules last year as part of President Trump’s package of tax cuts and reductions in safety net spending, including nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts.
Hospitals and other health centers are detailing what evidence people in many cases must provide — pay stubs or other proof of work or school attendance — to maintain coverage.
“There’s going to be people who fall through the cracks,” said Nicole Harper, chief financial officer at Eskenazi Health, a safety-net hospital in Indianapolis. “We’re bracing for impact.”
Because hospitals are heavily reliant on Medicaid funding, keeping a stable patient population is critical for them to maintain government reimbursements.
And now that Democrats will assume control of Congress on Jan. 3, some health systems are also preparing lobbying efforts to restore Medicaid cutbacks.
But even with their sizable new majorities, Democrats do not have the votes to override a presidential veto. Unless they strike a deal with Republicans, a rollback of the Medicaid rules and funding cutbacks is uncertain.
Many G.O.P. congressional members have long supported work requirements for Medicaid recipients, contending the system was riddled with fraud and that health insurance should be earned. The government estimates the mandates will save $317 billion in taxpayer spending over 10 years.
By 2034, more than five million low-income people in 44 states and the District of Columbia will lose Medicaid coverage because of the work rules, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Many will fall off by missing filing deadlines and failing to navigate red tape, even if they meet the rules’ criteria, officials and experts said.
Last month, a federal judge in Boston blocked a requirement that would have made it harder for people too sick to work to seek an exemption. Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said on CNBC recently that the ruling would be appealed.
But state and health officials must still review hundreds of serious illnesses and disabilities to decide which patients might qualify.
Complicating matters, the lists of ailments differ from state to state. Nebraska, for instance, has an exemption for rheumatoid arthritis, while Montana does not.
Effects will be far-reaching
For health systems, the price of patients losing Medicaid coverage is high. Emergency rooms could swell with uninsured patients and hospitals would take a significant financial hit from the loss of reimbursements. More than a third of the nearly $1 trillion in annual Medicaid spending goes to hospitals, paid for withfederal and state taxpayer money.
Safety-net hospitals with large numbers of Medicaid patients warn the financial losses will result in increases in charitable care and uncollected bills, which will shift higher costs to employers and patients with commercial insurance.
Small rural hospitals, which already are operating on thin margins, could be forced to shed jobs and services like maternity wards.
Roseland Community Hospital, a safety-net institution in Chicago, said looming Medicaid cuts were among factors that prompted its bankruptcy filing this month.
Among the people most affected are part-time retail employees, seasonal farm laborers and gig workers like Uber drivers. Many will need to hunt down pay stubs, meet recurring deadlines and fill out complicated eligibility forms.
In Indianapolis, the Eskenazi hospital is dispatching teams in the city’s low-income neighborhoods to educate patients, Ms. Harper said.
The requirements apply to states that expanded their Medicaid populations under the Affordable Care Act, which allowed childless adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty line to get coverage.
Nebraska and Montana imposed work rules earlier this year, providing a glimpse of what to expect in other states.
After Nebraska imposed mandates in May, wait times on its Medicaid call center rose to as much as two hours from under 30 minutes, according to executives and advocates.
Nebraska’s monthly Medicaid approvals fell 25 percent, or nearly 1,400 people, in May, June and July, according to an analysis of publicly available data by The Hilltop Institute, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
The state’s health centers also reported an increase in uninsured patients.
State officials said in an email that Nebraska denied Medicaid coverage to 1,773 people through September based on work rules alone. They said additional denials across other categories were caused by “seasonal fluctuations” and that it would be premature to attribute them to policy changes.
“Nebraska prepared carefully before launching work requirements on May 1, including training eligibility staff; communicating with community partners; and sending more than 75,000 notices, 38,000 text messages and 10,000 emails,” said Collin Spilinek, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.
In Montana, which started applying the rules in October, experts said confusion is widespread. They cited state notification letters with conflicting deadlines and a website they found difficult to navigate.
To qualify for a medical exemption in Montana, people must select an ailment from a list of hundreds of permissible diagnoses.
Montana’s list includes kuru, a neurodegenerative disease originating in the South Pacific that is virtually extinct, according to a scientific paper, which notes: “The end of cannibalism has put an end to this disease.”
Nebraska’s diagnoses list also includes kuru but is more encompassing.
“Nebraska has a very exhaustive list that we feel is overly inclusive,” said Rebecca de Camara, Montana’s Medicaid director, said at a legislative hearing in June. “We are trying to have a fairly narrow list that we believe really constitutes medical frailty.”
Montana Medicaid officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Officials and community leaders from Pennsylvania to California say they are moving quickly to prepare for a deadline crush at year’s end.
“It’s going to be a big train wreck,” said Sara Singer, a Stanford University health policy professor and member of a Northern California coalition using artificial intelligence to identify patients at risk of losing coverage.
Community health executives are worried that state Medicaid managers are not fully prepared as the clock ticks down. States have scrambled to issue new contracts to vendors and build systems to scoop up data from multiple government sources, said Matthew Salo, a consultant and past president of the National Association of Medicaid Administrators.
“There really wasn’t enough time to roll out something that was this complex,” he said.
Indiana, which adopted tougher deadlines and procedures than Congress, including quarterly compliance checks, is hiring 400 workers as part of $43 million a year in new spending to manage the new rules, said its Medicaid director, Audrey Frenzel.
Hospital executives in Nebraska said they expected problems to intensify. Since May, 90 percent of the state’s Medicaid denials were attributed to incomplete or improperly filed paperwork, said Jeremy Nordquist, chief executive of the Nebraska Hospital Association.
“That shows that we all have a lot of work left to make sure folks understand what they have to do to keep their coverage,” he said.
Nebraska’s Medicaid agency said that 83 percent of coverage denials for new applications were for people who did not respond to requests for information.
Drew Gonshorowski, who stepped down as the state’s Medicaid director in August and supports work rules, said eligibility checks occur on the anniversary of the original enrollment, which would soften the impact by spreading the burden over the year.
“Regardless of the views on the specific policy, there is opportunity to do what Medicaid programs do really well: extend a hand to the most vulnerable,” he said.
In 2018, Arkansas was the first state to try work mandates under Medicaid, resulting in the loss of insurance for 18,000 people before a federal judge suspended the program.
A survey published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that the program was “plagued by confusion,” noting that 92 percent of those who lost insurance had actually met the work requirement or should have been exempt.
Many of the 19 million adults who are subject to the work requirements can be automatically requalified using state income-tax data systems and other digital sources, according to state Medicaid directors. Others can expect a twice-yearly check-in.
“This is a little like having a D.M.V. appointment to try to prove you’re meeting your work requirements every month,” said Shelly Schlenker, executive vice president for CommonSpirit Health, a system with hospitals in 24 states. “If you’re already struggling to make ends meet, it’s one more burden in your life.”
Sanford Health, the nation’s largest rural health system based in Sioux Falls, S.D., said it was identifying opportunities in its 60 hospitals and 145 nursing homes for recipients to volunteer as valets or patient aides to maintain benefits.
In Michigan, the Henry Ford Health provider network assigned a four-person team a list of 1,400 Medicaid recipients to contact by phone last month, said Raquel Fenderson, who helps patients navigate the system.
People are asking: “How do I qualify, do I qualify?’’’ she said. “I tell them the process is still very new and we don’t have all the information.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
2) Cities Have a New Tactic to Block ICE Jails: Run Out the Clock
A lawsuit by San Antonio is part of a wave of legal challenges slowing the Trump administration’s effort to build immigration detention centers across the country.
By Edgar Sandoval, Reporting from San Antonio, Nov. 12, 2026
With roughly seven weeks until a Democratic majority takes over Congress, San Antonio is using a lawsuit to stall the Trump administration’s plan to turn a warehouse into a detention center for 1,500 immigrants.
Representative Joaquin Castro, a Democrat who represents part of the city, hopes the party’s new majority in Congress can block the project for good when it takes power in January.
“We are just getting going now,” Mr. Castro said. “Those places, those warehouses, are not suited for people.”
The projects have faced resistance and legal defeats, and several have been scrapped.
In San Antonio, Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones and other officials have said they have been kept in the dark since February, when the government purchased the sprawling warehouse for $66 million.
The city sued last month to stop work there until the federal government studies its effects on its neighborhood, joining nearly a dozen other cities, states and nonprofit groups to challenge such plans in court.
“In their rush to convert warehouses into Amazon-like store-and-ship facilities for immigrants, defendants have trampled over federal law designed to protect the city and other stakeholders’ interests,” San Antonio’s lawsuit reads.
The city, like others that have sued, argues that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has skipped legally required environmental reviews. The argument has already slowed the agency’s plans elsewhere: A federal judge in Maryland recently blocked a similar warehouse conversion on the same grounds. ICE has paused or dropped plans in at least five other states.
In San Antonio, the City Attorney’s Office said it was in talks with the Justice Department over a deal that would pause both the lawsuit and the work on the warehouse.
Ms. Jones said in a statement that she wants to cooperate with Democrats in Austin and Washington to resist ICE’s aggressive crackdown.
“I look forward to working with them on those approaches, which must include preventing the establishment of an ICE detention facility in San Antonio,” Ms. Jones said.
ICE did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Under the Trump administration, immigration arrests have surged in San Antonio. The area, which is majority Latino, has an estimated 100,000 undocumented residents, city officials said.
At St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church, less than a 15-minute drive from the proposed detention center, fears have run rampant among the many immigrant parishioners, the Rev. Jimmy Drennan said. In the months before the midterm elections, many called him to ask for his help in locating missing loved ones, whom they presume have been taken by ICE.
The warehouse project makes the threat concrete, he said.
“They are going to fill it up with our children’s friends, colleagues, neighbors and the people who occupy our churches,” Father Drennan said.
Mayor Jones and Mr. Castro have said that the troubles at other such facilities in Texas are cautionary tales.
At the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, about 73 miles south of San Antonio, migrants have complained about the lack of healthy food and medical care, and unsanitary conditions.
Advocates filed a legal motion last month demanding better conditions at Camp East Montana, the nation’s largest immigration detention center, which is inside the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso.
A center in Laredo came under scrutiny this month after the death of a Mexican man, who relatives said was a legal U.S. resident. His daughter said he had not received medicine for a heart condition, diabetes and high blood pressure. An ICE official denied that.
Democrats taking over Congress in January intend to oversee ICE and other immigration agencies closely, using money as a primary lever. Spending bills could be written to withhold or pull back money from agencies that have already received more than $100 billion.
“ICE would be wise to pause the purchases or sales of all of those ICE warehouses,” Mr. Castro said.
The prospect of stopping the San Antonio center is not universally popular. Two council members who lean conservative, Marc Whyte and Misty Spears, disagreed with their colleagues on the question.
“Federal law controls immigration, and City Hall has no business interfering,” they said in a joint statement. “Our residents sent us here to keep them safe, fix our infrastructure and make San Antonio a better place to live. Washington sets immigration policy. We’ve got more than enough work to do right here at home.”
But resistance is growing. A march last month organized by a county commissioner, Tommy Calvert, drew hundreds.
“The facility is woefully inadequate for human beings,” Mr. Calvert said.
Father Drennan said that many of his parishioners feared that they might end up locked inside the 639,595-square-foot warehouse.
“They are trying to make San Antonio the epicenter of the immigration movement, and it’s creating a great sense of fear and anger within the people of our community,” Father Drennan said of the federal government.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
3) Caught Between Killers: Ebola on One Side, Islamic State on the Other
The new epicenter of Congo’s fast-spreading outbreak is a region scarred by rebel violence. Responders are struggling to help it.
By Declan Walsh, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, Nov. 13, 2026
Declan Walsh and Daniel Berehulak have traveled for weeks through remote towns in eastern Congo to track the spread of Ebola.
Health care workers disinfect and prepare the body of child for burial at a makeshift treatment center.
Six months on, Ebola continues to hack a deadly trail across eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
When the outbreak was first detected in May, it resembled a single, giant blaze, with infections concentrated in a handful of towns in one province.
It has since morphed into a far bigger, more elusive foe, creeping into eight provinces and splintering into numerous hot spots as it moves through one of the world’s great rainforests.
Instead of one big fire, there are many now, scattered across a vast area about the size of Britain.
Health workers have corralled the virus where it was first detected, but infections are soaring elsewhere. Biakato, a small town deep in the rainforest, suddenly accounted for as many as one-quarter of new cases nationally. Yet its beleaguered residents were left almost entirely on their own, with dangerously little to defend themselves against the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in history.
“We see the same mistakes as before,” said Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe, who helped discover Ebola in 1976 and now heads Congo’s National Institute for Biomedical Research. “It’s as if we were starting from zero. It’s very disappointing.”
And if that were not enough, the campaign to contain the epidemic has run into a terrifying new threat: the Islamic State.
Ebola was already swamping Biakato when I got to the town in mid-October with the photographer Daniel Berehulak. Exhausted health workers reported 300 cases in the span of a month, up from 20 the month before.
But there were only two doctors, they hadn’t been paid in months, and they felt utterly abandoned. The aid workers who would normally pour in and set up an Ebola treatment center were being scared off by rebel fighters who have been terrorizing the region for years.
Their fears were tragically realized in recent days when the rebels, who are affiliated with the Islamic State, killed 106 people in a series of attacks across the region, U.N. officials said. One of the deadliest episodes occurred 25 miles south of Biakato, where militants torched homes, shops and health facilities, forcing Ebola patients to flee their beds. Thousands of residents also fled in an exodus likely to further spread the disease.
Even by the standards of eastern Congo, where conflict has raged for three decades, the fighters — from a group called the Allied Democratic Forces, or A.D.F. — are considered especially brutal. They roam the sprawling forests, periodically springing from their hiding places to mount attacks. Civilians are beheaded, mutilated and abducted. Children are forced to fight with the group. Mass killings have taken place at funerals and churches.
In 2019, the group pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, and by one recent estimate, it is the world’s second-deadliest group for civilians. Now, its terror tactics are hobbling the fight against Ebola.
A tentative effort to rescue Biakato is underway. Aid groups are using helicopters to fly over the perilous forests and have begun to build a treatment center. Even so, the local volunteers battling to hold back the tide of infections say they are in an impossible bind.
“We’ve got the A.D.F. on one side, and Ebola on the other,” said Jean-Lefranc Sakara, head of a Red Cross team that collects the Ebola dead from their houses. “We are well and truly caught in the middle.”
Daniel and I reached Biakato after a jolting two-hour ride through the rainforest. A wall of trees rose on either side, interrupted in places by ghost villages, their deserted buildings barely visible behind grass and weeds.
The fighters started preying on this forested corridor five years ago, ambushing passing traffic and raiding settlements. Most residents have since fled.
“It wasn’t safe for children any more,” said a man who suddenly emerged from the bushes, “so everyone moved to Biakato.” He hurried away, vanishing into the tall grass.
This muddy track, running 85 miles through the rainforest, has become the central artery of the outbreak. Cases are soaring in the towns of Beni and Mambasa, at either end of the road. Halfway along it lies Biakato.
Since May, more than 5,000 people have died in this outbreak, and experts fear it is growing so fast that it may surpass the devastating West Africa epidemic of 2014 to 2016, the largest on record, which killed more than 11,000. As recently as September, experts thought they were getting a handle on this one, but in recent weeks the transmission rate has risen again, according to official figures obtained by The New York Times, meaning it is still out of control.
Here in the district traversed by the Beni-Mambasa corridor, the transmission rate is double the average, suggesting that Ebola is spreading largely unchecked, experts say.
As we pressed on, Biakato came into view, its tin roofs sparkling amid the sea of green. On the edge of town, municipal workers guided us through a hand-washing station. In the center, motorbikes roared as people flowed into small shops and gold counters. Farmers dried cacao beans on giant mats, their lucrative crop used to make chocolate.
At the town hospital, chaos reigned. Families clustered by the gate, some wailing, as the bagged bodies of Ebola victims were carried out. An isolation area had been set up inside a pediatric ward. Patients sat listlessly on the steps outside, some visibly weak, separated from a bustling public section by a flimsy strip of orange fencing that did almost nothing to contain the disease.
Ebola patients and their relatives gathered by the fence, chatting at close quarters. One patient shared a bottle of juice with a visitor, passing it back and forth, risking transmission through infected saliva. Conditions were so bad that 75 percent of Ebola patients had died, the town’s records showed.
Espérance Kombi, a mother of seven, had been in the ward for two weeks. She looked stronger than most patients, but was traumatized by the deaths and suffering she had witnessed.
“I need a second heart to endure what I’ve seen in there,” she said, pointing to the ward door. “This one is not enough,” she added, tapping her chest.
Until recently, violence was the most pressing concern in Biakato. In May, fighters with the Islamic State affiliate stormed into the town, killing 21 people. Soldiers from nearby Uganda began patrolling the streets, under an agreement with the Congolese government, to ward off attacks.
But the upheaval continues just outside town. It got so dangerous recently that a group of hunter-gatherers from the forest, whose ancestors had lived there for centuries, took shelter beside the town’s Catholic church.
Alice Gloria, 18, sat on a stoop, still dazed by her ordeal. In September, fighters snatched her and her family from their farm. For four nights, she was marched through the forest, her 1-year-old baby in her arms.
At night, the fighters raped her repeatedly, she said in a whisper. “The older men did it.”
Ms. Gloria escaped on the fifth day, as the fighters attacked another farm. She walked for three days, carrying her daughter, until they reached Biakato. But her husband, Augustin, couldn’t escape with them. He was back in the forest, his fate unknown. “Still no news,” she said.
At first, it seemed that Ebola might bypass Biakato, said Job Bakwata, the town’s chief medical officer. The first recorded case was a gold miner who returned from the town of Mongbwalu in June, then died. But in the months that followed, as the virus ravaged other areas, Biakato had only a dribble of cases: one more in June, 14 in July, 20 in August.
Then in mid-September, infections surged, overwhelming the battered town.
Mr. Sakara, the Red Cross volunteer, threw himself into the response. A onetime seminarian, he had moved to Biakato four years earlier in search of safety. The rebels had attacked his home in the mountains of North Kivu, killing a sister and three brothers. “My grandfather told me to get out,” he said. “We came here to start over.”
After Ebola hit, he dropped everything to lead a small team that collects and disinfects the bodies of Ebola victims. Working that close to the virus was daunting, he said. The volunteers had protective suits but little training, and he felt terrified in the homes of Ebola victims who had just died, mopping up their infected blood or dragging their contaminated mattresses outside.
His team also faced hostility from the very people they are trying to save. Mourners hurled stones as they tried to bury the dead, showering them with insults and accusing them of somehow profiting from the outbreak. “They call it ‘Ebola business,’” he said.
That hostility was a disaster for the effort to stop the virus from spreading further. Ebola victims are at their most contagious after they die, which can turn unmanaged funerals into superspreader events.
Over the previous week, four members of his 12-person team had quit, fearing for their lives, he said. Nobody had stepped forward to replace them. “You cannot imagine what we are going through,” he said.
Rebels and many residents have one thing in common: Both groups were drawn to Biakato by cacao and gold. In a forest clearing outside town, Ismail Mbafumoja plucked a colorful pod from a branch, split it open and scooped out a brown seed coated in white pulp. “Cacao,” he said.
Until recently, his biggest worry was guarding his crop against Islamic State fighters and Congolese soldiers, both of whom he considered a threat. But now he had little time to farm at all because of all the funerals for Ebola’s victims. “I can’t count how many I’ve been to,” he said.
The farmer paused outside a neighbor’s house. Nobody was home, he said, because a child who lived here had just died. “Ebola,” he said.
The care Biakato’s patients so urgently needed could be found just 40 miles away, in Beni.
A treatment center run by Doctors Without Borders offered the gold standard in Ebola care. Doctors in white suits worked in tented wards. Strict safety protocols were observed. There were over 200 staff members, about six per patient. The center even had psychologists to manage patient trauma.
“We’ve learned a lot from previous outbreaks,” said Sam Arnold, the facility’s deputy head.
There was nothing of the sort in Biakato, despite the surging cases. In 2013, four Doctors Without Borders workers were abducted in an A.D.F. raid on a village in North Kivu Province. One escaped after 13 months; the other three have never been found.
The World Health Organization, which is leading the effort to get help to Biakato, has its own painful history in the town. During the last outbreak in this area, in 2019, armed men attacked its guesthouse in Biakato, killing three Ebola responders. Officials blamed the violence on the Mai-Mai, a term for local militias.
That leaves health officials walking a tightrope. Proceed too slowly, and Biakato could become a deep reservoir of Ebola, spreading infection across the region. Move too quickly, and they risk an attack, like a killing or a kidnapping of aid workers, that could collapse the entire effort.
Mistrust among local residents is also a problem. After decades of war, and numerous failed military operations, faith in the government has collapsed, officials said. The same Congolese soldiers who are supposed to protect the community also prey on it, seeking bribes or profiting from gold. When Ebola came along, locals saw the disease as yet another plot to suppress them.
“They don’t trust outsiders,” said Julien Harneis, the United Nations Ebola coordinator in Congo. “Experience has taught them not to.”
As infections began to rise in September, a W.H.O. team returned to Biakato to see how they might help. The omens were ominous, at first. The health workers woke one morning to find a headless sheep dumped outside their hotel — a sign they were not welcome, said Dr. Steve Ahuka, the head of Congo’s Ebola response.
But within weeks, Ebola had become so overwhelming that Biakato’s distrustful leaders were pleading for help.
On Oct. 12, Dr. Ahuka and Catherine Smallwood, a senior W.H.O. official, returned to Biakato to a very different reception. Local leaders formed a circle around Ms. Smallwood and, after apologizing for the 2019 killings, implored her to send help.
“They asked me to put the past in the past,” she recalled. “It was an extremely touching moment.”
Since then, the W.H.O. has deployed officials and revamped the chaotic health center. The Congolese government set up a lab to test patients. Medair, a Swiss aid organization, has sent medics.
And yet, even that may not be enough.
To stamp out the virus, health workers need to trace every known contact of an infected person. That kind of investigative work is impossible in the countryside while the A.D.F. still threatens it.
Dr. Muyembe, the Ebola expert, urged his government to consider what was once unthinkable: reaching out to the Islamic State.
“You absolutely have to find a way to get in touch with these people,” he said. “You have to tell them, ‘This is a risk you face, too.’”
Such an approach, even if exploratory, would be difficult, he admitted. Congo’s government officially refuses to negotiate with the A.D.F., a group the United States has designated as a terrorist organization.
“But we have to do it,” Dr. Muyembe urged.
Otherwise, he said, Ebola “will be impossible to contain.”
On the verge of collapse, Moïse Kalindera, 27, struggled up the steps of the Ebola ward, assisted by a medical worker in a white suit.
For weeks, relatives had been ferrying him from one clinic to another, in an increasingly frantic search for a cure. When he tested positive for Ebola, they refused to believe it.
“We think he has been poisoned,” his sister, Consolée, said as she watched him shuffle through the ward doors.
Mr. Kalindera was placed in a small room with another young man who offered hope of a way out.
Germain Kanyungu, a 31-year-old farmhand, had no illusions about Ebola. After fighting the virus for weeks, he was finally recovering and had just tested negative. One more result like that and he would be free.
He couldn’t wait. “Once I get out of here,” he said, “I’m never coming back to Biakato.”
That night, the two young men got to talking in the lonely Ebola ward, Mr. Kanyungu later recounted. They shared jokes and laughed. Mr. Kanyungu helped his roommate eat and comforted him when he confided his fears of dying.
The next day, Consolée and a brother came to visit. But neither wore any protection, and the brother emptied Mr. Kalindera’s urine bucket with his bare hands — a risk that Mr. Kanyungu found utterly reckless.
That night, Mr. Kalindera deteriorated sharply. He vomited, suffered diarrhea and begged for water. A nurse tried to insert an IV line, but failed to find a vein. Soon after, he died quietly in his sleep.
Nobody came to collect the body, leaving Mr. Kanyungu to spend the night alongside his dead companion, unable to sleep.
“I don’t want to go back inside,” he said the next morning, sitting outside in the sun. “I’ve seen too many people die.”
A truck arrived to carry Mr. Kalindera’s flower-print coffin to a forest clearing, a few miles outside town, where Ebola victims were being buried.
Over 100 freshly dug graves were squeezed amid a cluster of towering palm trees whose fronds formed a vaulted canopy over the impromptu cemetery. Plain wooden crosses bore no names. Gravediggers leaned on shovels, some swigging from beer bottles. The smell of hashish wafted through the air.
Mr. Sakara’s Red Cross volunteers maneuvered the coffin toward an open pit, struggling to keep their balance in the narrow spaces between graves. One slipped, causing the coffin to lurch, then fall into the grave with a thud. Onlookers grimaced or cried out in shock.
With no priest and no prayers, the gravediggers quickly scooped the rich, loamy earth into the grave. Wailing filled the air. One woman fell to the ground as soil hit Mr. Kalindera’s coffin. “Oh, Moïse!” she cried.
Consolée was absent — family members had forced her into isolation, fearing her visit to the ward might have infected her.
Yards away, another group began digging the next grave. A third group arrived, bearing a coffin for burial.
One mourner turned toward us.
“This is the fault of the white people,” she said loudly. “You brought Ebola here.”
Jeering erupted, led by the gravediggers.
“You killed him! I hope you are happy!”
“Let’s attack them!”
Two men beside us debated whether we were really journalists. Another walked up, holding out a hoe. “Take it, white man,” he said to me. “Help us dig.”
One of the gravediggers waved a toy wooden rifle, then pointed it at me.
As we slipped away, handfuls of soil fell on our heads, thrown from the direction of Mr. Kalindera’s grave.
The next day, Mr. Kanyungu left the Ebola ward, removing his white face mask to reveal a broad smile.
His second test had come back negative.
He was going home.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
4) Study Hard, Get a Career, Get Ahead? It’s Not What It Used to Be.
From India to France, the implicit meritocratic bargain that underwrote stable societies by providing advancement to new generations is breaking down.
By Amanda Taub, Nov. 13, 2026
“And young people across Europe are set to walk out on Nov. 20 in a general strike that could disrupt schools and businesses throughout the continent.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/13/world/europe/education-meritocracy.html
A Cockroach Janta Party protest at the New Delhi airport in June. Atul Loke for The New York Times
Protest movements have long relied on students as some of the most ardent foot soldiers. Young people have been on the front lines of protests against war, climate change and racial inequality. But in huge protests that have shaken India and France this fall, students have revolted against the failed promises of education itself.
In India, students took to the streets after the government abruptly canceled the results of a medical-school admissions exam because test questions had been leaked online. Aspiring doctors had to take the test again, after many spent years studying for up to 12 hours a day in hopes of winning one of the coveted spots — and the chance of upward mobility. Young people across the country saw the scandal as emblematic of a broken education system and were furious.
In France, students in poor suburbs outside Paris began protesting the decrepit physical condition of their schools, an opaque university admissions system and absent teachers. French education had long promised to serve as a “social elevator” enabling young people to advance in society, but had fallen into disrepair. Soon, demonstrations spread across the country and, in some cities, spiraled into rioting.
In both countries, the anger of the students shows no signs of abating. And while in many ways France and India could hardly be more different, their unrest was sparked by a similar source of outrage: the breakdown of a foundational social contract that one could call the meritocratic bargain.
It is a promise that lies at the core of many countries’ political compacts. Though specifics can vary, the central proposition usually goes something like this: A fair society rewards merit. Educational achievements are a good measure of merit because education is open to all and leads to valuable skills. Therefore, education should be a route to social and economic advancement.
The value of this system is not just that it selects for those with high ability, but also that it offers a justification for the resulting socioeconomic hierarchy — including who ends up at the bottom. “All selection mechanisms generate losers,” said Nicholas Kuipers, a professor at Princeton University who studies the politics of meritocracy. “The question is, Who do you want to be a loser, and who do you want to be a winner?”
In many places around the world, that system has proved to be remarkably effective, in large part because education has translated relatively straightforwardly into economic mobility.
But increasingly, many who work hard at higher education, often going into debt and sacrificing years of earnings potential to do so, are finding that the rewards are not there at the end. Instead of expected winnings, many young people are greeted with a life of economic struggle.
This discontent is affecting politics elsewhere as well. In the United States, data from The New York Times showed that 70 percent of voters under 30 in the recent midterm elections cast their ballots for Democrats, who tapped educated young people’s widespread frustration over being saddled with debt and stuck in low-paid, dead-end jobs.
In Serbia, student protests grew into a political movement that ousted Aleksandar Vucic, the country’s longtime nationalist strongman, in an election last month. And young people across Europe are set to walk out on Nov. 20 in a general strike that could disrupt schools and businesses throughout the continent.
An even bigger threat looms on the horizon, one that could upend the bargain everywhere: A.I. promises to dramatically restructure, or perhaps sever completely, the relationship between education and well-paid work.
That has the potential to further challenge not only the distribution of economic rewards, but the political bargain on which modern societies have been built.
Historically, such moments have been explosive — even revolutionary.
Meritocracy’s Promises and Pitfalls
The version of the meritocratic bargain we see today, with university education as a primary filter for middle-class careers, is a relatively recent construct, and not to be taken for granted.
Britain didn’t introduce universal, free secondary education until 1944. In the United States, college was largely the province of the privileged few until the G.I. Bill opened access to veterans after World War II. Around the same time, the SAT created the first nationally standardized benchmark for admissions.
In countries whose economies developed later, the bargain took even longer to take shape. In India, the national college entrance exam was not introduced until the 1960s. In China, there is a long history of using meritocratic exams to select civil servants and other elites, but that system was disrupted by 20th-century reforms and the Cultural Revolution. The modern system was ushered in by Deng Xiaoping. In 1977 he re-established the national “gaokao” exam system as part of a post-Cultural Revolution rebuilding process. In the late 1990s, further reforms radically expanded university access.
For individuals, this access to education promised more money, more status or both. But for governments, it also offered political stability — a way to convince people to buy into society as currently structured, by promising the potential for advancement to the underprivileged without ousting those who had wealth and power already.
Research has shown that the prospect of upward mobility — sometimes abbreviated as POUM — can make the poor less likely to demand redistribution. In China, merit-based selection for civil service jobs made people more willing to tolerate inequality, Hanzhang Liu, a political scientist at Florida State University, has found.
When people believed the system was meritocratic, they were more likely to attribute their failures to their own poor abilities, or to the high quality of the competition, she said. But when they did not believe so, those who lost out on jobs were more likely to consider the system rigged.
Still, education-based meritocracy puts significant burdens on the young people working to advance, and on their families. In India, students often go into debt and spend years of grueling study to try to win spots at the most prestigious engineering and medical programs.
In South Korea, national tests have generated an entire industry of cram schools known as hagwons, where students toil for hours each day on top of their regular schoolwork. In the United States, networks of charter schools like KIPP popularized the idea that for poor, ambitious kids, “college starts in kindergarten.” And when actual college starts, American students can easily take on six-figure debts for their degrees.
The Danger of Shattered Expectations
Just as the meritocratic bargain can be a source of social cohesion, a breakdown can become a trigger for social explosion.
In 1905, China abolished the national civil service exam that had for 1,300 years been a major way to recruit elites, including government bureaucrats. That move came as a shock to the people who had invested in years of education, hoping to earn a privileged position in society.
Those shattered expectations contributed to the revolutionary uprisings that eventually overthrew the imperial dynasty in 1911, according to the economists Ying Bai, at the University of Hong Kong, and Ruixue Jia, at the University of California, San Diego.
In an influential 2016 paper, they found that frustrated commoners who had hoped to become elites via the exam were especially likely to join the revolution. Disillusioned scholars flocked to revolutionary organizations in search of alternative routes to advancement, and became a major force behind the revolt.
That is not to say that France’s unrest signals the imminent return of the guillotine. But the recent protests there, and in other European countries like Italy and Spain, were fueled, in part, by the sense that the old order was enriching itself at the expense of providing opportunities for young people.
Much the same can be said of the student protest movement that led to the election defeat of Mr. Vucic in Serbia, where angry young people felt that meritocratic opportunity had been crowded out by corruption.
Protests can be a blunt instrument. But data show that the demonstrators have a point. In Europe, high unemployment rates for young people, paired with skyrocketing costs of living, have put the traditional milestones of independent adulthood out of reach for many.
Even in countries with healthier economies, there are signs that the breakdown of the meritocratic bargain is already having political consequences. In India, economic growth has been stronger, but it has not created enough jobs to keep up with the expansion of higher education.
In the United States, the emphasis on higher education as a sorting mechanism has led to people pouring tens of thousands of dollars into degrees that no longer necessarily confer economic advancement but still charge as if they do. Discontent has fueled the rise of political movements like the Democratic Socialists of America and efforts to unionize the work forces of companies like Starbucks and Amazon, Noam Scheiber, a Times labor reporter, writes in his new book, “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.”
But the biggest blow to the meritocratic bargain may be yet to come, as many fear that A.I. could do for knowledge work what a meteor strike once did for the dinosaurs.
A.I.’s arrival has already wiped out some entry-level technical jobs. In the United States, young coders are finding themselves working at Chipotle rather than starting the highly paid tech careers they had expected.
Even if A.I. does not eliminate professionals like lawyers, scientists and doctors, it may radically reshape those fields — and perhaps slash the salaries that come with them.
Some professions may adapt by making greater use of A.I. tools, even as other careers see their pay and numbers collapse. With time, new educational structures may also develop to match skills and meritocratic selection to the demands of a new economy.
But such profound economic change is by its very nature disruptive. In the meantime, it is likely to sow even more confusion about how young people can set themselves up for success, or prevent themselves from sliding down the economic ladder.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
5) The Twisted Logic of the Death Penalty Is Losing Its Power
By Bryan Stevenson, Nov. 13, 2026
Mr. Stevenson is a public interest lawyer. He has helped win reversals, relief or release from prison for over 140 people who had been wrongly sentenced to death.
Will Crooks for The New York Times
The death penalty in America is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit; it is about whether our imperfect governments deserve to kill. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s commutation last week of all of California’s 548 death sentences to life imprisonment without parole is a remarkable act of moral leadership.
California’s death penalty has cost taxpayers billions of dollars. It has absorbed enormous judicial and legal resources, even though California’s homicide rate has dropped dramatically without a single execution in 20 years. No one disputes that people on California’s death row have been convicted of horrific crimes. Many law enforcement officials and survivors of victims have understandably expressed anger about these commutations. My grandfather was murdered when I was 16, and I understand the rage and pain that violent crime produces. But we must reject the policy of blood for blood. The men and women who were on California’s death row will still be severely punished without the death penalty.
The United States Supreme Court effectively ended capital punishment in 1972 when it concluded in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty had been applied in an arbitrary and unreliable manner, violating the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
In many states, particularly former Confederate states in the South, the disproportionate execution of Black and poor people was considered so essential that new, discretionary schemes for imposing the death penalty were quickly devised. Within four years, the Supreme Court upheld a new era of capital punishment that spread across the nation.
The modern death penalty has been a complete failure. It is characterized by wrongful convictions, racial bias, unreliable proceedings and arbitrary and unjust sentencing. More than 200 people sentenced to death have been exonerated of the crimes for which they were convicted. For every eight people executed in America, one innocent person has been identified. This astonishing failure ratio would never be tolerated in aviation, food safety or virtually any other area of public policy — but executions persist.
Recent executions have exposed the cruelty of capital punishment in graphic and shocking ways. Botched executions, where condemned people writhe, gasp for air, moan and struggle before death, have become common in multiple states. The recent, torturous execution attempt in Tennessee that left Christa Pike unconscious for days forced many Americans to confront the myth that lethal injection leads to a peaceful death.
All of this dysfunction has taken place at a time when the United States Supreme Court has largely abandoned its oversight role in ensuring that states carry out the death penalty constitutionally. A decade after the death penalty was restored, overwhelming evidence of racial disparities in sentencing was presented to the Supreme Court in McCleskey v. Kemp. In response, the court’s majority surrendered to racial bigotry, declaring that racial disparities in sentencing were “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.”
These disparities have endured. A lawsuit filed in the California Supreme Court in 2024 presented empirical evidence that Black and Latino defendants are up to 8.7 and 6.2 times as likely to be sentenced to death compared to all other defendants. It is impossible to claim a commitment to racial equality while authorizing executions in the face of such evidence of systemic bias.
Today’s Supreme Court almost always refuses to stop executions, even when there are grave concerns about someone’s guilt, or lower federal judges have issued stays based on serious claims of constitutional violations. Without meaningful Supreme Court review, the burden has shifted to governors. Mr. Newsom’s decision should encourage other elected officials to be more active guardians of justice. The power of commutation exists for precisely such a moment as this.
Protecting the powerless and despised frequently comes with harsh and bitter political backlash. That’s true for any act of principled and moral leadership. During the civil rights era, a handful of federal judges and elected officials in the South confronted the injustice of Jim Crow segregation and distinguished themselves by doing what was right, despite intense opposition. These leaders upheld the values that make for a more just society. Mr. Newsom has reminded us that the death penalty presents a similar reckoning.
Like Mr. Newsom, Governors Laura Kelly in Kansas and Mike DeWine in Ohio have spoken openly about the flaws surrounding capital punishment. As their terms draw to a close, these governors have a chance to use their power and authority to do what the law permits and justice requires and commute death sentences to life imprisonment.
Ms. Pike endured her torturous botched execution attempt under Gov. Bill Lee’s watch. The governor has paused executions in his state but his successor, Marsha Blackburn, has threatened to electrocute Ms. Pike once she is sworn in. Ms. Pike’s attorneys have asked Mr. Lee to commute her death sentence before he leaves office in January. The governor has a short window to demonstrate that his role is not to enable the cruelty of the state, but to act as a backstop against it.
Exercising that authority need not be political suicide. Some will continue to use the death penalty to project a false sense of strength, but the twisted logic of killing people to show that killing is wrong is losing its power. This week, Gallup published a poll showing that support for the death penalty has dropped below 50 percent for the first time in over 50 years. Roy Cooper commuted 15 death sentences before leaving the North Carolina governor’s mansion in 2025. Last week, he became the first Democrat to win a North Carolina seat in the Senate in nearly 20 years. Even Alabama’s conservative Republican governor, Kay Ivey, has been compelled to commute three death sentences in recent years, more than any Alabama governor in decades.
At the end of the Revolutionary War, George Washington wrote to the nation’s newly independent governors, invoking the biblical charge “to do justice and to love mercy.” Throughout our nation’s history, that dictate has been ignored again and again in favor of retribution. By commuting hundreds of death sentences, Mr. Newsom has demonstrated what it means to lead with both of these virtues. It is now up to other leaders to find the moral courage to do the same.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
6) What to Know About Friday’s Nationwide Ground Stop
The air traffic control system’s overloaded, antiquated telecommunications equipment sustained its latest widespread failure, prompting a call for more money to fuel faster upgrades.
By Karoun Demirjian, Reporting from Washington, Published Nov. 13, 2026, Updated Nov. 14, 2026
Grounded planes at San Francisco International Airport on Friday.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
The Federal Aviation Administration issued a rare nationwide ground stop Friday afternoon, after outdated air traffic communications equipment became overloaded with data and began to fail, officials said.
The outage stranded thousands of passengers and caused widespread delays from which airlines and airports are still struggling to recover. It also highlighted persistent vulnerabilities in the aging U.S. air traffic infrastructure and a funding fight, as administration officials demanded lawmakers approve tens of billions of dollars more to accelerate systemwide upgrades.
Here’s what to know.
What caused the problem?
Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, told reporters at the White House Friday night that the radar and other air traffic communications started to falter at 3:36 p.m. when old routers became overloaded with data. While the failures were not universal, they were pervasive enough to prompt officials to issue the unusual nationwide moratorium on takeoffs, Mr. Duffy said.
Appearing alongside him at the White House, Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, stressed that there was no evidence that nefarious activity had triggered the technology failures.
“We’ve seen zero evidence that this was a cyberattack,” Mr. Mullin said, suggesting that new equipment and new technology that Mr. Duffy’s department had added to the old infrastructure was what had overwhelmed it.
Mr. Duffy insisted that the failure was caused by the antiquated, legacy communications equipment, not recent upgrades to the system.
“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Mr. Duffy said, predicting that until significant upgrades are made, “it’s going to continue to fail.”
How long will it take to get things back to normal?
Mr. Duffy warned that it would take “some time” for air travel nationwide to recover from the ground stop, predicting flight schedules would be fully back to normal by the time the Thanksgiving travel season begins.
“I believe that it’s going to take us some time to get back to capacity,” he said, adding: “We’re going to have some makeup to do.”
Mr. Duffy said that the F.A.A. would prioritize larger commercial flights ahead of private and charter flights, to get previously grounded flights off the ground.
What does the administration say needs to be done?
Mr. Duffy has long been pushing for a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. air traffic infrastructure, routinely complaining that controllers have been hampered by the country’s failure to upgrade outdated equipment.
“We have old, old switches, old routers — we use 1980s little copper lines,” he said to reporters Friday. Only last week, the F.A.A. announced that it had begun to phase out the use of floppy disks.
Last year, Congress approved $12.5 billion to fund upgrades to the country’s aging air traffic facilities and networks, some of which has been directed toward communications system upgrades. Mr. Duffy noted Friday that air traffic facilities that had been upgraded to digital systems did not experience the same overloading issues that prompted the F.A.A. to issue the ground stop order.
But he stressed that having an air traffic control system dependent on a “patchwork” of upgrades and fixes was untenable, calling on Congress to spend tens of billions more to allow for more upgrades.
Why did Duffy blame Congress?
For months, Mr. Duffy has been calling on the Republican-controlled Congress to give his department another $30 billion to accelerate efforts to upgrade air traffic control systems. On Friday night, he upped the ante, telling reporters he wanted $50 billion — and that he wanted it before the end of the year.
“This is an emergency, I want Congress to give us emergency funding,” he said, adding: “How many more times does this have to happen for Congress to give the money to fix it?”
But it is unclear whether Republicans will prioritize such a sum before the end of the year, after which control of Congress shifts to the Democrats, who are expected to scrutinize how the F.A.A. has utilized air traffic funding they have received so far. Republican lawmakers have filed bills in the House and Senate to authorize $30 billion in air traffic upgrades, but neither piece of legislation has cosponsors.
Later on Friday, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House’s top-ranking Democrat, appeared to reject Mr. Duffy’s accusing tone and shifted the blame back to the Trump administration.
“Today’s unprecedented breakdown is the latest in a series of unacceptable air travel incidents under the Trump administration’s failed leadership,” he said in a statement, adding that “American travelers deserve timely answers from the Trump administration about how and why this happened and assurances that steps are being taken to ensure that our air travel system remains safe and functional.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
7) Top Democrat Eyes Filibuster-Proof Bill to Unlock Affordability Agenda
The lawmaker set to lead the House Budget Committee outlined Democrats’ options for forcing a negotiation with President Trump on an economic package to bring down living costs.
By Catie Edmondson, Reporting from the Capitol, Nov. 14, 2026
Representative Brendan Boyle in his office at the Capitol this month. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
A top House Democrat mapping out how to leverage his party’s vast majorities in Congress next year to push through a sweeping economic agenda is considering using a filibuster-proof bill to muscle it through both chambers and to President Trump’s desk.
The approach, outlined by Representative Brendan Boyle, the Pennsylvania Democrat in line to be chairman of the House Budget Committee in January, would be one way of forcing Mr. Trump to either embrace or veto broadly popular measures to lower living costs.
Triumphant after electoral victories delivered them more than 255 seats in the House and at least 55 seats in the Senate, Democrats are weighing the best strategy for quickly delivering the affordability agenda they promised voters, including tackling the soaring costs of health care, child care and housing.
Mr. Boyle, the 49-year-old son of a janitor for Pennsylvania’s transportation authority and a school crossing guard, is now positioned to lead the way from his perch at the helm of the House panel that handles budget matters and sets spending priorities.
In an interview, Mr. Boyle said it was “worth exploring” using budget reconciliation — a tool that allows the party in power to bypass opposition from the minority and push through fiscal legislation on majority votes — to unlock the affordability agenda Democrats ran on, including reversing Medicaid cuts Republicans enacted unilaterally in 2025.
“I think any time we can pass good, popular, meaningful legislation, that only strengthens our hand in any ultimate negotiation with the White House,” Mr. Boyle said.
He also said he would like Democrats to forge a deal with Mr. Trump on the statutory limit on the national debt, ending what has become a perennial cycle of high-stakes fiscal clashes between the president and Congress that have repeatedly brought the country dangerously close to a federal default. Mr. Boyle has long pushed for legislation that would allow the Treasury Department to suspend the debt limit, subject to congressional override, rather than requiring an affirmative vote by Congress to increase it.
“He wants it raised,” he said of Mr. Trump. “We never again want to see a Democratic president have to have this held like a gun against their head, the same way it happened to Joe Biden and to Barack Obama.”
A sharp but sociable communicator, Mr. Boyle is part of a younger vanguard of House Democrats rising to the top echelons of the party. He said that no final decisions had been made, but outlined a scenario in which Democrats early next year would first try to pass their economic agenda with some Republican backing, which they would need to steer around a filibuster in the Senate. He suggested Democrats could then move to a partisan reconciliation package if they failed to win over G.O.P. supporters.
“It’s worth exploring reconciliation now that we have both the House and the Senate; however, I think it’s also worth exploring the fact that we’re 56,” Mr. Boyle said, referring to the number of Senate seats Democrats would control if they won a seat in Alaska, where their candidate was leading. “Are there four Senate Republicans who we could work with on issue X, on issue Y, to get things passed in a more expeditious manner?”
That strategy would be in step with what Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, has privately outlined to his caucus. He has said he is prepared to move to a filibuster-proof effort if Republicans will not back Democratic legislation meant to address cost-of-living issues.
Mr. Boyle said he would defer to Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader who is expected to become speaker, on whether the costs of an economic package would need to be offset by new taxes.
Democrats could try to pay for the cost of such a plan by rolling back tax cuts for the “megawealthy” that Republicans enacted during the first and second Trump administrations, he said.
Or they could not pay for them at all. Mr. Boyle said Democrats could argue: “Look, those folks passed a massive, $5 trillion bill and only paid for a fraction of it; we certainly shouldn’t be held to a different standard.”
In 2021, when Democrats used their governing trifecta in Congress under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to advance a legislative package through reconciliation, feuding broke out between the moderate and progressive flanks of the party over the scope and cost of the bill.
The House eventually passed a $2.2 trillion measure known as “Build Back Better.” But in the months of debate, centrists in the Senate pushed to narrow the measure substantially, outraging progressives, who then threatened to withhold their support for a separate $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Not yet at the helm of the budget panel, Mr. Boyle still vividly remembers the internal party churn that threatened to tank both bills and the multiday slogs he endured to pass them out of committee.
“When it got to the Senate, because of the math of 50-50, where every Senate Democrat could be king or queen, the bill got slimmed down considerably, about half of the size,” he said. “The name changed, and a lot of the things that I felt the best about in that bill were stripped out.”
“The biggest difference now,” Mr. Boyle said, “is 56 is a lot easier than 50.”
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
8) They Had Come From Afar to Build New Lives. Then, All Was Gone.
Theirs was a story as old as New York. On a street in Brooklyn, immigrants had arrived to work and live, until their lives intersected in tragedy.
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Ana Ley, Nov. 14, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/14/nyregion/building-collapse-brooklyn-immigrants.html
Brenda Vasquez, 25, lost her husband, Edgar Santiago Sapón Gutierrez, 26, when an apartment building collapsed onto a Brooklyn construction site. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
They had landed in New York City after long journeys from Latin America and West Africa. Some had found work on a construction site in Brooklyn. Others, a home in the apartment building next door.
Two of the young men toiling at the construction site were from Ecuador, another was from Guatemala. All had arrived only a few years ago, all were fathers in their 20s hoping to provide for their young children.
Next door, in the building with four apartments, there were immigrants from Guinea — an Amazon worker, a food delivery driver — and families from Colombia, including a family of four that had just moved there after saving enough money to abandon a migrant shelter.
On Wednesday, their lives collided in a spasm of devastation.
Most, if not all, of the people whose lives changed in an instant when the apartment building tumbled into the construction site were immigrants.
All eight who perished, including three workers at the construction site and two children from Colombia who lived in the building, were born outside the United States. So were many of the 18 people who were injured.
The collapse of the building in the Flatbush neighborhood captivated the world, in part, because it reflected the world.
Television crews from across the globe were drawn to the heap of rubble on Flatbush Avenue. Consulates rushed to support families and organize the repatriation of bodies to faraway homelands.
The calamity rocked one of New York’s most vibrant immigrant neighborhoods, an anchor of Afro-Caribbean cultures that has long served as a landing pad for newcomers, blending growing communities from Africa, South Asia and Latin America.
But it also laid bare the tension between New York’s identity as a city of immigrants and the perils that migrants with tenuous legal status sometimes face in establishing a livelihood.
The deaths echoed earlier tragedies that claimed the lives of vulnerable workers, from the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 mostly Jewish and Italian workers, to the 2015 trench collapse in the meatpacking district that killed Carlos Moncayo, a 22-year-old Ecuadorean construction worker, prompting tougher state penalties for contractors.
And it underscored the substandard housing conditions that immigrants are often subjected to in New York, where they can find themselves in older, poorly maintained and overcrowded apartments. The building that collapsed had a litany of unresolved violations: exposed electrical wiring, missing smoke detectors and an inadequate water supply for the sprinkler system, according to city records.
“This tragedy has impacted an immigrant workplace and an immigrant home,” said Manuel Castro, the former commissioner of immigrant affairs in New York City. “That should give us pause. We know these tragedies impact our communities disproportionately.”
As families assessed their losses, Brooklyn prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into how the residential building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue had caved into a hole at the construction site.
Adults and children, they had come to New York, legally or not, seeking better lives, according to friends and relatives. They resorted to the grueling, low-wage jobs that are integral to the city’s economy.
They had found the promise of opportunity in Flatbush.
The construction site at Flatbush and Bedford Avenues had drawn Latin American workers, the backbone of nonunion construction projects outside of Manhattan. More than 60 percent of all construction workers in the city are immigrants, 41 percent of whom are undocumented, according to a 2021 estimate from the Center for Migration Studies, a research organization.
Three of them died after the three-story apartment building pancaked into the ground where they were working.
“They were doing the foundation work, the lowest of the work but the most important part,” said Hildalyn Colón Hernández, the chief of operations at New Immigrant Community Empowerment, a nonprofit that specializes in organizing and training day laborers. “They were not in the wrong place at the wrong time — they were working.”
There was José Luis Caguana Cosquillo, 26, who migrated from Ecuador four years ago and had been relieved to find work after a stretch of unemployment, eager to support his 4-year-old son and his wife, who is expected to give birth this month.
Gabriel Siguencia, 22, had moved to the region in March 2025 to support his wife and son in Ecuador. He had started as a carpenter at the construction site two weeks ago and decided to work overtime on Wednesday.
“He just came here to do work, to be able to provide for his family back in Ecuador,” his stepsister, Kayla Chimborazo, said in an interview.
And Edgar Santiago Sapón Gutierrez, 26, a husband and father of a 6-year-old boy, had arrived from Guatemala three years ago.
“We are very devastated by the situation because in the end, we didn’t come to this country to face something like this,” his uncle, Eliseo Vásquez Talé, said in Spanish. “What we want is for justice to be served,” he added, saying that his nephew’s death was preventable.
Mr. Vásquez Talé said his family planned to transport his nephew’s body to his native country.
Walther Sinche, a community organizer in Queens, said city officials should have done more to protect the workers, stressing that day laborers are often afraid to complain about dangerous working conditions, out of a fear of retribution or being targeted by immigration officials.
Some of the immigrants who lived in the collapsed building were part of New York’s more recent, volatile immigration chapter.
They had entered the United States during the Biden administration, when millions of migrants crossed the southern border. More than 200,000 found their way to New York, overwhelming the city. Still unsettled years later, they had been contending with President Trump’s immigration crackdown, which had already subdued Flatbush, home to a bustling community of Haitians, after Mr. Trump stripped Haitians of legal protections that had shielded them from deportation.
“We have the intersection of immigration and people afraid to come out and speak,” Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, said on Friday. “We want to make sure that we’re speaking up for them.”
Anderson, 35, migrated from Medellín in Colombia with his wife and son three years ago “in search of a better future,” he said in an interview in Spanish. The couple, who had a second child in New York, had moved into a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of the doomed apartment building for $1,500 a month just over a week ago. They had secured stable jobs — him in painting, her as a home attendant — that had allowed the family to finally leave a migrant shelter.
“We searched everywhere,” Anderson, who asked that his family’s name not be used to maintain their privacy, said. “We wanted to make sure our children had enough space.”
They now have no home. But they survived.
Another family that had recently arrived from Colombia lived on the floor below; two cousins, ages 9 and 11, and a 31-year-old man, Juan Daniel Sabala Guzman, died.
The two other apartments were occupied by immigrants from Guinea, according to neighbors, including a man who lived with his pregnant wife; they both survived.
Two other men from Guinea died: Mamadou Bhoye Barry, 23, and Mamadou Bhoye N’Diaye, 31, who were cousins and roommates. Mr. Barry had been preparing for his night shift as a food delivery worker before the building collapsed. With no partner or children, he had lived in a migrant shelter two years ago, a friend told The New York Times, and had bounced between jobs, including as a cleaner at Kennedy International Airport. His body would be found in the rubble hours later.
Mr. N’Diaye, an Amazon worker, had also been getting ready to go to work.
Anderson was not at home when the building began to crumble. His wife, Johana, 31, was, alone with their sons Pablo, 9, and Joseph, 2. They plummeted to the ground. Pablo suffered a head injury, and Johana broke her collarbone and four ribs.
Joseph was saved by an Ecuadorean construction worker who scooped him up from the rubble moments later.
“We didn’t come here to cause problems, but we’re the most vulnerable,” Anderson said in Spanish, reflecting on his time in New York. “I have hope we’ll see better days.”
Kaja Andric, Miles G. Cohen, Matthew Haag, Bianca Pallaro, Wesley Parnell and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
9) A ‘Generational Clash’ Is Fueling Europe’s Protests
As retirees live longer, governments need to spend more on pensions. That makes it harder to fund other services, spurring protests like those planned this weekend in France.
By Jason Horowitz, Reporting from Madrid, Nov. 14, 2026
Students protesting last month in Paris. France is struggling to maintain both its education sector and its pension payments. Julien De Rosa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Sébastien Ducros, a French data analyst who supports the widespread student protests in his country, has identified an obvious culprit for the lack of government funds for dilapidated schools.
“A huge portion of the money is going toward retirees, while many other things are being neglected,” said Mr. Ducros, 36. “I honestly think — even if it feels strange to say — that people like my parents are in a position where they should and could” surrender some of their pension payments, he added, saying that they were about to retire.
But Laurent Grinwald, 72, who retired recently after decades as a postal worker, isn’t eager for his pension to be reduced, particularly to pay for other state-funded services. Especially, he said, as rents and the cost of living have shot up.
“We’ve been working all this time,” Mr. Grinwald said, “and now, suddenly, the stance is, ‘Well, no, we’re going to start taking a bit more?’”
This disagreement embodies a broader question for Europe, one that is at the heart of mass antigovernment demonstrations planned for Saturday in France, as well as recent protests driven by frustrated young people in countries including Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy and Portugal. As Europeans live longer, should the needs of the young be eclipsed by their parents’ and grandparents’ pensions, routinely the largest items in Europe’s national budgets?
“It’s a generational clash,” said Jorge Galindo, the director of EsadeEcPol, an independent think tank in Spain, which has some of the most generous pensions in Europe.
In much of Europe, spending on a growing population of older people has come at the expense of services and subsidies for young workers whose tax contributions help to fund pensions.
Spiraling defense costs, prompted by American pressure and Russian aggression, have also made it harder for governments to balance their books. And high interest rates have driven up the costs of servicing state debt.
All of that, coupled with rising rents and house prices, has compounded a sense of generational injustice among young people. Only 38 percent of people aged 15 to 30 think that policymakers consider the long-term consequences of their decisions, according to a recent European Union survey. Only a third believe that today’s young people have the same shot at success as young people 30 years ago did, the survey also found.
The enormous financial burden of pensions — they gobble up around 40 percent of the spending on social protections in the European Union — has not been lost on European governments.
Over the past decade, many countries have tried to tinker with pension formulas, trying to cut costs while postponing major political blowback. To many older Europeans, pensions are considered the sacrosanct base of the European welfare system.
Often, they have avoided cutting what each retiree is paid while gradually raising the age at which citizens qualify for those payments — to 67 from 65, for example, or older. Denmark plans to raise it to 70 by 2040.
Even that approach has had a political cost. When President Emmanuel Macron of France tried in 2023 to raise France’s retirement age to 64 from 62, it prompted such furious protests that the government eventually froze the measure. But that gave the country a different problem.
With one of the highest debt levels in Europe, France says it cannot afford to spend more on education — which has prompted the youth anger spurring the wave of unrest.
Other countries have tried other ways of softening the generational competition. Britain plans to save billions by slowing the speed at which its pension payments increase over time, while Spain has enlarged its pool of taxpaying workers.
Spain chose in 2011 to raise its pension age to 67 in most cases. Then the current left-wing government enlarged the pension bill by ensuring that pension payments would grow in line with inflation, protecting recipients from rising prices but putting an enormous strain on the budget.
To offset those costs, it has bucked the European trend and opened its doors to immigrant labor — more than 1.7 million foreigners have entered the Spanish work force since 2018.
Those workers have increased tax revenue, which in turn helps to fund pension contributions, but eventually, experts note, they will age, too.
Spain will spend 17.3 percent of its gross domestic product in 2050 on pensions, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — roughly four percentage points higher than now. That means the government would then be spending the equivalent in today’s terms of an additional $67 billion every year on pensions. It currently spends roughly $79 billion on education.
Despite the competition for resources, many of the young people protesting throughout Europe are loath to blame their elders.
“Honestly,” said Alice Cossa, 22, an Italian student who protested recently in Venice, “we’ve never talked about it.”
Left-wing demonstrators often say that pensions and other benefits can be funded by taxing the rich and corporations. Their right-wing counterparts suggest cutting immigration, blaming immigrants for soaking up welfare benefits.
Some feel, though, that at least some pensions, namely those received by wealthy older people, should be reassessed.
“We young people have less and less and less,” said Alejandro Rojano, 28, a bank employee who lives in a basement apartment in Madrid with a roommate. He said even his own nonagenarian grandparents received “way” more than his monthly salary, which was less than 2,000 euros, or less than $2,200. No political party would dare cut the benefits of such a dependable and powerful voting bloc as retirees, he lamented, adding of the pension payouts, “It makes no sense, you know?”
Mr. Galindo, the think tank director, said that given the entrenched political interests in protecting retirees, young people might need to form an essentially single-issue voting bloc. Because European governments are typically formed from coalitions of smaller parties, such a party could become pivotal and have its concerns taken seriously with only a handful of seats.
But young people are a shrinking demographic in Europe, and the number of older people, who are more likely to exercise political power through union and party memberships, is booming.
And young and middle-aged Europeans are reluctant to cut a benefit that they hope to enjoy in the future.
As Daniel Ramo, 46, left a recent teachers’ strike in Madrid protesting dismal salaries and packed classrooms, he said that he personally looked forward to receiving his generous Spanish pension after making €2,100 a month after taxes. In the meantime, the benefits of his parents’ pensions would trickle down to help him through tough times.
“I’m on strike knowing I’ll have to borrow money from my father,” said Mr. Ramo, who said his father’s pension made him the top earner in the family.
From the perspective of retirees, the hard-earned benefit helps keep families, and European society, going.
“We personally make more than our children do,” said Encarna Matilla, 72, as she took a walk in sunny Retiro Park in Madrid. She said her 88-year-old husband, who worked from 14 to 70, received a pension payment of €2,700, 60 percent higher than Spain’s median salary, and helped support her great-grandchildren.
“We are the safety net,” she said.
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris, Josephine de La Bruyère from Rome and Carlos Barragán from Madrid
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
