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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Israel Strikes Southern Lebanon After Pulling Back From Threat to Beirut
Under pressure from President Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel held off from attacking Beirut. But he vowed to continue Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, which could threaten peace talks with Iran.
By Aaron Boxerman, Christina Goldbaum, Farnaz Fassihi and Hari Raj, June 2. 2026
People fleeing the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, on Monday, after the Israeli military was ordered to attack targets there. Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
Israel launched fresh strikes in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appeared to pull back from a threat to strike Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, under pressure from President Trump and the United Nations.
Mr. Netanyahu paused the attacks on Beirut but made no mention of a cease-fire in Lebanon and vowed to maintain the military offensive in the south. Iran has said that among its conditions for a peace agreement with the United States is an end to hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon.
The Israeli military issued a new evacuation order on Tuesday for Nabatieh, one of southern Lebanon’s largest cities, which has been heavily bombarded in recent days.
Hours later, officials from the Lebanese government and Israel met for a new round of U.S.-mediated talks in Washington aimed at defusing the conflict.
On Monday, diplomats at an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council were nearly unanimous — with the exception of the United States — in calling for Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and refrain from launching more attacks.
Israel had warned earlier on Monday that it would strike Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.
Mr. Trump later said on social media that Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to stop their attacks on each other, while the Lebanese government — which does not include or control Hezbollah — said a new truce was taking shape.
Mr. Netanyahu then issued a statement that appeared to move away from his immediate threat to attack Beirut, suggesting it would depend on Hezbollah’s actions.
“I spoke with President Trump tonight, and told him that if Hezbollah doesn’t cease its attacks on our cities and civilians — Israel will strike terror targets in Beirut,” he said. He added that the Israeli military would “continue to operate as planned in southern Lebanon.”
There was no direct comment from Hezbollah. Lebanon’s government said it had “received confirmation that Hezbollah had agreed to the U.S. proposal for a mutual cessation of attacks.”
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2) Kenyan Court Deals New Blow to Plans for U.S. Ebola Unit
The court further delayed the Trump administration’s proposed quarantine unit for Americans exposed to the virus. The plan has sparked angry protests in Kenya.
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Brian O. Otieno, Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya, June 2, 2026
Demonstrators in Nanyuki, Kenya, on Monday, protesting plans to create an Ebola quarantine center for Americans. Andrew Kasuku/Associated Press
Kenya’s high court on Tuesday effectively delayed by three more weeks the Trump administration’s plan to set up a quarantine unit in the country for Americans exposed to Ebola, dealing a new setback to a project that has sparked angry protests among Kenyans.
A judge at the court, the Hon. Lady Justice Patricia Nyaundi, said in a ruling that the next proceedings in the case would not take place until June 23, at which point a date for a full hearing would be set — delaying any action on the matter until then. The court suspended the plan for the facility last week, after the Katiba Institute, a Kenyan civil society group, filed a petition challenging its constitutionality.
The court on Monday also ordered Kenya’s government to provide, within seven days, full details of the agreement it struck with the United States to set up the facility, including any financial arrangements and measures to protect the Kenyan population.
As part of its response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Trump administration announced last week that it would prevent any American citizens exposed to the virus from returning to the United States for observation and treatment. That decision, a departure from U.S. policy during previous Ebola outbreaks, has shocked many health experts.
U.S. officials also said that a 50-bed quarantine unit would be set up at Laikipia Air Base in central Kenya, for Americans exposed to Ebola.
That proposal has become a political headache for President William Ruto of Kenya. His opponents have accused him of bowing to U.S. pressure and risking the spread of Ebola in Kenya, which has never registered a case of the virus.
Critics are particularly incensed because U.S. officials said last week that the unit would only treat Americans. The top civil servant in Kenya’s health ministry, Dr. Ouma Oluga, said on Monday that the facility would also be open to Kenyans. U.S. officials did not immediately comment on that statement.
Mr. Ruto has defended his decision to agree to the facility, arguing that Kenya is well prepared should it have to deal with a potential Ebola case, and that Kenya’s health care system has long benefited from U.S. support.
“I gave the OK because it was an agreement and a partnership with friends who have walked with Kenya for 30 or 40 years,” Mr. Ruto told journalists in the northern town of Wajir on Monday.
“The American government has supported us,” he added. “They have deployed huge resources in Kenya to work with us on H.I.V., AIDS, to work with us on other diseases.”
In practice, health experts say any public health risk from the Ebola unit would likely be negligible, because it would follow stringent international health protocols under which any person suspected of being infected is isolated.
But the speed and the scale of the latest outbreak, and images circulating on social media of people sick with Ebola in other African countries, have raised powerful fears in Kenya. The World Health Organization on Tuesday confirmed 330 cases and 49 deaths from the outbreak, and many more cases are suspected. Almost all of the cases and deaths have been in Congo, with a handful in Uganda.
On Monday in Kenya, hundreds of people marched through the streets of Nanyuki, the town closest to the air base, protesting against the plan to build the quarantine unit. The police fired tear gas, and the military deployed an armored personnel carrier to prevent demonstrators from approaching the base.
Patrick Wahome, the community leader who organized the protest, said in an interview on Tuesday that two people had been shot and killed, apparently by the police, in the hours after the demonstration ended, under circumstances that he said were unclear.
A spokesman for Kenya’s police, Muchiri Nyaga, said that it had no record of the shootings.
Criticism of the Ebola unit proposal reflects broader voter antipathy toward Mr. Ruto, who faces a tough re-election battle next year for a second and final term. His government has faced a series of corruption scandals and protests led by young people in which the security forces killed dozens.
Tom Mboya, a Kenyan political analyst, said a lack of transparency over the deal between Kenya and the United States had fueled suspicion.
“You ask yourself, even objectively, what is the upside for Kenya and it is unclear,” he said.
Still, Mr. Ruto’s decision to set up the Ebola unit reflects a strategic partnership between the two countries that has deepened in recent years.
President Joseph R. Biden designated Kenya a major non-NATO ally in 2024, and Mr. Ruto’s government deployed hundreds of police officers to Haiti that same year, in a U.N.-sanctioned mission largely financed and organized by the United States.
The Kenyan decision also shows how African leaders have tried to cultivate ties with the Trump administration, even at the risk of domestic blowback. Several African countries have participated in the administration's so-called third-country deportation policy, in which countries take in immigrants deported from the United States even though they are not nationals of the receiving country.
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3) Lebanon Is Fed Up, and Ready to Remake Itself
By Lydia Polgreen
Photographs by William Keo, June 3, 2026
Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion Columnist reporting from Lebanon. Mr. Keo is a photographer based in Paris.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/03/opinion/lebanon-israel-iran-war.html
Photographs by William Keo
Fresh from his evening shower on May 15, Ibrahim Nehme was settling onto the couch to watch the news in a quiet neighborhood in Tyre, an ancient city in southern Lebanon. There was a lot to catch up on. A Lebanese delegation had just met with Israeli officials in Washington, part of the first direct negotiations between the two countries in decades. In theory, the talks had been positive: The two sides had agreed to meet again in June and to extend the month-old cease-fire between them for 45 days.
But just as he tuned in, he heard a crackle of nearby gunfire.
“I started hearing people shouting and screaming, and people started shooting in the air,” Nehme told me. The shooting could mean only one thing: An Israeli strike was coming. He grabbed his shoes, his teenage daughter and their cat, and hurtled down the stairs.
Minutes later, a missile crashed into the building next door. The blast sheared off the wall of the room Nehme had been sitting in; the sofa tumbled onto the ashen debris five stories below. Shards of glass blanketed the twin beds in his daughters’ bedrooms, and deep fissures snaked up the apartment’s exterior walls. He and his family had no idea why this placid, upscale neighborhood of elegant apartment blocks was bombed. It was a tight-knit community where everyone knew everyone, and the notion of Hezbollah fighters being among them was absurd.
“We are civilians,” Nehme, an architect, told me the next afternoon as he surveyed the damage to his home of 25 years, where he and his wife had raised four daughters. “Why attack us?”
Like Nehme and his tumbling sofa, Lebanon has found itself in the wreckage of an epic battle not of its own making. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia group, has been in conflict with Israel, on and off, for decades. After it fired rockets into Israel in March as vengeance for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Israel launched a brutal counterattack, killing almost 3,500 people and wounding more than 10,000, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
There is a cease-fire in place but also a war on. Israel regularly bombs residential areas it claims harbor Hezbollah militants, and Hezbollah attacks Israeli troops, who occupy an ever-expanding swath of Lebanese territory. Last week, Israel widened its ground assault and pushed deeper into Lebanon. This week, Benjamin Netanyahu ordered strikes on the Beirut suburbs, before pausing them apparently at Donald Trump’s behest. Peace talks are underway between the Lebanese and Israeli governments, even though Lebanon is not fighting Israel.
The result is an atmosphere of unreality, a bewildering and surreal condition I saw again and again in my travels across the country. It was there on Beirut’s famed corniche by the glittering Mediterranean, where shirtless men played hard-fought games of padel as young women in hijabs looked on, puffing away on fragrant shisha pipes. The roar of military aircraft and the low buzz of drones drowned out the gentle lapping of the sea.
Less than a mile away, just beyond a marina bobbing with gleaming yachts, hundreds of displaced people huddled in makeshift tents. They are the residents of border villages or suburban apartment blocks that have been reduced to rubble by Israeli air and drone strikes in the past three months, a mere handful of the more than 1.1 million Lebanese forced to flee their homes. In the south, makeshift gravesites dot the cities, their slapdash nature testifying to a stubborn vow to rebuild the ancestral villages razed by Israeli troops.
Those who are displaced run because of evacuation orders that arrive on social media from the Israeli Army’s Arabic spokesman. These orders have their own surreal quality. A foreign military, operating inside the territory of another nation, declares that “in light of the terrorist Hezbollah’s violation of the cease-fire agreement, the defense army is compelled to act against it forcefully.” These messages elide who, exactly, this “defense army” is defending.
The regional situation has never been so febrile. Each day brings news that seems to upend the news of the day before: The war in Iran is ending, or escalating, or both. Everyone, meanwhile, seems to be learning the hard lessons that only war can teach. Iran’s proxies did not protect it from American attack. Israel’s maximum force doctrine has, paradoxically, produced more resistance. America’s power was shown to stop short at the Strait of Hormuz. Nobody knows what comes next.
Yet what struck me, over the course of a week in Lebanon in mid-May, is how united so many Lebanese seem in their exhaustion. Whatever their creed, they can no longer stomach being in the cross hairs of foreign powers. Instead, there appeared to be a tentative consensus emerging, even among those most likely to blame Hezbollah for the country’s woes, that the people of Lebanon must find a way to share political and economic power. It was a hope, muted and precarious, that in place of absurdity and surrealism could come clarity and realism.
Elias Jarade typifies this changing mind-set. An Orthodox Christian member of Parliament from south Lebanon, Jarade defeated a Hezbollah politician in 2022 as part of a list of candidates seeking to break down sectarian divides. If he might once have been sympathetic to Israel’s fight against Hezbollah, that changed after Israel used booby-trapped pagers to attack Hezbollah leaders two years ago. Jarade, an eye surgeon, was horrified by the gruesome injuries he saw in civilian patients and disgusted by Israel’s celebratory response to the attack, which injured thousands.
“They congratulate Netanyahu for what he has done,” Jarade told me. “Let them come see the children, the elderly, that were blinded by these pagers. How come you are congratulating them? You know what the impact will be. There are two crimes that happened at the same time, the pager attack and the silent attitude of the whole world.” For Jarade, the atrocity put Hezbollah and Israel side by side as terrorizers of innocent civilians.
Tarek Mitri, an Orthodox Christian politician who serves as the deputy prime minister, also seemed keen to move past old divisions. He told me that efforts to portray Hezbollah as simply a tool of Iran, with no legitimacy in Lebanon, will backfire. “Hezbollah had a role, a major role, in driving the Israelis out of the south,” he told me, referring to Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 after nearly two decades of occupation. “They were hailed in Lebanon, not just among the Shiite community, but among all of us.”
Hezbollah’s popularity certainly waned, even among Shiites, since the group decided to join Hamas in targeting Israel after Oct. 7, and again after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei earlier this year. But the ferocity and indiscriminate nature of the Israeli assault have revived Hezbollah’s image as a protector of Lebanese sovereignty, for all its deep ties to Iran.
“I think we missed an opportunity in the year 2000 of restoring the full sovereignty of the state,” Mitri said. “From there on, Israeli incursions into Lebanese territory or Hezbollah operations into Israel have given each other pretext to interfere.” There is simply no military solution to the problem of Hezbollah, he told me. Instead, he said, its resolution will inevitably involve not just Iran and Israel but also other major players in the region. “Lebanon cannot be extracted from the conflict with Israel, unless there is a regional peace achieved.”
A couple of days later, I traveled to the region hardest hit by the conflict: the Shiite heartland of southern Lebanon. On my way south, I stopped in to visit a member of Parliament named Halima Kaakour in her ancestral village of Baasir. In a sprawling compound perched high above the sea, she made me a lunch of traditional Lebanese flatbreads topped with ground lamb, zataar, homemade cheese from a family dairy and freshly chopped tomatoes and herbs grown in a nearby garden.
“My ancestors used to do this, and now the new generation, they don’t want to work like that,” she said, stoking the glowing embers inside a wood-burning oven. “We are struggling to keep it alive.”
That is not the only thing Kaakour, a professor of international law and a Sunni Muslim, hopes to preserve. She has dedicated her life to the dream of a pluralistic, secular and united Lebanon. She was first elected in 2022, pledging to bring secularism, feminism and an emphasis on human rights to Lebanese politics. She has long been critical of Hezbollah but, like the deputy prime minister, rejects attempts to paint it as an alien force bent on destroying Israel. Her focus, instead, was on Israel.
“Israel tells us that it is going to transform Lebanon to Gaza, it’s going to occupy our land, destroy our land,” she said, referring to the approach laid out by officials including Israel’s defense minister. “Under international law, the threat to violence, not only the violence, is a crime itself.” Israel’s right to self-defense cannot come at the expense of Lebanese civilian lives, she argued, and killing a handful of Hezbollah fighters cannot justify the occupation and destruction of vast tracts of a foreign country.
I left Kaakour’s home, driving toward the coast and then south, crossing a half-destroyed bridge over the Litani River that demarcated the most active zone of Israeli military strikes. Turning off the busy north-south coastal highway, I headed inland toward Nabatieh, a city nestled among rocky hillsides that Israeli strikes had pummeled for weeks despite the cease-fire. Suddenly, I was in the only car on the road, speeding past shuttered storefronts and ghostly piles of rubble. Almost everyone had left, heeding Israeli evacuation orders.
I drove to a hilltop hospital to speak with the skeleton crew of medical workers that remained behind, tending to those who were unable to flee or who chose not to. Among them was a paramedic named Hussein Dakdouk. A few days before, he told me, in the aftermath of an airstrike, a man pulled up to the paramedics’ headquarters, his leg badly injured by the blast. Two paramedics rushed toward the man with their emergency gear, and Dakdouk ran to the ambulance to prepare it to transport the man to the hospital. As he turned the key in the ignition, he saw a rocket tear into his colleagues.
“I saw them being blown into pieces,” he said.
Two medics and a member of the administrative staff were killed in the strike, he said, three of more than 116 people killed by Israeli strikes on health-care facilities since March, according to the World Health Organization. Rescue workers and journalists across southern Lebanon have been killed in so-called “double tap” strikes, in which an Israeli rocket hits a target, and then another rocket is fired once people arrive to provide medical aid and document the scene. Such strikes were a hallmark of the Gaza war.
“Whenever separate previous incidents follow the same pattern, this makes us believe that this is not something random that is happening,” Dakdouk told me.
He sent the rest of his family north for safety, but felt compelled to remain to help those left behind. His house had been destroyed in the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2024, along with his small farm. But no amount of force could compel him to leave.
“This is our land,” he said. “We are not immigrants.”
About a week after my visit to Nabatieh, strikes on the area intensified as Israeli forces appeared to be encircling the city. Among the many buildings leveled was the headquarters of Dakdouk’s ambulance team.
In theory, the Lebanese Army should be in control of this terrain. But it is underfunded and underequipped. Partly this is a result of Lebanon’s own shambolic economic situation, but it is also a product of American policy that seeks to keep regional armies weaker than Israel’s. The notion that this feeble force could completely disarm Hezbollah — as Israel and America demand — strikes many Lebanese as laughable. If Israel’s high-tech army, backed by the United States, cannot defeat Hezbollah, how would the Lebanese Army be able to achieve it?
I asked a senior Lebanese Army official if the army could disarm Hezbollah. He waved his hand in dismissal, saying that would split the military, many of whose members are Shiite, and lead to a new civil war. “It is not a military question; it is a political one,” he said, requiring deep reform of the country’s sectarian political system and full implementation of the country’s constitution. “Arrangements dictated by the occupier will never work,” he declared, referring to Israel.
Back in Beirut, I met with a man named Nawaf Moussawi, a longtime Hezbollah politician who was a close ally of Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s charismatic leader, who was assassinated by Israel in 2024. Moussawi was once a central figure in the movement, serving as the head of its foreign relations department, but has an independent streak that has led to clashes with the current leadership.
Moussawi sat flanked by the Lebanese flag and Hezbollah’s yellow banner, festooned with a green fist holding an assault rifle, a symbol of the group’s militant bona fides and its claim to be the only reliable guarantor of Lebanese sovereignty. Despite the relentless Israeli assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon, he argued that the aftermath of the Iran war has left Israel weak and isolated, as well as revealing powerful truths about the limits of American military power.
“We see that the international developments and the regional developments are going to be in the interest of the Lebanese people and its national resistance,” he told me. “Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, they feel the danger of Netanyahu becoming victorious in this war.” He continued: “The world has to come to grips with the fact that the problem does not lie with the Lebanese or the Palestinians or the Syrians. It’s with this settler-colonial, aggressive, expansionist Israel.”
But at times in our conversation, he sounded almost conciliatory. At one point he interrupted his translator to correct her: Instead of the common Hezbollah formulation of “the Israeli enemy,” he had said “the Israeli occupier.” This might sound like a small distinction, but — as one Arabic speaker explained to me — the difference between these words in Arabic is stark. An enemy is categorical and eternal, something that must be defeated. “Occupier” is a more legalistic term, suggesting a state of affairs that can be remedied. Unlike Sheikh Naim Qassem, the current secretary general of Hezbollah, Moussawi did not predict the demise of the state of Israel.
“The bigger picture of finding a solution in the whole region is a one-state solution, one democratic pluralistic state, where all coexist,” he said.
This formulation, in the eyes of the Israeli government and its supporters in America, is hardly a concession. It would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and so, some might say, it is merely a more politely phrased version of the Iranian chant of “Death to Israel.” But Israel’s maximum-war doctrine in the aftermath of Oct. 7 has eroded its standing across the globe, making Moussawi’s position — that Israel should be a single pluralistic, democratic state with equal rights for Palestinians — something closer to an emerging global consensus.
To other powerful figures in Lebanon, the broader regional questions are none of their business. Late one afternoon toward the end of my visit, I met with Ghassan Hasbani, a leading member of the Lebanese Forces party, the political descendant of a Christian militia that demobilized at the end of the country’s brutal 15-year-long civil war, which ended in 1990. A guard ushered me through a locked gate and between the elegant stone columns of a hilltop mansion, into a wood-paneled office. Hasbani, a former telecom executive and an Orthodox Christian, laid the blame for Lebanon’s current troubles squarely on Iran.
“Things were quite good until Hezbollah, under the instruction of Iran, decided to enter the war in support of Hamas,” he told me. “This Iranian regime has been building its position to hijack the world for the last 40 years, and the world had left them unchecked for too long.”
I asked him if he worried about Israel becoming a hegemonic power in the Middle East or the plight of the Palestinian people, including Palestinian Christians. “It is not the job of Lebanon,” he replied.
“Lebanon,” he said, “has paid as much, if not more, than the Palestinians themselves in terms of price for this conflict.”
The spiraling crisis in the Middle East could produce many outcomes.
Iran’s stubborn endurance in the face of American and Israeli attacks could produce an even more dangerous and empowered Islamic republic; or Iran could yield to new agreements with its Gulf neighbors that require it to scale back its regional ambitions.
Israel’s inability to force regime change in Iran could lead it to lash out even more ferociously at its neighbors; or it could find itself exhausted and isolated, hemmed in by a loss of unstinting American support. Trump could fully return to his reckless war on Iran, abandoning faltering peace talks in search of an elusive military victory, whatever the cost; or he could face the reality that Americans have no wish to continue this tragic misadventure.
Whatever happens next, the Lebanese will be ready. Of everyone I spoke to, only Hasbani in his mansion seemed wedded to old hard-line positions. From Mitri, the deputy prime minister, and Jarade, the independent lawmaker, there was a recognition that Hezbollah — for all its problems — could not be excised from the body politic. For Kaakour, the professor, and Dakdouk, the paramedic, this recognition was paired with a commitment to a kind of national pluralism, rooted in care and conciliation. Even parts of Hezbollah seemed keen to find a route to a better political settlement forged on common ground.
Lebanon’s decades of war and strife have made it a reliable source of clichés: about ancient sectarian divides, rapacious elites bent on self-enrichment and a tragic fatalism etched in the country’s geography. But no other cliché is as persistent as the idea of Lebanon’s fabled “resilience” in the face of all these troubles. It is a word outsiders often use to describe Lebanon’s people, offered with seeming admiration.
But to my ear it is a backhanded compliment, carrying more than a whiff of condescension. By celebrating Lebanon’s ability to endure the unendurable, it both exonerates the external authors of this nation’s many troubles and strips its citizens of their agency to claim some mastery over their destiny. Despite the bloodletting and destruction, there are clear signs on the horizon that Lebanon could heal and remake itself on its own terms. It just needs to be given the chance.
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4) Israel Trades Strikes With Hezbollah After New Cease-Fire With Lebanon
Hezbollah’s leader said the Iran-backed group, which was not included in U.S.-brokered talks, had rejected the deal.
By Lara Jakes, Hwaida Saad and Dayana Iwaza, June 4, 2026
A pro-government demonstration in Tehran on Saturday. Despite a cease-fire announced between Iran and the United States in early April, both countries have continued to trade strikes. Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
Israel and Hezbollah fighters traded attacks on Thursday in southern Lebanon, hours after the Trump administration brokered a new cease-fire agreement between the two countries.
Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, said the Iranian-backed militant group rejected the new deal. That could further complicate negotiations to end the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, which has demanded that Lebanon be included in any broader peace agreement.
President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon told reporters that the agreement — announced by Israel, Lebanon and the United States in Washington on Wednesday — was the “final opportunity” to reach a comprehensive cease-fire and warned that “each party will bear responsibility” if it did not respond positively.
The deal would return to an April cease-fire agreement that has been largely ignored, with each side continuing to strike at the other. It demands a unilateral cessation of attacks by Hezbollah but does not explicitly require immediate concessions from Israel, such as a withdrawal of its forces from southern Lebanon. Israeli troops have occupied much of the region since invading during this latest conflict.
Hezbollah does not answer to the Lebanese government and was not a party to either set of negotiations, raising questions about whether the deal could be enforced.
Hezbollah officials said the group had fired two rocket salvos on Thursday at Israeli troops in southern Lebanon’s border region. The Israeli military issued a warning on social media to residents of southern Lebanon not to return to an area south of the Zahrani River, about 25 miles from the border with Israel.
Under the cease-fire that took effect in April, Israel said it retained its right to act in self-defense but would not carry out “offensive operations” against Lebanese targets by land, air or sea. Israeli forces have pushed deeper into Lebanon, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has ramped up his rhetoric against Hezbollah in recent weeks, even as truce talks have taken place.
On Thursday morning, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said the agreement also “includes an unequivocal statement” to disarm Hezbollah across Lebanon and a condemnation of Iranian involvement in the region.
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5) The U.S.-Qatar Domination of Gas Left the World Dangerously Exposed
Before the war, the global market for liquefied natural gas was increasingly commanded by just two countries, one of which has now been hobbled.
By River Akira Davis, June 4, 2026
River Akira Davis, the Japan business correspondent, reported from Doha, Qatar, and Tokyo.
The liquefied natural gas production facility in Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City before the war. Iranian attacks have crippled its production, and the damage will take years to repair. Picture Alliance, via Getty Images
Years before the war in the Persian Gulf, executives in boardrooms across Japan were discussing a development they feared posed a growing risk to Asia’s energy supplies.
The global trade in liquefied natural gas, the supercooled fuel that underpins power generation across Asia, was hardening into a duopoly. Just two nations — the United States and Qatar — were poised to account for the vast majority of supply growth by 2030.
Anxiety was high in Japan because it’s the largest L.N.G. importer behind China. The concern was that a market dominated by two powerful suppliers could disadvantage buyers and leave Japan vulnerable should either pillar falter. The United States was viewed as politically unpredictable, especially after the Biden administration paused permits for new export facilities in 2024.
And Qatar sat in one of the world’s most volatile regions.
In February, those fears were realized. That month, Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which Qatar ships virtually all of its L.N.G. to the rest of the world. Two weeks later, Iranian strikes hit Qatar’s Ras Laffan L.N.G. hub, inflicting damage that could take years to repair.
The disruption immediately knocked about a fifth of global L.N.G. supply off the market. In Asia, the destination for most of Qatar’s exports, gas prices skyrocketed. Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Singapore and Taiwan were among those in Asia getting anywhere from a third to nearly all of their L.N.G. from Qatar. The rug had been pulled out from under them.
It is easy, in hindsight, to say countries should have been better prepared, said Henning Gloystein, a managing director for energy at Eurasia Group, a political risk research firm. Yet significant energy supply disruptions occur virtually every decade, he said, and the industry’s growing reliance on just two suppliers had created a structural vulnerability.
“The industry was too concentrated,” he said. “Now, of the two big players, half are out of the market.”
Carved Out of the Desert
Qatar’s ascent to the top of the global L.N.G. industry began in 1992 when Chubu Electric, a Japanese utility, was scouring the globe for the four million metric tons of liquefied natural gas needed to fuel a new domestic power plant.
Finding traditional suppliers tapped out, Chubu turned to Qatar, then an oil-dependent nation mired in debt. Though sitting atop the world’s largest natural gas field, Qatar needed enormous investment to build the infrastructure required to liquefy gas for export.
For Qatar, the Japanese supply deal was transformative. The contract enabled the country to secure international bank loans needed to construct its first L.N.G. trains — the giant industrial processing units that liquefy gas.
From there, Qatar became a primary supplier in a rapidly expanding global market. Around the world, industrialized nations increasingly viewed natural gas as a critical bridge fuel, helping them move away from the more carbon-intensive coal while building toward a future powered by renewables. The worldwide demand for L.N.G. surged to more than 220 million metric tons by 2010, up from 55 million in 1990.
North of Doha, the Qatari capital, the authorities built Ras Laffan, an industrial city that today contains more than 100 square miles of gas-processing and liquefaction infrastructure. Visitors permitted inside the heavily guarded complex describe it as a dizzying labyrinth of steel rising from the desert.
The L.N.G. boom propelled Qatar’s annual economic growth above 10 percent for years. By 2006, Qatar had surpassed Indonesia to become the world’s largest L.N.G. exporter, a distinction it comfortably held for much of the past two decades.
Fracking Boom Takes America
In the United States, policymakers spent much of the early 2000s fearing the country was running out of domestic gas and building enormous import terminals. But starting around 2008, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling helped unlock immense resources previously trapped in shale.
The refinement of those technologies transformed the United States into a major exporter. Across the Permian Basin and the Marcellus Shale, new gas projects fed terminals in Texas and Louisiana that liquefied natural gas for shipment to Europe and Asia.
Throughout the 2010s, the U.S. fracking boom incited public backlash over issues like contaminated groundwater and gas leaks, but the L.N.G. surge carried forward as regulators refrained from halting permits for large and lucrative export projects. By 2023, the United States had overtaken Qatar as the world’s top exporter.
Around the same time, the duopoly was also being cemented as rivals receded. Russia’s plans to expand its gas sector were stalled by Western sanctions. Australia saw production plateau amid tightening environmental regulations and domestic supply mandates. Legacy Southeast Asian exporters such as Malaysia and Indonesia began consuming more of their own gas at home and exporting less.
That left two countries — Qatar and the United States — to divide an expanding global market. Both embarked on major production expansions. In 2019, Qatar announced plans for new wells and L.N.G. trains that would nearly double its export capacity by 2030.
Meanwhile, a new wave of projects sprang up along the American Gulf Coast that the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects will more than double American L.N.G. export capacity by 2029. By the end of the decade, Qatar and the United States are expected to control about half of the world’s total supply.
This dynamic has raised red flags in Japan for years. With the market increasingly concentrated in just two countries, importers faced the risk of sudden supply disruptions or the wielding of exports as geopolitical leverage. Japan has sought to diversify its liquefied natural gas portfolio, leaning heavily on Jera, a joint energy venture between two of the country’s biggest electric utilities, created in 2015 in part to achieve the scale needed to secure a broader array of supply lines.
Rise of a Near Monopoly
Now, one of the two global pillars of L.N.G. supply has been hobbled, with the Strait of Hormuz shut and Qatar unable to export. Even if the waterway reopens, production is likely to remain impaired for years because of structural damage at Ras Laffan. The expansion project, already behind schedule, is also likely to face further delays.
Countries heavily dependent on Qatar are struggling. Pakistan, which gets nearly all of its L.N.G. from Qatar, is enduring power blackouts. Vietnam and India are rationing gas and reverting to coal-fired generation. Even wealthier countries such as Singapore, which relies on Qatar for roughly a quarter of its L.N.G. imports, have issued sweeping energy-conservation guidelines.
American officials have sought to seize the moment. At an Asian energy forum in Tokyo in March, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum used the Middle East energy crunch to pitch U.S. suppliers. “We have energy to allow for prosperity at home, and the ability to sell energy to friends and allies across the Pacific,” Mr. Burgum said. Now, he told gathered business and government officials, “You don’t have an alternative.”
In reality, while American companies are racing to bring new export capacity online, those efforts will fall far short of offsetting the near-term loss of Qatari gas. Even after the strait reopens, supplies are likely to remain tight for years.
Parts of Asia are likely to continue rationing power. Eurasia Group’s Mr. Gloystein also expects a rush to diversify supply lines, with producers in countries like Australia, Norway and Canada scrambling to bring additional output online as quickly as possible.
Qatari production will eventually recover, but for the next few years, the industry is likely to shift from a duopoly-like structure toward one dominated by the United States, Mr. Gloystein said. “The U.S. will play a very, very dominant role.”
For gas importers already concerned that American energy exports could be used as leverage in trade disputes and diplomatic negotiations, the prospect is troubling. “That’s a very legitimate concern, which I think will reappear in the next two years,” Mr. Gloystein said.
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6) Governor Says Immigration Officials Won’t Let Her Visit Delaney Hall
Gov. Mikie Sherrill said the Department of Homeland Security’s actions at the New Jersey immigrant detention center raised “serious questions.”
By Tracey Tully, Published June 3, 2026, Updated June 4, 2026
Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Senator Andy Kim, right, have expressed concerns about conditions at the Delaney Hall immigration detention center. Credit...Dakota Santiago for The New York Times
Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey said Wednesday that federal immigration officials were continuing to bar her from entering a detention center in Newark, raising “serious questions about what is happening behind its walls.”
Ms. Sherrill noted that she had met Tuesday evening with relatives of migrants being held at the Delaney Hall detention center, which has become a focal point of protest against President Trump’s immigration crackdown. She said that the relatives had shared “heartbreaking reports of unsafe, inhumane and unconstitutional conditions” inside the 1,000-bed jail.
“Detainees have requested to meet with me,” Ms. Sherrill, a Democrat, wrote in a social media post, “and I want to meet with them.”
Ms. Sherrill first attempted to enter the facility on Memorial Day but was turned away. On Tuesday, the state’s attorney general, Jennifer Davenport, filed a lawsuit after state health officials were denied access to the medical unit and several other areas of the facility during an inspection.
Ms. Sherrill’s public rebuke on Wednesday reflected the growing tension between New Jersey’s elected leaders and federal immigration officials as demonstrations outside Delaney Hall have grown increasingly volatile in the last two weeks.
Groups of mainly peaceful protesters have gathered daily outside the detention center since it reopened last year. But the crowds began to grow after detainees initiated what they have described as a hunger and labor strike on May 22 to draw attention to the conditions inside the facility, which is operated by the GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison companies.
The situation escalated sharply over Memorial Day weekend.
The authorities deployed tear gas and wielded batons as protesters resisted calls to disperse. Ms. Sherrill made the decision to send in state troopers on horseback and on foot, a tactic that has been sharply criticized by immigrant rights leaders. And the city of Newark temporarily imposed a curfew on the streets nearest Delaney Hall.
On Wednesday evening, a contingent of demonstrators continued to keep vigil on a stretch of Doremus Avenue adjacent to one of the main gates at Delaney Hall. The crowd, numbering about 75, was peaceful, even festive. Some demonstrators bopped their heads to dance music, salsa, punk rock, rap and reggae.
But just before midnight, demonstrators and the police clashed anew, according to video footage shared on social media. It is a pattern that has played out nightly. The governor and the mayor of Newark, Ras J. Baraka, have blamed at least some of the hostility on protesters from outside of New Jersey.
Hours beforehand, a post on social media had urged demonstrators to return to the facility at 8 p.m.: “CURFEW IS OVER BACK TO DELANEY.”
By law, members of Congress are authorized to conduct oversight visits at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency facilities at will. And tours of Delaney Hall by members of Congress are common.
But other public officials, including governors, must request permission from the nearest ICE field office, according to a February 2025 ICE memo.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said she had no immediate comment on the governor’s statement.
Earlier on Wednesday, Representative Analilia Mejia, a Democrat who represents New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, confronted Markwayne Mullin, Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary, about conditions at Delaney during a committee hearing in Washington.
She said she had met with detainees during inspections who complained about “poor sanitation, spoiled food” and a “lack of medical care.”
“I met detainees who not only were given their medication sporadically, or had their dosages lowered without consultation of their doctors, but I met detainees who were not even made aware of what medication they were given, just handed a bunch of pills,” Ms. Mejia said.
Mr. Mullin defended the care provided at ICE facilities, which he said have more medical staff members than most state prisons. It was a point that Representative Jeff Van Drew, a Republican from New Jersey, also made last week after he toured Delaney Hall.
“I saw good conditions, clean facilities, basic care and a detention center where ICE and D.H.S. are doing a hard job that keeps our communities safe,” Mr. Van Drew said in a statement. “Quite frankly, the conditions I saw today are better than what you see in some nursing homes.”
Ms. Sherrill, a former congresswoman, made her opposition to Mr. Trump the centerpiece of her campaign for governor.
In March, New Jersey became one of the first states to pass a law that bars ICE agents from wearing masks while on duty. (The federal government filed a lawsuit the next month that seeks to block the law from being enforced.) Ms. Sherrill has also sued ICE over a planned detention center in a warehouse in Roxbury, N.J.
Mark Bonamo contributed reporting.
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7) An Uneasy Burial
By Arlette Bashizi, June 4, 2026
Funeral procession
More than 400 cases of Ebola have already been reported in Mongbwalu, a town in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where fear of the highly contagious disease runs the streets. But many of Sylvestre Atama’s parishioners refused to believe that it was Ebola that had claimed the life of their “bergère.” Their shepherd.
When patients at Mongbwalu General Hospital die of the disease, workers disinfect their remains, place them in body bags and then seal the bags in coffins provided by families. They return the coffins with strict instructions: Do not open.
Mr. Atama’s followers had other ideas.
They wanted a traditional burial ritual, which involves touching the body — and could easily have infected other people. When they were refused, they converged on the hospital, some armed, and tried to seize the preacher’s remains. A five-hour battle with security forces ensued.
The funeral procession shown above took place on a Monday morning after careful negotiations. Health workers carried the coffin, and soldiers and police officers kept the impassioned crowd at bay.
Many believed that Mr. Atama had died of malaria, not Ebola. With distrust deeply held by many Congolese toward the government and hospitals, they wanted to look inside the coffin themselves.
As the procession passed, the air filled with the sounds of grief and imprecation. Some prayed for the preacher’s soul. Others hurled accusations at the health workers who had tried to save him.
The soldiers were able to protect the health workers as they made their war to the cemetery about a mile distant, but then word came that a mob was awaiting them at the gravesite.
Changing course, when they got near the cemetery, they turned the coffin over to church leaders who, they said, had agreed to leave the remains untouched.
The church leaders finished up the procession. The health workers went back to tending to the living, and the dead.
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8) Ireland, Seen as a Weak Link in Europe’s Defense, Is Trying to Bulk Up
As concern rises in Europe over threats from an emboldened Russia, the Irish government says it’s working to plug gaps in its military, which reflect a tradition of neutrality.
By Megan Specia, Visuals by Paulo Nunes Dos Santos, June 4, 2026
Reporting from aboard the patrol vessel George Bernard Shaw in the Irish Sea, and from Dublin
Two sailors peered through binoculars from the bridge of the naval vessel as it patrolled the Irish Sea on a still morning in early May.
As they scanned the horizon, Lt. Cmdr. Maria O’Callaghan, the captain, pointed to a series of lines on a navigation display, indicating underwater power cables and gas pipelines that stretch between Ireland and Britain.
The crew of the Irish ship, the George Bernard Shaw, was looking for anything out of the ordinary while the captain used the screen to monitor a large vessel transporting liquefied natural gas. Although the ship was not on a sanctions list, the crew knew from tracking it in the past that it was heading north toward a Russian port, narrowly skirting Ireland’s territorial waters.
Their patrol was part of a stepped-up campaign by Ireland to apply greater scrutiny to the waters that surround it, as hybrid threats from an emboldened Moscow hang over Europe and ships seeking to circumvent Western sanctions sail in and out of Russia.
As America retreats from longstanding alliances in Europe, experts have warned that the small island nation, with permanent military forces of only 7,500, could be a weak link in European defense. That has resonated with the Irish government as it moves to modernize and bulk up its own defenses.
Lieutenant Commander O’Callaghan, 38, said her ship had begun hailing and questioning vessels over the radio at a level never seen in her 20 years of service. “It’s just about interrogating the information that is out there,” she said. “It’s mostly about looking at what’s around and being curious.”
Ireland has a long tradition of military neutrality, and successive Irish governments have used that posture to justify low defense spending. It is not a member of NATO, but Ireland carries outsize importance, security experts say, as a global data hub and as the European headquarters for many multinational technology giants, including Apple, Google and Meta.
Ireland’s foreign, trade and defense minister, Helen McEntee, said in an interview with The New York Times that her government was working swiftly to close a gap left by underinvestment.
“We need to be clear about what we as a country need to do, and that’s have stronger defense and security, that we need to invest in it more,” she said. “We are doing just that.”
The change is happening “as quickly as possible,” Ms. McEntee said, asserting that hybrid threats from Russia had made one thing clear: “Ireland is not immune to that.”
Ireland has raised its overall defense budget for the period from 2026 to 2030 to 1.7 billion euros, around $1.97 billion, a 55 percent increase. In February, it unveiled its first Maritime Security Strategy, setting out a five-year plan to protect its interests at sea and strengthen defense.
The maritime threats are growing, security experts agree. They cite the so-called shadow fleet, a group of aging tankers that covertly carry Russian fuel to avoid Western sanctions, but which are suspected of also sabotaging undersea cables elsewhere in Europe.
In 2024, the Yantar, which Western security services say was a Russian spy ship used to gather intelligence and map critical underwater infrastructure, was escorted by Ireland’s naval service out of Irish waters off the country’s west coast. It passed through the Irish Sea again in 2025. Other Russian vessels have been spotted lurking over data and energy cables in Irish waters.
A significant number of shadow fleet vessels ships have routed around Ireland’s west coast in recent weeks after Britain announced a new policy allowing the Royal Navy to board Russian ships under sanction transiting through its waters.
Because of legal and capacity limitations, there is little more the naval service can do than radio other ships and ask questions. Ireland lacks subsea sonar, anti-drone and air defense capabilities across its eight-vessel fleet. Crew shortages have also stymied patrols.
“Ireland certainly has a very steep hill to climb,” said Mark Mellett, a former chief of staff of the Irish Defense Forces, adding, “For Russia to get stronger, all that has to happen is for Europe to look weaker.”
The concerns feel more urgent this summer as Ireland prepares to host the rotating presidency of the European Union for the second half of this year. That will bring European leaders to the island for a series of meetings that pose potential security risks. In 2025, for example, Denmark reported drone incursions into its airspace while it held the position.
Ireland also wants to show a greater commitment to its European partners as it prepares. The government has accelerated some defense plans, including a military radar program. Some counter-drone technology will be introduced in the coming weeks. Officials also point to the budget increase over five years as a sign of greater commitment.
Others worry that the measures do not go far enough fast enough.
Barry Andrews, an Irish member of European Parliament, in a report earlier this year, found that Ireland’s security governance, infrastructure and military capabilities were not sufficient in the current security climate. While he acknowledged that some progress had been made, he said the upcoming presidency raised particular concerns.
“That puts a target on your back, and countries with far more sophisticated defense capabilities suffered major interruptions to their infrastructure during their presidency,” he said in an interview.
“I think the threat situation for Ireland has changed in the last few years because of major issues beyond our borders,” he said, citing America’s waning commitment to NATO under President Trump, as well as Russian aggression in Ukraine. “Also, Ireland had sort of a practice of strategic helplessness for a long time. And the U.S. and NATO and the U.K., they looked after the Irish defense and security, implicitly.”
Ireland’s military neutrality, a cornerstone of its foreign policy, has a long, complex history, rooted in hundreds of years of British occupation of the island, and the subsequent war of independence and civil war.
Since the state’s founding, it has maintained military neutrality, including during World War II.
The notion has stayed popular, and Ms. McEntee, the defense minister, dismissed the idea that the government was shedding that stance.
“Ireland’s position of military neutrality is not a position that’s in question,” Ms. McEntee said, but added that neutrality didn’t mean the country shouldn’t invest in defense.
The country also has longstanding involvement in peacekeeping missions, a point of national pride. Ireland sends its largest number of troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL.
Ireland has plans to increase its permanent defense personnel to 11,500 by 2028. And the naval service — long tasked with duties like policing fishing grounds, intercepting drug smugglers and search and rescue — will soon begin an upgrade that will modernize vessels and enhance recruitment.
The shifts in the security climate will be “taking us on a path where we have never been before,” said Aonghus Ó Neachtain, a naval service press officer, noting that Ireland had gone from monitoring around four shadow fleet vessels in its waters at any one time to something like three dozen in recent weeks. “We just didn’t foresee a lot of these things happening,” he added.
For Lieutenant Commander O’Callaghan, the captain of the George Bernard Shaw, the view from the bridge will look very different in the coming months and years, with sophisticated sonar equipment alerting the crew to underwater activity and surveillance radar allowing them to track aerial threats.
It’s part of a rapidly changing awareness of the significance of the marine domain, she said, as the Bernard Shaw glided across a remarkably still stretch of the Irish Sea northeast of Dublin.
“You will hear it referred to as ‘sea-blindness’ — as a nation, we just didn’t understand, we were very much inward-looking,” she said. “But there has definitely been a shift in that.”
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