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Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a mem-ber of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Et Tu, Brute? What Elon Musk’s Clash With Sam Altman Is Really About.
Mr. Musk’s lawsuit against Mr. Altman and OpenAI makes the case that all-encompassing greed is Silicon Valley’s defining feature.
By David Streitfeld, Reporting from San Francisco, April 28, 2026
Illustration by Ben Denzer; Photographs by Eric Lee/The New York Times, Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
One of the most controversial and overexposed men in the world is suing another man, who is equally unsympathetic and equally inescapable. Both are insanely rich.
It is so tempting to look away.
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman involves onetime colleagues and buddies who became peevish enemies. Now they would like to take each other down. Happens all the time. These guys just have more lawyers.
Ignoring this conflict would be a mistake, however. The rancorous dispute between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman, which went to trial this week with opening statements in an Oakland, Calif., federal courtroom on Tuesday, goes to the heart of Silicon Valley, a place that has always cloaked itself in virtue.
Mr. Altman and Mr. Musk started working on what was supposed to be a different sort of tech lab in 2015. OpenAI was a Manhattan Project for artificial intelligence, a nonprofit venture that would act as a shield against rapacious behavior by less benevolent outfits. The goal was to “shift the dialog toward being about humanity winning rather than any particular group or company,” according to a document in the case.
Mr. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, provided the initial funding. Mr. Altman was OpenAI’s leader and spokesman. But Mr. Musk says their interests quickly diverged when it became clear just how much money was up for grabs. OpenAI converted to a for-profit company last year. “A textbook tale of altruism versus greed,” Mr. Musk asserted in his suit’s opening salvo.
The fact that the person calling himself an altruist here is likely to become the world’s first trillionaire doesn’t necessarily make it untrue. In his lawsuit, filed in 2024, Mr. Musk said Mr. Altman, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and others “unjustly enriched” themselves in the development of OpenAI “to the tune of billions of dollars.”
OpenAI, whose value is approaching $1 trillion, had the inevitable response: No, you’re the one who is greedy. The company argued that Mr. Musk walked away when he could not take over the entire enterprise.
“This case has always been about Elon generating more power and more money for what he wants,” OpenAI said in a statement.
One of the few things the moguls agree on is that their feud evokes the works of a certain Elizabethan playwright. Mr. Musk, 54, said in his suit that Mr. Altman’s “perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions.” Mr. Altman, 41, mused in a blog post this month that “there has been so much Shakespearean drama between the companies in our field.”
If there is a Shakespeare play that could sum up this soured friendship, it’s “Julius Caesar.” Brutus wants to stop Caesar from gaining too much power, or so he says. Caesar is quite surprised that he’s being assassinated by a supposed friend. “Et tu, Brute?” he cries. Brutus ends the play as dead as Caesar but is mourned as “the noblest Roman of them all.”
Mr. Musk should be so lucky to draw such praise.
‘For the Good of the World’
In the middle of the last decade, Mr. Altman was a Silicon Valley insider running the top start-up incubator, Y Combinator. Ambitious and persuasive, he didn’t want just to fund companies. He was on a mission to save humanity, which — unknown to the masses — was at great risk.
“I think A.I. will probably, most likely, lead to the end of the world,” Mr. Altman said in 2015. It was a fear he would often express. Why not, he asked, create a bulwark against the other A.I. companies “for the good of the world”?
Mr. Altman drew in Mr. Musk, who was even more worried about where A.I. was heading. “We are summoning the demon,” Mr. Musk once said.
Immediately, there was a problem. People everywhere work on nonprofit ventures for modest salaries. They sacrifice for their ideals. Mr. Altman knew that would not fly in Silicon Valley. The engineers and scientists would “get start-up-like compensation if it works,” he promised.
The nonprofit was dead almost before it began. OpenAI is owned by its employees and investors, including Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, as well as the OpenAI Foundation. (Mr. Altman has no direct equity in OpenAI but has other investments that make him comfortably a billionaire.) OpenAI is planning to sell shares to the public in one of the richest stock offerings in history.
Silicon Valley is the great wellspring of wealth in modern America. Nine of the 10 richest Americans are tech entrepreneurs, with Warren Buffett the only exception. People might be offended by OpenAI’s turnabout, but few could say they were shocked.
Except the richest man in the world, whose own A.I. venture, xAI, is now part of one of his other companies, SpaceX. SpaceX will soon sell shares to the public as a decidedly for-profit operation.
No Happy Ending
Tech companies are subject to relatively few constraints these days. Congress is generally passive. Federal regulators have been hobbled. The Trump administration is stocked with venture capitalists and others receptive to tech and its money, as is President Trump.
What’s left for tech opponents are civil suits. Social media companies face an onslaught of cases. One of the first, in Los Angeles last month, found that Meta and YouTube were to blame for anxiety and depression in a young woman who was a heavy user.
“Trials are all we have right now, and things are better because of them,” said Max Tegmark, a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit trying to reduce catastrophic technology risks. “Trials provide information that is not otherwise accessible.”
The exhibits in the Musk/Altman trial are an example of material that presumably would never have seen the light otherwise. That includes emails between the two leaders as they tried getting OpenAI off the ground.
“Do you have any objection to me proactively increasing everyone’s comp by 100-200k per year?" Mr. Altman wrote to Mr. Musk in 2015. “I think they’re all motivated by the mission here but it would be a good signal to everyone we are going to take care of them over time.”
The Future of Life Institute gives OpenAI an overall grade of C plus for safety while xAI got a D. “A.I. is less regulated in America than sandwiches,” said Mr. Tegmark, who is also a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You can’t open a sandwich shop without having your kitchen inspected. But you can release an A.I. girlfriend for 11-year-olds and that’s fine.” A defeat for OpenAI might begin to change that, he said.
Some A.I. watchdogs said they would like to see OpenAI brought to justice the way Meta and YouTube were. But they would prefer almost any plaintiff to Mr. Musk.
“I don’t have long-term faith in a system where we’re legislating through private litigation,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a Washington-based advocacy group. “I don’t want to rely on a billionaire with a grievance.”
If Mr. Musk wins, she pointed out, it would weaken or even destroy OpenAI, “opening up a large share of the market that an Elon Musk company can then gobble up.”
And if OpenAI gets the suit dismissed? “It would send a signal that it’s OK to launch as a nonthreatening nonprofit working for the public’s benefit and then cynically change to a for-profit without any accountability,” she said.
Ms. Haworth’s conclusion: “There’s no happy ending here.”
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Some critics are worried that, in the worst scenario for OpenAI, its charitable arm would shutter. That, they said, would wipe out a very large foundation that could have helped people. Mr. Musk says he will give any damages he receives to the foundation.
Others take a more benign view.
“The law doesn’t rely on you being a good person to act in the public interest,” said Shaoul Sussman, a former official with the Federal Trade Commission. “A lot of the dirty laundry of OpenAI is going to come out.”
In a different environment, Mr. Musk’s pursuit of OpenAI might have been brief, ending with a tip to regulators. But he is not keen on government oversight, which during the Biden administration produced investigations and enforcement actions into his companies.
Instead, Mr. Musk’s case against OpenAI uses a legal doctrine called ultra vires, which means “beyond the powers.” It holds that a corporation is restricted to activities defined in its charter. This approach was widely used in the early 19th century when the federal government was small and weak and only a competitor could rein in your company.
Most corporations now have wide-ranging charters that allow them to pursue multiple goals. But there is one exception: nonprofits.
“This is the first high-profile case that I know of being pursued under these statutes for 100 years,” Mr. Sussman said.
In a trial expected to last several weeks, the very old laws will meet the very new technology. As Shakespeare said, what’s past is prologue.
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2) Graduates Reset Ambitions in Pursuit of First Jobs
Young people aiming to build careers are entering fields they had not considered to find their footing.
By Sydney Ember, April 28, 2026
A dismal job market has turned the spring commencement season into a bruising ordeal for many, including Sadie Parker, who will graduate in June from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Credit...Adam Amengual for The New York Times
Sadie Parker was fretting about finding a job.
Many people she knew were having trouble landing work. She had wanted to join the Foreign Service, but she was worried that federal spending cuts could limit her options. She was petrified that artificial intelligence would wipe out other entry-level jobs.
“I was extremely anxious,” said Ms. Parker, 22, who will graduate in June from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a double major in political science and economics.
To improve her chances, she broadened her search, applying for positions in consulting and other fields. She spent hours on a cover letter for a job at KPMG, the accounting firm, advising the California state government.
“I was like, wow, this looks so interesting,” she said. “The next day, I got a rejection.”
Recent college graduates are facing the most dismal and unpredictable job market in years. Employers overall are hiring fewer workers, dimming the prospects in particular for first-time entrants to the labor market. The rise of A.I. and its abilities are intensifying fears that entry-level jobs will disappear forever.
Junior-level postings on the job site Indeed fell 7 percent in 2025 from the previous year, according to a report the company released last week.
“As a job seeker, you’re having to work a lot harder to land that same job now because the competition has just really stiffened in the last couple years,” said Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed.
Those forces have transformed the spring graduation season into a bruising ordeal for many of America’s youngest degree holders.
In interviews and in responses to a New York Times survey, some college seniors and recent graduates said they had applied to more than 100 jobs without securing so much as a first-round interview. A number have resorted to tracking their applications using detailed Excel spreadsheets.
There is a swelling collective suspicion that A.I. is rejecting applications before human recruiters ever lay eyes on them.
The hunt has frustrated nascent career dreams and forced many job seekers to recalibrate their postgraduation plans. Some are working as servers at pizza joints, as baristas at coffee shops and in other jobs that do not require college degrees. Others have plans to attend graduate school to avoid the labor market altogether. Whereas embarking on a career used to be a goal after college, increasingly it is having any job at all.
“I’m, like, is it me or is it really, like, the market right now?” said Natalia Martinez, 24, a senior at the University of Central Florida. “I just feel like it’s so hard for somebody to take a chance on a college graduate.”
Ms. Martinez said she had applied to 150 jobs since February — “really anything that comes up in my area,” she said, including for positions as a receptionist or medical assistant — but she has not been successful. She spends sleepless nights doom-scrolling for jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed and is preparing for the possibility that she may have to move back in with her parents after graduation.
“I feel like I’m doing everything that I possibly can,” she said. “I just want some kind of path.”
Angst on college campuses about future employment is perennial and escalates during hiring slowdowns, when companies are more reluctant to bring on inexperienced workers. A front-page article in The Times in April 1991, for instance, took note of “traumatized seniors” whose job searches had “become a disheartening struggle of résumés, rejection and uncertainty.”
But fueled by the frenzy around A.I. and public prognostications of job market ruin, the typical jitters have hardened into dread.
“Students are definitely nervous,” said Sean McGowan, the director of employer relations at Carnegie Mellon University.
College graduates typically do better during economic downturns than workers without degrees. And while there have been dire predictions about A.I.’s effect on employment, the technology so far has not led to widespread job losses.
Still, the challenging job market has revived age-old questions among college students and recent graduates about whether going to college is worth it.
“I thought getting a college degree was the answer to everything,” said Lucy Kinyanjui, 22, a senior at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. “I feel like we just have to wait it out. I feel like getting my degree now is kind of useless.”
Ms. Kinyanjui, who juggles classes with work as a server at Topgolf, said she was constantly thinking about applying for more lucrative jobs that aligned with a career in health care. But she is concerned that her degree, in liberal studies, will not appeal to potential employers, especially in such a tough job market. She is thinking about getting a master’s degree eventually in the hope that it will make her more employable.
“I’m afraid of the rejection that I’m going to face,” she said.
Johnathon McCartney, 23, has felt similarly discouraged. A senior at the University of Florida who transferred from Colby College in Maine after his freshman year, Mr. McCartney studied public relations and wanted to get a job in communications. He focused his search on the Louisville, Ky., area so he could live near his girlfriend, but snubs piled up, including from a local P.R. firm.
“I applied for an internship with them and I interviewed, and I didn’t even get that,” he said. “Who is this state-level firm taking for a P.R. internship if not me?”
Mr. McCartney recently accepted a remote job as an immigration services officer with the federal government.
“I just feel fortunate or grateful that this is an opportunity that ended up working out for me,” he said.
For Ms. Parker, the senior at U.C. Santa Barbara, the sense of urgency was growing. None of her applications seemed to be gaining traction with employers. As A.I.’s technology improved, she wondered if she was running out of time to find an entry-level job.
“I was very much like, OK, I got to make sure I do this now,” she said.
When one of her friends suggested that she apply for a job as a finance associate at a large health technology company, she jumped at the chance even though she did not have experience in finance. She reached out to the company’s recruiters on LinkedIn and set up an informational chat.
Over the course of three months, Ms. Parker had one interview with the company, then another, and another.
“It was kind of a stressful process,” she said.
Three weeks after her third interview, in mid-December, she heard back for the last time.
She had gotten the job.
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3) Trump’s Top Child Care Official Wants a ‘Bonfire of Regulations’
As Americans face soaring child care costs, Alex Adams wants to loosen rules and tighten spending. Critics say that will harm children and shutter day cares.
By Coral Davenport, Reporting from Washington, April 28, 2026
Students at a Head Start program in Miami last year. The program provides child care and preschool to hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poorest children. Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press
When Alex Adams arrived in Washington late last year as the Trump administration’s point man on child care, he was little known outside his home state of Idaho, where he had helped engineer a massive deregulation effort that became the envy of many conservative activists.
He made his intentions clear right away.
Federal child care regulations, he told his new staff, should “fit on an index card in my back pocket,” according to two people who heard him make the remark.
Now, five months into his job as head of the Administration for Children and Families, which controls about $25 billion in child care and preschool funding for some 2.3 million poor children, Mr. Adams is preparing what he has said will be a “bonfire” of regulations.
Among his top targets: the most sweeping overhaul in a generation for Head Start, which provides child care and preschool to hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poorest children. Mr. Adams intends to loosen or eliminate the rules that limit how many children can be supervised by each teacher, according to three people familiar with the plans. Conservatives say the changes could give more poor children access to the service, yet many child care experts say they could jeopardize quality and safety. The alterations are expected to affect almost every other aspect of Head Start as well, such as nutrition standards for meals and health standards that require staff to ensure that children get access to medical care.
“We’re going to barbecue a lot of sacred cows,” Mr. Adams, who declined through a spokesman to be interviewed for this article, recently told the Imprint, a podcast about family policy. His office is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
As the Trump administration continues a quest led by its budget director, Russell T. Vought, to erase regulations and shrink bureaucracy in ways often unseen beyond industries and others who interact directly with the government, Mr. Adams is applying those conservative ideals in an area that will directly touch millions of Americans — particularly poor families who rely on federal subsidies for day care and other needs.
He appears to be relishing the role. In February, his office posted a cartoon on LinkedIn of Mr. Adams burning a hole through a stack of regulatory documents, sporting retro black-framed glasses, a Trump-esque extra-long red tie, and wielding a flaming match.
Mr. Adams has demonstrated an ability to tap hot-button issues important to the Trump administration. When Vice President JD Vance and other administration officials began highlighting rampant fraud involving day care centers in Minneapolis’s Somali migrant community, Mr. Adams attempted to cut off child care subsidies to Minnesota and four other Democratic-run states — a move that was blocked by the courts.
He is planning regulatory changes that would disqualify American children from receiving child care subsidies if one or more of their parents are not U.S. citizens, according to two people with knowledge of the effort who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not final.
President Trump last year tried but failed to freeze funding for Head Start, and considered proposing its full elimination, calling its curriculum “radical.” But Mr. Adams’s effort to transform the program by undoing regulations could have implications for many more young children than just those enrolled in Head Start. That is in part because preschools that enroll a mix of Head Start recipients and other children are generally required to follow the program’s rules and ratios for all students.
Mr. Trump has indicated in recent weeks that he would like to curtail federal spending on child care.
“We’re a big country, we have 50 states, we have all these other people, we’re fighting wars,” Mr. Trump said this month. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care.”
Mr. Adams’s efforts have drawn fire from critics who warn that deregulatory changes such as putting teachers and day care workers in charge of larger classes could endanger the children.
“There’s a difference between common-sense streamlining of regulations and throwing the rules that keep children safe into a bonfire,” said Elliot Haspel, an early-childhood education expert at Capita, a family policy research organization.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, said that Mr. Adams “has demonstrated what effective leadership looks like by cutting unnecessary red tape while maintaining appropriate health and safety standards in programs.”
Mr. Nixon said that The Times’s description of Mr. Adams’s plans to deregulate Head Start by lifting federal child-to-staff ratios and other rules was “an inaccurate characterization.” But he also pointed to the health department’s proposed 2027 fiscal year budget for the program, which describes an approach that would “streamline” federal standards on “health and safety requirements, child-to-staff ratios, and definitions of quality.”
Before joining the administration, Mr. Adams was a minor celebrity in conservative circles for his work in Idaho.
As budget director for five years under Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, Mr. Adams pushed policies that helped make Idaho the most deregulated state, according to George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, which tracks state regulations.
Elon Musk, who stormed into Washington after Mr. Trump’s 2024 election win to oversee his austerity program, the Department of Government Efficiency, posted a chart then showing Idaho’s plunge in regulations, writing, “Wow,” and adding a heart-eyes emoji.
When Mr. Adams took the helm of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare in June 2024, he moved fast to cut what he called “rocks-in-shoes” regulations. He erased a rule requiring foster parents to receive training and limited child care subsidies to only families who are very poor.
He worked with Idaho lawmakers to craft a law loosening teacher-child ratios. Federal recommendations currently say that a single caregiver should supervise no more than four infants, six 2-year-olds, nine 3-year-olds, or ten 4- to 8-year-olds. Under the new Idaho law, one person can care for up to six infants, nine 2- to 3-year-olds, thirteen 3- to 5-year-olds or twenty-five 5-to-13-year-olds.
The goal, said state Representative Barbara Ehardt, a Republican who worked with Mr. Adams on the measure, was to make it easier for parents to operate small day care centers out of their homes.
“One more child can make or break the business,” Ms. Ehardt said.
After his confirmation by the Senate and his November swearing-in, Mr. Adams devoted his first days in Washington to foster care.
He sent letters to at least 10 states directing them to roll back rules that require foster and adoptive parents to affirm the preferred gender or sexual orientation of gay, bisexual or transgender children in their care. Those rules, he wrote violate the First Amendment and “exclude loving families from adoption based on ideological, religious litmus tests.”
Some of the letters included an implicit threat to cut off funds if the states did not comply. “As you know,” Mr. Adams wrote, “my responsibilities include monitoring the use of relevant federal funds and ensuring compliance with federal law.”
Massachusetts and Vermont soon reversed their policies.
In a step that won bipartisan accolades, he directed 39 states to end their so-called orphan tax, which diverts survivors’ benefits for foster children whose biological parents have died to welfare agencies. Idaho and 10 other states have already ended the practice. Since his letters, the governors or legislatures of at least eight states have moved to make the changes.
When attention turned in December to the day care fraud scandal in Minnesota, Mr. Adams sent letters to state officials there demanding the “complete universe” of personal data on families receiving subsidies, including Social Security numbers and alien registration numbers, which can be used by the Department of Homeland Security to track applicants for asylum.
Mr. Adams said the demand for data was intended to “give confidence to the American taxpayer” that the money was not being improperly spent. It is illegal to use federal subsidies to pay for child care for undocumented children.
After Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk shared a video by a right-wing influencer purporting to show more fraud at day care centers in the Somali community, Mr. Adams followed up with similar demands for data about child care subsidy recipients in New York, California, Illinois and Colorado. He threatened to cut off $10 billion in funding if the states did not comply.
The states sued, saying the administration had no justification for the action beyond a “desire to punish” them for their political leadership, and courts have halted the freeze in funds.
Mr. Adams also ramped up verification requirements for all states receiving child care subsidies, saying his agency would send payments only after receiving photo evidence or receipts detailing how the money was spent.
That process halted payments to hundreds of day cares in states that struggled to adapt.
In Missouri, for instance, state officials found that their access to a state account that distributes federal child care subsidies was suspended with no notice. Days passed before Mr. Adams’s agency informed them about the new requirements, and the funds remained blocked for almost two weeks.
The freeze temporarily halted subsidy payments to 1,743 Missouri child care providers, or roughly 53 percent of day care providers in the state, according to the Missouri Department of Education.
Jamaica Showers, who runs a day care in St. Louis serving 27 children, 23 of whom receive federally subsidized tuition, said that just six children attended during the period that funds were halted.
Ms. Showers said the episode has her questioning whether she should accept children who rely on subsidized tuition. “It feels very scary now,” she said.
On Jan. 6, the same date that his agency sent the letters to the four states, Mr. Adams agency also proposed repealing four regulations that had been designed to make it easier for child care providers to receive the subsidized tuitions for low-income children. The changes are designed to save taxpayer money on child care — but small day care owners say they would reimpose burdens on them.
The current rules require states to send child care subsidies to providers at the beginning of pay periods, based on enrollment numbers — the same method used to fund public schools. Without the rules, providers would be reimbursed afterward, based on documented attendance — and would not be paid for days that children don’t attend.
The proposed changes would also make poor families pay more out of pocket, by deleting a requirement that their co-payment make up no more than 7 percent of household income. And they eliminate a requirement that states reserve child care slots for children with disabilities.
The proposed rollbacks, which are expected to be made final in the coming months, have received more than 12,000 public comments.
Among the many commenters opposing the rollbacks was Crystal Rogers, who runs Cozy Couch day care in Martinsburg, W.Va. She said the changes would hurt her small business, along with other mom-and-pop operations — the very businesses Mr. Adams has said he wants to encourage.
“If they take away enrollment-based pay, I will have to close. And I know a lot of other providers will as well,” she said. “My mortgage, utilities and insurance, my food bills — they don’t stop when a child is sick. Tying payment to attendance means that if a child is sick for a week, I lose a week of pay.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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4) Trump Push to End Key Humanitarian Protection Reaches Supreme Court
The effort to dismantle Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., is part of a shift away from providing humanitarian assistance to people from troubled countries.
By Jazmine Ulloa and Miriam Jordan, April 28, 2026
Jazmine Ulloa, who reported from Newark, N.J., and Miriam Jordan, who reported from Los Angeles, cover immigration.
An aircraft technician and Venezuelan whose Temporary Protected Status has expired has gone from earning $1,500 a week in a job with health insurance and a retirement plan to making $600 a week. Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
For decades, the United States has had a way to swiftly provide temporary legal status to people whose home countries are convulsed by famine, war or other acute humanitarian crises.
Created by Congress in 1990, Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., was a signal to a volatile world that the United States was committed to helping people who couldn’t safely return to their countries, and were unlikely to qualify for permanent residency under longstanding international refugee or asylum protections.
But President Trump has been pushing to end T.P.S. for hundreds of thousands of people, and on Wednesday, his administration will ask the Supreme Court to bless that effort, which has faced a succession of legal challenges.
While the termination of T.P.S. for Haiti and Syria will be the question before the justices when they take the bench on Wednesday morning, the stakes are far greater. Already, the president has all but ended the resettlement of refugees, who for decades were admitted by the tens of thousands. The system for weighing asylum claims, long overwhelmed by the number of claims and the lack of resources, has been brought to a near standstill by the administration.
Now, if allowed to effectively end T.P.S., the administration would be taking another step in remaking the role of the United States in the global order, furthering a shift away from programs and ideals that leaders in both parties championed for more than half a century.
Mr. Trump and his allies have argued that humanitarian programs have become dominant pathways for many migrants to enter the country, even though the programs were intended to serve relatively few people. “If you have hundreds of thousands of fake asylum seekers, what happens to the real asylum seekers?” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau told the U.N. General Assembly in September.
Lawyers challenging the administration in court argue the effort to strip away protections for immigrants is fueled by prejudice and politics and is about expanding the pool of people who can be expelled as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign.
“What we’re witnessing right now is the dismantling of humanitarian pathways coupled with the largest de-documentation campaign in modern American history,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and chief executive of Global Refuge, a nonprofit serving migrants and refugees.
Mr. Trump has slashed refugee admissions to a record-low cap of 7,500 people for the fiscal year that started in October. He has rolled back other humanitarian programs that were created or expanded under his predecessor, and his administration has intensified its efforts to deport asylum seekers to countries where they have no connections. A New York Times investigation has found asylum grant rates have plummeted as the administration has systematically pressured the nation’s immigration judges to support the president’s aggressive enforcement agenda.
The actions, taken together, represent a striking shift away from international commitments that the United States took on in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II, and that it incorporated into law in later decades.
But those humanitarian efforts would come to be seen as unfairly favoring certain countries and ethnicities. The criticism came to a head in the 1980s as the United States backed right-wing governments in El Salvador and the country descended into civil war.
At the time, Jim McGovern was a congressional staffer fielding complaints from Salvadoran constituents visiting the office of his boss, Representative Joe Moakley. Many Salvadorans were seeking asylum, but the Reagan and Bush administrations “didn’t want to admit El Salvador was an unsafe place to be,” said Mr. McGovern, now a House Democrat from Massachusetts himself.
Under mounting pressure from Mr. Moakley and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, Congress created the T.P.S. program, part of a package of immigration legislation signed into law in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, a Republican.
Unlike asylum and refugee statuses, which are evaluated on a case-by-case basis and can take years to obtain, T.P.S. can be activated quickly and cover many people at once, whether recipients entered the United States legally or not. The homeland security secretary determines when a country should receive the designation, which can last from six to 18 months, and there is no limit on how many times a designation can be extended.
Until recently, that flexibility made it a vital tool regardless of which political party held power in Washington, said Cecilia Menjívar, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Now, “it has become so politicized,” she added.
T.P.S. designations have been relatively short-lived for some countries, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina after its 1990s civil war, as well as Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia during the Ebola crisis that swept West Africa. But the program has become all but permanent for recipients from Haiti, Syria and several other nations where crises have spanned many years.
Blanca Molina, 65, who fled El Salvador’s civil war and arrived in New Jersey in the 1980s, keeps photos of herself with the many political leaders she lobbied to make the temporary protections possible. Roughly 170,100 Salvadorans are now covered under the program. Some have held the status for more than two decades.
The T.P.S. initiative offers no pathway to permanent residency or citizenship, but it has provided some peace of mind, Ms. Molina said. “People have been able to put down roots, buy homes, start businesses, have full lives,” she said.
But that longevity has long drawn skepticism from Mr. Trump and Republicans, particularly as President Joseph R. Biden Jr. extended T.P.S. to some of the migrants arriving in record numbers at the nation’s southern border.
“T.P.S. was intended to protect immigrants who were in the U.S. when a disaster befell their own, not to encourage people fleeing those conditions,” said Representative Tom McClintock, Republican of California, at a House subcommittee meeting in December on the program’s impact.
The Supreme Court case could now test the fate of the program and shape how future administrations use it.
Lawyers representing T.P.S. holders argue that Homeland Security Department officials violated administrative procedures, failed to properly assess country conditions and, in the case of Haitians, acted with racial bias when the agency moved to revoke the temporary protections. But lawyers for the federal government have countered that U.S. law does not allow courts to review D.H.S.’s termination decision and that the protections are “contrary to the national interest.”
Since Mr. Trump took office last year, his administration has ended T.P.S. designations for 13 out of 17 countries that had them when Mr. Biden left office. Venezuelans made up the largest group of recipients, roughly 600,000 people.
The Supreme Court’s decision will apply to protections for 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians, but it is likely to have implications for all T.P.S. holders, an estimated 1.3 million people.
In the Miami area, Marcos, 27, an aircraft technician and Venezuelan whose status under the program has expired, used to earn $1,500 a week in a job with health insurance, dental care and a retirement plan. Now, Marcos, who spoke on the condition that his last name be withheld because of his immigration situation, makes $600 a week off the books as a freelancer repairing aircraft parts.
He specializes in air conditioning systems and in the components that start plane engines and control cabin pressure. He said he reads 300- to 400-page manuals to do the work, and that his skills continue to be in demand because of a shortage of trained technicians like him.
“It was the worst news of my life,” he said of learning he would lose his protected status.
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5) Civil Rights Cases Slow at Education Dept. Amid Trump’s Overhaul
Data obtained by The New York Times shows that the Education Department resolved 30 percent fewer discrimination complaints in 2025 compared with the previous year.
By Michael C. Bender, April 28, 2026
Michael C. Bender has been covering the Trump administration’s efforts to bring cultural changes to the American education system. He reported from Washington.
Linda McMahon, the education secretary, is scheduled to testify on Tuesday to a Senate appropriations subcommittee that controls her department’s budget. Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The Education Department resolved roughly 30 percent fewer complaints of discrimination in American schools last year than in 2024 amid a Trump administration overhaul of civil rights enforcement, the sharpest year-to-year decline in more than three decades, according to government data obtained by The New York Times.
The drop came despite a record number of students seeking help from Washington to confront claims of prejudice, bias and bigotry in schools, according to the 2025 budget request from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
The slowdown has left about 20,000 students awaiting word from the government about the status of their claims, according to the data, which is maintained by the Education Department. The slower pace raises questions about whether the Trump administration’s pursuit of severe cuts to the department’s civil rights staff has hampered its ability to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
Education Department officials blamed the slowdown, in part, on what they described as a significant backlog of unresolved cases left by the Biden administration. Attempts to clear those cases last year were also partially slowed by a 43-day government shutdown, administration officials said.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon may provide more insight on Tuesday, when she is scheduled to testify to a Senate appropriations subcommittee that controls her department’s budget. The White House has proposed a 35 percent cut for the Education Department’s civil rights office next year, including a 49 percent reduction in staff, from 530 workers to 271. Ms. McMahon has said a more efficient staff could meet the department’s statutory duties.
Some of Ms. McMahon’s testimony on Tuesday may detail a recent restructuring of the civil rights office. The changes, overseen by Kimberly M. Richey, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, were meant to increase efficiency by creating investigative teams dedicated solely to disability- and race-based complaints, instead of relying solely on a regional approach, a senior official at the Education Department said.
Senate Democrats were briefed last week on the findings of a report from the office of Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, who examined the sharp decline in resolved complaints.
The report, published on Tuesday, found that in 2025, the civil rights office negotiated the fewest anti-discrimination settlements with schools since the Education Department began posting the deals online in 2014.
These legally binding deals, known as resolution agreements, are typically the final product of extensive investigations, outlining clear steps for schools to remedy civil rights violations and avoid potential cuts to federal funding.
President Trump’s administration secured 112 of these agreements in 2025, compared with an average of 818 per year during his first term, according to the report.
At the start of 2025, 12,000 cases were pending in the civil rights office, meaning the administration’s 112 resolution agreements last year provided enforceable relief to students in less than 1 percent of investigations, the report found. In 15 states, no resolution agreements were reached last year.
Earlier this month the Education Department’s civil rights office canceled six resolution agreements negotiated by previous administrations, a move that Democratic and Republican lawyers said was without precedent.
Mr. Sanders said the report showed the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department, which he described as illegal, “have been a disaster for students and families.”
“When a child with a disability is denied the education they are entitled to, when a student faces racial or sexual harassment — they turn to the Office for Civil Rights for help,” Mr. Sanders said. “Yet the Trump administration has decimated this office. As a result, tens of thousands of students facing discrimination have been left with no recourse. That is beyond unacceptable.”
Amelia Joy, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said the civil rights office was no longer focused on “pandering to an extreme ideology.” (President Joseph R. Biden Jr. attempted to expand protections for transgender students while in office, but those efforts were struck down by a federal judge in Kentucky days before Mr. Trump took office.)
“The prior administration failed our students, but we are utilizing every tool at our disposal to resolve the backlog and return common sense to our schools,” Ms. Joy said.
A senior official in the Education Department said the Biden administration left a backlog of nearly 20,000 civil rights complaints, compared with 4,200 cases left by the first Trump administration, according to the civil rights office’s 2020 annual report.
The official said it was unfair to compare the number of resolved cases in the first year of one administration to the last year of another, saying priorities typically change along with leadership.
But the first year of other administrations have not produced similarly drastic declines. The civil rights office in the first years of the administrations of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton all resolved roughly the same number of complaints as the last years of their predecessors. During the first year of Mr. Trump’s first administration, for example, department officials said they resolved about 85 percent more complaints than the final year of the Obama administration, according to annual reports.
Democrats have said that the department’s attempt to fire half of its Office for Civil Rights staff appeared to be a significant reason behind the drop in production.
From March to December last year, about a quarter of the $140 million budget for the civil rights office was paid to investigators while they were barred from working, a consequence of lawsuits that challenged the firings, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan auditing arm of Congress.
The Education Department’s broad investigatory powers have been a cornerstone of Congress’s guarantee of equal educational opportunity and one of the most coercive tools to remedy violations of civil rights based on age, color, disability, national origin, race and sex.
Discrimination complaints are typically filed by parents, students or education groups. The executive branch can also open investigations into any school, college or educational institution that received federal funding.
Over the past decade, about half of discrimination complaints were filed on behalf of disabled students, according to annual reports from the civil rights office. Discrimination complaints based on race, national origin and sex account for the rest.
The decline in resolutions comes as Mr. Trump has prevailed in rapidly revamping federal investigative targets to align with his political priorities. Those goals include pursuing allegations of anti-white discrimination in schools and stamping out existing protections for transgender students.
“We absolutely are fulfilling all of our statutory requirements — have not failed to do any of those,” Ms. McMahon told senators in June. “Not only are we reducing the backload, but we are keeping up with what’s coming in now with a reduced staff because we’re doing it efficiently.”
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6) F.B.I. Knew Civil Rights Group Informants Helped Bring Down Extremists, Lawyers Say
The Southern Poverty Law Center is planning to challenge the larger story of deceit and hypocrisy the Trump administration has been telling about its use of paid informants, court papers suggest.
By Alan Feuer, April 28, 2026
Southern Poverty Law Center lawyers met with prosecutors two weeks before the Justice Department unsealed its indictment against the organization in an effort to persuade them that the informant program, which was closed three years ago, had not been used to fund hate groups, but to hold them accountable. Rick Lewis/Alamy
The central premise of the federal charges filed last week against the Southern Poverty Law Center is that the storied civil rights organization defrauded its donors and betrayed its stated mission to fight hate groups by paying secret informants inside extremist networks.
On Tuesday, however, the law center pushed back firmly against the accusation that it sought to promote, not dismantle, far-right groups, asserting in court papers that information gleaned from its informants was shared at least three times with law enforcement agencies, including the F.B.I., resulting in arrests and prosecutions.
In fact, just two weeks before the Justice Department unsealed its indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, its lawyers met with prosecutors on the case in an effort to persuade them that the informant program, which was closed three years ago, had not been used to fund hate groups, but to hold them accountable.
During the meeting, the court papers said, the lawyers showed prosecutors evidence that the work of an S.P.L.C. informant helped the Justice Department during President Trump’s first term to secure a six-month prison term for a member of the white supremacist group Vanguard America who had lied to federal agents about his extremist ties during a background check for a security clearance.
Informants for the Southern Poverty Law Center also provided information to the F.B.I. about a member of a neo-Nazi group, the Atomwaffen Division, who had discussed attacks against Jews, gay people and others in Las Vegas and ultimately pleaded guilty to weapons charges, the court papers said. And their work formed the basis of a 45-page dossier that the S.P.L.C. gave the bureau, correctly warning that violence might erupt at the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in 2018 in Charlottesville, Va.
“The Department of Justice is well aware that the S.P.L.C. provided helpful information, through the use of its confidential informants, to law enforcement,” the papers said. “The Department of Justice also knows that these confidential informants helped law enforcement put violent extremists in jail.”
The two sets of papers, filed in Federal District Court in Montgomery, Ala., were the law center’s first legal response to the 11-count indictment charging it with wire fraud, lying to banks and a conspiracy to commit money laundering.
One of the filings asked Judge Emily C. Marks, who is handling the case, to bar prosecutors from making any false or misleading statements about the charges that could prejudice potential jurors. The other asked Judge Marks to allow defense lawyers to see the sealed grand jury proceedings in the case in an effort to determine whether prosecutors misled the panel that voted to return the indictment.
Both requests could face an uphill battle with Judge Marks, who was appointed by Mr. Trump. But taken together, they suggested that the S.P.L.C. was planning to mount a vigorous defense and would challenge not only the structure of the charges it is facing, but also the larger story of deceit and hypocrisy the Trump administration has been telling about the case.
In one of the filings, the law center’s lawyers accused Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, of falsely stating that the Justice Department was unaware that information gleaned from the group’s informants had been shared with the government.
“There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement,” Mr. Blanche said on Fox News on the evening the indictment was returned. “To the contrary, or else we would have known, from their own words, that they had given this money to these guys. And we didn’t know.”
But the law center’s legal team, led by Abbe Lowell, who is fighting the Trump administration in several politically tinged cases, said that statement was untrue, pointing to the meeting that defense lawyers had on April 6 with Kevin P. Davidson, the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama. The lawyers say that they also sent Mr. Davidson a letter one day after the indictment was released detailing how Mr. Blanche’s remarks were incorrect, but the government refused to retract or clarify them.
Mr. Blanche was not the only administration official who has made what the papers claimed were “false factual assertions” about the Southern Poverty Law Center and its informant program. Several Trump officials have overstated the accusations in the indictment, suggesting that the $3 million the S.P.L.C. is said to have paid its informants in recent years was tantamount to underwriting almost the entire far-right movement in the United States.
The papers pointed out that Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, baselessly claimed that the indictment showed the Charlottesville rally was a “hoax” perpetrated to discredit Mr. Trump. Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, has said that the S.P.L.C. engaged in “the ultimate hypocrisy” by funding hate groups they were supposed to be fighting.
And during a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” Mr. Trump himself asserted that “Charlottesville was all funded” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, adding without evidence that the violent rally, at which a young protester was fatally run over by a white supremacist’s car, was “part of the rigging of the election.”
The S.P.L.C. was formed in 1971 in Alabama and is best known for investigating groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy organizations. In recent years, Republicans have accused the group of unfairly targeting more mainstream conservative and Christian organizations, labeling them as extremists.
In October, Mr. Patel announced that the F.B.I. was severing its ties with the law center, claiming that it “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine.” Around the same time, Mr. Patel also cut the bureau’s ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a group that fights antisemitism.
The court papers filed on Tuesday indicate that lawyers for the S.P.L.C. tried several times to persuade the Justice Department that the basic accusations in their case were incorrect.
Days before the indictment was unsealed, the group gave prosecutors 15,000 pages of records about its informant program in response to a grand jury subpoena. Defense lawyers claimed in their papers that the information they handed over to the government was not reflected in the charges that were ultimately filed.
For that reason, among others, they want Judge Marks to break the traditional secrecy of the grand jury process and give them access to transcripts of what took place behind closed doors. The lawyers wrote that they want the material because there are indications “that the grand jury was not merely misled by the government’s presentation of the law, but likely that it was actively weaponized to facilitate such charges.”
Requests for grand jury transcripts are rarely successful, but they have been made more and more as the Justice Department under Mr. Trump has pushed the boundaries of normal criminal procedure in an effort to satisfy the president’s demands to bring charges against those he perceives to be his enemies.
In November, a federal magistrate judge in Virginia agreed to give defense lawyers for James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, all of the grand jury materials used to indict him on charges of lying to Congress. The magistrate judge, William E. Fitzpatrick, ruled that the inexperienced prosecutor picked by Mr. Trump to oversee the matter had made a series of unusual errors in front of the grand jurors.
The magistrate judge raised the issue of whether the charges against Mr. Comey would have to be thrown out because of “government misconduct.” But the case was ultimately dismissed by another judge for another reason: because Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor who filed the case, had been improperly in her job.
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7) F.B.I. Searches Businesses Around Minneapolis as Part of Fraud Inquiry
Investigators obtained nearly two dozen search warrants to collect evidence as part of a fraud investigation in a state that has become a top concern of the Trump administration.
By Ernesto Londoño, Reporting from St. Paul, Minn., April 28, 2026
Federal agents executing a search warrant in Bloomington, Minn., in December as part of a fraud investigation. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Federal agents on Tuesday morning searched businesses in the Minneapolis area, including day care centers, as part of a fraud investigation, the Department of Homeland Security said.
The operation was among the boldest moves since the White House launched a task force to combat fraud in social services programs last month, which Vice President JD Vance was appointed to lead.
A law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation, said agents from the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security had obtained 22 search warrants. The official added that the operation was unrelated to immigration enforcement.
“The task force and the DOJ will be relentless in exposing these fraudsters wherever they may be hiding,” Mr. Vance said on social media, referring to the Department of Justice.
Fraud in safety net programs in Minnesota has roiled the state in recent years, and captured the attention of the Trump administration. Federal prosecutors have charged scores of people with defrauding programs that were designed to feed low-income children, treat minors with autism and help people avoid homelessness.
Billions in taxpayer money have been stolen, according to federal prosecutors, with the first arrests occurring in 2022.
Although the fraud has been under scrutiny for years, the Twin Cities have been contending with aggressive federal actions since Trump beat Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Last year, roughly 3,000 federal agents were sent to the area to root out illegal immigrants, a surge that was met with fierce resistance by protesters and led to the killing of two residents.
In early January, Mr. Walz announced that he was not running for re-election so that he could devote more attention to combating fraud. He is scheduled to give his final state of the state address at the Capitol on Tuesday night.
The vast majority of the individuals charged in the state’s safety net fraud cases in recent years are of Somali origin. The White House cited that fact in justifying an immigration crackdown in the state this winter, even though the vast majority of defendants were American citizens.
Officials did not immediately disclose the nature of the businesses that were being searched or provide additional details.
Some locations federal agents searched on Tuesday included day care centers. Those businesses — some of which receive government funding — drew nationwide attention after Nick Shirley, a right-wing content creator, published a viral video in late December purporting to have exposed widespread fraud.
One business featured in that video — Quality Learning Center — became the subject of mockery because it had a sign that misspelled the word Learning. The site where the business operated was among those federal agents searched Tuesday, but it was not clear whether it remains operational.
Among the other locations federal agents were searching Tuesday morning was a tan building in south Minneapolis that houses two businesses: the Somali Senior Center and Adult Day Services, and the Original Child Care Center.
A local news station, KSTP, reported that federal agents had used a battering ram to enter another day care center in south Minneapolis.
Federal prosecutors have described the scale of fraud in Minnesota’s safety net programs as staggering. They say business owners have stolen several billion dollars in recent years by submitting claims for services that were not rendered.
The scandal has bedeviled Mr. Walz and other Democratic elected officials in the state as Republicans have questioned how so much taxpayer money was stolen on their watch. His administration has acknowledged that several programs lacked strong safeguards, making them magnets for thieves, and has tightened oversight.
State investigators were involved in the inquiries that led to the searches on Tuesday, according to the governor’s office.
“If you commit fraud in Minnesota you’re going to get caught — and that’s exactly what we saw today,” Mr. Walz said in a statement. “We catch criminals when state and federal agencies share information.”
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8) Will Communist Cuba Ever Pay Back the Billions It Confiscated?
With Cuba in dire economic crisis, people whose properties were seized by its government decades ago say it’s time to resolve thorny compensation claims.
By Frances Robles, April 28, 2026
Frances Robles has written about Cuba for more than 20 years.
“Richard Feinberg, a fellow at Florida International University who has studied property claims, said tackling the issue was important to normalizing diplomatic relations and establishing a trusted business environment in Cuba. The topic was the subject of two meetings between Cuba and the Obama administration, but with no resolution. Mr. Feinberg held discussions with Cuban officials as part of his research and said they did not seem interested. ‘The Cuban government didn’t seem to get it,’ he said. ‘They would say to me: Richard, why are you making such a big deal about something that happened 50, 60 years ago?’ ‘It’s indicative of how little the Cuban government understood economics and capitalism,’ he added. ‘They didn’t get private property.’”
Teo A. Babún, Jr., has fond memories of the large blue and white corner house in Santiago de Cuba where his grandmother, a wealthy matriarch in pre-revolutionary Cuba, hosted family gatherings for her eight children and 21 grandchildren.
The Babúns were industrialists who, like about 200,000 other affluent Cubans, fled the island after Fidel Castro took power. The Babúns left behind a railroad, sawmill, shipyard and cement factory — and the grand estate called “La Mesquita.”
For a time, Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and the former president, lived there. Nearly seven decades later, the Cuban government uses it to house an Arab civic association.
Known as “Casa del Arabe,” the house, which includes a restaurant, is among thousands of properties seized by the Communist government from people who left Cuba, some with just the clothes on their backs, and never received compensation.
Cuba’s system appears to be on the edge of collapse, and the United States government is eager to hasten the fall.
As the two sides negotiate in secret, a decades-old thorny issue has resurfaced: the untold billions of dollars’ worth of homes, factories, farms, sugar mills and other businesses confiscated in the years after a socialist revolution nationalized businesses and instituted sweeping land policies.
“If you own something and someone took it away from you without any kind of compensation or resolution, it’s just not fair,” Mr. Babún said. “My family just wants justice.”
If the United States has a hand in negotiating Cuba’s future, former property owners are hopeful that the issue will be addressed.
Resolving confiscations is complicated and would take years. But experts say there is plenty of precedent around the world, from Vietnam to Germany to China, that offers a road map.
For years, Mr. Babún’s late father, Teófilo Sr., dedicated himself to helping exiles take up arms against the Castro government, including in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
The younger Mr. Babún, 78, ran a religious nonprofit financed by the U.S. government and tried to create a registry of properties taken from Cubans, hoping the U.S. State Department would lobby the Cubans over those losses.
But the endeavor proved too time-consuming and difficult and his project ended with 8,000 claims registered, a small fraction of potential cases. (He said many people seemed hesitant, fearing that joining a pooled claim would nullify their ability to negotiate larger individual deals with the Cuban government.)
His family hired consultants in 2018, who estimated the value of the family’s holdings by that point at $874.2 million, including $9 million for the house, he said.
But Mr. Babún said the passage of time and his homeland’s worsening crisis have softened his perspective.
“You’ve got to find the solution that protects the current occupants if it’s a home and doesn’t displace anybody,” Mr. Babún said. “And at the same time find justice.”
Before 1959, Cuba was run by a dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and known as a playground for American elites. Wealthy Cubans were often regarded as oligarchs who exploited the poor.
The Castro brothers, seeking to end rampant corruption, severe economic inequality and dependency on the United States, led an armed guerrilla movement that toppled Mr. Batista.
A few months after they took over, an agrarian law expropriated farmlands over 1,000 acres and forbade foreign land ownership. In 1960, Cuba confiscated American-owned oil refineries and nationalized large businesses.
As payback, the United States announced a crippling trade embargo against Cuba that remains in place.
A U.S. government commission documented losses by U.S. companies and citizens, certifying nearly 6,000 claims with a value of $1.9 billion. With 6 percent interest the commission tacked on, the claims are now estimated to be worth about $9 billion, an amount Cuba would be hard-presssed to pay.
Five of the top 10 claimants were U.S. sugar companies. Others included Exxon, Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive and Woolworth’s.
By U.S. law, for the embargo to be lifted, the Cuban government must return property or businesses or compensate American owners whose confiscations were certified by the U.S. government.
U.S. officials meeting with Cuban leaders for secret talks have made clear that compensation for Americans and U.S. companies remains a key priority.
Cuba’s foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
In the early 1960s, the United States and Cuba held talks lasting almost a year around the question of what would count as “prompt and adequate compensation” for seizures, said William LeoGrande, an American University professor who wrote a book about the history of U.S.-Cuba talks.
“Cuba did not have the cash to pay immediately and instead Cuba offered long-term government bonds, which the U.S. said was neither prompt nor adequate,” he said.
While the U.S. government negotiates on behalf of Americans or American firms with certified claims, that is not technically the case for the many Cuban exiles who left homes and businesses behind.
Cuba considered those “abandoned” and they were taken as the government ostensibly set out to redistribute wealth. But the government held on to many itself. Only Cubans who stayed were compensated for lost properties, said Lisandro Pérez, a Cuba scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City who wrote a memoir about his family’s home in Cuba.
No official tally has ever been made public of confiscations by the Cuban government. There is no reliable estimate of how many there are or how much exiles could be owed.
“We were not supporters of Batista, were not political or committing crimes — we should get it back,” said Nicolás J. Gutiérrez, a Cuban American lawyer in Miami whose family lost a fortune estimated in the early 1960s at $50 million.
Their holdings included two sugar mills, 15 cattle ranches, a rice mill, a coffee plantation, a bank, an insurance company and a wholesale food distribution company.
Mr. Gutiérrez, the corporate secretary of the National Association of Cuban Landowners in Exile, also works as a consultant for other families whose properties were taken and is involved in a lawsuit against Expedia for booking customers to hotels the Cuban government built on confiscated beach property.
Expedia claims that the plaintiffs had no standing to sue though the case continues.
Mr. Gutiérrez, 61, has never been to Cuba. But he says if the government returns his family’s properties, the family will put them back into production and help Cuba’s battered economy.
“Not everyone in the family will rush back. I will rush back,” he said. “My view is that Cuba is in such a deep hole that in order to get out of that hole, it’s going to need to get serious new foreign investment.”
Experts agree that it would be unfeasible to return houses that were given to renters or divided up into multifamily apartments. Nobody is advocating widespread evictions. But many majestic mansions are being used by international diplomats or government ministries.
One house the Gutiérrez family owned in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood is occupied by Lloyd's of London. Neighbors on a Havana street where the family had another house said properties that were “abandoned” should not be returned.
“If they left the country,” one neighbor, Jorge González Amores, said, “that means they were not interested in the building.”
Experts have offered a variety of proposals, including setting up public-private funds to rebuild Cuba’s energy grid and using part of the profits to compensate former property owners, said Jason Poblete, a lawyer who represents American and Cuban property owners.
Experts point to Vietnam and Germany, which in the 1990s used frozen assets in the United States to pay property claims. But in the Soviet Union and China, property owners received only a fraction of the value of confiscated properties.
In other countries, compensation funds were generated by the privatization of state-owned companies.
But Cuba says it also has claims against the United States.
In 1999, a Cuban court found the U.S. government liable for deaths and damage caused by its “aggressive policies” against Cuba, including the Bay of Pigs invasion and the U.S. trade embargo. The tab then: $181 billion.
Carlos Fernández de Cossio, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, said in a recent interview with the website Drop Site News that in the 1960s Cuba had offered a “holistic agreement” over properties that belonged to Americans and U.S. firms with a lump-sump payment, but that the United States had refused.
Mr. Fernández de Cossio said a lump sum was the only solution. In that scenario, the Cuban government would pay the U.S. government, which would then have to distribute payments to those who lost property.
Richard Feinberg, a fellow at Florida International University who has studied property claims, said tackling the issue was important to normalizing diplomatic relations and establishing a trusted business environment in Cuba.
The topic was the subject of two meetings between Cuba and the Obama administration, but with no resolution. Mr. Feinberg held discussions with Cuban officials as part of his research and said they did not seem interested.
“The Cuban government didn’t seem to get it,” he said. “They would say to me: Richard, why are you making such a big deal about something that happened 50, 60 years ago?”
“It’s indicative of how little the Cuban government understood economics and capitalism,” he added. “They didn’t get private property.”
Enrique Carrillo, whose family owned the Santa Cruz rum distillery east of Havana, said he was anxious for Cuban families to be compensated and to help the country rebuild.
“We have been waiting a long time for this moment and for the stars to kind of align,” Mr. Carrillo said. “My father worked very hard for many years to build the company, and I am not planning to roll over. My family is not planning to roll over on history.”
Ed Augustin contributed reporting from Havana.
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9) It’s Been Centuries Since Haiti’s Revolution. It’s Still Paying for It.
By Laurent Dubois, April 28, 2026
Dr. Dubois is the author of “Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.”
Lynne Sladky/Associated Press
“Let’s go to Haiti, and how history repeats itself.” With these words, the CBS Sports commentator Nico Cantor celebrated the qualification of the Haitian soccer team for the 2026 FIFA World Cup last November, its first in over 50 years. The team’s victory over Nicaragua, he explained, had come on Nov. 18, a national holiday in Haiti.
“Two hundred and twenty-two years ago today,” Mr. Cantor said, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines led Haitian forces into the Battle of Vertières” — the last major battle of the Haitian Revolution — “where he defeated the French and gained independence.” The country’s triumph on the soccer field, he suggested, was the latest chapter of its long quest for dignity and sovereignty.
For many Haitians, the convergence was deeply meaningful. In a world in which they and their country are often attacked and demeaned, in which their people are often pushed around and rejected, the moment of unity and victory on a global stage was part of a sustained struggle against the odds.
Over centuries, competing stories about the country have become a way of fighting over much larger questions about freedom, racism and what the future of the societies of the Americas and the world will look like. For many decades after the Haitian Revolution began in 1791, the country’s reputation as the cradle of one of the world’s largest and most successful antislavery uprisings created anxiety and fear among enslavers throughout the Americas.
Since then, its very existence has routinely been cast by outsiders as a disturbance and threat. In the United States, the attacks against Haitian immigrants that were at the fore in the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign — and that continue today — are part of a centuries-old tradition.
But there has always been another way of viewing Haiti, too; one rooted in solidarity and an understanding that the past struggles and future aspirations of Haiti and the United States are intertwined.
Haiti was once French Saint-Domingue, a brutal plantation system where more than half a million enslaved Africans labored to produce products like sugar and coffee for European consumption. It was, for much of the 18th century, the most profitable colony in the world.
The mass uprising that overthrew slavery there in the early 1790s sent shock waves through Europe and the Americas. When Napoleon Bonaparte sent a force to re-establish slavery there in 1802, his troops were met with steadfast resistance. In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had been born into slavery, proclaimed Haiti’s independence and declared: “We have dared to be free.”
Many outside observers found all this to be simply “unthinkable,” notes the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. They couldn’t imagine the enslaved, whom they considered mere property, as historical actors, let alone equals or victors. So they sought to explain away the events by blaming outside agitators and casting the revolution as nothing more than unfurling barbarism.
Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1799, worried about the “cannibals of the terrible republic,” anxious about the influence they would have on enslaved people in the United States. Throughout the 19th century, pro-slavery writers and politicians continued to cast Haiti’s independence as a disaster, and negative depictions of the country and its people in media of that era became staples of broader racist thought.
This very loud tradition has often shrouded the long reach of the Haitian revolutionaries’ powerful ideals and practices. As Jefferson feared, the revolution inspired an antislavery movement in the United States, including the nation’s largest slave revolt in Louisiana in 1811.
The abolitionist John Brown considered the Haitian Revolution an inspiration and an example, and the Haitian government carried out a state funeral in his honor in the National Cathedral, complete with an empty casket, after he was executed in 1859. For Americans who also had a vision of a future based on freedom and equality, Haiti was, in the words of Frederick Douglass, “bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh.”
Over time, Haiti became a magnet for migrants from around the world, including African Americans, Germans and people from the Middle East. But that began to change in 1915 when the United States invaded Haiti and rewrote its constitution to allow foreign landownership in the hopes of developing a sugar plantation economy there under U.S. control.
The occupation, which lasted until 1934, upended life in Haiti, with U.S. authorities seizing land and waging a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against those who resisted. It also laid the foundations for decades of dictatorial rule under the Duvalier family from 1957 to 1986.
Many Haitian migrants fleeing that regime sought refuge in the United States, but as their numbers grew in the 1970s, they encountered increasingly restrictive immigration policies. Washington largely supported Haiti’s dictatorial regime as a regional bulwark against communism, so, in contrast to those fleeing neighboring Cuba, the United States considered Haitian migrants economic rather than political refugees.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed an executive order directing the Coast Guard to interdict boats carrying Haitian migrants on their way to Florida. This immigration strategy, still active today, was developed specifically to prevent Haitians from setting foot in the United States, where lawyers could work with them and help them claim asylum.
Throughout the 1980s, Haitians were accused of bringing AIDS to the United States — a spurious claim that nonetheless led to a fresh wave of anti-Haitian sentiment in America. In the 1990s, after a violent coup against the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide sent thousands more fleeing the country, the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay became a detention camp for many Haitians, as well as Cubans, who had been caught on the water seeking refuge in the United States. A series of subsequent crises have led Haiti to an increasingly dangerous and unstable place.
The Haitian diaspora in the United States now numbers over a million people. These migrants play a crucial role in Haiti’s economy through remittances and are a vibrant part of the communities in which they live. They also continue to be frequent targets of virulent attacks.
The hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants who are in the country under the Temporary Protective Status program, which was established in the aftermath of a devastating 2010 earthquake, may soon have that status revoked pending a Supreme Court decision later this year.
But there is a different tradition we can draw from: one of exchange and kinship, nurtured by Frederick Douglass and many others over the past centuries. The acts of support shown to Haitian migrants in communities like Springfield, Ohio, where hundreds of locals gathered in a Baptist church in February to protest plans to terminate Temporary Protective Status for Haitians, demonstrate that that tradition remains very much alive.
That is the past we can carry into the future. We can still dare to be free.
I want to have grace for an op-ed that is necessarily brief. However, the history of the Haitian Revolution is morally gray and complex: Dessalines defected partway through the revolution and betrayed, Louverture, one of his fellow commanders--who was then arrested by the French and died in prison. He also ordered the genocidal massacre of all of the white colonists, including women and children. I am the first person to argue that we must try to judge people--at least part--by the morays of their times, and in this vein I have been critical of portrayals of the Founding Fathers that have focused myopically on their slaveholding--to the extent that their contributions to democratic governance have been sidestepped in some circles. To be consistent, I must not focus myopically on Dessalines's moral failures. But it's worth it to put the complexity and moral failings of the revolutionaries in Haiti and in the United States on the record--in both cases.
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10) Fidelity Won’t Let Fund Holders Donate to Southern Poverty Law Center
Fidelity cited the Justice Department’s recent action against the civil rights organization in emails to holders of its charitable-giving funds explaining its decision.
By Ron Lieber, April 29, 2026
Fidelity will no longer allow customers to donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center through charitable-giving funds. Brian Snyder/Reuters
The country’s largest sponsor of donor-advised funds has cut off the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Last week, the Justice Department indicted the civil rights nonprofit on charges of committing financial crimes. Many of the center’s supporters immediately went online to donate money to help it fight the federal government.
But Fidelity told its customers, who have over 350,000 charitable giving accounts that allow them to maximize tax savings while giving money to eligible nonprofits, that they could not donate to the center through the accounts anymore.
“Fidelity Charitable is aware of an ongoing governmental investigation into Southern Poverty Law Center,” according to an email it sent to a donor. “Consistent with our grant-making standards and practices, the organization is not an eligible grant recipient during the ongoing investigation.”
Donor-advised funds allow people to donate money — including appreciated investments — to a fund that resembles a personal mini-foundation and take a tax deduction that year.
You don’t have to give the money away all at once. You can parcel it out over time, as long as the entity administering the donor-advised fund is willing to push that donation to the nonprofit recipient. Usually, this is a rubber-stamp approval process for legal nonprofits like S.P.L.C.
A Fidelity spokesman declined to answer questions about how the suspension was applied, aside from pointing to language on its website. The website lists reasons that a grant recommendation “might” be declined, including if an organization “is being investigated for alleged illegal activities or noncharitable activities, such as terrorism, money laundering, hate crimes or fraud,” or if “other state and federal agencies” are investigating a charitable organization.
In 2023, the S.P.L.C. criticized Fidelity and other sponsors of donor-advised funds, including Vanguard, for acting as a “consistent and significant source of income for groups peddling a variety of hateful and extremist beliefs.” It specifically mentioned white nationalist, hard right and anti-LGBTQ+ groups.
In a recent “60 Minutes” interview, President Trump said, without providing evidence, that the racist rally in “Charlottesville was all funded” by the S.P.L.C. “It was done to make me look bad,” he added.
Last week’s indictment accused the S.P.L.C. of fomenting racism by paying informants that worked for hate groups. The organization responded by saying that the federal government had known about the payments and had used the intelligence provided by informants to enforce the law.
A Vanguard Charitable representative did not respond to requests for comment on whether it was barring its account holders from giving to the S.P.L.C. Charles Schwab did not comment; as of Wednesday morning, it was still possible for account holders to request a donation to the group.
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11) A.I. Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons
Scientists shared transcripts with The Times in which chatbots described how to assemble deadly pathogens and unleash them in public spaces.
By Gabriel J.X. Dance, April 29, 2026
Vanessa Saba
One evening last summer, Dr. David Relman went cold at his laptop as an A.I. chatbot told him how to plan a massacre.
A microbiologist and biosecurity expert at Stanford University, Dr. Relman had been hired by an artificial intelligence company to pressure-test its product before it was released to the public. That night in the scientist's home office, the chatbot explained how to modify an infamous pathogen in a lab so that it would resist known treatments.
Worse, the bot described in vivid detail how to release the superbug, identifying a security lapse in a large public transit system, Dr. Relman said, asking The New York Times to withhold the name of the pathogen and other specifics for fear of inspiring an attack. The bot outlined a plan to maximize casualties and minimize the chances of being caught.
Dr. Relman was so shaken he took a walk to clear his head.
“It was answering questions that I hadn’t thought to ask it, with this level of deviousness and cunning that I just found chilling,” said Dr. Relman, who has also advised the federal government on biological threats. He declined to disclose which chatbot produced the plot, citing a confidentiality agreement with its maker. The company added some safety guardrails to the product after his testing, he said, though he felt they were insufficient.
Dr. Relman is part of a small group of experts enlisted by A.I. companies to vet their products for catastrophic risks. In recent months, some have shared with The Times more than a dozen chatbot conversations revealing that even publicly available models can do more than disseminate dangerous information. The virtual assistants have described in lucid, bullet-pointed detail how to buy raw genetic material, turn it into deadly weapons and deploy them in public spaces, the transcripts show. Some have even brainstormed ways to evade detection.
The U.S. government has long planned for powerful adversaries unleashing deadly bacteria, viruses or toxins in the American population. Since 1970, there have been a few dozen, fairly small biological attacks around the world, such as the anthrax-laced letters that killed five Americans in 2001. Despite perennial warnings, a major catastrophe has not happened and remains unlikely, most experts say.
But even if the probability is low, an effective biological weapon could have an enormous impact, potentially killing millions of people. Dozens of experts told The Times that A.I. is one of several recent technological advances that have meaningfully increased that risk by expanding the pool of people who could cause harm.
Protocols once confined to scientific journals have been salted across the internet. Companies sell synthetic bits of DNA and RNA directly to consumers online. Scientists can split up sensitive aspects of their work and outsource the tasks to private labs. And all of those logistics can now be managed with the help of a chatbot.
Kevin Esvelt, a genetic engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared conversations in which OpenAI’s ChatGPT explained how to use a weather balloon to spread biological payloads over a U.S. city. In another chat, Google’s Gemini ranked pathogens by how much they could damage the cattle or pork industries. Anthropic’s Claude produced a recipe for a novel toxin adapted from a cancer drug. Other chats contained information that Dr. Esvelt — known in his field as something of a Cassandra — felt was too dangerous to share.
A scientist in the Midwest, who requested anonymity because he feared professional reprisal, asked Google’s Deep Research for a “step-by-step protocol” for making a virus that once caused a pandemic. The bot spit out 8,000 words of instructions on acquiring genetic pieces and assembling them. While the response was not entirely accurate, it could have still significantly helped someone with malicious intent, the scientist said.
The Trump administration, resolved to lead the world in A.I. innovation, has dialed back oversight of the technology’s risks. What’s more, several top biosecurity experts — including the leading scientist on the National Security Council — left the executive branch last year and have not been replaced. Federal budget requests for biodefense efforts shrunk by nearly 50 percent last year. (A White House official said that the administration was committed to keeping Americans safe and that some staff on the N.S.C. and several agencies were focused on biodefense.)
The technology’s proponents argue that it will transform medicine for the better, speeding up experiments and crunching enormous data sets to discover new cures. Some scientists believe the upside for humanity easily outweighs any incremental new risks. Chatbots, the skeptics say, present information that’s already available on the internet. And making a deadly virus requires years of hands-on expertise.
Anthropic, OpenAI and Google said they were constantly improving their systems to balance potential risks and benefits. The chats shared with The Times, they said, did not provide enough detail to allow someone to cause harm. (The Times is suing OpenAI, claiming that it violated copyright when developing its models. The company has denied those claims.)
A Google spokeswoman said the company’s newest models would no longer answer the “more serious” inquiries, including the one asking for the virus protocol. A new report found that Google’s latest model was worse than other leading bots at refusing to answer high-risk biological prompts.
One of the country’s loudest voices of warning comes from the A.I. industry itself. Anthropic’s chief executive, the trained biologist Dario Amodei, wrote in January about the risks he saw in A.I. development, including autonomous weapons and threats to democracy. One risk outweighed the rest.
“Biology is by far the area I’m most worried about, because of its very large potential for destruction and the difficulty of defending against it,” he wrote.
‘Historically Catastrophic’
Dr. Esvelt has for years warned scientists, journalists and lawmakers about the dangers of synthetic biology if left unchecked. In 2023, he helped craft a stunning demonstration of how chatbots had raised the stakes.
He asked ChatGPT to help him assemble a pathogen that could cause mass death. The bot provided accurate instructions, even outlining which raw materials to buy. He put the unassembled biological pieces into test tubes and packed them in a box, which a colleague then brought to a White House meeting on biological risks.
Dr. Esvelt has continued to probe leading chatbots, sometimes posing as a crime writer seeking plausible methods of spreading viruses, or as an ethicist trying to educate others. Often he plays a version of himself: a scientist exploring the intricacies of virology.
He and other scientists worry about publicizing these risks in news articles that could draw a road map for bad actors. But they also hope that public scrutiny will encourage companies to make their products safer.
“Anything where there isn’t an expert warning them, they can’t fix,” said Dr. Esvelt, who has consulted for Anthropic and OpenAI. He said the industry should censor a wider swath of biological information and share it only with approved users.
He shared transcripts showing how the bots paired scientific rigor with strategic reasoning.
Gemini, for example, gave Dr. Esvelt a list of five pathogens that could harm the cattle industry and estimated the potential economic damage of each. One of the threats, it said, was “historically catastrophic.” In a different conversation, the bot told him how to get a biological weapon through airport security without being detected.
The Google spokeswoman said that its team of biology experts determined that the chats, made with an earlier model of Gemini, presented information that was publicly available and not harmful.
Anthropic’s Claude offered Dr. Esvelt a recipe for a new toxin that would sterilize rodents. He said that it would be relatively easy for a biologist to adapt the toxin to people.
Alexandra Sanderford, a safety leader at Anthropic, disagreed: “There is an enormous difference between a model producing plausible-sounding text and giving someone what they’d need to act.” She acknowledged, however, that A.I. posed risks, and said that Anthropic had set aggressive refusal thresholds for biological prompts, “accepting some over-refusal out of an abundance of caution.”
Dr. Esvelt asked ChatGPT about using weather balloons to drop substances from high altitudes. At first, the bot repeatedly warned about the dangers of this activity.
“I’m not going to help you model or optimize dispersal of biological material (seeds, pollen, spores),” ChatGPT said, explaining that the information would be “too easy to repurpose for harm.” It then ignored its own warning and modeled the airborne spread of pollen grains over a large Western city.
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that this example did not “meaningfully increase someone’s ability to cause real-world harm.” The company works closely with biologists and the government to add appropriate safeguards to their products, she added.
The leading models are also vulnerable to so-called jail-breaking, in which people feed the bots specific prompts known to bypass safety filters. After The Times attempted a standard jail-breaking approach, ChatGPT discussed details of the lethal virus that was the focus of the White House demonstration nearly three years ago.
The models’ safeguards are “like a flimsy wooden fence that is easy to overcome,” said Dr. Cassidy Nelson of the Center for Long-Term Resilience, a British think tank. OpenAI’s spokeswoman said that the company regularly monitored for jail-breaking vulnerabilities.
Even when A.I. models are updated with safer controls, the older versions are often readily available.
For example, Dr. Esvelt said that Anthropic adjusted Claude’s filters so it would refuse to discuss a specific agricultural threat. When The Times asked certain questions about the same microbe, the bot refused to answer — and suggested switching over to a previous version to continue the conversation. Ms. Sanderford said this was an intentional strategy because older models were less likely to provide harmful information.
Still, the older model went into detail about the “optimal conditions” needed for the pathogen to decimate thousands of acres of a crucial crop.
A Range of Risks
The Times shared the transcripts with seven experts in virology and biosecurity.
Dr. Moritz Hanke of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said that some of the chatbots’ proposed strategies to spread infection were “remarkably creative and realistic.”
Dr. Jens Kuhn, a bioweapons expert who once worked at one of the most secure laboratories in the U.S., said that the chats offering logistical details — such as the weather balloon instructions — could help skilled biologists brainstorm and refine their plans of attack.
“A major problem that experienced actors have is not necessarily making the virus but turning it into a weapon,” Dr. Kuhn said.
Others cited recent research suggesting that A.I. models could be misused for biowarfare. One study, for example, asked leading chatbots difficult questions about a range of laboratory protocols. The results shocked the field: ChatGPT outperformed 94 percent of expert virologists.
Another, published in Science last year, focused on companies that sell synthetic DNA. Many use software to screen orders for genetic sequences linked to toxins and pathogens. But the study found that A.I. tools came up with thousands of variant sequences for dangerous agents that the screening software could not detect. (The researchers suggested a fix to improve the software.)
Still, A.I. users would need some real-world expertise to follow a bot’s instructions. Some research, including a study backed by A.I. companies, has found that while chatbots can help novices learn certain lab skills, the technology isn’t particularly helpful for carrying out the range of complex tasks needed to make a virus from scratch.
Viruses are complex machines, similar to the world’s finest clocks, said Dr. Gustavo Palacios, a virologist at Mount Sinai in Manhattan who once worked at a Department of Defense laboratory. “Do you think that a do-it-yourself person could disassemble a Swiss watch and then reassemble it?”
He said he was concerned, however, about A.I. in the hands of experienced actors.
A recent terrorist attempt in India suggests that malicious actors are already using the technology. In August, the Gujarat police arrested a 35-year-old physician, saying he was plotting an attack on behalf of the Islamic State. He was accused of trying to extract ricin, a lethal toxin, from castor beans. The doctor had sought advice on his preparations from A.I.-powered Google searches and ChatGPT, a lead investigator told The Times.
The OpenAI spokeswoman said that, based on public reports, the doctor sought “information that’s already accessible online.” The Google spokeswoman said the company did not have enough information to comment.
Skeptics note that restricting the biological capabilities of A.I. models could stifle lifesaving advances, such as discovering new drugs. Scientists at Google shared a Nobel Prize in 2024 for developing an A.I. model that could predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins — crucial building blocks of a cell — and create new ones.
“There is tremendous upside to the technology,” said Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford. Last year, he used an A.I. model called Evo to design a virus that destroys harmful bacteria.
The latest version of Evo, he said, can design beneficial proteins to fight cancer — but also has the potential to invent lethal toxins no one has seen before.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
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12) San Antonio Is Booming. But Poverty Hasn’t Budged.
The city’s rapid expansion brought new jobs and investment, but decades of low wages and limited access to education and housing have kept many residents from reaching the middle class.
By Edgar Sandoval, Photographs and Video by Tierney L. Cross, Reporting from San Antonio, April 29, 2026
Kayla Miranda with her son, De’Andre, at their home in the Westside neighborhood of San Antonio.
Olivia Cruz hopped carefully off a bus in an upscale San Antonio enclave framed by oak-lined streets.
On a recent day in April, Ms. Cruz brushed off a leg injury with the help of a new cane and tried to focus on the $120 payday needed to cover the rising cost of raising two grandchildren.
“You go to the grocery store to buy meat or vegetables, and the bill comes up to more than $100,” said Ms. Cruz, 68, as she limped toward her client’s home to clean. “I’ve been poor for as long as I can remember, but it feels like it is harder to be poor these days.”
Ms. Cruz’s story underscores what economists describe as the defining tension of this moment: an economy that appears strong by some measures but has failed to deliver a sustained sense of progress. San Antonio is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country in part because of its relative affordability compared with other major Texas cities. It has drawn new residents from across the state and country but unlike Austin or Dallas, the city has struggled to generate large numbers of high-paying jobs, with much of its economy anchored in lower-wage service work. The rising cost of securing a middle-class life has made opportunity feel more distant, feeding a growing belief that the economy is not working for many in the nation’s seventh-largest city.
San Antonio ranks as the third poorest among the top 25 largest U.S. metro areas, behind only Houston and Detroit, according to the latest U.S. census. In 1980, 20 percent of residents lived below the poverty rate. Today it hovers around 17 percent, higher than the state or national averages, said Monica Cruz, a special research associate with the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
San Antonio’s economic woes are tied to longstanding societal setbacks that have gone unresolved by past administrations, critics say. Those setbacks include a reliance on low-wage workers; low rates of higher education; and limited access to homeownership, one of the most common ways to amass generational wealth.
Rogelio Sáenz, a professor of sociology and demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said the region’s poor neighborhoods had struggled to recover from redlining, a Depression-era practice in which federal housing policies and lenders labeled Black and brown neighborhoods as too risky for investments.
The practice was formalized through color-coded maps that shaped where banks issued loans, creating pockets of deep poverty and racial and economic segregation in the process, he said.
“If you don’t have the financial means to be able to purchase your home, you never build that wealth up from owning a home, and then you don’t pass that on to your children,” Mr. Sáenz said. “You see the unequal funding of education. You continue to see the inequality taking place.”
In 1968, a CBS documentary titled “Hunger in America” shocked the nation through its depictions of extreme poverty in four corners of the nation, including the west side of San Antonio, which is known today for its taquerias, small stores known as tienditas, and murals of the Virgin of Guadalupe and folklore singers who reflect the neighborhood’s Mexican American history.
Nearly six decades later, Kayla Miranda, 45, a housing activist and a mother of four children, two of whom are autistic, said the community remained stuck in a persistent pattern of poverty because of a legacy of discriminatory policies that had deprived low-income neighborhoods of investments.
“The money goes to millionaires and billionaires instead of giving money to extremely low income,” Ms. Miranda said. “A lot of people here are a car breakdown or health emergency away from becoming homeless.”
Ms. Miranda said she became stuck in this cycle after a death in the family and the temporary deportation of her children’s father forced her home into foreclosure. She became homeless for a year and a half. She has since rebounded and now lives in public housing where she cares for her two disabled sons full-time.
“I can’t hold a normal job because I have to take care of my sons,” she said. “There is this horrible stigma that people have that you are poor because you want to be.”
She said she hoped the city would address the longstanding failures that had left families like hers struggling. “The mayor and the council inherited this problem,” she said. “It was passed down to them.”
Former mayors of San Antonio like Julián Castro, who served from 2009 to 2014, and Ron Nirenberg, who left office last year after four two-year terms, said they had enacted policies that were aimed at tackling systemic poverty, knowing they would not see all of the outcomes during their tenures.
Mr. Castro championed a prekindergarten education program, tax breaks to incentivize the construction of new homes and jobs in renewable energies.
“There has been significant progress in the last couple of decades in diversifying the local economy, increasing the number of good-paying jobs,” Mr. Castro said. “But there’s still a lot of work to do.”
Ms. Miranda pointing to her neighborhood on a map.
Mr. Nirenberg, who is running for county judge in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, said he was playing the long game. While in office, he worked to support economic initiatives for early and college education, access to health care and affordable housing.
If he were elected as county judge, a role similar to the mayor’s at the county level, Mr. Nirenberg said he planned to work with Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, who was sworn in less than a year ago, to see his old policies through.
In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Jones said she was working to expand affordable housing away from decaying public housing and attract large companies in the artificial intelligence space, biotechnology and other industries to San Antonio. She recently led a delegation to Taiwan to urge businesses to invest in San Antonio.
“What I have found in speaking with companies is, they know Austin, they know Houston, they know Dallas, but they don’t know San Antonio as well,” she said. “I think we have to be much more aggressive in our economic development outreach. If they don’t know about us, then we’ll go there and share our story.”
One person familiar with San Antonio’s story was Ricardo Martinez, 46, a real estate agent from Austin who moved to the city during the pandemic in search of a home for him and his husband.
“We couldn’t find anything within our price range in Austin that wasn’t another condo,” Mr. Martinez said.
They couple found a 2,000-square-foot home for about $300,000.
“In Austin, that would have gotten us a closet,” he said. “San Antonio is a lot more affordable.”
The affordability that has attracted newcomers has not eased concerns about whether the city’s growth will translate into meaningful gains for its poorest residents.
Letty Sanchez, a prominent community activist and chair of the Historic Westside Residents Association, said she was disappointed to see some of the city’s new ventures move downtown and to other wealthier neighborhoods. Even though voters narrowly approved a proposition for an expansive sports and entertainment area known as Project Marvel during the March primaries, Ms. Sanchez said most of the jobs generated from the project were likely to be in concessions, restaurants and retail.
“It doesn’t help to lift people out of poverty,” Ms. Sanchez said. “It is not a living wage.”
Ms. Cruz, the grandmother who cleans homes, said she was unsure if she would see a prosperous San Antonio in her lifetime.
“I think we have to be much more aggressive in our economic development outreach," Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones said.
On that day in April, she knocked on the door of the house she was cleaning and was greeted with concern by her employer of many years, someone she considers part of the family, who noticed her cane and her limping.
“Are you OK?” the homeowner asked. “Are you able to work today?”
Ms. Cruz dismissed her concerns with a smile and quickly picked up a rag to start wiping a dresser by the door.
“I can’t afford not to work, even if my foot hurts,” Mr. Cruz said moments later. She had hurt herself on a rock while walking a dog.
“The bills don’t care if you are in pain,” she added with a bittersweet chuckle.
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13) Stalled Taxis, Postponed Weddings: War in Iran Hits African Families
Despite the fragile cease-fire in the Middle East, many Africans say they are bracing for tougher times ahead and making difficult decisions about the future.
By John Eligon, Golden Matonga and Matthew Mpoke Bigg, John Eligon reported from Johannesburg, Golden Matonga from Lilongwe, Malawi and Matthew Mpoke Bigg from Nairobi, April 30, 2026
A girl using a solar-powered light to study during electricity rationing in Juba, South Sudan, last month. Jok Solomun/Reuters
As the globe convulses over the economic fallout from the war in Iran, many African nations say the ripple effects of the conflict are exacerbating longstanding challenges at home, like the lack of manufacturing on the continent and its heavy reliance on imports and foreign investment.
The standoff over the Strait of Hormuz has sent fuel prices skyrocketing. Global shipping has been pushed to a breaking point, limiting access to medicine, fertilizer and other major commodities. President Trump’s tariffs and the withdrawal of U.S. foreign assistance had already set many African economies back.
Analysts say Africa is particularly vulnerable to such external shocks because of its longstanding dependence on goods produced elsewhere. “We as a continent need to focus on internal resilience,” said Abi Mustapha-Maduakor, the chief executive of the Africa Private Capital Association.
Despite the fragile cease-fire between the United States and Iran, many Africans say they are bracing for tougher times ahead. They are making difficult calculations about how much to feed their families, whether to plant crops, how to pay for transportation and how to manage shortages.
The unwed taxi driver
Francis Kazembe, a taxi driver in the Malawian capital of Lilongwe, made the difficult decision to postpone his wedding in May, he said. The money to pay for it just isn’t there.
Mr. Kazembe, 28, said his typical daily earnings of 50,000 Malawian kwacha (about $30) have plummeted. Because of the fuel shortages, he has to spend hours, or sometimes days, waiting for fuel, so he can’t drive his taxi as much. Some days, he does not earn the 30,000 kwacha he is required to pay the taxi owner for the use of the vehicle, he said.
When he falls short of that amount, he has to give whatever he earns to the boss and goes home with nothing. And the lines at gas stations are so long, he said, that he is unable to drive his taxi on some days.
“In the past four days, I have twice slept at the filing station,” he said in an interview in April.
Malawi’s government announced in April that it had completely run out of fuel reserves and that it was negotiating with international lenders for emergency funding. There are concerns that rising fertilizer and seed costs could ruin harvests for small-time farmers and push many people in the country toward malnutrition.
“Year in and year out, there’s some problem,” said Pamela Kuwali, the Malawi country director for Care International, a development and humanitarian organization. “When global shocks hit, they don’t land on spreadsheets, they land in kitchens.”
Pounding corn with a mortar and pestle
The war is also choking a vital economic lifeline for African families: remittances from relatives working in the Persian Gulf states.
Many of the Africans working there have had their employment interrupted, analysts said. More than 200 million Africans rely on financial support from people working abroad, according to the United Nations. In 2023, Africa received $100 billion in remittances, or nearly 6 percent of the continent’s gross domestic product, according to the United Nations.
Hampered by their own budget constraints and impoverished populations, many African governments are struggling to find a way forward. The governments of the West African nations of Senegal and Gambia announced restrictions on foreign travel for government officials to save costs. The Ghanaian government announced the removal of some fuel taxes and charges to offset increasing gas prices.
Diesel shortages in Zambia in March forced hammer mills that grind corn into flour to shutdown in the Mafumba ward in the country’s southeast.
That forced women, who bear most of the labor burden in the area, to resort to the old-school, backbreaking method of manually pounding the corn with a mortar and pestle. That cut into the time the women had for their various other responsibilities like farming and child care, said Collins Mweemba, a resident of the area.
The economic challenges are also spurring political tensions that some analysts fear could lead to further instability.
Fuel supplies are so limited in Ethiopia, the second-most populous country on the continent, that the price of black-market diesel has increased by up to tenfold. That in turn has affected not just the price of goods, but also the amount of food getting to towns and cities outside the capital, Addis Ababa.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia has been increasingly outspoken in recent months about the need for his country to have its own port, leading to fears of a renewed conflict involving the neighboring coastal country of Eritrea. The fuel price shock has served to intensify Ethiopia’s demands for port access.
A mother with mouths to feed
Before the war, many African households spent more than half of their income on food and energy, and more than 80 percent in extreme cases, according to an article by Tobias Heidland and Ann-Marie Verhoeven published by Megatrends Africa, a research organization.
“These regions are disproportionately affected by the economic consequences compared to the rest of the world,” they wrote.
Zainab Usman, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy in Washington, said data suggested that Africa was not uniquely affected by the shocks of the war in Iran, but the war has added urgency to long-overdue conversations on domestic and regional energy security in Africa.
“Dependence on imports of essential commodities from regions of the world that might be unstable, that might be vulnerable to volatility is just not sustainable anymore,” she said.
Nurses working at public health facilities in Zimbabwe have been using the price increases linked to the war to highlight why they deserve raises they have long demanded.
Mitchel Londiwe, a nurse at Mpilo Central Hospital in the western city of Bulawayo, said she had been told that the cost of the driver who takes her two children to school will double to $160 a month when schools reopen from break in May.
Ms. Londiwe is 36 and earns $540 per month. She said she was considering sending her children to live with her mother in a rural area, where they would walk about five miles to school every day, to save on transportation costs.
The rising cost of food has also led them to change their nutrition habits, she said. They now usually eat bread for breakfast, corn meal with vegetables for dinner and no longer have meat because she cannot afford it, she said.
“Soon, we will look malnourished,” Ms. Londiwe said. “I’m afraid.”
Reporting was contributed by Jeffrey Moyo in Harare, Zimbabwe, Rabecca Lungu in Lusaka, Zambia and Saikou Jammeh and Ruth Maclean in Dakar, Senegal.
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14) Iranians Live With Pain and Powerlessness, Beneath a Smooth Veneer
After months of upheaval, many are attempting to get on with their lives while quietly grappling with grief, economic stress and a loss of hope.
By Yeganeh Torbati, April 30, 2026
An emotional goodbye on Iran’s border with Turkey before an Iranian family headed to Australia for work, not knowing when they would reunite with loved ones at home. Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times
On the surface, Iranian society appears to be functioning normally, at least for a country that weeks ago was under heavy bombardment.
Hip young people gather outside street cafes in Tehran, smoking and chatting with friends. Tickets to a high-profile rock concert in the city sold out in minutes. And people still travel outside Iran for leisure and for work.
That is all a veneer, many Iranians say, masking the painful and precarious conditions that they are living with. Four months of traumatic, world-shaking events — a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests followed by a devastating war — have dashed hopes for the future, and left large parts of society in grief, feeling powerless.
“People are living their lives,” said Sara, an Iranian woman in her 40s living in Turkey, who had traveled to Tehran in the winter and returned to Turkey in late April. But, she said, the apparent calm was misleading: “Everyone’s morale is terrible.”
Like most of the two dozen or so Iranians interviewed for this article, Sara declined to be fully named, fearing reprisals from the government. Others declined to be identified at all.
Sara was in Iran for some of the worst weeks of the war, and said that Iranians outside the country were more anxious about what was happening inside than those actually living there, who may be more resigned. “Everyone is hopeless, or some have hopes in something that is illusory,” she said.
For those opposed to the country’s Islamic authoritarian government, mass protests in January brought thrilling hopes of political change — only for that to curdle into grief, rage and shock as security forces killed thousands of demonstrators.
Since then, Iranians of all political persuasions have been affected by the destruction and death wrought by U.S.-Israeli airstrikes. Basic food items are increasingly difficult for even the middle classes to afford, and a continuing government-imposed internet shutdown has largely isolated the country from the outside world. Until very recently, Iranian airspace was closed to civilian flights.
And yet, people are also pursuing their passions and careers despite immense obstacles.
That was apparent from interviews at a land border crossing and train station in eastern Turkey in late April. A theater troupe came by bus, bound for Europe to rehearse a new play. A young woman with dyed magenta hair crossed the border to see a favorite band in Istanbul. And a man in his 30s came to Turkey to complete a critical step on the path to pursuing his education in Italy.
“I don’t know why Iranians are like this, but no matter what happens, even if there are high prices, still life goes on,” said Melika, 28, who was visiting Turkey with a friend and sister in late April for an exam. The three had just disembarked from a 23-hour train from Tehran to Van, in eastern Turkey, and they planned to continue on to Istanbul. “Iranians are very flexible — they adapt themselves,” she added.
During the war, she said, restaurants were packed, even as much of the economy came to a standstill. She speculated that people were choosing to enjoy the money they had, rather than bothering to save it for a car, house or other life goals.
“Now those things are out of reach for a large portion of society,” Melika said. “So they say, ‘Why should we be hard on ourselves? Let’s at least have a nice meal.’”
By contrast, Shahrzad, 57, who was boarding a train in Van to return to Iran, said she was choosing to save her money and cutting spending on unnecessary items, even though she considered herself well-off.
Shahrzad said that, during the war, bombs seemed to fall constantly — 20 to 30 a day, at all hours of the day and night. Still, she was sanguine: “We got used to it,” she said, as she chatted and joked with a man and woman waiting in line with her.
Her generation, which experienced the instabilities of the 1979 revolution and lived through the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, had learned over the decades to endure upheaval, she said.
Iran’s teenagers and 20-somethings, she said, had a different approach, with far less patience for the difficulties they were experiencing, and most were opposed to the government.
“Gen Z, nobody can handle them,” she said. “We are more peace-seeking. The young people are more radical.”
Several Iranians at the border said they felt like they were at the mercy of world powers and their own government, with no agency to determine events in their own lives.
One man, a day trader who had come to Turkey to use the internet for work before returning to Iran said that people seemed to have stagnated, following the news and waiting to see what happened. He himself had little hope that things in the country would change for the better.
“I think it’s all a game,” said Sara, the woman in her 40s, when asked about the cease-fire between the United States and Iran. “We’re just being played with.”
Kiana Hayeri contributed reporting.
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15) Some Black Southerners Say Voting Rights Ruling ‘Missed the Mark’
Veterans of the civil rights movement and others said the Supreme Court decision felt like a bleak end to decades of gains in Black representation in the region.
By Audra D. S. Burch and Emily Cochrane, April 30, 2026
Audra D.S. Burch reported from Hollywood, Fla., and Emily Cochrane from Nashville.
A commemoration of the 1965 voting rights march known as Bloody Sunday for the violence inflicted upon activists. “I just never in my wildest imagination ever dreamed that we would be, in 2026, where we are now, based on what happened in 1965,” said Dr. Leslie B. McLemore, 85. Rita Harper for The New York Times
Dr. Leslie B. McLemore remembers the fear that simmered in the air as he went door to door as a young college student working to register Black voters in rural Mississippi in the early 1960s. The threats. The gun brandished in his face by a patrol officer along a highway.
It made the celebration even more joyful as he joined other students crowding around a television when the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965. On Wednesday, he grappled with different emotions after the Supreme Court dealt it its latest blow.
“I just never in my wildest imagination ever dreamed that we would be, in 2026, where we are now, based on what happened in 1965,” said Dr. McLemore, 85, one of the few surviving veterans of the civil rights movement. “It’s a historic, sad day.”
Given the Supreme Court’s conservative majority and other rulings that had chipped away at the Voting Rights Act over the years, Wednesday’s decision did not entirely surprise voting rights groups or Black leaders across the South, where the landmark law has led states to create several majority-Black voting districts.
But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in writing for the majority, took some aback with his assertion that the nation had undergone “vast social change” since the law’s passage. He pointed in part to increased voter registration and turnout by minorities.
“Discrimination that occurred some time ago, as well as present-day disparities that are characterized as the ongoing ‘effects of societal discrimination,’ are entitled to much less weight,” he wrote.
The ruling was cheered by conservatives across the country, many of whom had objected to the law’s focus on race. The path forward, said Amir Hassan, a Black Republican running for Congress in Michigan, is for people to align themselves ideologically, rather than by “who has melanin and who doesn’t have melanin.”
“It’s upsetting, the fact that people think I want the same thing as another person just because of our skin tone,” said Mr. Hassan, who is running in a district where most voters are white.
Black Americans, especially in the South, have historically backed Democrats. So if the ruling leads G.O.P.-led state legislatures to eliminate majority-minority congressional districts, dividing those voters among Republican-safe districts, the political ripples will be significant.
For some Black Southerners, the Supreme Court’s reasoning amounted to a debatable assessment of racial progress.
“He can write those words,” said Dr. McLemore, who pledged to keep talking about the struggles that civil rights veterans had endured to secure passage of the Voting Rights Act. “But he has no idea and no appreciation for what Black people and what people of color have gone through in this country.”
The gains in Black representation across the country since the act passed have been particularly meaningful in the South.
As recently as 2024, Alabama and Louisiana each sent two Black representatives to Congress — the result of litigation over new congressional maps. At least one of those seats — in Louisiana’s Sixth Congressional District — is now in jeopardy, given that a majority of the Supreme Court found the new map to be an illegal racial gerrymander.
“I’m somewhat depressed about the ruling. No way is it better,” said Delores Suel, 77, who is Black and owns a child-care center in Jackson, Miss., part of the state’s lone majority-Black district. “The Supreme Court missed the mark.”
Elsewhere in Jackson, Tyra Dean, 55, who is Black and owns a taxi company, said that “discrimination still exists.”
“I feel what they are doing now will lead to more discrimination,” she continued.
The suggestion that the standing of Black voters in the South had improved enough to warrant changing the framework courts use to assess compliance with the Voting Rights Act rankled some Black elected Democrats.
“I want to be crystal clear — that is not the experience that most people of color have in the South, whether we’re talking about politics, education, housing, access to health care or the professional world,” said Raumesh Akbari, a Democratic state senator in Tennessee and the chamber’s minority leader.
For some national civil rights leaders who watched what they describe as the rise and fall of the Voting Rights Act over time, Wednesday’s decision felt like an abrupt end to decades of political progress.
“The majority opinion is illogical when racially polarized voting in the South is real; when the racial wealth gap, the educational achievement gap and health outcome gaps are real; when discrimination claims in employment are still rampant,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League.
Press Robinson, an activist in Baton Rouge, La., who was involved in challenging past congressional maps, said he feared the ruling could have ramifications not just for the makeup of Congress, but for all levels of government.
“Judges, school board members, councilmen — doesn’t matter, it will affect them all,” he told reporters in a news conference on Wednesday.
Mr. Robinson, who grew up in South Carolina during segregation, predicted that the Republicans who control the government in Louisiana — and in nearly every other Southern state — would move aggressively to reshape the political landscape from the local level on up, wiping out Black representation.
“They are determined to see to it that we don’t have a voice at all,” he said.
Reporting was contributed by Michelle Baruchman, Jimmie E. Gates, Clyde McGrady, Bryant K. Oden and Rick Rojas.
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16) Transgender Idaho Residents Sue After State Criminalizes Use of Bathrooms
The lawsuit seeks to block a state bathroom law that is the nation’s most restrictive, with penalties that could include a five-year prison sentence.
By Amy Harmon, April 30, 2026
The law passed both chambers of the Republican-dominated Idaho Legislature last month, largely along party lines. Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Six transgender Idaho residents asked a federal judge on Thursday to strike down a new state law that makes it a crime for people to use the bathrooms in public buildings and private businesses that do not match their sex at birth.
Violating the law would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison. A second offense within five years would be a felony, carrying up to a five-year prison sentence. Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal filed the suit in federal court in Boise, where several of the plaintiffs live. The plaintiffs are also represented by attorneys at Munger, Tolles & Olson and Alturas Law Group.
After learning that Idaho lawmakers had approved the legislation last month, Diego Fable, 37, a transgender Boise resident, asked his employer if he could keep his job should he move to Colorado. Mr. Fable, who has a full beard and has been using bathrooms designated for men since he transitioned six years ago, said the law made everyday life outside his own home seem impossible.
“Do I comply and use the women’s restroom and risk drama?” Mr. Fable said. “Do I drive all the way home” to a toilet, he asked, “and then come back?”
“How do I navigate going skiing or going birding out in the park?” he continued. “How do I navigate playing Dungeons and Dragons for six hours? The safest route feels really isolating, which is to just stay home.’’
Before the passage of the new law, 21 states, including Idaho, already restricted transgender people from accessing bathrooms that align with their gender identity in public schools and, in many cases, government-owned buildings and public places like parks or airports, according to a database maintained by the Movement Advancement Project, a research organization that tracks state-level legislation on L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
Idaho’s new law is seen as the most restrictive in the nation. In addition to publicly-owned properties, it applies to privately-owned settings such as restaurants, retail stores, business offices, or game stores that host Dungeons and Dragons tournaments. Unlike other state laws that apply only to multi-user restrooms, Idaho’s law covers even single-user bathrooms designated for male or female occupants. Idaho is also the only state where violations could lead to a felony charge.
The law passed both chambers of the Republican-dominated Idaho Legislature largely along party lines. Its supporters said the ban was necessary to protect the privacy, safety and dignity of women and girls, as well as for consistency in the way the state defines who falls into the categories “men” and “women.”
“This bill protects Idaho’s cultural decency,” said Senator Josh Kohl, a Republican from Twin Falls.
But in an interview, plaintiffs in the suit spoke of the complexity of compliance. Zoey Wagner, 30, a transgender woman who uses female-designated bathrooms, said she feared harassment should she use one designated for men. Amelia Milette, 50, who is transgender and was born and raised in Idaho, said her job requires her to visit a range of offices on different days. The new law would require her to plan a route somehow that would include gender-neutral bathrooms. Mr. Fable’s employer told him that to work out of state he would need to be reclassified as a contractor, which will affect his health insurance and other employee benefits.
In the complaint, lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that the law fails the constitutional requirement that the state have a rational basis to enact it. They cite the testimony of the Idaho Fraternal Order of Police that existing Idaho laws, such as criminal trespass statutes, already addresse inappropriate or disruptive behavior in restrooms.
“Transgender people are being targeted in the state of Idaho,’’ said Barbara Schwabauer, senior staff attorney for the A.C.L.U.’s L.G.B.T.Q. and H.I.V. Rights Project. “That is the only explanation for a law that has this vast of a penalty and sweeps this broadly.’’
The plaintiffs claim that the law violates their guarantee of equal protection and their due process right to avoid disclosing private information. Because of its penalties, they argue, the law needs to clear a high bar for clarity, and that the language that allows access to single-user facilities if an individual is in “dire need” or if theyare the only ones “reasonably available” render the law unconstitutionally vague.
The law is set to go into effect on July 1. The plaintiffs have requested a preliminary injunction to stop the state from enforcing it while the case is being decided. They are not challenging the portion of the law that covers locker rooms and showers. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Idaho could bar transgender students from using locker rooms and changing areas that aligned with their gender identity, citing the state’s interest in not exposing students to “the unclothed bodies of students of the opposite sex.”
But the appeals court has not ruled on the challenge to the bathroom portion of that law. Challenges to laws regulating the use of bathrooms by transgender people in Kansas, South Carolina and Oklahoma are also making their way through the courts.
Seamus Hughes and Anna Griffin contributed reporting.
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17) Israel Intercepts Aid Flotilla Heading to Breach Naval Blockade of Gaza
Activists said the Israeli military boarded and disabled boats carrying humanitarian assistance to the territory in international waters near Greece.
By Isabel Kershner, Lynsey Chutel and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, April 30, 2026
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, Lynsey Chutel from London and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel.
Boats carrying activists and humanitarian aid bound for Gaza, as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, in Barcelona, Spain, this month. Joan Mateu Parra/Associated Press
The Israeli military intercepted a flotilla of boats challenging the country’s naval blockade of Gaza in international waters near Greece, Israeli officials and the activist group behind the mission said on Thursday.
The Global Sumud Flotilla, the protest group in charge of the boats, has repeatedly tried to breach Israel’s decades-old naval blockade of Gaza and deliver aid.
The group stepped up its activity after Israel imposed severe restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza following a deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023, which ignited a devastating two-year war in the coastal enclave.
On Thursday, the Israeli navy boarded multiple boats in the flotilla of more than 80 vessels, which was sailing from Barcelona to Gaza, the group said in a statement.
“After smashing engines and destroying navigation arrays, the military retreated intentionally leaving hundreds of civilians stranded on powerless, broken vessels directly in the path of a massive approaching storm,” it said on social media.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to the activists’ claims that their boats had been disabled.
The group also blamed the Israeli military for jamming communications on multiple vessels, “severing their ability to coordinate or signal for help.”
The Israeli foreign ministry described the flotilla as “a PR stunt” and “a provocation without humanitarian aid” in a statement on social media. It referred to the mission mockingly as “the condom flotilla,” and said it found contraceptives and drugs aboard at least one of the vessels.
The group said it was delivering “large-scale humanitarian aid, including food, baby formula, school supplies, and medicine” and has not addressed the Israeli claim regarding contraceptives and drugs. The group also said it wanted to create a “civilian-operated maritime route to Gaza to ensure unimpeded access to food, medicine, and essential supplies,” and to assert Palestinian sovereignty over Gaza’s waters.
In the past, the Israeli authorities have said that flotillas intercepted on their way to Gaza were found to be carrying only limited amounts of aid.
The Israeli foreign ministry said on Thursday that about 175 activists from more than 20 boats had been detained at sea and were being brought to Israel.
The ministry also released a video that showed people it said were activists playing games and doing cartwheels on the deck of a ship, with the caption: “The activists enjoying themselves aboard Israeli vessels.”
At least 20 Turkish nationals were among those detained, according to news reports.The Turkish government said Israel had violated “humanitarian principles and international law.”
“This act of aggression further represents a breach of the principle of freedom of navigation on the high seas,” the Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement.
The Israeli foreign ministry said Israel was “committed to the freedom of navigation.”
“Due to the large numbers of vessels participating in the flotilla and the risk of escalation, and the need to prevent the breach of a lawful blockade, an early action was required in accordance with international law,” it said in a statement. “The operation was carried out in international waters peacefully and without any casualties,” it added.
A fragile cease-fire took effect in Gaza in October. The Israeli military controls about half of the territory and Hamas controls the rest of the enclave, including the area along the coast. Hamas has said it is prepared to relinquish the administration of the territory but has resisted Israeli calls to give up its weapons, stalling international plans for reconstruction.
Israeli restrictions on aid have eased over the past six months. In a report this month, the United Nations office that coordinates humanitarian affairs in Gaza and the West Bank said that although major impediments persist, aid entry into Gaza had “surged considerably” between April 14 and 20, compared with the previous week. It partly attributed the increase to the reopening of an additional crossing for goods to enter along Gaza’s northern boundary with Israel.
Israel imposed a maritime blockade on Gaza in January 2009 during a military offensive against Hamas, the Islamic militant group that seized control of Gaza in 2007 after ousting the Western-backed Palestinian Authority a year after winning legislative elections.
Israel has justified the blockade on security grounds, saying it is needed to prevent weapons from being smuggled into Gaza and militants from moving freely.
An Israeli government commission that examined a deadly raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza in 2010 argued that Israel had acted in accordance with international law when its military enforced the naval blockade by intercepting ships in international waters.
The United Nations described Israel’s naval blockade in a 2011 report as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea. Other U.N. reports, however, have criticized the restrictions as a form of collective punishment.
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