Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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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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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) As a Doctor, I Can Understand the Allure of ChatGPT
By Helen Ouyang, May 24, 2026
Dr. Ouyang is an emergency physician and an associate professor at Columbia.
María Medem
Several months ago, I got the results back from some routine blood tests, and let’s just say several numbers were a tad too high. My doctor advised “continued diet and exercise” and signed off on the results.
For the past couple of years, though, my numbers had been inching up, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t seem to do much about them. I requested a phone call from my doctor — surely, she had better advice than what she wrote — but she messaged back that if I wanted to discuss my results, I had to set up another appointment.
So, I did what everyone does in this day and age: I turned to artificial intelligence. With low expectations, I typed my lab results into ChatGPT.
As both a physician and a patient, I found the experience startling. Not because ChatGPT dazzled me with its scientific knowledge, but because it behaved the way I wish modern medicine, and its practitioners, still would.
I had always assumed the “human side” of medicine was the part A.I. couldn’t touch. Sure, I know doctors are turning to A.I. to help them break bad news, since patients seem to find messages crafted by bots more empathetic than those written by doctors. But, in practice, what I thought really mattered was that a person was delivering that care.
The chatbot didn’t just spit back generic advice. It asked questions about my daily life and figured out what I could realistically change. It suggested a short walk immediately after eating, something I’d never taken seriously. When I inquired about doing a longer activity, it told me that would likely offer only marginal benefit. Its recommendations were manageable and easy to follow.
When I sheepishly asked a silly question — if eating my vitamin gummies after my post-meal walks would raise my blood sugar — it asked me to upload the link to the specific product, and it did a close analysis of its ingredients. (No, it would not.)
I felt comfortable telling it that there was no way I was taking some of its suggestions — consuming Metamucil drinks or another psyllium husk powder concoction, no thank you — and it responded with understanding and offered me alternatives. (No offense taken.)
Of course, as I doctor, I know when to question the chatbot and when to ignore it. Many other patients don’t.
But I could also ask the same question over and over, and the chatbot never seemed annoyed or judgmental. Most important, it kept cheering me on — precisely the kind of steady, relational care we keep insisting only humans can provide. Recently, I met a patient living with a highly curable form of cancer. Every week, he would ask a chatbot if his cancer could be cured. He already knew the answer — he just longed for regular reassurance.
As a doctor, I was a little embarrassed to be using ChatGPT. But every interaction with, say, OpenEvidence, a professional medical A.I. tool, felt cold and sterile. It referred to me as if I were a case report, not a person with preferences and habits. I realized what was winning me over about ChatGPT wasn’t its ability to sift through the latest studies, or diagnose my ailments; but its unwavering messages of empathy and encouragement, and its endless willingness to listen and its patience. It’s not human, but it can model some traits we value most in human interaction.
I followed ChatGPT’s advice, and when my blood work improved, ChatGPT affirmed my progress and urged me to keep going. I doubt I would have made those changes — much less stuck with them — without that sustained back-and-forth. I certainly hadn’t before.
It’s a grim fact of American medicine today that doctors can’t come close to a chatbot’s availability. And when the health care system can’t reliably offer time, attentiveness and compassion, patients will go searching for them somewhere else, even from a machine we assumed could never feel human. A.I. may not replace doctors, but it will change what patients expect from us. Doctors need to adapt.
Before I used a chatbot for my own health concerns, the thought of telling a patient to “ask ChatGPT” was inconceivable — or at least something I considered terrible care. Now I’m not so sure. In certain situations, A.I. offers something patients clearly need and medicine has trouble fulfilling.
The reality is, many patients are already consulting A.I. Doctors can keep fearing or condemning those interactions, or they can figure out how to support people using A.I. tools for their health care — cautiously, with clear guardrails. I would never tell patients to ask ChatGPT or Claude for a diagnosis, but perhaps I would suggest they use it to make sense of a new condition or keep up with routine screenings — or translate “diet and exercise” into steps that actually fit into their lives, as I did. At the same time, we need safeguards built into these systems to protect people from real harm from dangerous advice.
My experience with the chatbot has already shifted how I interact with patients in the E.R., with only minutes to piece together fragments of their circumstances. When a patient asks the same question repeatedly, I try to listen for what’s behind it. Maybe she’s not after more medical facts.
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2) New York’s Rape Laws Leave Out Many Victims Who Drank Willingly
Prosecutors say accusers who chose to drink or get high have a “very high burden” of proving they were physically helpless and unable to consent. There is a push to change the law.
By Maria Cramer and Olivia Bensimon, May 24, 2026
Leslie Hunt said she was raped in October 2015 when she went out with a co-worker for drinks. She woke up in a Brooklyn hospital. Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times
A young woman testified that she was out with two male friends when they decided to drink at the home of one of the men.
She became ill and one of the men helped carry her to a bed. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, she testified that both men and a third man who came into the room took turns having sex with her as she murmured, “I just want to go home.”
Prosecutors in Westchester County argued it was clear that the woman had not consented and that she had been raped. Richard Ferrante, a lawyer for one of the men, said his client believed “there was nothing done without consent.” But jurors could not agree on a verdict, resulting in a mistrial. The men pleaded guilty to lesser charges that helped them avoid prison.
Prosecutors say cases like this might have turned out differently under a bill pending in the New York Legislature that would change the state’s rape law, which has made it difficult to charge people with rape if the accuser chose to become intoxicated.
The current law excludes people who were voluntarily intoxicated from claiming they were “mentally incapacitated” during an assault and therefore unable to consent, according to prosecutors. Defense attorneys argue someone could still say they were “physically helpless,” meaning they were either unconscious or physically unable to communicate consent at the time of the act.
But that definition leaves out people who were semiconscious, slurring their words, or unable to stand or walk steadily before they were assaulted, according to those that back the new bill.”
A significant number of victims who were clearly intoxicated cannot meet the “very high burden” of proving physical helplessness, said Joe Muroff, chief of the Special Victims Unit at the Bronx district attorney’s office.
If the bill passed, those victims “would be able to seek their day in court,” he said.
With at least 90 sponsors, the bill has bipartisan support from more than half of the State Assembly. But with less than two weeks before the session ends on June 4, the bill appears doomed to die without even a vote.
The first version of the bill was introduced in 2019 by Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, a Democrat representing the Bronx, but it has never been brought to the floor for a vote.
Some supporters have blamed the Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, a Democrat representing the Bronx whose role is to bring bills for a vote. Last month, a dozen people, including sexual assault survivors and their advocates, protested outside Mr. Heastie’s office in the Bronx, calling on him to support the bill.
Kerri Biché, a spokeswoman for Mr. Heastie, declined to state his position on the bill. But she said that generally the speaker wants to have the support of 76 Democrats before bringing a bill to the floor. There are 103 Democrats and 47 Republicans in the Assembly.
“There’s not yet sufficient support to bring the measure to the floor,” Ms. Biché said. “We are continuing to discuss the bill with our majority members.”
Under the proposed legislation, third-degree rape could be charged in cases where a person who was under the influence of drugs or alcohol and was unable to control or understand their behavior was assaulted by someone who should have “reasonably” understood the condition of the victim.
Other states like California and Virginia already have similar laws.
Defense lawyers have pushed back hard on the legislation, saying it would make it easier for prosecutors to charge people who had sex with someone they believed had given consent and later claimed they were too intoxicated to know what they were doing.
Yung-Mi Lee, a public defender and past president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, described the legislation as “very paternalistic.”
“To just say anyone who is that drunk is incapable of saying ‘no’ takes away ownership and a woman’s ability to say, ‘Well, I wanted to have sex with that person even though I wasn’t able to stand steadily,’” Ms. Lee said.
If the bill were passed into law, she said, it could capture “a lot of innocent conduct” and “be weaponized against a lot of innocent people when the so-called victim regrets having sex with the other person.”
The judge in the Westchester County case, Susan Cacace, is now the county’s district attorney.
“When you’re intoxicated, it’s difficult to formulate the words to express anything,” she said. “Victims should be protected even if they’re out for a good night and want to drink. It doesn’t make it right for them to be victimized.”
Mr. Dinowitz said it’s a “binary issue.”
“Either you’re on the side of the survivors or you’re on the side of the rapists,” he said. “For once, we should be able to put ourselves in the shoes of people who have endured untold horror and be on their side.”
Darcel Clark, the Bronx district attorney, said the proposed law would not be used to prosecute drunken consensual sex.
The burden of proof will remain high, and prosecutors will need to call witnesses or pull video surveillance to prove that a person was incapacitated, she said.
Jane Manning, a former prosecutor and advocate for rape survivors, said the legislation targets cases “where a person is visibly, severely incapacitated, and a predator takes advantage of that incapacitation.”
Opponents still have concerns.
“I, of course, want survivors to get justice,” said Assemblywoman Latrice M. Walker, a Democrat whose district includes the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. “I am also cautious about the creation of new laws and our duty to preserve due process protections.”
Mark Bederow, a lawyer who has represented defendants accused of sexual assault, said the current law is “not a license to say that somebody is not mentally incapacitated under the law, therefore they can’t be raped.”
But advocates say the current need to show physical helplessness is insufficient.
They point to the case of Leslie Hunt, who in October 2015 went out with a co-worker for drinks and woke up in a Brooklyn hospital. There, she said, a nurse told her that she had been found inside a hotel, climbing on furniture. When emergency workers came to help her, she fought with them, kicking and screaming.
A rape kit found semen on her body and she had bruises on her arms. But, in part because of errors the detectives made in the investigation, she was unable to prove she had been drugged.
And because of her conduct inside the hotel, Ms. Hunt said she did not appear “physically helpless.”
“It’s incredibly unjust,” said Ms. Hunt, now 42 and living in California. “Like I did something wrong because I chose to drink.”
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3) To Get the Strait Open, Trump Had to Leave the Hardest Issues for Later
President Trump is hailing the agreement with Iran as groundbreaking, even as he admits it “isn’t even fully negotiated.” But the nuclear stockpile, enrichment and missiles have not been discussed.
By David E. Sanger and Tyler Pager, Published May 24, 2026, Updated May 25, 2026
David E. Sanger has covered the Iranian nuclear program for two decades. Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent who reported from Washington.
The Strait of Hormuz has been a focal point since the start of the conflict. Reuters
The temporary agreement that the Trump administration announced with Iran this weekend isn’t a peace deal. It isn’t a nuclear deal. It isn’t a missile deal.
Those may yet come — perhaps in a few months, though a senior United States official said there was no agreed time limit for nuclear talks, or perhaps far longer if the history of negotiations with Iran holds. But for now, Mr. Trump has emerged with an arrangement that could extend a cease-fire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, relieving the greatest energy disruption in modern times.
The best news from this at-the-brink negotiation between Washington and Tehran, mediated by a hard-line Pakistani general, is that a conflict that easily could have spun further out of control appears to be de-escalating. Assuming both President Trump and Iran’s supreme leader, in hiding to avoid assassination attempts, approve the final wording, the choke point through which a quarter of the world’s oil passes should reopen.
That is no small thing at a time when Republicans feared they would be headed into the November midterm elections with gasoline hovering around $4.50 a gallon and a president pursuing a war most Americans tell pollsters they oppose. For the Iranians, the opening comes just as their battered economy appeared about to crack, from the loss of most of their oil revenue.
But for a president who had declared only 11 weeks ago that “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” the agreement he announced this weekend was far short of that. And his tone was markedly different.
“The negotiations are proceeding in an orderly and constructive manner, and I have informed my representatives not to rush into a deal in that time is on our side,” he wrote on social media.
Until the supreme leader and other Iranian officials certify the understanding “the Blockade will remain in full force and effect,” he wrote.
He added: “There can be no mistakes! Our relationship with Iran is becoming a much more professional and productive one.”
Yet Mr. Trump essentially gave into the Iranian demand to kick the hardest issues down the road — while apparently succeeding in forcing the Iranians to end, at least temporarily, their stranglehold on one of the world’s most vital waterways.
In the end, each side had little choice but to give ground. They chose the least-bad of what each saw as bad options. But all that does is begin to restore the status quo to roughly where it was on Feb. 28, when Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel launched a war to finally bring Iran’s nuclear and missile programs to an end.
So far, they have failed to achieve those goals: Iran is still in possession of more than 11 tons of nuclear fuel, including 970 pounds that is close to bomb grade — though it is buried under rubble, deep underground. An early plan to essentially stage a coup, overthrowing the government, placing a former Iranian hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, into power, never materialized.
If the strait does reopen, Mr. Trump’s aides say they are planning to enter a second phase to get back to a serious negotiation with the Iranians on the issues that triggered the war. A senior administration official, who declined to be named, told reporters on Sunday that the Iranians had already generally agreed to turn over their 60-percent enriched uranium — the stockpile that could be converted to a dozen or so bombs in relatively short order.
But the Iranians have said nothing about surrendering that fuel, which along with its power to shut off traffic in the strait is their best leverage. The U.S. official also conceded the exact mechanism by which Iran would dispose of their highly enriched uranium remains unresolved as does whether Iran, at the end of the negotiation, will ship out all of the additional uranium in its possession, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The United States also said the Iranians had agreed, verbally, to some kind of suspension of enrichment of new nuclear fuel. But Mr. Trump himself told reporters nine days ago on Air Force One that Tehran’s leaders had backed away from a commitment to suspend that activity for 20 years, and it is unclear where they are on the issue now.
And Iran has so far refused to even discuss limits on the size and range of their missiles which the United States had said it would insist upon. That is a critical issue to the Israelis, who are within reach of many of Iran’s ballistic missiles.
Despite the confidence from the United States that all those issues would be resolved, it seemed possible that the negotiations and fragile cease-fire could collapse at any point. The U.S. official briefing reporters on Sunday repeatedly acknowledged they could not predict what Iran would ultimately agree to, or even if the supreme leader would formally sign off.
But the official said the reopening of the strait, which would not include any Iranian tolls, would remove the economic pressure, reassure the markets and create space to address the nuclear issues. The official did not say how the United States would deal with Iran’s claim over the past three months that it now has sovereignty over the strait, which had been traversed as international waters.
But the official did say that the agreement with the Trump administration amounted to a “walk-back” by the Iranians, because they will not be charging tolls.
Mr. Trump only added to the doubts on Sunday afternoon, when he declared on social media that “If I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama,” in 2015, which curtailed Iran’s nuclear activity, but did not eliminate it.
“Our deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet,” he acknowledged. “So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about.”
Among the “losers" were prominent members of Mr. Trump’s own party. Republican Iran hawks said he had folded to pressure, and failed to finish the job. Among the harshest critics was Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who had warned that “everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught!”
Mike Pompeo, Mr. Trump’s first-term C.I.A. director and then his Secretary of State, was equally dismissive, leading Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, to declare on social media that Mr. Pompeo “should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals.”
Longtime negotiators who had opposed the attacks also had their doubts.
“This is what happens when a poorly conceived war of choice turns into a highly flawed ‘peace’ of necessity,” Aaron David Miller, a former Mideast negotiator, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said on Sunday.
“Original, unrealizable war aims abandoned,” he said, “and now little leverage to secure what really matters — restraining Iran’s nuclear capacity and permanently opened straits.”
Until a few days ago, the Trump administration was insisting it would not enter into any accord that did not deal with the hardest issue upfront: the nuclear program. But administration officials relented — in part because they needed to get the strait open and in part because they have come to recognize the complexity of negotiating on Iran’s vast nuclear complex, a task that took the Obama administration nearly two years and resulted in a 160-page agreement.
“You can’t do a nuclear thing in 72 hours on the back of a napkin,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview in New Delhi, where he was on a diplomatic mission. “The straits have to be immediately reopened, and then we will enter, under agreed-to parameters, into very serious talks about enrichment, about the highly enriched uranium and about their pledge to never have nuclear weapons.”
When pressed on why Mr. Trump appeared to change course this time, the U.S. official said Iran was making significant accommodations, but the toughest decisions still lay ahead.
Two remaining mysteries are how the United States will ultimately deal with Iranian demands to unfreeze billions of dollars of frozen Iranian funds, and lift years of sanctions placed on Iran to prevent it from selling oil or buying goods and technology.
The U.S. official said those issues — among the most contentious for the cash-strapped Iranian government — had not even been addressed yet, though he held open the possibility that those could be part of a trade. “No dust, no dollars,” the official said, a reference to Mr. Trump’s repeated references to “nuclear dust,” his way of talking about the highly enriched uranium that is largely at the nuclear site at Isfahan that the United States bombed last June.
Mr. Trump has suggested he would never give Iran back its cash, comparing himself to President Barack Obama, who returned $1.7 billion that Iran had paid for weapons in the 1970s that were never delivered.
Mr. Obama “gave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon,” Mr. Trump wrote Sunday on social media. “Our deal is the exact opposite.” But on those issues, there is no deal yet, at Mr. Trump himself acknowledged.
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4) Even After a Strait of Hormuz Deal, Moving 1,500 Ships Won’t Be Easy
An agreement to reopen the waterway would be followed by a complicated process of navigating a backlog of vessels stranded for nearly three months.
By Jenny Gross, Reporting from London, May 25, 2026
Companies will need to know how their ships will be prioritized if passage through the Strait of Hormuz is restored. Credit...Reuters
When the Strait of Hormuz finally reopens, shipping companies will need to know which oil tankers get to start moving first, and who to ask for the go-ahead. Vessels will need guidance on routes. And there’s the question of the potential threat of mines in the strait.
The United States and Iran are moving closer to securing a deal to reopen the strait, and captains aboard the roughly 1,500 ships that have been stranded in the Persian Gulf for nearly three months are getting ready.
But a lot has to happen before they can start moving through the narrow and vital waterway, which carried one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas before the Iran war.
Even if a deal is finalized, the prewar status quo, when upward of 130 ships transited the strait each day, would be perhaps weeks or even months away. That is also one reason that energy prices, which have climbed in the United States and around the world, are not expected to fall fast.
Before ships can begin leaving the strait, which is 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest, companies will need to know how their ships will be prioritized, said Jakob P. Larsen, the chief safety and security officer of the Baltic and International Maritime Council, which represents companies in the maritime sector. Ideally, he added, vessels would be asked to follow a speed limit to minimize the risk of ships colliding or grounding in shallow water.
“We will need to know which route to take, and then, of course, what kind of coordination or permits or whatever would need to be obtained with which authorities,” Mr. Larsen said.
The potential for ships to strike sea mines that Iran is believed to have planted in the strait is a peril. British military officials have said Iran’s mines include ones that sit on the seabed and send gas bubbles to the surface, causing serious damage to a ship’s hull.
Navies including those of the United States, Britain, France and Germany would need several weeks to deploy minesweepers, the International Energy Agency said in a report this month. This risk is likely to keep maritime insurance rates high.
Iran has threatened to exercise control of the strait and recently established a regulatory agency to run operations there.
Ships that have been maintained by skeleton crews of seafarers — about 20,000 in all — have to be restarted.
Drifting in the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, vessels have accumulated barnacles, sea creatures and algae that can impede navigation.
Hapag-Lloyd, the fifth-largest container shipping group in the world, has been able to get one vessel out since the lockdown began. That ship required a lot of cleaning, Rolf Habben Jansen, the chief executive, said recently on a company podcast.
“We also noticed that once we got her out that the maximum speed she could still achieve was significantly less than normal,” he said.
Lasse Kristoffersen, the chief executive of Wallenius Wilhelmsen, a car shipping and logistics giant with one vessel stranded in the Persian Gulf, said it would take at least 30 to 45 days until shipping in the region returned to normal — if everything went as planned.
The situation would stabilize only when shipping companies felt comfortable moving their stranded ships out of the Persian Gulf and also sending them into the region to load cargo.
Companies will need to determine that their ships will be safe from further conflict. The Houthis, an Iranian-backed militant group that controls much of Yemen, began launching drones and missiles at Israel in 2023, shortly after the onset of the Gaza war. They also attacked ships in the Red Sea, which leads to the Suez Canal, another vital maritime corridor.
The Red Sea is subject to fewer attacks these days, but many shipping companies are still avoiding it. “The fear of that possibly happening is enough for us not to trade,” Mr. Kristoffersen said.
Dimitris Ampatzidis, a risk manager at Kpler, a maritime data firm, said that even if an orderly procedure for vessels to transit can be set up, traffic would probably recover to only 40 or 50 percent of normal levels over three to four weeks.
“The key question for shipping markets is what comes next: a managed reopening, escorted transit system, restricted passage, or a genuine return to normal operations,” he said. He believes the most likely scenario is that vessels will be able to move through the strait, but with constraints. They will have limited routes, higher costs to be insured against the risk of war and longer waiting times, he said.
For now, some in the shipping industry are skeptical about the prospects of a deal to reopen the strait.
“It remains to be seen when it’s actually going to get signed and done and dusted,” said Ami Daniel, the chief executive of Windward, a maritime intelligence firm, noting the differences between what U.S. officials and Iranian officials are saying. And companies may be wary if President Trump declares that the strait has opened, he said, saying that had happened twice before.
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5) In City at Center of Ebola Crisis, ‘the Virus Is Far Ahead of Us’
The deadly virus has spread alarmingly in Congo for months. Only now is the response taking shape.
By Declan Walsh, Photographs by Arlette Bashizi, Published May 24, 2026, Updated May 25, 2026
Disinfecting the public market on Saturday in Bunia, in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeast, as part of the response to the Ebola virus’s resurgence.
Since an Ebola outbreak was declared in Bunia, a bustling city in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, global alarms have gone off. Borders have slammed shut, flights have been diverted as far as the United States and the Congolese World Cup team is currently in quarantine in Belgium.
Yet here in Bunia, at the heart of the crisis, the usual signs of an organized response — large medical tents, medics in sealed white suits and goggles and patients lying in strict isolation — are not yet in place.
Instead, the incipient aid effort is only getting set up. Outside Bunia’s main hospital on Saturday, workers hammered nails and pushed up tents a few yards from the main door, in a frantic scramble to erect a handful of isolation wards where patients can be triaged, isolated and treated.
“The virus is far ahead of us,” said Ahmed Mahat, a manager with International Medical Corps, which is building two of the isolation wards. “And it’s spreading fast.”
The world is playing catch-up in Congo. Caught flat-footed by an outbreak that was discovered disastrously late — perhaps two months after it started — the system of international response is struggling onto its feet.
Almost nothing was in place when the first patient was confirmed with the rare Bundibugyo species of the virus on May 15. Shortly after, Macky Mbavugha, a field manager with the International Rescue Committee, contacted the local health office to see if it had stocks of protective equipment. He found empty shelves.
“Zero,” he said. “Everyone was totally unprepared.”
President Trump’s aid cuts exacerbated the crisis, he added. If American funding for Congo had not been slashed last year, “maybe the alert would have sounded earlier,” Mr. Mbavugha said, echoing a widely held assessment in the aid community.
And when larger aid groups sought out local organizations to boost the Ebola response, many were gone, having closed after funding dried up last year, he said.
Not only was the virus a rare species — with no cure or vaccine, and few tests for it available in the field — it enjoyed a spectacular head start over the aid workers who were trying to contain it. Only a week ago, the World Health Organization estimated that 246 people had contracted the virus, mostly in the area around Bunia and a nearby district.
By Sunday that figure was over 900, Congolese authorities said, and 175 others had died, according to the W.H.O.— an acceleration at such an early stage of an outbreak that experts said was terrifying. Just 10 days since the Ebola outbreak was declared, it is already the third largest on record.
Even now, just about everything is in short supply. Congolese health workers treating patients or burying the dead lack basic protective equipment. Supplies of hand sanitizer have run out in the pharmacies of Bunia. And, crucially, only a trickle of tests are being processed every day at the city’s government lab.
Aid officials briefed on the lab say that it processes about 40 tests most days, and one day managed just 20 because officials ran out of fuel for the generator that powers it.
Most of all, aid workers are short on time. Running so far behind the virus, intervention has become less about vanquishing Ebola than about simply trying to slow its steamroller advance across the region. Although the outbreak is concentrated in Ituri, the war-torn province of which Bunia is the capital, it has also been detected in two other provinces as well as in neighboring Uganda.
An American official, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive assessments, said officials deem it highly likely that the virus has also spread into South Sudan.
Ebola is a highly contagious disease that spreads through bodily fluids. A family of fruit bats is believed to be the natural host of the viruses that cause Ebola. There have been just two other known outbreaks of the Bundibugyo species, which has a fatality rate of about 40 percent.
This is Congo’s 17th outbreak of Ebola, more than any other country since the disease was discovered here in 1976. For Bunia, a lush city on the edge of a sprawling rainforest, the outbreak is the latest of many calamities.
I landed here on Friday aboard a plane of United Nations peacekeepers, mostly from South Asia. They are part of a longstanding effort to impose peace on an area where ethnic rivalries and rich resources — gold, timber and coffee — have brought decades of conflict.
Rival militias overran Bunia in the early 2000s, battling for control in fighting that by 2003 became so intense that France deployed military troops to impose a peace.
Now the government is back in Bunia, but the surrounding countryside is controlled by a plethora of armed groups formed mostly along ethnic lines, although one particularly vicious outfit has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
Those ethnic tensions are likely also to shape the response to Ebola. Two isolation wards are planned for the city — one each for neighborhoods dominated by Hemas and Lendus, the dominant, rival ethnic groups.
Years of conflict have also frayed communities where conspiracy theories about Ebola hold particularly strong. As aid workers rush to build isolation wards, they are confronting angry mobs who accuse them of being somehow responsible for the virus.
In recent days, furious crowds burned down one isolation ward in Rwampara, just outside Bunia, and a second one in Mongbwalu, a small mining town to the north of the city that experts say is the likely epicenter of the outbreak.
Funerals are a particular flashpoint. In rural areas, people often demand to bury the dead in the traditional custom, which involves much touching of the corpse, even though that is also a perfect way to spread the disease.
In Bunia, many are just coming to terms with the growing epidemic. Some residents appeared to take it lightly — splashing about in public pools in recent days, or meeting with friends at saunas, a popular entertainment.
But increasingly, worry is taking hold. On Friday night, Joel Mugisa, a 30-year-old doctor, traipsed between pharmacies in search of hand sanitizer. Every shop was sold out.
He said he wasn’t panicking just yet, but worried about other people, and the widespread penchant for conspiracy theories. “People don’t take Ebola seriously,” he said, before vanishing into the night. “That’s the main problem.”
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6) The Medical System Abandons Women When They Are Most Vulnerable
By Sejal Hathi, May 25, 2026
Dr. Hathi is a new mother, a physician and the director of the Oregon Health Authority.
Zack Nathanson
A pregnant woman in America receives more sustained medical attention than at almost any other point in her life. Her blood is drawn, her glucose monitored, her weight and blood pressure tracked. She sees a doctor every four weeks, then every two, then every week.
Then she has the baby — and the system moves on.
I know how quickly care recedes because I am living it. One year after my daughter’s birth, I still begin most days in a body I no longer fully recognize. I sustained a third-degree tear during delivery and spent months dealing with urinary incontinence. Pregnancy separated my abdominal muscles, and their stubborn refusal to reknit rendered even the most ordinary movement, like lifting my daughter from her crib, a willful act.
I had nowhere obvious to turn. My obstetric specialist discharged me at six weeks after delivery, and the general OB clinic was stretched so thin it had stopped scheduling new postpartum patients. My primary care physician said postpartum recovery was outside her scope. So I assembled my own care: researching my symptoms, calling pelvic floor therapists, coordinating referrals.
I am a physician who runs her state’s health agency. I had good insurance, paid leave and a fluency with institutions most new mothers should never need. What I did not have was a single provider who could serve as a quarterback for my care.
The dominant obstetric care model treats postpartum recovery as a brief coda to pregnancy: a short follow-up interval, punctuated by a three- to six-week clinic visit. Our reimbursement system reinforces that assumption, bundling prenatal care, delivery and immediate postpartum care into a single global fee, even as recovery extends months longer.
Beginning next year, the American Medical Association will replace that global fee with new codes that allow providers to bill for each piece of care separately. But fragmenting the bill may deepen the underlying problem: Beyond the first few weeks after delivery, no single clinician owns accountability for the mother’s recovery and well-being. Her baby will see a pediatrician seven or more times in the first year of life. Whether the mother sees a doctor will depend largely on whether something goes wrong
That gap in care would matter in any era. It is especially consequential now, as the United States openly debates how to persuade women to have more children. The White House has called itself “the most pro-family administration in history,” and Vice President JD Vance has said that the government should “make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids.”
But that postpartum year is when many families quietly decide whether to try again. Women who experience significant complications are up to 20 percent less likely to have another child, and when they do, they wait longer.
It is also a period of profound vulnerability. Mental illness spikes in the months following delivery. And for many women, the demands of caring for a baby and a lack of paid leave too often conspire to deter them from seeking necessary care. Two-thirds of pregnancy-related deaths in the United States happen in the year after giving birth, and more than 80 percent are preventable.
A mother and her newborn’s health is inextricably intertwined. When a mother’s depression goes untreated, infant cognitive development suffers. When her baby falls ill, she produces targeted antibodies in her breast milk to fight infection. States with the worst maternal mortality rates tend also to have the worst infant outcomes.
It’s true that there has been some recent good news for maternal health. Most notably, all but one state will extend Medicaid postpartum coverage from 60 days to a full year after birth by the end of this summer. But coverage is not the same as ensuring that patients have ongoing, coordinated medical care. To achieve that, we should design a model that treats mother and infant as a single unit of care, both clinically and financially, through the first year of life.
This could start by having maternal and pediatric services in the same location, such as placing midwives, mental health counselors and pelvic floor therapists inside pediatrician offices. After all, we know mothers reliably appear for their baby’s appointments even when they neglect their own. Better still would be taking advantage of babies’ built-in schedule of checkups to screen both mother and baby for common conditions at the same visit (some pediatric offices are already starting to screen mothers for postpartum depression).
Providers across maternal and pediatric services could be paid to work collaboratively and rewarded for keeping both patients healthy. That would require significant changes to the way the health system delivers and reimburses providers for care, but the deeper shift is conceptual: that medicine has a clear responsibility for both lives.
None of this is fanciful. Finland, for example, has long followed mother and child together at its public maternity clinics, assigning the same nurse to care for both patients through the early years. It’s a system based around the simple truth that a mother’s recovery matters as much as her newborn’s growth.
My husband and I always imagined we would have more than one child. I understand more viscerally now why so many women stop at one — not because they don’t want another child, but because they know how swiftly the system lets go once the baby arrives.
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7) Out of Gas, Cubans Cook With Charcoal and Wood to Survive
The U.S. oil blockade has left millions without cooking gas. In Santiago de Cuba, the cradle of the Cuban revolution, apartment tower residents resort to charcoal and firewood.
By Ed Augustin and Lisette Poole González, Photographs by Lisette Poole González, May 25, 2026
Outside one of five 18 story apartment towers in Santiago de Cuba this month.
On a recent night, Yusimi Castellano crouched over her squat iron stove, arranging charcoal and gently placing the Styrofoam and the plastic she used as kindling over it. She used a cigarette lighter to start a small fire.
Noxious smoke billowed through her 18th floor apartment, eventually sweeping out toward the former military barracks where the Cuban Revolution is said to have begun and the verdant mountains that wrap around Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second-largest city.
Slowly, the charcoal began to glow. She put a grill made of old coat hangers on top and boiled some spaghetti for her family’s dinner.
“I shouldn’t be cooking with charcoal,” said Ms. Castellano, 58, who has asthma and lately has been short of breath and coughing constantly. “But if I don’t cook, I die.”
Ms. Castellano’s crude cooking methods have become the norm across the complex of five 18-story buildings, each with 120 apartments, where she lives and that were once meant to showcase the revolution’s promise when they opened four decades ago.
Today, some people can’t even afford charcoal, and resort to chopping firewood to cook in their homes.
Life here and across much of Cuba, already difficult because of an economy that has been in shambles for years, has become even worse since the Trump administration mounted its escalating pressure campaign against the country’s communist government.
First, the Trump administration stopped oil deliveries from Venezuela, Cuba’s main benefactor, after U.S. forces in January captured Venezuela’s president.
Then President Trump used the threat of tariffs to cut off foreign fuel shipments almost entirely, including from Mexico, Cuba’s other crucial supplier.
The Cuban government says its oil reserves have run out and that its aging electric grid is becoming increasingly unreliable. The country produces some oil but far from enough to meet its needs.
Outside Havana, the capital, power outages now last 20 hours a day. The lack of energy has set off an enormous humanitarian crisis that has become deadly.
The main refinery in Santiago has stopped producing liquefied petroleum gas, cooking gas mostly made from Venezuelan and Mexican oil.
Last December, Ms. Castellano picked up a small canister filled with cooking gas from a state store at the bottom of her building. The canisters were supposed to be refilled every month, but by then they were being refilled roughly every other month. Since January, however, no gas has been given out.
Breakfast in Ms. Castellano’s home has become a rarity. With the elevator no longer functioning most of the time, the delivery boy who used to bring bread is unwilling to slog up 18 floors.
But the family has no choice. Five mornings a week, Ms. Castellano’s niece walks Ms. Castellano’s 87-year-old mother, Giorgina, who has dementia, downstairs and to a state-run day program for older people a few blocks away. In the afternoon, the two must trudge back upstairs.
“The country is being strangled,” said the niece, Yailen Menéndez, 38.
Residents are sleep-deprived. Because nobody knows when the power will come on, people leave lights and fans on. If the electricity kicks on, the sudden glare or cool breeze will wake them so they can do their chores before another outage.
“Night has become day,” said one neighbor of Ms. Castellano’s, who stopped by quickly to drop off a sprig of oregano. “Everybody wakes up when the lights come on to wash, cook — to do everything.”
While many households in Havana still have gas piped into their kitchens, Santiago, like the rest of the country, doesn’t have that type of infrastructure. (Santiago’s population, according to the last census in 2012, was about 431,000, but that was before an enormous wave of migration from Cuba. Many apartments in Ms. Castellano’s complex are empty.)
The city, where a majority of the population is Afro-Cuban, has traditionally been a bedrock of government support, but it’s poorer than Havana, has a less developed private sector and receives fewer remittances from abroad. With less to cushion the crisis, Santiago has been particularly hard hit by the economic collapse.
Haydee Gómez Suárez, 63, who lives in a different tower from Ms. Castellano’s, sells thin plastic bags for bread for the equivalent of 2 cents each outside privately owned bakeries. But the bakeries’ ovens are electric.
“If there’s no power, there’s no bread,” she said. “And if there’s no bread, I can’t sell a single bag.”
She has lost more than 20 pounds in recent years, she said, and eats just one meal a day.
Water leaks through her damp, dingy apartment. She cooks with cardboard and scraps of wood she finds in mounting piles of trash.
She sluices buckets of water over her kitchen walls, but the smell from her cooking fires clings to her furniture, and soot has darkened her walls.
It’s a far cry from when the towers opened in 1983. One Cuban magazine described the complex, built with earthquake-resistant technology, as “the future face of the city.”
The buildings were inaugurated on the 30th anniversary of the failed rebel assault on the Moncada military barracks, which the buildings overlook. The attack, staged by Fidel Castro and his small band of rebels on July 26, 1953, was later mythologized as the start of the revolution that toppled a U.S.-aligned dictator.
(Fidel’s brother, Raúl Castro, who also fought in the nearby Sierra Maestra mountains, was indicted last week on murder charges for the downing of two civilian planes 30 years ago that killed four men, including three Americans.)
The apartments in the complex were given to families of the rebel guerrillas and to workers at a new textile plant billed by the government as one of the largest in Latin America. Each building’s name is linked to the rebel campaign.
“It was a projection of a future — a country bounding forward toward development and emancipation,” said Aida Morales, a researcher in the historian’s office in Santiago.
Asked what the projection is now, she laughed. “We’re an island; you can’t go anywhere but the sea,” Ms. Morales said. “And there’s no one to help us.”
As night fell, Anyerman Quiñones Goicoechea, 40, who lives in the complex and is a building painter for a state-owned company, sat brooding in the dark in a rocking chair. After working for the state for more than 20 years, he feels he has nothing to show for it.
“The system has to fall,” he said. “They have to go. Or change the way they think.”
He blames the blackouts mostly on the regime. “This country prioritized building hotels, not power plants.”
Four floors above him, a couple had a different viewpoint. Antonio Nieto Paneque, 83, and his wife, who did not want to share her full name, ate cold rice and beans she had prepared at 11 p.m. the night before when the power returned.
Mr. Nieto Paneque said he joined an urban guerrilla group in Santiago as a teenager in 1957, smuggling pistols throughout the city.
“The revolution brought electricity to the countryside,” he said. “We believed peasants had the same right as people in the city.”
His wife pointed to their rice cooker, hot plate, refrigerator and a “very good” pressure cooker, all distributed two decades ago when the government, flush with cheap Venezuelan oil, sought to move Cuban kitchens on to the electric grid.
“We lived normally before Trump took power,” Mr. Nieto Paneque said, an LED headlamp strapped around his forehead. “Our lives were stable.”
In 2019, the first Trump administration began imposing sanctions on companies shipping Venezuelan oil to Cuba, and in response the Cuban government introduced what it said were temporary energy-saving measures. They turned out to be permanent.
Even before the more recent round of actions by the Trump administration, sanctions had left the Cuban government without enough money to buy the fuel the country needed, some economists say. Trump administration officials have blamed Cuba’s woes on what they call the government’s corruption and incompetence, not the U.S. oil blockade.
Still, while most Cubans now go without cooking gas, electricity and public transportation, the Cuban police and armed forces continue receiving fuel for their vehicles.
Cuba’s Soviet-era electric grid is obsolete, weakened by decades of underinvestment and a lack of maintenance — a result of the island’s failed economic model and sanctions on parts needed to maintain the system.
Halfway up the blacked-out tower where the Castellanos live, the orange glow of a wood fire illuminated the balcony of one of the apartments. Silhouetted figures bent over flames.
In the park below, life went on. A street vendor rapped the metal box keeping warm his roasted peanuts sheathed in paper flutes. Nearby, other vendors sold candies, condoms and candles.
Yoandris García, 33, another resident of the complex, sat near them, preferring the cooler air to another sleepless night sweating in bed.
He said he lost his job last month when the minibus company he worked for ran out of fuel. The next day, he said matter-of-factly, he planned to walk four miles to cut wood with a machete and haul it home on his shoulder.
Across the avenue, the single streetlight went off. Mr. Garcia said he hoped that meant the electricity might be directed elsewhere, as is sometimes the case.
“Now they’ll put it on over here,” he said, nodding toward the apartment towers. Nothing happened.
For many here, the question of why there is so little electricity is irrelevant. Disillusioned, disempowered and exhausted, many say they no longer care. They are too busy surviving.
“Those in power know the truth,” said Felo González, 50, a furniture repairer. “Our job is to hustle.”
Adrian Rey Duharte Garcés contributed reporting.
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8) Tensions Rise as Iran Threatens to Retaliate Against U.S. Strikes
The threat came hours after American military forces renewed attacks in southern Iran, even as fragile diplomacy efforts to end the war continued.
By Leo Sands, Erika Solomon and Eric Schmitt, May 26, 2025
A photo of Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, at an event in Tehran on Sunday. Credit...Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
Tensions remained high between Iran and the United States on Tuesday, threatening to upend fragile diplomacy efforts as Iranian officials warned of retaliation after American strikes overnight.
Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, said in a written statement on Tuesday that the war with the United States had shown that American military bases in the Middle East are no longer safe, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said it would respond forcefully to any U.S. strikes.
The comments were released hours after American military forces conducted what U.S. Central Command said were “self-defense strikes” in southern Iran.
The hostilities have added to the uncertainty surrounding a potential peace deal, with President Trump and his administration offering conflicting signals about the state of play. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday said talks to end the war were continuing, and a deal could take “a few days.”
Iranian officials sought to project a position of strength, with Mr. Khamenei saying in a written statement that “the hands of time do not turn backward, and the nations and lands of the region will no longer serve as shields for American bases.”
During the war, Iran bombed U.S. bases across the Middle East in retaliation for U.S.-Israeli strikes, forcing many American troops to relocate to hotels and office spaces, military personnel and American officials said.
Mr. Khamenei, who succeeded his father after he was killed by U.S.-Israeli strikes on the opening day of the war in late February, also called for greater cooperation among Muslim countries in his statement, which marked the start of the Hajj pilgrimage, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.
U.S. forces on Monday struck missile launch sites in Iran and boats that were trying to place mines, American officials said. U.S. Central Command said they were intended “to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces.”
In recent days, Mr. Trump has threatened a return to hostilities while also pushing a potential path to peace. He has focused on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which was effectively blockaded by Iran in the early days of the war, disrupting energy markets worldwide.
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9) Israel steps up strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
By Euan Ward, Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, May 26, 2026
The Israeli military said it had struck more than 100 Hezbollah sites overnight in southern and eastern Lebanon, including weapons storage facilities and command centers. It also issued an evacuation warning on Tuesday for the entire city of Nabatieh, one of the largest cities in southern Lebanon, signaling that airstrikes there were imminent.
Mashghara, a town in the Bekaa Valley, was among the areas that were hit overnight, killing at least 11 people, including two children, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strike.
“We are at war with Hezbollah,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a video statement on Monday night, adding that he had ordered the military to “press on the pedal even more.”
The latest round of fighting began in March, shortly after the U.S.-Israeli offensive against Iran, when Hezbollah fired rockets across the border in support of Tehran. A U.S.-brokered cease-fire took effect in April, but tit-for-tat attacks have continued, with each side accusing the other of violating the truce.
Now, the violence in Lebanon appears to be intensifying just as President Trump and Iranian officials signal progress toward a possible deal to end the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
The terms of any U.S.-Iran agreement remain murky, but three senior Iranian officials told The New York Times over the weekend that it would also halt fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon. However, Mr. Netanyahu appeared to double down on Sunday, saying he had “reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself against threats on every front, including Lebanon” during a weekend phone call with Mr. Trump.
Hezbollah said on Tuesday that it had launched a string of drone and rocket attacks on Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, where Israeli forces have carved out what they call a “forward defense line” extending several miles deep after invading during the war.
Hezbollah has increasingly relied on low-cost, fiber-optic drones, which are difficult to jam, to target Israeli troops. The attacks have exposed an Israeli vulnerability, even after weeks of airstrikes and ground operations aimed at degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities.
As a result, Mr. Netanyahu has faced mounting pressure from Israeli hard-liners to broaden the campaign in Lebanon, including by resuming strikes on Beirut and its southern suburbs. Such a move would further strain the already fragile cease-fire and complicate U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict.
In recent weeks, Israeli and Lebanese representatives have held rare, direct talks in Washington aimed at brokering a longer-term settlement. A central issue is Hezbollah’s disarmament, which Israel has demanded but Hezbollah has ruled out discussing until Israel ceases its attacks and withdraws from Lebanese territory.
Military officials from both countries are scheduled to meet at the Pentagon on Friday under U.S. supervision, with a separate round of political talks set for next week.
Hezbollah is not a party to the talks and has rejected any direct negotiations with Israel.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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10) The Wars in Ukraine and Iran Are More Alike Than You May Think
Aspects such as drone technology and diplomacy show how the wars intersect on the battlefield and in global alignments, providing a model for future conflicts.
By Lara Jakes, May 26, 2026
Lara Jakes covers conflict and diplomacy, with a focus on weapons and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Assessing the damaged buildings following Russian strikes in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, on Sunday. Roman Pilipey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The trench warfare and heavy artillery on Ukraine’s battlefields in 2022 don’t look much like the war by air and sea that began when the United States and Israel attacked Iran.
But similarities between the two conflicts soon became evident and remain so almost three months later.
In both, the country with the more powerful military has been unable to vanquish its adversary. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia expected a quick victory when he launched his “special military operation,” more than four years ago. President Trump initially vowed that the “little excursion” against Iran, which started on Feb. 28, would last four to five weeks.
“For both Russia and for the United States, there’s a lot of unmet expectations about their military operations,” said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iran and Russia and a professor at Sciences Po, the elite social sciences university in Paris, attributing it to “the hubris on both sides.”
Over the last several days, negotiations have produced progress toward an initial plan for peace between Iran and the United States, though with much uncertainty, given the renewed American strikes against Iran on Monday. Whether or not an agreement is reached, the war will have provided lessons, along with the conflict in Ukraine, on the evolution of modern warfare.
Technology reshaping warfare
Asymmetrical tactics have helped both Ukraine and Iran hold off stronger forces with which they could not compete in a conventional miliary confrontation.
Iran, for instance, struck at the United States by attacking its allies. It instilled fear in Persian Gulf states by sending one-way attack drones to hit military bases and energy facilities in countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. It has also used the threat of mines and small armed speedboats to keep a chokehold on the narrow Strait of Hormuz.
Ukraine has assassinated Russian military officials in Moscow and regularly struck oil facilities, the lifeblood of the Russian economy. It has also used sea drones to neutralize Russia’s much bigger Black Sea navy.
Perhaps most indelibly, experts said, the two conflicts demonstrate how innovation and technology are reshaping warfare.
The United States has turned to drone-detecting systems loaded with artificial intelligence to protect the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, according to a person familiar with the agreement. Those systems were developed by Ukraine to defend itself from Russia.
In Lebanon, the militant group Hezbollah is attacking Israeli troops with explosive drones controlled by fiber-optic cables, like those commonly used in the war in Ukraine.
Layered systems of sensors, guided missiles and drones — and, in many cases, A.I.-enabled technology — that were honed in Ukraine and deployed in the Gulf, “are likely to rapidly proliferate around the world,” said Michael Kofman, a military expert and senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In both wars, “we see the advent of mass precision on the battlefield,” Mr. Kofman said. Already, he said, Hezbollah and combatants in Mali have turned to similarly cheap and easily built technology, showing that such systems “will democratize access to mass precision on the battlefield for middle and small powers.”
Similar attack strategies
The fighting in the Middle East before the cease-fire took effect in early April featured the kind of drone swarms combined with ballistic missile attacks that officials and experts said debuted in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Iran delivered one-way Shahed attack drones to Russia in 2022, which Moscow used to strike Ukraine. That same model has been launched against Gulf countries by Iran this year as Russia is returning the favor with some military support to Iran. The extent of that support remains unclear, but according to U.S. officials, it includes shipping drone parts across the Caspian Sea.
Ms. Grajewski noted “some cooperation” between Russia and Iran in manipulating global location systems to confuse the opposition’s targeting guidance. Some ships linked to Iran appear to have recently spoofed locator trackers in the Strait of Hormuz — mirroring a long-honed tactic of Russia’s illicit shadow fleet of energy tankers — to evade detection by the U.S. Navy.
Russian anti-jamming equipment was found in an Iranian drone targeting a British base in Cyprus in March. European officials and experts are concerned Moscow will supply weapons if stalled peace talks break down and Iran resumes strikes across the region.
“We’ve seen evidence of Russia helping Iran with its attacks,” the British defense minister, John Healey, said in April at a meeting of allies who are sending military support to Ukraine.
He did not describe that evidence but added, “Putin wanted us distracted by the conflict in the Middle East.”
Diplomatic ties
The Iran war has strained some alliances, most notably between the Trump administration and Europe, where many leaders believe the conflict is unnecessary and unlawful.
It has also set off a worldwide scramble for energy supplies, with some countries turning to Russia for illicit but available oil and gas. And it has delayed the Russia-Ukraine peace process by diverting the United States’ attention to the Middle East.
“I believe they were drinking Champagne in the Kremlin when President Trump started the war in Iran,” said Danylo Lubkivsky, director of the Kyiv Security Forum and a former Ukrainian deputy foreign minister.
But the war in Iran has also produced some surprising alliances, most evident in the new partnerships Ukraine has forged with Gulf states.
In April, Ukraine announced new security agreements with Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Those kinds of ties would have been unlikely several years ago when some of those Gulf states had previously sought to maintain neutral relations with Russia.
Kyiv wants to trade its drone technology and training assistance in return for Middle East diplomatic backing, energy deals and advanced air-defense systems, said Jana Kobzova, co-director of the European Security Program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Mr. Zelensky is hoping “to turn this crisis into an opportunity,” she said.
At the least, Ms. Kobzova said, agreements with oil-rich states that include the sale of drone technology to them could prove lucrative to Ukraine’s burgeoning defense industry.
Europe has been a lifeline for Ukraine since the United States mostly stopped donating weapons and equipment to Kyiv last year.
Its countries have bought weapons from the United States to send to Ukraine, and last month the European Union unlocked a loan of 90 billion euros, about $106 billion, to help Kyiv endure the ongoing war.
But Europe’s ability to continue to provide robust support may depend on whether the shortage of fuel and goods caused by the Iran war drags down European economies, a situation that would worsen if peace is not achieved.
Riccardo Alcaro, an expert at the Institute of International Affairs in Rome, said the continuing standoff over the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping lane for 20 percent of the global energy supply, illustrated how Iran can pose as significant a threat to Europe as does the one on its doorstep, in Ukraine.
“The Ukraine war is still Europe’s main front,” said Mr. Alcaro, whose research focuses on Europe and Iran. “But the Iran war is not a secondary front, in the sense that it is really, really, really impacting Europe’s ability to contribute to its first priority — which is Ukraine.”
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11) Fearing Deportation, Mothers Give Birth in Shadows
Haitian women are having babies in squalid, unsupervised settings after the Dominican Republic started sending immigration agents to detain migrants at hospitals.
Photographs by Ana María Arévalo Gosen, Written by Hogla Enecia Pérez and Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Reporting from the Dominican Republic, May 26, 2026
Katty Joseph, a Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic, was afraid to go to a hospital to have her baby.
She did not want to get deported.
Dominican immigration officials stationed at public hospitals were detaining undocumented migrants who were then deported, including mothers and their newborns. The dragnet, underway for over a year, has overwhelmingly ensnared Haitians fleeing a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in neighboring Haiti.
Ms. Joseph, 20, arrived in the Dominican Republic a year ago and was living in the backroom of a car repair shop after the owner took her in. That is where, in late October, she said she gave birth.
Propped on a blanket on the grease-stained floor, she said she pushed through the stifling Caribbean heat with the help of a friend. Ms. Joseph cut the umbilical cord herself with a razor, she said, but the baby didn’t cry.
Less than 24 hours later, he was dead, she said.
“It was a very difficult moment,” Ms. Joseph said in Creole, searching for words to describe her loss.
The Dominican Republic is carrying out one of the most extensive mass deportation campaigns in the Western Hemisphere, expelling thousands of Haitians back to a country in shambles.
The effort has extended to hospitals, a contentious move critics have denounced as inhumane and reflecting deep anti-Haitian sentiments on the island nation.
Dominican officials describe the hospital crackdown, which began in April 2025, as a crucial step to remove Haitians they say are draining public resources. By the government’s metrics, the policy has worked: Deportations are up, and the number of Haitians seeking hospital care is down.
But over the past year, it has led a growing number of Haitian women to give birth at home or in other unsupervised and often squalid settings, according to medical professionals and local advocacy groups.
They warn that mothers and infants face life-threatening risks — including infections and hemorrhages — without medical intervention.
The fallout is clear: Hospital births among Haitian women dropped by nearly 60 percent in the 12 months since agents were deployed — to 13,856 from 32,967 in 2024, according to Dominican health statistics.
“It’s been catastrophic,” said William Charpentier, the president of the National Board for Migration and Refugees, a Dominican advocacy group assisting Haitian mothers.
Over several months, The New York Times interviewed nearly a dozen Haitian mothers, as well as doctors and informal midwives helping Haitian women give birth in the shadows. The Times documented the deaths of one newborn from medical complications and one mother who died of septic shock two weeks after delivering twin boys at home.
Giving Birth in the Shadows
Ms. Joseph said the owner of the car repair shop took her baby to a pediatrician four hours after the boy was born in Puerto Plata, on the northern Dominican coast. The pediatrician, Dr. Juan Payero, said the baby’s vital signs were stable, but he was concerned that the infant was hungry and had not yet cried.
Dr. Payero said he urged Ms. Joseph to go to a hospital, but the baby died a few hours later. Ms. Joseph said she dug a hole and buried the baby’s body herself on a hill near the town where she lived. An autopsy was never performed to determine the cause of death, she said.
The baby, Dr. Payero suggested, could have died from malnourishment, lack of oxygen, an infection caused by the unhygienic conditions in which he was delivered, or tetanus from the razor used to cut the umbilical cord.
The crisis is the latest flashpoint in decades of tension on Hispaniola, the Caribbean island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Dominican economy has long relied on Haitian migration to power its agriculture, construction and tourism industries, but the recent surge triggered a backlash.
Tens of thousands of Haitians have crossed the 240-mile land border in recent years, escaping relentless bloodshed and deprivation in one of the most unstable countries in the Americas.
The Dominican government responded with a far-reaching deportation campaign supported by many Dominicans worried that Haiti’s gang violence would spill over the border and that the exodus was burdening taxpayers.
President Luis Abinader, tapping into a wave of nationalism that fueled his re-election in 2024, imposed weekly deportation quotas that have led to the expulsion of more than 478,000 Haitians since January 2025, including border crossers deported multiple times, according to Dominican officials.
The last government survey, from 2017, estimated that nearly 500,000 Haitians lived in the Dominican Republic, with an additional 252,000 born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents.
Mr. Abinader oversaw the construction of a 100-mile border fence surveilled by soldiers and sensors, but his most divisive move took aim at places traditionally considered sanctuaries: hospitals.
In April 2025, the government began requiring the island’s public hospitals to report patients without proper documentation to immigration authorities so that they could be detained and deported after receiving care. Not even the Trump administration has enacted similar measures at U.S. hospitals as part of its deportation campaign.
Dominican officials said the move was necessary to prevent overcrowding in hospitals they described as inundated by Haitian migrants.
Vice Adm. Luis Rafael Lee Ballester, the general director of migration, said he was unaware of any spike in at-home births among Haitian women.
He stressed that undocumented Haitians face deportation only after receiving and paying for medical care in hospitals. Under current protocols, mothers are detained 72 hours after giving a natural birth, while those who undergo C-sections are detained after seven days.
“We’ve seen ourselves obligated to take a series of measures for national security and to guarantee the safety of our citizens,” Admiral Lee Ballester said in an interview, adding that officials were acting with “a high degree of professionalism and respect for human dignity.”
The policy, which has resulted in the deportation of breastfeeding mothers and their infants, has been denounced by human rights organizations and the United Nations, with a top U.N. official in Haiti saying it raised “serious humanitarian and human rights concerns.”
Cristiana Luis, the president of the Movement of Dominican-Haitian Women, an advocacy group, said, “It’s an affront to the human dignity of women. And their girls and boys.”
Twins, Orphaned at Birth
Over the past year, fear of deportation to their crisis-ridden homeland has kept many Haitians from seeking medical care.
Last November, Linline Poleis, 28, gave birth to twins, Duleyson and Dudleyca, in a house under construction where she was living without permission, according to her family. She refused to go to a hospital for fear of being deported and was alone during the delivery, until a midwife arrived later to help cut the umbilical cords, her family said.
She quickly became ill and began to bleed profusely from her pelvis, according to family members and neighbors interviewed by The Times. Neighbors said they pooled 4,500 pesos, or $75, to send her to a private health clinic, where she was treated for high blood pressure.
The next day, Ms. Poleis collapsed and died on a sidewalk in Santo Domingo, the country’s capital, her family said. Her autopsy report, conducted by Dominican officials and reviewed by The Times, found she died from septic shock, septicemia and endometritis — a uterine infection that is a leading cause of postpartum death.
The orphaned twins are now in the care of their father’s family.
A New Crop of Midwives
The spike in at-home births has revived a cottage industry of parteras or midwives, who were common decades ago but had largely disappeared as the Dominican Republic moved toward a hospital-based maternity system.
Kenya Degraff, a 28-year-old community activist, said that since becoming a midwife last year, she has crisscrossed the island helping more than two dozen Haitian women give birth — never charging them a fee.
“Right now, many Haitians here don’t have money,” Ms. Degraff said, referring to the high costs to give birth at private hospitals to avoid immigration officials. “Are you going to let someone die because of money?”
The Times late last year visited the house of another midwife in northern Dominican Republic crowded with six Haitian women. The midwife said she charged $100 to $250 for her services, from simply cutting the umbilical cord to providing traditional steam baths, which can help soothe new mothers.
“Dominicans don’t know I do this at home,” said the midwife, who requested anonymity out of fear that Dominican officials could deport the women she helps.
Islan Luis, 21, was visiting the midwife’s house after giving birth two days earlier because she did not have the $2,000 she said it cost to give birth at a private hospital.
Ms. Luis said she had gone to shower in her home and felt a pain in her hip when she suddenly went into labor in the bathroom.
“The baby was born immediately after I felt the pain,” said Ms. Luis, who was still suffering from abdominal pain but had not yet seen a doctor.
After 17 hours of labor at the midwife’s house, another Haitian woman, who requested anonymity out of concern that she could be identified and deported, rushed to a public hospital to give birth.
The Times accompanied the woman and her husband to the hospital, where they said they paid a $250 bribe to avoid being reported to immigration authorities, on top of the roughly $85 for the hospital care.
Shortly after giving birth, she said, she had to share a bed with another Haitian mother and both of their babies.
Nearby, she added, Dominican mothers cuddled their babies in their own individual beds.
This report was produced with the support of the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) as part of its Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice in the Americas Initiative. The Times retained full editorial control over the article, and funders do not review stories before publication.
Frances Robles contributed reporting.
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12) Judge to Decide How Long Torture’s Taint Infected the Sept. 11 Case
Eight days of legal arguments at Guantánamo have brought the long-running terrorism case to a moment of truth in the long wait for justice.
By Carol Rosenberg, May 26, 2026
Reporting from the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Washington
A detainee at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay in 2019. The case of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is in its 15th year of pretrial proceedings, with no date set for the trial to begin. Doug Mills/The New York Times
Prosecutors portrayed the prisoners as unrepentant jihadists who bragged about their roles in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to federal agents during their first months in military detention at Guantánamo Bay.
Defense lawyers cast the men as so broken by violence and solitary confinement in their years in C.I.A. prisons overseas that they were groomed to involuntarily confess to U.S. agents.
Over eight days this month, the two sides offered these stark, clashing views to a military judge who is now confronted with the overarching question in the long-running capital case: Did Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of hatching and organizing the Sept. 11 attacks, and two co-defendants voluntarily incriminate themselves to F.B.I. agents years ago, and can their statements be used against them?
The case is in its 15th year of these pretrial proceedings, and no date has been set for the trial to begin. But the judge’s decision could be a turning point almost 25 years after the attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.
The judge, Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, said he would rule this summer.
Stephan Gerhardt, whose brother Ralph was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, said the judge’s decision would provide “a major step forward as it answers probably the biggest legal question that needs resolution before a trial date being set.”
He watched some of the arguments in the court at Guantánamo this month.
The legal question before the judge is not about the crime itself, the largest terrorist attack ever in the United States. That will be left for a trial.
The Secretive World of Guantánamo Bay
· U.S.S. Cole: The Army judge in the bombing case ordered the prosecution to do its “due diligence” in providing defense lawyers with any evidence the U.S. government might have “regarding Iran’s role” in the attack off Yemen 25 years ago. President Trump has said Iran was “probably involved.”
· Torture Ruling: A government lawyer appealed to a Pentagon review court to overturn a torture ruling in the Sept. 11 case that disqualified the use of the confessions of a man accused of conspiring in the hijacking plot that killed nearly 3,000 people.
· Cuban Deportees: The long, circuitous journey of dozens of Cuban men who were designated for deportation from the United States last year but instead taken to a prison at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay ended when they were repatriated to Cuba.
· Guantánamo Prison Enters 25th Year: The prison has outlasted the war in Afghanistan, has employed tens of thousands of temporary troops and holds six men charged but not yet tried in death penalty cases.
· A Curious Collaboration: An unlikely collection of portraits has given the public its only glimpse inside the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay.
It is whether the prisoners were so thoroughly conditioned after more than three years of incommunicado detention, which started off with brutality and continued with years of questioning by U.S. government agents, that they involuntarily told their captors what they wanted to hear.
A crux of the question confronting the judge is the legal principle of attenuation, how to get an untainted confession after a coerced one. Prosecutors say the “clean” interrogations at Guantánamo in 2007 met the legal standard of a change in time, change in place and change in identity of questioners.
Defense lawyers say they did not.
Transfer to Guantánamo
To make his decision, the judge is reviewing years of testimony and reams of classified evidence managed by four previous judges in the case against Mr. Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi to decide whether there was a clear moment of attenuation.
Or, as the judge called it, the pivot.
Military judges have so far thrown out the confessions of two other capital defendants, Ammar al-Baluchi and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, because of what the C.I.A. did to them. Prosecutors are appealing to reinstate Mr. Baluchi’s statements.
“Mr. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed could not shut up about his role as the emir of the 9/11 attacks,” the lead prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., said on the first day of the hearing. Mr. Trivett said Mr. Mohammed boasted about the attacks to C.I.A. interrogators after he was captured in Pakistan in March 2003 and then to F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo in January 2007.
It was in March 2003 when Mr. Mohammed was in C.I.A. custody that he was waterboarded 183 times. His lawyer, Gary D. Sowards, said that after his client was tortured, he was questioned hundreds of times, sometimes three times a day, by C.I.A. investigators.
Then at Guantánamo in 2007, the agents who questioned the defendants did not give them an explicit Miranda warning of their right to remain silent, the agents later testified. The prisoners were also not given a “cleansing statement” informing them that their previous statements could not be used against them.
The men were in their fourth year in U.S. custody and they had not been allowed to consult a lawyer, though Mr. Mohammed had asked for one. That would come more than a year later, after they had confessed and were charged.
Mr. Trivett, the prosecutor, told the judge that the pivot point took place when the prisoners “walked off” a C-17 cargo plane at Guantánamo Bay in September 2006 and were told they were in the custody of the Defense Department. It was Labor Day weekend, and President Bush announced days later that they had been transferred to Guantánamo for criminal prosecution.
In court, defense lawyers showed the judge classified photos of the men on the airstrip in shackles and blindfolds, like the chains and hoods the C.I.A. had used to move them around the world between secret prisons. To the prisoners, their lawyers said, it was another stop on their odyssey through the black sites that began with their capture and torture in 2003.
The two weeks of arguments toggled between these narratives.
Secret Recordings
Defense lawyers described the early years of C.I.A. custody when the defendants were beaten and shackled upright and nude in agonizing ways to deprive them of sleep. Their heads were repeatedly slammed into a wall, and agency records showed they were subjected to humiliating rectal abuse.
After the men were broken, they continued to cooperate under a threat of returning them to “the hard times,” a term used by agency psychologists who had violently interrogated them, their lawyers said.
Conditions at Guantánamo were somewhat different, the lawyers said, but not different enough in the minds of men who had been conditioned to cooperate in years of isolation. Before his F.B.I. interrogations at Guantánamo, each man was held alone in his cell 23 hours a day, then let out into an open-air portion for conversation with another prisoner two cells away, the testimony showed.
The prisoners saw representatives of the International Red Cross for the first time after more than a thousand days of detention, and could write home that they were alive. But the prison copied those messages and, over the objections of the Red Cross, gave them to prosecutors to use against the prisoners.
Two agents testified that, on his first day of interrogation in 2007, Mr. Bin Attash blurted out a request to “tell the judge” that he was proud of his contributions to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Defense lawyers described once-classified episodes of abuse in court to persuade the judge that the men were still in the thrall of C.I.A. conditioning when they were questioned in 2007 at Guantánamo.
Matthew Engle, who is representing Mr. Bin Attash, said C.I.A. records show that his client was at first chained and left wearing only a diaper, and then, in his second year of agency custody, starved into submission. Mr. Bin Attash “came to adopt a persona he had never had before,” the person who defiantly told F.B.I. agents to send a message to an imaginary judge, as no case had yet been charged.
Walter Ruiz, the lawyer for Mr. Hawsawi, said the C.I.A. had secretly held him at Guantánamo for a few months starting in late 2003, and brought him there with a torn, hemorrhaging rectum from a brutal cavity search at the last black site. He was still bleeding when he was brought back to the base in late 2006 and told he was in military custody.
Prosecutors played covert prison recordings of the defendants discussing their 2007 interrogations to show that their confessions were voluntary.
“The C.I.A. time is over,” Mr. Mohammed is heard saying on a tape, quoting his questioners. “Now the choice is in your hands.”
Defense lawyers said the recordings were cynically chosen selections of prisoners describing what they had been told in their interrogations, not necessarily their acceptance of the claim. Mr. Engle asked the judge to listen to other recordings.
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