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The Bay Area Demo Legal Collab and friends are hosting a Grand Jury education and training event. Join us for a political history of how Grand Juries are used for political repression, hear from Grand Jury resisters and learn how to plan for repression for yourself and your community.
In the Bay Area there have been recent FBI visits, Grand Jury subpoenas and investigations into our political movements. If you are contacted by the feds or other law enforcement agencies you should exercise your rights and reach out to legal support:
· You do not have to open your door or let FBI or other agents into your home without a warrant.
· You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney: you do not have to talk to FBI or other agents or answer their questions. It can be dangerous to do so. Say, "I do not want to answer questions without my lawyer. Please slip your card under the door and my lawyer will call you."
· For legal help, call the Bay Area Federal Defense Line, 415-285-1041 and someone will return your call within 48 hours.
The Bay Area Federal Defense line can help connect you to a lawyer if you are contacted by agents related to progressive political activism. It is sponsored by the Bay Area Demo Legal Support Collaborative- a joint effort of Legal Solidarity Bay Area, NLG-SF, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, Anti-Repression Committee, and Oaklaw.
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
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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) Wars, Wildfires and Migrants Leave Europe Straining for Control
A brutal summer has exposed how much pressure European countries are under from forces largely out of their grip: war in Iran and Ukraine, record heat and more.
By Michael D. Shear, Aug. 6, 2026
Michael Shear often writes about the challenges facing European countries as they are forced to rely less on support from the United States.
Firefighters in Lanton, a town southwest of Bordeaux, France, last week. Pierre Crom/Getty Images
Once again in recent days, Europe has seemed to be watching from the sidelines as its destiny is shaped by outside forces.
Would President Trump choose to restart a massive war with Iran and drive up the cost of oil? Would global warming drive wider and worse wildfires, even as several already raged across the continent? Would a sudden, unexplained surge of people across the Moroccan border into a Spanish exclave — almost all of whom were immediately sent back — divide the bloc’s leaders and fuel the far right?
It has already been a brutal summer for Europe: two wars, record heat, rising inflation and deep anxiety about food, energy and security. The back-to-back crises are prompting calls for joint action, urgent Zoom meetings between different groups of presidents and prime ministers, and political hand-wringing in parliaments from Poland to the United Kingdom.
But like so much else that has happened in the past several years, many of Europe’s challenges are out of its control.
The Iran war — a conflict that most of Europe never wanted — has disrupted life across the region, driving up the price of gas, groceries and travel. The continent’s leaders have pledged to help secure the passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz once the fighting ends. And yet, they seem destined to hear about the next stage of the war from Mr. Trump’s social media feed.
Europe has been unable to resolve the war in Ukraine after more than four years of bloodshed. Its achievements in cutting emissions to combat climate change are overshadowed by the actions of the United States and China. The future of A.I. is being shaped largely elsewhere. Right wing populism has risen, fueled by migration, inequality and misinformation.
“No matter how you look at it, measure it, this is a difficult, unsettling time for Europe,” said Richard Haass, who served for two decades as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He said Europe is partly a victim of circumstance, but also is responsible for its lack of authority over its own fate.
“It’s not just that they’ve under-spent, but they’ve underorganized themselves when it comes to their own security,” he said. “It’s essentially a bystander, with few exceptions, to the A.I. competition. That’s not something that was done to Europe by the United States or China. That was something that was done by Europe to itself.”
On many fronts, Europe has acted.
When Russia invaded Ukraine more than four years ago, Europe and Britain immediately took steps to support Ukraine, including sending billions of dollars in aid, imposing sanctions on Russia and welcoming millions of Ukrainian refugees into their countries through special programs.
After Mr. Trump re-entered the White House in 2025 and signaled a warmer stance toward President Vladimir V. Putin, Britain, France, Germany and other European nations formed the “Coalition of the Willing” to try to protect Ukraine’s interests in any peace deal, and worked behind closed doors to reconcile the Ukrainian and American presidents. Those efforts helped prevent Mr. Putin from cutting a deal with Mr. Trump at Ukraine’s expense.
But while the coalition has repeatedly stated that “no arrangements regarding European interests and security can be negotiated without Europeans,” that has proved difficult to enforce. Time and again, Mr. Trump has sidelined America’s allies in favor of direct — and largely fruitless — talks with either Russia or Ukraine.
“For years, European leaders have spoken about strategic autonomy and Europe’s emergence as a serious security actor,” Lesia Ogryzko, the director of the Sahaidachnyi Security Center in Kyiv, wrote for the Atlantic Council. “The coming months may provide the clearest test yet of whether those ambitions are realistic.”
They have had less influence over the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, even though its effects are felt keenly across the continent. Europe’s vocal opposition to Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war enraged the American leader and soured trans-Atlantic relations.
In April, partly as an effort to repair relations with Mr. Trump, Britain and France announced an effort to organize a military operation that could help protect free and open travel through the Strait of Hormuz once a lasting cease-fire was agreed to. But the on-again, off-again fighting between the United States and Iran has made it too dangerous for the operation to begin. Diplomats from several European countries said the possibility that they will send military ships to help remove mines from the strait or escort tankers is essentially on hold until it becomes clear whether the war is truly on pause.
Mr. Trump has threatened in recent days to dramatically escalate strikes on Iran if the regime does not agree to open the strait. On Tuesday, the president told Fox News that Iran would be “hit very hard” if the crucial waterway was not opened very soon.
Even as the Iran crisis has continued, wildfires have been raging across Europe, where swaths of bright red on the weather maps indicated the unprecedented heat waves that have become increasingly frequent.
For most of the past two decades, European countries have mostly been in agreement about the dangers posed by climate change and have acted to cut emissions and invest in renewable energy. But since Mr. Trump’s arrival in the United States, they have been at odds with one of the world’s largest polluters, making their efforts to confront the changing climate more difficult.
Now, it is clear that countries in the region are facing the consequences of global warming, with average temperatures rising faster than on any other continent. Britons are living through the driest July in nearly two centuries. Fires have displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain. In Greece, firefighters died battling blazes that are yet to be fully controlled.
The surge last week of tens of thousands of people into Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory on the North African coast, raised the possibility of a new crisis that is testing European unity on one of the region’s most potent political issues.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s left-wing prime minister, has become famous for his welcoming approach to some migrants, particularly workers from Latin America. But he has taken a tougher approach with people attempting to illegally cross Spain’s borders with Morocco. He cracked down on the arrivals in Ceuta quickly with his country’s military, and most were sent back over the weekend. A floating barrier is being set up near a sea wall between the two countries.
The incident exposed tensions within the European Union that have grown deeper in recent years, as far-right parties including the Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally have seized on fear of migrants as a way to energize political supporters. Almost two dozen E.U. countries lashed out at Spain in the hours after the migrants arrived in Ceuta, with some calling for suspending the country from the bloc’s free-movement zone. Mr. Sánchez responded by calling those nations “selfish.”
Some analysts noted that the lack of solidarity with Spain at a time when it faced an external threat was an indication of the difficulty that the continent has in projecting authority on the global stage.
Mr. Haass, of the Council on Foreign Relations, said he thinks the lack of unity underscores the fundamental problem for Europe as it seeks to shape its future.
“The whole,” he said, “is much less than the sum of its parts.”
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2) Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left
One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.
By Shane Goldmacher, Aug. 6, 2026
Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent who has been covering the Democratic Party’s efforts to win back power in 2026.
The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful defeat of the year.
Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.
“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism.
Dr. El-Sayed’s win was not the blowout that some pre-election polls had predicted. But his narrow nomination in one of the country’s signature swing states still represented a critical moment for the party’s middle, which had previously sought to cast the far left’s successes as contained within the country’s most urban and liberal corridors.
Their fear: Dr. El-Sayed was paving a path for a progressive to seize the party’s presidential nomination in 2028 — and then go on to lose the general election.
“It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states,” Mr. Cowan added.
Most party leaders — from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York to former Vice President Kamala Harris — quickly embraced Dr. El-Sayed’s Senate candidacy, given the stakes of the Michigan seat at the play. But some moderates see the emerging left as a danger.
The fact that Democrats recently put Michigan in the early lineup of presidential nominating states — a race just 18 months away — only heightened the significance of Dr. El-Sayed’s victory.
For now, the next big test is only a week away. In Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist and state assemblywoman representing the progressive hotbed of Madison, has emerged as the party’s front-runner for governor in another key battleground race.
Mr. Cowan said the $15 million his group would spend through 2028 was not directed at individual candidates. Instead, the group plans to target the Democratic Socialists of America movement, which he believes poses a “mortal danger” for Democrats.
He said the effort would include opposition research into D.S.A., polling, social media programs and educating Democratic activists and leaders. It would target both proud democratic socialists and those such as Dr. El-Sayed, whom he derided as performing the “D.S.A. dodge” — flirting with democratic socialists enough to get their organizing manpower and support while remaining distant enough to avoid the explicit label.
How this discrediting campaign will affect the current midterm cycle — potentially undercutting Democratic nominees in swing-state races and undermining the party’s chances of retaking Congress — remains unclear.
Centrist Democrats say their purpose is to make progressives understand the risks of some of the more radical planks of the official D.S.A. platform: defunding the “Department of War,” taking “steps toward fully abolishing the police and prison system,” enacting “reparations” and establishing a 32-hour workweek.
“The upside of being associated with more extreme movements is you get attention and real and perceived energy and outsider status,” said Liam Kerr, the co-founder of another centrist group called Welcome PAC.
Mr. Kerr said that the far left was currently receiving all of those benefits without “the baggage” of particular positions — a dynamic he hoped would shift with added attention.
On Wednesday, one progressive Democrat who won his party’s House nomination distanced himself from the D.S.A. Will Lawrence, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement who defeated two more moderate Democratic rivals in Michigan on Tuesday, said he allowed his D.S.A. membership to lapse in the last month. Mr. Lawrence, 35, now faces a Republican incumbent, Representative Tom Barrett, in one of the country’s premier battleground districts.
Whatever comes next, Dr. El-Sayed’s triumph was a watershed moment for the progressive movement, a statewide success in Middle America that could not easily be dismissed. This was not Zohran Mamdani’s win over Andrew Cuomo in New York City, or a congressional primary win in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Philadelphia or Denver.
After all, the party establishment had the one-on-one race it had wanted against Dr. El-Sayed. The state’s Democratic governor delivered a late endorsement of Representative Haley Stevens, the moderate alternative. And Ms. Stevens enjoyed a gargantuan advertising advantage that swelled into the tens of millions of dollars.
More than $32 million of that money came from a super PAC linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which signaled that it would continue opposing Dr. El-Sayed through the fall.
Dr. El-Sayed has made running against AIPAC a centerpiece of his candidacy. On MS NOW on Wednesday, he said the links between Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were “inextricable.”
“Netanyahu is a big reason why they’ve gotten so aggressive and, frankly, so bloodthirsty under his reign,” Dr. El-Sayed said.
Progressives have not won every race this year. On Tuesday, Cori Bush, a left-wing former congresswoman, lost badly in her bid to win back her old seat.
But they have won convincingly in enough places — including Graham Platner’s Senate nomination in Maine before his withdrawal — to put the party’s establishment on its heels.
“The Democratic Party is now Blockbuster,” Van Jones, the Democratic commentator and former Obama administration official, said on CNN on Tuesday. “These kids are Netflix.”
Colin Mortimer, the director of the centrist Center for New Liberalism, said that moderates needed to stop tempering their tone to appeal to voters sick of the status quo.
“It seems to me a lot of energy is on the left, but the big energy we are seeing from the base of the Democratic Party is just a rejection of the establishment and a rejection of incumbents,” Mr. Mortimer said.
He pointed to some upcoming races as key tests where it was younger center-left candidates doing the challenging of older incumbents, including the bid of Representative Seth Moulton, a moderate, to unseat Senator Ed Markey in Massachusetts, as well as Luke Bronin’s challenge to Representative John Larson of Connecticut.
Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, sharply disagreed.
“They’re missing the plot,” Mr. Mitchell, who spent the last week campaigning in Michigan, said in an interview. “There is a populist insurgency taking place in this country.”
Moderates, he said, were misreading the room if they did not believe voters were animated by specific ideas as much as tenor. “I can tell you what they’re missing,” he said. “They’re missing a point of view.”
Or as Hasan Piker, the lightning rod live-streamer who campaigned in Michigan with Dr. El-Sayed, said in a text message on Wednesday, “70 million dollars worth of smears couldn’t make up for a lack vision demonstrated by the establishment dems.”
With a signature fitted V-neck black T-shirt, Dr. El-Sayed built his successful campaign with a call-and-response set of catchphrases that captured the scope of his ambitions: “Money out of … politics. Money in your … pocket. Medicare for … all.”
Some Democratic strategists hoped he would focus, in particular, on the second of the three in the coming months as polls show that voters are ready to punish President Trump and his party for failing to bring down cost.
Republicans appeared most eager to frame the race around crime, linking Dr. El-Sayed to past movements and comments about defunding the police or prisons. Chris Gustafson, a spokesman for the top Senate Republican super PAC, previewed that line of attack, calling Dr. El-Sayed “a dangerous threat to the safety and freedoms of every American.”
The contours and coalitions of the Stevens-El-Sayed primary are likely to provide a road map for progressives who decide to run for president. Dr. El-Sayed campaigned with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and featured them both prominently in his closing ad.
The Senate primary was not the first time that Michigan opted for a left-wing candidate in a marquee contest. In 2016, the state delivered an upset win for Mr. Sanders in his presidential primary against Hillary Clinton, who went on to lose Michigan that November to Mr. Trump.
The Michigan Senate race of 2026 was already a must-win for Democrats if they hope to wrest control of the Senate from Republicans this fall. At the same time, for Mr. Schumer, Dr. El-Sayed would add to the ranks of Democrats opposed to him as a leader.
It is also a must-win for progressives aspiring to prove they can succeed not just in primaries but also in crucial and competitive general elections.
For now, the party’s moderate wing was hoping to learn lessons after a painful defeat.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Mr. Kerr said. “It’s a tough but necessary time.”
More on the 2026 Midterm Elections
· Divided Democrats: One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.
· Election Deniers Hold Key Roles: These officials, who have supported President Trump’s false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, oversee or help administer elections in counties across the nation where competitive House and Senate races will determine control of Congress.
· Texas Senate Race: Both the Republican candidate, Ken Paxton, and Democratic candidate, James Talarico, are seeking to win over voters with competing proposals on tax, housing and health care that are aimed at lowering household costs.
· Chuck Edwards: The Republican lawmaker from North Carolina said that he was dropping his re-election bid, after the House Ethics Committee had recommended that he be censured for “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers.” Now, just over 12 weeks before Election Day, Republicans are scrambling to find a candidate.
· Michigan Primary: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic primary race for Senate, giving progressives a test for the fall. William Lawrence, another progressive democrat, defeated two moderate candidates to challenge a vulnerable Republican incumbent in a House race. Representative John James, a two-term congressman from suburban Detroit, won the Republican nomination for governor and will face Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state.
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3) Insults, Expletives and Fat-Shaming: Vance Trolls Critics on the Right and Left
The vice president has dispensed with the decorum and restraint of his predecessors to directly take on opponents and journalists on social media with sometimes profane and often personal jabs.
By Peter Baker, Aug. 6, 2026
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered or interviewed 10 vice presidents. He reported from Washington.
Vice President JD Vance has shown an appetite for conflict online, going after “idiots” and “scumbags” who anger him. Credit...Alex Kent/The New York Times
It was hardly the first time that someone on social media called someone else fat. But it may have been the first time that a vice president of the United States did so.
Peeved at a conservative columnist who criticized his position on Iran, Vice President JD Vance jabbed on Wednesday at his physical appearance. “If you’ve ever met him in person,” he wrote on social media, “it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”
In an era when playground insults pass for political dialogue, few have leaped into the online flame wars with more gusto than Mr. Vance. The first millennial vice president has long dispensed with the decorum and restraint of his older predecessors to go after the “idiots” and “scumbags” who anger him, from the “limousine socialists” on the left to the “disgraceful” conservatives on the right.
He works, of course, for the master of the personal put-down, and perhaps that explains Mr. Vance’s emergence as one of the administration’s chief trolls. But even if he hopes to impress President Trump, Mr. Vance also appears to have a natural appetite for conflict, the product of a generation that grew up with gladiatorial political instincts. It is not enough that someone else may be wrong about policy or politics; they must be stupid, mendacious, vile or, yes, even overweight.
“Vice President Vance’s willingness publicly to disparage others in personal terms stands apart from the behavior of modern vice presidents during the last half-century,” said Joel K. Goldstein, a scholar of the vice presidency at the St. Louis University School of Law. Whatever his motivation, Mr. Goldstein added, “it departs from the norms associated with the office and undermines the goal of promoting rational public discourse.”
Mr. Vance’s advisers and allies see it differently, of course. By engaging with critics, however disparagingly, they argue that he is demonstrating the sort of accessibility and authenticity Americans are craving, at least Americans of a particular stripe. He has himself been the target of plenty of ugly attacks and should be free to push back. Those who see his tone as uncouth, they say, are the same pompous elites who have similarly tut-tutted Mr. Trump for more than a decade.
“I tend to err on the side of openness,” Mr. Vance told NBC News early last year. “That’s probably a generational thing, right? I come from a very tech-forward generation.”
Still, even Mr. Vance has evinced some concern with his online habits. In May, he told NBC that he had given up social media for Lent, deleting the app for X, formerly called Twitter, from his phone. “It’s one of these things where not having that as a distraction, I think, has made me much more productive,” he said.
But he said that living “in such a crazy bubble” meant that social media gave him a chance to have unplanned interactions with people. “I think one of the good things about social media is that it actually exposes you to unfiltered raw opinions, and that’s one of the things that I need to hear as a political leader,” he added. “So I will definitely reinstall it, but I’ve enjoyed my little break from it.”
A spokesman for the vice president, who declined to comment on the record, said Mr. Vance’s words to NBC still stood but that did not mean he would not engage online with supporters and critics alike.
What makes Mr. Vance’s combative tone online so striking is that it comes in contrast to other venues where he projects a more thoughtful, measured demeanor. His new book, “Communion,” released in June, offered an introspective look at his journey from evangelical Christianity to atheism to Catholicism. To promote it, he even went on ABC’s “The View” for a vigorous but civil interview with the mostly liberal hosts.
One of the hosts, Joy Behar, even said afterward that Mr. Vance had a sense of humor and that, while she disagreed with him on issues, he should run in 2028 because he would stop being so caustic. “I think if he were president, he’d go back to being a kinder person,” she said. “Trump is the one who’s not kind.”
Vice presidents have often played the role of attack dog, traditionally freer to be more aggressive than the presidents they served. The most vituperative vice president of the modern age was surely Spiro T. Agnew, who eagerly served as President Richard M. Nixon’s pit bull against perceived enemies like liberals (“pusillanimous pussyfooters”), journalists (“nattering nabobs of negativism”) and antiwar protesters (“an effete corps of impudent snobs”).
But he never had access to the bullhorn of social media. And his successors have generally taken a less abrasive, even stodgy approach, attacking opponents, yes, but steering away from the kind of personal denigration that Mr. Vance favors. Even Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s first vice president, maintained an old-fashioned disciplined dignity throughout his four years in office, in sharp contrast to Mr. Vance’s bring-it-on feistiness.
“It’s childish behavior that is unbecoming of the office,” said Kevin Kellems, who was communications director for Vice President Dick Cheney. “He’s behaving like a high school jock trying to win over the temporary young fun friends.”
Jamal Simmons, who served in the same role for Vice President Kamala Harris, said Mr. Vance appeared to be auditioning for Mr. Trump’s support for a presidential run in 2028.
“I would guess this is the culture of Vance’s boss in grading his performance,” Mr. Simmons said. “In the Trump administration, everybody has an audience of one, and you get rewarded for being pugilistic and snarky.”
Mr. Vance certainly has the pugilistic, snarky part down. Never much of a turn-the-other-cheek kind of guy, he issued blast after blast through most of last year and into early this year until his Lenten break from social media. What makes him different from Mr. Trump, who regularly attacks friends and foes alike online, is that Mr. Vance directly responds to critical messages and gets into back-and-forth arguments with other posters.
“I have an extraordinary tolerance for disagreements and criticisms from the various people in our coalition,” he wrote last year about attacks on Tucker Carlson’s son Buckley, who works for the vice president. “But I am a very loyal person, and I have zero tolerance for scumbags attacking my staff. And yes, *everyone* who I’ve seen attack Buckley with lies is a scumbag.”
He does not hesitate to go after journalists who annoy him. Terry Moran, the former ABC News correspondent, is “a leftwing radical,” he claimed. Josh Kraushaar of the Jewish Insider, he wrote, is either “the biggest hack in Washington” or “the dumbest journalist in Washington.”
Nor does he hesitate to take on fellow Republicans. David Reaboi, whose X biography describes him as a “right-wing Twitter pugilist,” is, according to the vice president, a “loser” for suggesting that Mr. Vance’s team was leaking to the news media about Iran peace talks. Right-wing influencers like Laura Loomer, Mr. Vance wrote, are “disgraceful actually” for “attacking the administration and sowing division” in a dispute about how much to focus on abortion.
He also has little filter when it comes to profanity. “I hate this smug, self-assured bullshit,” he wrote of a podcaster who called Trump supporters “very, very dumb.” He declared a Wall Street Journal story reporting that Mr. Trump sent a bawdy letter to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to be “complete and utter bullshit.” To Democratic senators grilling Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, he wrote, “You’re full of shit and everyone knows it.”
After he deleted his app for Lent, Mr. Vance’s social media feed turned more conventional, evidently maintained by his staff. For the past couple of months, it broadly praised Mr. Trump, boasted about the vice president’s anti-fraud efforts, said nice things about Mr. Vance’s wife, praised Mr. Trump some more, offered support to political allies, gave updates on Iran talks and praised Mr. Trump even more.
But then this week, the authentic Mr. Vance was clearly back online, lashing out at Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and columnist for The Washington Post who has been one of the leading voices on the right supporting Mr. Trump’s war against Iran.
In a scathing column last week, Mr. Thiessen blamed the vice president for the failed memorandum of understanding with Tehran and said Mr. Vance “publicly undermines the president” by seemingly contradicting Mr. Trump’s stated policy. “Perhaps it’s time for the president to take the advice of those who have delivered him success in Iran — not those like Vance who have failed him,” Mr. Thiessen wrote.
A few days later, Mr. Thiessen jumped into an unrelated social media thread over affordability — specifically the price of burritos. Responding to a post quoting a university student complaining that it costs too much to buy Mexican fast food, Mr. Thiessen wrote: “Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.”
That was when Mr. Vance jumped in, suggesting that Mr. Thiessen had gone back for seconds in the cafeteria too often. Some commenters online came to Mr. Thiessen’s defense by recalling that Mr. Vance, who by his own account lost 30 pounds between 2022 and 2024, was not always so svelte himself.
Mr. Thiessen did not respond to messages requesting comment, and Mr. Vance’s office declined to elaborate.
An ally of the vice president said the columnist had it coming. “It’s neither appropriate nor constructive for self-described ‘Republican’ commentators like Marc Thiessen, who earns an absurd living promoting war after war on television, to use their platforms to dismiss the economic anxieties of young Americans,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a former Trump campaign aide.
He added: “I support elected officials who speak the truth. The vice president was right: Marc Thiessen appears to be severely obese. He should lay off the burritos.”
But don’t expect Mr. Vance to lay off the social media.
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4) America’s Most Divisive Historian Gets a New Biography
Dave Zirin traces the radical career of Howard Zinn, whose “A People’s History of the United States” has sold millions of copies.
By Adam Hochschild, Aug. 3, 2026
Adam Hochschild’s most recent book is “American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.”
The historian Howard Zinn in 1984. Credit...Marilyn Humphries/Alamy
Few, if any, American historians have been more celebrated and reviled than Howard Zinn (1922-2010). His “A People’s History of the United States” is praised in the Oscar-winning movie “Good Will Hunting” and featured in episodes of both “The Sopranos” and “The Simpsons.” Officials in two states tried to ban the book. Donald Trump has attacked “propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn.” The right-wing firebrand David Horowitz compared “A People’s History” to “Mein Kampf.” The books about Zinn range from the journalist Dave Zirin’s admiring new biography, “The People’s Historian,” to bitter attacks (“Debunking Howard Zinn”) and an attack on the attackers (“Zinnophobia”).
There are good reasons Zinn’s “A People’s History” has sold more than four million copies since it was first published in 1980. It introduced readers to figures like the socialist activist and presidential candidate Eugene Debs, the labor organizer Big Bill Haywood, the anarchist Emma Goldman, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the slave revolt leader Nat Turner who were mentioned only briefly or not at all in the ponderously upbeat textbooks of half a century ago.
The book sees Columbus’s arrival through the eyes of the Arawak Indians. It attacks Columbus’s biographer Samuel Eliot Morison for emphasizing the explorer’s devout faith and skipping quickly over his massacres. It sharply questions whether World War II was entirely a “good war,” given Allied bombings of civilians, a Jim Crow U.S. military, American support for restoring the British and French colonial empires, and more.
“A People’s History” has been criticized, in part correctly, for many things, including not keeping up with new scholarship, idealizing Native Americans, seeing Christianity mainly as a tool of conquest, being too tough on Abraham Lincoln and, more generally, for viewing all of U.S. history as struggles between oppressors and oppressed.
Zinn cites Albert Camus to the effect that in a world of victims and executioners one must choose sides. True, but most people and groups don’t fit neatly into one of those categories. Nonetheless, “A People’s History” has left its mark for the better on many an American textbook written since.
In “The People’s Historian,” Zirin, who knew and worked with Zinn in his last years, does a lively job of portraying the historian’s deeply engaged life. Zinn’s politics came not from books — there were none in his immigrant parents’ cold-water tenement flat — but from his life.
He was born into the now shrinking Jewish working class. At 18, he became a union laborer in a Brooklyn shipyard. He saw combat as a bombardier in World War II, and went to college on the G.I. Bill, loading trucks at night. After completing graduate school at Columbia, he received a single job offer, from Spelman College, for Black women, in Atlanta. It was 1956, the civil rights movement was underway, and from that point on he would mix teaching and writing with activism.
Zinn was arrested many times, at both civil rights protests and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. He helped plan the curriculum for the Freedom Schools that friends of his in the civil rights movement set up in Mississippi in 1964 and taught at the schools and in prisons. He helped the fugitive antiwar priest Daniel Berrigan find a hiding place. He and his wife stashed in their home some of the Pentagon Papers secretly copied by their friend Daniel Ellsberg before Ellsberg made them public.
Moreover, Zinn was forced out of Spelman, which wanted to produce well-mannered, closely chaperoned middle-class women, not the future civil rights activists Zinn mentored — who included Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman. At Boston University, where he later taught for more than 20 years, he clashed with the conservative president, John Silber, who was horrified that this outspoken radical had somehow gotten tenure on his faculty.
Zirin’s book evokes these battles well but falls short of being a judicious assessment of his subject. In Zirin’s eyes, Zinn was always right, and he energetically rebuts fellow historians on both the right and left who criticized his work. The biography also tends toward clichés and overstatements. Zinn’s bomber crew had to “wake up before the crack of dawn” and in his late 80s, Zinn was still — Zirin uses the phrase three times — “sharp as a tack.” And can it really be said that Boston in the 1970s “reeked of provincialism and prejudice”?
Whatever Zinn’s shortcomings, he had an enormous positive impact on his readers — and in an age when there are ever fewer serious readers. He and his collaborators found creative ways to spread their message, including in an anthology of voices from American history’s underdogs, and in a widely seen play and film based on that material.
The immense popularity of “A People’s History” revealed an embarrassing vacuum in the way American history has long been taught — something that will still be worth pondering and repairing long after the fractious commemoration of our 250th birthday is behind us.
THE PEOPLE’S HISTORIAN: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn | By Dave Zirin | Dutton | 308 pp. | $32
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5) A Trans Woman Pulled a Gun and Started a ‘Stand Your Ground’ Debate
Gun-friendly Wyoming has a “stand your ground” statute that allows people to use force to defend themselves. So why is a trans woman being prosecuted after being shoved to the ground?
By Jack Healy, Reporting from Laramie, Wyo., Aug. 6, 2026
“I had to defend myself,” said Rihanna Kelver, who pulled out a gun outside the Crowbar & Grill in Laramie, Wyo. Daniel Brenner for The New York Times
When Rihanna Kelver goes on road trips or ventures out alone to photograph the rural night sky, she often packs a small teal handgun. Being a transgender woman in Wyoming is not easy, she said, but owning a gun sure seemed like it would be.
Then one night last September, Ms. Kelver, 28, drew her gun after she had been pushed down in the street during a brief confrontation with three men in the college town of Laramie, according to police reports and surveillance video. Wyoming’s “stand your ground” law is supposed to offer legal protections to gun owners who draw in self-defense, yet Ms. Kelver was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and possession of a deadly weapon with unlawful intent, charges that carry up to 15 years in prison.
The case has touched off an impassioned debate in one of the country’s most gun-friendly, staunchly Republican states about whether the Second Amendment applies when the person holding the gun is transgender.
“I had to defend myself,” said Ms. Kelver, who transitioned as a high schooler in Laramie and has been an outspoken activist for trans rights. “I don’t know how it wasn’t reasonable, given the dangers and threats trans people hear every day.”
The county attorney in Laramie said gender and sexual orientation had played no part in his decision to prosecute the case, and a judge found there was enough evidence to take it to trial.
Ms. Kelver says she would not have been charged if she had been a biological female shoved to the ground by a group of men.
Interest in guns and firearms training soared in L.G.B.T.Q. communities after President Trump’s 2024 election win, as Americans who had never previously considered owning a gun worried about political violence or losing their rights to a more aggressive second Trump presidency.
Then last August, a 23-year-old trans woman killed two children in a shooting spree at a Minneapolis church, prompting a wave of right-wing figures to call transgender people mentally ill and violent, and question whether they should be allowed to own guns at all.
Ms. Kelver said she grew up around guns and went target shooting with her grandfather in Colorado. A friend gave her the .380 subcompact pistol that fit neatly into a hip pack a few years ago after some men in a pickup truck harassed her as she took photos at night in a deserted stretch of Wyoming.
Wyoming’s permissive gun laws made that simple. Wyoming does not require gun owners to register their weapons and allows people to carry firearms concealed or in the open without a permit. The state’s Firearms Freedom Act declares that guns made and kept within state lines are exempt from federal regulations, and its “stand your ground” law allows people to use force to defend themselves if they reasonably believe their safety is threatened. The law says they do not have a duty to retreat if they are not the initial aggressor.
Laramie, a city of 30,000 where bike shops and galleries put rainbow stickers in their windows and Pride Fest fills a park every year, is still living in the shadow of Matthew Shepard. In 1998, Mr. Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, was brutally beaten by two men and left tied to a fence in a field, bringing an avalanche of outside scrutiny and soul-searching crashing down onto Laramie.
Ms. Kelver’s supporters around town worry that the case could divide the town anew, undercutting years of progress and reopening old wounds.
“They’re charging Rihanna because she’s a trans woman,” said Nichol Bondurant, a high school teacher who dressed in white as a wide-winged angel in the wake of Mr. Shephard’s murder to thwart anti-gay protesters who flocked to Laramie then. “Gun rights don’t say you have to fit a political affiliation.”
The divisions preceded Ms. Kelver’s case. Wyoming’s Republican-dominated Legislature has passed a law restricting bathroom use by transgender people, curtailed gender-related health care and required parental notification if a student wants to use a different name or pronouns. But many elected leaders in Laramie — including the county prosecutor — are Democrats and have opposed such measures.
Ms. Kelver said she did not usually carry her gun in Laramie. She moved there when she was 11, went to high school there, ran for the local school board at 18 and now works at a local bar and grill.
But on Sept. 13, she had felt uneasy after being harassed by an acquaintance, she said, so she tucked her gun onto her hip when she left for a night shift at the Crowbar and Grill, a pizza-and-beer spot where banners for Black Lives Matter and L.G.B.T.Q. rights hang beside the American flag.
Ms. Kelver said she had two shots at the bar, then went outside to smoke a cigarette before her shift at about 10 p.m. One man in a group of three shouted a profanity directed at the Crowbar, according to court records, and Ms. Kelver said that the man, Scott Durham, also yelled an anti-gay slur, though he denied that to the police.
Ms. Kelver, upset, walked up to the men and asked, “What did you just say?” according to police reports. Surveillance video from a downtown camera shows her walking into the street toward the men, one hand on her hip by the pack that held the gun. Seconds later, Mr. Durham pushed her away, and Ms. Kelver stumbled and fell onto her back.
The moment she hit the pavement, she drew and racked the gun and pointed it. She did not fire. The three men walked away, and Ms. Kelver got up and collected her belongings that had scattered in the street. The encounter was over in about 10 seconds.
The confrontation occurred in the tense atmosphere just three days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Mr. Durham blamed her for inciting the confrontation, telling a police officer, “I’m not trying to start a fight,” according to body camera videos. None of the men were charged, and they were allowed to leave after giving their accounts to the police.
Mr. Durham is listed as the victim in police reports. In a brief telephone interview, he said the episode had been “mis-portrayed and misconstrued” in news coverage that began with an article in The Laramie Reporter and quickly spread on social media. He declined to comment further.
Ms. Kelver said she injured three vertebrae when she hit the pavement and had to walk with a cane for months.
Her lawyer, Andrew Holcomb, has filed a motion to dismiss the case based on Wyoming’s “stand your ground” law.
“She doesn’t pull a gun till she’s on her back with three guys around her,” Mr. Holcomb said of Ms. Kelver. “She only used the force that was necessary to stop the attack.”
Ms. Kelver also faces a misdemeanor charge for initially telling the police that she had brandished a knife, not a gun. In an interview, she said she had been shaken up and confused immediately after the confrontation and had misspoken.
As news of the incident spread online, critics blamed Ms. Kelver for inciting the conflict, saying she was wrong to approach the men in the first place. Some derided her appearance and gender identity. But Ms. Kelver has also found support in Laramie, where friends held a benefit concert to raise money for her legal defense.
Ms. Kelver said she rejected a plea deal that would have spared her from jail time but stripped away her gun rights. She is set to go to trial in November.
“I’m not going to roll over,” she said. “I’d rather lose fighting.”
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6) When a Texas School Police Officer Got ‘Riled Up’ Over a Defiant Teen
The incident, one of thousands of times that school officers in Texas have used physical force in recent years, underscores long-held concerns about policing in schools.
By Clare Amari, Photographs by Meridith Kohut, Aug. 6, 2026
This article was reported in collaboration with The San Antonio Express-News as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
Officer Marc Laue was seething.
Minutes earlier, while patrolling the hallways of Judson High School in Converse, Texas, he had confronted a 15-year-old accused of pushing an assistant principal. The teenager, Jeremiah Johnson, cursed at the officer and walked away.
Officer Laue grabbed repeatedly at Jeremiah’s arms and backpack, body camera footage of the encounter shows. When the boy pushed away, the officer wrapped his arms around him and took him to the floor.
Now Jeremiah was handcuffed in the school’s cramped police office. As another officer tried to lower Jeremiah into a chair, Officer Laue rammed his fists into the boy’s belly.
“Sit the fuck down!” Officer Laue shouted.
Since 2022, when a gunman killed 21 people at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas has spent billions of dollars installing police officers at public schools. Under state law, officers are supposed to stay out of “routine student discipline.” But over the past few years, they have used physical force in thousands of cases, including to stop seemingly minor misbehavior.
The incident at Judson High offers an extraordinary glimpse into a confrontation gone wrong. What makes it so unusual is that the student and the officer, as well as a teacher, discussed it with a reporter. The 33-minute episode, from November 2023, was also captured on body camera footage, which was reviewed by The New York Times and The San Antonio Express-News.
The case underscores a concern that has been raised by parents and advocates since schools began stationing law enforcement on their campuses: that officers might clash with vulnerable students, derailing their lives.
Ian Adams, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina who reviewed the footage for The Times and The Express-News, called it “horrific.” The way Officer Laue shoved his fists into Jeremiah, Mr. Adams said, went beyond the bounds of “normal policing.”
As Jeremiah folded into the chair, he gasped. “I can’t even breathe,” he said.
Officer Laue yelled at him to shut up, using an expletive. Then, he smacked Jeremiah on the side of the head.
A principal’s accusation
That morning, Elizabeth De Alba, an assistant principal, contacted Officer Laue over her walkie-talkie. The two met up in a crowded hallway, his body camera footage shows.
“He pushed me,” she told the officer, pointing out Jeremiah, who was walking ahead of them in a black sweatshirt, his hood up.
Jeremiah grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the eastern edge of San Antonio. His parents used drugs, records show, so his great-aunt and -uncle, Debra and Calvin Johnson, adopted him when he was a toddler. They raised him alongside nine other children.
The Johnsons described Jeremiah as a quiet, serious child who sang in the choir at his family’s Pentecostal church. He enjoyed school, but struggled with his class work. In eighth grade, school officials determined he had a learning disability, records show.
Jeremiah liked typical teenage things: video games and action movies; teasing his sisters and doting on his baby niece. But by the time he enrolled at Judson High, he had been in several fights and was introduced to a gang by his older, biological brother.
He first crossed paths with Officer Laue in February 2023, when he was a freshman. The officer restrained him to keep him from fighting with another student, police records show. The next week, Officer Laue received a tip about two photos on social media that showed Jeremiah in a bedroom holding a gun, according to the records. Jeremiah had it for protection from a rival gang, he told a reporter in a recent interview.
Nine months later, Ms. De Alba accused Jeremiah, then a sophomore, of pushing her in the hallway. So Officer Laue navigated his way through a crowd of students to confront him, the footage shows.
1 minute 30 seconds later
The teenager met the officer with profane language and racial slurs.
Officer Laue told Jeremiah he was under arrest, and moved to cuff him. But the boy wrenched free, knocking the officer’s body worn camera to the ground.
Ms. De Alba, a former reserve police officer, picked it up. She filmed the struggle, holding the camera upside down.
Officer Laue, 6-foot-2 with a sturdy frame, kicked Jeremiah’s legs out from under him. The teenager, nearly as tall but thin, fell backward.
The officer straddled him; when a second officer arrived, they put Jeremiah in handcuffs and then hoisted him up.
They led the boy toward the school police office. “Let’s go,” Officer Laue said.
From Combat to the Classroom
A few minutes later, Officer Laue stood over Jeremiah, berating him. He taunted him for crying. He told him he would go to jail and stay there.
“That’s your future,” Officer Laue said.
The episode inside the office was captured entirely on the second officer’s body camera. That officer, Richard Radziski, repeatedly urged his colleague to calm down. Five times, he raised his hand and signaled Officer Laue to stop. But the disparagement continued.
At one point, Officer Laue accused Jeremiah of assaulting a school administrator. Jeremiah insisted he had not, and urged him to check the school surveillance cameras.
“You think I believe you over her?” Officer Laue asked.
Jeremiah shook his head. “Of course you don’t,” he answered.
Officer Laue, then 41, had been working for the school district police department for two years. It was his first job in law enforcement, and like all new officers, he went through the police academy. He received the 20 hours of state-mandated training specific to school policing. (Texas’ training is half the minimum recommended by the National Association of School Resource Officers.)
Before policing, Officer Laue served in the U.S. Army. He enlisted in 2004, records show, and during his nine years of service he deployed twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. For a time after his discharge, he operated technical equipment in the West Texas oil fields.
In an interview earlier this year, Officer Laue told The Times and The Express-News that he had thought his military experience would give him an advantage in law enforcement. But initially, he found Judson High unnerving. The crowded hallways made him “a little agoraphobic,” he said.
Still, he enjoyed mentoring students. Some, he said, had even asked him to come to their graduations.
When asked about the incident with Jeremiah, Officer Laue said that he had “put pressure on his midsection” only to get him into the chair.
He acknowledged that he had been “riled up” in the office, but could not say why.
“I don’t get that mad very often,” he added.
‘I Got You’
Inside the school that day, word was spreading that Jeremiah had been tackled and handcuffed. His physical education teacher, Kirk Logan, raced to the school police office as soon as he heard.
On his mind was the history of violence between police officers and Black people like Jeremiah and himself, he said in an interview.
“I’m not going to let it get there,” he recalled thinking.
Mr. Logan had a friendly relationship with Jeremiah — they talked often about music, sports and making good choices. He had recently served on a school committee that drew up a set of disability accommodations for the teen, records show. Such Individualized Education Program documents, known as I.E.P.s, are used for many students in public schools.
Part of Jeremiah’s plan advised school employees to avoid “power struggles” and to let him cool down if he got upset. It is unclear if that document, which was finalized days before the incident, was provided to Officer Laue.
When Mr. Logan arrived in the school police office, Jeremiah rose from his chair, footage shows. He begged the teacher to call his mother.
“Sit down or I’ll put you down!” Officer Laue shouted.
Mr. Logan positioned himself between Jeremiah and the officer.
He cupped the back of Jeremiah’s head. “Hey, Jeremiah,” he said, touching his forehead to the boy’s. “I got you.”
Several minutes later, Ms. De Alba arrived and shared her account of what had happened: She said that she had caught Jeremiah skipping class and suspended him, and then he pushed her.
Jeremiah interrupted, saying he had not skipped class. “When did I push you?” he asked.
Officials for the Judson school district did not provide any surveillance footage of the interaction between Ms. De Alba and Jeremiah to The Times and The Express-News, saying its release would compromise campus security.
Ms. De Alba and Officer Radziski declined to comment for this article. Both still work for the school district, payroll records show.
‘An ugly day’
Jeremiah was charged as a juvenile with assault and resisting arrest. The assault charge was later reduced to making a threat, court records show. He was put on probation, which was extended after he was caught smoking marijuana and repeatedly broke his evening curfew. At one point, he had to wear an ankle monitor, he said, which he hid under his pant leg around his classmates.
He stopped going to school last fall. Now 18, Jeremiah says he no longer hangs out with the boys in the gang. He spends his free time playing games on his phone and listening to songs by Lil Poppa and NBA YoungBoy, who rap about betrayal and feeling misunderstood.
He recently got a job washing dishes — a step toward getting his life together. He wants an apartment and to be able to support himself. More education may be in his future, but he does not plan to return to Judson High.
Since the episode with Officer Laue, he said, he has a visceral reaction to seeing police officers on the street. “I just go into shock,” he said.
His takeaway from what happened? Officers “show no mercy.”
Officer Laue said that he had been reprimanded for yelling at Jeremiah and ordered to take an anger management course. A district spokeswoman declined requests for an interview and did not respond to written questions about the encounter.
In an email, the spokeswoman said that the district “takes all matters involving student safety and student concerns seriously” and is “committed to continuously reviewing its practices.”
The only record in Officer Laue’s personnel file that the school district released was his resignation letter. He left a year and a half after the incident.
He told The Times and The Express-News that he did not like policing and that he is now an emergency medical technician. “It’s more of a feel-good profession,” he said. “I don’t have to be mean to people.”
The officer added that he had “nothing against” Jeremiah and hoped he was doing well.
After the arrest, he recalled, he watched surveillance footage of the interaction between the teenager and Ms. De Alba. Based on what he could see in that video, it appeared Jeremiah “might have brushed past her,” Officer Laue said.
“I wouldn’t have called that an assault,” he said.
Had he seen the footage before confronting Jeremiah, he said, he would have turned him over to a school administrator and declined to press criminal charges.
Looking back, he added, the whole situation could have unfolded a lot differently. “I wish we didn’t have an ugly day,” he said.
Asher Lehrer-Small contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Noyes contributed research. Produced by Rumsey Taylor.
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7) Seized on Their Way to Gaza, Activists Tell of Abuse in Israeli Custody
In interviews, more than 20 people who tried to break an Israeli blockade described beatings, electric shocks and other abuse after being captured. Israel denied the accusations.
By Catherine Porter, Elisabetta Povoledo and Nimet Kirac, Aug. 7, 2026
Reporting from Paris, Rome and Istanbul, the reporters spoke to 24 people who were detained when Israel intercepted their convoy. They also reviewed several activists’ medical records and spoke to legal experts about the Israelis’ actions.
When Arno Meyns tried to sail to Gaza in May, Israeli forces intercepted his boat at gunpoint, took him to an Israeli ship and, he said, shoved him into a darkened shipping container.
Barefoot and soaked in seawater, Mr. Meyns found up to four men waiting there to attack him, he said.
“They started kicking me right away. It was dark. They punched me, too. They stopped for a moment, and then started again,” said Mr. Meyns, 34, a Belgian who is a captain for small commercial vessels.
Mr. Meyns was among more than 400 activists on a flotilla of roughly 50 boats who were apprehended on the Mediterranean Sea by Israel as they tried to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
The stated goal of the activists, who sailed from Turkey on May 14, was to bring food and humanitarian aid to the war-ravaged enclave. In reality, many expected to be detained, like those who had participated in similar flotillas, before reaching the territory. They hoped that media coverage of their journey would call attention to Israel’s restrictions on supplies to Gaza, which tightened after the war began — and which later contributed, experts said, to famine in parts of Gaza.
The activists were captured days after setting sail. Interviews with activists and statements from Israeli officials both show that they were then held by Israel for roughly three days, first at sea aboard Israeli vessels, and later in the Port of Ashdod.
There, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, walked among them, taunting them in a video he posted to social media. At least two of the activists were immediately deported to Greece, while the rest spent the night in prison in southern Israel before being deported to Turkey, they said.
After the detainees arrived in Turkey, the flotilla’s organizers soon announced that the detainees had made “numerous reports of physical abuse” as well as “deeply disturbing accounts of sexual humiliation and degrading treatment carried out by Israeli forces.”
More than 50 were brought by ambulance to hospitals from the airport in Turkey, according to a lawyer for the flotilla. Over the following days, activists began returning to their home countries, where they often sought more treatment and gave more detailed accounts of their detention to international news outlets. Their accusations spurred condemnations from global leaders and investigations by prosecutors in countries including France and Italy, and by police officers in Australia.
Israel denied the accusations, saying that the activists had been treated in accordance with the law. They released brief videos showing activists hugging each other in detention and receiving water from an Israeli officer.
In the months that followed, we separately interviewed 24 activists, all but one of whom spoke on the record. We also reviewed records provided by medical authorities in Australia, France, Italy and Turkey. All of the activists gave consistent accounts of a pattern of abuse, first aboard the Israeli vessels and then on Israeli soil.
Twenty-two said they were subjected to varying kinds of physical assault. The 23rd said she had witnessed such violence, and the 24th, a doctor, said she had treated injuries caused by it. Seven people said they were hospitalized after Israel released them. Six provided medical records that showed they had variously suffered fractured ribs, a fractured vertebrae, a broken coccyx, a firearm wound and a collapsed lung.
Four said they had been shot with what they thought were rubber bullets or beanbag rounds while detained on an Israeli ship. Three said they were shocked with what they believed to be tasers while being beaten inside a shipping container.
The convoy — known as the Global Sumud Flotilla — was the largest of at least eight failed attempts by pro-Palestinian activists to sail to Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Its members came from dozens of countries and included seasoned campaigners who had long opposed Israel’s existence. One of its organizers attended the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, and another praised Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023. The members also included first-time participants — doctors, sailors, a bookshop owner, and a lawmaker — many of whom had joined the flotilla to protest Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza after the Hamas attack.
The activists’ accusations echo even graver accounts made for years by Palestinians detained by Israel.
Since the start of the Gaza war, thousands of Palestinians from Gaza have been held incommunicado for weeks or months, usually without charge, and routinely subjected to abuse, according to investigations by the United Nations, international rights groups and both Israeli and Palestinian campaigners. A previous investigation by The New York Times found that dozens of Palestinians have died inside Israeli prisons, while others have faced abuse including electric shocks, beatings and broken bones. One Palestinian told The Times that he was raped with a stick.
Israel has denied systematic abuse at its detention facilities.
By their own accounts, the activists were treated less punitively than most detained Palestinians and for a much briefer time. Even so, international law experts said that the treatment that they described would constitute a breach of international law.
“Anyone detained under the protections of the Geneva Convention is not supposed to be subjected to violence, like beating and tasering or burning someone,” said Janina Dill, an expert on the laws of war at Oxford University.
At least four different branches of the Israeli security forces were involved in detaining the captured flotilla activists. Israel’s military and its prison service both rejected allegations of abuse. The police referred a request for comment to the foreign ministry, which denied the accusations.
The military said in a statement that its “orders require respectful and appropriate treatment of flotilla participants” and that “no specific incidents of deviation from these binding procedures are known.” The Israel Prison Service said the detainees were held “in accordance with the law, with full regard for their basic rights.” It added that the service “rejects attempts to portray systematic abuse or unlawful conduct.”
The foreign ministry accused the activists of making “false allegations” that had been “scripted in advance, for one goal only — defaming Israel.” The ministry described the activists as “anarchists” and “agitators.”
Intercepted at Sea
Israeli naval commandos began intercepting the flotilla’s ships on May 18, in an operation that took more than 30 hours to complete, activists said, because of the large number of ships.
Dario Carotenuto, an Italian opposition lawmaker who took part in the flotilla, said he first saw the commandos on May 19. The boat that he traveled on was more than 100 miles west of Gaza, well outside Israel’s maritime border, according to a screenshot from an app that monitored a tracker in his backpack.
Three Israeli speedboats roared toward the 80-foot vessel, he said, prompting activists to enact an interception protocol they’d trained for. They donned their life jackets and sat together on deck, arms raised, he said.
The boat’s plastic windows were shattered by rubber bullets, Mr. Carotenuto said.
“There were at least two or three soldiers pointing their guns at us,” he said.
The activists view the Israeli raid as an act of piracy. The Israeli military said it acted legally to maintain its maritime blockade of Gaza.
Michael N. Schmitt, a former U.S. military lawyer and professor at West Point, said countries can act in international waters to enforce a blockade and temporarily detain people during such an operation to ensure the safety of their military personnel. However, it is illegal to abuse those detainees, he said.
After his capture, the Israelis brought Mr. Carotenuto and the people on his boat to a large gray ship, where other activists were aboard, he said.
Most of the people we interviewed described receiving similar treatment on that vessel.
First, the Israelis frisked them, removing some of their clothes. Then, activists said, they were pushed to the wet floor, usually restrained by zip ties. Later, they were marched to a desk where they were asked for identification.
Mr. Carotenuto offered his diplomatic passport and said he was a lawmaker, he said.
“They said: ‘Shut up,’” he said.
The activists who spoke to us were divided between two makeshift prisons on what many described as two separate warships. Some detainees spent up to two nights and two days there — though others, captured later, spent less.
The detainees said they had to sleep on the floor. Some said the space was so cramped that they were forced to sleep in shifts.
Both floating detention centers consisted of several shipping containers, topped with barbed wire and arranged to form an open-air courtyard, the activists said. A row of portable toilets lined one side. Armed, masked officers surveilled the space from above, they said, occasionally providing bottled water and bags of bread.
Ten activists said soldiers threw flash grenades into the courtyard, often with the apparent intent of dispersing detainees. Thirteen said that guards also fired rubber bullets or beanbag rounds into the courtyard.
Mecid Bagcivan, a Turkish N.G.O. worker, said he was shot in the right thigh at close range. The Times interviewed Mr. Bagcivan at his hospital bed in Istanbul, hours after surgery on that limb. His hospital report, reviewed by The Times, said it was hit by a firearm, without specifying the munition.
Taken to a Shipping Container
At one detention site, detainees were each taken inside a darkened shipping container, where most were kicked and punched, according to all 17 of the interviewees who had been held at that site. Three also said they were shocked with what they thought was a taser.
Mr. Carotenuto recalled entering the container carrying his shoes in one hand and holding up his trousers with the other, since his belt had been confiscated, he said. Inside, he said, he was kicked in the ribs and leg and punched in the face. An Italian medical report noted many bruises on his body.
Juliet Lamont, 55, an Australian activist and filmmaker, said she was raped in the container.
She said she was brought there with chains around her ankles, as well as zip ties binding her wrists. Inside, five men hit her, pulled out clumps of her hair and punched her in the ribs and face, Ms. Lamont said. At one point, she said, her underwear was wrenched down and something was inserted into her vagina.
“It was big enough to be a hand,” Ms. Lamont said. “It didn’t feel metallic enough to be a gun.”
Eight days later, she had a rape test at a hospital near her home in Australia. The local sexual assault service in New South Wales said in a letter that it had provided her with an “acute response” at an emergency department, followed by “ongoing therapeutic support.” The letter did not detail the results of the test.
A separate medical report from an Australian hospital, reviewed by The Times, said that a vertebrae in Ms. Lamont’s lower spine had sustained a mild fracture, though doctors could not tell when. She said it was likely broken when soldiers kicked her in the back.
Ms. Lamont reported the allegations to the Australian police. She had participated in an earlier flotilla, last October, after which she also accused soldiers of violence, including sexual assault. Though she risked similar treatment by joining the second flotilla, she said, she did so because individual sacrifice was necessary to achieve political change.
The Israeli foreign ministry characterized the rape allegation, which Ms. Lamont has recounted to other media outlets, as “an outright lie,” but it said Israel would investigate it if it received an official complaint. No such complaints have been made to Israel about the treatment of activists on this flotilla because, its organizers said, it was “legally untenable” to rely on Israel to investigate itself.
Activists described the trauma of overhearing other activists being abused.
“We could hear them screaming, howling,” said Malika Baouya, 48, a French nurse. “I couldn’t take it anymore, I was trying to plug my ears.”
Ms. Baouya suffered a fractured vertebrae, according to a hospital report, and was told by doctors to wear a neck brace for eight weeks.
Dr. Margaret Connolly, an Irish general practitioner, said she brought a stethoscope and medicine on the voyage in case fellow activists got sick.
These supplies were confiscated soon after Dr. Connolly was captured, she said. The Israelis then refused to provide her with alternatives to treat the wounded.
“They just ignored me,” she said.
Instead, Dr. Connolly, 67, and other captured medics were forced to improvise. They reworked shirts into bandages, bread into makeshift compresses and plastic bottles into splints, she and others said.
On the second day of detention, some of the flotilla participants nominated Dr. Connolly — the sister of Ireland’s president — as their spokeswoman.
“I begged for water, I begged for clothes and I begged for painkillers. And worst of all, I had to beg for sanitary towels,” Dr. Connolly said.
She was one of only two interviewees who said they were not beaten while in Israeli custody. But she said she had frequently witnessed such violence.
“I survived, but I have witnessed levels of brutality and depravity,” Dr. Connolly said.
Taunted in Port
By May 20, the activists had been brought to Ashdod, a port in southern Israel.
Mr. Carotenuto and a prominent Italian journalist were deported that day — perhaps, the lawmaker said, because of their higher profile.
The other activists faced abuse. Dozens were forced to kneel facedown, some with their hands tied behind their backs, as shown in footage distributed by Mr. Ben-Gvir, the Israeli minister. That video, later deleted, was captioned: “This is how we receive terror supporters. Welcome to Israel.”
On the second day of detention, some of the flotilla participants nominated Dr. Connolly — the sister of Ireland’s president — as their spokeswoman.
“I begged for water, I begged for clothes and I begged for painkillers. And worst of all, I had to beg for sanitary towels,” Dr. Connolly said.
She was one of only two interviewees who said they were not beaten while in Israeli custody. But she said she had frequently witnessed such violence.
“I survived, but I have witnessed levels of brutality and depravity,” Dr. Connolly said.
Taunted in Port
By May 20, the activists had been brought to Ashdod, a port in southern Israel.
Mr. Carotenuto and a prominent Italian journalist were deported that day — perhaps, the lawmaker said, because of their higher profile.
The other activists faced abuse. Dozens were forced to kneel facedown, some with their hands tied behind their backs, as shown in footage distributed by Mr. Ben-Gvir, the Israeli minister. That video, later deleted, was captioned: “This is how we receive terror supporters. Welcome to Israel.”
Lawyers from Adalah, a rights group based in Haifa, Israel, were allowed to meet with 220 activists in the port but were not given access to the others, according to Miriam Azem, a spokeswoman for the group. Their meetings were rushed and often disrupted by Israeli officers, particularly if the activists began detailing their abuse, Ms. Azem said.
The lawyers witnessed officers slapping two activists and interviewed dozens of others with extreme rib pain, as well as some who said their companions had been sexually assaulted, Ms. Azem said.
Later, the activists were driven to Ketziot Prison, about 65 miles to the south, before being brought the next morning to an airport and flown to Istanbul.
Now recovering at home, several activists said that though they had been traumatized, it was worth it to publicize the plight of Gazans.
“We made some impact,” said Mr. Meyns.
He would, he said, “probably” join another flotilla.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel, and Laura Chung from Sydney, Australia.
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8) We Thought Tech Would Make War More Precise. We Were Wrong.
Until recently, attacking civilian energy infrastructure was unacceptable. The dynamics of modern war have changed that.
By David Wallace-Wells, Aug. 7, 2026
“There are more wars than there used to be — worldwide, the number of conflicts has nearly doubled over the last 15 years. These wars are bloodier, too, with the annual death toll more than twice as high in the 2020s as it was in the 2010s and nearly five times as high as in the 2000s.”
When, last month, President Trump threatened to destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant, tit for tat, any time a missile or drone attacked an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, he was promising what would have looked, not very long ago, like an unconscionable act of military retribution: attacking energy infrastructure to impose pain on civilians.
They used to call this kind of thing a war crime. But somewhat suddenly, it has become a nearly universal feature of 21st-century conflict. Iran has been targeting energy infrastructure around the Persian Gulf since the very first day of fighting in February. Ukraine and Russia have been striking each other’s oil refineries and power grids for several years now. In Gaza, Israel has destroyed much of the electricity distribution network, periodically blocked the arrival of fuel and struck nearly every hospital and medical facility in the region. In Sudan, there have been drone attacks on power plants, substations and fuel depots from both sides in the ongoing civil war, plunging the country into blackouts and humanitarian crisis. In Yemen, the Houthis are firing on tankers in the Red Sea to restrict the flow of oil through the Bab al-Mandab Strait and are reportedly planning strikes against the largest oil production facility in Saudi Arabia, in a bid to pinch global markets ahead of the American midterm elections.
At West Point’s Modern War Institute, they are calling it the age of energy warfare. All around the world, civilian power supply — technically off-limits, according to international law, wherever that still applies — has become a “frontline target” in a new kind of conflict, four experts wrote in the report, published last month. Electricity plants, substations, transmission grids — military planners have always taken note of these systems, along with hospitals and water systems and other logistical features of civilian infrastructure. But for decades it has been rare for great powers to openly target energy supply, and often a kind of humanitarian outrage followed when anyone did, which meant that a broad expectation of civility prevailed. “Such sanctuary,” the authors of the West Point report wrote, “is over.” Energy infrastructure has become a much more common target, particularly as conflicts drag on in regions temptingly full of power plants and pipelines. “All of a sudden,” says Morgan Bazilian, an energy-systems scholar at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines and an author of the report, “our distaste for anything outside of the rules of war doesn’t look all that strong.”
The change is partly technological, with drones and other autonomous weapons making it much easier to strike behind enemy lines, much harder to defend against such attacks and perhaps less pressing to consider whether they constitute violation of some high-minded norms. For decades, military analysts liked to talk about “fourth-generation warfare,” in which stronger national militaries found themselves engaging with nonstate actors — insurgents, terrorists, mercenaries and private contractors. But the battles of the war on terror now seem like relatively distant memories, and attacks on energy systems have emerged as one striking harbinger of what’s to come. We may be watching the arrival of a fifth generation, in which even superpowers act a bit more as insurgents do, in which the line between open fighting and economic conflict grows harder to discern and in which the prohibition against strikes on nonmilitary targets begins to look more like a relic of an earlier age.
Last Thursday, the United States dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on a family home on Iran’s Qeshm Island without any apparent military connection. That same week, Minnesota officials concluded that a cyberattack on municipal drinking-water systems was most likely the work of Iranian hackers.
There are more wars than there used to be — worldwide, the number of conflicts has nearly doubled over the last 15 years. These wars are bloodier, too, with the annual death toll more than twice as high in the 2020s as it was in the 2010s and nearly five times as high as in the 2000s.
In the rich and relatively secure countries of the world, we were a bit slow to note the changes, persistent in the faith that war had grown rarer, more moral and more circumscribed. According to this logic, wars happened within an international legal order grounded in the Geneva Conventions and enforced by superpowers who liked to see themselves as moral actors on the world stage. Total war was a thing of the past, we may have told ourselves, with even relatively ugly battles now governed by relatively strict rules of engagement. And while brutal conflict may have persisted in places like Syria or Sudan, up in the unipolar north, we believed, we dispatched our fighter jets like gentlemen.
The invasion of Ukraine was an alarming break — not just the first true land war in Europe in a generation but one that quickly recast the shape of war for the generation to come. In the fall of 2022, Russia launched more than a thousand missile strikes against Ukrainian power plants and substations, autotransformers and the electric grid itself, according to Ukrainian officials; the W.H.O. had also tallied 700 strikes against hospitals and other health care facilities in the first nine months of the war.
Then came the drone revolution. In Ukraine, drones have remade the battlefield so thoroughly that the front is now effectively frozen, a next-generation form of trench warfare, with the frontline “kill zone” so clouded by drones that on average — according to the head of the C.I.A., at least — new Russian arrivals are killed within a half-hour. Robots and drones are now seizing territory on their own. Small drones target soldiers relieving themselves in outhouses and drive individuals out of homes into exposed air. Ukraine recruits gamers to be drone operators, “Ready Player One”-style, then manages campaigns in part by posting gamified performance metrics on public points-based leaderboards. Russia now has a similar program.
In certain ways, drones have made war more precise. But they have also helped widen the scope of conflict. The front may be effectively frozen, but Ukrainian drones are now frequently striking Russian energy targets that not very long ago seemed not simply too far to reach but beyond the pale as well. Between 2022 and 2024, Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure roughly doubled. Between 2024 and 2025, they doubled again. Early in the war, Ukraine was successfully targeting faraway Russian energy infrastructure perhaps a couple of times a month; for most of last year, it has averaged about 12 times each month. Drone pilots are now reportedly instructed by military planners to hit particular chimneys, identified as especially vulnerable nodes, to knock out production or distribution for longer.
Just in the past few months, Ukrainian drones and missiles have targeted Russian oil refineries, oil depots and oil export facilities. They’ve targeted Crimea’s electric grid and the Black Sea tanker fleet. Outside Moscow, Ukraine hit an oil refinery that supplies more than a third of the capital’s fuel supply, knocking operations offline through the end of the year. Early last month, it struck the country’s largest oil refinery — located in Siberia, 1,750 miles from Ukraine. A few weeks later, it hit one 1,500 miles from the front. The damage to these refineries, visible from space, lingers for months; many of those targeted over the last year are still struggling to restore even half of their previous production.
All told, these strikes have taken out between one-third and one-half of Russia’s entire oil refining capacity, some estimates suggest, and half the country is now dealing with fuel shortages and rationing. Within Russia, the result is what the defense analyst Michael Kofman has called a “genuine fuel crisis.” In Crimea, coupons for limited amounts of gas were selling out within minutes, only to be resold at significant markup. In June, all such sales were suspended — one of more than 50 regions in Russia where sales are being limited. Consumer prices grew five times as fast in June as they did in May, according to the Russian central bank, but energy prices aren’t the only way the new rules of war have hit home. Ukrainian drones have targeted civilian apartment complexes deep behind the front and are now routinely striking distribution centers of the Amazon-style retailer Wildberries.
In Ukraine and Russia, where pipelines and supply chains figured in earlier conflicts, energy warfare now looks like an endless volley of missiles and drones, some ending in spectacular midair interceptions and others in apocalyptic scenes of explosive fire and billowing Vantablack smoke.
In Iran, we are seeing something different — not just energy warfare but energy war, a conflict fought over and within energy markets, with military operations designed primarily to shape global prices and global supply of fuel. After Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in March, Dmitri Medvedev, the former president of Russia, compared the “Hormuz weapon” to a nuclear arsenal. But it works only if the price of gas becomes painful for American customers. The United States launched its war to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and degrade its military, but for months now the White House has been primarily focused on liberating all that fuel and bringing it to market.
In the very first days of the war, Iran targeted not just American regional military facilities but also oil refineries and gas fields, pipelines and export terminals, and especially the oil tankers idling in fear in the strait — not to mention hotels and malls and airports around the region. Now and again, Iran has also targeted desalination plants that provide up to 90 percent of drinking water to U.S. allies in the region. Iranian leadership appears to be in no hurry to negotiate an end to hostilities, preferring to press its strategic advantage and secure a perpetual claim on the strait and all global energy flows passing through it.
At first, the United States and Israel appeared more focused on traditional military targets, that first-day double-tap attack on the school in Minab aside. But in March, a strike on Tehran’s oil depots blanketed the city of 10 million in clouds of toxic airborne petrochemicals. And as the war drew on, the United States and Israel have struck oil depots and gas fields, electric grids and even individual power lines — in addition to imposing their own blockade of the strait to restrict Iranian exports. Lately, Iran has claimed that they’ve been targeting desalination plants, too.
This harm to ordinary people is one price of a long stalemate. The price of oil spiked with the first strikes and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but it never got as high — or as painful — as most experts feared. For stretches of the spring and summer, it wasn’t even clear whether the conflict was active or governed by cease-fire or the ambiguous “memorandum of understanding.” Energy flows would only partly and tentatively resume; prices would drift downward without ever returning to prewar levels. Diplomacy was conducted through leaks, often false, designed to push traders or reassure investors. In nearly six months, American missile stockpiles have been woefully diminished, American troops have been forced to evacuate from bases in the region, and American claims to hegemonic control over regional energy flows have been decimated. It’s a worse defeat than Vietnam, Foreign Policy has declared, and yet that defeat shows up much more clearly in energy markets than on the battlefield.
On July 29, a Central Command intelligence officer sent a message to military analysts, desperately soliciting ideas “for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.” The next day, Trump pledged the harshest assault on Iran’s energy infrastructure since the war began, then backed off in the hope of re-establishing the prewar status quo of an open strait — which may require an acknowledgment that Iran is now in control of it. In February, the world’s premier military tried to launch a conventional display of air-power dominance. Iran responded with energy warfare. Energy warfare won.
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9) ‘Shame!’: An ICE Facility Roils a Tiny Town, With a House Seat in Play
Tiny Hudson, Colo., was mostly known as a speed trap between plains and suburbs. Then ICE announced it was coming, setting off months of protests.
By Jack Healy, Reporting from Hudson, Colo., Aug. 7, 2026
Protesters from across the Denver area packed the town council meeting in Hudson, Colo., on Wednesday. Chet Strange for The New York Times
Now, Democrats are hoping they can capitalize on growing anger over the high cost of living and Mr. Trump’s deportation campaign to retake the district and reclaim control of Congress.
Mr. Evans has expressed support for immigration detention centers, while his Democratic challenger, Manny Rutinel, a progressive state lawmaker, is campaigning on a pledge to “stop ICE from terrorizing our communities.”
When it opens, as early as next month, the Big Horn detention center in Hudson could vastly expand immigration enforcement in a corner of Colorado where immigrants from across the world work in meatpacking plants and fields. It would nearly double Colorado’s immigrant detention capacity, and opponents say it would sow fear across the plains.
Diana and Ernesto Cruz, who live in nearby Fort Lupton, Colo., voted Republican in 2024 after being fed up with inflation and scenes of chaos along the southern border under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. But they said Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown had gone too far, and they did not want an ICE detention center down the road. They are planning to vote for Mr. Rutinel in November.
“There are more important things,” Mr. Cruz said on Wednesday, as he parked his big-rig truck outside the couple’s American flag-draped home.
Late last year, protesters rallied outside Mr. Evans’s district office in Greeley, Colo., to urge him not to support the detention center. A spokeswoman for Mr. Evans declined a request to discuss the issue.
Conservatives in Mr. Evans’s district said they welcomed the prospect of more immigration enforcement in Colorado, a Democratic-led state that the Trump administration has attacked for its sanctuary policies. They’ve also argued that the detention center would create jobs and revive a prison that has sat empty for more than a decade.
“It’s just sitting there,” said Denise Geddes, a nurse’s aide in Fort Lupton who described herself as “big time MAGA.” Unauthorized immigrants, she said, are “taking over the system.”
“We’re going to scoop your butt up,” she continued.
The GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison companies, has a $529 million contract to run the facility and is already advertising for security officers, starting at $35 an hour, and other support staff. On Wednesday, a few pickup trucks came and went from the property, but there was no sign that any detainees had arrived. Neither the GEO Group nor ICE responded to requests for comment.
Hudson’s leaders insist they are powerless to stop the center. Bryce Lange, the town manager, said the prison had been approved by town voters years ago and that it still had a certificate of occupancy, even though it has sat empty for more than a decade.
“We’re very limited in our abilities to do anything,” Mr. Lange said. “It’s already built.”
The prison building is owned by Highlands REIT, a Chicago-based real-estate investment trust, which did not respond to requests for comment.
The town’s inaction has only fueled protesters’ frustration. Opponents of the prison sued Hudson last month, arguing the building site is not zoned for an immigration detention center. The suit says the facility could strain Hudson’s water systems, roads and emergency services by housing as many as 1,200 detainees in a remote facility 12 miles from the nearest hospital.
“The town has thrown up its hands and claimed it does not have the authority to act — that is a lie,” said David Seligman, executive director of the progressive legal nonprofit Towards Justice, which sued Hudson on behalf of a faith group and a neighbor near the facility.
Dozens of protesters regularly flock to Hudson to march through the streets and demonstrate in the dusty field outside town hall. Thousands of people have deluged the town with angry written comments.
“It’s against every fiber of my being,” said Barbara Mills-Bria, a retired engineer who drove from suburban Denver to Hudson with two friends to attend a raucous council meeting on Wednesday.
A brass band strutted through a quiet neighborhood as organizers handed out leaflets opposing the detention center, prompting pickup trucks stuck behind the procession to honk in frustration. Chesney Baldwin, a college student who lives in Hudson, was puzzled as he watched the marchers go by.
“Everyone here likes ICE,” he said. “This isn’t Denver.”
Some residents and town leaders are tired of the scrutiny and say their normally staid town meetings have been hijacked by outsiders. Five police officers were searching bags and providing security at a council meeting on Wednesday as dozens of demonstrators waited to make statements opposing the detention center.
“These people don’t pay taxes here,” Tracy Trevarton, a Hudson resident, said, as she stood in the entryway to town hall. “We can’t even get in here and conduct our own business. It’s tearing our town apart.”
Protesters, in turn, have accused Hudson of trying to stifle open debate by limiting public comments. The meeting this week grew so heated that the mayor abruptly adjourned it, prompting even more outrage.
Kerry Shaklee, a longtime resident and member of Hudson’s planning commission, walked away shaking his head. He said he opposed the detention center, which he characterized as a “travesty.” But he also felt for the besieged town government.
“They’ve been through the wringer,” he said. “I ran for council. Thank God I lost. I didn’t need to sit through all of this.”
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10) Puerto Rico Will Begin Rationing Water Amid Fresh Crisis
Starting on Friday, the island’s water authority is scheduled to shut off water for rotating 48-hour periods in parts of San Juan and surrounding areas.
By David Ovalle and Laura N. Pérez Sánchez, Aug. 7, 2026
David Ovalle reported from Miami, and Laura N. Pérez Sánchez from San Juan and Loíza, P.R.
Residents of Loíza, P.R., say their water stopped running in early June. Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
Across Puerto Rico, residents are being forced to forgo showers and housecleaning.
A restaurant owner in San Juan collects condensation from an air-conditioning unit so customers can use the water to flush toilets.
Miles away in the town of Loíza, residents flock to Peter Pabón, who weaves his tanker truck through narrow streets to fill buckets, storage bins and plastic bottles. Bedridden and sick residents depend on him.
“Everyone knows me already, and I know where everyone is,” said Mr. Pabón, 34, who delivers about 10,000 gallons of water daily for a private water company dispatched by the island’s government.
Similar scenes are unfolding in other parts of Puerto Rico, as it plunges into yet another water crisis driven by notoriously fragile infrastructure, and that has been worsened by a recent drought.
In June, a major pipeline ruptured, affecting service for tens of thousands of customers in the San Juan area. The pipeline was later fixed, but the interruptions persisted.
At the same time, more than half of the archipelago is experiencing moderate to extreme drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. The San Juan area experienced the driest July in more than a century, said Emanuel Rodríguez, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service.
The compounding problems have put another spotlight on the Puerto Rican government’s inability to reliably provide basic services, deepening frustration among residents already plagued by regular power outages.
This week, Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón of Puerto Rico cited the drought in declaring an island-wide state of emergency. Starting on Friday, the island’s water authority is scheduled to put in place new rationing measures by shutting off water for rotating 48-hour periods in parts of San Juan and surrounding areas.
Ms. González-Colón urged conservation, saying that washing cars, watering plants and hosing down driveways “limits our ability to maintain water availability in the metropolitan area.”
But residents have had little patience for the government’s response and what they say is a lack of communication. At a small protest in San Juan this week, Alfredo Cuyar, a 66-year-old retired aviation executive who lives in an upscale part of the Santurce neighborhood, said his water service had been terrible for more than a year — long before the drought.
“Not even after Hurricane Maria did we lose our water service,” Mr. Cuyar said of the 2017 storm that also devastated the island’s electricity grid.
Water woes are nothing new for the U.S. territory of more than three million residents who have long contended with low water pressure and spotty service. Droughts prompted strict water rationing in 2015 and 2020.
Government officials and experts blame a lack of investment and maintenance in the island’s aging water infrastructure. Félix Aponte Ortiz, a leading water management expert in Puerto Rico, says that up to 60 percent of the water in the island’s system never makes it to customers.
“There’s an emphasis in producing more water and in rehabbing the big infrastructure,” Mr. Aponte Ortiz said, “but not so much in updating pipes.”
This spring, the mayor of San Juan sued the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority over its inability to deal with water outages.
The authority did not return requests for comment.
Mr. Rodríguez, the hydrologist with the Weather Service, said that this year’s El Niño weather pattern and a mild tropical storm season were making it difficult to predict when enough rain might replenish reservoirs.
“It could be five or six months of below-normal precipitation, not only us but all of the entire northeast Caribbean,” he said.
The Puerto Rico National Guard, mobilized by emergency declarations, has distributed nearly 600,000 gallons of water, mostly in the San Juan region. Officials are offering grants of up to $5,000 for small businesses to buy or rent water trucks or to buy bottled water, cisterns and tanks, among other equipment and services.
But relief efforts have done little to ease the misery of residents like Mindy Muñoz, 45, a hotel worker who says she has gone 80 consecutive days without running water in her Santurce apartment.
To save water, she cooks, cleans and flushes less often. Ms. Muñoz is lucky that her job sometimes allows her to bathe in vacant hotel rooms.
The anxiety of lacking has left her mentally wrecked, she said. “I feel like I need therapy,” Ms. Muñoz said.
The crisis is also hampering the island’s vital tourism and hospitality industry.
Tourists are now canceling trips, said Sami Rodríguez and Allen Wolford, who run an Airbnb in San Juan and are trying to open a boutique hotel. Construction on some rooms has been stalled, in part, because there isn’t enough water to mix concrete, Mr. Rodríguez said.
For David Santini, the restaurant owner in San Juan who collects air-conditioning condensation for his customers, it is a “daily state of stress and uncertainty as a business owner.”
Every day, he loads into his Toyota Corolla 30 gallons of water from home and ferries them to his restaurant, Molinis Café, so that staff members can cook favorites such as the mashed plantain dish mofongo.
“You start getting used to this misery, to this mediocre reality, but I’m still surprised that this is the reality in Puerto Rico,” Mr. Santini said.
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11) Trump Administration Fast-Tracks Military Cooperation With Colombia
The country’s new Trump-endorsed president takes office on Friday. Sweeping plans to target drug traffickers with U.S. help are already underway.
By Annie Correal and Eric Schmitt, Aug. 7, 2026
Annie Correal covers Latin America and Eric Schmitt covers the U.S. military and national security.
“The two governments have wasted no time. After meeting with defense officials in Washington, Colombia’s incoming defense minister, Gen. Jorge Eduardo Mora, said that the recently announced strategy, called Plan Patriot 2.0, marks ‘a new stage of cooperation, integration and joint action.’ The two countries have discussed plans to provide U.S. intelligence and support to Colombia’s military for counternarcotics missions, to extradite captured traffickers and to restart the aerial eradication of coca plants, according to U.S. officials.”
Colombia’s new president campaigned on promises to crush his country’s powerful drug traffickers with the help of the United States.
He takes office Friday, but his plans to partner with U.S. forces are already underway and could make Colombia a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s efforts to militarize the fight against drug trafficking across the region.
After Colombian officials from the incoming administration traveled to Washington last month, a senior U.S. defense official announced a new military partnership with Colombia that he said would take a historically strong alliance “to new levels.”
And the president-elect, Abelardo De La Espriella, has named Medellín the hub of President Trump’s new regional anti-trafficking alliance, the Shield of the Americas.
The Trump administration has made targeting traffickers in Latin America a priority. Blaming cartels and drug gangs for America’s overdose crisis and for fueling violent crime, his administration has designated two dozen groups in the region as terrorist organizations and has authorized using lethal force against them.
U.S. officials have created a regional anti-cartel coalition and military task force including 18 other nations, and have compared their push to U.S. military campaigns against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
The Trump administration has also pressed Latin American leaders to allow U.S. forces to conduct joint strikes within their territory, and Mr. Trump has touted U.S.-involved operations that killed the leaders of a major cartel in Mexico and a transnational gang in Venezuela.
Previous U.S. crackdowns on drug trafficking in Latin America have had limited success — and the latest push has raised concerns that military operations could threaten countries’ sovereignty and endanger civilians.
Before Mr. De La Espriella’s election in June, the Trump administration had made little headway with Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer and traditionally Washington’s closest ally in the region.
The outgoing president, Gustavo Petro, a leftist, criticized Mr. Trump’s anti-trafficking strategy and denounced as murder the U.S. military strikes on boats that the Trump administration has claimed, without evidence, are carrying drugs off the coast of South America. The strikes have now killed at least 221 people.
The U.S. authorities imposed sanctions on Mr. Petro, decertified Colombia as a counternarcotics partner and threatened to cut off aid.
Mr. De La Espriella, a staunch conservative who had never held office, is poised to be a far more willing ally. On the campaign trail, he praised Mr. Trump’s boat strikes and won over many Colombians with vows to come down on armed traffickers “with the wrath of God.”
The two governments have wasted no time. After meeting with defense officials in Washington, Colombia’s incoming defense minister, Gen. Jorge Eduardo Mora, said that the recently announced strategy, called Plan Patriot 2.0, marks “a new stage of cooperation, integration and joint action.”
The two countries have discussed plans to provide U.S. intelligence and support to Colombia’s military for counternarcotics missions, to extradite captured traffickers and to restart the aerial eradication of coca plants, according to U.S. officials.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.
The timeline for joint operations is not clear. One former senior Trump administration official said there was pressure from the White House and senior Pentagon leaders to show results immediately after Mr. De La Espriella took office, but noted that U.S. military commanders were counseling more planning.
The Department of Defense declined to comment beyond a statement from last month. The White House referred questions to the State Department, which said in a statement, “We stand ready to support Colombia’s efforts to strengthen its security forces, defeat narcoterrorists and criminal organizations and end illegal immigration flows.”
Colombia’s armed groups, which include former leftist rebel armies and right-wing paramilitaries, have long been involved in drug trafficking, but have expanded significantly in recent years amid soaring global demand for cocaine. (They also traffic illegal gold and other minerals.)
The groups have multiplied and spread into more of the country, and the number of combatants has increased from around 13,000 in 2022 to nearly 27,000 last year, according to conflict researchers.
Military operations were largely halted for much of Mr. Petro’s term, as his government pursued peace talks with armed groups, a move critics say allowed the groups to expand.
“Is this the right moment for a more kinetic approach?” said Kevin Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 2014 to 2019. “My answer is ‘yes, and.’”
Even as armed drug trafficking has surged, Mr. Whitaker said, Colombia’s military has been hobbled by funding cuts, and scores of generals were purged under Mr. Petro.
Planning and executing operations is a cycle that improves with repetition, he said, “and this is an armed force which just hasn’t been doing it for the last four years at the same level that it had done before.”
He added: “You can’t just snap your fingers.”
Restarting the aerial eradication of coca, the plant used to make cocaine, also requires planning, experts say. Eradication using glyphosate, an herbicide, was banned by Colombia in 2015 in response to World Health Organization warnings about the health effects on humans.
Both governments will be eager for an early show of force, said Gimena Sánchez, the Andes director at the Washington Office on Latin America.
The U.S. government, which has promoted dramatic footage of military operations against alleged traffickers, may be looking for more such imagery in the run-up to November’s midterm elections. For his part, Mr. De La Espriella is likely to “go big,” Ms. Sánchez said, kicking off his term with “showy actions.”
Targeting the leaders of trafficking groups has been shown to have little long-term effect on the drug trade, she said.
Mr. De La Espriella’s presidential office did not respond to a request for comment.
The original Plan Patriot was a U.S.-backed military offensive in the 2000s that deployed thousands of Colombian soldiers against leftist rebel groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. It was part of Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar U.S. program to provide military aid and other assistance.
It dealt significant blows to the FARC, which eventually agreed to disband, signing a landmark peace accord in 2016. But a truth commission found that Plan Patriot also resulted in extreme violence by state forces, including extrajudicial killings.
Quashing traffickers has long been a challenge for Colombia’s military. The groups operate in rugged terrain and sometimes live among civilian populations. Adding to the challenge, they have now spilled across Colombia’s borders into Venezuela and Ecuador.
Another obstacle, conflict experts say, is that many minors have been recruited by trafficking groups, in part to ward off airstrikes.
It is not clear how much aid could now flow to Colombia. In the past, Colombia was the region’s largest recipient of U.S. security assistance, but during the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term, that assistance was cut by more than half, to around $187 million from $400 million, according to a report to Congress by the Trump administration.
With Mr. De La Espriella now in office, experts say, the spigot could reopen.
Mr. Mora, the incoming defense minister, has said Plan Patriot 2.0 would help restore Colombia’s military capabilities. According to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, the partnership is expected to bolster Colombia’s helicopter fleet and provide drone protection technology as armed groups are increasingly turning to drone warfare.
The plan has drawn criticism from the left. Senator Iván Cepeda, whom Mr. De La Espriella narrowly defeated in June’s election, told an interviewer: “What’s being discussed is a strategy to subject Colombia to another sovereignty and convert it into a kind of protectorate.”
Mr. De La Espriella had originally planned to hold his inauguration at a military base in a conflict zone, instead of the capital. Lawmakers ultimately approved moving the event to Cali, a city near the zone.
This week, the Colombian authorities reported that they had intercepted a bus carrying 1,000 pounds of explosives meant to target military and police facilities during the inauguration. The police said the attack had been planned by a FARC dissident group.
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