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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We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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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. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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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) Heat Deaths in a ‘Cold’ Country Are a Warning to the Rest of Europe
A June heat wave in Belgium and neighboring countries exposed a lethal lack of readiness. That’s a risk as another wave hits Europe.
By Jeanna Smialek and Koba Ryckewaert, Reporting from Brussels and Liège, Belgium, Aug. 15, 2026
Treating a 77-year-old woman for heat-related illness last month at MontLégia hospital in the Belgian city of Liège. Ksenia Kuleshova for The New York Times
Seniors died in stifling apartments. Emergency calls were left on hold. Doctors treated an onslaught of people sick from heat, sometimes in wards without air-conditioning.
These are scenes that played out in Belgium, one of the world’s wealthiest nations, on a recent summer weekend. They are also a warning to Europe.
Europe is the fastest-warming continent, yet large parts remain ill prepared. As heat waves scorch its nations this summer, they are killing thousands in countries with strong health systems. In just one week in late June, there were around 16,000 excess deaths, or more people who died than usual, in Europe. Belgium, France and Germany were the worst affected, based on data collected by the European Mortality Monitoring Network.
Belgium, known for cold and damp, not searing heat, had the highest excess deaths in Europe, making it a case study into what went wrong. In Wallonia, the region that makes up the country’s south, the death rate was 77 percent higher than what would be expected between mid-June and early July. Some hospitals were overrun, with gurneys and patients lining the hallways and medical staff working without breaks in the unrelenting heat.
“Each crisis is becoming increasingly severe,” said Yves Coppieters, the health minister for Wallonia. “That’s what we’re failing to anticipate.”
Climate change means that the issue is most likely here to stay. Across Europe, “we think the summers are hot now,” said Joan Ballester Claramunt, a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health who focuses on climate change and health. “The future that we’re seeing, it could be much worse.”
Belgium is a stark example of why heat waves can become deadly in countries more accustomed to cool weather. Emergency systems in some cases buckled under the pressure, and structural challenges left the most vulnerable to suffer.
The federal health ministry defended elements of the response and noted that hospital capacity had been scaled up during the crisis, but it acknowledged that some change was needed. “I believe we must indeed learn lessons quickly,” Frank Vandenbroucke, the Belgian minister of social affairs and public health, told lawmakers early last month.
During the late June wave, MontLégia hospital, in the Belgian city of Liège, experienced a rush of patients so intense that in the emergency room healthier people were temporarily lined up in hallways so that those past the point of saving could have privacy while they died.
Dr. Arnaud Detroz, who was working that weekend, said his team was confronted with overheating cases that they had seen mostly in textbooks. “In our countries, at our latitudes, these cases are relatively rare,” he said.
‘Very Crushing’
Belgium is not accustomed to taking heat so seriously.
At the start of the June heat wave, Theo Francken, the defense minister, posted an image on Instagram of himself smiling in the sun with the caption, “It’s warm for two days and we’re all going to die again apparently.” He criticized the press.
“Enjoy the beautiful weather,” he added. “And LIVE!”
The weather quickly turned into a matter of life or death.
Temperatures shot up between mid-June and early July, surpassing 100 degrees in parts of Wallonia. The fact that it was early in the summer, before people had a chance to acclimatize, worsened the danger, experts said.
In the last weekend of June, the Belgian emergency call line was severely overwhelmed, according to medical groups whose representatives signed an open letter protesting the meltdown. In some cases, they said, it took 10 minutes just to get through to an operator. (Bernard Quintin, the Belgian interior minister, told lawmakers that average waits were much shorter and noted that extra staff members were brought in.)
“If you have to wait for 10 minutes if you have a stroke or heart attack, it’s quite a big problem,” said Dr. Pierre-Louis Deudon, a general practitioner in the Brussels region who signed the letter.
Emergency rooms were also overrun in parts of Wallonia. During the peak of the heat wave, the number of emergency vehicles arriving at Grand Hôpital de Charleroi, about an hour’s drive west of Liège, rose from an average of 60 to up to 110 per day, said Dr. Laurent Peyskens, deputy head of the emergency department.
“It was very crushing,” Dr. Peyskens said.
Half of all emergency rooms in Wallonia lacked air-conditioning, said Dr. Phillippe Devos, director general at Unessa, a federation of Belgian health care providers in Brussels and Wallonia.
For Belgium, June 27 appears to have been the second-deadliest day of the 21st century, after a day early in the coronavirus crisis. In Wallonia, June 28 was deadlier than the depths of the pandemic in 2020.
“We should definitely be afraid of a repeat,” said Loïc Gillerot, a climate-health expert at CERAC, an independent Belgian research center that studies climate risk. “The question is: Are we talking about a repeat this summer?”
Pre-existing Conditions
In Belgium, as elsewhere, extreme heat hit the vulnerable the hardest.
The region of Wallonia had more than twice as much excess mortality as the northern region of Flanders.
Part of the problem, experts said, is that people in Wallonia have lower incomes on average. Poor people are more likely to have pre-existing health conditions, and they often lack access to well-ventilated housing.
About 85 percent of the more than 900 excess deaths in Wallonia between mid-June and July 1 were of people 65 or older, according to figures from Sciensano, the Belgian health data institute. Low-income seniors who lived alone were particularly at risk, health care professionals said, as their houses or attic apartments became baking death traps.
“You have people who are isolated, old,” Dr. Devos said. “We saw in the emergency rooms: When people came to the E.R., it was impossible to save them.”
Wallonia’s housing was part of the challenge. Many residential buildings are aging and were constructed to hold in heat, not to keep it out.
“It’s a country that is considered cold, culturally,” said Gilles Vanvolsem, managing director of the Belgian Green Building Council. “People think more about heating their house than cooling their house.”
Nor did behaviors adjust. Belgians, including those with medical conditions and their caregivers, at times appeared unaware of how to handle the heat.
Dr. Deudon in Brussels noted, for instance, that people on antidepressants and other mental health drugs often are not made aware that they are at higher risk, and so they continued to go to work as normal.
Dr. Toon Ceyssens, a general practitioner in Flanders, echoed that concern, noting that blood pressure medications also increase the danger.
During the worst of the heat wave, he was alarmed to see residents at a care institution where he works still taking excursions. “The caretakers and the patients didn’t take the heat wave that seriously,” he said.
Cold Country No More
To limit heat risk, countries like Belgium will need to shake their cold-country mentality, experts said.
Dr. Ceyssens said patients were often hesitant to install air-conditioning, worried that it would make them sick, spread germs and harm the environment.
Belgians do not “want to be Americans,” with the indoor temperature set to 65 degrees, he said, but he saw a middle ground in which vulnerable people would have access.
“The mentality on air-conditioning has to change,” he said.
Others disagree. Even some Belgian officials are wary of relying too much on climate control, concerned that adding it could overwhelm the power grid and leave cities even hotter by pumping hot air into the streets.
“Air-conditioning can be appropriate in specific situations, particularly for vulnerable people or certain buildings,” said Simon Souris, a spokesman for Wallonia’s housing and energy minister. “However, our long-term strategy is not based on its widespread deployment.”
Since June, Belgian experts have issued recommendations for more cooling spaces and resources for the vulnerable. Federal authorities are working toward handling emergency calls differently, doctors said. The housing authorities in Wallonia are instituting policies to encourage housing renovation.
Yet medical workers and public health experts fear that the kind of changes that are needed — like housing and infrastructure improvements — will take more time than Belgium has. At MontLégia, doctors remain concerned that officials will not dedicate enough resources to the ongoing threat of heat.
Late last month, as emergency doctors recalled losing patients in June, another arrived.
A 77-year-old woman was wheeled in with heat stroke, her frail chest heaving, her temperature near the point of organ failure. Doctors cut off her blouse and covered her in ice packs.
They are bracing for more. A supply closet on the emergency-room floor is stocked with fans. Nearby, a refrigerator is filled with cooling IV drips.
“As emergency-room doctors, we can come to terms with fatality, but it’s not the same when you know it’s due to a systemic failure,” said Dr. Michèle Yerna, who runs the MontLégia emergency unit. That, she added, is “much harder to bear.”
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2) As Inflation Eats Up Pay Gains, Workers Fall Behind
When prices spiked in 2021-22, wages failed to keep up for many workers, new research shows. Now the pattern is repeating.
By Ben Casselman, Ben Casselman is the chief economics correspondent, Aug. 15, 2026
The latest shock, driven by the jump in energy prices tied to the war with Iran, has sent measures of consumer sentiment tumbling. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Americans’ paychecks are losing ground to inflation.
Again.
Government data released this week showed that consumer prices rose 3.4 percent in July from a year earlier, outpacing a 3.2 percent increase in hourly earnings over the same period. That means that, for the fourth month in a row, Americans’ real wages — how many sandwiches, haircuts and gallons of gas they can buy with an hour’s pay — actually fell.
Such declines are unusual. In the years before the coronavirus pandemic, real wage growth sped up and slowed down with the ebbs and flows of the economy. But pay never fell outright for more than a month or two at a time.
Then came the pandemic and the ensuing surge in prices, which led to the sharpest decline in inflation-adjusted wages since the 1980s. From February 2021 to June 2022, the buying power of the average American’s paycheck fell more than 4 percent.
The latest shock, driven by the jump in energy prices tied to the war with Iran, hasn’t been nearly as severe. But coming on the heels of the earlier decline in pay — and at a time when affordability and the cost of living remain top of mind for many voters — it has sent measures of consumer sentiment tumbling.
“The real hourly wage is absolutely the fundamental building block of working Americans’ living standards,” said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “When it’s falling in real terms, that’s a huge problem for folks who are already stressed by affordability concerns.”
Mr. Bernstein should know. He was a top economic adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. when the administration was trying to persuade Americans that the economy was improving despite the shrinking value of their paychecks. Those efforts largely failed.
Now, the Trump administration is making similar arguments, so far with the same result. In political polls, voters give the president poor marks for his handling of the economy, which had been an area of strength for him.
On Friday, the University of Michigan said its long-running measure of consumer sentiment fell in early August, partly reversing modest gains when gas prices eased in June and July. Only 8 percent of people surveyed said they expected their income growth to exceed inflation over the next year, down from 18 percent at the end of last year.
Falling real wages aren’t the only sign that households are struggling to manage higher prices. Personal income after taxes — a broader measure that takes into account other sources of cash such as retirement benefits and rental income — also fell in inflation-adjusted terms in the second quarter. And the savings rate has plummeted as Americans try to maintain their standard of living.
The latest inflation data contained some modest good news for Republicans. It showed prices rising more slowly in July than at the peak of the oil shock in the spring. If that trend continues, wages should start rising faster than prices once again.
History Lessons
But even if wage growth does rebound, Americans’ assessment of the economy may not quickly follow suit. Pay gains consistently outpaced inflation during Mr. Biden’s final two years in office, but measures of consumer sentiment barely recovered.
New research from the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago may help explain why. Economists used data from ADP, the payroll processing company, to study pay patterns of millions of workers before and during the pandemic-era surge in inflation.
Before the pandemic, they found, most companies gave nearly all their workers a standardized annual pay increase, often about 3 percent. During a period of low, stable inflation of about 2 percent, that was enough for workers to scratch out modest gains in real terms.
When inflation jumped in 2021 and 2022, however, companies offered only slightly better annual pay increases, meaning most workers fell behind. The only way to get a bigger raise, at least for many workers, was to change jobs. Unsurprisingly, workers did so in droves — the number of Americans quitting their jobs hit a record high in 2021 and 2022, when inflation was at its peak.
Some workers managed to win larger raises by merely threatening to leave, or by getting promotions. But among employees who stayed with the same company from 2021 to 2024, more than two in five, 43 percent, saw their wages decline in real terms, by an average of roughly 9 percent.
“These are big numbers,” said Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago who is one of the paper’s authors.
Economists often think about inflation as having relatively small consequences for a large group of people, unlike job losses, which have large consequences for a relatively small group of people. But if inflation results in large, persistent wage declines for a significant share of employees, Mr. Hurst said, “the cost of inflation to workers is just orders of magnitude more than any of our macro models say.”
Older workers, who have a harder time moving between jobs, were hit especially hard. More than half of workers ages 50 and up lost ground to inflation between 2021 and 2024. Even when they did change jobs, they typically got smaller raises than their younger peers.
Younger workers were more likely to get raises that kept up with inflation. But they had to hustle for them — jumping between jobs or seeking out competing offers — and, even then, their pay typically lagged behind where it would have been had prepandemic trends in pay continued.
“During periods of inflation, wage adjustments are not free,” said Christina Patterson, a University of Chicago economist and another author of the paper. Ms. Patterson was also an author of an earlier paper showing the toll that such fights over pay take on employees. “In order for workers to recover their wages, they had to start fighting for it.”
Less Leverage
Now real wages are falling again just as some workers were starting to make up for lost ground. And while inflation isn’t as high as it was four years ago, the labor market is weaker, making it harder for workers to move between jobs in search of better pay. Wage growth has slowed in recent months even before accounting for inflation, a sign of workers’ reduced bargaining power.
A measure of employee sentiment from the job site Glassdoor hit a record low last month, as workers worried about the shrinking value of their paychecks and about the threat posed by artificial intelligence and other forces.
“Workers have less power now — the pendulum has swung from employees back toward employers,” said Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor. “There’s less incentive for employers to proactively offer a raise or benefits to offset higher prices.”
The recent declines in pay could pose a problem for Republican candidates in this fall’s midterm elections. Research from economists at Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley, recently found that, in the 2024 election, Mr. Trump and other Republicans made their largest gains in the parts of the country where real wage growth was weakest. Now, the same trend could work against them.
“President Trump gained from drops in real wages,” said Francesco Trebbi, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was one of the study’s authors. “Voters punished incumbents for the reduction of the purchasing power of their income.”
But, Mr. Trebbi continued, “the problem is now he is the incumbent.”
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3) Trump Backed Away From a Wall at Big Bend. But the Bulldozers Are Here.
Over the objections of environmentalists, local sheriffs and some state leaders, the Trump administration appears to be moving ahead with border infrastructure in one of Texas’ most beloved parks.
By J. David Goodman, Aug. 15, 2026
Construction workers cleared a road in Big Bend National Park earlier this month. Brian Finke
Texans were caught off-guard several months ago when the Trump administration appeared poised to construct a 30-foot wall through Big Bend National Park, a rugged expanse of moon-like desert that is a point of pride for many in the state.
But after bipartisan opposition grew, the wall was removed from the federal government’s border construction map. Many exhaled, believing that the West Texas park, with its towering mountains and cliffs, would be spared.
Then the bulldozers arrived this month.
The sight of these earth-moving machines along the Rio Grande near the Santa Elena Canyon, one of the park’s major attractions, pointed to the most significant evidence of border barrier construction in the park. Contractors ripped through mesquite trees and brush and leveled the ground for more than a mile of what appeared to be a future roadway.
Big Bend is beloved by Texans and many across the country, even those who are not among its more than 500,000 annual visitors. It is a place to feel the immense and inhospitable wilderness of West Texas, where the stars at night actually are big and bright.
The construction sparked a fresh wave of anger and outrage from all sorts of people — environmentalists, former park officials, local sheriffs — who again insisted that such infrastructure was unnecessary in a border region so remote and dangerous that people have rarely tried to cross there, even at the peak of unauthorized migration.
Both John Cornyn, the state’s outgoing Republican senator, and James Talarico, the Democrat running to replace him, expressed concern this month about the start of construction inside the park.
“My constituents believe that the 1,000-foot riverbank cliffs and remote Big Bend terrain offers its own source of deterrence,” Mr. Cornyn said in a letter last week to the Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin.
Other Republican state leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who defeated Mr. Cornyn in the Senate primary, have not weighed in directly on the construction.
On Friday, a local nonprofit and an outdoor recreation business represented by State Senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat, filed a federal suit to try and halt the project. A day earlier, a bipartisan group of Texas legislators sent Mr. Abbott a letter urging him to ask federal officials to stop the construction.
“It’s gotten to the point where people are picking up the torches and marching in the street right now,” said Tex Toler, a former tourism director for Marfa, Texas, northwest of the park. “This is one of Texas’ and the country’s last wild places.”
After days of confusion among West Texas residents, senior Trump administration officials explained their plans and rationale on Thursday. There would be no wall, but there would be construction.
“C.B.P. is building one new access road, improving existing roads, installing detection technology and placing vehicle barriers in limited, strategic locations,” Rodney Scott, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said in a statement.
The park consists of 118 miles of land on the U.S.-Mexico border, and a patrol road is slated to run along much of it. A few areas would have miles of four- to six-foot-tall vehicle barriers.
The bulldozers and excavators have been engaged this month in “survey and design work,” Mr. Scott said.
Fewer than six migrants a day have been encountered crossing from Mexico in recent months in the entire Big Bend patrol sector, which includes the park and hundreds of miles of border, federal statistics show.
Officials have said that while unauthorized crossings are currently at record lows, they could increase in the future.
The Trump administration has been furiously building new border barriers, and Mr. Scott said the Big Bend construction was necessary to fill in gaps. Southwest Valley Constructors, one company currently at work in the region, was awarded a $1.7 billion contract. The company directed questions to federal officials.
“We will not leave Big Bend as an opening for cartels to exploit by shifting their routes and tactics,” Mr. Scott said in the statement.
Many of those who oppose a wall are also against building a patrol road. They include local sheriffs who have insisted that major border infrastructure projects are not necessary.
“What security problem are we trying to solve?” Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland of nearby Terrell County, a Republican and a former Border Patrol agent, wrote on social media. “Can the same security objective be accomplished more effectively another way?”
On Wednesday, people gathered for a demonstration against the construction at the Santa Elena Canyon. Many carried signs protesting the construction — “Stop the Steel,” “No Wall” — or held handmade depictions of javelinas and other wildlife that could be affected by the construction along the river. Some feared the road plan would require building bridges and blasting along Mariscal Mountain, a remote peak.
“There will be no coming back,” said Michael Ryan, a former Big Bend park ranger who attended the protest. “They’re taking taxpayer dollars to ruin this national park.”
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4) Trump’s Other Hold on the Americas: The Visa
As part of its expansionist approach to the Western Hemisphere, the Trump administration is trying to reassert its dominance, one U.S. visa at a time.
By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Emma Bubola, Gabriel Labrador and David Bolaños, Aug. 16, 2026
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega reported from Mexico City; Emma Bubola from Santiago, Chile; and David Bolaños from San José, Costa Rica. Gabriel Labrador is a Salvadoran journalist working in exile.
The State Department overseen by Marco Rubio has restored the visas of political figures in Central America once penalized by the U.S. government and has revoked visas for others. Kenny Holston/The New York Times
When Chilean officials signed an authorization for a 12,000-mile undersea cable connecting the country to Hong Kong, they were thrilled. They said the Chinese project would boost national connectivity and even reach Chile’s remote Easter Island.
But the mood shifted abruptly later that day in January after a senior official from the U.S. Embassy in Santiago met with Guillermo Petersen, the chief of cabinet at Chile’s telecommunications ministry. According to Mr. Petersen, the American official warned that the project could increase the risk of Chinese cyberattacks and that, if Chile forged ahead, the United States would issue a travel ban not only for the officials involved, but for their spouses and children as well.
Across Latin America, the Trump administration has deployed aggressive tactics to tighten its grip on the region. They include crippling tariffs and economic sanctions, strikes on dozens of boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, wading into foreign elections and the capture of the president of a nation in his own capital.
But one of its most agile and surgical tools is also deeply personal: the U.S. visa.
The meeting in Chile lasted just six minutes, Mr. Petersen said. But that was enough to persuade his government to put the project on hold.
“It was basically a threat,” Claudio Araya, then Chile’s telecommunications under secretary, said this month.
The U.S. ambassador to Chile, Brandon Judd, said in a statement that these actions “were not a surprise,” as they followed years of discussions on the matter.
Visa sanctions, Mr. Judd said, “are not meant to punish, but to change behavior.” He added, “They did exactly that in this case.”
Typically used in the past to keep out security threats, fight corruption or defend democratic institutions, travel permissions have been weaponized under the current State Department, experts say. The U.S. government has revoked visas to target foreign leaders, ambassadors and other officials, judges and journalists, among others — while quietly reinstating visas for some like-minded allies.
A Regional Stick
The Trump administration has been clear about its intentions to use this tool in the Americas.
In a statement in April, the State Department announced that it had expanded its policy on restricting visas to target those in the Western Hemisphere who “carry out activities that are adversarial to and undermine America’s interests.”
Washington has used its visa playbook to pursue varying goals. In some countries, the United States has aimed to replace China’s footprint with its own. In others, it has rewarded compliant, right-wing partners, even by punishing their political enemies. Elsewhere, it has pressured governments into folding to U.S. demands or penalized those who question its policies.
This month, the Trump administration rescinded the visa of Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, the Brazilian ambassador in Washington, in a tit-for-tat retaliation over Brazil’s delaying the approval of President Trump’s ambassador nominee and refusing entry to several other U.S. diplomats. The U.S. government had previously stripped a Brazilian Supreme Court justice of his visa for prosecuting former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally.
Revoking a visa, while sometimes performative, can also send a powerful message, said John Feeley, a career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Panama from 2015 to 2018. It can undermine a person’s political authority and sever personal or professional ties to the United States.
“A congressman or a prosecutor without a U.S. visa,” Mr. Feeley said, “is somebody who is flying with a broken wing.”
Some of Washington’s allies say the Trump administration is well within its rights when restricting visas.
“That falls under the strict sovereignty of the United States,” Manuel Tovar, the foreign minister of Costa Rica, where at least 15 opposition figures and critics have had their U.S. visas revoked, said in an interview. “We shouldn’t interfere in matters outside our jurisdiction, just as we expect no nation to determine Costa Rica’s immigration policy or decide who is granted entry into our country.”
Because visa records are confidential, the U.S. government rarely discusses the details of specific revocations, making it difficult to quantify how much the Trump administration has used this tool for political ends.
But Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other U.S. officials have “broad discretionary authority” to cancel visas “whenever and wherever a compelling U.S. policy interest is at stake,” the State Department said in an email.
The China Factor
For the Chilean officials involved in the undersea cable project, acquiescing to America’s demands did not immediately seem to be enough. About a month after the U.S. diplomat’s initial warning, the State Department announced it was barring those officials and their family members from the United States. Their actions, the department said, had “compromised critical telecommunications infrastructure and undermined regional security.”
For Juan Muñoz, then Chile’s telecommunications minister, the announcement was a “huge reputational hit.”
His visa was eventually reinstated, he said, but the fallout lingered.
“My Wikipedia now says I am a person sanctioned by the United States,” Mr. Muñoz, an academic who studied in California, where three of his children were born, said. “You feel like you have been placed in the same list as the world’s worst troublemakers.”
Chile is not an isolated case. Washington has targeted people elsewhere when it suspects they have facilitated Chinese investments.
This month, an Argentine electric company said it received warnings about visa revocations for executives linked to expanded operations there by Huawei, the Chinese telecom-equipment maker. Peter Lamelas, the U.S. ambassador to Argentina, responded on X, saying that the issue was “a matter of national security.”
And last year, after two opposition lawmakers in Costa Rica criticized a presidential decree banning Chinese 5G vendors like Huawei, the State Department revoked their U.S. visas.
“They are sending a message to political actors that speaking out in support of positions favoring China will bring consequences,” said Johana Obando, one of the Costa Rican lawmakers whose personal and diplomatic visas were canceled.
“It is a way of intimidating decision makers to benefit the United States,” she said.
The State Department, in its April announcement on the expanded visa restriction policy, said it would “use every available tool to protect our national security interests, defend American interests, and promote our region’s safety.”
Reaping Rewards
In shifting its visa policy, the United States has abandoned its post-Cold War crusade for regional rule of law, trading it for a more transactional approach, some analysts contend.
“Corruption, human rights violations or judicial interference no longer matter,” said Ana María Méndez Dardón, the Central America director at the Washington Office on Latin America, a rights group.
As Washington stops prioritizing democratic values, political figures once facing U.S. sanctions are seeing their privileges restored, Ms. Méndez said, after their countries renew friendships with the White House.
During the Biden administration, the United States penalized a number of Central American officials it considered corrupt or anti-democratic under a law known as the Engel List. Even after it lapsed, the administration used a variety of legal tools to continue denying them visas, according to a former State Department official with direct knowledge of the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations.
When Mr. Trump took office, the official said, that effort was entirely discontinued.
At least three senior Salvadoran officials placed on the Engel List and close to President Nayib Bukele — who has eagerly aligned with Mr. Trump — quickly benefited.
They included Javier Argueta, then Mr. Bukele’s legal adviser, who faced sanctions for orchestrating the unconstitutional removal of judicial officials; Christian Guevara, head of Mr. Bukele’s legislative faction, penalized for introducing a law that criminalized media coverage of gangs; and José Ernesto Sanabria, Mr. Bukele’s press secretary, cited for pressuring opposition officials to resign under threat of criminal charges.
Mr. Argueta and Mr. Guevara set foot in the United States for the first time in several years — in July and September 2025, respectively — according to travel records that The New York Times reviewed. They have since entered the country multiple times. Mr. Sanabria traveled to Miami more recently, in June.
Mr. Argueta told The Times that his visa had indeed been restored but declined an interview request. Mr. Sanabria did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did Mr. Guevara, but he has posted photos on social media talking to U.S. lawmakers or posing at the White House.
The State Department did not answer specific questions about the reinstatement of visas for former Engel List designees, or whether preventing them from entering the United States remains a priority.
A Stark Break
Visa revocations have also been used to suppress criticism of the Trump administration, or even of U.S.-aligned foreign leaders.
In Panama, for example, after two politicians criticized a sweeping security pact between their country and the United States, they were notified that their U.S. visas had been revoked. While the United States has a long history of covert interventions and heavy-handed meddling in Latin America, former diplomats say the Trump administration’s methods represent a stark break.
“No recent American administration ever did this kind of open attack on freedom of expression” in a foreign country, Mr. Feeley, the former U.S. ambassador to Panama, argued.
It is also unlikely to end soon, experts said.
On Thursday, Andrés Manuel López Beltrán — the son of Mexico’s left-wing former leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who remains highly influential over the governing party — said that Washington had revoked his visa. The move followed corruption accusations against Mr. López Beltrán, which he has denied. In an open letter to Mr. Trump, he criticized the measure as a politically motivated attack on his father’s political movement.
Jody García contributed reporting from Guatemala City, and John Bartlett from Santiago, Chile.
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5) As Iran War Turns Into Economic Battle, a New U.S. Strategy Recalls Old Ones
The United States and Iran are poised to blow past a deadline they had set themselves to broker terms on peace and Iran’s nuclear program.
By Aaron Boxerman, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. Sanger, Aug. 16, 2026
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. Sanger from Washington.
Ships anchored this month in the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Bandar Abbas, Iran. Ali Saeedi/Getty Images
President Trump’s cease-fire with Iran in June envisioned a broader deal to end the war and rein in the country’s nuclear program, all negotiated within 60 days.
But that deadline, set to pass on Monday, has been essentially abandoned, and the war has transformed into a contest of willpower and economic endurance that has no end in sight.
There have been no publicly reported U.S. strikes on Iranian targets since late July. Yet the effective collapse of the agreement underscores how Mr. Trump has struggled to end the war he started in February alongside Israel, and how far he remains from the ambitions of the June deal, including fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway where Iran has choked off oil and gas shipping since the fighting began.
Those inside the White House are well aware that they will blow past Monday’s deadline and that the conflict has largely morphed into one of economic warfare, according to two Americans familiar with the negotiations.
The current strategy bears a striking resemblance to previous, yearslong U.S. attempts to isolate Iran in the hopes of compelling it to abandon its nuclear ambitions. The policy had mixed results, and some analysts are skeptical that even severe economic pressure on its own will force Iran to change course. After all, that was the approach Mr. Trump attempted in his first term, even though his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said last week that he was about to impose financial penalties unlike any seen before.
The June memorandum of understanding was widely seen as a boon for Iran, granting the regime badly needed sanctions relief even as talks over tough concessions like nuclear enrichment were postponed for later. But Iranian leaders opted to escalate again rather than consolidate their gains from the deal, according to Nate Swanson, an Iran expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research group.
Ships could move through the Strait of Hormuz freely before the war. Iran’s insistence that the deal’s vague language on the issue gave it control over the waterway led to the deal falling apart. Iran began firing on ships that transited in channels outside Iranian waters, and American forces retaliated by bombing southern Iran, prompting a cycle of attacks and counterattacks across the Middle East.
Now, Iran refuses to reopen the strait until the United States follows through on its commitments from the cease-fire, like releasing frozen Iranian assets abroad. The Trump administration wants Iran to first end the blockade, said Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, a research institute.
“Neither side is really ready to finalize a deal. They both think that in a matter of days or weeks, the other side will be more desperate for a deal, so they’ll be able to get more out of it,” Mr. Vaez said. “This is why we are locked into this game of endurance again.”
On Saturday, the United Arab Emirates’ foreign ministry slammed Iran for attacking a vessel affiliated with the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company the previous day. Iranian officials did not comment.
Reopening the strait has increasingly become Mr. Trump’s main focus in the conflict, even though he initially said the war was meant to empower the Iranian people to overthrow the existing regime, severely degrade its missile capability and stop Tehran from getting a nuclear weapon.
There has been little indication that Iran and the United States have extensively discussed the Iranian nuclear program since the cease-fire in June, let alone formulated a deal that could satisfy both sides.
Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, said over the weekend that Iran had yet to decide whether to resume talks with the United States. But the 60-day timeline was no longer relevant, he added, given that the June agreement was essentially defunct.
“We did not have a cease-fire that now needs to be extended,” Mr. Araghchi said. “We had an end to the war, which has now taken on a new status.”
Former U.S. officials who worked on Iran say the prospect of a new nuclear deal between the United States and Iran within 60 days was always remote, although the agreement provided for extensions. A previous, Obama-era, agreement took about two years of delicate talks to negotiate. Mr. Trump withdrew from that deal, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2018.
The Trump administration hoped that the June agreement would, at the very least, open the Strait of Hormuz. But to get the deal over the line, they relied on vague language that lent credibility to Iran’s claim to dominate future shipping in the waterway, analysts said.
“It was a flawed document; it was hurried out when it wasn’t ready for prime time,” said Mr. Swanson, the Iran expert. “And they didn’t resolve the most important short-term issue, which was the strait.”
Instead, the United States and Iran now seem to be settling in for an indefinite struggle, neither at all-out war nor in a defined peace. Seeking to force Iran to accept U.S. terms, the Trump administration has brought back sanctions on Iranian oil and reinstated a naval blockade, both of which were temporarily canceled by the agreement.
Iran’s strained economy, which prompted mass protests that were brutally crushed early this year, is a major consideration for Iranian decision makers. But Mr. Swanson argued that the current stalemate was more likely to push Iran toward escalation than toward conciliation.
While there has been little progress on the commitments outlined in the agreement, Mr. Trump and his Iranian counterparts have continued to exchange a war of words.
During an event in Garden City, N.Y., on Friday, Mr. Trump appeared once again intent on changing the narrative, saying he would soon be “declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”
It was not clear how serious Mr. Trump’s proposal was. But doing so could involve deploying boots on the ground and almost certainly would require a prolonged Navy presence — moves antithetical to the “America First” values of Trump supporters who want an end to prolonged military conflicts overseas.
Mr. Trump has also been known to toss out half-baked ideas on foreign policy to redirect attention and scrutiny, like when he shocked the world last year by proposing a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip, an idea that never materialized.
The White House on Saturday did not respond to questions over whether the administration had developed actual plans to take control of the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Trump’s aides also did not respond to questions over the approaching Monday deadline.
Iranian officials, in turn, have defied Mr. Trump as they push their own demands — including one that they had not made before war.
“Accept reality once and for all. So far, you have suffered major strategic defeats,” Kazem Gharibabadi, the Iranian deputy foreign minister, said on social media. “The Strait of Hormuz has been Iranian, is Iranian, and will remain Iranian.”
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6) U.S. and Iran Blow Through Deadline to Agree to a Broad Deal to End War
President Trump said a cease-fire agreed in June would lead to limits on Iran’s nuclear program and finish the conflict, but the countries appear far apart.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Aug. 17, 2026
People in Tehran, Iran, last month. Iranians are coping with severe economic strain from six months of war. Credit...Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
The United States and Iran on Monday missed their 60-day deadline to reach a deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear program under the terms of the cease-fire they agreed to in June, underlining the breakdown of a truce that President Trump promised would end the war.
Mr. Trump had announced the so-called memorandum of understanding between the two countries with great fanfare two months ago. But the short-lived agreement failed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran effectively blockaded after Israel and the United States attacked in late February, or end a conflict that has entered its sixth month.
The expiration of the deadline is largely symbolic, as both Mr. Trump and Iran’s leaders have said in recent weeks that the deal is basically dead. The original deal also provided for the 60-day period to be extended if necessary, which would have been likely given the sensitive and complex nature of the negotiations.
But the milestone nonetheless shows how Mr. Trump has struggled to achieve his war aims — like forcing Iran to curtail its nuclear ambitions — and how emboldened the Iranian government feels, with the two countries at risk of further military conflict.
The president said on Monday that preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was still his main objective. “The number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon,” he said on social media.
Esmail Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, had told reporters earlier that the negotiations on the nuclear deal “never began,” adding that the 60-day period was “fundamentally no longer relevant.”
There have been no publicly reported U.S. strikes on Iranian targets since late July. But the United States and Iran appear to be gearing up for a protracted campaign of economic attrition that could easily tip over into renewed warfare, analysts said. Iran is wielding its control of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for oil and gas shipping, to choke global energy markets, raising pressure on Mr. Trump to reach a deal.
The Trump administration has rescinded the sanctions waivers on Iranian oil, which it issued during the brief truce. U.S. forces have also reimposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports, hoping that squeezing Iran economically will force it to make concessions. But Iran’s leaders are betting that the country can endure more economic pain than the United States, especially as Mr. Trump faces midterm elections in November.
“The Islamic republic is trying to put the economic crunch on America, and America is trying to put the economic crunch on the Islamic republic,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based research institute.
Mr. Taleblu said that the U.S. economic campaign could be punishingly effective against the Iranian economy. But Iran’s clerical leadership was likely to respond by escalating further, he warned, setting the stage for another round of armed conflict.
Like Mr. Trump’s other recent Middle East deals, the June agreement aimed at a quick truce while pushing off thornier dilemmas for future rounds of negotiations. Analysts argued that the vaguely worded agreement was tilted in Iran’s favor and suggested that the president was trying to wind down an increasingly unpopular war that threatened to bog him down in the Middle East.
Talks over Iran’s nuclear program were delayed for what were supposed to be two months of further talks, even though Mr. Trump had said concern that Iran might obtain a nuclear weapon was a major element of his case for war.
U.S. officials hoped the deal would at least reopen the Strait of Hormuz, to ease the pressure on the global economy. But the cease-fire faltered almost immediately, and Iran quickly moved to assert its control over the waterway.
Iranian officials cited ambiguous language in the cease-fire deal to declare that some ships were wrongly passing through the waterway without their permission and fired on some. U.S. forces retaliated by bombarding southern Iran, prompting a cycle of attacks and counterattacks.
The escalation prompted Mr. Trump to consider launching a major military offensive against Iran on at least two occasions. He pulled back both times after pleas from regional allies like Saudi Arabia, which have borne the brunt of Iranian military reprisals, as well as warnings from White House advisers over dwindling stockpiles of critical munitions.
Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting.
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7) Islamophobia’s Rise in Texas: ‘I Won’t Rest Until Every Muslim Is Gone’
Muslim communities have been growing for decades, particularly around Dallas. Now, conservatives want to roll up the welcome mat.
By J. David Goodman, Lauren McGaughy, Jesus Jiménez and Ruth Graham. The reporters, based in Houston, Austin and Dallas, conducted more than 45 interviews at mosques, businesses and political events around Texas for this article, Aug. 17, 2026
Ghulam Kehar rose before dawn in early June to attend the day’s first prayer at his local mosque in Irving, Texas, before heading off for a monthslong deployment with the U.S. Coast Guard.
He had been deployed before, but this time was different. He felt apprehensive about leaving his wife and four children behind in Texas, even for a short while.
Rhetorical attacks on Muslims by top Texas leaders had become more pronounced, and seemed to be trickling down. At his mosque, the Valley Ranch Islamic Center, and others across the state, congregants and religious leaders swapped stories of ugly comments directed at them while praying in public or sitting in public parks.
In recent months, a man was arrested and charged with making a terroristic threat at a major new Islamic center in Houston. Not far away, in Conroe, a woman told Muslim shoppers at a grocery store they were “not welcome in this state or this country” — after losing her job, she received nearly $250,000 from supporters after video of her comments circulated widely. In McKinney, a Dallas suburb, a woman grabbed a former mayor and stuffed paper with an anti-Muslim message down his shirt during a heated City Council hearing over a mosque expansion.
“Leaving them alone in this environment, it would be a little worrisome,” Mr. Kehar said of his family. “It’s just the fear of what’s being spewed out there.”
He arranged for his family to join him on his deployment near the Canadian border as soon as they could get there.
Mr. Kehar, who grew up in California, is part of a growing number of Muslims who moved to Texas in recent decades in search of good schools, affordable homes and a thriving community of fellow believers. The Dallas-Fort Worth area has been a particularly strong magnet for families like his. Dozens of mosques have opened. Some are expanding. Others, like the glittering DeSoto House of Peace, south of Dallas, aim to provide new anchors for Muslim communities in Texas.
“This is the place to be for American Muslims,” said Tammam Alwan, who moved to Irving from Detroit after discovering the community through religious videos online. “I made a prayer: Please, God, send me to Irving.”
But as the communities have grown, so has the resentment against Muslims.
The promise to combat “radical Islam” has long been a part of Republican politics. The rhetoric has only intensified nationally, as Muslims like Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor of New York City, and Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, won major races.
But politicians in Texas have gone beyond words, turning the power of the state against some Muslim groups.
A major turning point arrived in early 2025, after members of the East Plano Islamic Center unveiled plans for a real estate development centered on a new mosque in farmland east of Dallas. The opposition was immediate and intense.
State leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have since opened investigations into Muslim institutions across Texas. They’ve sought to block the real estate development and investigate religious divorce counseling. Mr. Abbott threatened to take state funding from Texas airports that provide ritual washing stations for Muslim travelers, ordered the cancellation of a private water park party celebrating a Muslim holiday and labeled the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national civil rights group, as a terrorist group — a step that even the Trump administration has so far not taken. (Florida followed Texas in applying the same label to CAIR.)
Efforts by Republican state leaders to restrict Islamic practice have coincided with a push to expand Christianity’s place in public life. In June, Texas became the first state to mandate Bible readings in public schools, where lawmakers had already required prayer time and the posting of the Ten Commandments.
For many conservative voters in Texas, Islam has replaced the border as a major concern since early last year, Republican consultants have said. Anti-Muslim activists and hard-right candidates have increasingly described Islam as incompatible with American values. They warn that the United States could soon look like Europe, where Muslim populations are larger.
“I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone,” one statewide Republican candidate, Bo French, wrote on social media this summer.
Muslim leaders in Texas have debated how to respond. Some counseled outreach. Others were frustrated with the return of rhetoric that had been largely dormant since the 9/11 attacks despite years of trying to foster interfaith understanding.
“We’ve constantly tried to point to our record and hope that our record will organically speak for itself,” Dr. Omar Suleiman, a prominent Muslim scholar, said in an interview at the Valley Ranch mosque. “We tried that, and it did nothing for us.”
The moment called for a posture of “strength,” Mr. Suleiman said, and a robust legal defense against what he said were false attacks. “We have to actually make lying legally and politically costly to these people,” he said. “We have to fight them back.”
He pointed to the religious protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution as the basis for such a defense. But recently, hard-line conservatives have been looking for a way to deny those protections.
In what would be an apparent first, one avenue being explored in Texas is to try to use state law to ban or regulate some Islamic cultural practices, such tribunals for marriage and other decisions governed by religious rules, often referred to as Shariah law.
Some want to do it as soon as the Texas Legislature meets next year.
“One of the first things we’re going to try to do is define what a religion is,” said State Representative Alan Schoolcraft, a San Antonio Republican. “Islam itself is not just a religion. It’s much more than a religion.”
Texas’ Muslim population remains small, around 1 or 2 percent of all residents. Precise figures are hard to come by, because the census does not ask about religion, but surveys by the Pew Research Center, and estimates by state officials, put the population between 300,000 and 500,000 people. Among the most populous states, only New York and Illinois have a higher share of Muslims than Texas.
The Dallas-Fort Worth area has been a popular destination. In recent years, one of its growing communities is in Irving around the Valley Ranch Islamic Center, the city’s second mosque. Founded in 2009, the mosque has a large campus and is planning a 31,000-square-foot expansion, with a cafe and basketball court. At a recent nightly prayer, families struggled to find parking.
“We’re growing faster than expected,” said Sheikh Yaser Birjas, who has led the congregation since 2010.
Mr. Birjas said the mosque’s success was in part thanks to its early embrace of technology. New people discovered its services online. Some moved to Texas to join.
One indication of the growing community comes from census data on international migration from Muslim-majority countries to the United States. That population grew in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area to more than 159,000 in 2024, from about 79,000 people a decade earlier — growing five times faster than the population as a whole.
Another indication can be found in the increasing number of Muslim congregations.
In the four biggest Dallas-Fort Worth counties, the number of mosques nearly tripled to 76 by 2020, up from 28 two decades earlier, according to data from the Association of Religion Data Archives. In Collin County, a fast-growing suburban area north of Dallas, the number quadrupled, to 12 from three.
The increase was notable, but the number of mosques remains small. By comparison, the four counties have more than 3,000 evangelical Christian congregations.
How Islam Became a Republican Focus
Nearly every speech at the Texas State Republican Convention in June included some expression of anti-Muslim sentiment. Multiple conference panels warned of a Muslim invasion. Combating Shariah law — the Islamic code that guides the observant — was named a top legislative priority.
In the convention hall, the Texas House’s new Sharia-Free Caucus had a booth. Amy Mekelburg, a prominent anti-Muslim influencer, presented a video warning that Texas barbecue restaurants were being replaced by “Arab shopping plazas” — part of a coordinated “takeover.”
The focus on Muslims gained new traction with President Trump’s first White House run. In 2015, the mayor of Irving, Beth Van Duyne, gained national attention by railing against Shariah law. (She is now a member of Congress.) Two years later, Texas Republicans passed anti-Shariah legislation as part of a wave of bills pushed by the Center for Security Policy, a hard-right Washington think tank.
For a time, the party moved away from Islam to concentrate on immigration, the pandemic and gender politics.
But some on the far right began focusing on a different and more contentious message: that Islam is not a religion but a political ideology.
Then came the proposed real estate development with a mosque outside Dallas, known at the time as EPIC City. “This is how the West falls,” Ms. Mekelburg wrote on social media in February 2025.
Her rhetoric caught Mr. Abbott’s attention, and he soon initiated state investigations into the proposed development and the mosque community, the East Plano Islamic Center, or EPIC, that supported it.
Anthony Holm, a Republican political consultant, said concerns about Islam were an extension of Republican voters’ fears about illegal immigration — and help explain Mr. Abbott’s focus. “Anything he does is poll-driven,” Mr. Holm said of the governor.
Mr. Abbott has used his terror designation of CAIR to try to restrict other Islamic groups. The council is challenging the designation in court.
“We experience waves of Islamophobia,” said Shaimaa Zayan of CAIR’s Austin chapter. “This is the worst wave.”
Seeing a Looming Religious ‘Conflict’
About 300 people gathered at a Dallas movie theater in late May to watch a documentary film billed as revealing “the disastrous effect of Islam in America.”
The event’s sponsors included a nearby Christian ministry, a group of Jewish conservatives, several Republican women’s groups and two local county Republican parties.
“Most of the people that are speaking up are Christian,” Frank X. Panico, the film’s director, who is Catholic, said as he mingled by the popcorn machines.
As the Muslim population has grown in Texas, an assertive Christianity has also taken root. Hard-line conservative Christians characterize the situation not as a demographic shift, but as a spiritual battle.
The documentary, “The Great American Conflict,” contained a mix of theological, political and cultural warnings. It depicted Islam as a force that could pull communities to the left — citing Mayor Mamdani of New York — and also threaten women’s freedom.
The audience heard Texas was at the center of this cultural struggle.
“This is the battlefield right now,” Erick Stakelbeck, a host on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, said at the event.
Barbara Isaacs, an activist in Collin County, distributed a pamphlet encouraging Texans to get involved with their local governments to prevent or slow the construction of mosques.
“Share this with your friends, your church members,” she urged the crowd.
What Does It Mean to ‘Assimilate’?
Farhat Shaikh, a doctor living in Frisco, north of Dallas, stood outside a polling place during a sharply contested mayoral runoff election in June.
For many on the hard right, Frisco — with its large South Asian and Muslim populations — was the epicenter of the fight for Texas’ future.
Dr. Shaikh urged voters to support Mark Hill, a former school board trustee, who vowed to unite the city. Mr. Hill’s opponent, Rod Vilhauer, talked about the need for Muslims to assimilate into American culture, and some of his supporters warned of a Muslim “takeover.”
Mr. Hill prevailed in the election. Still, for Dr. Shaikh, the divisive campaign put Muslims like her in a kind of bind.
Assimilation means joining institutions and being “part of the decision making,” she said. “I’m part of the P.T.A., I volunteer for my community, I’m a practicing physician. I am assimilating.” But being active can also be attacked as trying to “take over,” she said.
The question of assimilation has animated Texas legislators like Mr. Schoolcraft, and fueled calls for a definition of religion in Texas law. Mr. Schoolcraft hoped such legislation would encourage Muslims to more fully assimilate and not create enclaves, such as the EPIC City development.
“I’m not saying totally abandon your culture,” Mr. Schoolcraft said. “But try to become a citizen where you’re living. Otherwise there’s going to be conflict.”
Texas Republicans have warned of Muslims seeking to create a parallel justice system. Some pointed to a small decade-old organization based in Dallas, the Islamic Tribunal, which provides religious consultation to women seeking divorce, including in abusive marriages. Mr. Paxton began an investigation.
A lawyer for the organization, Maria Kari, said its religious guidance — like that of a Jewish rabbinical court or a Catholic tribunal — was protected by the First Amendment.
“We are not a court,” said Taher El-Badawi, who founded the Islamic Tribunal.
Recasting Islam as a political ideology would be unprecedented as a legislative strategy, said Asma T. Uddin, a religious liberty lawyer, and “a way of winning the religious liberty fight before it starts, by defining the other side out of the category.”
American courts have avoided defining religion over the years. In 2010, Tennessee residents tried to stop a new mosque, arguing it was not entitled to be treated as a house of worship because Islam was not a religion.
The Justice Department responded in a brief that “Islam is plainly a religion” protected by the First Amendment. Whether the department under Mr. Trump would take the same position was an open question.
For now, local Muslim institutions have defended themselves on constitutional and legal grounds, and promised to continue their work.
“The Muslim community is a huge community in Dallas and they need help,” said Mr. El-Badawi of the Islamic Tribunal. “We are religious help. That’s all.”
Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting from San Antonio, Sasha von Oldershausen from Austin and Jeff Adelson from New York.
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8) I’m a Psychiatrist. I’m Hearing Something New From Young Women.
By Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell, Aug. 18, 2026
Dr. Garfinkle-Crowell, a psychiatrist, is the author of the forthcoming “Girlhood, Translated: Understanding Young Women in the Age of Therapy Speak and Self-Diagnosis.”
Tess Havas
Several years ago, I started noticing something new when teenage girls or young women came to my office for their first psychiatric sessions. Patients used to dread being told that there was something, as they saw it, wrong with them. Now these young women were announcing their diagnoses — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression — almost before telling me their names.
They had researched their symptoms on Instagram; they’d taken TikTok quizzes about them; they had cross-indexed their conditions with those of their friends. It was everyone — gravel-voiced film majors and earnest high school athletes, class presidents and girls who skipped school, girls who spent weekends in the Hamptons and girls who had to work for their spending money. The patients of this new wave were talking in therapy-speak, and their therapy hadn’t even started.
The physician part of me would instantly start thinking through an alphabet soup of treatments for the conditions these girls were reporting — D.B.T., C.B.T. and E.M.D.R. and medications to go with each.
Another part of me — the parent, the Xennial — would struggle to suppress an inner eye roll. If you’re a parent of an adolescent girl, you might have experienced your own version of these two reactions: either terror for your daughter’s psychological well-being or alienation from all the jargon. You might have even tried to convince your daughter that everything was fine. None of those responses set us up to hear what these girls and young women are trying to say.
I’ve been listening to girls every day for years, and I’ve learned a few things that can help parents, therapists and anyone else who struggles to communicate with young women as they describe some form of distress.
It starts with accepting that diagnosis words may function differently for these young women from the way they do for others. They are not necessarily claims to cold, scientific truths, yoked to specific evidence-based treatments. Instead, research increasingly reveals, these words are often a coping mechanism, an effort to find some accepted narrative in which to situate one’s very personal pain. We should try to hear them that way: We should take the therapy-speak, to borrow an expression, seriously but not literally.
One girl told me she had assigned herself a diagnosis of depression, which she later acknowledged she thought would make me care about her. Another girl was stuck on an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, mostly because it made her feel less alone by connecting her to a vocal and vibrant online community.
Several young women insisted they fit the clinical definition for anxiety, because it was less scary to blame an inherent flaw in their brains than to explore the causes of their very real discomfort — which turned out to be a mix of anger toward their loved ones and guilt for having those feelings. Another girl said she used her various self-diagnoses as a container for whatever felt like “too much” about her, allowing her to fulfill what she thought was the teenage female’s highest calling: to be chill.
In some cases, my patients’ self-diagnoses were spot on. In many others, however, the psychiatric label seemed more like a compromise between uncomfortable feelings and the desire for social acceptance. Are these labels a source of strength or a straitjacket? Are they helping young women find help and acceptance or standing in the way? The answer isn’t so simple.
Adolescent girls and young women aren’t the only ones reaching for therapy-speak, of course. According to some measures, 50 percent of Gen Z-ers have labeled themselves with mental health conditions, and illness identities have taken hold of young people, both online and off. But girls are by far the primary drivers of this trend. They are the main group looking up health information online, talking about their feelings and relationships and seeking labels for what’s wrong.
They are also the demographic with the worst mental health profile. I think the association with young women, a group so often dismissed as frivolous, is a big part of why therapy-speak is regarded as a sign of weakness and self-indulgence.
As for therapists, we think about psychiatric diagnosis a lot less than you might imagine. That’s partly because categories in our field tend to be more flexible than those in other areas of medicine. Classifications often evolve and change over time, especially for young people and most of all for young women. Besides, no two people experience these conditions in exactly the same way. So we always have to try to understand the person first.
Therapy-speak — leading with diagnostic language, applying labels instead of describing feelings — can make that hard. It can leave friends and loved ones feeling they have no ability to help, as though they’ve got to back off and let the professionals do their thing. And it can short-circuit a young person’s already difficult progress of self-discovery.
To be clear, I’d still rather live in a world where everyone talks about trauma too much than one where you’d get shoved in a locker for being different. Ideally, we should create an environment in which girls can stop blaming their own brains for every problem and where they don’t feel they have to be sick to be heard. Until they have access to a more nuanced lexicon of human troubles, however, we need to listen differently.
Small acts of translation can help. Someone who says she has A.D.H.D. may or may not fit the clinical definition, but she’s probably telling you she feels scattered, overwhelmed or afraid she’s a mess. If someone says she has anxiety, you can be pretty sure she’s nervous, uneasy or unsure of herself. If the word “depressed” freaks you out, consider instead why the person using it feels hopeless, lonely or in despair.
If you’re sick of hearing every classmate, roommate or ex described as “toxic,” look past the cliché and consider the harm it’s meant to describe. Whatever works, gently offer that less literal meaning back to her — not to challenge her words but to understand them. Not to see if she really has a particular diagnosis but to see what’s going on beneath it.
This kind of translation is a quiet process but changes the way you show up, the energy you bring. With teenagers, that’s always half the battle. Being too reactive makes it about you and your fears; being too quick to reassure can make you seem you don’t understand the seriousness of her concerns. Searching beneath the buzzwords for what she’s really telling you avoids both pitfalls.
Ultimately, translation is an exercise in empathy, in jumping out of the limits of your own perspective. Making that effort is a powerful way to help another person feel better.
Language can illuminate certain parts of the truth while obscuring others. Perhaps that’s why it is believed that Claude Monet said that in order to see a thing, we must forget its name. Internet users might have been getting at something similar when they came up with the hashtag #LetsNormalizeNotCallingWomenCrazy. When it comes to therapy-speak — whether it’s used in my office or in your house — this kind of translation is an important first step.
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9) A Texas University Is Using A.I. to Cut Left-Leaning Content
The politician behind Texas’ conservative overhaul of higher education is now running a university system. Some say his effort to ferret out forbidden topics is a dystopian academic nightmare.
By Vimal Patel, Aug. 18, 2026
The Texas Tech campus in Lubbock is in a right-leaning part of the state. Its leader is trying to clamp down on teaching about gender and sexuality. David Kozlowski/Getty Images
The Texas Tech faculty meeting began amicably this spring, with offers of refreshments. Then administrators handed out reports, created partly by artificial intelligence, listing the lessons professors needed to stop teaching.
“What?” one professor asked. “I don’t even teach those things.”
“There are factual errors,” added another.
“It’s A.I. slop,” a third said.
Texas Tech is using A.I. to ferret out books and other materials that touch on topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. Professors describe the effort as a dystopian academic nightmare, in which ideologues are wielding technology to sideline subject-matter experts.
That is not how the Texas Tech system’s leader, Brandon Creighton, sees things.
Mr. Creighton, a former state lawmaker who has been heading the five-university system since November, is the force behind the effort. He has said there was “quite a bit of garbage in curriculum” at universities.
His course-review plan, he said, “will produce the best curriculum in America. I also believe it will be a national model when we’re finished.”
Mr. Creighton is tackling two of higher education’s most pressing problems, at least in the eyes of its Republican critics and others who argue universities need to be reformed. Academia needs to rebuild lost public trust as campuses have moved left and to make itself more relevant in the era of artificial intelligence, they say.
In an interview, Mr. Creighton fired off a litany of concerns about higher education shared by Republican politicians across the country. He said that diversity, equity and inclusion offices discriminated against Asian students, campus protests often turned antisemitic, and diversity statements — which he has called “leftist loyalty oaths” — sidelined conservatives in faculty hiring.
Politics aside, Mr. Creighton has said an A.I.-fueled wave will forever reshape higher education in the years ahead. He said he wanted the campus to be well positioned to take advantage of that paradigm shift by focusing on degrees that employers want and eliminating low-enrollment programs. He touts a partnership with Nvidia to invest in A.I. infrastructure.
But Mr. Creighton’s moves have tapped into existential anxieties haunting professors. Many worry that limits on their academic freedom are strangling their work even as technology moves faster to upend education than they can keep up.
“There’s a level of stress that’s very hard to explain,” said Lucy Schiller, a creative-writing professor who was asked to switch out a book she wanted to assign. She said she broke down in tears when she realized the scope of Mr. Creighton’s plans.
Academia’s Republican Wave
Mr. Creighton represents something of a trend in red states like Florida and Texas: a former Republican lawmaker tapped as higher education leader. In Florida, at least seven college presidents are former Republican politicians, as are the heads of both the Texas A&M and University of Texas systems.
Even so, Mr. Creighton sticks out. He was behind some of the state’s most consequential legislation targeting higher education. He wrote a bill enacted last year that sidelined the role faculty play in governing universities and tightened the state’s grip on curriculum. He also wrote a bill enacted in 2024 that abolished D.E.I. offices in the state’s public universities.
Mr. Creighton, who is from Conroe, Texas, north of Houston, earned a bachelor’s degree in government from the University of Texas at Austin and a law degree from Oklahoma City University. He said his views on higher education were shaped, in part, by his own difficulties paying for college.
Texas Tech’s main campus, in Lubbock, part of one of the state’s reddest districts, includes an agricultural and engineering college, along with a center dedicated to free-market economics. The university has a politically diverse faculty and student body.
But Mr. Creighton has argued that conservatives have been treated unfairly on campus, and some faculty members have become rattled after his administration issued a series of escalating directives.
Memos in December and April outlined the closures of programs centered on sexual orientation or gender identity, required the recognition of only two sexes and outlawed student dissertations on gender identity. The administration also created a portal in which professors must submit their course materials for review.
The strictest prohibition at Texas Tech is on classes in the core curriculum, which are a menu of lower-level courses that students must select from in order to graduate. Mr. Creighton has banned any course in the core that includes material related to sexual orientation and gender identity.
Sonja Stojanovic, a French studies professor, worried about her core course, called Holocaust in Literature. Because it mentions that gay and bisexual men were also targets of the Nazis, university leadership suggested that the course become an upper-level course.
“Now the Holocaust becomes an elective,” she said.
Texas Tech is also making changes beyond the core. Jonathan Friedman, with PEN America, a free-expression group, said that while other universities across Texas are reviewing curriculums, Texas Tech has gone the furthest. The university is “edging forward towards greater and greater ideological control,” he said.
Last month, the American Association of University Professors sued the university, saying the course-review effort is viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.
Some students have voiced concerns. One student group started a petition to remove Mr. Creighton from office, saying he was unfit to serve. But some conservative students support the chancellor.
Mr. Creighton is bringing ideological balance to a sector that is overwhelmingly liberal, said Preston Parsons, the local chapter president of Turning Point USA, a conservative group.
“Is it necessarily a bad thing that we have universities that sit a little different on different issues?” Mr. Parsons asked.
In the interview, Mr. Creighton said that only 60 or so courses of more than 14,000 taught in the university system were recommended for modification, and system officials have said that another 300 courses were “proactively” modified by faculty members before review.
He also said that the course-review effort has been deliberative, with many layers, including a Board of Regents committee, and that A.I. was just one step to make it more efficient. Most of the work was done by humans, he added.
Self-Censoring Courses
Some professors are self-censoring to avoid running afoul of the new guidance.
Ms. Schiller, the creative-writing professor, said the new directives restrict teaching about “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” but do not define those terms. “They’re making us do the work of reading between the very obvious lines,” she said, “and overcomplying out of fear that we might be reported or separated from our work or disciplined.”
Jacob Bell, a Medieval historian, said he worried about how to discuss Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake for, among other reasons, cross-dressing. Mr. Creighton’s memo about gender exempts biographical details of historically significant figures. Still, any references must be “purely incidental,” according to the April memo.
Dr. Bell removed two weeks of study about Viking men and women. He said Viking mythological poems often featured gender-changing gods like Loki and Odin, material he no longer felt comfortable teaching.
When asked about Dr. Bell’s case, Mr. Creighton suggested that professors not make pre-emptive decisions and rather submit materials to the university system for review.
Dr. Bell went a different route. He believes that future Texas Tech students will be “unprepared to deal with normal people in the world that they’re going to interact with.” He recently accepted a new job, at a public university on the East Coast.
A faculty senate survey from May found that about 50 percent of respondents changed their course content without being asked to comply with the new directives.
Survey respondents also said they worried about irreparable reputational damage. One said Mr. Creighton’s directives amounted to “using a chain saw to remove a splinter.”
Mr. Creighton shrugged off the concerns. He said many professors are supportive of the changes, though they are less vocal, and noted other university systems are implementing their own course-content reviews.
“Ours is absolutely the most deliberative and respectful of academic freedom,” he said, adding, “It has never been more exciting to have an opportunity to be a faculty member at the Texas Tech University System.”
Sherry Sylvester, a fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, called Mr. Creighton’s effort “fearless and meticulous” and said legislation authored by Mr. Creighton has been critical in wresting control of universities from faculty members.
“Texas is the model for the nation in returning our universities again to places of open debate, free inquiry, getting rid of ideological indoctrination and creating degrees of value for students,” Ms. Sylvester said, adding, “Faculty members need to remember that they are state employees.”
At the faculty meeting this spring, a couple dozen professors questioned administrators, including Ronald Hendrick, Texas Tech University’s top academic officer.
Dr. Hendrick, caught between his enraged faculty and Mr. Creighton’s plan, said he did not know the Texas Tech system would be using A.I. in the effort.
In an interview, Professor Schiller said her report hallucinated information about a course she was not teaching.
It did refer to one book she teaches, however: “Voice of the Fish” by Lars Horn, who says he is transmasculine. The book, which is described by the publisher as exploring “the trans experience through themes of water, fish and mythology,” must be switched out.
Ms. Schiller did not make the changes. Rather, she left the university and started at Grinnell College this month.
“I loved my job here until this year,” she said.
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10) Google Just Made It Easier for Campaigns to Send You Fund-Raising Emails
Republicans previously sued Google claiming its spam filter was biased, but the case was dismissed. The company will now allow verified campaigns to more easily bypass the spam filter.
By Shane Goldmacher, Aug. 18, 2026
Google has updated Gmail’s policy to allow political committees to more easily bypass its spam filter when sending emails for donations, allowing more political ads to land in inboxes. Credit...Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times
Google quietly rolled out a new program on Monday that will allow candidates, political parties and political action committees to more easily bypass Gmail’s spam filter and send fund-raising appeals to the inboxes of the company’s many millions of email users.
The change comes after years of complaints from Republicans that Gmail’s spam algorithm unfairly blocked their committees’ emails more than those of their Democratic counterparts, although those complaints were dismissed in court. For campaigns and PACs that meet the terms of the program, it is expected to route an influx of cash solicitations into Gmail inboxes, helping campaigns raise millions of dollars more in the final sprint to the midterm elections.
Google chose not to debut the new program with any fanfare, instead posting an update to its Help Center on Monday. The company began to reach out to some political committees in both parties on Monday after publishing the change, according to three people briefed on the outreach who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Political strategists in both parties said the new policy could be deeply consequential for candidates — even if frustrating for users in the United States, who are likely to be bombarded with pleas for donations.
“Heading into the 2026 elections, Gmail users are going to be flooded with unwanted political spam because Google decided to create a V.I.P. lane for campaigns,” said Kenneth Pennington, a Democratic digital strategist and veteran online fund-raiser. “This is a bad deal for Gmail users and a gift to bad actors in the political fund-raising space.”
José Castañeda, a spokesman for Google, said the new program resulted from an effort to provide long-term clarity for both campaigns and users.
“This program is designed to connect people with the emails they want to receive while keeping them fully in control of their inboxes,” he said in a statement. “To participate, bulk senders must meet strict security and compliance requirements, ensuring that messages people receive are relevant, useful and verified.”
The new program is set to begin on Sept. 8, the day after Labor Day — and the day before Republicans are set to hold a rare midterm convention in Dallas.
The change comes four years after Google rolled out a similar program on a pilot basis that was discontinued months later.
At the time, the Republican National Committee sued the technology giant, accusing it of “throttling its email messages,” though Google said the party had not signed up for the program. A federal court later dismissed the case, with Judge Daniel J. Calabretta writing of the R.N.C.’s claims, “This is pure speculation, lacking facts from which the Court could infer animus or an absence of good faith.”
The Federal Election Commission also dismissed a formal complaint from Republicans that Gmail’s spam filter was biased against the party.
Whether a fund-raising email winds up in users’ spam folders or inboxes can be worth millions of dollars to campaigns over time.
It is not immediately clear whether the changes would affect one party more than the other, but some Republicans appeared optimistic.
“For years Google’s algorithm silenced Republican voices, burying our emails in spam while Democrats’ landed in the inbox,” said Will Kiley, the communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “This program is a real chance to fix it and let voters hear from the candidates they choose to follow. We’ll be watching closely to make sure Google follows through.”
Some Democrats feared the change could open the door for so-called scam PACs, which spend little of their money on actual campaigns, to more easily reach inboxes. Other Democrats hoped the change might help deliver the party an advantage because Democrats generally have been better at online fund-raising than Republicans.
The R.N.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Google’s new program will require that candidates, PACs and party committees register the domain they send emails from and that their spam rates, the percentage of emails that users mark as spam, remain below 0.3 percent, according to the policy.
Mr. Pennington, the Democratic strategist, feared that Google made the change because of pressure from Republicans.
“While there could theoretically be another reason for this policy shift, it appears that Google is sacrificing the inbox sanity of its customers simply to placate a false, bad faith narrative from Republicans claiming partisan spam bias,” he said.
Amanda Elliott, a Republican digital strategist, said the mistrust on the right with the tech industry runs deep, especially around the issue of whether fund-raising emails wind up in inboxes or the spam folder.
“For everyone who’s been talking about censorship and bias, this could be a put-up or shut-up moment,” she wrote in a text message. “Are your emails landing in spam filters because you’re a Republican or because you’re just running a subpar email program and not following best practices? Perhaps we’re about to find out!”
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11) These Protesters Were Charged with Terrorism. Who’s Next?
By Rozina Ali, Aug. 18, 2026
Ms. Ali is a journalist and the author of “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America.”
Lucas Burtin
Earlier this summer, a federal judge sentenced a group of eight anti-ICE activists to a collective 450 years in prison after what has become the first “test case” for the Trump administration’s crackdown on left-wing activism.
The government’s case is built on events that occurred in front of the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, on the Fourth of July last year. That night, activists set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with the people detained inside. Then a few separated from the group, vandalizing cars, slashing tires on a government van and breaking a surveillance camera. When a police officer arrived on the scene and pointed his weapon, one of the demonstrators, Benjamin Song, fired an AR-15-style rifle, injuring the officer in the neck.
The government referred to the group of demonstrators as a “Northwest Texas antifa cell,” suggesting the activists were part of a coordinated effort to commit a terrorist attack on the ICE facility.
What Mr. Song and the others did that night are crimes, to be sure. Mr. Song injured a police officer. Some damaged federal property. All of them were convicted of riot. But civil rights advocates who watched the case expected those protesters to get sentences of a handful of years. Instead, even people on the periphery of the action — whose worst offense was spray-painting a guard post — got anywhere from 30 to 70 years in prison.
The decades-long sentences in the Prairieland case were only possible because prosecutors brought forth an unusual charge: “material support” for terrorism. This law, which has been used to prosecute primarily Muslims in the years after 9/11, is being broadly applied under the Trump administration against people President Trump characterizes as his political enemies. Who and what constitutes “terrorism” could have broad implications for our civil liberties. If Mr. Trump’s statements are any indicator, what happened at Prairieland is not likely to be an isolated incident.
The law that prosecutes material support to terrorism, created in 1994 and expanded two years later in the wake of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, is two-pronged: one part prosecutes support for a terrorist organization and the second prosecutes support for specific acts of terrorism. Both come with lengthy minimum sentences and a possibility of a lifetime in prison. But what could constitute “support” is so ambiguous that, shortly after the law was created, it had confused even senior government officials. During an interagency background briefing, one Clinton administration official wondered if even “$25 of dues” to a group could count as material support.
As it turned out, prosecutions for small donations and increasingly vague definitions of support would happen in a few years. In the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, prosecutors accused hundreds of people of supporting terrorism this way. “Support for terrorism” could entail anything from translating a magazine to even offering nonviolent alternatives to a militant group. It did not matter if the defendant directly helped carry out an assault or belonged to a terrorist organization: They could be prosecuted as if they were.
The post-9/11 years were a time of a single-minded effort to quash threats of Islamic terrorism before an attack could be carried out. But the ambiguity of the law, in particular its focus on prevention, made the material support statute ripe for abuse by overzealous prosecutors. Take the case of a Kurdish imam in Albany, N.Y., named Yassin Aref, who was arrested in 2004 and charged with both parts of the material support law.
Prosecutors alleged that Mr. Aref witnessed a man (who turned out to be a government informant) “loan” money to a member of Aref’s mosque. The informant fabricated a story, telling Mr. Aref and the man that he had acquired the funds he was offering them by selling ammunition to a terrorist group that was planning to assassinate a Pakistani envoy. Mr. Aref nodded along with the vague details of the informant’s tale, and in keeping with Islamic customs of money-lending, agreed to witness the loan. According to prosecutors, that was enough to show his support for terrorism, a crime of which Mr. Aref was eventually convicted, serving 15 years in prison. A Human Rights Watch report later highlighted Mr. Aref’s case as one of many showing dubious uses of antiterrorism laws.
Mr. Aref’s case was not a lone example. In those years, law enforcement swept through Muslim communities, goading young men — including those with no criminal record — toward making statements in support of terrorist plots, then slapping them with material support charges. Of the nearly 1,000 defendants prosecuted by the United States on charges of international terrorism after 9/11, more than half were convicted of material support for terrorism, including cases when no act of violence occurred.
An Albany Times Union columnist who was following Mr. Aref’s trial at the time wrote, “Someday we’ll look back on the present national paranoia over terrorism and the excesses done in its name with the same national embarrassment that Americans feel for Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts of the 1950s and our appalling treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II.”
Twenty years later, the witch hunt appears to have only expanded, albeit with a different political focus. Last September, two months after the demonstration at the Prairieland ICE facility, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. After the murder, the president’s adviser Stephen Miller described left-wing political organizations as a “vast domestic terror movement.”
Weeks later, Mr. Trump issued a memo directing the F.B.I.’s Joint Task Terrorism Force — a network expanded in the aftermath of 9/11 — to investigate and disrupt “domestic terrorism” and political violence. He also signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terror organization,” describing it as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government.” But antifa, short for “antifascist,” is a leaderless political movement composed of disparate strategies and aims.
The U.S. government has no legal designation for “domestic terrorist groups.” Yet even when it is just talk, the Trump administration’s use of the term had an impact on the Prairieland case. In the original indictment, released in July 2025, prosecutors had not leveled any charges of material support for terrorism. By November, after filing two rounds of indictments, prosecutors charged all eight defendants with the crime.
As a deeply reported Texas Monthly story detailed, the Prairieland defendants were hardly members of a cohesive terrorist cell. Some were part of a Signal chat that was used to plan the demonstration. Several of them were attached to various organizations, like the Democratic Socialists of America and an anticapitalist reading group.
Even if one reads these loose associations as proof of a coordinated attempt, legal experts told me it would not rise to a terrorism charge. The demonstrators were already faced with a cocktail of severe charges after their arrest, including attempted murder. (Mr. Song would be convicted of attempted murder; the other four defendants charged with it were acquitted.) But the material support charge allows the court to impose some of the harshest sentencing in its legal arsenal. “It’s an act of judicial terrorism, designed to keep people from coming to protest,” Shayana Kadilal, a senior attorney for the Center of Constitutional Rights who has worked on material support cases, told me.
This law has not only been used against individuals; prosecutors have also turned it against nonprofits, ultimately shutting down a major Muslim charity and complicating the work of others. “Once terrorism laws are in place, they are hard to roll back,” Katherine Tomaszewski, a lawyer who has helped charities in such cases, told me. “No one wants to be seen as ‘soft on terror.’” But, she pointed out, the danger of the law being so “overbroad and unchecked” is that it can be manipulated.
We’re already beginning to see the Trump administration building on such precedents. In the aftermath of Mr. Kirk’s murder last year, the White House called for investigations of liberal foundations and donors, like the philanthropist George Soros and the businessman Reid Hoffman, for their role in what they claim is fomenting political violence (read: financing liberal nonprofits). The Justice Department instructed federal prosecutors to explore possible charges against Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations, including racketeering, wire fraud and material support for terrorism.
It could well get worse from here. “The label of ‘terrorism’ is a powerful political tool,” Sufia Khalid, a lawyer representing one of the Prairieland defendants, told me. For the last two decades, the “terrorism” charge was leveled almost exclusively at a religious minority, lulling some into believing that such laws would not affect them. Now, the domestic use of the terrorism charge threatens to cast its net even wider.
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12) ABC Sues F.C.C. to Block Threat to Its TV Licenses
The network asked a court to stop the agency from taking steps that could force ABC stations off the air and accused the F.C.C. of violating its First Amendment rights.
By Jim Rutenberg and John Koblin, Aug. 18, 2026
An ABC News reporter prepares to broadcast from outside the New York Stock Exchange. Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times
ABC on Tuesday sued the Federal Communications Commission, accusing the agency of infringing on its First Amendment rights. It asked a federal court to stop the F.C.C. from pursuing aggressive regulatory moves that the network said posed an “existential threat” to its operations.
The lawsuit was unusual, a rare example of a major media organization suing the Trump administration over its unrelenting campaign to punish the national press through regulation and lawsuits.
The suit, filed in federal court in Washington, is meant to halt a series of F.C.C. moves that placed the network’s ability to operate in doubt. In the most extreme case, the agency was threatening to strip several ABC stations of their broadcast licenses, which would force them off the air.
ABC owns and operates eight local stations that carry its programming across the country, including in major markets like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Like all local stations, they can only operate with licenses controlled by the F.C.C.
The F.C.C., led by its chairman, Brendan Carr, called for an unusual, early review of the broadcast licenses last spring, citing ABC’s internal diversity and inclusion practices. None of the ABC licenses, which have terms of eight years, were up for renewal yet. Mr. Carr’s decision came after the ABC late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, angered President Trump with a monologue joke.
The F.C.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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13) ‘A Blatant and Gargantuan Conflict of Interest’
By Thomas B. Edsall. Mr. Edsall contributes weekly essays from Washington on politics and demographics, Aug. 18, 2026
Jens Masmann for The New York Times
The Trump family’s crypto business exemplifies all of the sleaziest aspects of the president’s code of conduct, if we can call it that.
It is almost certainly unconstitutional and may well be illegal. Estimates vary, but according to a cryptocurrency analytics firm reported on in The Times, the Trumps made at least $1.4 billion, and their investors, lost nearly $4 billion from purchases of Trump-linked crypto. These purchases have — let’s say — coincided with pardons, dropped investigations and favorable regulatory decisions.
This crypto scheme is central to President Trump’s personal agenda: to use his office to vastly increase his and his family’s fortune.
The icing on the cake: A growing number of economists and financial analysts argue that crypto is itself a fiction, lacking a backup system of gold, silver or perhaps most important a national government, ordinarily considered essential ingredients of a currency.
As far back as October 2018, Nouriel Roubini, an economist at N.Y.U., testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs: “It is clear by now that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies represent the mother of all bubbles.”
In September of 2022, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, declared: “I’m a major skeptic on crypto tokens.” Dimon went on to suggest that they are “decentralized Ponzi schemes.”
In 2023, Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins, dismissed crypto: “Bitcoin is a bubble. It has no inherent value and is terribly overpriced.” He added that “buying Bitcoin is a fool’s game.” It’s a critique he has repeated often since then.
I asked a wide range of crypto experts about the Trump family’s involvement in the industry, and more than half pointed me to an independent analyst, Molly White, who regularly produces detailed reports for her newsletter, Citation Needed.
White, whose work has been praised in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, emailed her reply to my queries: “I wouldn’t say that running a crypto business inherently would lead to corrupt transactions, except that crypto is extremely poorly regulated.”
However, White continued,
“…shady actors are extremely normalized in the crypto world so the usual reputational screening that might keep someone like that from investing in a business doesn’t seem to apply.
“I do think Trump’s dealings are both illegal and unconstitutional. While it’s challenging to definitively prove a quid pro quo, the sheer number of times an individual or company has supported Trump’s campaign or invested in his crypto businesses and then quickly enjoyed favorable policy treatment or regulatory relief is so long it’s hard to believe it’s all coincidence.
“The deals with the U.A.E. and the business with Justin Sun are particularly fishy. There should be serious investigations into all of this, whether under the foreign emoluments clause or 18 USC §201, and Trump should face both impeachment and criminal consequences.”
Speaking of the last national election, White wrote, “the
crypto industry was quite successful in politics in 2024, installing at least six new pro-crypto senators and more than a dozen representatives.”
With Trump in the White House and Republican control of Congress, White said, the key regulatory agencies are controlled by “loyalist, pro-crypto commissioners.”
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14) How Israel’s Financial Chokehold Is Stifling the West Bank Economy
Intensifying restrictions have hit every part of the territory’s dealings, spurring worries about whether the Palestinian Authority can remain solvent.
By Adam Rasgon, David M. Halbfinger and Fatima AbdulKarim, Reporting from Ramallah, West Bank, Aug. 18, 2026
Montaser Amro, left, and his brother inspecting a box of unpaid bills at his supermarket in Majd, West Bank. Mr. Amro said that his customers owed him around $155,000 and that he was struggling to pay suppliers. Samar Hazboun for The New York Times
Israeli pressure on the West Bank has sent the occupied territory to the brink of financial collapse as severe restrictions have touched every part of daily life and caused an economic crisis.
Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has stopped thousands of Palestinians from working in Israel, withheld billions of dollars of tax revenues and enforced banking restrictions that have harmed business.
The Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank, has been forced to cut spending on salaries and public services because of the sharp fall in revenues. The reductions have been felt acutely in sectors such as health care, with pharmacies routinely running out of medicines as the government allocates less money to buy them. The budget cuts have also forced clinics to open only a few days a week and hospitals to operate with fewer doctors and nurses.
Ibtisam Hammad, 54, was diagnosed with breast cancer three months ago. After a hospital appointment in the West Bank city of Ramallah, she made her way to a pharmacy to collect her medications. Only three of her six prescriptions were in stock.
“I’m lucky,” Ms. Hammad said, smiling despite her exhaustion. “Last time, they only had one.”
Ms. Hammad’s trouble getting medicines was indicative of wider economic problems. The Palestinian Authority has often warned of a financial collapse that never materialized, but there are growing concerns about how long it can remain solvent.
“We’re facing a huge problem,” Mohammed Mustafa, the authority’s prime minister, said in an interview. “Everyone has been affected.”
Israel has squeezed the economy.
As an occupied territory, the West Bank is inescapably economically dependent on Israel, which controls who and what enters and leaves that territory and the Gaza Strip, including the money that flows in and out.
The Oslo Accords in the 1990s reinforced that dependency, making the Israeli shekel the main currency in both territories and establishing links between Israeli and Palestinian banks. That has effectively given Israel control of a financial spigot that it can turn off.
Tensions have occasionally intensified economic pressure on the Palestinians. After the October 2023 attack, Israel started a devastating war in Gaza and also opened a new era of economic warfare in the West Bank.
First, Israel quickly canceled permits for tens of thousands of Palestinian laborers to reach their workplaces in Israel. Many worked in construction and agriculture and brought billions of dollars into the Palestinian economy every year. Since the start of the Gaza war, unemployment in the West Bank has skyrocketed to 28 percent, more than double the rate before the conflict, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
Unemployment rate in the West Bank
Then, in May 2025, Israel started confiscating hundreds of millions of dollars per month in import taxes that it collects on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf. This revenue stream accounts for about two-thirds of the West Bank government’s budget for 2026 of about $6 billion, according to Palestinian officials.
That deficit has forced the Palestinian Authority to lower the salaries of 140,000 civil servants and security officers, shorten school weeks to three days and accumulate billions of dollars in debt.
Maj. Arafat Halabi, a traffic police officer in Nablus, said that his monthly salary of about $1,500 had been halved.
“All I can do is the minimum of the minimum,” he said.
Major Halabi, 36, said that he eats meat only on Fridays to save money, commutes to work on public transportation instead of using his car and has been unable to buy new clothes for his children. His debts are mounting because he can afford only a small part of a monthly loan repayment and his electricity bill.
Israel has also erected new roadblocks across the West Bank, stifling the movement of goods within the territory. In Hebron, the most populous city, the Israeli military has closed five of seven entrances and exits, according to Mayor Yousef Jabari and residents. The military said that only two were regularly open and a third was “intermittently” open based on operational and security considerations.
Doron Spielman, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s office, accused the Palestinian Authority of “attempting to divert attention from its support for terrorism and its failure to reform by blaming Israel.”
The office of Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, who has been a driving force behind the pressure campaign, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The Palestinian Authority says it has taken some steps to address Israeli concerns. In February 2025, Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s president, issued a decree to end the practice of paying stipends to the families of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, a long-held demand of Israeli officials. American and Israeli officials have dismissed Mr. Abbas’s efforts, while Palestinian officials say the new law is being enforced.
Banks have been hobbled.
Israel has also limited the amount of shekels that Palestinian banks are allowed to send to Israeli banks, a crucial process that helps enable Palestinian merchants to buy goods from Israel and the rest of the world.
The Netanyahu government permits quarterly transfers of about $1.5 billion from Palestinian to Israeli banks — far less than previous administrations allowed. The restrictions have resulted in about $5.7 billion languishing in bank vaults in the West Bank, according to Palestinian government and banking officials.
“They’re preventing us from meeting the demand in our markets,” said Bashar Yasin, general manager of the Association of Banks in Palestine, a trade group.
Thaer Abahri, a wholesale importer of flour, sugar, rice and chocolate, said that he was able to import only half of what he used to buy.
“I feel hopeless,” said Mr. Abahri, who is from the northern West Bank city of Jenin. “This issue is killing the economy here.”
In recent weeks, Palestinian banking executives have expressed concerns that their institutions could be cut off entirely from Israeli banks. Israel Discount Bank and Bank Hapoalim, the only Israeli banks that work with Palestinian ones, have said that they are worried that those ties could expose them to lawsuits over money laundering or terrorist financing, and they have threatened to end the relationships. The Israeli banks have expressed frustration that the Israeli government has not done more to protect them from the risk of litigation.
Yahya Shunnar, governor of the Palestinian Monetary Authority, warned diplomats in July that the Palestinian economy was nearing a “full crisis” because of Israel’s economic restrictions, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The New York Times.
“There remains a narrow window to act, but it’s closing,” Mr. Shunnar said. “And it’s closing quickly.”
Mr. Shunnar also said that Andrew Abir, deputy governor of the Bank of Israel, the country’s central bank, had warned the Palestinian Monetary Authority to prepare a contingency plan to replace the shekel as its currency. The Israeli central bank said in a statement that it made sense to have contingency arrangements in place.
Palestinian economic experts, however, warned that suddenly doing that could cause chaos and make trading with Israel more complicated and costly.
Businesses and individuals feel the strain.
In Majd, a village near Hebron, Montaser Amro, 32, a supermarket owner, has allowed customers to take groceries and pay for them later. His customers owe him around $155,000, he said, and he is struggling to pay suppliers on time, prompting some to refuse to deliver goods unless he pays upfront.
“How am I supposed to run my business this way?” he said. “It’s not sustainable at all.”
Mr. Mustafa, the Palestinian Authority prime minister, has few tools to improve the situation. His government has imposed a hiring freeze except for the health sector, stopped allocating money to development projects and is operating on an emergency budget, he said. He has asked for the international community to send more aid, but those requests have largely gone unanswered.
The only hope, Palestinian analysts and officials said, is that Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition will be replaced by a less hard-line government in elections in October. A new Israeli government that is less determined to inflict pain on Palestinians could loosen the economic chokehold, they say.
At the Ramallah hospital, Ms. Hammad was trying to come to terms with the shortage of medications and overcome her tiredness. Her two daughters held her arms as she returned to her car.
“It’s the worst time to get cancer,” she said.
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15) Sugar Importer With Trump Ties Said to Maintain Abusive Labor Practices
A watchdog group said the Dominican company continued to violate labor standards after President Trump lifted an import ban last year.
By Ana Swanson, Aug. 18, 2026
Ana Swanson covers international trade and is based in Washington.
Cutting sugar cane on a plantation in the Dominican Republic in 2023. Concerns over forced labor and human rights abuses in the Dominican sugar sector have existed for decades. Erika Santelices/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Weeks after President Trump began his second term, his administration quietly lifted a measure that had blocked a major sugar producer in the Dominican Republic from shipping its product to the United States over concerns about forced labor at the company’s plantations.
The owner of the company, Central Romana, has cultivated close political ties to Mr. Trump, donating to his 2024 campaign and his White House ballroom project. José Fanjul, a Cuban American businessman known as Pepe, has hosted Mr. Trump at his Fifth Avenue apartment and attended a state dinner at the White House welcoming King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the United States.
The decision to allow Central Romana to send sugar to the United States has raised inferences of political interference, along with concern from labor groups that have been monitoring working conditions on the company’s Dominican farms.
On Tuesday, one nonprofit watchdog group, the Corporate Accountability Lab, released a report saying that many of the abusive conditions that led to the United States’ blocking sugar from Central Romana in 2022 had not been rectified.
The farm’s workers, most of whom are of Haitian descent, are still laboring under abusive working conditions, earning poverty wages, working excessive overtime and facing intimidation and threats from their superiors, the group said. The report added that workers live in dilapidated and overcrowded company-owned housing, some of which lacks electricity and potable water.
Corporate Accountability Lab is an independent nonprofit that describes its mission as holding corporations legally accountable. The group carried out more than 100 formal interviews on Central Romana’s farms over the course of five visits in the past several years, it said.
Charity Ryerson, the watchdog group’s executive director, said that the group’s staff members and investigators had regularly visited Central Romana’s farms and worker housing between January 2023 and December 2025 and spoke with dozens of workers in that time.
“What we saw was depressingly familiar — more or less the same conditions that were present when C.B.P. issued the withhold release order,” she said, referring to Customs and Border Protection, which administers such import bans. “The small changes we did see were largely superficial, and, importantly, didn’t address the pervasive climate of fear among workers,” she added.
Central Romana has denied accusations of any labor violations at its farms, stating that the watchdog group’s report is “riddled with inaccuracies and untruths.” In a response to questions from The New York Times, Jorge A. Sturla Ferrer, a spokesman for Central Romana, said that presenting the accusations as facts was “defamatory in nature.”
“Central Romana continues to operate with the ongoing improvements for the working and living conditions of our employees and their dependents, always committed with their welfare in compliance with international regulations and in accordance with the applicable laws of the Dominican Republic,” he said.
The White House referred a request for comment to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Central Romana is the largest sugar producer in the Dominican Republic. The firm is partly owned by members of the Fanjul family, who also operate a conglomerate that sells sugar under the Domino Sugar and C&H brands. Pepe Fanjul and his brother Alfonso, who died this month, have been politically active for decades, donating to both Democrats and Republicans.
In 2024, the Fanjul Corporation gave a $1 million donation to Make America Great Again, a political action committee supporting Mr. Trump, and $413,000 to the Republican National Committee. It gave lesser contributions to Democrats. Pepe Fanjul also hosted a $50 million fund-raiser for the Trump campaign in May 2024, The New Yorker reported.
In October, at a White House dinner for ballroom donors, Mr. Trump called out Mr. Fanjul’s contributions.
“Pepe, you were fantastic,” the president said. “He’s got a little sugar business. He has a monopoly on the world’s sugar — I would say that’s a good business.”
“He’s been great and a supporter right from the beginning for years,” he added.
The Trump administration has recently taken aim at the forced labor laws of other countries. In July, it issued tariffs on more than 80 countries that it said did not adequately ban imports of goods made with forced labor.
The United States has had a longstanding ban on imports of goods made with forced labor. The Trump administration has pushed other countries to adopt such bans in its trade deals. Last month, it added 43 companies to a list that bars goods suspected to be made with forced labor in Xinjiang from the United States. But critics say the United States still has shortfalls on its own labor protections.
Human rights groups have long raised concerns about abuses in the Dominican sugar industry. Many of the workers on Dominican sugar farms are Haitian migrants or Dominicans of Haitian descent. Some do not have citizenship in the Dominican Republic or in Haiti, making it difficult for them to leave and find other jobs.
In its research at Central Romana farms, Corporate Accountability Lab said it found that these stateless workers, as well as elderly workers who had not received retirement benefits, were the most vulnerable to exploitation.
In November 2022, the Biden administration said that it had identified conditions of forced labor on Central Romana’s plantations during an investigation and blocked the company’s sugar from the United States.
That ignited a fierce lobbying push from Central Romana, which spent more than $1.3 million on lobbying from the beginning of 2023 through the end of 2025, according to tracking from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit campaign finance group. The company hired several well-connected lobbying firms, Akin Gump, Barsa Strategies and Patino Brewster & Partners. Those firms employed former officials from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees C.B.P. and the import bans, as well as a former U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
One of Akin Gump’s activities was filing Freedom of Information Act requests with Customs and Border Protection and other agencies in the Biden administration to seek information about the communications between government officials and Corporate Accountability Lab and other groups working on labor issues, the report said.
Corporate Accountability Lab said that, while the import ban was in place from 2022 to 2025, it saw some limited improvements on the company’s farms, including some repairs to housing and latrines. An electrification project also connected at least one of the housing areas to the electrical grid, the report said.
The company also took some steps to make health care more accessible in sugar cane fields, including deploying a medical van to treat minor health issues.
But workers interviewed by Corporate Accountability Lab on the topic described the services as still inadequate. And the worker settlements that the group visited were plagued with many of the same conditions, including a lack of electricity and potable water and poor housing, the report said.
After Mr. Trump came into office in January 2025, Corporate Accountability Lab said that customs officials reached out to them to set up a briefing on their findings, scheduled for Feb. 28, 2025. But the day before, the meeting was canceled, and the labor group’s attempts to reschedule were ignored.
Two weeks later, C.B.P. modified the import order against Central Romana. Though some customs officials have said that the protocol for lifting an order is not well defined, others said that it did not go through established processes.
Corporate Accountability Lab said that the circumstances of the reversal were “procedurally irregular and followed significant donations to the Trump campaign.” The group also said it “saw no evidence” that the company engaged in the type of remediation process that C.B.P. had previously recommended.
One current official, who declined to be named for fear of retribution, told The Times that the way the order was modified was unusual and that he believed the decision was political. Another official said that the decision to lift the order came to customs officials directly from the White House.
Such orders are typically supposed to remain in effect until the importer produces proof that its supply chain is free of forced labor, a process that C.B.P. has said should involve a thorough review of its supply chains, including engaging with workers and worker-led organizations.
But Central Romana’s order was changed on the condition that it provide certification within the next six months that it had complied with applicable labor standards, the report said. The customs agency did not issue a news release about the change, as it had with some previous moves.
Kelly M. Fay Rodríguez, who led global labor policy in the State Department during the Biden administration, said that when she left government in January 2025, shortly before the import ban was lifted, issues at Central Romana persisted.
“I had hoped that the company would pursue a strategy that would really meaningfully address the threats that workers faced and the intimidation and exploitation that they reported, but by the time I left, it had not been resolved,” she said.
In June, six Dominican civil society organizations wrote an open letter arguing that forced labor continued on Central Romana’s farms. Since 2023, the Dominican Republic has been carrying out a plan to deport thousands of people of Haitian descent, worsening a climate of fear and dependency among farm workers, the groups said.
In the months after the lifting of the import ban, Patino Brewster, Barsa Strategies and Akin Gump all filed to terminate their lobbying registrations.
Kitty Bennett contributed research and Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.
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