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Greetings All,
Despite the Herculean efforts of Leonard’s attorneys and doctors, his medical transfer was denied. The BOP has refused to treat Leonard’s vision for over a year. On New Year’s Eve, he was rushed to the hospital when a blood vessel ruptured in his eye. Leonard Peltier is going blind.
If Biden does not grant Clemency, we must hit the ground running. Please see www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org to view the Red Road Home Campaign, designed by Leonard’s lead counsel.
It is our great hope that Biden will grant Clemency and Leonard Peltier can speak on what he faced. Join us as we talk about Leonard Peltier and Indigenous Genocide on January 25th. Registration link:
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-Uy0V_ZDTLm0aQy8XQu9ZA#/registration
Two people who have stood with Leonard for decades and have had a profound impact on the world, Rose Styron and Alex Matthiessen, had an excellent piece published in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/07/joe-biden-leonard-peltiers-clemency
The people holding Leonard have vast resources. The New York Times has begged Rose for her exquisite writing — they would not touch this piece. Neither would the Washington Post. There is a media white-out on Leonard Peltier. The conditions in which he is being held are atrocious under even third-world standards — lockdowns that keep everyone in solitary confinement for weeks at a time. This is not mentioned in the media. State prisons have oversight laws. Federal prisons do not. Federal prisoners are allowed no communication with anyone while in lockdown. Coleman 1 operates in the dark. Please visit our Advocacy page if you would like to know more:
https://www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org/advocacy
Please consider raising your voice. Ask Congress to be Congress and hold these people accountable. If you are overseas, let the Senate Judiciary Committee know what this looks like to other nations. The United States is guilty of human rights violations that should distress everyone. As stated, it operates in the dark. It is time to shine a hard light on what it is doing to our people.
If you want to send a message of solidarity or a good joke to Leonard, he would love to hear from you. He likes the bad jokes also. Please write in 22-point bold font so he can make the words out. Leonard said to tell you all he deeply appreciates your letters, but he would love to be able to read them. Please number the pages in large numbers — the prison gives him copies of letters, and the pages are not in order.
LEONARD PELTIER #89637-132
USP COLEMAN I
PO BOX 1033
COLEMAN FL 33521-1033
Thank you all for your continuous efforts and support of Leonard Peltier. You are appreciated more than you know.
https://www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org/donate
In Solidarity,
Dawn Lawson
Personal Assistant Leonard Peltier
Executive Assistant Jenipher Jones, Esq.
Leonard Peltier Ad Hoc Committee
1-800-901-4413
dawn@freeleonardpeltiernow.org
www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org
Questions and comments may be sent to:
info@freedomarchives.org
To unsubscribe contact:
http://freedomarchives.org/mailman/options/ppnews_freedomarchives.org
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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On this Wrongful Conviction Day, Leonard Peltier, the longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner, is incarcerated in lockdown-modified operations conditions at USP Coleman I, operated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
Yet, in this moment of silence, Leonard speaks.
To honor his birthday and all those who are unjustly convicted and incarcerated, the Leonard Peltier Official Ad Hoc Committee has released a video of Leonard Peltier that is going viral. Narrated by renowned scholar Ward Churchill and set to a video created by award-winning filmmaker Suzie Baer, the film most importantly centers Leonard’s personal reflection on his 80th year.
Jenipher Jones, Mr. Peltier's lead counsel, commented, "This powerfully moving film captures the essence of who I know Leonard to be. I am grateful to Professor Churchill and Suzie Baer for their work and longstanding advocacy of Leonard. As the recent execution of Marcellus Williams-Imam Khaliifah Williams shows us, we as a society bear a responsibility to uplift the cases of all those who are wrongfully convicted and also hold the government accountable to do that for which it professes to exist. We must challenge our impulses of blind blood-thirst for guilt and the use of our legal systems to carry out this malignant pathology. There is absolutely no lawful justification for Leonard's incarceration."
“Leonard Peltier is Native elder whose wrongful incarceration is shameful. His continued imprisonment exemplifies the historical cruelty of the US Government toward Native people. The US BOP's treatment of Leonard Peltier is unlawful, and he deserves his freedom.” —Suzie Baer
Leonard's Statement: Peltier 80th Statement.pdf:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ABHSRNdyB8SKn0I&id=DFF2DD874157D44A%21118178&cid=DFF2DD874157D44A&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&o=OneUp
To view the film, please visit:
https://tinyurl.com/Peltier80thPresentation
We hope to have additional updates on Leonard soon. In the meantime, please engage our calls to action or donate to his defense efforts.
Miigwech.
Donate/ActNow:
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, 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 authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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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.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
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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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
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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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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1) Syria Confronts an Immense Challenge: Justice for Assad Regime Crimes
The rebel alliance that took power has vowed to prosecute senior figures from the ousted government, but accountability will be hard to achieve in a vulnerable, divided and battered country.
By Vivian Yee, Reporting from Cairo, Jan. 12, 2025
A stadium in Damascus, the Syrian capital, last month. The site was used by the Assad regime’s military to fire mortars at rebel neighborhoods. Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
There seem to be no limits to the dark revelations laid bare by the downfall of Syria’s 54-year Assad regime.
Prisons have emptied, exposing the instruments of torture used on peaceful protesters and others considered opponents of the government. Stacks of official documents record thousands of detainees. Morgues and mass graves hold the gaunt, broken-bodied victims, or at least some of them.
Many others have yet to be found.
For these and many other atrocities, Syrians want justice. The rebel alliance that overthrew President Bashar al-Assad last month has vowed to hunt down and prosecute senior regime figures for crimes that include murdering, wrongly imprisoning, torturing and gassing their own people.
“Most Syrians would say they can only achieve closure to bring this dark 54-year era to an end when they bring these guys to justice,” said Ayman Asfari, chairman of Madaniya, a network of Syrian human rights organizations and other civic groups.
But even assuming that the new authorities can track suspects down, accountability will be hard to achieve in a country as vulnerable, divided and battered as Syria. The experiences of other Arab countries whose despotic regimes collapsed testify to the challenges: None of those countries — not Egypt, not Iraq, not Tunisia — succeeded in securing comprehensive, lasting justice for the crimes of earlier eras.
Syria faces some distinctive hurdles. The country’s new de facto leaders come from the country’s Sunni Muslim majority, while the senior ranks of the deposed regime were dominated by Alawites, a religious minority. That means prosecutions for Assad-era abuses could risk fueling Syria’s sectarian tensions.
The justice system was for years little more than a tool for Mr. al-Assad, making it ill equipped to handle sweeping, complex human rights violations. Many thousands of Syrians could be implicated, more than can possibly be prosecuted, raising questions about how to handle lower-level officials.
And after years of war, sanctions, corruption and mismanagement, it is an enormous task just to sort through the damage while transitioning to a new government.
Nine in 10 Syrians live in poverty. Cities lie in ruins. Homes have been destroyed. Tens of thousands of people were unjustly detained for years or decades. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the fighting. Many are still missing.
Syrians will need time and many discussions to design a sound accountability process, said Nerma Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, which has been gathering evidence against Syrian regime figures for years.
“These are things that take time, and they never happen overnight,” she said.
But there is enormous pressure on Syria’s new leaders to begin punishing the old, and the transitional authorities in the capital, Damascus, have promised to do so.
“We will not relent in holding accountable the criminals, murderers and security and military officers involved in torturing the Syrian people,” Ahmed al-Shara, Syria’s de facto leader, said in a post on Telegram in December. He added that they would soon publish “List No. 1” of senior officials “implicated in the torture of the Syrian people.”
Hunting down such figures will be difficult, if not impossible. Mr. al-Assad has found refuge in Russia, which is unlikely to give him up. Many of his top associates have melted away, with some reportedly in hiding in Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates.
Still, Syrian human rights groups in exile began laying the groundwork more than a decade ago, gathering evidence for prosecutions that were mounted in other countries — and someday, they hoped, in their own.
But Fernando TravesÃ, executive director of the International Center for Transitional Justice, which has worked with such Syrian groups, cautioned that, before beginning prosecutions in Syria, the authorities should first earn citizens’ trust by building a state that meets their needs.
Doing so would avoid the missteps of a country like Tunisia, where a lack of economic progress in the years after the 2011 Arab Spring revolution left many people embittered and disenchanted. By 2021, Tunisians had turned on their fledgling democracy, throwing their support to a president who has grown increasingly authoritarian. Efforts to bring members of the feared security services and regime cronies to justice are now functionally suspended.
“Any process of truth, justice and accountability needs to be coming from institutions that have some legitimacy and credibility with the population, otherwise it’s a waste of time,” Mr. Travesà said. Providing crucial services, he added, would encourage Syrians to view government as “not a tool for repression; it’s taking care of my needs.”
The transitional government can take basic yet vital steps such as helping refugees who left years ago obtain new identification, adjudicating what should happen to property that was stolen or occupied during the war, and providing stable electricity and running water. It will need to deliver humanitarian aid and economic improvements, though those may only be possible with the help of other countries.
And it must do all this in an evenhanded way, or Syrians might see accountability efforts as selective or politically driven. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, the United States-led occupation and successive governments purged and blacklisted even junior functionaries in the former ruling party without due process, which analysts said undermined faith in the new system.
“The only way to heal the wounds with the other communities is to make sure they’re fairly represented,” Mr. Asfari said.
The Syrian authorities are signaling that they understand. They have vowed repeatedly to respect minority rights and have promised amnesty to rank-and-file soldiers who were forced to serve in Mr. al-Assad’s military. Most government employees have been allowed to stay on to keep institutions running.
Any prosecution “has to be a good process, otherwise it’ll look like score-settling,” said Stephen J. Rapp, a former international prosecutor and former U.S. ambassador for global justice who has worked on Syrian abuses for more than a decade. “And that can play a key role in reconciling a society and defusing efforts to settle scores, for instance, against the children of parents who committed these crimes.”
In an added complication, some of the documents that will be crucial to mounting any prosecutions have been damaged in the chaos following Mr. al-Assad’s downfall, with regime prisons and intelligence agency archives ransacked, looted or burned, said Ms. Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.
Because Syria remains under wartime sanctions, her group and others trying to safeguard these papers for future use in court cannot operate across much of the country, further jeopardizing their efforts.
The wartime mass graves and torture devices are only the most glaring evidence of abuses overseen by Mr. al-Assad and his father, Hafez.
Nearly every Syrian, in some sense, has been wronged by the former regime. So it is not enough to prosecute individuals for crimes committed during the civil war, say veterans of justice efforts in other countries that underwent political transitions.
Mr. Rapp called for a “larger truth-telling process” that could help “really begin to understand the system of state repression that was Syria for the last 54 years, and this machinery of murder that was Syria” since 2011.
One model could be the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which heard testimony from victims and perpetrators of rights violations, offered reparations to victims, and in some cases granted amnesties.
Ms. Jelacic said Syria would need a broader reckoning with the Assad regime’s legacy that “doesn’t contribute to the divisions, but that it contributes to healing.”
Before trials begin, experts said, Syria should overhaul its police and court systems and build a legal framework to handle rights violations, perhaps creating a special tribunal to prosecute the most serious crimes. An equally urgent priority is finding out what happened to the estimated 136,000 people who remain missing after being arrested by the Assad regime and identifying bodies uncovered in mass graves.
But Syria cannot wait too long to prosecute former regime officials. Slow-moving official justice leaves room for angry people to take matters into their own hands, which could set off cycles of violence and deepen sectarian divisions. Already, scattered revenge killings and threats against minorities who were favored by the Assad regime have been reported.
After Tunisia’s revolution, lengthy delays in bringing cases against former security officials added to citizens’ sense that their new democracy was bankrupt.
Lamia Farhani, a Tunisian lawyer who has long sought justice for her brother’s fatal shooting while he protested the previous regime in 2011, said that her country’s disillusionment had permitted the current president, Kais Saied, to dismantle its democracy.
“We had a nascent democracy that failed at the first storm,” she said. “And all this happened because there was no real reconciliation.”
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2) Israeli Security Chiefs Join Critical Talks for a Cease-Fire in Gaza
Pressure is on to reach a deal that would see Hamas release at least some hostages before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office.
By Isabel Kershner, Adam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman, Jan. 12, 2025
Isabel Kershner and Adam Rasgon reported from Jerusalem, and Ronen Bergman from New York.
A demonstration on Saturday in Tel Aviv calling for the release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip by Hamas. Credit...Amir Levy/Getty Images
Israeli security and policy chiefs were expected to arrive in Qatar on Sunday for high-level talks about a proposed cease-fire deal in Gaza that would see hostages released in the final days of President Biden’s term and before Donald J. Trump takes office.
Biden administration officials have been pressing for a deal that would become part of the departing president’s legacy, and Mr. Trump has warned that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if Hamas does not release the hostages before he is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
Lower-level negotiations have been underway in recent weeks after months of deadlock.
While some progress has been made, disagreements remain on several key points, including the timing and extent of Israel’s redeployments and withdrawal from Gaza and its willingness to ultimately end the war, according to several officials and a Palestinian familiar with the matter. They were speaking on the condition of anonymity because the talks are being held in secrecy and they were not authorized to discuss details publicly.
Representatives of the departing and incoming U.S. presidents have been cooperating on the issue, the Biden administration has said, while Qatar and Egypt are mediating between Israel and Hamas.
Brett M. McGurk, Mr. Biden’s Middle East coordinator, was already in Doha, the Qatar capital, putting together the final details of a text agreement to present to the two sides, Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said on “State of the Union” on CNN on Sunday.
“We are very, very close and yet being very close still means we’re far because until you actually get across the finish line we’re not there,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s intended Middle East envoy, met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on Saturday. On Friday, Mr. Witkoff was in Doha, the capital of Qatar, and met the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani, for talks that focused on efforts to reach a cease-fire in Gaza, according to Qatar’s Foreign Ministry.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office announced late Saturday that he had discussed the issue with Israel’s security chiefs and with negotiators from both the departing and incoming American administrations. He also instructed Israel’s top negotiators — including David Barnea, the head of the Mossad intelligence agency — to leave for Qatar with the goal of advancing a deal, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said.
Disagreements between Israel and Hamas remain on the fundamental issue of the permanency of a cease-fire, with Mr. Netanyahu still unwilling to declare an end of the war as part of a three-phase agreement that was laid out by Mr. Biden last May.
Israel is insisting on a vaguer formula that leaves room for ambiguity, according to the Palestinian familiar with the matter and two Israeli officials. Another official familiar with the matter said the Americans were supposed to provide mediators with a guarantee that the United States would work to bring the war to an end, though Israel has not agreed to any exact phrasing.
Hamas is also demanding detailed maps from Israel showing where it will withdraw to, but Israel has not provided them, according to the officials and the Palestinian familiar with the matter. They added that disagreements remain about the timing of an Israeli troop withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor, a strip of land abutting Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Nearly 100 hostages who were seized during the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, remain in Gaza, out of roughly 250 who were taken. Israel believes at least a third of the remaining hostages are dead.
Israel and Hamas have both shown signs of wanting to resolve the outstanding issues, as pressure mounts from the United States and the Israeli public. Last week Hamas representatives indicated that the group had approved an Israeli list of 34 hostages to be released in the first stage of an agreement.
But Israel said last week that it had not received any information from Hamas regarding the status of the hostages appearing on the list, which includes those it considers the most vulnerable and urgent cases: women and children, men over 50 and several sick or injured hostages.
Israel has demanded a list from Hamas of which hostages remain alive. Without that, Israeli officials say, there can be no agreement on how many Palestinian prisoners Israel would be willing to release in exchange for them. As of Sunday morning, Israel had not received a list of live hostages, according to one of the officials familiar with the matter.
The body of one of the hostages whose name appeared on the list of 34 — Youssef Ziyadne, 53, an Arab citizen of Israel — was located last week by Israeli forces in a tunnel in Gaza along with the remains of his son, Hamza Ziyadne, who was also captured during the 2023 attack.
The Israeli military brought the remains of both men back to Israel for burial.
Mr. Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said that Mr. Biden would have a call soon with Mr. Netanyahu but stressed that the main obstacle to a deal has been Hamas.
“We are not by any stretch of the imagination setting this aside,” Mr. Sullivan said. “There is a possibility this comes together. There’s also a possibility, as has happened so many times before, that Hamas in particular remains intransigent.”
Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington.
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3) Charles Person, Youngest of the Original Freedom Riders, Dies at 82
In 1961, he and 12 other civil rights activists were nearly killed for trying to integrate interstate bus terminals across the South.
By Clay Risen, Jan. 11, 2025
Charles Person at his home in Atlanta in 2011. He was an 18-year-old college freshman when he first became involved in the civil rights movement. Credit...David Goldman/Associated Press
Charles Person, the youngest of the 13 original Freedom Riders who traveled from Washington to Birmingham, Ala., in 1961 in an effort to integrate interstate bus terminals across the South — and who were nearly beaten to death for doing so — died on Wednesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 82.
His daughter Keisha Person said the cause was leukemia.
Mr. Person was an 18-year-old freshman at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, when he first became involved in the civil rights movement, joining the thousands of students across the South who were marching against Jim Crow laws and sitting in at segregated lunch counters.
His first arrest, during a sit-in at an Atlanta restaurant, was in February 1961. When he returned to campus, he saw an ad from the Congress of Racial Equality looking for volunteers for a trip by commercial bus from Washington to New Orleans. Along the way, the ad said, they would test a recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation in bus terminals that served interstate travelers.
Because of his age, Mr. Person had to obtain his father’s permission to apply. (His mother flatly refused.) He was accepted, and after training in nonviolent techniques, he and the others — six other Black riders, including the future congressman John Lewis, and six white ones — left from Washington’s Greyhound station aboard two buses.
Mr. Person was paired with an older white rider, James Peck. Their job was to enter the terminals so Mr. Person could try to use the white restroom while Mr. Peck entered the Black restroom. Then they would order food at the designated white and Black lunch counters.
Their first test, in Fredericksburg, Va., was uneventful, save for a few ugly stares from white people in the depot. But in Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Person was almost arrested when he tried to have his shoes shined in a white part of the terminal.
Things became tense in Atlanta, the last major stop before Alabama. Several white men boarded and sat among the Black riders, who, against custom in the Jim Crow South, were seated throughout the bus instead of in the back.
The next stop was Anniston, a small town in eastern Alabama. The station was closed, but the driver stopped anyway. Another bus had been firebombed outside town, he said. If they wanted to proceed, the Black riders would have to move to the back.
When they refused, he left the bus. The white men who had boarded in Atlanta, members of the Ku Klux Klan, then viciously attacked the riders; both Mr. Person and Mr. Peck were knocked unconscious before being dragged to the rear.
“They threw us to the back of the bus,” Mr. Person said in a 2021 interview on the podcast “Book Dreams.” “One eyewitness said they stacked us like pancakes.”
With racial hierarchy restored, the bus proceeded to Birmingham. It was Sunday, May 14 — Mother’s Day. A crowd of white people, including scores of Klansmen, awaited the riders.
They left the bus and gathered their bags. Mr. Peck and Mr. Person were supposed to be the first to enter the terminal. Mr. Peck, looking at Mr. Person’s bloodied face and shirt, hesitated. But Mr. Person said, “Let’s go.”
At first, the crowd inside the station thought Mr. Person had assaulted Mr. Peck. When Mr. Peck said the two of them were friends, several men pulled him into a hallway and began beating him with a pipe. Someone grabbed Mr. Person, too, but after a few minutes he was able to break away.
By then the station was engulfed in violence, with Klansmen setting upon riders with abandon. Mr. Person managed to catch a city bus, then made his way to the home of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a leading figure in the city’s civil rights community.
Over the next few hours, more Freedom Riders, including Mr. Peck, made it to Mr. Shuttlesworth’s home. Most doctors did not want to treat them for fear of retribution, but they eventually found medical care.
They struggled to find another bus willing to take them to New Orleans. They finally boarded a plane. After a few days of speeches and meetings, Mr. Person flew back to Atlanta.
The first Freedom Ride was over, but others had already begun — some 400 people joined the campaign in total, many of them facing beatings and prison along the way. But it worked: On May 29, President John F. Kennedy’s administration ordered the desegregation of all interstate bus terminals.
“It really was the template for citizen politics in the 1960s,” said Ray Arsenault, the author of “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice” (2006). “A lot of what came after — the antiwar protests, the women’s movement — all drew on these ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
Charles Anthony Person was born on Sept. 27, 1942, in Atlanta. His father, Hugh, was a hospital orderly, and his mother, Ruby (Booker) Person, was a domestic worker.
A gifted math and science student, Charles was accepted to M.I.T. but, without a scholarship, could not afford to attend. He also applied to Georgia Tech, a public university, but was rejected because of his race. He enrolled at Morehouse College, a historically Black institution, with plans to become a nuclear engineer.
When he returned from the Freedom Rides, he told his mother he wanted to continue being part of the civil rights movement. She urged him try a different form of service by enlisting in the Army, which was a safer option at the time.
He joined the Marines instead. He served two years in Vietnam but spent most of his career at Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba, as an electronics expert. He retired in 1981.
His first marriage, to Carolyn Edith Henderson, ended in divorce. He married Jo Etta Mapp in 1986. Along with their daughter, Keisha, she survives him, as well as their son, Brandon Swain; three children from his first marriage, Cicely Person, Cammie Person and Carmelle Searcy; his siblings, Joyce Clark, Susan Person and Michael Person; and two grandchildren.
After returning to Atlanta, Mr. Person started his own electronics business and later worked in technical support for the city’s public schools.
He also became locally involved in civil rights activism. In 2022, he wrote “Buses Are a Comin’: Memoirs of a Freedom Rider” with Richard Rooker.
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, he and Pete Conroy, who helped create a national monument around the Freedom Rides, founded the Freedom Riders Training Academy, which draws on the 1961 campaign to teach nonviolent protest.
“My sense is that he had very little ego,” Mr. Arsenault said. “He didn’t want to get any credit. But he never changed his ideals.”
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4) I Work at the F.T.C. I Know What Is Killing Local Groceries.
By Alvaro Bedoya, January 13, 2024
Mr. Bedoya is a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission.
John Lehr for The New York Times
Swaths of America have been hollowed out. Some people look at boarded-up shops in small towns and some urban centers and think: They just couldn’t compete. As an antitrust enforcer, I have a different reaction: Maybe we missed something.
For decades, our government stopped big retailers from pressuring suppliers for secret deals that were denied to smaller rivals. This was done under a law called the Robinson-Patman Act. It was, at one point, the most frequently enforced antitrust law at the Federal Trade Commission. But starting in the 1980s, as part of a philosophical shift that embraced the idea that unfettered markets can resolve all ills, officials hit the brakes and eventually stopped enforcing the law altogether.
Consumers know what happened next. From the early 1980s to today, big-box store chains flourished while over 100,000 small retailers closed shop. These closures particularly affected low-income communities and created food deserts — areas where healthy, affordable food is hard to find. Forty years ago, the term “food deserts” didn’t exist. Now it is almost a synonym for rural and inner-city America.
Last month the commission, which I serve on, voted to bring its first Robinson-Patman action in more than two decades. We filed suit against Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, the nation’s largest distributor of alcohol, alleging that the company systematically forced small grocery and liquor stores to pay higher prices than big-box retailers such as Costco and Walmart — differences that cannot be attributed to the lower cost of buying in bulk. (Southern Glazer’s called the commission’s lawsuit “misguided and legally flawed” and said the company’s “pricing and discounting structure does not violate” the Robinson-Patman Act.)
When I was sworn in at the Federal Trade Commission almost three years ago, I took a special interest in Robinson-Patman. People said the law protected the inefficient, but that bore little resemblance to my visits to the corner stores of New York and Washington, D.C., and the independent grocers in my wife’s home state, Louisiana.
One day I came across the 2021 congressional testimony of R.F. Buche, a fourth-generation independent grocer in South Dakota. He talked about how the failure to enforce the law was hurting his customers in Indian Country.
I decided to visit his store, Buche Foods. It is the only full-service grocer in Pine Ridge, a community of 3,000 in one of the poorest counties in the nation. Yet the store was vibrant. Signs were in English and Lakota; school pride gear lined the walls.
In the manager’s office, Mr. Buche brought out a list of grocery essentials: eggs, lettuce, cereal. Next to each item was the cost to his wholesaler and the sale price at the nearest big-box store, 50 miles away. His customers had to pay 30 to 50 percent more for these items than those at the big-box store.
This had nothing to do with buying in bulk, Mr. Buche explained. Even when his wholesaler bundled smaller orders to approximate the volume of the big boxes, it still couldn’t gain access to those lower prices. “Twenty years ago, if you shopped our coupons, we could meet or beat the big boxes,” he added. “Not anymore.”
I traveled to North Tulsa, Okla., to visit Oasis Fresh Market, the first grocery store to open in that community in 15 years. Unlike Pine Ridge, which is minutes from the Badlands, this store is in the shadow of the once-thriving business district known as Black Wall Street. Their experiences — from the customers to the owners — were familiar. Oasis Fresh Market is an independent grocer serving a predominantly low-income community, where the average resident’s life span is years shorter than the national average. If either store goes under, area residents would need to travel long distances to obtain even basic grocery items.
And like Mr. Buche, Aaron Johnson, the founder of Oasis, rattled off the premiums he had to pay that big-box stores do not.
I also talked to the bulk purchasers, whose job it is to secure the best prices for independent grocers. In a boardroom near Salt Lake City, the chief executive of a wholesaler serving a range of independents broke down in tears of frustration while he explained that no matter what he did, no matter how big his order sizes, he simply couldn’t get the same prices from suppliers as buyers from big-box stores.
“It makes no sense that places where food is grown and where the most people live have trouble finding access to the central food items and products,” said an Alabama grocer, Jimmy Wright, in one of our recent commission meetings.
Critics of the commission’s efforts to revive Robinson-Patman have created a myth that the law will raise prices — even though there is no empirical research in the 88 years of the law’s existence that shows that. The reality is that Robinson-Patman was passed so that small retailers and their customers could have access to the same low prices as their bigger competitors.
A majority of Americans think that our economy is rigged against them and in favor of the wealthy. Maybe that’s because when powerful companies break the law, prosecutors give them the benefit of every shadow of every doubt — and when those companies’ interests run up against the rule of law, those rules are set aside or broken.
The point of Robinson-Patman is that the same rules should apply to everyone. It is time to enforce the law again.
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5) How Unauthorized Immigrants Help Finance Social Security Benefits
Undocumented workers often pay taxes that help fund programs like Social Security — even if they can’t collect from them in the future.
By Tara Siegel Bernard, Jan. 13, 2025
Dongyan Xu
The Social Security Administration receives billions in free money each year from an unexpected source: undocumented immigrants.
This group paid an estimated $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes in 2022, according to a recent analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning tax research group. Since unauthorized workers cannot collect retirement and other Social Security benefits without a change to their immigration status, the billions they pour into the program effectively act as a subsidy for American beneficiaries.
President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to carry out the nation’s largest mass deportation program to date, and restrict legal pathways to immigration. It’s hard to predict whether the incoming administration will be able to follow through with its most aggressive promises, among them sending home the estimated 11 million undocumented workers currently in the United States.
But if the White House does follow through, economists project a broad drag on the economy — and it could cost Social Security roughly $20 billion in cash flow annually, according to actuaries at the Social Security Administration, which sends benefits to 68 million Americans each month, totaling $1.5 trillion last year.
Social Security has faced a financing shortfall for years, partly because of demographic shifts. Falling birthrates mean fewer people are paying into the program, thousands of baby boomers are retiring daily, and retirees are collecting benefits for longer periods.
“America’s demographic realities are increasingly challenging for financing programs like Social Security,” said Shai Akabas, executive director of the economic policy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit. “Net immigration into the country is one factor that has positively pushed against that trend and helped fill the gap left by an aging work force.”
The trust fund that pays Social Security’s retiree benefits is expected to run dry in 2033, when tax revenue will be enough to pay 79 percent of scheduled benefits. That means beneficiaries’ checks would be reduced by 21 percent if Congress did nothing. (Legislators are expected to do something, though there is a debate about the best approach to shore up the program.)
Major shifts to immigration policy could have ripple effects on Social Security. The net immigration rate was projected to drive population growth — and account for all population increases beginning in 2040 because American fertility rates are so low, according to a 2024 report from the Congressional Budget Office.
“If the immigrant work force declines, that will likely worsen Social Security’s financial picture in the near term and require more significant reforms elsewhere,” said Mr. Akabas of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which recently studied the issue. “That said, the broader questions of immigration policy and border security require careful thought that goes beyond their impact on the Social Security program.”
To get a sense of how different levels of immigration — both lawful and otherwise — can alter the program’s finances over the long term, we can look at the Social Security Administration’s latest annual trustees report, which forecasts the financial health of the combined trust fund for retiree and disability benefits over a 75-year period starting in 2024. (Social Security’s shortfall is often measured as a percentage of the total payroll covered by the program, or all the wages subject to payroll taxes, the program’s dedicated funding source.)
The trustees’ best estimate assumes a population of 1.24 million net immigrants each year. At that rate, the program needs an additional 3.5 percent of its taxable payroll to become fully solvent. But if annual net immigration fell to 829,000 (its low estimate), the program’s long-term financing shortfall would worsen by about 10 percent (to 3.9 percent of taxable payroll from 3.5 percent).
But if net immigrants rose to nearly 1.7 million annually, the financing shortfall would improve by 10 percent (to 3.1 percent of payroll).
In other words, for every 100,000 net immigrants each year, the funding gap is improved by 0.09 percent of taxable payroll.
“Most of these individuals are earlier in their careers and begin contributing to Social Security immediately, even though they will not claim benefits for years into the future, if ever,” a Bipartisan Policy Center report said. “This creates a net positive effect on the Social Security system.”
Undocumented workers are still required to pay taxes on any income earned in the United States, and it’s estimated that at least half of them file federal tax returns. But even if they have contributed to payroll taxes, they are not permitted to collect any Social Security benefits and many other credits, including the earned-income tax credit, which requires that all tax filers and their dependents have valid Social Security numbers.
Employers are generally required to verify prospective workers’ identities and their eligibility to work using the I-9 form, and to collect documentation as evidence. Since people generally need a Social Security number to get a job, undocumented workers who receive paychecks — instead of being paid in cash, for example — may use made-up Social Security numbers, another person’s number or a number that was once valid when they had work authorization status.
But when they file their tax returns, they use another number: the individual taxpayer identification number, also nine digits and known as ITINs. The Internal Revenue Service created them in 1996 to enable people who are ineligible or who do not have Social Security numbers to legally file tax returns and comply with tax laws — say, a student visa holder or certain spouses of people with employment visas.
Though undocumented workers may fear that their having obtained an ITIN could be used to deport them, there are protections that prevent the I.R.S. from sharing taxpayer information with other federal agencies. Congress would need to take legislative action for this to change.
Undocumented workers often file tax returns to show good moral character, which might later help them in any immigration cases, whether that’s related to deportation or putting them on the road to citizenship.
“They want to integrate into American society, and this is an important way to do that,” said Sarah Lora, an associate clinical professor at Lewis & Clark Law School and the director of its low-income-taxpayer clinic. “There is almost a reverence for the tax system,” she said, referring to the attitudes of undocumented taxpayers she has assisted with returns.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that undocumented workers paid a total of $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, a third of which went toward the payroll taxes that are dedicated to paying for social insurance programs, including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment taxes.
“It is well established that undocumented workers contribute to the solvency of major social insurance programs through their tax contributions,” said Carl Davis, research director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
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6) Israel and Hamas Are ‘on the Brink’ of Cease-Fire Agreement, Blinken Says
The negotiations, mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States, appear to be making progress after months of failed attempts to achieve a breakthrough.
By Adam Rasgon, Aaron Boxerman, Isabel Kershner and Ismaeel Naar, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 14, 2025
The aftermath of an Israeli strike in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Tuesday. Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israel and Hamas are “on the brink” of agreeing to declare a cease-fire in Gaza and release hostages held there, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Tuesday, raising hopes for some respite to the violence after more than 15 months of war.
“It’s right on the brink, it’s closer than it’s ever been before,” Mr. Blinken said at an Atlantic Council event in Washington. “But right now as we sit here we await final word from Hamas on its acceptance. And until we get that word, we’ll remain on the brink.”
Neither Israeli nor Hamas officials have publicly confirmed their position on the cease-fire proposal, although Mr. Blinken suggested that Israel was on board with the agreement and that its fate now rested with Hamas.
U.S. officials have made optimistic remarks about cease-fire talks in the past only for negotiations to break down repeatedly into mutual recrimination.
But in recent weeks, officials familiar with the talks have expressed increasing hope for a deal.
Officials in both the Israeli government and Hamas have suggested that they are ready to move forward if the other side signs off. On Monday, a Hamas official said a deal was possible in the coming days as long as Israel did not suddenly change its positions. On Tuesday, an Israeli official said Israel was ready to close the deal and was waiting for Hamas to make a decision.
Some officials have also suggested that a looming deadline was helping to close the gap: the end of President Biden’s term and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
Mediators had “managed to minimize a lot of the disagreements between both parties,” Majed al-Ansari, the spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, told reporters on Tuesday. The talks were focused on “the final details of reaching an agreement,” he said.
But mediators, which include Qatar, Egypt and the United States, and other officials have warned that even substantial progress could be dashed at the last minute.
“We believe that we are at the final stages, but until we have an announcement — there will be no announcement,” said Mr. al-Ansari, adding that there was no immediate timeline for signing a deal.
Mr. Trump has warned that there will be “all hell to pay” unless the hostages are freed by the time he becomes president. Steve Witkoff, his pick for Middle East envoy, has also made trips to Qatar and Israel, meeting with top officials there, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Saturday. (Mr. Witkoff is also the co-chair of Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee, which is in charge of next week’s ceremony.)
If Hamas and Israel conclude an agreement, it would bring some relief to Palestinians in Gaza, who have endured miserable conditions in displacement camps and relentless bombardments by Israel, and for the families of hostages abducted from Israel, who have worried for more than a year about the fate of their loved ones.
“I pray this time the return is real,” said Manar Silmi, 34, a psychologist with an international aid group, who was hoping to head back to the Gaza City home she had fled early in the war. “We’ve suffered more than enough.”
A framework agreement had been sent to both sides, said Mr. al-Ansari, adding that the talks now centered on “outstanding details” about how the deal would be implemented.
In a statement, Hamas also said that the negotiations “had reached their final stages.” The Palestinian armed group’s leadership “hoped that this round of talks would end with a complete and clear agreement,” Hamas said.
Hamas officials negotiating in Doha must obtain the consent of the group’s remaining military commanders in Gaza for the emerging deal. Those commanders include Mohammad Sinwar, whose brother Yahya led the group before being killed by Israel in September. Communicating with them can be difficult, leading to delays.
It was still not clear whether Mr. Sinwar had conveyed to Hamas leaders in Doha his position toward the cease-fire proposal.
The framework of the deal was heavily inspired by previous proposals discussed in May and July, said a diplomat familiar with the talks, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the volatile negotiations. Those proposals detailed a three-stage cease-fire in which Israeli troops would gradually withdraw from Gaza, as Hamas released hostages in exchange for Palestinians jailed by Israel.
For over a year, international efforts have failed to end the war ignited in the Hamas-led attack that killed around 1,200 people in October 2023. Another 250 people were taken hostage to Gaza, according to the Israeli authorities.
In response, Israel launched a military campaign against Hamas that destroyed large areas of the enclave and killed at least 45,000 people, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Around 105 hostages were released during a weeklong cease-fire in November 2023, the bodies of others were recovered by Israeli troops, and a handful were rescued alive. Roughly 98 hostages are now believed to remain in Gaza, around 36 of whom are presumed dead by the Israeli authorities.
During the first phase of the proposed cease-fire — which would last roughly six weeks — Hamas would release 33 named hostages, most of whom Israel believes are alive, said an Israeli official, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks. Israel is willing to release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange, the official said, but the number depends on how many of the hostages are still alive.
Eli Albag, whose daughter Liri, 19, was abducted from the military base where she served during the Hamas-led attack, met with Mr. Netanyahu on Tuesday evening alongside other relatives of hostages.
Mr. Netanyahu projected optimism, Mr. Albag said. But he said he still found it hard to think about what it might be like to welcome his daughter home.
“We want to see the deal signed first,” he said. “After that, we’ll make room for other thoughts.”
While there is significant public pressure in Israel to reach a deal to free the hostages, many Israelis also fear that a cease-fire would leave Hamas in power in Gaza, allowing its fighters to regroup and plan more attacks down the road.
Two of Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-line coalition allies — Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — have already denounced the proposed agreement as an effective surrender to Hamas. The two far-right parties could threaten Mr. Netanyahu’s government if they withdrew from his ruling coalition in protest.
The agreement would likely still go through, as Israel’s parliamentary opposition has mostly committed to giving Mr. Netanyahu a safety net to secure a cease-fire and hostage deal. But it is unclear how long that would last, as it would leave Mr. Netanyahu’s political future dependent on rivals who have vowed to oust him.
In Gaza, Montaser Bahja, a displaced English teacher sheltering in Gaza City, said Palestinians were starting to feel hopeful about a deal after more than a year of hunger and deprivation.
But even if both sides declared a cease-fire, many Gazans were frightened by their uncertain postwar future, Mr. Bahja said. And even if Hamas’s deal secured the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, few would see that as an achievement given the scale of the death and devastation in Gaza, he added.
“Everything is up in the air,” he said. “At this point, people just want it to end.”
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7) In a First, the E.P.A. Warns of ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Fertilizer
Levels of PFAS in sewage sludge used as fertilizer can pose risks that sometimes exceed safety thresholds “by several orders of magnitude,” the agency said.
By Hiroko Tabuchi, Jan. 14, 2025
A wastewater treatment plant in Fort Worth, Texas, last year. Credit...Jordan Vonderhaar for The New York Times
For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday warned that “forever chemicals” present in sewage sludge that is used as fertilizer can pose human health risks.
In an extensive study the agency said that, while the general food supply isn’t threatened, the risk from contaminated fertilizer could in some cases exceed the E.P.A.’s safety thresholds “sometimes by several orders of magnitude.”
A growing body of research has shown that the sludge can be contaminated with manmade chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, which are used widely in everyday items like nonstick cookware and stain-resistant carpets. The chemicals, which are linked to a range of illnesses including an increased risk of cancer, do not break down in the environment, and, when tainted sludge is used as fertilizer on farmland, it can contaminate the soil, groundwater, crops and livestock.
Last year, The New York Times reported that 3M, which for decades has manufactured PFAS, found as early as 2000 that the chemicals were turning up in sludge samples from municipal wastewater plants across the country. In 2003, 3M told E.P.A. of its findings.
The E.P.A. has for decades encouraged the use of sludge from treated wastewater as inexpensive fertilizer with no limits on how much PFAS it can contain. But the agency’s new draft risk assessment sets a potential new course. If finalized, it could mark what could be the first step toward regulating PFAS in the sludge used as fertilizer, which the industry calls biosolids. The agency currently regulates certain heavy metals and pathogens in sewage sludge used as fertilizer, but not PFAS.
The Biden administration has tackled PFAS contamination elsewhere, setting limits on PFAS in drinking water for the first time and designating two kinds of PFAS as hazardous under the nation’s Superfund cleanup law. Those rules came after the agency said in 2023 that there is no safe level of exposure to those two PFAS.
The new E.P.A. assessment “provides important information to help inform future actions by federal and state agencies,” as well as sewage treatment plants and farmers, “to protect people from PFAS exposure,” Jane Nishida, the E.P.A. acting administrator, said in a statement.
It’s unclear what further steps the incoming Trump administration might take. President-elect Trump has been hostile to regulations, though he spoke on the campaign trail of “getting dangerous chemicals out of our environment,” and concerns about PFAS contamination in fertilizer have reached some deeply red states.
The E.P.A.’s risk study comes as farmers across the country have been discovering PFAS on their land.
In Maine, the first and only state that is systematically testing its farmland for PFAS, dozens of dairy farms have been found to be contaminated. In Texas, a group of ranchers sued the provider of sludge fertilizer last year after a neighboring farm used the fertilizer on its fields. County investigators found several types of PFAS in the ranchers’ soil, water, crops and livestock, and the ranchers have since sued the E.P.A., accusing the agency of failing to regulate PFAS in biosolids. In Michigan, state officials shut down a farm where tests found particularly high concentrations in the soil and in cattle that grazed on the land.
The E.P.A. said its analysis did not suggest the general food supply was at risk. Sewage sludge is applied to less than 1 percent of the fertilized acreage of agricultural land a year, it said, a number that roughly aligns with industry data. And, not all farms where sewage fertilizer was used would present a risk.
Still, studies have found that, because PFAS is so persistent in the environment, tainted sludge applied years or even decades ago can continue to be a source of contamination. More than 2 million dry tons were used on 4.6 million acres of farmland in 2018, according to the biosolids industry. Farmers have obtained permits to use sewage sludge on nearly 70 million acres, or about a fifth of all U.S. agricultural land, the industry said.
The E.P.A. hasn’t changed its policy of promoting sludge fertilizer, which has benefits along with the risks. It is rich in nutrients, and spreading it on fields cuts down on the need to incinerate it or put it in landfills, which would have other environmental costs. Using sludge fertilizer also reduces the use of synthetic fertilizers that are based on fossil fuels.
The agency said in its new assessment that at farms that used contaminated sludge, the highest human risks involved drinking milk from pasture-raised cows raised on a contaminated farm, from drinking contaminated water, from eating eggs from pasture-raised hens or beef from cattle raised on contaminated land, or from eating fish from lakes and ponds contaminated with runoff.
Particularly at risk were households that live near or relied on products from a contaminated source, for example milk or beef from a family farm contaminated with PFAS from sewage sludge, the agency said. It said in certain conditions, risks exceeded the E.P.A.’s acceptable thresholds by several orders of magnitude.
The general public, which is more likely to buy milk from a grocery store that sources its produce from many farms, was at less risk, the agency said. For its assessment, the E.P.A. focused on the two most commonly detected types of forever chemicals, called PFOA and PFOS, though many others exist.
The Food and Drug Administration does not set limits on PFAS levels in food. Since 2019, however, the agency has tested nearly 1,300 samples and said the vast majority were free of the types of PFAS the agency is able to test for.
Some public health experts and advocacy groups have questioned the testing methodology, and the agency itself says that “PFAS exposure from food is an emerging area of science and there remains much we do not yet know.” Last year, Consumer Reports said it had detected PFAS in some milk, including organic brands. Packaging is another source of PFAS in food.
The National Association of Clean Water Agencies, which represents wastewater treatment plants across the country, said the findings reinforced that sludge fertilizer was not a risk to the public food supply. Sludge providers have argued that they should not be held responsible for PFAS contamination, saying the chemicals are simply passed onto them.
“Ultimately, the manufacturers of these chemicals must bear the responsibility and cost to remove these chemicals” from their products and environment, said Adam Krantz, the group’s chief executive.
In the absence of federal action, states have started to take their own measures. Maine banned the use of sewage sludge on agricultural fields in 2022 and remains the only state to have done so. In December, a Texas lawmaker introduced a bill that would place limits on levels of certain kinds of PFAS in sewage sludge applied to farmland. Oklahoma lawmakers have also introduced a bill that would place a moratorium on the use of sludge on farmland.
An outright ban on the use of sludge as fertilizer would bring its own problems. Wastewater sludge still needs somewhere to go. Since Maine’s ban, some wastewater treatment plants say they have been forced to ship sewage sludge out of state.
Environmental experts say what’s important is limiting the amount of PFAS that ends up in wastewater and sewage in the first place. That could come from phasing out the use of PFAS in everyday products, or requiring manufacturers to treat polluted wastewater before sending it to municipal wastewater treatment plants.
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8) Israel and Hamas Hope to Secure Cease-Fire Deal Within Days, Officials Say
Negotiators and mediators meeting in Qatar were rushing to address outstanding issues on Wednesday.
By Adam Rasgon, Patrick Kingsley, Aaron Boxerman and Ronen Bergman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 15, 2025
The aftermath of an Israeli strike in Gaza City on Wednesday. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mediators were aiming on Wednesday to clinch a deal within days between Israel and Hamas on a cease-fire that would release hostages held in Gaza, after more than a year of devastating war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed much of the enclave.
Neither Israel nor Hamas has publicly endorsed the agreement, but the Palestinian group said on Tuesday that the negotiations had entered their “final stages.”
In order to implement the deal, Hamas’s negotiating team at the talks in Doha, Qatar, must obtain the consent of the group’s commanders in Gaza, including Mohammad Sinwar, whose brother Yahya led the group before being killed by Israel in October.
Hamas officials did not respond to questions about whether Mr. Sinwar had replied to the proposal. But two Israeli security officials said that objections raised by Mr. Sinwar to a draft agreement had been resolved and estimated that a deal could be concluded within the coming 24 to 48 hours.
A Hamas official aware of the talks said that its negotiators were working to have details finalized by the end of Wednesday or Thursday but that negotiations were still ongoing and that the timing was not clear.
Officials interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Outstanding issues included maps of how Israeli forces would redeploy inside Gaza during the cease-fire, as well as lists of Palestinian prisoners slated for release in exchange for Israeli and foreign hostages, one of the officials said.
Israel has also demanded a system to prevent armed fighters from returning to northern Gaza. Mediators are also trying to iron out details on inspections of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians who would be expected to head to northern Gaza from the south, where many have been displaced, in the event of a truce, the official said.
The latest round of talks is being held in Qatar, a key mediator alongside Egypt and the United States. Majed al-Ansari, the spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday that the two sides had overcome major disagreements.
In Israel, some hard-line members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have also voiced opposition to the deal. But on Wednesday, Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, said he believed that a majority would sign off on an agreement if it came to a cabinet vote.
Months of shuttle diplomacy have failed to end the war in Gaza, which began after Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 that killed 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage. Around 105 captives were later released in a weeklong cease-fire in November 2023 in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
Israel and Hamas have since held numerous rounds of indirect talks, all of which ultimately collapsed amid mutual recriminations. Officials familiar with the negotiations have expressed cautious optimism while noting that there is always a chance that the discussions will founder.
The current deal is broadly similar to a three-phase cease-fire framework publicized by President Biden in late May, according to several officials familiar with the talks. On Wednesday, Yossi Fuchs, Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet secretary, posted on X that the latest proposal was the same as the one from May.
Under the May proposal, Israel and Hamas would first observe a six-week cease-fire in which Hamas would release women, older men, and ill hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinians jailed by Israel, and 600 trucks carrying humanitarian relief would enter Gaza daily.
The proposal also calls for Hamas to release three female hostages on day one of a deal, four more on day seven, and another 26 over the following five weeks, according to a copy of the document obtained by The Times. At the same time, Israel would be required to release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners during the initial six weeks.
A minimum of 60,000 temporary homes and 200,000 tents would also be brought into Gaza during the initial phase.
During the second phase of a deal, Israel and Hamas would declare a “permanent cessation of hostilities,” Israeli forces would withdraw from Gaza and the remaining living hostages would be swapped for Palestinian prisoners. But the details have been a major point of contention: For months, Hamas demanded Israel commit to ending the war, which Israel resisted.
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.
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9) Economic Toll of Los Angeles Fires Goes Far Beyond Destroyed Homes
The ongoing disaster will affect residents’ health, local industries, public budgets and the cost of housing for years to come.
By Lydia DePillis, Jan. 15, 2025
A commercial strip devastated by the Eaton fire in Altadena, Calif. About 12,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed so far in the Los Angeles area. Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
After decades of mounting damage from climate-fueled natural disasters, researchers have compiled many misery-filled data sets that trace the economic fallout over weeks, months and years.
The fires still burning in Los Angeles are sure to rank among America’s most expensive — but there is no perfect analogue for them, making it difficult to forecast the ultimate cost.
The main reason is that wildfires have typically burned in more rural locations, consuming fewer structures and attacking smaller metropolitan areas. The Los Angeles conflagration is more akin to a storm that hits a major coastal city, like Houston or New Orleans, causing major disruption for millions of people and businesses.
“It looks a lot more like the humanitarian situation from a flood or a hurricane than a wildfire that people are watching in the hills,” said Amir Jina, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, who has studied the economic impact of climate change.
On the other hand, several mitigating factors could lead to lower costs and a stronger rebound relative to other places. The cinema capital’s wealth and industrial diversity, along with other natural advantages from geography and weather, may allow Los Angeles to stave off a worst-case scenario.
Estimating the likely economic losses is tricky at this stage. The weather data company AccuWeather has offered a figure of $250 billion to $275 billion, though a Goldman Sachs report said it found the estimate high. (Declining to provide a breakdown because its methodology is “proprietary,” AccuWeather said it considered many factors including long-run health impacts as well as short-term losses in the value of public companies exposed to the disaster.)
Here are some elements to account for when thinking about the total cost of the fires.
Physical Wreckage
The most straightforward component of damage is the number of structures damaged or destroyed, currently about 12,000. That’s fewer than the 18,000 felled by the Camp fire in Northern California in 2018, but this is a different kind of house: Zillow values the average home in the Pacific Palisades ZIP code at $3.4 million; in Altadena’s ZIP code, it’s $1.3 million.
That’s what is driving early estimates of insured losses progressively higher, now reaching $30 billion, according to Wells Fargo. But insurance will neither make all homeowners whole nor pay the full cost of rebuilding. Carriers have dropped thousands of policies in the affected areas in recent years, and the state-backed insurer of last resort caps coverage at $3 million per residential property.
Then there’s the damage to commercial space. Although one landlord managed to protect an outdoor mall with privately hired water tankers, many other businesses were gutted.
These neighborhoods may be better able to recover than others hit by wildfire in recent years. The median annual household income in Pacific Palisades, for example, is more than $200,000, compared with about $80,000 nationally; in Altadena, it’s $134,000.
Nonetheless, public funding will be needed to repair and reconstruct sewer systems, power lines and roads. Water infrastructure requires particular attention, since ash and contaminants can pollute drinking water far outside the burned areas.
“I’m not sure there’s enough money to go around,” said Margaret Walls, director of the Climate Risks and Resilience Program at Resources for the Future, an environmental think tank. “Communities haven’t figured out how to pay for this.”
Work Not Getting Done
Wildfires and hurricanes can have short- and long-term effects on employment and productivity. People who have evacuated may be unable to work, and the jobs based in the affected areas — such as landscaping, teaching school and providing health care — at least temporarily disappear.
Early data is trickling in. The fires haven’t hit major employment centers or industrial facilities, but the number of total hours worked in Malibu and Pacific Palisades declined 57 percent the week the fires started relative to the prior week, according to Homebase, an operations platform for small businesses.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs forecast that the fires would knock 15,000 to 25,000 positions off the Labor Department’s employment report for January. That’s less than the hit from last summer’s major hurricanes, after which people quickly returned to work.
But the damage doesn’t end there. A study published this month in The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management found that large fires depress job creation in the affected counties. The effects rise with the share of the county’s landmass that burned, and Los Angeles County is nearing the upper end of the scale.
According to one of the authors, Raphaelle Gauvin-Coulombe, an assistant professor of economics at Middlebury College, a fire of this magnitude on average reduces monthly employment growth by 1.46 percentage points over three years. Los Angeles has a relatively varied industrial base, including manufacturing, higher education and technology along with entertainment, which could help it recover faster. On the other hand, it relies much more than the typical county on leisure and hospitality enterprises, which are extremely vulnerable to fire.
“If you rely a lot on visitors for your economy, the reduction in consumer demand will be especially important for the region,” Dr. Gauvin-Coulombe said.
The study also found that a federal disaster declaration could substantially cushion those negative impacts by pumping billions of dollars into the community. That often leads to an increase in local economic output after disasters, despite the devastation.
But that money comes from somewhere, and the costs are rising. As one example, Congress had to replenish the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund after last year’s hurricane season, and such supplemental appropriations have become larger and more frequent.
“That’s tax money coming from me and you that could have gone to other uses if we weren’t as exposed to this much risk,” Dr. Jina said.
Long-Term Health Effects
The most immediate, concrete impact of the fires on human health is the body count: So far, 25 people are known to have died, with the tally likely to rise.
But that’s only the beginning. Wildfire smoke has a range of ill effects, including asthma, cancer and preterm births, with children and those with respiratory conditions the most at risk. The particular poisons lofted into the air when houses and their contents burn, rather than just vegetation, could create even more complications.
Natural disasters also set off a series of events that lead to thousands of earlier deaths over more than a decade, research has found. People who are forced to flee their homes or who lose work opportunities deplete their financial resources, which can diminish access to regular health services. Compounding stress can lead to risky behaviors, and public resources are drained by disaster response, all of which adds up to additional loss of life.
Rising Cost of Living
California is an expensive place to live, and the fires are likely to supercharge that problem in the Los Angeles area, at least in the short term, as people displaced from the fires seek new places to live.
“I would look for rents to go up basically immediately,” said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. “We have very few vacant rental homes, so there’s no real cushion within our housing market.”
At the same time, an even more fundamental threat is growing: the rising cost of property insurance, which was already prohibitively expensive in many areas of California. When policies become unaffordable or unavailable, real estate starts to lose value, which can drain the wealth of families whose main financial asset is home equity.
Experts say the way to keep areas insurable is to make not just individual buildings, but whole communities, less flammable. That means retrofitting roofs and siding, adding sprinkler systems, clearing vegetation and undertaking a host of other measures that cost money and require constant vigilance.
According to Dr. Walls, it’s the price people will need to pay for living in beautiful places next to wild landscapes. Thus far, homeowners have not been forced to shoulder the full cost of prevention.
“Do you really want to live there? Then you better invest in way more hazard mitigation than you’re doing,” she said. “They aren’t really pricing the risks appropriately in California.”
Possible Paths Forward
To a large degree, Los Angeles’s recovery — and the distribution of harms and benefits — depends on policymakers.
With little intervention, wealthy individuals could assemble burned lots to build even larger estates in the still-breathtaking coastal locale. Private equity companies could buy up land at vastly reduced prices and wait for conditions to be ripe for rebuilding.
Alternatively, local government officials could encourage a pattern of reconstruction that eases the city’s affordability problem. Turning some land back into open space while rezoning to build more units on less acreage would bolster the housing supply while allowing communities to be defended more easily.
“From a housing economist’s perspective, if we have opportunities to build in a more dense multifamily way, we should,” Mr. Bellisario said. “The ‘but’ is, we know we’re in a wildfire damage zone — can you do it in a way that can be made safe and insurable and also house more people than maybe we did before?”
Adding more housing is probably necessary to stem the flow of people already moving out of California. Places hit by fire tend to lose population and not recover.
The good news is, retrofitting existing homes can be relatively affordable, and new communities built from scratch even more so, according to a study by the research group Headwaters Economics.
With large-scale disasters becoming more frequent, “we do not want to get to the point of normalizing it,” said Kimiko Barrett, an analyst with the firm. “We do know how to build things safer and smarter for this increasing reality we’re looking at.”
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10) It’s a Good (Great?) Time to Be a Big Bank
The largest banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, reported bumper profits on Wednesday.
By Rob Copeland and Danielle Kaye, Jan. 15, 2025
JPMorgan, the nation’s biggest bank, said it earned $14 billion in profits in the fourth quarter, and nearly $59 billion for the full year. Credit...Sam Bush for The New York Times
Worried about the economy? You must not run a major bank.
A swath of the nation’s largest lenders, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, reported quarterly and annual financial results on Wednesday that beat analysts’ expectations, and largely expressed a go-go attitude about what’s ahead after President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated next week.
JPMorgan, the nation’s biggest bank, said it earned $14 billion in profits in the fourth quarter, and nearly $59 billion for the full year. Wells Fargo made $5.1 billion in the fourth quarter and $20 billion for the year and said wealthy depositors were plowing more money into its higher-end savings products. Citi, which topped estimates, reported net income of $2.9 billion in the quarter and $12.7 billion for the full year.
Goldman Sachs, which saw fourth quarter profits of $4 billion and $14 billon for 2024, said it had particular success connecting risky companies looking for money to clients willing to lend it, typically a sign that credit conditions, as Wall Street puts it, remain fluid.
So good were the vibes that JPMorgan’s chief financial officer, Jeremy Barnum, in a briefing with reporters, cited an 89-year-old term from the economist John Maynard Keynes, remarking that there was “no question that we are in an ‘animal spirits’ moment right now.”
To some degree, Wednesday’s earnings results were not a surprise: Bank stocks rose even faster than the broader market in 2024, which ended the year up 23.3 percent, as lenders took advantage of a hot stock market and pickup in corporate financing activity to fatten profits. Shares rose further in midday trading.
Still, bankers traditionally cloak themselves as a risk-averse bunch, and given the questions about the future for interest rates, deal making and the geopolitical world, their optimism about what’s ahead is noteworthy.
It’s a deal
There’s nothing an investment banker likes more than an easy, enthusiastic environment for corporate-financing activities like mergers and acquisitions and initial public offerings. All the major banks that reported earnings on Wednesday said they saw boom times ahead.
Michael Santomassimo, Wells Fargo’s chief financial officer, said that the bank’s corporate clients largely viewed the incoming administration as business friendly and pro-growth, potentially a boon for deal-making.
“It feels like many of our clients, or many of the market participants, feel more confident in their ability to execute on M&A transactions,” Mr. Santomassimo said.
Already, Goldman Sachs was able to sell off some of what it calls “historical principal investments,” or assets that it is looking to unload, at a profit, the bank said.
California fires
The wildfires that have devastated Southern California will inevitably carry some toll to major lenders, which said they did not expect to lose too much money but were monitoring the crisis closely.
A Goldman Sachs spokesman said the bank was analyzing the fallout from the destruction of homes and office buildings. While mortgages tied to those properties should be insured, he noted, the insurance companies, which rely on financing from banks and others, could come under pressure.
JPMorgan sounded a similar note. “The analysis is being done building by building, mortgage by mortgage,” said its chief executive, Jamie Dimon.
JPMorgan said more than 20 of the bank’s employees had lost their homes.
Citi said the areas affected by the Los Angeles fires represented less than 3 percent of the bank’s residential mortgage portfolio, and that its overall real estate exposure did not appear to add up to much.
Questions remain
Although its stock rose nonetheless, Wells Fargo reported revenue that fell short of analysts’ expectations. Mr. Santomassimo pointed out that mortgage rates have remained relatively high, muting the bank’s big business of providing home loans.
Some consumers, especially those who are lower income, are struggling under the “cumulative impact of inflation,” Mr. Santomassimo said.
And despite the general good cheer among bankers for Mr. Trump’s return to the Oval Office, it fell to JPMorgan’s Mr. Barnum and Mr. Dimon to elucidate the possibility of a more melancholy economic future, describing “some tension.”
Mr. Dimon flagged deficit public spending — Mr. Trump has laid out big plans to expand various government programs — as a factor that could drive up inflation and prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, which could spook consumers and companies into a new retreat.
Citi’s corporate clients, though generally optimistic, are grappling with policy uncertainty, said its chief financial officer, Mark Mason. They’re considering how Mr. Trump’s proposed tariffs, immigration and tax policies could shape the economic landscape.
“All eyes are focused on the U.S. in a big way,” he said.
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11) How a Company Makes Millions Off a Hospital Program Meant to Help the Poor
A private business has helped supercharge a controversial federal drug program. Patients and insurers have been left with big bills.
By Ellen Gabler, Jan. 15, 2025
Virginia King was charged more than $2,500 after receiving a cancer drug, even though the clinic was enrolled in a federal discount program. Credit...Adria Malcolm for The New York Times
Soon after being diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, Virginia King sat in an outpatient clinic in Santa Fe, N.M., while a nurse injected her with a powerful drug to slow damage to her spine, where the disease had spread.
Even though the drug had a list price of about $2,700, the hospital that owned the cancer center billed Mrs. King’s insurance company $22,700. Her insurer paid $10,000, but the hospital wanted more.
She got a bill for over $2,500 — “more than half my take-home salary for a month,” said Mrs. King, 65.
She had unknowingly sought care from a hospital that participates in a federal program allowing it to buy drugs at a steep discount and charge patients and insurers a higher amount, keeping the difference.
The intention behind the program was for a small number of safety-net providers to have access to affordable drugs and be able to expand their care for needy patients. But instead, the program has exploded: Now, more than half of nonprofit hospitals in the United States take part. While some providers say it has helped keep their doors open, others — especially large nonprofit health systems — have been accused of maximizing payouts and swallowing the profits.
The program’s escalation has driven up health care costs for employers, patients and taxpayers, studies show.
In 2023, for instance, New York changed the way it administers drug benefits for Medicaid patients, in part because the state had discovered the cost of the federal program had increased by more than 200 percent over three years, said Amir Bassiri, the state’s Medicaid director.
“The numbers and the growth were staggering,” he said. “We all bear the cost.”
Along the way, one little-known middleman has been cashing in, The New York Times found.
The company, Apexus, has worked behind the scenes to supercharge the program, according to interviews with current and former employees and emails, internal reports and other documents.
Twenty years ago, the federal government chose Apexus to manage what was then a small program, negotiating with drug distributors and manufacturers to secure better prices and access to medications. But Apexus is allowed to collect a fee for almost every drug sold under the program, giving the company an incentive to help hospitals and clinics capture as many prescriptions as possible:
Its “purchasing optimization team” shows hospitals how they can make more money by buying different drugs.
A certification program and an Apexus-run “university” trains providers in boosting earnings.
Apexus employees give advice that broadly interprets the rules of the program so hospitals can claim additional patients and drugs.
Apexus was on track to double its revenue from 2018 to 2022, projecting $227 million that year, according to a 2022 internal memo written for the directors of Apexus’ parent corporation and reviewed by The Times. The company costs relatively little to operate and has enjoyed profit margins above 80 percent, according to that memo and three former employees.
In a statement, Apexus said it simply executed its government contract and did not contribute to the growth of the program, called the 340B Drug Pricing Program. “The drivers of growth are multifaceted,” the statement said.
But in the 2022 memo, the president of Apexus, Chris Hatwig, posed a question: “Are there other areas for program expansion within 340B that we are not thinking about?”
Government officials have told Apexus to focus solely on administering the program and not to influence drug purchases. But Apexus leaders have sometimes ignored that request, according to two complaints filed with a government watchdog and six current and former employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared professional or legal retribution.
In its statement, Apexus said it was “fully transparent” with the Department of Health and Human Services and had never breached its contractual obligations.
The Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency within H.H.S. that oversees the program, declined to answer detailed questions from The Times. But in a statement, a spokeswoman said the agency “conducts rigorous oversight of all contracts,” and “to our knowledge, Apexus has not violated” its contract. Regulators and leaders of the company meet frequently to discuss the company’s work and prevent conflicts of interest, the spokeswoman said.
The growth of 340B has drawn criticism for years from Congress, drugmakers and employers, who say it has added to ballooning health care costs. But the role of Apexus has largely gone unexamined.
“They’ve got a license to hunt,” said Marsha Simon, who as a staff member of a congressional committee helped write the bill that authorized the program.
$66 Billion in Sales
Established in 1992, the 340B program essentially requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to offer discounts on outpatient drugs to hospitals and clinics that treat a greater share of low-income and uninsured patients.
The hospitals then can charge insurers and patients the standard price and keep the profits. Although the money is supposed to encourage care for impoverished patients, there are few rules to enforce that.
Patients rarely know they are part of this system. Their prescriptions can be counted as 340B when they get outpatient treatment at a hospital or clinic that qualifies for the program, regardless of the patients’ own income or insurance status. The provider can continue to make money off the patients’ future outpatient prescriptions, even if they get them somewhere else.
Apexus has had contracts to handle the program since the early 2000s. The government does not pay Apexus — instead, drugmakers and distributors pay the company a small percentage of sales.
Based in Irving, Texas, it is a subsidiary of Vizient, a private business owned by hospitals that negotiates a range of health care discounts. Apexus was established as a small nonprofit in 2007 but became a for-profit company in 2014.
Around the same time, 340B began to explode for a number of reasons. More hospitals qualified for the program after the Affordable Care Act expanded the number of people on Medicaid. Other health care systems qualified after acquiring hospitals and clinics in poor areas. Some, already eligible for 340B, bought up practices that used high-margin drugs, like oncology clinics. And a government rule change meant hospitals could make money from prescriptions filled at a greater number of pharmacies.
A decade ago, sales of 340B drugs were $12 billion. In 2023, they reached a high of $66 billion.
Fighting the program’s growth has become a top priority for drugmakers, as well as some employers and insurers.
In North Carolina, prescription drug spending for state employees jumped almost 50 percent from 2018 to 2022. A report in May from the state treasurer’s office found that 340B was partly to blame: Hospitals that participated in the program billed the state health plan far more than hospitals that did not — almost 85 percent more for certain cancer drugs. In one example, hospitals bought a drug commonly used to treat melanoma for an average of $8,000 but billed the state $21,512.
In some cases, costs are passed along to patients.
Mrs. King, the cancer patient in New Mexico, refused to pay her $2,500 bill, and the hospital, Christus St. Vincent, sent it to collections in July.
After The Times asked about the bill last month, a spokeswoman for Christus St. Vincent said the charge was “a misunderstanding and has been resolved,” adding that the drug program helped the hospital provide charity care and reinvest in cancer treatment and primary care.
Mrs. King switched to a free-standing oncology clinic that does not qualify for the federal drug program. That clinic billed her insurance $8,000 for the injection, about a third of what Christus St. Vincent had charged. Her responsibility was nothing.
An Ever-Growing Portfolio
Ms. Simon, who helped draft the legislation creating 340B, said the government chose an outside contractor like Apexus in order to negotiate with distributors and drugmakers on behalf of small hospitals and clinics without a lot of buying power.
But regulators and Apexus have expanded that role, allowing the company to build a highly profitable business off the program and the loosely written statute that authorized it. The company has been “aggressive” in helping health care facilities maximize their revenue from the program, said Shawn Gremminger, chief executive of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, which represents employers who buy health insurance for more than 45 million people in the United States.
“This is a government contractor, and the goal of the government should not be, ‘How do we make more money for 340B providers?’” said Mr. Gremminger, whose organization has pushed for the program to be overhauled.
Over the past two decades, Apexus has adapted its business model to harness 340B’s tremendous growth. A 2022 PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Times showed that Apexus employees received bonuses if the company increased its revenue each year.
With exclusive access to sales data, Apexus’ “purchasing optimization team” will analyze a hospital system’s drug-buying habits and compare them with those of their competitors, according to four current and former employees. In some cases, Apexus will suggest that a hospital buy more 340B drugs or tweak its inventory in ways that can churn more cash.
Apexus declined to answer detailed questions about its optimization team, but said in a statement that the company “only provides technical assistance” in keeping with regulations.
Apexus also holds “340B University” events to help providers and others in the health care industry understand the program, and it fields questions through a national call center. But the rules governing the program are ambiguous, and Apexus offers broad interpretations, according to four current and former employees.
For instance, one of the thorniest issues is which patients can be claimed by hospitals for discounted drugs. The further a hospital casts its net, the more patients and drugs it can include under the program, and the more money it can make. Apexus has advised hospitals that they can mine records as far back as 36 months for eligible patients they may have missed, two of those employees said.
Similarly, Apexus employees have showed hospitals how to maximize the number of pharmacies they work with, boosting the number of prescriptions that can qualify for discounts, those employees said.
In its statement, Apexus said those examples were inaccurate but would not say how. It added that the company encouraged “conservative and responsible stewardship” of the 340B program, and that all information it provided was approved by regulators.
A spokeswoman for H.R.S.A. said it reviewed materials prepared by Apexus but declined to comment on that specific advice.
The company has developed other ventures that have brought in revenue:
About eight years ago, Apexus began selling a $750 course for people to become “certified experts” in 340B.
It started a business to give hospitals better access to specialty drugs — for conditions like cancer, H.I.V. and autoimmune diseases — which are major drivers of 340B’s growth. That company, Acentrus, helped hospitals and clinics provide data to manufacturers in exchange for deeper discounts and access to those drugs. It was sold last year.
The company charges 3 percent in fees for a line of generic drugs that are managed and provided by drug distributors, according to former employees. Apexus simply provides access to the health systems.
For the last decade, Apexus has earned millions of dollars on drug purchases made outside the 340B program: Because not all outpatient drugs qualify for 340B discounts, hospitals must stock their pharmacies with medication purchased through different channels. Apexus acts as a middleman, making fees off those transactions.
That has frustrated drugmakers and competitors. In 2021, the drug manufacturer Baxter wanted to sell non-340B drugs to hospitals without going through Apexus, according to emails obtained under public-records laws. But government regulators would not allow it, a spokeswoman for Baxter said.
In early November, Premier, the main competitor to Apexus’s parent company, Vizient, sued the federal government over these sales. The setup, the suit argued, forces hospitals to pay higher prices for those non-340B drugs and drives revenue to drug manufacturers and Apexus.
In its statement, Apexus said its federal contract did not preclude it from developing other businesses, as long as they were not in conflict with the terms of the agreement.
Regulators were aware of these ventures, the company said, noting that its specialty drug business, Acentrus, was in “no way associated with” the 340B program. The 2022 company memo, however, said Acentrus “resulted in an additional $20 million” in revenue within the 340B program.
H.R.S.A. declined to comment on the scope of its authority over Apexus and whether it knew about all the company’s revenue-generating arms.
Criticized, but Pushing Ahead
About six years ago, Krista Pedley, then the director of the H.H.S. office in charge of 340B, reprimanded Apexus leaders in a Skype meeting, saying it was acting more like a sales-driven business than a program administrator. She reminded them that Apexus’ role was not to help 340B grow, according to five former or current employees familiar with the meeting.
For about a month afterward, regulators reviewed any communication Apexus had with health care facilities to make sure the company didn’t overstep, the employees said.
But that did not seem to dampen the company’s pursuits. (In an email, Ms. Pedley said she did not recall that meeting, and noted that her former office met regularly with Apexus.)
In 2021, an unnamed Apexus employee filed a complaint with H.H.S.’s Office of Inspector General, an internal watchdog, saying the company was “always trying to grow the program.” The company, the employee wrote, had hired “sales-type” staff to influence hospitals’ drug-purchasing decisions.
The complaint said that regulators did not understand Apexus’ business, and that employees had been told by company leaders to describe its work as “education.”
Another anonymous complaint, filed in 2022, echoed the allegation that Apexus had hired staff to help shape hospitals’ purchasing decisions, and said it was using “data in ways to drive revenue for itself, without asking (or asking and disregarding) the government’s opinion.”
Apexus declined to answer specific questions about the meeting with Ms. Pedley, but said The Times's account was a “mischaracterization of our day-to-day, collaborative discussions” with the agency.
Apexus rejected the allegations in the anonymous complaints and said it had been unaware of them until The Times provided it with copies. The spokeswoman for H.R.S.A. said that it, too, had been unaware of the complaints.
In interviews, four current and former employees said that for years, Mr. Hatwig, Apexus’ president, acknowledged that regulators did not want the company to develop sales-focused arms of the business but encouraged his staff to do so anyway, saying that the government would not know.
Apexus denied that, saying that “everyone at Apexus understands the expectation that they conduct themselves and perform their work in an ethical and compliant manner.”
Julie Tate and Carson Kessler contributed research.
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