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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) At Trump’s Direction, Federal Agencies Are Abandoning Discrimination Cases
President Trump has tried to scale back anti-discrimination regulations that date back decades. Federal agencies have heeded his call.
By Erica L. Green and Niko Gallogly, July 5, 2026
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent, and Niko Gallogly writes about business.
Kenni Miller joined a class-action lawsuit by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but the case was later dropped by the Trump administration. Kristian Thacker for The New York Times
Black Americans registering to vote in a primary election in Atlanta in 1944. Jim Crow-era literacy tests did not ask about race, but disproportionately prevented Black people from voting. Associated Press
When Kenni Miller started as a shift manager in his local Sheetz convenience store in Altoona, Pa., he felt something that he rarely had as a Black man in the workplace.
He felt trusted. He felt appreciated.
When he was fired a few weeks later, in the summer of 2020 after a background check, Mr. Miller, then 27, was devastated. A nonviolent, felony drug conviction from his teenage years had never caused him to be denied a job before. And he already proved he could do the work.
“I was well spoken,” Mr. Miller told The New York Times in an interview. “They had me running the cash register, talking to people, all the customers. I’m doing these things, learning the whole store, so I’m equipped for the job. That’s not the issue here, right?”
In 2024, Mr. Miller was part of a class-action lawsuit against Sheetz filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that the company’s criminal background checks disproportionately screened out applicants of color.
But soon after President Trump took office, the E.E.O.C. abruptly dropped the case.
The agency cited an executive order by Mr. Trump that directed federal agencies to “deprioritize” cases like Mr. Miller’s, in which companies are scrutinized not for intentional discrimination, but for having policies that have an unintentional, “disparate impact” on minority applicants.
The result has been an abandonment of civil rights cases across the federal government, in departments including education, housing, trade, justice and the E.E.O.C. There is no public accounting of exactly how many cases have been closed, but legal advocates describe a generational void in civil rights enforcement.
“It is absolutely widespread, and it is absolutely devastating,” said Dariely Rodriguez, chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “We know a lot of time with discrimination, there’s rarely a smoking gun. A lot of people don’t know that they’re being subjected to discrimination. We need our federal agencies to look into that hidden discrimination.”
For Mr. Trump, the directive against disparate impact litigation is part of a broader push to eradicate “diversity, equity and inclusion” — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — from every part of American life.
He and other opponents of the cases argue that employers should not be penalized for the mere implication of discrimination, usually shown through statistics. Instead, they say, the focus should be directed at explicit and intentional discrimination.
Nick Ruffner, a spokesman for Sheetz, declined to comment on the E.E.O.C’s decision to dismiss its lawsuit. But he said in a statement, “Sheetz does not tolerate discrimination of any kind,” and the company wanted “to reaffirm our commitment to fairness, inclusivity, and treating every team member and customer with respect.”
The impact of the decision to abandon discrimination cases has been felt acutely by those who have turned to the E.E.O.C., the nation’s top enforcer of workplace discrimination laws.
Under its new chair, Andrea Lucas, the agency has aggressively prioritized Mr. Trump’s goals, such as pursuing cases of white men who believe they have been discriminated against.
The agency declined to comment on specific lawsuits. But in a statement, Ms. Lucas said “rooting out race and sex discrimination has always been central to the E.E.O.C.’s mission.”
The test of disparate impact liability was established in 1971 and has been the legal theory crucial to enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned racial discrimination by employers and other institutions.
One widely cited example of disparate impact has been the Jim Crow-era literacy tests that some states created as a condition to vote. The tests did not ask about race and so seemed neutral on their face. But they disproportionately prevented Black people from voting because they had long been forced out of schools.
Amalea Smirniotopoulos, senior policy counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which successfully argued the first disparate impact case at the Supreme Court, said the legal theory is a recognition of the remnants of state-sanctioned discrimination.
“We didn’t just want to take down the ‘Whites only’ signs,” Ms. Smirniotopoulos said. “Fundamentally, the civil rights movement was fighting for the ability for people to actually get living wage jobs, and housing, access to mortgages, and all of the things that actually make for an equal society.”
The measure was codified by Congress in 1991, and upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015. Because disparate impact remains codified in law — which the president cannot erase unilaterally — Mr. Trump could only demand that agencies stop making the cases a priority.
The agencies have taken heed.
The Education Department, which has severely drawn back its civil rights investigations, stopped pursuing disparate impact investigations in areas like school discipline.
The Department of Housing withdrew guidance for how the agency would assess disparate impact in enforcing fair housing laws, including redlining, and began dropping housing discrimination cases from its docket. In one instance, a public housing authority found to have favored white applicants withdrew a settlement two days after its offer, citing Mr. Trump’s order, according to an investigation by ProPublica.
The Federal Trade Commission dismissed its claims of discrimination it had brought against three Texas car dealerships for discriminating against Black and Latino consumers in charging more for add-ons.
The Department of Justice also dropped several high-profile cases predicated on disparate impact theory, including several lawsuits against police and fire departments whose hiring policies and exams were found to be discriminatory. It also recently terminated the first-ever environmental justice settlement in which Alabama officials were supposed to provide septic tanks to Black residents. The Trump administration called the plan “illegal D.E.I.” and scrapped the deal. The agency also issued a rule that eliminated disparate impact from its enforcement of Title VI.
And the Office of Management and Budget, which sets policy for the entire federal government, proposed a sweeping new regulation that prohibits the use of federal funds to “promote or support theories of disparate-impact liability” for all agencies.
The rule could ban federal funding for studies, litigation or other activities predicated on the idea that certain policies and practices could disproportionately harm certain groups — which could affect everything from the study of maternal mortality disparities at the Department of Health and Human Services to grant-funded organizations that tackle issues like housing.
Filling in the gaps are legal advocacy groups that are trying to keep cases going. Mr. Miller, with the help of a team of private attorneys, decided to become a named plaintiff in the Sheetz case, to take the place of the E.E.O.C. in the lawsuit.
“What the administration or folks who support dropping disparate impact say is that they want people to be judged by their merits,” said Pooja Shethji, a lawyer at Outten & Golden LLP, one of the lawyers representing Mr. Miller, “and that’s exactly what Mr. Miller wants — to be judged by the work, and his qualifications.”
The request is still pending before a judge, and a ruling could come down any day.
Mr. Miller said he has found a new job, but the shame he felt walking down the road with his nametag after he’d been abruptly let go still weighs on him. He said he felt compelled to stand up for Black men in America, who are often overlooked and over-incarcerated.
The E.E.O.C. found that Sheetz background check resulted in 14.5 percent of Black job applicants being denied employment, while 13 percent of Native American applicants and 13.5 percent of multiracial candidates were screened out. The denial rate for white applicants was less than 8 percent.
“The average me doesn’t come back from a situation like that,” Mr. Miller said. “I want to be the one who speaks up for this situation — which is life after having a job — and make sure jobs are held accountable.”
‘Keep Up With the Boys’
While Mr. Trump’s order specifically took aim at race-based cases, it has broad consequences for other groups, including women, L.G.B.T.Q. people and people with disabilities.
When Leah Cross started training for a new job as an Amazon delivery driver, her female colleagues gave her a piece of advice that they said would “help her keep up with the boys.”
She should purchase a “Shewee,” they told her, the camping device used by women to urinate in the woods, or in otherwise remote areas. It would help her meet her delivery quotas and avoid being punished for straying from her route for a bathroom break — a predicament her male colleagues rarely found themselves in because they could easily urinate in bottles.
Ms. Cross felt up to the challenge. When she landed a job at the world’s biggest online retail giant in August 2022, she felt like she had made it.
“Getting a leg into that industry, I saw it as, like, working for Google,” Ms. Cross recalled in an interview. “I know it’s not amazing, but I was just kind of like, ‘Hey, I’m part of something.’”
But by the end of her four-month stint she felt she was part of a humiliating trend. Like her female colleagues, she was relieving herself in her delivery van several times a day. She had received phone calls from her manager when he was notified that she deviated from her route, often to find a bathroom to use sanitary products. In November 2022, she was fired for “failure to perform.”
Ms. Cross was among three former Amazon workers who filed a grievance against Amazon in 2023, alleging the company violated wage laws by introducing strict delivery quotas and monitoring drivers with GPS tracking and surveillance cameras that alerted supervisors if a driver went off route for a bathroom break.
Ms. Cross went further, also filing a discrimination charge with the E.E.O.C. that year, alleging that women suffered disproportionately from Amazon’s strict policies because women could not urinate in bottles as easily as men and are more likely to need access to bathrooms to take care of menstruation needs.
A spokeswoman for Amazon declined to comment on Ms. Cross’s complaint. The company has maintained that workers are allowed to take bathroom breaks, and that its delivery app shows where public bathrooms are.
“You don’t see a lot of females to look up to when you’re starting this position, because it takes a lot for females to meet these working conditions,” Ms. Cross said.
In December, 2024, the E.E.O.C. contacted Ms. Cross, stating that it was “very interested in moving forward with Ms. Cross’s case.”
“I kind of accepted at that time that there wasn’t a whole lot that I could do based on my standing, and financial background,” Ms. Cross said. “But I saw hope.”
But last fall, the agency notified Ms. Cross that it would no longer be investigating her case, citing Mr. Trump’s directive. Ms. Cross, with the backing of three legal advocacy groups unsuccessfully sued the EEOC last year over its withdrawal from disparate impact cases. A judge dismissed her case.
The case illuminated the difficult path ahead for many Americans, particularly for those who don’t have the resources to take on big companies and for whom the federal government has been their only recourse.
And civil rights attorneys say that because of the administration’s attacks on D.E.I., it is getting harder to find people willing to be the face and name of private lawsuits.
“It takes a lot of bravery in this moment,” Ms. Smirniotopoulos said, “considering what it means to have the president and the federal government saying that discrimination doesn’t exist.”
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2) Venezuelans Warned That Public Housing Towers Might Crumble in a Quake
Residents, construction experts and seismologists said for years that Venezuela’s public housing would be vulnerable in a natural disaster.
Volunteers and relatives removing a body from the rubble of the Luisa Cáceres de Arismendi complex in late June.
The soaring high rises between the mountain and the sea were a deliberate statement, built by Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chávez, as a promise to house the poor in dignity.
But now, as residents claw through the rubble of the buildings after back-to-back earthquakes, many have turned their anger toward the government, accusing it of building shoddy apartments for political gain.
When the earthquakes ripped across Venezuela’s northern coast last month, public housing in the state of La Guaira, a gateway to Caracas, the capital, became some of the densest pockets of death.
Massive buildings, home to thousands of people, crashed to the ground, leaving valleys of dust and destruction. Town homes in a sprawling complex named for Mr. Chávez crumbled like toy houses. Some burst into flames.
The devastation has raised questions about the government’s role in the loss of so many lives in structures that building experts had been warned for years could not withstand a major earthquake.
Construction experts who know La Guaira have revived long-running concerns about the terrain the complexes were built on, the quality of their materials and the integrity of their design. Plans for the buildings began in 2011, just ahead of an election, and construction proceeded hastily, with design details and information about soil tests largely withheld from the public.
In 2017, Enzo Betancourt, then president of the Venezuela College of Engineers, called the structural integrity of the government-built units “a state secret.”
Two days after the quakes hit, Juan Manuel Chirinos stood at the edge of a collapsed tower at one housing unit, looking for his son, also called Juan Manuel, 32. All around him, people were hammering away at the rubble, desperately trying to find signs of life.
“These people weren’t killed by the disaster,” said Mr. Chirinos, who was also searching for his son’s wife and their two children. “They were killed by the government because they built these buildings like garbage.”
The apartments were built under a state program named Misión Vivienda. It was a showcase piece of Mr. Chávez’s revolution, meant to “break the capitalist logic that commodified the home,” according to a state website.
The Venezuelan government, now run by Delcy Rodríguez, a leading figure in Mr. Chávez’s movement, says that more than 5.5 million homes were built, with more in the works.
“Beyond the number of homes,” says the site, “it is about quality.”
In La Guaira, where some buildings are now marked in red paint for demolition, Misión Vivienda buildings are far from the only apartments to have fallen. Homes built by private contractors for the wealthy and middle class, with names like Coral Beach and Coral Mar, also crashed to the ground, killing many and raising questions about their integrity.
A representative of Ms. Rodriguez’s government declined to respond to questions about the Misión Vivienda buildings. At a news conference on Thursday, Ms. Rodríguez said that the majority of the buildings that collapsed in La Guaira had not been built by the state.
But the Misión Vivienda complexes stand out because of the extensive amount of destruction in an enormous public-works project that had been a source of concern for years. There were hundreds of apartments in the badly damaged concrete complexes known as OPPE 25, OPPE 26, OPPE 27 and OPPE 33 and roughly 2,500 in the battered Hugo Chávez development. In many cases, large extended families with deep political ties to Mr. Chávez inhabited a single apartment.
The Misión Vivienda buildings that fell in La Guaira were built at a time of state largess, when Venezuela was still relatively flush with oil money. Yet, for more than a decade before the quakes, residents, seismologists and watchdog groups publicized cracks in the walls, problems with safely installing gas lines, and the risk of collapse in the case of an earthquake. In other parts of the country, Misión Vivienda buildings were so poorly constructed they had to be destroyed years ago.
Many were built by foreign companies with opaque contracts, raising questions about whether designs and materials had been adapted to fit the region’s geographic vulnerabilities.
“There was no technical interest there,” said Guillermo Rivas, the owner of a construction company who has worked in La Guaira for more than 40 years. “The interest there was populism.”
Juan Manuel Chirinos, the missing son, had moved into a Misión Vivienda apartment just four days before the temblors. But many others had lived in public housing complexes for years, and had been given their homes as a reward for their loyalty to Mr. Chávez.
Now these buildings are scenes of chaotic searches and desperate calls for more help from the state.
“We have no tools,” said Willy Bermúdez, 38, a police officer who had lived in OPPE 26 for 13 years. “We’re scraping by with our fingernails.”
On Tuesday, sitting in the rubble of his building, he said he had spent nearly a week digging for his wife and their two boys before finding his family’s furniture and his son’s middle school diploma. Then, from below, he heard “cries and taps,” he said.
That night, rescuers — a mix of paramedics, firefighters and volunteers with no clear command structure — were trying to dig a tunnel toward the noises.
Mr. Bermúdez cried as he spoke. The operation went long into the night. And the next day, he sent a text message: “My entire family died.”
Mr. Bermúdez lived in Tower G of the OPPE 26 complex. Next door, Tower F is damaged but still standing.
The picture was much the same in the Hugo Chávez development — some of the low-slung buildings with blue vinyl siding crumbled completely. Others, while now uninhabitable, merely buckled and leaned. It will take time to understand why this happened.
Mario Lieghio, the president of La Guaira’s construction chamber, said that the state’s enviable position between the mountain and the sea also made it vulnerable to disaster, as silt from the mountain accumulates and softens the earth. While building in La Guaira is possible, he said, it must be done carefully, with detailed soil studies, deep foundations if necessary and materials and designs that can resist quakes.
On Wednesday, he drove through the Hugo Chávez development, pointing to the mountains of flimsy metal and particle board that were used to build the apartments.
“This has to be a lesson,” he said, “a truly gigantic lesson.”
The state had hired a Turkish company, Summa, to build the complex.
“Those people finished a building in less than a week,” said José Luis Sarmiento, a union leader and a construction worker who helped build the Hugo Chávez complex. “We were doing well because we went fast.”
The Turkish firm did not respond to a request for comment.
Burak Pelenk, an architect who worked on the Hugo Chávez project, helping to secure building approvals, said that he believed the project was designed with earthquakes in mind.
“In Turkey we have experience with earthquakes,” he said in a text message.
“The problem could stem — I am an architect, not an engineer — from flawed soil analysis or the foundation.”
Just blocks from the Hugo Chávez buildings, the sea sparkled. Some of the development’s residents had relocated to a nearby baseball field, where they had been sleeping in tents.
In other public housing complexes, the search for survivors and the vigil for the dead continued.
In the remains of the rubble, Mr. Chirinos told his wife that he had watched rescuers recover what appeared to be the bodies of a family of four — possibly his son, his son’s wife and their boys, 8 and 11.
“I saw them,” he said. “They brought them out. They were embracing each other.”
But officials had taken the bodies away, he added, and would not tell him where they were going.
Amid the broken concrete at OPPE 26, Oswaldo Tovar, 45, had used a small hammer to find his wife and 8-year-old daughter.
By the time he reached them, they were dead.
At the same development, María de los Ángeles Sevilla, 59, said that she was convinced her missing daughter, Yorlin, was alive: “A mother can feel it in her body. I feel my daughter is alive.”
Days later, Yorlin was also found dead, as were two grandchildren, including an 11-month-old baby.
At the OPPE 27 complex, Sergio Castillo, 28, spent three days digging for his cousin, Diego Tovar, 16.
“He never abandoned his cousin,” said Diego’s mother, Milagros Hernández, 43.
On Tuesday, Mr. Castillo emerged from the rubble drenched in sweat, carrying Diego’s body.
It was late at night, and he hugged his aunt, her body lit by his headlamp.
“They built this all wrong,” Mr. Castillo said. “This shouldn’t have been here; they shouldn’t have put us here.”
Sheyla Urdaneta contributed reporting. Drone piloting by Andres Conde.
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3) Sorry, A.I. Is Not Giving Us a Four-Day Workweek
By Joanne Lipman, July 6, 2026
Ms. Lipman is the author of “Next! The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work” and other books.
“The forecasters predicting the four-day workweek also overestimate how much time technology will actually save. When I was a college intern at The Wall Street Journal in the early 1980s, we typed on manual typewriters using triplicate carbon paper, and fixed mistakes by cutting and pasting with scissors and glue. Theoretically, our work hours should have plunged with the advent of digital tools — but instead they exploded, as technology created the ability to publish around the clock. Full-time employees last year worked an average of 41.9 hours per week, a figure that hasn’t changed much since the pre-internet 1990s. And at home, the advent of the internet didn’t decrease the amount of time Americans spent on housework. It’s an old pattern: As dishwashers and microwaves supercharged productivity in the 20th century, expectations about cleanliness, nutrition and child-rearing ballooned accordingly, and chores like laundry that once might have been outsourced migrated right back to homeowners. A.I. appears to be following the same trajectory, increasing our output rather than decreasing our workload. A recent study of a 200-employee tech firm concluded that ‘A.I. tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it,’ leading to ‘workload creep’ as employees began taking on additional responsibilities. Similarly, a 2025 paper found that A.I. use ‘is associated with longer work hours and less leisure.’”
Steven Ahlgren
Some of the brightest minds in business believe that artificial intelligence will spell the end of the 40-hour workweek. The financier Steve Cohen has said we will work four days per week soon, while Zoom’s chief executive, Eric Yuan, predicts it will be three. Bill Gates foresees a two-day workweek within a decade, and Elon Musk says work will ultimately become optional altogether, akin to a hobby, like “playing sports or a video game.”
Don’t count on it.
The truth is, any one of these executives could have shortened the workweek years ago, long before A.I.
Studies have proved that a four-day workweek with the same pay is not only possible, but superior. A 2015 trial in Iceland was so successful — productivity remained the same or better, while employee satisfaction soared — that it has since expanded throughout the country. A 2022 study in Britain involving 61 companies and almost 3,000 employees found that revenue increased, while employee stress and burnout plunged. Experiments in New Zealand, Japan, Australia and Brazil have also been home runs.
Americans overwhelmingly favor a four-day workweek, too. Yet it has largely been a non-starter here. In my four-plus decades as a journalist and editor, I’ve written and assigned multiple articles about workplace trends. Almost every expert prediction on the demise of the five-day workweek has been wrong.
Why? Because we consistently underestimate executives’ ferocious attachment to face time. The very leaders rhapsodizing about a shorter workweek in the future are demanding more time, not less, from their employees in the here and now. Mr. Musk requires a “minimum” of 40 hours in the office, and has said it takes 80 hours or more a week to have real impact. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who also foresees a four-day workweek, has said he personally works seven days. The JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon, who predicts a workweek of 3.5 days, insists on five full days in the office, and is a vociferous critic of remote work.
The forecasters predicting the four-day workweek also overestimate how much time technology will actually save. When I was a college intern at The Wall Street Journal in the early 1980s, we typed on manual typewriters using triplicate carbon paper, and fixed mistakes by cutting and pasting with scissors and glue. Theoretically, our work hours should have plunged with the advent of digital tools — but instead they exploded, as technology created the ability to publish around the clock.
Full-time employees last year worked an average of 41.9 hours per week, a figure that hasn’t changed much since the pre-internet 1990s. And at home, the advent of the internet didn’t decrease the amount of time Americans spent on housework. It’s an old pattern: As dishwashers and microwaves supercharged productivity in the 20th century, expectations about cleanliness, nutrition and child-rearing ballooned accordingly, and chores like laundry that once might have been outsourced migrated right back to homeowners.
A.I. appears to be following the same trajectory, increasing our output rather than decreasing our workload. A recent study of a 200-employee tech firm concluded that “A.I. tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it,” leading to “workload creep” as employees began taking on additional responsibilities. Similarly, a 2025 paper found that A.I. use “is associated with longer work hours and less leisure.”
Perhaps this time really will be different, and A.I. will significantly reduce the workweek. There may be no choice, if those who believe we are on the verge of an A.I. jobs apocalypse are correct. Already, Cisco, Block, Coinbase, HP, IBM and Salesforce are among the companies that have cited A.I. as a reason for layoffs. Some economists believe we will need to reduce work hours to allow more people to share in the labor and the paychecks.
Notably, while the chorus of leaders predicting a shorter workweek continues to grow, most are vague about when that change might happen. None of them appear to be setting things in motion now. Admittedly, a wholesale shift to a shorter workweek would be highly complex for large companies — and far more so for a society that’s built around the five-day cadence, encompassing everything from school hours to infrastructure projects.
A shorter workweek would also require a significant shift in America’s workaholic culture, which views busyness as a status symbol. While Americans say they want a shorter workweek, most employees in a recent survey said they would use the majority of time savings from A.I. to do more work. As it is, more than 40 percent of Americans don’t take all of their vacation days, and 88 percent of parents in a recent survey said it was important for their children to have careers they enjoyed, more than quadruple the percentage who said it was important to get married and have kids. There’s a reason that one of the most quoted lines from “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is the workaholic editor Miranda Priestly cooing, “Boy, I love working. I really do. Don’t you?”
Despite the obstacles, there are a few causes for optimism. A few small U.S. companies have adopted a four-day workweek in recent years, including Kickstarter and ThredUp. ThredUp’s chief executive said he’s seen “tremendous improvements” in employee happiness and creativity, and that “retention metrics are through the roof.”
Business leaders began forecasting the demise of the five-day workweek even before Henry Ford standardized it in 1926. The engineer Charles Steinmetz in 1923 asserted that electric power would lead to a four-hour workday within a century. The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek by 2030. Now, the shorter workweek can finally become a reality. There’s no need to depend on some magical moment when A.I. suddenly changes the way we work. Companies should stop making vague predictions about a shorter workweek, and start making it happen.
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4) Efforts to Help Smokers Quit Stall Under Trump
The C.D.C.’s tobacco control office has been shut for more than a year. After its most prominent antismoking campaign went off the air, calls to 1-800-QUIT-NOW lines have plummeted.
By Christina Jewett, Reporting from Washington, July 6, 2026
The ads were jarring: a man with a hole in his throat where his larynx, or voice box, had once been. A woman whose teeth and jaw had been removed after oral cancer. Another woman speaking in a robotic voice, which was altered when her larynx was removed: “I wish I’d never seen a cigarette in my entire life.” A black screen followed, saying she died two days later.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 14-year ad campaign, called Tips From Former Smokers, was highly memorable and, research shows, highly effective in motivating people to quit. Last year, though, as tobacco companies gave millions to political organizations related to the Trump administration, the campaign went dark.
There is no definitive evidence linking the donations to the lapse of the ad campaign. But the decision to terminate it was one of several steps the administration has taken to unravel federal government antismoking initiatives that had long had bipartisan support during a time when the administration has delivered significant policy wins to tobacco companies.
The C.D.C.’s Office on Smoking and Health, which managed the campaign and worked with states on smoking cessation measures, has been shut down for more than a year, after its staff was laid off as part of the administration’s government downsizing efforts. While hundreds of other federal health employees were eventually rehired, the smoking office staff members have not been.
Even after Congress restored the office’s funding late last summer, its employees have remained on paid leave as litigation challenging the firings plays out.
In recent weeks, under pressure from Congress, the C.D.C. has given states diminished funding to air ads from the campaign’s archive, but the federal government will not produce new ads or negotiate contracts for them to air nationwide. The ads had prompted millions of smokers to dial state quit lines for help on how to stop smoking. In interviews, people who ran quit lines in several states said that since the ads went off the air, calls have plummeted along with enrollment in programs that offered counseling and nicotine gum and patches.
The abandonment of an effort that was widely regarded as a public health triumph has puzzled antismoking activists who point out that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s platform was based on ending chronic diseases, which are a well-known consequence of smoking.
“We find it very ironic in an administration that wants to make America healthy again that we’re cutting all of these resources related to smoking and vaping,” said Nancy Brown, the chief executive of the American Heart Association.
Helping adults stop smoking is one of the most evidence-backed ways to improve the public’s health. Smoking rates in the United States have fallen significantly, to less than 10 percent of adults, compared with 42 percent of adults in the early 1960s. Still, smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the country, causing about 490,000 premature deaths each year.
A national survey of adults who smoked from 2012 through 2018 found that the Tips from Former Smokers campaign was associated with more than 16 million people attempting to quit smoking and one million succeeding. During those years alone, the campaign was associated with saving an estimated $7.3 billion in health care costs.
“It’s crazy that they have cut this funding if they really want to save lives and save money,” said Sally Herndon, who ran North Carolina’s tobacco control program until her retirement last year.
Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement that the C.D.C. “remains committed to tobacco prevention and control and continues to support this priority through outreach, education and surveillance.”
The cuts have come as tobacco companies have aggressively lobbied the administration for policy changes that would likely increase their market share of vaping and other nicotine products.
The New York Times recently reported that Reynolds American, which makes Newport and Camel cigarettes, saw a coveted new federal policy take shape that would allow an entire new class of flavored e-cigarettes onto the market. The initiative was announced just days after a $5 million donation and lunch with President Trump at his golf course in Florida. Executives from Altria, which makes Marlboro cigarettes, were also present.
The new policy was crafted over the objections of Dr. Marty Makary, then the F.D.A. commissioner, who cited it as the reason for his resignation in May. It stunned some public health experts, who say the F.D.A. set aside one of its central authorities: to approve or reject individual products based on their merits.
“It’s very clear this guidance is a gift to the tobacco industry on a silver platter with a side of public health malpractice,” said Brian King, a former leader of the F.D.A.’s tobacco division and executive vice president for U.S. programs of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
Opponents of the policy say flavored vapes will introduce young people who have never smoked to nicotine products.
But Ms. Hilliard, the health department spokeswoman, said the F.D.A. was focused on protecting youth and a “science-based review process for tobacco products.”
She added: “Cigarette smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States. And the agency supports the development of products that may provide less harmful alternatives for adults who smoke.”
The federal cuts to antismoking programs and what some view as lenient new policies represent a reversal of decades of setbacks for tobacco companies under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The C.D.C.’s shuttered Office on Smoking and Health employed experts on effective tobacco interventions who worked with state health officials to advance antismoking policies such as bans on indoor smoking, higher tobacco taxes and education for parents about e-cigarettes.
The office sent most of its $240 million budget to states each year, but shortly after laying off the staff, in April 2025, the C.D.C. notified states that their annual funding for tobacco control would not be coming.
Many state tobacco control offices cut their own staff as a result, including in New York, Texas and North Carolina. Late last year, Congress reinstated some funding to states that had relied on the C.D.C. office for expertise.
“We know that we really save lives and save money with tobacco prevention and control,” said Ms. Herndon, who until recently led North Carolina’s tobacco control efforts. “But without the training and technical assistance and support from the Office on Smoking and Health, a lot of the newer staff coming along are struggling to know what to do.”
The Tips From Former Smokers campaign went off the air around September of last year, though some larger states such as New York and California continued to run some antismoking ads.
Since then, calls to 1-800-QUIT-NOW lines — which traditionally experience a 30 percent spike in the weeks after an ad campaign — have fallen off significantly.
National data on the quit line call volume was not compiled for the last year after the federal employee in charge was let go, said Thomas Ylioja, the president of the North American Quitline Consortium.
But at Quit for Life, an organization that operates quit lines in 19 states, Guam and Washington, D.C., calls fell by 25 percent in the first half of 2026 compared with the first half of 2025 when the ads were on the air, according to Nick Fradkin, the group’s director of public health strategy.
Officials in other states said calls had fallen off too — by about 45 percent in Texas, 25 percent in California and 18 percent in New York. In Virginia enrollment in the quit line counseling services fell by half from October 2025 through February 2026, said Logan Anderson, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Health.
In recent weeks, the C.D.C. offered $40 million, down from the usual $65 million, for states to air archived antismoking ads. It is unclear whether new ads will be created.
In North Carolina, at least, “we don’t have the media machine that produced those fabulous ads,” Ms. Herndon said.
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5) Tobacco Companies Are Cashing In on Zyn’s Unstoppable Popularity
The makers of nicotine pouches are building new plants and expanding to meet demand. While influencers claim health benefits, experts warn the products can be highly addictive.
By Murray Carpenter, July 6, 2026
“Along with vaping products, the Big Tobacco corporations have seized on the nicotine pouch market as a way to offset the steep decline in domestic sales of cigarettes. Pouch sales are projected to increase to more than $40 billion worldwide by 2033 from $6.9 billion in 2025, according to an analysis by Grand View Research, a market research firm. Companies are racing to meet the demand, so far investing more than $1 billion in plant production to accommodate the growth. Several states have welcomed the industry’s forays into the latest twists on nicotine products, handing out millions of dollars in tax credits and grants. But the marketing of nicotine-laden items like pouches, gums and lozenges as another safe alternative to traditional cigarettes has heightened public health concerns. Experts are accusing the tobacco industry of once again deliberately ignoring decades of science that proved the addictive nature of nicotine, and of stoking demand by producing more and more potent varieties.”
As nicotine pouches explode in popularity, tobacco companies are investing heavily in factories in the United States and creating new jobs from Florida to Colorado.
Along with vaping products, the Big Tobacco corporations have seized on the nicotine pouch market as a way to offset the steep decline in domestic sales of cigarettes. Pouch sales are projected to increase to more than $40 billion worldwide by 2033 from $6.9 billion in 2025, according to an analysis by Grand View Research, a market research firm.
Along with vaping products, the Big Tobacco corporations have seized on the nicotine pouch market as a way to offset the steep decline in domestic sales of cigarettes. Pouch sales are projected to increase to more than $40 billion worldwide by 2033 from $6.9 billion in 2025, according to an analysis by Grand View Research, a market research firm.
Companies are racing to meet the demand, so far investing more than $1 billion in plant production to accommodate the growth. Several states have welcomed the industry’s forays into the latest twists on nicotine products, handing out millions of dollars in tax credits and grants.
But the marketing of nicotine-laden items like pouches, gums and lozenges as another safe alternative to traditional cigarettes has heightened public health concerns. Experts are accusing the tobacco industry of once again deliberately ignoring decades of science that proved the addictive nature of nicotine, and of stoking demand by producing more and more potent varieties.
Reminiscent of Juul and other flavored vaping products that caused a public uproar over teenage consumption, the pouches — tobacco-free “lip pillows” placed between the cheek and gum — have revived warnings that nicotine is highly addictive and can cause a host of conditions, like anxiety and heart arrhythmia. It also threatens a teenager’s still-developing brain, with the potential for affecting behavior and cognitive function, experts say.
Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, a Democrat, defended his state’s decision to support a new $600 million plant in Aurora, built by Philip Morris International, which is getting $4.5 million in state tax credits.
“We were the first state to legalize marijuana, and now have over 650 dispensaries, have legalized natural medicine and have almost 50 regulated healing centers that offer psilocybin,” Governor Polis said. “Of course, we want safer alternatives to smoking, like Zyn, to be in our state.”
The expansions signal the tobacco industry’s influence in the widening debate over the safety of this new generation of products.
As a major donor to President Trump, the industry has enjoyed a friendlier reception from his administration than they did from other presidents.
In May, the Food and Drug Administration issued new guidance relaxing regulations on nicotine pouches and vapes, a week after the tobacco company Reynolds American donated $5 million to a Trump-backed super PAC.
In late June, the F.D.A. announced that it would allow some products from one brand, Zyn, to be marketed as having a lower risk for some cancers and diseases than cigarettes do.
The pouches also have a prominent booster in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health secretary, who has described pouches as “probably the safest way to consume nicotine” and has acknowledged using them.
Zyn is produced by Swedish Match, a Philip Morris International subsidiary. Its plant in Aurora employs more than 120 people, with plans to expand to 500 employees. In addition, the corporation spent $232 million to build a plant in Owensboro, Ky., and employs 340 workers there.
Reynolds American, the subsidiary of British American Tobacco, the company known for Camel cigarettes, sells Velo nicotine pouches. It recently increased pouch production at Tobaccoville, N.C., and at its American Snuff Company plant in Clarksville, Tenn.
In the last two years, Reynolds added about 1,000 jobs in the United States, mainly through pouch-making expansion, according to Luis Pinto, a company spokesman.
Altria, which makes Marlboro cigarettes, is producing the brands called on! and on! PLUS in Richmond, Va. The company won F.D.A. approval in December for additional pouch products under a new streamlined program. (Altria was known as Philip Morris, which rebranded in 2008 and spun off international sales to Philip Morris International.)
In December, Swisher, known for Swisher Sweets cigars, announced a $135 million expansion to its Jacksonville, Fla., factory. The company said it expected to add at least 240 jobs to support production of nicotine and caffeine pouches.
And the Swedish firm WiJo is spending $13 million to open its first pouch plant in North America, in Lexington, S.C.
In South Carolina, a large Juul plant in Lexington County that had been awarded tax abatements and grants closed after a federal ban on most flavored vapes in 2020, and politicians said they were glad to see it go. But officials in the same county awarded tax incentives to WiJo for its pouch factory last year.
The American tobacco industry has imported the technology for nicotine pouches from Sweden, often by purchasing that country’s companies. Altria bought Helix Sweden in a series of deals starting in 2019. Philip Morris International bought Swedish Match for $16 billion in 2022.
Garrett Nelson, a senior equity analyst at CFRA, said smoke-free nicotine products like pouches and vapes were generating new revenue for a tobacco industry that had appeared moribund.
“They are now viewed as growth companies, and there is a lot of optimism surrounding products like Zyn and IQOS and other smoke-free products,” Mr. Nelson said in an interview.
Zyn dominates the pouch market.
“If you look at the first quarter, they have 61 percent retail market share in dollar terms of the nicotine pouch market in the U.S. and, on a volume basis, about 56 percent of the market share,” Mr. Nelson said.
While most of Philip Morris International’s revenue continues to come from cigarettes, Zyn has helped the company to nearly double its share price in two years.
But the supposedly safer alternatives to traditional smoking haven’t quelled concerns about nicotine dependence. Symptoms include irritability, restlessness, trouble concentrating, anxiety, and appetite and mood changes.
The American Lung Association has sounded the alarm about pouches becoming the latest avenue for young people to develop an addiction. Citing similar concerns, in May the World Health Organization urged stricter regulation of them. In April, France went further by outlawing nicotine pouches, causing trade tensions with Sweden.
Sam Dashiell, a spokesman for PMI, disputed claims that these products targeted young people, saying pouches were being marketed to the 25 million adult Americans who still smoked cigarettes.
“Smoke-free products are a better option for current legal-age nicotine consumers who would otherwise continue smoking or using other traditional tobacco products,” Mr. Dashiell said.
Pouch proponents often cite the success in Sweden, where smoking rates have dropped considerably, and where the switch from cigarettes to pouches is sometimes called “the Swedish model.”
These products use nicotine extracted from tobacco leaves or synthetic nicotine, which is becoming more common. The pouches contain a powdered mix of nicotine, flavors and other ingredients that dissolve in the mouth.
Pouches are often promoted as more than a cigarette replacement. Some MAHA-aligned health influencers (a.k.a. Zynfluencers) endorse them as a hack for energy and cognitive enhancement. The conservative media host Tucker Carlson, who co-owns a pouch brand, promotes pairing nicotine and caffeine products “for a perfect coffee break.”
Mr. Dashiell said Phillip Morris International does not pay social media influencers to market its pouches.
Dr. Gina Kruse, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz who researches tobacco cessation, said more research was needed to determine the effects of nicotine pouches.
“A lot of the studies that have looked at things like the cytotoxicity of pouches, or the constituents, have come from industry,” she said. “And there’s an urgent need for more independent research to understand what risks come with these.”
She added that a broad concern centers on the potential for pouches to become an “on-ramp” to nicotine dependence, and entice people to move to harmful products like cigarettes. “And there’s certainly concern about flavors appealing to youths,” Dr. Kruse said.
A growing worry is that companies are raising the levels of nicotine, making the pouches more potent and more addictive, said Sven Jordt, a distinguished professor at Duke University School of Medicine.
Dr. Jordt, who is a member of the F.D.A.’s advisory committee on tobacco products, said the highest levels of nicotine in some popular pouches had risen from six to eight milligrams of nicotine per pouch to nine to 15 milligrams. “That’s definitely a quantum jump.”
The stronger pouches include Reynolds American’s Grizzly and Velo Plus, and Philip Morris International’s Zyn Ultra, he said.
“We need to investigate what happens in long-term use, to the whole digestive system,” he said.
“It’s another source of artificial sweeteners, with their own issues,” Dr. Jordt added. “What happens to sleep behavior, what happens to fertility? There have to be studies about oral health — how does it affect gum health?”
Dr. Jordt said Sweden was a cautionary tale: “Now they have an epidemic of oral tobacco use, and I think that might, unfortunately, be the future in the United States.”
The expansion of factories “signals the strategies of these companies for the future,” he said.
Mr. Pinto of Reynolds American said the company planned to spend $3.2 billion by 2030 to make more nicotine products, with pouches driving most of the expansion.
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6) To Stay Cool, Wear Flowing Robes and Throw Water Around? Yes, Says Science.
Throughout history, people have come up with surprising ways to beat the heat that actually work.
By Hiroko Tabuchi, July 3, 2026
Uchimizu, a Japanese practice of pouring cold water on pavement, has a cooling effect. The Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press
Long before air-conditioning, people around the world came up with ingenious ways to beat the heat. But, really — wear dark, billowing robes? And drink tea?
The science can be surprising. As big chunks of the United States and Canada roast through the weekend, some of these ideas might be worth a closer look.
Water That Sidewalk
In Japan’s sweltering summer months, you might see storekeepers with a bucket of cold water, dousing hot pavement outside their stores.
The practice, called uchimizu, grew out of Japan’s tea ceremony tradition. It was originally a purifying ritual and an act of welcome for guests. But uchimizu also has an effect on temperature thanks to what’s known as evaporative cooling — when water evaporates, it pulls heat out of the hot ground.
A 2018 study in the journal Water found that uchimizu caused air temperatures to drop by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit near the ground, even with small amounts of water.
According to Shigenori Asai, director of the Japan Water Forum, the more neighbors join in and douse the pavement, the more effective it is. “You might even feel a cooling breeze,” he said. His group is sponsoring a global Uchimizu Day on Aug. 1.
Hang Screens of Fragrant Grass
Before air-conditioning, people in some of the hottest parts of India survived intense heat waves by weaving screens made from the spongy roots of a sorghumlike grass called vetiver.
The screens are kept wet and hung over doors and windows facing the wind for another version of evaporative cooling. Hot air blowing through is stripped of some of its heat. The grasses also smell good.
The process works so well, especially in dry environments, that some modern data centers are turning to a variation of this idea called indirect evaporative cooling.
If old-fashioned technologies like this can make a dent in the expected surge in air-conditioning use in India and other countries, that would bring great benefits, said Liza Raju Subhadra, an architect in Kerala, India, who works with alternative materials.
“It’s not just energy-intensive — when a neighbor uses an air-conditioner, the hot air gets passed onto me,” she said. “It makes a big difference if we can passively cool our homes.”
Wear Dark, Flowing Robes (or Seersucker)
It may seem counterintuitive to wear heavy, dark clothing in the desert, but communities in the Middle East and North Africa have done so for centuries.
A study published in Nature in 1980 found that dark robes can indeed create a cooling effect when worn in loosefitting ways. The robe absorbs heat and warms the air inside the garment, but as that hot air expands and rises rapidly, it escapes through the top. The upward flow acts like a pump, drawing cooler air from the bottom of the robe.
“The additional heat absorbed by the black robe was lost before it reached the skin,” the authors concluded.
For a different look, try seersucker. In the hot, humid summers of the American South, linen and seersucker, the thin, puckered cotton fabric, are staples.
Seersucker is woven in a way that causes some threads to bunch together, giving the fabric its distinct wrinkled texture. That prevents it from flattening and sticking to sweaty skin. It also creates tiny pockets that aid air circulation and cooling.
Eat Spicy Food, Drink Tea
It might also seem counterintuitive to eat spicy food during a heat wave. But chili peppers contain a chemical compound, capsaicin, that binds to receptors on the tongue that detect heat and pain.
This tricks the brain into thinking the body is overheating, creating a cooling reflex. Blood vessels dilate to flush heat to the skin, and sweat glands open to cool the body rapidly via evaporation.
It’s one reason that many hot places, such as India, Thailand and Mexico, have spicy cuisines.
Drinking an ice-cold, sugary soda, on the other hand, can have the opposite effect. It makes the brain lower natural sweat reflexes in response to the intake of cold liquid. And the body has to work to break down the sugar, generating internal heat.
In parts of Asia, people instead drink slightly chilled, unsweetened teas steeped from plants like barley. They hydrate and can also improve blood flow, allowing it to circulate near the skin to release heat.
What about a cold beer, you ask? It is tempting, but alcohol can cause dehydration and make it harder for the body to regulate its internal temperature.
Take a Siesta
Siestas, the midday breaks once more common in Southern European nations like Greece, Spain and Italy, have reportedly been on a decline.
That’s a shame, some experts say. The human body generates heat simply by moving around and processing energy. Engaging in physical labor during especially high temperatures can cause heat exhaustion.
In recent years, as Europe has grappled with increasingly scorching summers, officials in countries including Germany have started extolling the virtues of a midday break.
“We should follow the work practices of southern countries during heat,” Johannes Niessen, then the chairman of Germany’s leading national association of doctors, told the news outlet RND in 2023.
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7) With $8 Billion in Venezuelan Oil Money, U.S. Gives $300 Million in Quake Aid
In 2010, there was a huge U.S. aid effort after a quake in Haiti. Today, U.S. officials say they oversee billions in Venezuelan oil revenue, but aid is less.
By Simon Romero, July 6, 2026
Simon Romero has reported extensively from both Haiti and Venezuela.
Volunteers and family members searched for survivors in a building in La Guaira, Venezuela, that collapsed after back-to-back earthquakes struck the country in June. Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
When a giant earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, the United States mounted an enormous relief effort involving more than $3 billion in aid, 7,000 U.S. troops on the ground and a halt to deportations of Haitians to their devastated country.
That response dwarfs what the United States has promised for earthquake-ravaged Venezuela, a country the Trump administration says it is now running after seizing its leader this year. So far, the U.S. has put forward $300 million, deployed a much smaller force of about 900 U.S. military personnel and not announced a halt to deportations of Venezuelans.
I was one of the first reporters on the ground in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, in 2010. Big differences mark the disasters: Haiti is poorer than Venezuela, its earthquake death toll appears to have been far higher and, perhaps most important of all, the U.S. approach to the world has fundamentally changed.
But the parallels between the disasters are also haunting: Pancaked multistory concrete buildings, bodies flooding into overwhelmed morgues, survivors disparaging government responses, and civilians leading desperate rescues of people trapped in the rubble.
Viewed against cityscapes clouded by dust from pulverized structures, the images speak to hollowed-out first-responder agencies, generalized impoverishment and political dysfunction in both Haiti and Venezuela.
But in the years since the United States led an international effort to help Haiti, Trump officials have expressed disdain for foreign aid. They have gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main U.S. agency for distributing foreign aid, and slashed assistance to poorer countries.
At the same time, crisis-plagued Venezuela has gone from being one of Latin America’s largest aid donors to itself requiring large amounts of aid. In 2010, Venezuela was among Haiti’s main donors, providing food, medicine, emergency oil shipments and debt relief.
Before Venezuela’s economy collapsed a decade ago, its socialist leaders framed such aid as a political counterweight to U.S. policy, which blended earthquake recovery with nation-building efforts, channeling most assistance through U.S.A.I.D.
In Venezuela, the Trump administration is now prioritizing immediate search-and-rescue operations and political stability in a country it views as an oil-rich client state where U.S. energy companies can make fortunes.
After raiding Venezuela’s capital and seizing its authoritarian president in January, Mr. Trump said that he was taking control of Venezuela’s oil. Since then, American officials have said they are overseeing billions in Venezuelan oil sales.
The question is, how much of that money will be used to help quake survivors and rebuild Venezuela now that large parts of the country lie in ruins?
Having dismantled U.S.A.I.D. last year, the U.S. authorities are now channeling the $300 million in assistance announced so far through groups like the Red Cross, religious organizations and the United Nations. This U.S. funding accounts for the bulk of global relief efforts, with the European Union and countries like Australia offering much smaller amounts.
John Barrett, the top U.S. diplomat in Venezuela, said last week that the United States expected to remain engaged in Venezuela’s recovery for as long as necessary, with shelter, debris removal, running water and electricity generation the immediate priorities.
But Mr. Barrett also said that the Trump administration’s broader strategy for Venezuela — prioritizing political stability and using Venezuela’s own oil revenues to finance an economic recovery — remained unchanged despite the disaster.
“Reconstruction looks a little bit different, of course, since the devastating earthquake,” Mr. Barrett told reporters while emphasizing that the destruction did not damage Venezuela’s oil industry. “So that production continues, and that continues to increase with the investments that the United States and private enterprise from around the world had already begun to initiate.”
Still, doubts have emerged as to whether the U.S. aid for Venezuela is anywhere close to what the country will need to rebuild. The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that losses from the earthquakes could reach well into the billions of dollars.
But the amount of recovery aid the Trump administration has announced is just a fraction of the estimated $8 billion in revenues from oil exports it has taken out of Venezuela since the United States deposed the country’s ruler, Nicolás Maduro, in January.
The Trump administration has framed the U.S. control over Venezuela as benefiting both countries. But it has refused to disclose precisely how much revenue it has collected by selling Venezuelan oil or even how it is using these funds.
President Trump has said Venezuelans were happy because of all the money from the new trade between the two countries. But even before the quakes, many Venezuelans were already complaining that life was just as hard as it was before the United States toppled Mr. Maduro — with regular blackouts, a weakening currency and rising prices.
Javier Corrales, a professor of political science at Amherst College, said it would be hard to describe as generous the $300 million in U.S. earthquake aid when the United States controls revenues from Venezuela’s oil industry worth many times more.
“This fits into the prevailing impulse that the United States is going to be helping countries as long as it profits more than others are profiting from the United States,” Mr. Corrales said.
Still, Haiti’s experience showed that bigger isn’t always better when it comes to disaster aid.
After the earthquake in 2010, U.S. recovery projects included building a power plant and new government buildings, upgrading a port and developing a national police force.
But most infrastructure projects overseen by U.S.A.I.D. were delayed, cost more than planned or had to be scaled back, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found years later. In one case, the agency had planned to build 4,000 houses but completed only 906 because of higher-than-expected building costs.
The huge influx of foreign aid, about $13 billion in total, provided a lifeline but let corruption and political dysfunction go unchecked, leaving Haiti’s government with few incentives to carry out the institutional transformations necessary to rebuild.
Even worse, United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti played a role in a cholera outbreak following the earthquake that left 10,000 people dead.
“The magnitude of that disaster and the magnitude of the failure in the response to it have fed into the anti-aid sentiment we’re seeing today,” said Jake Johnston, the director of international research for the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
During his first campaign in 2016, Mr. Trump homed in on the controversies swirling around the Haiti aid by accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of profiting from the relief efforts. Mr. Clinton, the former U.S. president, was a U.N. special envoy for Haiti, coordinating international aid efforts; Ms. Clinton was secretary of state and running for president that year. Both of them rejected those claims.
“I think people now look back on seeing the state that Haiti is in today, in 2026, and they argue that was not money well spent for the U.S. taxpayer,” said Kenneth Merten, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti at the time of the 2010 earthquake.
“But I would argue that in terms of saving lives and providing shelter, food, and water for people, it was really a very well-run operation by us and our partners,” Mr. Merten added.
As Venezuelans now sift through the rubble of their own disaster, the long tail of what happened in Haiti is still casting a shadow over the relief efforts, said Sam Vigersky, a former U.S.A.I.D. official who led the agency’s disaster assistance response teams and is now an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
At the time of the Haiti earthquake, “the United States was everywhere, every time, all at once, in terms of how they approached humanitarian aid globally,” Mr. Vigersky said.
By contrast, Mr. Vigersky said, the Trump administration was taking more of an “à la carte approach where humanitarian relief is being directly tied to statecraft.”
Today, he pointed out, there are countries like Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen with food insecurity and deep humanitarian crises where the United States has made sweeping aid cuts.
In Venezuela’s case, the country matters to Trump officials for various reasons: it is a neighbor in the Western Hemisphere, has some of the world’s largest oil reserves and is currently serving as a test case in which the United States installs a pliant leader at the helm without pursuing overall regime change.
Genevieve Glatsky and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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8) How a Four-Generation Cuban Family Survives on $60 a Month
The U.S. oil blockade has deepened a humanitarian crisis, forcing Cubans to lean on the island’s long tradition of community solidarity to provide a cushion.
By Ed Augustin, Photographs by Lisette Poole González, July 7, 2026
Ed Augustin and Lisette Poole González traveled to Santiago de Cuba to chronicle Cuba’s intensifying humanitarian crisis.
Analeidis Arias Marin gets her children ready for school in Santiago de Cuba in May.
Adrián Silva Guerra saw the streetlight flicker back to life. It was 2:08 a.m. on a Thursday. An electric repairman, Mr. Silva Guerra quickly got up from his concrete stoop and went inside, leaving the front door ajar so the night air would drift over his 7-year-old son sleeping on a foam mattress.
He walked into his workshop, sat down next to a stack of broken televisions he cannibalizes for spare parts and began to solder. A ribbon of smoke wafted from a green-and-copper circuit board he was working on to repair a television. He did as much as he could until, two hours later, he was plunged back into darkness.
“I’m a slave to the current,” said Mr. Silva Guerra, 32, haggard and sleep-deprived.
Shortly before the lights went out, his mother, Zucel Guerra Brise, 52, left their house in Santiago de Cuba, the country’s second-largest city along the southeastern coast. Thanks to the trickle of electricity, the ovens at a local privately owned bakery made bread that night.
She lined up to buy 100 small rolls of bread, preparing to walk the city’s streets and resell them so her family would have money for lunch. She paid 7 cents per roll and sold each for 9 cents.
Mr. Silva Guerra, his mother, and his father, Luis Silva Aldana, 64, a primary-school teacher, cobble together the equivalent less than $60 a month. With this they must sustain their four-generation family, which also includes Mr. Silva Guerra’s wife, Analeidis, their two young children and Zoe, his grandmother.
Over nearly two days in May, we watched as the family struggled under some of the most miserable conditions they said they had ever endured.
Their circumstances are a microcosm of the struggles facing Cuba, which is experiencing its worst humanitarian crisis since a revolution nearly seven decades ago paved the path to Communist rule.
The Trump administration has applied a stranglehold on Cuba, demanding political and economic change from its leaders. The Cuban government’s repression and failed economic system have exacerbated the consequences of a decades-old U.S. trade embargo.
Since the start of the year, an effective American oil blockade and a wave of new sanctions on top of existing ones have crippled the Cuban state, leaving it without enough fuel to run the country. (Cuba experienced a nationwide power outage on Monday.)
All this has left Mr. Silva Guerra and his extended family living on the edge — eking out a pittance of income, unable to feed themselves adequately and at the mercy of short bursts of power at unpredictable times.
The bodega, a state system that once guaranteed food staples at extremely low prices, began faltering because the government lacks enough money to import food. Now, it’s all but vanished.
In some months the Silva Guerra family doesn’t receive any rice, beans, eggs or chicken from the state — just a roll of bread for each of them every third day. The government says it is out of diesel fuel needed to transport food. Food prices at markets have surged nearly 20 percent this year, according to official figures.
With electricity available for barely four hours a day, their income has shrunk: even working as fast he can at night when the power usually flows, Mr. Silva Guerra, once the family’s main breadwinner, contributes little to the family pot.
The family yearns for “chorote,” a thick breakfast drink native to eastern Cuba made from toasted corn flour, sugar and milk. Instead, in the morning, Ms. Silva Guerra tore loaves of white bread into quarters and swirled together some water with a sachet of white powder to make a mango-flavored soft drink.
This was breakfast. And not just for the family.
“If I don’t eat breakfast here, I don’t eat breakfast at all,” said Lazaro Figueroa Tamayo, 52, a longtime family friend who once cut sugar cane but now works as a cook in a hospital.
Also at the table was another family friend, Rolando Galan Labrada, 59, and his 6-year-old daughter, as well as a neighbor’s 7-year-old son who comes by every morning to eat.
Ms. Silva Guerra then walked her children — Alejandro, 6, and Anna Jeline, 4 — up steep hills to school. Legend has it that their neighborhood, Chicharrones, was named after street vendors who during the Spanish colonial period sold pork cracklings to people watching troubadours.
In the late 1950s, residents here — including Mr. Silva Guerra’s great-grandfather — helped Fidel Castro’s rebels wage urban guerrilla warfare, hiding them from a police force under the control of a dictator aligned with the United States.
Everyone in this tight-knit community seems to know each other. Doors open directly out onto the street. Vendors sit on stools selling washing detergent, coffee and lollipops. People carry buckets of water from houses that have water to houses that do not, either because of shortages or broken pipes.
Most of the food people here eat now comes from the private sector. Money sent from the Cuban diaspora in Florida and Spain buys chicken, rice, and beans.
The Mexican government, which stopped shipping oil to Cuba after the Trump administration threatened tariffs against countries that continued providing fuel, is shipping packs of rice, bags of split peas and bottles of vegetable oil to children under 4 and adults over 65.
People in the neighborhood fortunate to have enough to eat give whatever extra they have — a chicken leg, a pound of rice, a cup of sugar — to those going through harder times, particularly families with children.
These humble acts of generosity multiplied many times over coupled with targeted state food programs to vulnerable groups “is what’s keeping people alive,” said Walter Mondelo, a law professor at the Universidad de Oriente, Santiago’s major university, who is suffering the same hardships as many other Cubans.
Analysts say that Cuba’s socialist model, while squelching individual freedoms, encouraged people to care for each other — through egalitarian ideology and mass mobilizations that reduced illiteracy, vaccinated the population and sent doctors abroad.
“People who have the least show the most solidarity,” he said. “Despite all its failures, the Cuban revolution taught people to share and help one another. A lot has been lost, but part of that remains.”
This street-level solidarity persists because it works — people give out of altruism, but also on the understanding that they may need something in the future.
For Mr. Silva Guerra, who fixes some of his neighbors’ work tools for free, “it’s a way of living together.”
Mr. Figueroa Tamayo, the family neighbor, has a tender relationship with Zoe Brise, 73, Mr. Silva Guerra’s grandmother, who had been bed bound and in a cast since she fractured her hip in a fall.
He lifts her from her bed, which is in the kitchen since there is no space anywhere else, to the bathroom and to the living room so she can socialize.
“He carries me with a bit of spice because he wants to marry me,” she said laughing.
When the lights flicked back on at 1:23 p.m. that afternoon, everyone in the home suddenly got excited. Beyond the front door, the street cleared out as people hurried inside to wash clothes and charge their devices.
“Electricity!” Zucel Guerra Brise, Mr. Silva Guerra’s mother, shouted. She plugged in a hot plate her son had cobbled together from a wooden stool, a sheet of zinc, and the coil of an old rice cooker and started to boil chicken.
Salsa music played from speakers inside Mr. Silva Guerra’s workshop. Within minutes, two women arrived with a DVD player that wasn’t working.
He smiled for the first time that day: “When the power comes on, I can put my skills to use.”
But it did not last. Fifty-seven minutes later the music died. He did not have enough time to fix the DVD player and it was another day Mr. Silva Guerra earned no income.
“It torments me,” he said. “When there’s no power, my mind starts to wander. I think about what I can sell to buy a packet of spaghetti.”
He said he has started getting migraines because of stress.
Without public transport, with no money to go out and have fun, and with having to make sure someone is home when the power comes on, people’s worlds have gotten smaller. The days are monotonous and predictable.
The next morning, the two Silva Guerra children were kept home from school. The family had no money to pack them snacks. “I have nothing to give them,” Mr. Silva Guerra said.
In the afternoon, he was repairing a television. As he removed the plastic casing, the power failed again.
Out of pocket and with no money for the lunch, he borrowed 80 cents from a neighbor to buy a pound of rice and a cube of tomato purée.
Back home, he and Mr. Figueroa Tamayo began dismantling the state-issued wooden cot that his 3-year-old daughter had been sleeping on.
“Either we wait for the power to come back on,” he said, knocking out the slats, “or we improvise.”
Even during the so-called “special period” in the 1990s after the Soviet Union, Cuba’s biggest benefactor, collapsed and the country plunged into misery, the family never had to improvise cooking.
Now they did.
Ms. Silva Guerra rested a shelf of their dead refrigerator across two blocks in their small back yard, assembled the wooden slats between the blocks and placed a sooty pan filled with water, rice and tomato purée on top.
Then she lit the fire.
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9) How Economic Anxiety Is Driving the Democratic Socialists’ Surge
Interviews with D.S.A. members and organizers in New York City suggest that frustration with the economy has been the most important factor in the group’s growth.
By Emma Goldberg, July 7, 2026
“‘The lesson that many Democrats will take away from these elections is get with the populist program or get out,’ Ms. Owens said. ‘The economic populist moment is here.’ Plenty of establishment Democratic leaders are alarmed by how widely the democratic socialist message is resonating, with some saying that the desire for economic change is understandable but that the group’s policies and candidates won’t have broad enough appeal in swing states. ‘They believe the capitalist system is rigged for those at the top,’ said Jay Jacobs, chairman of New York’s Democratic Party.”
The Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter has fostered a sense of community through running events and soccer games. Nicole Craine for The New York Times
On many Tuesday evenings, Richard Custodio can be found jogging over the Manhattan Bridge, along with fellow members of a Democratic Socialists of America run club. These outings are peppered with debates, some probing and some existential.
Many feel a persistent sense of economic angst. Rent is crushing, and Mr. Custodio wonders where he could find the money to get his girlfriend a ring. He and his D.S.A. run-club friends — some of them white-collar workers with six-figure salaries, others with blue-collar jobs — discuss what they have in common with working-class Americans. Some ask, “Am I a class traitor?”
Mr. Custodio, a 28-year-old investment researcher, has a ready reply. “If you’re someone who has to work for a living, and you’re not living off a trust fund, you are part of the working class,” he says.
Mr. Custodio is part of a swell of young people active in D.S.A.’s New York City chapter who helped push two democratic socialists, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, to victories in House primaries last month. Their wins have caused some soul-searching among establishment Democrats, eager to find out why so many New York voters have embraced democratic socialism.
Certainly a rethinking of the Democratic Party’s support for Israel played a role, as did a desire for fresh fighters in Washington.
But in interviews, many D.S.A. members, leaders and strategists argue that the driving force in the primary results and in the group’s expanding influence is a sense, especially among young people, that the economy isn’t working for many people. This economic frustration — and the spotlight given to it by Mayor Zohran Mamdani — is prompting many to join the D.S.A., with the national organization announcing that it had surpassed 120,000 members on Saturday.
“A once good operative once said, ‘It’s the economy stupid,’” said Morris Katz, a progressive strategist who closely advises Mr. Mamdani, citing the octogenarian James Carville. “Look at Dari and Claire’s slogans. Claire’s slogan was ‘Workers deserve it all,’ and Dari’s was ‘Babies not bombs.’ Those are two campaigns fundamentally speaking to a political class that has neglected workers.”
In New York’s 13th District, Ms. Avila Chevalier, 32, performed best in several younger precincts including or next to Columbia University — including one home to its medical school and its on-campus housing, and another directly adjacent to Columbia. Her opponent, Representative Adriano Espaillat, did best in older and majority-Hispanic areas, with his best precinct including the Fort Washington Senior Center.
In New York’s Seventh District, covering parts of Brooklyn and Queens, Ms. Valdez won college-educated and higher-income areas handily. Her worst-performing precinct, excluding those with large Hasidic populations, has the oldest voters in the district.
Young people explaining their support for Ms. Valdez and Ms. Chevalier cite layoffs in white-collar industries, the threat of job displacement from artificial intelligence, rising costs of living, and a sense that the federal government is spending money on wars that could be spent on services.
Nationally, the job market for educated young people is dire. The unemployment rate for college graduates between 22 and 27 has been up significantly in the last three years; more than 40 percent of college graduates that are employed held jobs that didn’t require their degrees.
And even New Yorkers who have low six-figure salaries say they have realized that neither their college degrees nor their high income seem to guarantee a sense of long-term stability.
“People are feeling this economic precarity,” Mr. Custodio said. “When everything sucks, everything feels really on edge, you’re more open to things changing.”
At the national level, progressive strategists say they are trying to make the case that economic grievance is what’s driving recent D.S.A. election wins, more so than any other policy issue.
Lindsay Owens, who runs a progressive think tank in Washington, said that after the New York primaries she went through a whirlwind week of meetings — with congressional aides, national operatives and democratic socialists in New York. She listened to influential Democrats argue over whether there was a single overpowering issue that drove voters toward the D.S.A.
“The lesson that many Democrats will take away from these elections is get with the populist program or get out,” Ms. Owens said. “The economic populist moment is here.”
Plenty of establishment Democratic leaders are alarmed by how widely the democratic socialist message is resonating, with some saying that the desire for economic change is understandable but that the group’s policies and candidates won’t have broad enough appeal in swing states.
“They believe the capitalist system is rigged for those at the top,” said Jay Jacobs, chairman of New York’s Democratic Party.
“What D.S.A. is doing is filling a vacuum in a time where people are feeling very much distressed over their economic condition,” he added. “The challenge we have is to compete in the arena of ideas with them.”
As for signs of rapprochement, Mr. Jacobs signaled concern. He said he had reached out to the three House primary winners in New York City and spoken to two, but Ms. Avila Chevalier had not returned his calls: “I placed three calls, and that’s it.”
As young people grow more economically disillusioned, D.S.A. members have become younger and more white collar. In a 2013 national survey of its members, the organization found that the median age of its members was 68 years old. By 2021, that figure had dropped to 33. In 2013, 3 percent of D.S.A. members surveyed said they were white-collar workers; by 2021, that had grown to 13 percent.
Membership has also grown as democratic socialists win primaries. The New York City chapter grew by more than 7,200 people in the year after Mr. Mamdani’s primary win, and by more than 870 members in the week after Ms. Valdez and Ms. Avila Chevalier won. The group’s members have been buoyed by its victories, including New York’s new tax on pieds-à-terre and New York City’s rent freeze on one- and two-year leases for rent-stabilized apartments).
“The No. 1 thing that brings people to the D.S.A. is that they want to not feel powerless, which is how most members respond to the economic reality,” said Gustavo Gordillo, a co-leader of the group’s New York City chapter. “They’re motivated by economic struggle.”
The New York City chapter has been encouraging people to channel their sense of financial unease into political organizing. Mr. Gordillo noted that the group’s orientation sessions for new members include a conversation themed, “What is the working class?” There, new members are taught that anyone who works for a living can be working class.
“A lot of tech workers are working class,” Mr. Gordillo said. “We’re trying to build a broad movement — we think of most D.S.A. members as being working class.”
Mr. Gordillo, who until recently worked as an electrician, described his own political coming-of-age. He moved to New York City just over a decade ago to work in an art gallery. Rent in New York was eye-popping, and he often heard friends fret over how they would ever save enough to start families.
After Donald J. Trump won the presidential election in 2016, Mr. Gordillo went to a D.S.A. workshop on socialism, where organizers taught him about the conflict between “the working class and the billionaire class.” Mr. Gordillo took the message to heart and has spent the last decade expanding the group’s membership and influence.
At D.S.A.-run soccer games and orientation sessions, and at victory parties for Ms. Valdez and Ms. Avila Chevalier, many young people describe joining the organization because they believe big economic changes, like rent freezes and affordable child care, are the only answer to an economy that makes it difficult for even the well-off to keep pace.
“A lot of my friends who are actors or work in hospitality or nightlife, they’re drawn to the social safety net that D.S.A. is looking to achieve,” said Jessie Cialdella, 28, a D.S.A. member who works in digital commerce.
Leslie Bentley, 35, a D.S.A. member who lives in Bushwick and voted for Ms. Valdez, grew up in rural Kentucky, where most people she knew voted Republican. As a teenager, she remembered being frustrated by the idea that voting Republican meant her neighbors were “voting against their own interests.”
She said she understood that those people were challenging liberal conventions and establishment candidates because of their economic frustrations, a sense that the ultrawealthy were leaving working people behind. Now, she feels that she and her neighbors in Bushwick are channeling this same feeling into votes for the far left.
“This isn’t a Republican issue or a Democratic issue,” Ms. Bentley said. “It’s about being able to afford where we live.”
She and fellow D.S.A. members, she added, are drawn to candidates who seem to understand firsthand that college degrees and comfortable upbringings don’t insulate people from instability. She pointed to Mr. Mamdani’s story as an example: He is a Bowdoin graduate raised on the Upper West Side, who knows that the luxuries of New York should be accessible to anyone.
“Zohran grew up in the economic prosperity of the 1990s,” she said. “I always joked we needed a mayor who had fond memories of going to the Toys ‘R’ Us in Times Square and to Mars 2112.”
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