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The Bay Area Demo Legal Collab and friends are hosting a Grand Jury education and training event. Join us for a political history of how Grand Juries are used for political repression, hear from Grand Jury resisters and learn how to plan for repression for yourself and your community.
In the Bay Area there have been recent FBI visits, Grand Jury subpoenas and investigations into our political movements. If you are contacted by the feds or other law enforcement agencies you should exercise your rights and reach out to legal support:
· You do not have to open your door or let FBI or other agents into your home without a warrant.
· You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney: you do not have to talk to FBI or other agents or answer their questions. It can be dangerous to do so. Say, "I do not want to answer questions without my lawyer. Please slip your card under the door and my lawyer will call you."
· For legal help, call the Bay Area Federal Defense Line, 415-285-1041 and someone will return your call within 48 hours.
The Bay Area Federal Defense line can help connect you to a lawyer if you are contacted by agents related to progressive political activism. It is sponsored by the Bay Area Demo Legal Support Collaborative- a joint effort of Legal Solidarity Bay Area, NLG-SF, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, Anti-Repression Committee, and Oaklaw.
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
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) Democratic Socialists Are Winning Big. Now They Want Action.
The Democratic Socialists of America, after a string of election victories in New York, is eager to tax the rich and enact anti-Israel policies.
By Emma Goldberg and Sally Goldenberg, July 26, 2026
A large rally in Albany, N.Y., was the cornerstone event of a campaign to tax the rich that ultimately fell short, but democratic socialists plan to push ahead next year. Graham Dickie for The New York Times
On a sticky evening in July, leaders of the surging democratic socialist movement in New York City jumped onto Zoom to begin crafting the next phase of their campaign.
Democratic socialist candidates had just toppled five incumbents, capturing two House primaries in the city and a handful more in state legislative races. But with an off-cycle election year ahead, leaders in the city’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America were shifting their focus from winning votes to changing policy.
The group’s next order of business, its members agreed in the nearly hourlong Zoom, is to pressure Gov. Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat, to raise income taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers when the state Legislature convenes in Albany in January.
The group had failed to persuade Ms. Hochul to do so earlier this year, settling instead for a much more limited tax on multimillion-dollar second homes in New York City. But with its influence on the rise, the group believes that a broader tax-the-rich campaign may succeed next year, despite Ms. Hochul’s continued resistance.
“We brought the fight to Hochul to tax the rich last session when we had only nine socialists in the State Legislature,” Gustavo Gordillo, the co-leader of New York City’s D.S.A. chapter, said in an interview. “This cycle, our forces will be almost doubled, and there’s a whole new crew of progressive legislators who are going to demand what New Yorkers want, which is for Hochul to tax the rich.”
Since Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary win last year, the New York City D.S.A. chapter, active since the 1980s, said it has added more than 7,000 members. Its current membership of roughly 15,000 is spread across the city, often concentrated in gentrified pockets of Brooklyn and Queens (the so-called Commie Corridor), along with Upper Manhattan.
As the organization matures, it is confronting how to chart its path forward. Some members are laser-focused on drafting their most prominent political ally — Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — to run for president in 2028, sometimes putting them at odds with their national brethren. Others are pushing for a more expansive policy agenda, including a renewed focus on public safety, condemning Israel’s military actions through legislation and considering a public takeover of its largest utility company.
The city’s D.S.A. arm has 14 working groups focused on policy goals, but it has so far trained its focus on selecting political candidates and winning elections. Knocking on doors and building energy for elections have tended to be more central to the organization than in-the-weeds policy analysis.
“The organization feels that the sky’s the limit in New York City,” said Asad Dandia, the Brooklyn borough historian and a D.S.A. member. “There’s an understanding that D.S.A. has emerged as one of the major political players in New York City, and arguably the most powerful political organization in the five boroughs.”
Members of the D.S.A. will be making a renewed push to pass the “Not on Our Dime” bill, which would strip New York nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if their funds are used to support Israeli settlement activity. They are also trying to persuade lawmakers to introduce a bill that would penalize airlines that facilitate arms shipments to Israel from Kennedy International Airport. The chapter has also talked about increasing its focus on climate and energy — issues that can be difficult to mobilize voters around, though they have felt more urgent in a summer of heat waves and wildfires.
D.S.A. is part of a coalition of advocacy groups that is pushing for the state to build enough public renewable energy to power 12 million households. Far more ambitiously, members of the coalition have discussed pushing either the state or city to step in and take over Con Edison, with the aim of lowering utility bills and making the case that the public sector ought to run the grid, not the private sector. Such a plan would face major logistical and financial hurdles and is unlikely to get Ms. Hochul’s support.
During their recent planning meeting, leaders spoke at length about how to use the governor’s promises to expand free and low-cost child care statewide as a way to pressure the governor to raise taxes on the wealthy.
“She’s already committed to a major child care program, which is unfunded at this point,” Mr. Gordillo said in the interview. “It would be a huge embarrassment for her not to raise taxes on the rich in order to fund the program she helped to start.”
Ms. Hochul, for her part, has found opportunities to partner with Mr. Mamdani on initiatives big and small, from child care to the World Cup to the so-called pied-Ã -terre tax. But as she faces re-election in November, she has also embraced the role of playing the moderate foil to Mr. Mamdani and his progressive base, knowing that the city relies on Albany to fund the new administration’s expansive agenda.
“Governor Hochul has been focused on lowering costs for New Yorkers and making it easier for both businesses and residents to stay in our state,” her spokesman, Anthony Hogrebe, said. “She does not believe in raising taxes for the sake of raising taxes, and has only considered new revenue raisers when absolutely needed to solve real problems. The governor makes decisions based on what’s best for New Yorkers, and no amount of political pressure can change that.”
In the early months of his administration, Mr. Mamdani has sought to strike a conciliatory tone with the governor. He endorsed her re-election in early February, which infuriated some democratic socialists. When progressive groups in New York staged a major “Tax the Rich” rally in Albany, busing hundreds of people from the city, Mr. Mamdani privately told organizers that he planned to skip the event.
Democratic socialists have tended to give the mayor a pass. But now, in private conversations, some are analyzing whether the mayor can play a more active role in pushing their priorities, given that he is more firmly established inside City Hall.
Many members of Mr. Mamdani’s progressive base remain opposed to his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. While her appointment spurred frustrated messages in chapter group chats, D.S.A. members have done little to push Mr. Mamdani to drop her. Recent primaries demonstrated that democratic socialists in New York City are frustrated by economic inequality, Israel and President Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics — but its leaders have been a lot more muted around public safety reforms.
Mr. Mamdani has prioritized improving his affordability agenda and condemning Israel’s military actions, while keeping the issue of police reform at a distance. The D.S.A. recently pressured him, successfully, to scrap his plans to hire another 580 police officers and is pushing him to expand the new Office of Community Safety, which would divert certain 911 calls from police officers to clinicians.
Mr. Mamdani had promised to create a larger Department of Community Safety that would have a $1.1 billion budget, but so far the endeavor is far more modest — a mayoral office with a $270 million budget, most of which is money diverted from existing programs. The operation tasked with handling the 911 calls — the heart of the whole project — is getting a mere $35 million.
Tiffany Cabán, a city councilwoman and member of the D.S.A. who describes herself as a “hard-core abolitionist,” said she wanted the mayor to push the Police Department to cease its increased focus on enforcement of low-level crimes and build out the Office of Community Safety. But she acknowledged that drawing in voters with an anti-policing agenda remains a challenge.
“We’ve seen a lot of movement around Palestinian liberation, on antiwar organizing; we’ve seen a lot of movement around tax the rich,” Ms. Cabán said. “But policing is just hard.”
As the influence of the D.S.A. grows, so, too, does the volume of its critics. One persistent area of concern is how the organization addresses racial inequality, a matter that was highlighted this week when a Black Democratic leader, Donovan Richards, invoked an accusation of “white supremacy” on X. The comment, directed at the D.S.A. in response to discourse around a New York Times story on the group, was plastered on the cover of the right-leaning New York Post and was being circulated by critics of the organization.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, the veteran civil rights leader, argued that the D.S.A. should fine-tune its focus on affordability by addressing racial disparities, rather than treating all types of financial struggle the same. Mr. Sharpton applauded the group’s recent string of victories and said they “raise expectations” for the organization.
“There is a race gap in affordability. They’ve got to deal with more than class, and also deal with race,” Mr. Sharpton said. “If they do not, then they run the risk of having some people in the Black community come back at them, saying you’re ignoring race.”
A poll of 719 likely New York State voters, conducted in May by the firm Data for Progress, found the D.S.A. is unpopular with 42 percent of those who responded, and popular with 30 percent.
Jay Jacobs, chairman of the state Democratic Party, said he appreciated the D.S.A.’s commitment to affordability, but he questioned some of the group’s tactics and policy goals. He argued that their focus on taking down centrist Democrats wasn’t helping in the broader effort to flip Republican-held seats and win back Congress.
“Too often they look at moderate Democrats as the greater enemy than Republicans,” Mr. Jacobs said. “They don’t appeal to people in the middle. Most Americans are moderates.”
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2) An Admiral’s Rise Reveals the Politics Driving Hegseth’s Pentagon
Before he was picked to lead the Navy, Adm. Daryl Caudle found ways to signal his support for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s anti-diversity goals.
By Greg Jaffe and Kate Kelly, July 26, 2026
Greg Jaffe, who covers the military, and Kate Kelly, an investigative reporter, have been covering Pentagon promotions. They reported from Washington.
“Sailors recalled Admiral Caudle telling them in an informal conversation at an awards banquet that the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program needed to focus more on helping troops avoid risky behavior. According to the sailors, Admiral Caudle offered examples: If he strode naked through the forest, coated in honey, he should not be surprised if he were attacked by a bear, officials said. If he wore gold chains and a fancy watch on a visit to Harlem, he risked getting robbed. At least one sailor believed Admiral Caudle was blaming assault victims for provoking their attacks.”
Admiral Daryl Caudle during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last year. Eric Lee for The New York Times
Adm. Daryl Caudle saw an opening to land the Navy’s top job last year, and he seized it.
Before Pete Hegseth had even been sworn in as defense secretary, Admiral Caudle, then the head of a major Navy training command, offered to help Mr. Hegseth prepare for his politically contentious Senate confirmation hearing, according to current and former defense officials.
The outreach was a breach of military ethics, the officials said. Senior military officers are supposed to avoid any hint of partisan bias or political activity.
Nothing came of the offer. But soon after Mr. Hegseth took office, he fired the first woman to lead the Navy: Admiral Caudle’s boss. Days later, a senior officer on Admiral Caudle’s staff contacted Mr. Hegseth’s team in another breach of protocol.
His pitch: Mr. Hegseth should choose Admiral Caudle to be the next chief of naval operations, the current and former officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.
The officer described Admiral Caudle in terms that matched Mr. Hegseth’s view of the values that military officers should embody. There was “no one more in line” with Mr. Hegseth’s vision for remaking the military, he said, according to an official familiar with the exchange. The officer cast Admiral Caudle as a “warfighter” who wanted to remove “woke barriers” that he claimed were weakening the force, the official said.
Even though Admiral Caudle was not on a list of candidates recommended by senior Navy officials, Mr. Hegseth chose him for the job.
But before the promotion could be finalized, the admiral needed to address another problem. There was an unresolved inspector general investigation into comments he had made to sailors about the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevent and Response program, officials said. Some interpreted his remarks as blaming victims.
To help resolve the inquiry, Admiral Caudle hired Timothy Parlatore, a Navy Reservist and well-known lawyer who had represented Mr. Hegseth and President Trump. Mr. Parlatore had recently been tapped by Mr. Hegseth to serve as his “special adviser” in the Pentagon. Before Admiral Caudle was a client, Mr. Parlatore had recommended him to Mr. Hegseth as a strong candidate to lead the Navy, officials said.
The inspector general found the allegations of wrongdoing to be unsubstantiated, and Admiral Caudle took over as the 34th chief of naval operations last summer.
His path to that position is a case study in how the military promotion process at the Pentagon under Mr. Hegseth has deviated from tradition, leaving it susceptible in the view of critics to politicization and favoritism.
Since taking office nearly 18 months ago, Mr. Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen senior officers, including Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who held the top Navy job before Admiral Caudle. He has also removed from promotion lists about 40 senior officers who had been selected by boards made up of their peers.
Mr. Hegseth has insisted that his actions were necessary to root out those he has described as radical ideologues. “The left captured the military quickly, and we must reclaim it at a faster pace,” he wrote in his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors.” “We must wage a frontal assault, a swift counterattack, in broad daylight.”
Admiral Caudle’s promotion is a view into the flip side of Mr. Hegseth’s purge.
Before the defense secretary had even taken office, he had publicly singled out Admiral Franchetti as someone he believed had been promoted solely because of her gender. She knew that if Mr. Hegseth was confirmed, she would likely be fired.
In December 2024, Admiral Franchetti called together the Navy’s four-star admirals to discuss potential replacements, officials said.
She reminded them that their most important job in the coming weeks was to put the Navy’s integrity and its reputation as an apolitical institution ahead of their ambitions, according to people familiar with the meeting.
Admiral Caudle was in the room that day, and around the same time was also privately offering to help Mr. Hegseth prepare for his confirmation hearing, defense officials said.
Capt. Dave Hecht, a spokesman for Admiral Caudle, said in a statement to The New York Times that the admiral planned to limit his discussion with Mr. Hegseth to “factual, operational matters.”
He said that Admiral Caudle’s interactions with Mr. Hegseth always focused on military, not political, issues. “Adm. Caudle has consistently conducted himself in a professional, nonpartisan manner throughout his career,” Captain Hecht’s statement added.
A Pentagon directive counsels active-duty troops to avoid “partisan political activity.”
After Mr. Hegseth fired Admiral Franchetti, senior Navy officials, led by the service’s acting secretary, assembled a list of the three officers they believed were best qualified to fill her position. Admiral Caudle was not on it. Navy leaders thought he was better suited to lead the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear arsenal, the officials said.
Mr. Hegseth reviewed the Navy’s list in a meeting with senior staff members.
“Where’s Caudle?” he asked, according to officials with knowledge of the meeting.
Mr. Hegseth’s chief of staff said he was not familiar with the admiral. Mr. Hegseth instructed him to discuss the matter with Mr. Parlatore, officials said.
Mr. Parlatore, who had left the Navy a decade earlier, had recently been commissioned by Mr. Hegseth as a Navy reservist and member of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
As a civilian attorney, he had represented naval officers and sailors in a series of high-profile cases. His clients included Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who in 2019 was charged with killing a wounded prisoner in Iraq. Chief Gallagher was ultimately acquitted of nearly all the charges against him.
Mr. Parlatore also helped Mr. Hegseth negotiate a $50,000 settlement with a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017. And he had represented Mr. Trump in matters related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol and classified documents found at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Mr. Parlatore had not met Admiral Caudle, but told Mr. Hegseth that he had heard good things about him, officials said. Other staff members recalled Admiral Caudle’s eager outreach during Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation process.
In late March, Mr. Hegseth selected Admiral Caudle to lead the Navy. In a statement, Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said that Mr. Hegseth “interviewed many candidates for the position and ultimately found Admiral Caudle to be the right fit.”
“Every decision is based strictly on merit,” Mr. Parnell added.
Before Admiral Caudle’s nomination could be sent to the White House, the inspector general had to complete its investigation, which had languished for more than a year. Sailors recalled Admiral Caudle telling them in an informal conversation at an awards banquet that the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program needed to focus more on helping troops avoid risky behavior.
According to the sailors, Admiral Caudle offered examples: If he strode naked through the forest, coated in honey, he should not be surprised if he were attacked by a bear, officials said. If he wore gold chains and a fancy watch on a visit to Harlem, he risked getting robbed. At least one sailor believed Admiral Caudle was blaming assault victims for provoking their attacks.
The admiral declined to comment on his remarks.
In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Parlatore described his work on behalf of Mr. Caudle as routine. He identified and suggested witnesses to the inspector general, and accompanied Admiral Caudle to his interview with investigators. “The same thing I have done for hundreds of others,” he said.
The inspector general’s job, like a prosecutor’s, is to collect evidence and offer findings. A decision to punish is made by the service member’s chain of command, which includes the Navy secretary and potentially Mr. Hegseth.
Admiral Caudle took command as the chief of naval operations last summer.
“I’m chomping at the bit to get after the work that lies ahead to ensure that our Navy remains and forever will be the most dominant, lethal and credible maritime fighting force the world has ever known,” he told a crowd of dignitaries that included several former chiefs of naval operations, including Admiral Franchetti.
He closed his speech with a pledge to lead the Navy with “integrity, honor and resolve.”
Since then, Mr. Parlatore’s dual role as a private lawyer and special adviser to Mr. Hegseth has sparked concern in Congress. In April, Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, asked Mr. Hegseth if Mr. Parlatore represented officers being considered by Mr. Hegseth for promotions.
“I’m the one that makes decisions about choosing senior officers,” Mr. Hegseth said.
“Does he represent them, Mr. Secretary?” Mr. Crow pressed.
“He doesn’t represent anyone,” Mr. Hegseth replied. “He’s a legal adviser to me on reserve duty, and always has been.”
The next day, Mr. Parlatore sent Mr. Crow a letter.
“You asked whether I represent senior military officers under consideration for promotion,” Mr. Parlatore wrote. “I do not.”
He did not mention his earlier work for Admiral Caudle. At the time of the letter, Mr. Parlatore said, he was not representing clients being considered for promotions.
Mr. Parlatore said that there was nothing preventing him from working as a Navy reservist in Mr. Hegseth’s office and representing military clients. “The vast majority of military cases, if I wanted to do them, there would be no conflict of interest,” he said.
Mr. Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, said that Mr. Parlatore was “in full compliance with all ethics laws and regulations.”
Still, to avoid any appearance of impropriety, Mr. Parlatore told The Times that in late 2024, he stopped taking new military clients and ceased charging earlier clients with active cases.
The sole exception, he said, was Admiral Caudle.
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3) Trump Is Pushing Nuclear Energy. His Family and Supporters Could Benefit.
In some cases, no direct line can be drawn from the president’s domestic nuclear agenda to his family or close allies. But they have overlapping business ties that could position them for gains.
By Eric Lipton and Kate Kelly, July 26, 2026
Eric Lipton reported from Washington. Kate Kelly reported from New York.
Mr. Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, are involved in a venture related to nuclear power. Doug Mills/The New York Times
The decision by President Trump to grant Saudi Arabia access to American nuclear technology aligns with his administration’s push to accelerate domestically backed nuclear power projects around the world.
But it may also contribute to a major trend in Mr. Trump’s second term: allowing the government to help enrich the president, his family, advisers and others in his orbit.
There is no evidence at this point that Mr. Trump’s friends or family helped orchestrate the Saudi nuclear deal. Yet a number of the president’s allies and relatives, including members of his cabinet, stand to benefit if his big bet on nuclear power pays off. Certain investors with ties to these deals are positioned to profit, even if the delivery of large new loads of nuclear-powered electricity remains years away.
The overarching goal is to generate more electricity as the demand surges worldwide, driven by a data-center building boom and growing consumer consumption. Investors are financing traditional, large-scale nuclear power plants along with a new technical approach called small modular reactors. Others are mining the uranium needed to power nuclear plants. Some others are vying to build those plants.
In some cases, how the Trump family or the president’s allies could potentially gain from the president’s nuclear plans is straightforward. In others, no direct line can be drawn, but there are such overlapping business ties that it is hard to separate the policy decisions from the potential personal benefits.
For example, Westinghouse, the Canadian-owned but U.S.-based company that developed the technology behind the AP1000, a large-scale reactor whose design has been used in China and for plans in Eastern Europe, is expected to be part of the deal, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The majority owner of Westinghouse is Brookfield Asset Management, one of North America’s largest commercial real estate owners. It is a frequent business partner with Newmark, the real-estate firm run and owned in part by the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that Mr. Trump’s position is about increasing electricity supply, rather than helping any companies with which he or his circle might have connections.
“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, our country has seen historic advancements for civilian nuclear energy development, innovation, and technology, which is a critical component to meet the nation’s growing energy needs while keeping prices low for families and businesses,” she said. “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read.”
Westinghouse’s chief executive, Dan Sumner, in a statement called the Saudi deal a “landmark step” that “expands opportunities for U.S. industry and workers.”
Kerrie McHugh, a Brookfield spokeswoman, said that the company, with more than $1 trillion in assets, has an enormous number of business partners and “robust processes in place to manage any potential conflicts, consistent with our fiduciary responsibilities.”
Officials at the Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Here is a look at Mr. Trump and some of those with ties to him that could benefit from his nuclear goals.
The president and his family
Trump Media & Technology Group, the money-losing company that hosts Truth Social, the platform where Mr. Trump first posts most of his White House announcements, has moved recently to add — incongruously — nuclear energy to its portfolio.
The company announced in December that it intends to merge as part of a $6 billion deal with a nuclear fusion start-up called TAE Technologies. During Mr. Trump’s first term, and again last year, TAE won financial support from the Energy Department’s Office of Fusion Energy Science.
The president’s shares in the publicly traded Trump Media are worth about $875 million as of earlier this month, according to other public filings. The value of those shares could grow if the TAE merger proves a success.
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.’s nuclear investments
Separately, two of the president’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., in November became part owners through an investment partnership in a company called Quantum Leap Energy, which is working to develop certain isotopes that can be used as nuclear fuel.
Quantum Leap reached a deal last year with a Texas-based company co-founded by Rick Perry, who was energy secretary during Mr. Trump’s first term and is now seeking federal assistance to build nuclear power plants in Texas. Mr. Perry did not respond to requests for comment.
Asked about any potential conflict of interest, a spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said that he was working on deals that were good for the country.
“Don is a lifelong businessman and investor who tends to invest in companies that align with his America First worldview,” said the spokesman, Andy Surabian. “He does not interface with anyone in the federal government on behalf of any company that he invests in.”
Eric Trump did not respond to requests for comment.
Jared Kushner’s dealings with Saudi Arabia
Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has a complicated relationship with those involved in the recent nuclear agreement.
He participated in discussions related to Saudi Arabia’s push for access to U.S. nuclear technology when he worked at the White House during Mr. Trump’s first term. He also helped establish agreements between Israel and multiple Arab countries to normalize their relationship, called the Abraham Accords.
Now, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is one of Mr. Kushner’s biggest backers. The fund committed $2 billion to Mr. Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, shortly after he left the White House in 2021. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, an ally during Mr. Kushner’s government tenure, helped convince the sovereign wealth fund to provide the money.
It is unclear whether Affinity will invest in Saudi’s nuclear energy initiative. For now, the kingdom expects to finance the effort itself, according to an official with knowledge of its plans.
On Thursday, the Trump family’s connections to all of this were on display when the president announced on Truth Social that the nuclear agreement would be contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords.
The Cabinet
The Commerce and Energy Departments have been at the forefront of pushing Mr. Trump’s nuclear agenda. Both are led by secretaries who have either direct ties to the industry or family ones.
Mr. Lutnick has been leading an effort to invest U.S. tax dollars into companies in the nuclear sector, including Westinghouse. Companies his family members help run could profit.
Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment bank that Mr. Lutnick led until he was hired by Mr. Trump, is at the center. Cantor has over the last year helped several companies in the nuclear sector raise money, which generates millions of dollars in fees for the firm.
Among them are Oklo, Energy Fuels Inc and enCore Energy. Each is seeking permits, financial assistance or Trump administration contracts for its nuclear projects.
Oklo, based in Santa Clara, Calif., in 2019 became the first nuclear power company to receive site-use permit from the Energy Department for commercial operations.
Oklo also has links to Chris Wright, the energy secretary. Mr. Wright was a director at Oklo until he joined Mr. Trump’s cabinet. That connection spurred a Democratic lawmaker to complain to the White House that Oklo stood to benefit improperly from government nuclear permits and programs.
Bonita Chester, Oklo’s head of communications, said in a statement that Mr. Wright has had “no role in Oklo’s governance” since resigning from the board.
“We’ve worked with leaders across both sides of the aisle to advance policies that accelerate the deployment of safe, commercially viable nuclear technology,” she added.
Energy Fuels, which Cantor helped last year raise money to expand its mining efforts, disclosed in June it is slated to get a $725 million federal loan from the Pentagon.
The company — one of the top U.S. producers of natural uranium concentrate sold to nuclear plants — has noted to The Times that it began working with Cantor before Mr. Trump’s second presidency. It declined to comment.
The network goes beyond these smaller nuclear companies.
Westinghouse, in which the U.S. government has an option to take an equity stake, is at the fulcrum of the proposed nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, as the plan is for its government to back the construction of multiple AP1000 reactors there.
The Trump administration in October announced plans to partner with Westinghouse to build $80 billion worth of its nuclear reactors across the United States, a deal negotiated in part by Mr. Lutnick.
“Together with Westinghouse we will unleash American energy,” Mr. Lutnick said in a statement then. “This partnership embodies the bold vision of President Trump — to rebuild our energy sovereignty, create high-paying jobs, and drive America to the forefront of the nuclear renaissance.”
Newmark has made money over the past year by helping finance billions of dollars worth of United States data center projects that were promoted by Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Trump, as The Times previously reported.
Blake Ruppe, a Commerce Department spokesman, said that Mr. Lutnick has complied with all requirements that he divest from his family companies. “There is no conflict of interest,” he said in a statement. “It is knowingly false to suggest otherwise.”
A prominent Trump donor: Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel, a billionaire investor and entrepreneur, was an early political backer of Mr. Trump and helped Vice President JD Vance begin his political career, serving as one of the largest donors to Mr. Vance’s Senate race in 2022.
Mr. Thiel is a major investor in General Matter, a U.S. nuclear fuel company focused on producing what is known as high-assay low-enriched uranium. A giant load of new nuclear fuel will be needed if all these new nuclear power plants are built, and General Matter is positioned to benefit.
The Energy Department in January awarded General Matter a $900 million contract to build out its nuclear fuel effort. The U.S. Export-Import Bank, where Mr. Lutnick is a board member, also issued up to $4.2 billion in “letters of interest” to finance the export of General Matter’s domestically enriched uranium to nuclear operators in South Korea and Japan.
Mr. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for General Matter said that the federal support started under the Biden administration and that the company had not engaged with Mr. Vance since he became vice president.
“Our contract is 100 percent milestone based, so we don’t get paid until we fulfill our commitments to taxpayers,” Lee Robinson, a co-founder of General Matter, said in a statement.
The tech titans
As the explosive growth of artificial intelligence strains the nation’s power capacity, tech companies are turning to nuclear energy. Among them are Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft — all of which have backed at least some of Mr. Trump’s energy policy goals.
Each of those companies donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s 2025 inauguration, placing some of their executives — including the Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai — in prominent seats at the event.
The companies have supported the White House in other ways.
Amazon spent $40 million to acquire a documentary on Melania Trump, the first lady, generating a licensing fee of more than $10 million.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI — whose chief executive, Sam Altman, personally donated $1 million to the inauguration — have helped finance an Energy Department project called Genesis Mission, which will use AI to further the nation’s energy goals, among other objectives.
In announcing its $60 million investment in the program on July 22, Chris Barry, who runs Microsoft’s public sector business, called Genesis Mission “exactly the kind of moonshot that defines American science.” A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the Saudi deal.
A spokeswoman for Meta, which operates several data centers overseas, declined to comment on whether the company might benefit from the Saudi nuclear deal. Amazon, Google and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.
Ivan Penn and Ana Swanson contributed reporting.
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4) Employers Fear Labor Shortage as Many Immigrants Lose Protected Status
A recent Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for the Trump administration to end a humanitarian program that has allowed about one million immigrants to work legally in the U.S.
By Miriam Jordan and Madeleine Ngo, July 26, 2026
Miriam Jordan and Madeleine Ngo cover immigration and have been reporting on the economic impact of the Trump administration’s efforts to expel large numbers of immigrants.
The Supreme Court decision last month allowing the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for immigrants touched off protests outside the court. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Around Washington, Salvadoran-born crews have helped renovate, rebuild and maintain the Capitol, the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery. In senior living facilities in Florida, Massachusetts and New York, Haitian caregivers assist aging Americans with daily activities.
These workers are among more than one million people who have been allowed to live and work in the United States under a decades-old humanitarian program, and who now face the prospect of deportation.
Last month, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status, as the humanitarian program is known, and now industries are bracing for the loss of vital workers.
About 70 percent of T.P.S. holders were participating in the U.S. labor force, many in construction and health care, according to an analysis by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.
But on Monday, about 350,000 T.P.S. recipients from Haiti and several other countries will lose their work permits in the first wave of fallout from the Supreme Court ruling. About 190,000 Salvadoran beneficiaries could be next to lose their status when it expires in September.
“For particular places and particular industries, tens of thousands of workers no longer able to legally work is going to be a very big hit,” said Alexander Arnon, the director of policy analysis at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan research organization that has analyzed the economic impacts of T.P.S. workers.
Economists say the loss of those workers could be gradual, as some pursue other potential protections, such as asylum, and others continue working but off the books.
Still, as the clock ticks toward the end of Temporary Protected Status, business organizations, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have mounted a campaign for action on Capitol Hill, joined by a growing number of state and local leaders from both parties.
“Congress can, and should, exercise its plenary authority over immigration policy to prevent significant disruption to America’s work force and avoid an unnecessary humanitarian crisis,” the chamber wrote in a July 10 letter to Senate leadership.
State and local leaders are echoing those concerns. Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, has called ending T.P.S. for Haitians a “mistake” and predicted a steep economic toll for his state. In South Florida, home to the largest Haitian population, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and Commissioner Marleine Bastien of Miami-Dade County, along with business leaders, gathered on Wednesday to address the potential fallout.
“Ending T.P.S. doesn’t save American money,” Ms. Bastien said during a news conference. “Ending T.P.S. costs America money.”
But on Wednesday afternoon, Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri, blocked a fast-track attempt by congressional Democrats to extend T.P.S. for Haitians and criticized the program for becoming all but permanent. “T.P.S. was created for emergencies,” Mr. Schmitt said on the Senate floor. “Democrats turned it into a one-way racket towards permanent mass migration.”
Created by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, T.P.S. was intended to offer short-term relief to foreign nationals already in the United States who could not safely return home because of armed conflict or natural disasters. But with some countries mired in humanitarian crises for years, T.P.S. has become almost indefinite for some foreign nationals. And with Congress unable for decades to find a consensus on modernizing the country’s antiquated immigration laws, humanitarian protections such as T.P.S. and asylum have become de facto paths to long-term, if not permanent, residence.
That has turned T.P.S. into a target for some critics of the immigration system, including President Trump, who has made ending it a priority since his first term. After returning to the White House last year, he resumed his push to end the program, and after more than a year of court fights across the country, he won a Supreme Court decision allowing the executive branch to revoke T.P.S.
For years, companies and industries that employed large numbers of T.P.S. recipients championed them and the program as a source of motivated workers, often for jobs that were otherwise hard to fill.
But as the Trump administration intensified its effort to revoke the protection, many companies became reluctant to speak out, leaving it to trade groups to make the case for the program.
Associated Builders and Contractors, a construction trade group, was part of a coalition that recently sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security and highlighted the challenges brought on by the ending of T.P.S. program.
In a statement, the Trump administration defended its effort to end the protection. “D.H.S. is upholding the rule of law and getting back to common sense,” Zach Kahler, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said.
Employers who hire people working unlawfully in the United States can face steep fines and criminal charges of harboring undocumented people.
For their part, T.P.S. beneficiaries will have to decide whether to stay or leave the country. The government has their addresses, making it easy for federal agents to find them.
It is not clear how much time the government is likely to give people to organize their affairs and depart. Many have homes, vehicles and bank accounts, said Abel Nuñez, the executive director of CARECEN, a Washington, D.C., advocacy organization for people from Central America.
“You can’t just carry your house in your pocket, your car in your pocket,” Mr. Nuñez said.
Thanks to T.P.S., Concepcion Morales worked for 22 years on federal sites, including at the Naval Academy and the National Institutes of Health.
“Any government building you walk into, you can be sure that someone with T.P.S. has done work there,” said Mr. Morales, 50, who is from El Salvador and arrived in the United States when he was 23.
Mr. Morales was able to secure U.S. permanent residence through an American adult child four years ago. But by design, T.P.S. does not offer a direct path to a green card, and most recipients will now become vulnerable to deportation.
Patricia Campos-Medina, a political scientist at Cornell University who recently completed a study about Central American T.P.S. holders, said, “They have devoted their entire years of productivity to this country.”
“It’s not about being able to return to their country of origin; this is their home,” she said. “The majority are fully employed, have American-born children, own homes and have businesses.”
Daniel West, director of government relations for Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has faulted the program and criticized Republicans who have sought to maintain T.P.S.
“The Trump administration is right to let these overused T.P.S. programs expire as originally intended,” he said.
The administration has not announced plans to end T.P.S. for El Salvador, which expires in September. But it tried to do so during Mr. Trump’s first term.
And the administration has already announced that it will terminate the status for most countries currently covered, including Ethiopia, Myanmar, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Employers have already been notified that the work permits of T.P.S. recipients from those countries will no longer be valid. People from El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine who received T.P.S. still have employment authorization.
The United States has been sending one deportation flight to Haiti per month since December 2023. The last removal flight to Haiti landed in Cap Haitien, a northern city, on July 16 with more than 100 deportees. The number of flights is expected to increase significantly.
Stephen Miller, an architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, was asked after the T.P.S. ruling if Haiti is safe.
“For Haitians? Absolutely,” Mr. Miller said. “Haitians live in Haiti. It’s not our position that Haitians should leave Haiti. It’d be crazy for us to say that Haitians couldn’t live in Haiti. It’s their country.”
Haiti has been engulfed in violence since the assassination of its last elected president in 2021. Large swaths of the capital Port-au-Prince are controlled by gangs that have attacked, kidnapped and killed civilians, causing the internal displacement of more than one million people. The country’s economy is in ruins, and international aid organizations report widespread food insecurity.
In an interview, a Haitian woman who works as a nurse in Florida and who has had T.P.S. since Haiti was first designated in 2010 said she was fearful of being forced to return to a country where she hasn’t lived in more than a decade and where, she said, she had no family.
“The anxiety is indescribable,” said the woman, who has a U.S.-born toddler and who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that she not be identified because she fears she could be targeted by immigration agents.
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5) Wildfire Smoke Chokes Skies in Spain and France
Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate or told to take shelter inside.
In Photos and Video
By The New York Times, Published July 25, 2026, Updated July 27, 2026
Wildfires in France and Spain last week have blazed toward cities, forced evacuations by land and sea and wreathed the skies of southern Europe in stifling smoke.
Already broiling under intense summer heat, more than 300,000 people in France and Spain fled their homes or were ordered to remain indoors as dozens of fires moved across parts of each country. In France, one official called two severe fires the “ogres of the summer.” In Spain, another labeled one blaze “the worst wildfire in the Madrid region’s history.”
The Spanish government declared the fires in the Madrid region a national emergency, and both countries requested additional aid from the European Union to combat the fires and help people affected.
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6) Flames Advance on Bordeaux, Where Evacuees Balance Dread and Hope
With surrounding towns in southwestern France evacuated and fire still spreading rapidly, several thousand are sheltering in the city, unsure what will become of their homes.
By Mark Landler and Giulia Imbert, Reporting from Bordeaux, France, Published July 26, 2026, Updated July 27, 2026
As a fierce, fast-moving and capricious wildfire spread to within 10 miles of Bordeaux on Sunday, the city, France’s sixth largest, had become a refuge for thousands of people evacuated from their towns and villages.
Many of them took shelter in Bordeaux’s cavernous exhibition center, united by fear, confusion and a determination to get back their homes, which they desperately hoped would be spared by the flames.
There are differing voices in this instant community, attesting to the divergent lives of the people across the Gironde region. Fear is leavened by hope, gratitude to the firefighters is tinged by anger toward the authorities, and optimism in a swift recovery is offset by uneasiness about the natural forces that led to this disaster.
“I don’t want to start again at zero to find a new apartment,” said Imane El Idrissi, 35, a single mother who fled at 4 a.m. on Saturday, after the police pounded on her door to warn her it was time to leave. “I don’t have the means.”
Ms. El Idrissi, who was born in Morocco, said she had carefully gathered all her immigration and residency documents, filling her suitcase with papers in place of clothing. Her two daughters were born in France, she said, but she couldn’t shake the fear that if she left the country, she might not be allowed back in.
Her friend, Atika Farhati, 77, a retired hospital worker, said she worried about losing her apartment and treasured possessions, including a Chinese vase. Her town, Eysines, northwest of Bordeaux, lies in the path of the fires, which were blown east by swirling winds from the Atlantic toward the city.
“The sky was red,” she said, recalling the flame-scarred view from her fifth-floor balcony. “Now that we’re here, we can only wonder how it’s going to end.”
For Roger Peuron, that outcome is not seriously in doubt. A retired engineer who worked at an armaments factory in Saint-Médard-en-Jalles, Mr. Peuron, 89, said he was confident the fire would be stopped short of his town, if only to prevent it from igniting a factory that makes fuel for strategic ballistic missiles.
“If that ever happened to the industry,” he said, “it would be a true catastrophe.”
Still, Mr. Peuron said France had never witnessed a fire like this, and it raised profound questions about how people should change their relationship to their environment. Sprawling pine forests that were planted across the region over centuries are now an accelerant for fire.
“We need to replace the trees because the sap in the pines is flammable, and the trees don’t have deep roots, so they are easily blown over by the wind,” Mr. Peuron said. “The pines were planted to drain the region’s swamps, but they’re no longer suited to the environment.”
“We need sequoias,” he added. “They’re sturdy!”
French officials backed up Mr. Peuron’s contention about the extraordinary nature of the fire, reflecting a warming climate. About 42,000 hectares, or 103,000 acres, have burned in Gironde since the fire started last week. It has forced the evacuation of about 220,000 people, one of the largest peacetime evacuations in French history.
At the same time, fires in central Spain have burned about 50,000 hectares and displaced 105,000 people.
So far this summer, forest fires have burned 115,000 hectares in France, according to the French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez. By comparison, the average yearly loss from 2014 to 2023 was 9,000 hectares. In the summer of 2022, which was considered devastating and led France to bolster its firefighting resources, about 70,000 hectares burned.
On Sunday, a heavy yellow-orange cloud of smoke hung over Bordeaux, an elegant city of 260,000 that is famous as the center of France’s wine industry. An acrid smell pervaded its streets, and tiny particles of soot flecked the air. Pedestrians wore face masks, and many shut themselves in their homes.
As the fire crept toward the city limits, Bordeaux’s mayor, Thomas Cazenave, said on Sunday that the authorities did not expect they would have to order an evacuation. But he and other officials warned that uncertainty was the watchword, as shifting winds and heat made it difficult for firefighters to gain control of the blaze.
The forecast for Bordeaux calls for high temperatures of 37 degrees Celsius on Tuesday and 41 on Wednesday — about 99 and 106 degrees Fahrenheit.
At the exhibition center, the talk was of how long people would have to wait before they would be allowed back home. People passed the time reading, playing cards, and, in the case of one young man, Julien Hochard, picking at his guitar.
“There’s a solidarity that we’ve seen emerge here, one that’s slowly growing,” said Mr. Hochard, sitting on a camp bed next to his friend, Céline Lartigue. She said she had been impressed by firefighters’ efforts to stem the blaze.
But from a nearby bed, Rabah Boukabous piped up to disagree.
“I think the authorities reacted late,” he said. “They should have recognized the gravity of the situation.”
“They could not have prevented it,” said Mr. Boukabous, 70, “but they could have limited it.”
Catherine Porter contributed reporting from Paris
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7) Firefighters in France Encounter a ‘Fire Cloud’
A pyrocumulonimbus — a thundercloud created by intense heat — is a phenomenon that can spark new blazes and is “unprecedented in France,” officials said.
By Claire Moses, July 27, 2026
Smoke from wildfires north of the Arcachon basin in southwestern France last week. Romain Perrocheau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Nearly a week into devastating wildfires in France, officials said that firefighters had encountered a phenomenon that many of them had not seen before: a pyrocumulonimbus, or “fire cloud.”
These large thunderclouds, also known as pyroCbs, are created by intense heat from large fires or volcanic eruptions, which in turn can spark more fires. In other words, it is a fire-fueled thunderstorm that does not bring rain.
One pyrocumulonimbus generated more blazes over the weekend in one of the hardest-hit areas of France, Marc Vermeulen, the director of fire and emergency services in the Gironde region, said at a news briefing on Sunday.
“While this type of fire occurs regularly in Canada and Australia, it is unprecedented in France,” Lt. Col. Eric Brocardi, a spokesman for the National Firefighters Federation of France, told Agence France-Presse.
“The fire became extremely virulent and unpredictable again generating its own wind and spreading erratically toward the Bordeaux metropolitan area,” Laurent Nuñez, France's interior minister, also said on social media.
Wildfires are so hot they can sometimes create their own weather systems. The smoke from the fires acts as a plume of heat rising into the atmosphere, according to Britain’s Royal Meteorological Society.
The hot air rises, which causes it to cool and expand. Once it is cooled sufficiently, the cloud’s vapor condenses onto the ash from the fire and forms a gray or brown cloud that can then develop into a pyrocumulonimbus (pyro means “fire” in Greek). Once it has formed, the storm cloud can carry embers and start new blazes elsewhere.
In the Gironde region, 103,000 acres have burned, according to officials, and 220,000 people have been asked to evacuate from Gironde and the neighboring Landes region.
The pyrocumulonimbus phenomenon presents extreme challenges for firefighters.
“These fire-generated clouds are linked to extreme fire behavior that impedes firefighting efforts and can devastate communities,” according to NASA, which emphasized the need to better understand the clouds “given the ongoing and projected increases in fire activity and severity.”
Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.
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8) This Is the Way Out of Our Ultraprocessed Dystopia
By Julia Belluz, July 27, 2026
Ms. Belluz is a contributing Opinion writer covering health, nutrition and chronic illness.
Andrew B. Myers
When Bryce Martinez started feeling an aching around his heart, he thought it might be an asthma attack. But at the school nurse’s office, his blood pressure was found to be so high that he was rushed to the emergency room. There, doctors diagnosed him with Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease.
Bryce, then 16, was bewildered. He’d developed obesity early in childhood, but until that chest pain, had no other sign anything was wrong with his health. He hadn’t even realized kids could get Type 2 diabetes.
Back home, he searched online for information about his illnesses, devouring news articles and videos. He learned that American children live in dysfunctional food environments, where the least healthy options tend to be the most affordable and accessible. That as parents took on more working hours, there was less time for cooking than in previous generations. That food companies filled the gap with convenient, ultraprocessed food, containing industrially manipulated ingredients that you wouldn’t find in home cooking. That these foods are often full of salt, sugar, fat and additives. Bryce was shocked that regulators didn’t vet all food additives for health and safety, and that companies could slap healthy labels on nutrient-bankrupt junk.
Junk, Bryce realized, was a lot of the food he grew up on in Pennsylvania. Even the food that didn’t seem too bad. A bowl of cereal on the way out the door — marketed to kids, and sometimes advertising fiber and nutrients, but also high in sugar. At school, the lunches featured pizza, burgers and mac and cheese. Bryce’s parents tried to cook nutritious meals whenever they could, but they both had full-time jobs. When he arrived at home before his parents got off work, he’d pull a can or box from the cupboard or freezer to heat in the microwave — more mac and cheese or a ready-to-heat meal. Juice pouches washed the meals down. Some of the food he snacked on — chips, ice cream — appeared to be designed so that he couldn’t stop eating. He used to blame himself for that.
By age 18 he started to understand that the responsibility didn’t lie with him alone. Mr. Martinez sued 11 major food manufacturers — including Kraft Heinz, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé USA — alleging the consumption of their products brought on his Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease in childhood. The lawsuit, filed at the end of 2024, was the first personal injury case related to ultraprocessed foods.
Since then, I’ve tracked more than half a dozen other personal injury lawsuits filed against major food manufacturers, all alleging ultraprocessed foods, engineered to drive addiction and marketed to children, caused chronic diseases in someone under the age of 18. I’ve followed these cases because I’ve become increasingly convinced that litigation may be our only path to a healthy food environment.
Polling shows that across the political spectrum, a majority of Americans now believe ultraprocessed foods can be addictive, that companies deliberately try to hook children and that regulation is needed. Policies that seemed politically toxic in the era of the “Big Gulp” ban in New York under Mayor Michael Bloomberg now appear less so. Ashley Gearhardt, a food addiction expert at the University of Michigan, sees the craving economy in the world of food and beyond. “As a parent, I feel like there’s corporate vultures that are just circling my head waiting for me to have a bad day, so they can swoop in and make my child a lifelong loyalist to their damaging product,” she said.
In the background, nutrition science has matured. Researchers have uncovered how processed foods override the bodies’ built-in signals for satiety and nutrition and increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes and obesity, among other chronic diseases.
But this doesn’t mean Americans will see new legislation any time soon. While the Trump administration, and particularly the MAHA Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wing, has had a lot to say about ultraprocessed food, all that talk hasn’t generated substantial new regulation. But the problem runs deeper. “It’s been 30, 40 years now that people have been talking about the toxic nature of the food environment, how the food industry is contributing to that, and public policy things that should be done, and almost nothing has happened,” said Kelly Brownell, a public health researcher at Duke University.
I know this impasse intimately. I’ve written about chronic disease and food for over a decade. When people ask how we can fix the food system, I usually answer with some version of: demand change at every level you can — school, workplace, city, country. But, if I’m honest, the fight has often felt hopeless when I think of the lobbying power of the $10 trillion global food and beverage industry.
It was only in delving into the history of public health litigation that I started to feel some optimism. Again and again, bands of clever lawyers interested in public health and social justice fought for protections that policymakers had failed to deliver, long after the harms of a product were established. Litigation forced substantive opioid regulation. It helped curtail the use of leaded paint and asbestos, and made driving safer. But the most thoroughly developed use of litigation for public health involves the cigarette.
For most of the 20th century, the public was inundated with tobacco marketing and secondhand smoke in ways that seem absurd today. Magazine advertisements featured doctors’ favored brands of cigarettes. The “cool dude” Joe Camel cartoon popped up on TV to entice children. Smoke filled hospitals and airplanes.
Starting in the 1950s, individual plaintiffs stepped forward to sue tobacco companies. There was the factory worker who smoked two packs a day and eventually lost a lung to cancer. There was the widow who sued for wrongful death on behalf of her deceased husband, a dedicated smoker since age 9. The industry swatted such lawsuits off through the 1980s. But even though the plaintiffs overwhelmingly lost, as the historian Allan Brandt detailed in “The Cigarette Century,” the cases snowballed, and led to legal discovery that unearthed damning industry documents.
Tobacco companies, which were finely tuning nicotine levels to drive addiction and targeting “pre-smokers” (also known as children), held records showing that their products caused cancer, while their executives publicly claimed otherwise. The documents that came to light in discovery not only laid bare the industry’s deceit and hypocrisy, but also gave lie to the claim that smoking was a matter of personal responsibility. Most significantly, they spurred mass tort litigation and left governments with no choice but to act.
In the 1990s, state attorneys general started to sue the tobacco companies for a public health crisis that taxpayers were largely left paying for. The resulting global settlement restricted tobacco marketing and mandated companies pay states billions in damages. Legislators finally had the political ammunition to meaningfully restrict smoking. They reined in access to tobacco products and increased cigarette taxes. Adult smoking rates have plummeted from 42 percent in 1965 to 9 percent in 2025.
Bryce Martinez’s complaint was dismissed in Federal District Court last year because the judge, though “deeply concerned” about the effects of ultraprocessed foods on children, ultimately agreed with the defendants’ claim that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove specific products caused Mr. Martinez’s illnesses. (The defendants, in their joint motion to dismiss the case, also argued that their products are safe, federally regulated and legally compliant.)
In June, the judge denied Mr. Martinez’s motion to amend the case with additional detail. His lawyers at the firm Morgan & Morgan say they plan to appeal the dismissal and will continue to file similar lawsuits across the country. Meanwhile, the other cases are still moving forward. None of it will be easy.
Dr. Brandt, the historian, recently told me to expect more defeats. With tobacco, there were hundreds of losses, and those cases were simpler because they required proving only that a single product made someone sick. Yet Dr. Brandt is optimistic about litigation against the food industry. Americans are “becoming more appropriately skeptical that industry is acting around food in the public’s interest,” he said. He believes that we’re entering the tobacco trials era with Big Food.
The legal and public health experts I spoke to see the most promise in cities and states taking action. Last December, San Francisco’s city attorney announced a first-of-its-kind lawsuit on behalf of the people of California against the same 11 food companies Mr. Martinez sued. That complaint alleges the companies worsened a public health crisis affecting a large segment of the population and straining health budgets (the cost of diabetes alone in California has been estimated at some $47 billion). I believe other jurisdictions, also facing soaring costs, should follow with their own lawsuits.
Even if these cases gain steam, and some win, Big Food won’t be going anywhere. But litigation like Mr. Martinez’s could spur lawmakers to force companies to act in the public’s interest, as Dr. Brandt put it, enhancing individual agency rather than eroding it. This might mean taxes, warning labels and reformulation requirements to reduce unhealthy food consumption, and — crucially — subsidies and improved access to healthy choices.
If jurisdictions sue, we might even learn a few things in legal discovery. What do food manufacturers know about children’s brains, and how to entice them? What do they know about how to include just enough sugar, or the perfect amount of crunchiness, so people can’t stop eating?
As it happens, we already know bits and pieces from the tobacco documents. Philip Morris purchased Kraft in 1988, and a little earlier, R.J. Reynolds acquired major food brands and merged with Nabisco. The tobacco documents show that cigarette companies applied their knowledge about flavor optimization, youth marketing and brain chemistry to ultraprocessed foods in order to increase profits.
Unlike the early tobacco plaintiffs, Mr. Martinez got sick as a child. He did so in a home where he didn’t buy the groceries, in a food system he didn’t design. When he left the hospital following his chest pain a few years ago, he returned to school and was confronted by a new reality. Injecting insulin felt awkward, he says, and caused people to ask him questions he didn’t always want to answer.
Today he’s managing his illnesses with a GLP-1 medication, but at age 20, he’s worried about the future. Will he get a job with health insurance that covers his medical bills? When I asked him what he wished he’d known about food when he was a kid, he said, “Convenience ultimately comes at a cost.”
That may still put too much on the consumer. To play on a question that the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler asked during the tobacco trials: Whose choice is driving the demand for ultraprocessed foods in America? Is it a choice by consumers to continue eating them? Or by food companies to maintain the public’s dependency on them?
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9) Immigration Detention Has a Transparency Problem. Private Companies Will Make It Worse.
By Lauren-Brooke Eisen, July 27, 2026
Ms. Eisen is the senior director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law.
Jesse Rieser for The New York Times
In deep red Hanover County, Virginia, just north of Richmond, Donald Trump won 62 percent of the vote in 2024. It might have followed that the voters there supported his administration’s immigration agenda. And yet, in January, Hanover County’s board of supervisors opposed the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to purchase and retrofit a local 550,000-square-foot warehouse as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Protest was so vociferous that the Vancouver-based developer Jim Pattison Developments announced the sale would “not be proceeding.”
In the early months of the new Trump administration, D.H.S. spent some $1 billion on 11 warehouses, promising to turn those inhospitable spaces into 100,000 beds for immigrants on track to deportation. But, as in Hanover County, officials and communities across the country pushed back against warehouse expansion plans, citing humanitarian concerns, pressures on local infrastructure and services, and general revulsion at the notion of hosting detention centers in their hometowns. The agency is now planning to sell or offload seven of the 11 warehouses bought in that early spending spree.
But one solution created another problem: D.H.S. will now most likely increase its existing reliance on private for-profit firms to maintain or boost immigration detention capacity. That pivot comes with its own set of humanitarian worries, raises even greater transparency and oversight concerns and makes it harder for communities to resist the effort. At the start of Trump’s second term, the government was detaining around 40,000 immigrants. Today, there are more than 65,000 detainees housed across the country in for-profit and government-owned detention centers and county jails.
Whether privately run or operated by the government, immigration detention facilities have historically had a notoriously poor track record. Reports abound of detainees being placed in overcrowded and unsanitary facilities, deprived of medical care and served contaminated food. Thirty-three people died in ICE custody last year, the highest number in two decades. ICE has already recorded 20 deaths in detention so far this year.
Several of ICE’s newly purchased warehouse conversion projects were thwarted or delayed because of lawsuits arguing that the agency didn’t conduct the required environmental reviews. That worked for new spaces. Now, as ICE is working with both county jails and for-profit firms to expand detention capacity by drawing on empty beds in operating facilities, or reopening facilities that already existed, it will be harder for state and local governments to credibly argue that a town’s infrastructure can’t handle the influx of people.
Further, for-profit firms are generally not required to directly comply with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). That means that when a family member or journalist is looking for information about a detainee, alive or dead, legal hurdles can stand in the way. FOIA applies specifically to federal government agencies. When it comes to information or communications that remain proprietary to a private company, the public cannot compel private prison corporations to provide those materials.
When journalists and others do receive documents through the federal government’s FOIA mechanism, the materials are often significantly redacted. It is already challenging for family members or private counsel to track down and even confirm the presence of a detainee, let alone his or her status, in this immigration detention system.
For-profit prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic — as well as local counties — have long contracted with the federal government to build and operate detention centers and transport detainees from one location to another. ICE is a significant source of revenue for these two companies: GEO Group reported that ICE made up 48 percent of its revenue for 2025; CoreCivic reported that ICE accounted for 35 percent of its total revenue that same year.
In February 2025, the federal government awarded a 15-year contract to GEO Group to house ICE detainees at its 1,000-bed Delaney Hall facility in New Jersey. Administration officials also contracted with CoreCivic to reopen a family detention facility in Dilley, Texas, that can hold 2,400 people. In March of this year, CoreCivic began receiving detainees at its newly opened Midwest Regional Reception Center in Leavenworth, Kan., which has the capacity to hold 1,033 people. Detainees at both the family detention facility in Texas and the facility in New Jersey have reported inhumane conditions and contaminated food. Both groups have disputed these claims, and have said that detainees have access to medical care and meals that adhere to religious diets, among other amenities.
“CoreCivic is committed to partnering with the federal government to help meet their goals and objectives,” CoreCivic’s senior director of public affairs, Ryan Gustin, wrote to me last month by email in response to questions about the federal government’s warehouse strategy and his perspective on the company’s ability to increase bed capacity to help meet the government’s demand. He noted that CoreCivic was not involved in the warehouse purchases and that the company has worked with the federal government for more than four decades. “We routinely engage with all our government partners on ways to deliver value to the taxpayer, and we welcome those conversations,” he said. GEO Group referred me to ICE for my questions.
There are some ways for a concerned public to address transparency and oversight issues. In 2017, the California legislature passed a law requiring the state’s Department of Justice to review and report on conditions of confinement at civil immigration detention facilities across the state. Other states should take California’s lead. This month, D.H.S. bought two California detention centers from CoreCivic for a combined $1.5 billion. CoreCivic will continue to manage the facilities, but now that the federal government owns the detention centers there could be legal challenges about state oversight.
At the national level, Congress should drastically expand the information that private prison companies must disclose, giving the public much better insight into the state of these facilities and the contracts behind them. The idea already exists in the Private Prison Information Act, a piece of legislation that has been introduced multiple times over the past two decades without success. The bill would require private prison companies to be subject to the same transparency requirements as the federal government when those companies are contracting with the federal government to hold federal prisoners or detainees.
Selling many of the recently purchased warehouses won’t dismantle the administration’s immigration detention agenda. And increasing reliance on for-profit firms comes with the dark possibility that we will know even less about what is happening to immigrants. But opening immigration detention practices to scrutiny is one of the most important ways to ensure that vulnerable people are being treated humanely.
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10) Cut Off From Fuel, Cuba Is Still Surviving
President Trump has tried to strangle Cuba by blocking its oil imports. But six months later, the island is finding ways to endure.
By Jack Nicas, Videos by Alex Pena, Photographs by Lisette Poole González, July 27, 2026
Jack Nicas and Alex Pena spent a week in Cuba on the first journalism visas granted to New York Times staff in nearly eight years.
“Cuba produces the gas domestically, so it is one of the few energy sources not affected by the blockade. The gas is also cheap, especially for the 120,000 households that pay a flat rate regardless of use. One man said he had been running a generator off gas almost nonstop, and yet was still billed the same 50 pesos, or eight cents, for the month.”
Humberto Palmero in his backyard, where he makes gasoline from plastic chips in Pinar del Rio, Cuba.
For months, President Trump has been predicting that Cuba is about to collapse.
“It’s just going to fall,” he told reporters on Jan. 4, a day after taking control of Venezuela’s oil, which had been Cuba’s lifeline.
He then imposed an oil blockade that has pushed the island into its worst ever energy crisis, with mass blackouts now lasting nearly all day. And yet, more than six months later, the Cuban government and people are still standing.
This month, we visited the country to understand how. After a week on the ground, we found that while Cubans are clearly suffering, they are also doing what perhaps they do best: adapting.
They are swapping their gas-guzzling 1950s American cars for electric motorcycles and rickshaws from China; importing hefty lithium batteries to keep televisions and fans running through blackouts; jury-rigging generators to run on more accessible natural gas; and installing solar panels on rooftops and even vehicles.
Together, the workarounds amount to a new Cuban energy grid — this one more in the hands of the Cuban people, propping up society with the electricity off and fuel lines dry.
These solutions have enabled the Cuban government to ration power by turning on the lights for just a few hours a day, stretching out whatever scarce fuel it has left in an effort to withstand Washington’s intense pressure campaign.
The result is that Cuba has lasted far longer without fuel shipments than the Trump administration appears to have expected.
Over nearly seven decades of U.S. pressure, Cuba has defied the odds and improvised to survive. Now it seems that Mr. Trump, like many U.S. presidents before him, is also finding that toppling the government founded by Fidel Castro is not so simple.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters last week that the Trump administration still wants to see the Cuban government fall. “We’re prepared to be very realistic about how you do that, and patient,” he said. “These are complex things that take time, and obviously we’re prepared to do what we can.”
The Cuban government is seeking a deal. “Cuba is not an enemy of the United States,” Carlos Fernández de Cossio, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, said in an interview. “What we would like is a constructive and respectful relationship.”
Meantime, the Cuban people, as they have for decades, are making do. “Cubans thrive amid crisis,” said Humberto Palmero, a 55-year-old farmer, standing on the hill where he grew up along Cuba’s coastline, with a view toward Florida. His siblings had already left for Miami and his two children are fleeing to Spain, but he said he is determined to stay.
After hearing about the oil blockade, Mr. Palmero learned on YouTube how to distill junk plastic into homemade gasoline and diesel. He has since built a tiny, makeshift refinery in his backyard to power his motorcycle and light his stove.
“We look for solutions,” he said. “The economic restrictions are slowly killing us, but we’re pulling through with all our might, managing to get by until we see what happens next.”
Misery and Grit
In Havana and beyond, the crisis’s effects were clear.
We met families walking two hours for water because government pumps had run out of diesel. Women, lacking cooking gas, burned firewood on the street. Powerless refrigerators became cabinets. Hitchhikers littered roadsides after the city halted public busing. And dozens of people told us they were simply exhausted after so many sleepless nights in the sweltering heat without fans or air-conditioning.
But we also saw a country that was still functioning.
Vehicles were on the road — despite black-market gasoline reaching $30 a gallon — because many were electric. Restaurants were open for the few who could afford them, powered by rumbling generators out back. Hospitals, government buildings and the airport had power because they were on protected parts of the grid. Medical clinics, nursing homes and bank branches ran off solar panels donated by China.
Cell service was sometimes working. Televisions showing the World Cup were not hard to find. And even roadside stands were serving cold beer from refrigerators powered by the sun.
But the makeshift energy grid also exposed Cuba’s inequality.
The batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles overwhelmingly belong to wealthier Cubans, which usually means those with relatives abroad. Their poorer neighbors often live without power and scrape by with meager pay amid rising inflation.
“The situation here is fine, because the owner can afford to buy solar panels,” said Yeny Oliva, 26, a bartender at a roadside restaurant. “But for us, at home, life is awful.” On wages of roughly $1 a day, she said, she struggles to buy milk for her 3-year-old daughter, and then their food spoils quickly without electricity.
Yet she also was grateful for the solar energy. Without power, the restaurant had closed. Then, the owners installed the panels and she was back at work.
While not everyone can afford alternative power sources, their energy has trickled down. Electric rickshaws ferry people to work. Solar panels have kept stores open. And people charge their phones and lanterns off their neighbor’s battery or the generator at work.
In one neighborhood, we saw one of the few families with a generator set up a television in the street so children could watch cartoons.
“We have not reached the point of having a humanitarian crisis precisely because of the strength of our society,” Mr. Fernández de Cossio, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, said in Havana’s Fidel Castro museum, where the lights were on but the air-conditioning had failed. “The intimate expectation in political circles in the United States was that Cuba could not survive beyond April. And here we are.”
Scraping the Barrel
Other than a single Russian oil tanker in March, allies have not been willing to test Washington’s effective oil blockade.
As a result, Cuba has been powering its electric grid solely with domestic oil and gas and a growing network of solar parks sponsored by China. Together, they are enough to support roughly half of Cuban demand, according to Jorge Piñón, who studies Cuban energy at the University of Texas.
To preserve that supply, the government strategically cuts power at certain times and in certain places. It also runs plants at lower capacity to keep them from failing; extracts more natural gas; and even tries to refine sludgy oil residues from the bottom of years-old tanks.
“They are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel,” Mr. Piñón said.
Mr. Piñón said he and other analysts underestimated the Cuban government’s resourcefulness when they forecast it would exhaust its fuel stocks by March. But now he is skeptical of the government’s claim in May that the island has run out of fuel. On our trip, it was clear gasoline and diesel were still circulating.
At least some is coming from the United States. The Trump administration has allowed limited fuel exports to private businesses in Cuba, which has relieved pressure on black-market gas prices. And last week, the U.S. government’s first batch of $100 million in aid arrived.
The moves show how the Trump administration is exerting power over Cuba, ordering other nations to halt fuel shipments but allowing its own, and then providing aid in response to the resulting crisis. A White House spokeswoman said the Trump administration viewed Cuba as a threat to national security.
Exhausted Cubans told us they were angry at both Havana and Washington. Yet no one said they planned to take to the streets. Aside from banging pots and pans, the Cuban people have hardly staged protests.
“You go out to express your opinion on the street, and they throw you in jail or fine you,” said David HechavarrÃa Gamboa, 24, standing alongside his wife on a darkened street. “I can’t put my family at risk.”
Chasing Daylight
When U.S. forces captured Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January, Nelson Vega knew Cuba had a problem. Venezuelan oil had powered Cuba for years.
A month later, Mr. Vega, a 38-year-old entrepreneur, borrowed money from relatives in Florida to buy a Chinese-made electric rickshaw for $4,850. It took 10 hours to charge, and almost immediately, the blackouts made that difficult. So he invested a further $600 to drill solar panels to its roof.
Now he can power the entire battery by parking it in the sun for a day. “To me, this is the future,” he said. “We’re going to overcome the U.S. blockade.”
Once we traveled outside Havana, solar panels proliferated. Cuba’s power grid has been decaying in rural areas for years, making blackouts — and solar panels — already common.
On the road west, we met Abel Menéndez on a roof blanketed in panels. He has been selling and installing solar kits for five years, he said, but now both supply and demand have skyrocketed. At the same time, costs have dropped, to about $400 a panel from $500 a year earlier. “People are constantly calling,” he said.
We also came across a new field of panels — one of the government’s 54 solar parks, most inaugurated since 2025 and all built with China’s help.
Few countries are adopting solar faster than Cuba. Solar energy can now meet roughly 10 percent of Cuba’s electricity needs, the government says, up from 3 percent at the start of 2025. Cuban officials aim to depend fully on renewable energy by 2050.
For now, solar provides a boost, but it hardly solves Cuba’s problem. The island lacks the massive batteries needed to store solar power. That means it can provide roughly 20 percent of Cuba’s electricity at midday, but virtually none after the sun sets, during peak demand.
Running on Fumes
Perhaps Cuba’s hottest product of the moment are portable lithium batteries that can be charged in a few hours and then temporarily power televisions, fans or even refrigerators.
The most popular model costs about $750 in Cuba, sold on social media by Cubans who have imported them from China. That is more than most Cubans make in a year, so most of the batteries are sponsored by relatives abroad.
Other Cubans are electrifying their homes with the gas piped in for cooking and heating water. About 280,000 residences in Havana have such gas lines, and many are connecting them to modified generators designed to run on liquid fuel. Cuba produces the gas domestically, so it is one of the few energy sources not affected by the blockade.
The gas is also cheap, especially for the 120,000 households that pay a flat rate regardless of use. One man said he had been running a generator off gas almost nonstop, and yet was still billed the same 50 pesos, or eight cents, for the month.
On one of our final nights in Havana, we found a bar still full of patrons past midnight, powering its string lights and Latin music with a natural gas generator. Outside, we met Kiké RodrÃguez, 37, founder of a Cuban barbecue business, Manteca, that has expanded during the crisis. He now employs 18 people to cook and deliver pork and plantains to customers across Havana.
“We’re the masters of this,” he said. “We’ve been figuring things out our whole lives.”
He pointed to the rooftop, where he said he was finishing a remodel to open his first brick-and-mortar restaurant, powered by the same generator.
“How are things going to play out? Nobody knows,” he added. “But when people say the country is going to fall apart, I don’t exactly know what they mean.”
Diana Karla Hernández and Dariel Pradas contributed reporting. Yasu Tsuji contributed video editing and production.
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11)Why Restarting a Nuclear Power Plant Can Be Much Harder Than Expected
The first U.S. attempt at reopening a shuttered reactor has been held back by run-down equipment and a lack of planning.
By Rebecca F. Elliott, Photographs by Jamie Kelter Davis, July 27, 2026
Reporting from the Palisades nuclear plant on Lake Michigan and the plant owner’s headquarters in Camden, N.J.
Some of the setbacks at Palisades were expensive and time consuming, such as discovering that key equipment was corroded.
When Michigan’s oldest operating nuclear power plant shut down in 2022, it was supposed to be for good. The plant, which sits on the coast of Lake Michigan, had company — dozens of other reactors had already been wound down.
But soon after the turbines stopped spinning, those plans changed. A little-known company from Camden, N.J., quietly started taking steps to attempt what no one had done before in the United States: restart a shuttered nuclear reactor. The process would take about two years, estimated the company, Holtec International.
Four years later, the plant, called Palisades, is not yet generating power.
The delay is a reminder of the challenges of expanding nuclear energy, even at a time when the technology enjoys broad bipartisan support. The United States has built just two new reactors in the past decade. They cost more than twice as much as planned and arrived seven years late, quelling interest across the energy industry and on Wall Street.
Some of the setbacks at Palisades were expensive and time consuming, including discovering extensive corrosion of the equipment that uses hot radioactive water to produce high-pressure steam. Others were mundane: supply chain headaches, an underground water line that leaked, valves that needed replacing.
None of these challenges were unforeseeable. Holtec had never operated a nuclear power plant. It also embarked on the project almost as soon as it bought Palisades. The company applied for federal subsidies for the effort seven days after the sale closed, according to records obtained by The New York Times.
By the time Holtec decided to restart Palisades, it had not completed a top-to-bottom inspection of the plant, Jeff Borah, the general manager of plant operations, said in an interview.
“We didn’t take the time to really plan out the whole project before we started doing work,” Mr. Borah said. “It’s like building a fire truck on your way to the fire.”
Now, Holtec is aiming to load fuel into the nuclear reactor in September, records show, and generate power by the end of the year. It faces a March 2027 contractual deadline.
The Palisades restart is part of a larger effort to revive nuclear energy in the United States. The Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, is dangling billions in federal financing to kick-start investment. In June, the Energy Department offered up to $17.5 billion in subsidized loans for the purchase of nuclear equipment in hopes of having 10 large reactors under construction by 2030.
“We’re going to do whatever it takes to get that ball rolling,” Chris Wright, the energy secretary, said in an interview.
Jigar Shah, who ran the Energy Department’s loan office during the Biden administration, said Holtec’s work encouraged other companies to pursue similar projects. Constellation Energy and NextEra Energy followed Holtec by agreeing to reopen nuclear reactors in Pennsylvania and Iowa. Like Palisades, those plants were slated to be dismantled, distinguishing the projects from other efforts to restart reactors that were taken offline temporarily.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Holtec being optimistic,” said Mr. Shah, whose office backstopped a low-interest loan of up to $1.52 billion to finance restarting Palisades, which has the capacity to meet the electricity needs of more than 800,000 homes. “They thought that they were going to inherit a plant that was in much better shape.”
A Holtec executive and former nuclear regulators said it was not surprising that the company had decided to reopen Palisades without having inspected certain equipment, particularly given that it had owned the facility for only a short time.
“There are some systems you can’t really inspect until you start the project,” said Rick Springman, Holtec’s president. As an example, he pointed to a turbine that needed to be disassembled before being thoroughly examined, a process that took months.
“The difference between building a new house and rehabbing an old house is there is going to be discovery,” Dr. Springman said.
Other projects have not been as fraught. Constellation Energy says it expects to restart the undamaged reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania next year, ahead of schedule. Unlike Holtec, Constellation owned and operated its plant for many years.
Palisades was bought from Entergy, a utility company. An Entergy spokesman praised Holtec’s restart effort but did not comment on the plant’s condition when it was sold.
The plan to revive Palisades, which opened in 1971, has put off some locals, including people who say they support nuclear power. Worries range from the amount of taxpayer money being spent and Holtec’s lack of expertise operating nuclear reactors to cancer risks. A recent study led by Harvard’s public health school found higher cancer mortality rates in counties near operating nuclear plants.
“It doesn’t seem like a smart idea to try to restart something that’s this old,” said Dave Simonelli, who spends summers less than a mile from Palisades as the crow flies. The 69-year-old described himself as being pronuclear, but concerned with safety: “Why restart an antique? A car in the junkyard.”
Palisades was built at the vanguard of a booming business in the United States. By the end of the 1970s, the country had more than 60 reactors. And by the mid-1990s, that figure had topped 100.
But people soured on nuclear power after a reactor at Three Mile Island partially melted down in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Companies canceled dozens of projects. One reactor after another shuttered as they struggled to compete with power plants that burned natural gas, which was becoming cheaper.
By 2022, however, public attitudes toward nuclear power were improving, including among Democrats who had been skeptical of the technology. Nuclear reactors can generate electricity around the clock without releasing greenhouse gases.
Officials working in the Biden administration and for Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, tried unsuccessfully to convince Entergy to keep Palisades open. So they turned to Holtec.
It was a gamble. The company was in the business of making the equipment to store spent nuclear fuel and dismantling old reactors, not running plants.
Holtec quickly estimated that reopening Palisades would take two years and cost more than $1.9 billion, including a contingency for cost overruns, records show.
It took almost that long just to line up customers and other financing after the Energy Department rejected Holtec’s initial application for subsidies. Holtec eventually pushed the restart date to October 2025 and then to the end of this year.
Two electric cooperatives, Wolverine Power Cooperative and Hoosier Energy, agreed in 2023 to buy the power Palisades produced for 28 years at a fixed price. A Times review of a Holtec securities filing indicates the co-ops may have agreed to pay roughly $59 per megawatt-hour. That is slightly higher than the market rate for wholesale electricity in the region.
Holtec and Wolverine Power declined to comment on the price. Hoosier Energy did not respond to requests for comment.
It didn’t hurt that the government was showering Palisades with money, including $300 million from Michigan and the promise of federal tax credits once the plant was running. Separately, the Agriculture Department awarded $1.3 billion to Wolverine and Hoosier in late 2024, most of it to be put toward this effort.
It was around then that Holtec discovered a major problem. The plant’s twin steam generators, among its most expensive equipment, were more degraded than the company had expected.
Holtec plugged or repaired thousands of skinny U-shaped metal tubes inside the generators. “That was a significant delay in the project, months,” said Mr. Borah, the operations manager.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission signed off on Holtec’s approach, which activists and some residents worry was insufficient.
“Here at Palisades, there have been so many compromises,” Michael J. Keegan, a co-chairman of the environmental group Don’t Waste Michigan, testified at a June N.R.C. hearing where he argued that Holtec should have replaced the steam generators.
Dr. Springman, Holtec’s president, said the repaired equipment had been extensively inspected and tested. “We feel very comfortable with the safety of the component,” he said.
This spring, Palisades resembled a Lego set that was being reassembled. Scaffolding draped in orange fabric straddled the turbines and a generator that converts steam into electricity. Nearby, a worker cleaned pipes. A screen showed men clad in white protective suits inspecting a giant metal barrel designed to hold nuclear fuel in the nearby reactor building.
Holtec, which is responsible for any additional expenses tied to the project’s delay, declined to share an updated cost estimate.
Mr. Springman said that describing the project as delayed was “unfair” since the contractual deadline for restarting the facility is March 2027.
It is a sensitive time for Holtec, which this month filed paperwork for an initial public offering. Armed with its experience at Palisades, the company wants to build and operate smaller nuclear reactors, starting at the Michigan site.
It is riding growing enthusiasm for nuclear power. The federal government, technology companies and others are offering to invest in or lend money to nuclear companies. Elsewhere, the energy crisis stemming from the war with Iran is pushing countries toward nuclear energy.
That Palisades has been slow to reopen was of little concern to Gail Patterson-Gladney, a commissioner in Van Buren County, the plant’s home. “We are like a prototype, something that’s never been done,” Ms. Patterson-Gladney said.
Jim Wilson, 66, who lives down the road from Palisades, has been readjusting to the idea of having the plant back online. He recently bought a Geiger counter to measure background radiation levels in his home.
“I have faith that they’ll do it right,” Mr. Wilson said. “Otherwise I’d have a for-sale sign on my house.”
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12) Should We Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent?
More light at the day’s end comes at a price: much later winter sunrises across much of the U.S. Scientists have documented consequences for public health and the economy.
By Lynne Peeples, July 27, 2026
Lynne Peeples is a science writer in Seattle who has written about circadian rhythms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/science/daylight-saving-time-health-safety.html
George Etheredge for The New York Times
The Sunshine Protection Act, passed by the House this month, promises an easy fix to an unpopular ritual: The bill would halt the twice-yearly changing of the clocks and make daylight saving time permanent.
A competing House measure, introduced in early July, would lock the clock on standard time. Now lawmakers confront three imperfect options: permanent daylight saving time, permanent standard time, or the seasonal clock-switching we have now.
Permanent daylight saving time may well be the riskiest of those choices, many scientists believe, with unintended consequences for health and the economy. Ultimately, the question is where to place an hour of daylight, a particularly scarce resource in winter.
The name of the House bill “gives the illusion that you’re increasing the amount of light,” said Jamie Zeitzer, co-director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences at Stanford University.
“But you’re not. You’re just changing when the light occurs.”
In Seattle, for example, permanent daylight saving time would push sunrise past 8:30 a.m. for roughly 10 weeks each winter. Permanent standard time would bring sunrise before 4:30 a.m. for about two months each summer.
Many sleep and circadian scientists think the disputed hour belongs in the morning. A network of clocks throughout the body coordinates everything from immune defenses to metabolism. The most potent time-setting signal for that system: sunlight.
Bright mornings and dark evenings help keep the internal clocks in sync, so the body can perform the right functions at the right times. Shifting an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening potentially disrupts this circadian system.
“The preponderance of the evidence is that daylight saving time is not good for our health or safety, and I think it shouldn’t happen,” said Elizabeth B. Klerman, a sleep and circadian researcher at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Studies link chronic circadian misalignment to higher risks of cardiovascular and metabolic disease, some cancers and mental health problems. That’s one reason why the American Medical Association and other health, sleep and scientific organizations have endorsed permanent standard time.
Still, the appeal of permanent daylight saving time is obvious. More people would leave school and work before dark during the winter. Extra evening light might encourage exercise and socializing and, some studies suggest, reduce car accidents and rates of certain crimes.
“Where is that hour of daylight the most beneficial? I think it’s a pretty intuitive answer — when people are awake to use it,” said Steve Calandrillo, a law professor at the University of Washington who has studied the economics of daylight saving time.
The cost is darker mornings. “The worst choice of all three options is permanent D.S.T.,” said Dr. Phyllis C. Zee, director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
The country has tried it before. In January 1974 during the oil crisis, Congress imposed year-round daylight saving time. It was popular at first — until people began complaining about the “second dark age,” and children were struck and killed walking to school in the dark.
Officials scrapped the experiment, and most of the country went back to seasonal clock changes, a system some researchers now consider the lesser of three evils.
Mixed Research
The public has little appetite for keeping the status quo. Only 12 percent of Americans say they want to keep springing forward and falling back, according to an AP-NORC poll in October.
Beyond the annoyance, studies have found measurable short-term consequences to resetting the clocks: upticks in traffic accidents and heart attacks, dips in life satisfaction, even reductions in charitable giving and longer criminal sentences handed down by judges.
Settling on a permanent time brings its own trade-offs, although the evidence here is thinner.
Results of studies predicting road safety, for example, under year-round daylight saving time land all over the map — with positive, negative and no effects. Much of that research draws on clock transitions or short extensions of daylight saving time, making it hard to know how the effects would play out during a permanent change, Dr. Klerman said.
Still, one analysis exploited natural variations in sunrise and sunset times to estimate that permanent daylight saving time could prevent hundreds of pedestrian and motor-vehicle deaths a year, largely because evenings see more traffic than mornings do. Another study found that robberies dropped with extended evening light.
But such gains, scientists note, could be offset in other ways by darker mornings, chronic sleep loss and circadian disruption. Even under the current seasonal system, research suggests our circadian clocks never fully adjust to the spring shift.
So some researchers have tried to gauge the effects of permanent daylight saving time by comparing people living at different positions within time zones.
These studies link living on the western side, where the sun rises and sets later by the clock, to less sleep, lower wages and higher rates of some cancers and suicide. And one study found significantly higher rates of fatal traffic crashes in counties unusually far west in their time zones.
Modern life has muddied the picture. Many people spend their days in relatively dim indoor light and their evenings under much the same artificial light, blurring the natural contrast between day and night.
Scientists may still debate the risks and benefits of moving to permanent daylight saving time, but generally agree on one point: Different people in different places will experience them in different ways.
Worries About Children
Extreme early birds, for example, might do fine with extra evening light — it could even help them stay awake long enough to enjoy a night out.
But teenagers and night owls might struggle, scientists say. Circadian timing usually shifts later during puberty; adolescents tend to fall asleep later and wake up later. Darker mornings could dial their natural clocks later still, even as school bells force them out of bed early.
One risk: car accidents. “High schoolers are driving cars to school in the dark in the middle of their biological night,” said Horacio de la Iglesia, a biologist at the University of Washington who has studied circadian rhythms for decades.
Other potential hazards range from mental health to academic performance. Winter depression among teenagers and young adults in Russia rose after it adopted permanent daylight saving time in 2011, then fell again after the country switched to permanent standard time in 2014.
Because brains, not factories, drive much of today’s economy, student performance may be the strongest economic case against year-round daylight saving time and for year-round standard time, said Philipp Neumann, an economics researcher at Bielefeld University in Germany.
Taking advantage of Indiana’s historically uneven adoption of daylight saving time, one study found SAT test scores were an average 16 points lower in counties that observed seasonal daylight saving time compared with those on permanent standard time. The gap widened among lower-income students.
Dr. de la Iglesia studied students before and after Seattle high schools moved their morning bells to 8:45 a.m., about an hour later than before. Students slept about 34 minutes more a night, and grades and attendance improved.
Permanent daylight saving time, he said, would “undo all the benefits of the school start time delay.”
Certain businesses, however, clearly profit from later sunsets. Retail and entertainment interests have long supported daylight saving time and its extension. Candy companies, too, backed delaying the fall clock change until after Halloween.
Dr. Neumann coauthored a broad review weighing the short- and long-term effects of permanent daylight saving time and permanent standard time on health, road safety, crime, electricity use and the economy.
The conclusion: Permanent standard time came out ahead overall, driven largely by the expected health benefits.
Too Soon?
Under current law, states may opt out of daylight saving time and stay on standard time year-round, as Arizona and Hawaii do. Both bills before Congress would change the national default while leaving some room for state choice.
But too much local discretion risks recreating the very confusion that standard time zones were designed to fix, Dr. Zeitzer said.
Before U.S. railroads introduced standard time zones in 1883, towns set their clocks to strike noon when the sun reached its zenith overhead. As The New York Times put it that November, if clocks had rung an alarm at local noon from Maine to the Pacific, “there would have been a continuous ringing from the east to the west lasting for 3¼ hours.”
Returning to true local sun time isn’t practical in a modern, interconnected society, Dr. Zeitzer said — even though, biologically, he considers that standard the best solution.
Among the more viable options, scientific opinions diverge. Some researchers actually prefer the current system to either permanent alternative.
Acknowledging the limited and inconsistent evidence to date, a recent review of more than 150 studies found the effects of clock changes and seasonal daylight saving time were “not uniformly detrimental.” The authors concluded that continuing the biannual dance, while working to mitigate its negative effects, is “worth consideration — until more robust evidence emerges.”
David Prerau, a leading expert on daylight saving time, suggests that we keep the twice-yearly resets but ramp up public campaigns urging people to prepare as they would for jet lag, by getting more sleep and slowly shifting bedtimes, meals and even medication schedules ahead of transitions.
“Before we make any major change, I would at least try it,” Dr. Prerau said.
Till Roenneberg, a circadian researcher and professor emeritus at LMU Munich who has long studied human sleep timing, also sees biological logic in the seasonal switch and prefers it to permanent daylight saving time.
His own preference, though, is permanent standard time — paired with more flexible school and work start times.
The problem here isn’t really the clock but the rigid schedules society has built around it, he and other scientists say.
School and work schedules should be delayed or relaxed to better accommodate both early birds and night owls, who don’t all thrive on the same fixed clock, they say. Schedules could even be shifted with the seasons.
Permanent daylight saving time “is not a problem except for the fact that businesses are still telling people to get into work at 8 a.m.,” Dr. Zeitzer said. “And schools are still opening up at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m.”
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