The Bay Area Demo Legal Collab and friends are hosting a Grand Jury education and training event. Join us for a political history of how Grand Juries are used for political repression, hear from Grand Jury resisters and learn how to plan for repression for yourself and your community.
In the Bay Area there have been recent FBI visits, Grand Jury subpoenas and investigations into our political movements. If you are contacted by the feds or other law enforcement agencies you should exercise your rights and reach out to legal support:
· You do not have to open your door or let FBI or other agents into your home without a warrant.
· You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney: you do not have to talk to FBI or other agents or answer their questions. It can be dangerous to do so. Say, "I do not want to answer questions without my lawyer. Please slip your card under the door and my lawyer will call you."
· For legal help, call the Bay Area Federal Defense Line, 415-285-1041 and someone will return your call within 48 hours.
The Bay Area Federal Defense line can help connect you to a lawyer if you are contacted by agents related to progressive political activism. It is sponsored by the Bay Area Demo Legal Support Collaborative- a joint effort of Legal Solidarity Bay Area, NLG-SF, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, Anti-Repression Committee, and Oaklaw.
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We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. 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) Oklahoma Becomes First of Three States to Execute Inmates on the Same Day
Executions were also scheduled in Alabama and Tennessee, which faces scrutiny over a failed execution last month.
By Emily Cochrane, Reporting from Nashville, Aug. 13, 2026
Alabama is one of three states planning to carry out executions by lethal injection on Thursday. Dave Martin/Associated Press
Oklahoma became the first of three states to execute an inmate on Thursday using lethal injection, in what would be the first time in more than a decade that three people on death row are killed on the same day.
Tennessee was scheduled to carry out its execution at the same time, while the execution in Alabama was planned for the early evening.
Nationally, states are on track to execute far fewer people in 2026 than in previous years. Public support for capital punishment is at its lowest level in decades, according to Gallup polls, even as the Trump administration has called the death penalty an “essential tool for deterring and punishing” horrific crimes.
Each of the three men scheduled to die Thursday was convicted of murder. In Tennessee, Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, was convicted of the 1985 stabbing and murder of a motel maid. In Oklahoma, Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, was convicted of fatally shooting his then-girlfriend in 2003. In Alabama, Jeremy Williams, 42, pleaded guilty to the sexual assault and murder of a 5-year-old girl in 2021.
Officials at the Oklahoma Department of Corrections confirmed that Mr. Cuesta-Rodriguez died at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, about 130 miles east of Oklahoma City. He was pronounced dead at 10:13 a.m.
Officials in Tennessee had convened Thursday for their execution. That procedure was expected to be closely watched because it comes after officials called off the scheduled lethal injection in May of Tony Carruthers, a man convicted of three 1993 murders, when medical staff were unable to find a vein. Mr. Carruthers received a yearlong reprieve from Gov. Bill Lee.
Maria DeLiberato, a lawyer for Mr. Carruthers who witnessed the series of failed attempts to insert a line for the lethal drug, later wrote in The New York Times that it was an agonizing experience that lasted more than an hour.
Mr. Hines’s lawyers have asserted that the state’s lethal injection procedure could violate the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. In one court filing, the state of Tennessee responded that “the U.S. and Tennessee Constitutions do not demand avoidance of all pain in executions.”
Mr. Hines was found guilty in 1986 of the stabbing death of Catherine Jenkins at the Kingston Springs motel where she had worked as a maid. He has maintained his innocence and unsuccessfully fought for a new trial in Tennessee.
Tennessee restarted executions in 2025 after a pause begun in 2022 when it admitted that its lethal injection drugs had not been properly tested. Mr. Hines is part of a lawsuit challenging the new injection procedure.
Lawyers for Mr. Hines have also criticized state officials for not disclosing more information about the failed execution of Mr. Carruthers. The state also won’t disclose whether the doctor who was unable to administer the lethal drugs to Mr. Carruthers would be tending to Mr. Hines.
Tennessee officials say that state procedure bars the identification of any medical staff involved in an execution.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday declined to intervene in Mr. Hines’s case.
Only six states have plans to carry out capital punishment this year. Florida remains by far the most aggressive in its use of the death penalty, accounting for 12 of the 20 executions carried out so far this year.
Oklahoma has executed three people this year. Mr. Cuesta-Rodriguez, the inmate executed Thursday, said at a recent hearing that he did not want clemency, according to local reports. Instead, he said he wanted to apologize to the surviving children of Olimpia Fisher, 43, his then-girlfriend. After a string of domestic assaults, he shot and killed her during a confrontation.
In Alabama, Mr. Williams will be the state’s first person executed this year after the Supreme Court issued a rare decision in June blocking the scheduled execution of another inmate by nitrogen gas. Mr. Williams dropped an appeal, effectively requesting that the death penalty be carried out.
Ann E. Marimow contributed reporting from Washington.
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2) U.S. Investigated Left-Leaning Groups During Minnesota Immigration Crackdown
The government conducted expansive surveillance, infiltrated group chats and obtained financial records of organizations never accused of crimes.
By Alan Feuer and Ernesto Londoño, Aug. 13, 2026
Alan Feuer reported from New York, and Ernesto Londoño from St. Paul, Minn.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/us/politics/dhs-inquiry-immigration-protests-minnesota.html
People marched through downtown Minneapolis in late January to protest the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Four days after Alex Pretti was fatally shot while filming officers taking part in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, the Homeland Security Department quietly opened an investigation at its office in St. Paul.
The target was not the Border Patrol agents who had killed Mr. Pretti, a 37-year-old government nurse, in late January. Instead, it was several left-leaning political organizations — labor unions, a climate change group, socialist collectives — that investigators believed had provided help and money to what they described as the “violent opportunists and agitators” on the street, according to newly released government documents.
As part of their inquiry, the documents show, homeland security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.
In one instance, officials used administrative subpoenas to obtain more than three years of financial records from the Sunrise Movement, an environmental action group, and a labor union, the Communications Workers of America. That time frame went well beyond the civil unrest in Minnesota, which was prompted by the deployment of thousands of immigration agents to the state during the winter.
In another, investigators scrutinized three years’ worth of wire transfers made by the nation’s biggest health care workers union, the Service Employees International Union, in what they referred to as an inquiry into “domestic terrorist financing.”
The documents further detailed an expansive covert surveillance operation in which undercover agents spied on protesters and organizers at meetings held online, as well as in libraries, parks and churches, taking down not only what they said, but also their names and sometimes license plate numbers. The undercover agents also infiltrated group chats on Signal, listening as activists discussed coming demonstrations and their political opinions.
So far, none of the organizations targeted by the homeland security inquiry, conducted with the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, have faced charges. And yet, as the investigation moved forward, prosecutors showed grand jurors a PowerPoint slide asserting that 18 groups — including the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the country’s largest federation of labor unions — were part of a conspiracy to impede the work of immigration officers in Minnesota.
Ultimately, that supposed conspiracy led in June to the indictment of 15 people accused of interfering with law enforcement agents as members of the far-left movement known as antifa.
The Homeland Security Department did not respond to a message seeking comment. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to answer questions about the investigative tactics.
By its own account, the institutional left in Minnesota, especially the labor movement, played a central role in bringing out hundreds of thousands of people to march in protest of President Trump’s immigration crackdown in the state. But the demonstrations — and corresponding efforts to monitor the movements of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — were largely undertaken by ordinary residents, most of whom have said they were committed to peaceful resistance.
“While federal agents repeatedly broke the law, ordinary people exercised their First Amendment rights to protect their neighbors,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement. “The Trump administration is now trying to intimidate individuals and organizations who opposed his agenda.”
Some of the 15 people charged in the so-called antifa case did, in fact, belong to some of the unions and political organizations that faced scrutiny over several months during the spring and winter. But the newly released documents, which were disclosed as part of a motion asking for more details about the criminal inquiry, suggest that investigators used those tenuous connections to take a deep dive into the inner workings of the groups.
Kevin Riach, the lawyer who filed the motion, in Federal District Court in Minnesota, wrote that the homeland security investigation into the interference with federal agents “extended far beyond any potential threat to law enforcement safety.”
“It concluded, with no evidence (but obvious political animus),” he wrote, “that numerous Twin Cities unions and nonprofit organizations were involved in a widespread conspiracy,” adding that “it surveilled and surreptitiously gathered financial records generated by these organizations despite the lack of any connection between those organizations and criminal conduct.”
The investigation in some ways called to mind Cointelpro, the intrusive counterintelligence program that the F.B.I. ran against leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s under the leadership of the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover.
The Minnesota surveillance reports in particular documented what largely appeared to be political activity protected by the First Amendment. They showed how undercover agents embedded themselves in a “noise protest” outside a hotel where immigration agents were staying and took down notes at other gatherings as demonstrators brainstormed ideas on how to protest the surge of officers who descended on Minnesota late last year.
Former federal prosecutors questioned why homeland security officials took the lead in a case that would typically be overseen by the F.B.I. Others said that the broad use of subpoenas targeting labor unions and other groups was unusual and concerning, especially if it turns out there was no evidence that the organizations were breaking the law.
“The government’s power to investigate is extraordinary, and with that power comes a responsibility to exercise care and restraint,” said Harry Jacobs, who resigned as the chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota in January in protest over the Trump administration’s handling of the killing of Renee Good.
“An investigation should begin with a legitimate basis to suspect criminal conduct, not with a chosen institution or group,” Mr. Jacobs added. “Prosecutors must follow the facts and the law wherever they lead, rather than select a target and work backwards to build a case.”
Several of the groups that were targeted in the inquiry, known as Operation Puppet Master, and in a follow-up investigation called Project Whipple Shield, declined to comment. (Whipple Shield is a reference to the Whipple Building, which served as a hub of the immigration operation.)
When Daniel N. Rosen, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, announced the indictment of the 15 purported antifa members two months ago, he chose his words carefully, insisting that the defendants had been charged only because each of them had “violently opposed” federal agents taking part in the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.
“Be assured,” he told reporters, “the Department of Justice and my U.S. attorney’s office has and will distinguish between lawful protest and criminal conduct.”
But what Mr. Rosen did not disclose that day was that the charges filed against the 15 defendants stemmed from a sprawling investigation. Its tentacles had touched the lives of scores of ordinary people — teachers, veterans, union members — who in many instances had gotten together to do little more than discuss monitoring ICE agents or abolishing ICE altogether.
The case in St. Paul, like others against ICE protesters, arose from a sweeping directive issued last year by Mr. Trump known as National Security Presidential Memo 7. The memo ordered a whole-of-government approach to stem what officials have described as a rising tide of left-wing political violence.
But former prosecutors and civil rights lawyers have criticized it for encouraging aggressive investigations and prosecutions of groups and people on the left for activities typically protected by free speech laws.
In drafting their indictment, prosecutors under Mr. Rosen focused on an organization called Direct Action Minnesota, or DAMN, an umbrella group that describes itself as a “decentralized coalition of working-class people engaged in various forms of community defense against the current federal occupation” in Minnesota. Prosecutors said that the group trained its members in how to use shields against law enforcement officers, conduct surveillance, plan events and mount “rapid mass mobilization” against actions by ICE officers.
The indictment details some behavior by protesters with ties to DAMN that clearly seems violent or obstructive.
For example, prosecutors said that on Jan. 23, demonstrators who had gathered at the Whipple Building threw ice blocks at law enforcement vehicles. They also formed a blockade, boxing federal agents into one area near the federal building. Weeks later, prosecutors added, some of the defendants put debris in a road outside the building, trying to block access to it.
But the indictment also notes that the defendants often relied on information gleaned from group chats whose members tracked and monitored vehicles going to and from the Whipple Building — behavior that is not necessarily illegal. Indeed, the federal judge overseeing the case, Katherine M. Menendez, has already issued an order in a separate civil proceeding saying that protesters cannot be arrested simply for following federal agents in their vehicles.
Nonetheless, some groups that organized and ran the group chats were targeted by the surveillance operation and later identified in the prosecutors’ grand jury presentation as being part of the conspiracy to interfere with ICE agents. Other members of the alleged conspiracy were said to include the local chapters of the S.E.I.U. and the Democratic Socialists of America, a state teachers’ union — and even the Grease Pit, a small bike shop in Minneapolis.
In his motion, Mr. Riach described how federal agents took down the license plate numbers of people who attended a protest at a church in Roseville, Minn., and used that information to obtain their names. The agents then searched social media for images of the people, compiling an “intel work-up” that included detailed personal information about them.
“None of these individuals did anything other than engage in protected First Amendment speech in a church meeting room,” Mr. Riach wrote. “Yet now their personal information is memorialized in a D.H.S. dossier.”
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3) Deaths of 3 ICE Detainees Prompt Questions About Medical Care
Immigrants at Delaney Hall in Newark have complained about health services. Federal officials defended the treatment provided there and elsewhere.
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Ana Ley, Aug. 13, 2026
The treatment of detainees at the Delaney Hall center in Newark has come under scrutiny. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The first death came in December.
A 41-year-old immigrant from Haiti died after suffering a medical emergency within hours of arriving at Delaney Hall, a troubled, privately run immigration detention center in New Jersey.
Months later, a Delaney detainee from Guatemala had what appeared to be a seizure and died after being transported to a hospital, federal officials said on Wednesday. And earlier this month, a man from El Salvador, 41, suffered a medical emergency; the cause of his death remains unknown.
The deaths of three Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees in less than eight months have raised urgent questions about the medical services provided at Delaney Hall and at other detention centers, with immigrants and local officials describing haphazard health care.
In interviews, immigration lawyers said that detainees at the 1,000-bed center have routinely encountered hurdles in receiving daily medications and comprehensive treatment for chronic diseases such as cancer. Injuries that were sustained by detainees during arrests by ICE sometimes go untreated, they said.
Dozens of detainees at Delaney Hall have complained about medical neglect there during the past year.
The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said that detainees receive good medical care. Geo Group, the private company that operates Delaney, did not respond to requests for comment for this article. The company has previously disputed allegations of substandard conditions included in federal and state reports.
Federal lawmakers have sought to make their own assessment but have received only limited access during their tours of Delaney.
Similar complaints have emerged about other detention centers. Congressional Democrats documented 85 reports of medical neglect in detention centers across the United States. In Texas, four detainees this year sued the country’s largest detention center, accusing it of human rights abuses.
“There’s a systemic problem of people having access to medical care” at the detention center, said Michael Musa-Obregon, a New York lawyer who has represented dozens of clients held at Delaney. “A lot of people are ignored when they request medical care, whether it’s for routine medical or even emergency medical situations.”
Details of the deaths tied to Delaney remain unclear, making it difficult to establish whether they stemmed from systemic failures, delayed care or unavoidable medical complications.
At least one family — the relatives of the Salvadoran man who died — has said that it believes he died because staff members failed to properly care for his underlying conditions, including epilepsy, high blood pressure and diabetes.
Federal standards of care require ICE to conduct a physical examination and mental health screening of detainees within 14 days of arriving. The same standards mandate that detention centers have a physician available around the clock, and prescription medication and other treatments are expected to be provided on a timely basis.
“It is a longstanding practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters ICE custody,” homeland security officials said on Wednesday. “This includes medical, dental and mental health services as available, and access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care.”
The living conditions at Delaney have come under scrutiny by Democratic lawmakers and state investigators since the Trump administration opened the center last year.
Overcrowding, spoiled food, dirty living quarters, the acrid smell of body odor are among the complaints that have been lodged by detainees, prompting unrest and hunger strikes in protest.
The New Jersey Department of Health had tried to inspect the detention center’s infection-control protocols and practices, but was turned away in June. New Jersey’s attorney general sued to force the center to allow state health inspectors inside. The suit is pending.
After each death of a Delaney detainee, federal officials said that proper care had been provided to the men who died.
ICE officials said that emergency workers performed “lifesaving measures” on Jean Wilson Brutus, the immigrant from Haiti, before he was taken to a Newark hospital, where he died the next day of what appeared to be “natural causes.”
Delaney employees “responded immediately” when the detainee from El Salvador, Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, had a medical emergency, officials said.
And the man from Guatemala, Jose Chajon-Raxon, “was provided proper medical care from the nurse who reassured him he was safe” during his apparent seizure, officials said. His death had gone unreported for weeks until ICE officials acknowledged it in a statement late Wednesday.
At least 53 other people have died after being held at detention centers since President Trump took office last year, according to a New York Times analysis. The 33 deaths that were recorded in 2025 were the most ICE custody deaths in a single year. But because so many more immigrants have been detained as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, the rate of deaths is not as high as in the early 2000s.
Some immigration lawyers suggested that ICE may be struggling to provide adequate medical care because of the number of people it has detained, with little regard for factors such as age or medical conditions that might make them vulnerable in detention.
“Unfortunately, they have no shame in taking in people who are elderly, people who are sick, people who have pre-existing medical conditions, people who suffer from cognitive disabilities, people who are receiving ongoing treatment like dialysis or for diabetes,” said Reuben Kerben, a lawyer who has represented people held at Delaney.
At Delaney and elsewhere, some detainees say standards of care often go unmet.
Eleazar Garcia Nieto, 40, said he had to press Delaney staff members to receive his daily medication for a thyroid condition and high cholesterol.
Mr. Garcia Nieto, who migrated from Mexico two decades ago, was apprehended by ICE agents on June 27 outside the hotel in New Jersey where he works as a chef, according to court records. He was taken to Delaney, where he said he was kept for about a day inside a warehouselike room with about 100 other detainees who were being processed, all forced to stand, sit or sprawl out on the floor.
“Do you imagine having so many people packed in one place?” he said in an interview. “I was surprised they didn’t take precautions to protect not just us, but their employees, too.”
Over three days, he said, he was asked to fill out the same paperwork repeatedly for his medication.
“It’s a headache to obtain any type of medical help,” he said. “You have to plead and supplicate with whoever is in charge.”
He was eventually summoned to the infirmary, where he encountered a doctor and two women whom he believed to be nurses. About 10 other detainees waited for hours outside the infirmary. Some were older, and some had diabetes, he said. They stood or sat on one of the five available chairs.
In the end, Mr. Garcia Nieto received his medication — a day before he was freed after his lawyer filed an emergency lawsuit requesting his release.
Neither ICE nor the Geo Group responded immediately to a request for comment about Mr. Garcia Nieto’s experience.
Elora Mukherjee, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, said that some of her clients had accepted deportation to avoid the dismal living conditions at Delaney Hall, where she said some other clients had been deprived of their medicine.
“They have been in pain, sometimes unbearable pain, for days,” she said.
Mark Bonamo, Nicole Hong, Allison McCann and Tracey Tully contributed reporting.
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4) With Trump’s Hamas Deal in Peril, Kushner Set to Visit Israel for Gaza Talks
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s senior aide, is expected to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who has rejected a U.S.-backed deal to disarm Hamas.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Aug. 14, 2026
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s senior aide and son-in-law, is set to visit Israel early next week, according to four people familiar with the plans, days after the Israeli government rejected a U.S.-brokered disarmament deal with Hamas.
Mr. Kushner is expected to meet with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss Gaza, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to divulge details about Mr. Kushner’s schedule.
The deal, agreed to late last month between Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace and the militant group Hamas, called for the disarmament of Palestinian factions in Gaza and the withdrawal of Israeli forces there.
The Board of Peace is a new international organization chaired by Mr. Trump that has focused on plans for governing and rebuilding Gaza. Mr. Kushner is a senior member of its executive board and was involved in cease-fire negotiations between Hamas and Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel rejected the deal, a move that was seen as an appeal to his right-wing voting base ahead of national elections in October. Yet the prime minister also ordered the Israeli military to pause its strikes in Gaza, in an apparent effort to appease the Trump administration.
For days after the announcement, the Israeli military conducted no airstrikes in Gaza, until Wednesday, when the military carried out a fresh attack, saying it was targeting Hamas militants. It conducted further attacks on Thursday.
Hamas officials have condemned the strikes, calling on mediating countries in the region to pressure Israel to halt them.
Hamas remains in control of about half of Gaza, where most of its people live. The group said that among those killed by Israel this week was the head of the police force in the Gaza City area.
Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s high representative for Gaza and former United Nations envoy, will join Mr. Kushner in Israel, according to two of the people with knowledge of the visit. Mr. Mladenov has played a leading role in the negotiations with Hamas over disarmament, frequently meeting with officials from the group in Egypt.
Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mladenov were also expected to visit Egypt next week to meet with regional mediators, according to two of the people.
The deal with Hamas says that, as part of the disarmament process, Israel should first uphold its side of the cease-fire, which was agreed to in October last year. That includes halting airstrikes and allowing more aid into Gaza.
The 15-point document leaves elements of the disarmament process vague, however. It calls for a “gradual, sequential and timebound manner” for decommissioning and storing heavy weapons, with an exact timetable still to be determined.
It adds that, at the “end of the process,” the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, will “hold, control or store weapons in Gaza.” The committee, a body of Palestinian technocrats, was assembled by the Board of Peace to take over governing Gaza under the board’s supervision.
Many Israelis remain skeptical that Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace can successfully disarm Hamas. The group has long touted armed struggle against Israel as the core of its ideology, and members have said they regard disarmament as tantamount to surrender.
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5) Little Thefts, Big Charges: Trump’s Justice Dept. Targets Lesser Fraud
As the Trump administration drops charges against corporations and the wealthy, it is also taking aim at small-scale fraud cases, including against the operator of a weathered food truck in California.
By Devlin Barrett, Reporting from Washington, Aug. 14, 2026
Justice Department officials have internally declared that each assistant U.S. attorney should have at least 25 open cases at all times. Credit...Alex Kent/The New York Times
As the White House expands its “war on fraud,” the Justice Department announced criminal charges in recent days against a new symbol of that battle — a food truck in Santa Ana, Calif.
Soriano Produce, a weathered white food truck advertising ice cream treats as well as fruits and vegetables, drew the attention of undercover agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement for what investigators said was a startlingly high number of food stamp transactions for such a small business.
The case against the food truck owner, Esmeralda Soriano, is an example of the Trump administration’s push to show that “no fraud is small enough or big enough to look away from,” as Vice President JD Vance said in a speech in April.
The new emphasis on small-dollar fraud comes as the administration has issued pardons and commutations to white-collar convicts, pulled back from pursuing criminal cases against multinational corporations and dropped high-profile charges against wealthy executives.
Administration officials say they are pressing to prosecute fraud involving government-funded programs because Democrats have failed to do so at the federal, state and local levels. Current and former federal prosecutors, however, criticize the change as effectively lowering the standards of a Justice Department that for decades prided itself on tackling big, financially complex investigations in executive suites, and leaving the small cases in corner stores and food trucks to local agencies.
A food truck “is not the kind of case you would typically see federal law enforcement resources being poured into,” said Jacqueline Kelly, a former federal prosecutor. “And that’s resources being pulled from other areas. We’re not seeing an increase in fraud prosecutions involving public companies, investment frauds and the more traditional Wall Street prosecutions typically pursued by the Justice Department.”
Matthew Tragesser, a spokesman for the department, disputed the characterization, saying that it “will never turn a blind eye to fraud.”
“Pursuing only the largest-dollar cases while ignoring smaller ones would send precisely the wrong message — that low-level fraudsters are immune from federal prosecution,” he added. “They are not.”
The White House is directing the administration’s anti-fraud push, with the Justice Department establishing a new division intended to fight fraud whose leaders report to Mr. Vance.
The prosecution of low-level cases has long been left to state and local officials, an arrangement that the Trump administration maintains has allowed small-time fraud to mushroom into a significant drag on public funds. White House officials have pointed to Minnesota, where dozens of people have been accused of stealing millions from a government program meant to keep children fed during the coronavirus pandemic, as an example of the kind of fraud that has been allowed to fester.
The same day that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced the case against Ms. Soriano, they trumpeted separate charges against Jesse Cervantes-Gomez, a cashier who worked at a Los Angeles grocery and party supply store. He was accused of accepting $9,559.04 worth of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cards, commonly known as food stamps, as payment to the store and giving undercover ICE agents $4,810 in cash in exchange.
Federal prosecutors initially sought to keep both defendants, who are U.S. citizens, behind bars as they await trial on charges that may not even lead to jail time under federal sentencing guidelines. Judges instead freed them on a $5,000 bond each. A lawyer for Mr. Cervantes-Gomez declined to comment. A lawyer for Ms. Soriano did not respond to a request for comment.
In both instances, the undercover operations to ensnare the defendants were conducted by ICE, an agency whose mission is immigration enforcement.
Food stamp fraud is a simple but enduring scam — use benefits meant to feed low-income people to instead get cash. Until recently, however, those kinds of cases were generally left to local and state investigators, considered too small for the federal government. In the instances of Ms. Soriano and Mr. Cervantes-Gomez, investigators say the businesses tallied up suspiciously high amounts of receipts for food stamps.
In announcing the charges against Ms. Soriano, the Justice Department said the food truck’s lack of scanners, “coupled with consistent high-dollar transactions and rapid back-to-back transactions, are indicators of possible fraud.” Over a one-year period, the truck redeemed more than $600,000 in food stamp benefits, far larger than similarly sized competitors, prosecutors said. That suspicious data is different, however, from the amounts of fraud that can be charged or proved in court.
For decades, federal prosecutors have generally insisted on minimum-dollar thresholds before pursuing fraud cases. In many U.S. attorney’s offices in big cities, the threshold sits around half a million dollars.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, the administration has decreed that that rule of thumb no longer applies. Current and former prosecutors worry that a Justice Department already suffering from the departures of thousands of experienced prosecutors is lowering the bar for fraud cases that will produce more indictments, but less meaningful work.
To try to drive up the number of cases, department officials have internally declared that each assistant U.S. attorney should have at least 25 open cases at all times. For a low-level prosecutor handling common drug or violent offenses — or food stamp fraud — that is not particularly high. For a senior prosecutor handling complex public corruption or corporate fraud investigations, two dozen open cases can be a crushing workload.
In phone calls to prosecutors around the country, a senior Justice Department official, Aakash Singh, has pushed back against criticism of the rule. That threshold of 25 cases is the bare minimum to show that a prosecutor “has a pulse,” he has told officials, according to people familiar with his remarks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share the details of internal discussions.
For more than a decade, the number of financial crimes prosecuted by the Justice Department has gradually shrunk. The reasons offered for the broad decline vary — some contend that the government is more reluctant, or less experienced, in pursuing fraud, or that gathering reams of evidence in a digital age has become more time-consuming.
From the start of Mr. Trump’s second term to this May, the administration brought 4,747 white-collar cases, or about 5 percent of the total criminal cases, according to federal statistics analyzed by Justice Connection, a group of former department employees that has been critical of the Trump administration’s sweeping changes.
Those figures are a significant drop from previous administrations (5,554 cases from the same period under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; 6,626 cases in Mr. Trump’s first term; and 8,781 cases in President Barack Obama’s second term).
The founder of Justice Connection, Stacey Young, said the department under Mr. Trump had been “all over the map when it comes to fraud,” citing its uneven application of prosecutions.
“The president pardons scores of wealthy executives, then creates a new fraud division overseen by the vice president,” she said. “The D.O.J. drops multimillion-dollar fraud cases, then pursues people alleged to have defrauded SNAP of a few thousand dollars. Enforcement priorities send a message, and their message on fraud is chaotic.”
Sarah Krissoff, a former federal prosecutor, warned that pursuing a high volume of low-level fraud cases would come at a price, particularly given the Justice Department’s thinned ranks.
Every new administration, she added, seeks to revamp the department in favor of its priorities, with mixed results.
“They are constantly relabeling stuff, and 95 percent of the time it’s just propaganda — it’s not substantive,” she said. “But this is more significant because the Justice Department has been stripped of so many of its people, particularly its experienced people. If you’re just pushing numbers, you’re going to see a lot of mistakes.”
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6) Conservatives Don’t Like Sociology. Some Sociologists Don’t Either.
A group of sociologists broke away in protest from their colleagues over disagreements about Israel. Some worry the political stances are harming the field.
By Vimal Patel, Aug. 14, 2026
Attendees of a breakaway sociology conference in New York on Tuesday made signs in support of Palestine. Jackie Molloy for The New York Times
The president of the major sociology association, Shelley Correll, had just taken the stage at the discipline’s big annual conference in New York City on Sunday when a few dozen sociologists began chanting “Free Palestine” and unfurled a banner.
The short disruption was partly drowned out by turning up Dr. Correll’s entrance music, Dolly Parton’s “Big Dreams and Faded Jeans.”
Tuning out the broader cacophony around sociology is not so easy, however.
Republicans in some states have singled out sociology as a poster child of everything that is wrong with academia, saying that it has become a hotbed of leftist activism. And rifts have formed within the discipline over whether to take political stances on issues like the war in Gaza.
At the same time, fewer students are signing up for sociology classes, making the debates feel all the more urgent.
Sociologists study human society and behavior. The field has long included a mix of science and activism. But sociology’s difficulties are driving arguments about whether the discipline should rein in its advocacy wing to gain public confidence, or stand its ground against outside attack.
“We lost something through this pursuit of partisanship,” said Fabio Rojas, a professor at Indiana University who writes about schisms in sociology, adding, “There are a lot of people who are just like, ‘I want to go to work and not hear about Palestine.’”
Mixing research and justice
Sociology is sprawling. It includes ethnographers who conduct in-depth interviews, data-driven researchers and those who do both. Many sociologists study crime, demography, religion and other topics that do not generally irk conservatives. Sociology has also become a home for scholars who examine sexism, racism, policing, immigration and other politically charged topics.
The field emerged from the Enlightenment as a way to study human society and behavior amid rapid social change. Scrutinizing power was always a key part of the science, with early sociologists like W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Addams and Harriet Martineau using scholarship to fight against racism, sexism and inequality.
Critics of the discipline say that it is now too hyper-focused on left-leaning concerns like inequality. That word appeared 186 times in the 165-page conference program.
Many sociologists argue that it’s impossible to study human society deeply without seeing inequality and discrimination. And those who support activism argue that it is not a big step to then use that knowledge to push for public policy changes.
The work of Anthony Abraham Jack, a Boston University sociologist, would be labeled activism by some. He wrote an impactful book called “The Privileged Poor,” about food insecurity among students at elite colleges. He then successfully pushed for schools to change their dining-hall policies.
Dr. Jack prefers the term “public scholarship.” He says that his work “is expanding the definition of what scholarship is, to not just publish articles and write books but also to be part of the dissemination of information.” He and other sociologists argue that economists, for instance, might advocate their preferred policy positions but aren’t thought of as “activists.”
But critics of the state of the discipline say sociologists who aim to change the conditions they study can no longer claim to be rigorous scientists. A report released over the weekend about the state of scholarly standards in the field said it had been compromised by politics that influenced the discipline’s values and priorities.
The report was produced by a commission led by Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, where leaders have argued that higher education is in need of reforms. The commission found that scholarship in the humanities and social sciences was sometimes in the service of political goals.
“Some topics cannot be studied or cannot be studied in an honest way,” said Jukka Savolainen, a Wayne State University criminologist and sociologist who is not part of the commission.
For scholars studying incarceration, he said, “the only research that’s rewarded and allowed and encouraged is to find the umpteenth way in which incarceration is harmful.”
How sociology became a target
Other academic disciplines like history and anthropology face many of the same accusations of a left-wing bias. But conservatives in Florida singled out sociology in their push to excise what they said were left-leaning topics from the college curriculum.
Sociology courses are no longer allowed in the required general-education curriculum, a move that has sociology professors fearful that enrollments could plummet in the fall.
Ray Rodrigues, the head of the State University System of Florida, has said that the discipline is “now social and political advocacy dressed in the regalia of the academy.”
Scott Yenor, a conservative activist who briefly served on the board of the University of West Florida, said sociology had acquired a reputation as being left-wing for decades but that there were also strategic reasons it had been singled out by conservatives.
“History can be as bad,” said Dr. Yenor, a Boise State University political scientist, “but going after history makes you seem like you’re anti-intellectual. Conservatives like history.”
The sociology conference’s theme this year played to the scholar-activism wing: “Disrupting the Status Quo: Putting Sociology to Work for a More Equitable Society.” Republicans cited it as further evidence that the discipline was overrun with activism.
Dr. Correll, a Stanford sociologist, picked the theme and defended the scholar-activist model.
In an interview, Dr. Correll, who studies gender inequality in the workplace, said that many people became sociologists “to help make the world a better place.” She added that she had chosen the Dolly Parton song because it “offers a hopeful and compelling blueprint for social change.”
Doubling down to save itself
Student interest in sociology has dramatically dropped in recent decades. One analysis found that since 2013, completions of undergraduate sociology degrees fell by 25 percent.
Sociologists cite factors like a broader societal shift toward degrees that are perceived as prioritizing trade skills. The political attacks do not help.
While concerned sociologists worry that embracing activism could drive away new recruits to the discipline, some say that staying true to the discipline’s social justice roots will be what saves it.
The overall numbers mask that sociology is thriving in some liberal places, especially California. An analysis by Michel Estefan, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, found that two out of every five sociology bachelor’s degrees were earned in California.
The majority of them are students of color. Scholars like Dr. Estefan see a racial component in how quickly researchers are described and dismissed as “activists.” One person’s “activism” is another’s “policy recommendation,” he said.
At the New York conference, fissures over Gaza were the main point of division, not whether sociologists should dial down their activism more broadly.
Close to a thousand sociologists boycotted this year’s event because the group’s leadership did not allow a membership vote on whether to admonish and boycott Israel, according to the boycott’s organizers. More than 4,500 sociologists attended the main conference, officials said. Some attended a shadow conference down the street titled, “Resisting Authoritarianism: Global Solidarity and Democratic Futures.”
Dr. Correll said she did not see how boycotting Israel would make a difference in Gaza.
But Zachary Levenson, a sociologist at Florida International University who is a member of Sociologists for Palestine, said the scholars’ activism was part of a broader movement started by student protesters that had made a difference. It caused “a sea change in public opinion” against Israel that Dr. Levenson said he had never seen before.
Dr. Levenson rejected the notion that the Gaza activism was hurting the discipline’s public perception. It was Dr. Correll, he said, who had embraced “quite literally the politicization of the field” by embracing scholarly advocacy — except on the Gaza issue.
Dr. Correll said she wasn’t worried. She said the disagreement was a sign of pluralism, and that the discipline had overcome major challenges before.
“It’s really healthy for an academic discipline to not be grounded into just one way of being,” she said.
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7) How Cyclospora Evaded the U.S. Food Safety System to Sicken Thousands
The Trump administration delayed a rule last year that could have sped up the effort to pinpoint the source of the contamination. Critics charge that food safety oversight has eroded overall.
By Christina Jewett and Julie Creswell, Aug. 15, 2026
Christina Jewett and Julie Creswell have been covering the causes and consequences of the cyclospora outbreak.
Last year the Food and Drug Administration cut a program that tracked cyclospora outbreaks and delayed a rule that would have required companies to swiftly provide supply chain records in investigations of foodborne disease outbreaks. Al Drago for The New York Times
Cases of cyclosporiasis were mounting rapidly in Michigan and state health officials were homing in on a common thread: Many of those who had fallen ill had eaten at Taco Bell.
On July 1, they asked the company for its supply chain records, crucial information in tracing ingredients that may have caused the outbreak.
On July 3, they wrote and asked for the records again.
On July 6, they wrote a third time.
“With the rapid nature of this outbreak and the number of people affected, we need to ensure we are completing traceback in a timely manner to preserve public health,” Lauren Edwards, an epidemiologist on the state’s rapid response team, said in an email to executives at Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell. (The New York Times obtained the correspondence under Michigan’s open records law.)
Later that day, Taco Bell provided some records to the state, which by then was working with the federal Food and Drug Administration. The F.D.A. asked for additional records two days later. Finally, on July 13, the agency received all the records it needed to pinpoint lettuce from a Taylor Farms plant in Mexico as a source of the outbreak.
A federal rule that had been scheduled to take effect in January would have required Taco Bell to send those records within 24 hours. But last year, the Trump administration delayed the implementation of that rule until mid 2028, saying companies needed more time to prepare.
Food safety experts say the postponement has hindered the response to the outbreak, the largest cluster in a record number of cyclospora cases in the United States this year.
“Time translates into illnesses and lives,” said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, who reviewed the emails from Michigan. He added: “We would have had a much better response to this outbreak if they hadn’t delayed that rule.”
Cyclospora, which can cause explosive diarrhea, cramps and other severe symptoms, has been a recognized driver of foodborne illness for nearly 30 years. But this year’s massive toll — totaling more than 24,500 confirmed or suspected cases so far and two deaths — reveals shortcomings in the U.S. food safety system that may leave Americans more vulnerable to future pathogens, public health experts say.
Many point to an erosion of food safety oversight during the Trump administration, stemming in part from its aggressive efforts to roll back regulations and shrink the federal government. Last year, the F.D.A. laid off many of the staff who supported food inspectors’ travel planning and who coordinate with foreign governments on food safety. (An F.D.A. spokesman said on Friday that “travel support staff and staff that coordinated with foreign governments have been reinstated.”) The administration eliminated a committee tasked with studying problems that led to outbreaks. It also cut a program focused on cyclospora tracking.
“So far this administration has made our food less safe, not safer,” said Scott Faber, the senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “By firing food safety experts, by reducing the number of inspections, by tracking fewer pathogens, and by failing to set up a traceability system that makes sure that we’re able to to clear the shelves quickly.”
Donald Prater, the F.D.A.’s acting deputy commissioner for food, said the agency responded swiftly with the information it had on hand. He added that even if the 24-hour rule had been in effect, it would not have made a major impact on managing this outbreak response.
An F.D.A. spokesman said that protecting the nation’s food supply remains a core responsibility, and the agency has the personnel and resources to respond to outbreaks of foodborne illnesses.
Taco Bell said it responded to requests from Michigan and federal officials in a timely manner. “We acted immediately, voluntarily and proactively to protect our guests and support health officials,” the company said in a statement.
On July 15, federal authorities tied the outbreak to iceberg lettuce that had been supplied to Taco Bell from a plant in Mexico owned by Taylor Farms, the large U.S.-based producer of fresh vegetables, fruits and greens. The next day, Taylor Farms began a recall of their products containing iceberg lettuce that had been shipped to 27 states.
A spokeswoman for Taylor Farms said it promptly responded to requests for information and is cooperating with health officials in the U.S. and Mexico. On July 19, it sent independent third-party experts to conduct a “top-to-bottom review” of food safety processes there.
Yet efforts by authorities to figure out how the iceberg lettuce in Mexico became contaminated by cyclospora, a single-cell parasite that infects the small intestine and spreads through feces, continue to move slowly. Although Taylor Farms temporarily shut down the plant on July 18, F.D.A. inspectors did not arrive in Mexico to inspect it until this week, nearly a month later.
The investigators from the F.D.A. were delayed in traveling partly because of clearances needed to work in an area deemed unsafe for Americans, according to a person familiar with the effort, who was not authorized to speak about it. They also needed to coordinate with the Mexican government and gather enough testing supplies to do a thorough investigation, the person said.
The slow start could make it difficult to discover a root cause of the contamination, said Sandra Eskin, chief executive of Stop Foodborne Illness, a nonprofit working to protect against foodborne pathogens.
Declining inspections
Some of the problems that have hampered the response to this outbreak developed over decades: Scientists who study cyclospora said they have lacked the funding to better understand the parasite, including how it spreads and how to detect it. Food safety advocates say the goals of a landmark food safety law enacted in 2011 have not been met amid weak regulations and falling numbers of foreign food facility inspections.
The federal rule requiring companies to swiftly produce records in an outbreak investigation was drafted under that law, the Food Safety Modernization Act, which gave the F.D.A. new powers to keep food free of parasites and pathogens, to rapidly trace produce through the supply chain and to aggressively expand inspections.
The law set a goal of 19,200 annual foreign inspections by 2016. But foreign inspections have fallen markedly even as the foreign food supply has surged. In 2025, the agency made about 1,100 visits to foreign food plants and cited significant lapses in about 80 of them. Its last visit to the Taylor Farms facility in Mexico was in 2019, records show.
Even though finding the tiny cyclospora parasites during a site visit is challenging, such visits could reveal indicators such as irrigation water with high levels of fecal matter.
A spokeswoman for Taylor Farms said that it has a “robust fecal indicator testing program that includes cyclospora for all of our water sources. All of those tests have been negative.”
With the exception of the pandemic years, the F.D.A.’s foreign food inspections in 2025 were at a 15-year low, agency data show.
Currently, the F.D.A. has about 440 staff charged with inspecting more than 300,000 registered animal and human food facilities — domestically and abroad.
“Other things help ensure the safety of the food supply, but inspection is the classic consumer protection when it’s done correctly,” Ms. Eskin said.
Another major safeguard outlined in the law was meant to add visibility into the food supply chain, particularly for public health officials and regulators charged with limiting harm during an outbreak.
The rule that the F.D.A. ended up delaying last year was meant to “limit food-borne illness and death.” It required food sellers, including restaurants and grocers, to provide the agency or an authorized representative with a spreadsheet detailing their suppliers within 24 hours of an outbreak, or a reasonable amount of time the agency agrees to.
The F.D.A.’s decision to delay the rule was followed by action from the Republican-controlled Congress, which took additional steps to bar the F.D.A. from using its funding to enforce the rule and urged a revision favoring greater flexibility.
In Michigan cyclospora has now sickened more than 12,000 people and contributed to two deaths. Officials said in the internal emails, which were first obtained by Bloomberg News, that they had to contend with an antiquated disease surveillance system and analyze the information from interviews with 700 people who fell ill.
Once Taco Bell emerged as a common thread the interviews, getting the company’s supplier list was crucial, said Susan Mayne, a former F.D.A. official who remains active in food policy. In such a large outbreak, she said, it’s important to determine if one ingredient came from a central source, in contrast to those from an array of farms.
“The faster you can get back to the records, the faster you can identify the source of the outbreak and remove those products from the market and prevent further exposures,” she said. “So speed is everything.”
Searching for solutions
This week is not the first time F.D.A. officials flew to Taylor Farms’ Mexican processing plant to investigate a cyclospora outbreak.
In 2013, in the wake of an outbreak that sickened more than 600 people who ate salad at Olive Garden and Red Lobster, federal inspectors descended on the facility and examined more than 1,000 samples of lettuce, irrigation water and the feces of the farm workers, a main harbor for the cyclospora parasite.
They found virtually nothing, an inspection report shows. Every result was negative, except for one considered inconclusive.
The F.D.A. did note that the facility’s practice of washing the salad mix with recycled water had the potential to spread cyclospora, if it was present. But ultimately the agency could not “determine how or at what point in the supply chain” the cyclospora was introduced. Taylor Farms said it then began a new process for testing water and produce.
Jim Gorny, a produce safety expert who retired in 2024 from the F.D.A., said cyclospora wasn’t viewed inside the agency as high-risk like E. coli or listeria. Yet, some scientists were growing increasingly worried as cyclospora outbreaks grew in size and scope. Originally found in berries and basil, by the 2000s, it was affecting larger numbers of people after eating salad.
Cyclospora is a uniquely difficult parasite to detect, monitor and eliminate. Testing for it in the environment — especially in agricultural water — is extraordinarily challenging, and, as a result, rarely done.
Moreover, cyclospora does not grow in laboratory culture. Scientists often use culture as a tool to amplify tiny bits of bacteria, like salmonella or E. coli, to detectable levels. The same cannot be done for cyclospora, said Kalmia Kniel, a microbiologist at the University of Delaware who researches the parasite.
And because cyclospora are distributed sparsely in large volumes of water, finding them is like dipping a net in the ocean to find a single type of fish. There’s also no way to kill them in processing plants that wash produce like lettuce: They can survive chlorination, a standard process used to kill bacteria.
Dr. Kniel and other food safety researchers have been asking the government repeatedly for $10 million to fund work to develop new ways to spot the cyclospora in the environment and to set testing standards. But after four consecutive years submitting grant proposals to the United States Department of Agriculture, the work remains unfunded.
The U.S.D.A. said its peer reviewers had selected projects viewed as “most impactful” for growers and that it had supported some cyclospora research last year.
Dr. Gorny noted that he helped develop an F.D.A. action plan for cyclospora that was released in 2023. The plan called for increased and improved education, testing for cyclospora and rapid root-cause analysis of outbreaks. Recently, officials working on the plan held an educational session in a region of Mexico that had been tied to prior cyclospora outbreaks.
But progress toward solutions has been slow. F.D.A. guidance on produce safety released this week acknowledged that the agency does not know of any treatment the would prevent the spread of cyclospora “and be suitable for use on fresh-cut produce.”
As a result, there may be more summers of cyclospora.
“Until we get down to the hard work of better research, getting tools for better and faster detection and better root cause analysis,” Dr. Gorny said, “this is going to happen again.”
Caroline Hopkins Legaspi contributed reporting.
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8) Israeli Strikes in Lebanon Kill 11, Health Officials Say
The Lebanese health ministry said several children were killed in a strike overnight, one of the deadliest attacks in months. Israel’s military said it was targeting Hezbollah infrastructure.
By Abdi Latif Dahir, Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, Aug. 15, 2026
The aftermath of an Israeli strike in Deir al-Zahrani, a town in southern Lebanon, on Saturday. Abbas Fakih/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A pair of Israeli strikes killed at least 11 people in southern Lebanon early Saturday, the Lebanese health ministry said, one of the deadliest attacks in the country since a fragile truce took effect nearly two months ago.
A strike overnight in Ansar, near the city of Nabatieh, killed seven people, including three children, and wounded two others, health ministry officials said. Hours later, Israeli warplanes carried out an airstrike on Deir al-Zahrani, killing at least four and wounding 17 others, according to the ministry.
The Israeli military said in a statement that its attacks in the Ansar area had targeted infrastructure belonging to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reports of civilian deaths or on the attack later on Saturday morning.
The Israeli military said the strikes followed Hezbollah activity in the Ali al-Taher ridge, a strategic hilltop about six miles from the Israeli border that has emerged as a focal point of the conflict in recent months.
Nawaf Salam, Lebanon’s prime minister, called the escalation on Saturday “extremely dangerous,” and said it undermined efforts to establish stability in the country’s south.
“The seven martyrs in the Israeli strike on Ansar town were not ‘military infrastructure,’ and the children and women killed were not military targets,” Mr. Nawaf said in a statement on social media.
Hezbollah condemned the attacks in a statement, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel of escalating the war “in order to strengthen his domestic political position.” The group vowed that the strikes would be “met with an appropriate response.”
A cease-fire reached in mid-June was meant to halt the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and pave the way for establishing a more durable peace. But the truce has since frayed, with fighting between the two sides continuing across southern Lebanon.
The strikes on Saturday come as Israel and Lebanon remain at odds over the terms of a “framework agreement” that was intended to wind down the conflict after months of U.S.-mediated negotiations in Washington and Rome.
Under the agreement, signed on June 26, Israel is expected to gradually withdraw from territory it occupies in southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese Armed Forces would then deploy in those areas and help facilitate the return of residents displaced by the fighting.
The framework has been criticized in Lebanon because it does not set out a timetable for the Israeli withdrawal, and because it links the process to the Lebanese government’s efforts to disarm Hezbollah, which the state has long struggled to do.
Hezbollah itself was not a party to the U.S.-brokered negotiations and has rejected direct talks with Israel.
In a statement published online by his office on Saturday, Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, condemned “Israel’s repeated violations of the framework agreement” along with the “international laws requiring the protection of civilians.”
The war in Lebanon began in early March after Hezbollah fired into Israel in retaliation for U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. The subsequent fighting has killed more than 4,300 people and wounded more than 12,000, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. More than one million people have been displaced as Lebanon’s economic and humanitarian crises have deepened, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Israel has continued to occupy swaths of southern Lebanon. In recent weeks, it has demolished buildings in areas it controls and carried out sporadic attacks in the south, including airstrikes and drone strikes, according to Lebanese officials and state media. The Israeli military says the operations aim to dismantle Hezbollah infrastructure and prevent the group from rearming and threatening northern Israel.
As part of their attack early Saturday, Israeli forces blew up buildings in the southern town of Bint Jbeil and several nearby villages, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported.
Israel marks the boundary of the area it controls on its maps, and says that it considers any armed person operating south of that demarcation line as a security threat and a legitimate military target.
In a televised speech on Friday, Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, condemned the recent Israeli strikes, saying they demonstrated the futility of negotiating with Israel. He also criticized the pace and manner of the Israeli withdrawal, and the difficulties faced by the Lebanese Army in taking control of those areas and enabling displaced residents to return.
“These negotiations will bring nothing but shame and disgrace,” Mr. Qassem said.
Hwaida Saad, Aaron Boxerman and Sarah Chaayto contributed reporting.
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9) Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring
Jason Arday, the school’s youngest Black professor, was found dead on Friday. The school ignored a series of warnings about his life story and his work.
By Mara Hvistendahl, Megan Specia, Leo Sands, Ali Watkins and Susan Dominus, Aug. 15, 2026
When Cambridge University interviewed Jason Arday for one of the most prestigious sociology positions in the world, he was an early career scholar and underqualified, by the school’s own standards.
Cambridge’s requirements, reviewed by The New York Times, called for “an outstanding research record of international stature” and a “proven successful track record” supervising Ph.D. students. Dr. Arday had a modest publication record and had bounced from one university to the next — not staying long enough to oversee a full three-year-or-more doctorate.
Cambridge hired him anyway in 2023, making him, at 37, the university’s youngest Black professor at a time when the school was under pressure to diversify. In doing so, Cambridge thrust him into the international limelight, giving him a platform at one of the world’s elite universities to champion academic diversity and making him a target for critics.
Dr. Arday was found dead in London on Friday, days after resigning his job amid accusations that he had plagiarized chunks of his papers, embellished parts of his recently published memoir and fabricated aspects of his life story. The controversy exploded along cultural fault lines — race, neurodiversity and academic hiring.
In his Aug. 5 resignation letter, he wrote, “I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgment.” He added, “This is not the end of my work. It is simply the end of this chapter.”
His family said that, since starting at Cambridge, Dr. Arday had faced a campaign of scrutiny intended to undermine him. That became too much for him, they said.
Questions about Dr. Arday’s career are unlikely to end with his death, however, because they were as much about Cambridge as they were about him. The centuries-old alma mater of Isaac Newton, William Wordsworth and kings and queens, Cambridge now faces deep scrutiny about its decision-making, even from its own faculty.
While Dr. Arday was underqualified for his job, he had a remarkable story: a tale of being diagnosed early with autism and having such significant developmental delays that he spent his entire childhood in a special-needs school. In his account, he did not speak until age 11 or read until 18, yet he managed to earn his doctorate and begin giving keynote speeches on the academic circuit. Also, he had run 30 marathons in 35 days for charity, a feat that would have placed him among the world’s elite athletes.
If, in hindsight, elements of Dr. Arday’s story seemed too good to be true, Cambridge ignored repeated warning signs. A review of internal Cambridge documents and interviews with former colleagues and associates shows that, in addition to passing over more experienced candidates for the job, administrators gushed publicly about Dr. Arday’s scholarship and privately disregarded complaints about his work. They declined to investigate plagiarism concerns and accused his critics of a “vile campaign” to discredit him.
Dr. Arday’s claims about not speaking were false, a former classmate and a speech professional who worked with him told The New York Times. His supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal preteen to Ph.D. had no precedent in medical literature, experts in developmental and speech delays say. That should have set off alarm bells for the Cambridge hiring committee, which included a child psychiatrist who had done research on autism, experts said.
Before Dr. Arday’s death, conservative commentators seized on his fall as evidence of diversity-and-inclusion efforts run amok. They said that Cambridge had been so eager to diversify that administrators let their judgment be clouded.
“They seem to have drunk the D.E.I. Kool-Aid,” Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former Conservative lawmaker in Britain, said early this week on The Telegraph’s “Daily T” podcast.
Prominent academics on the left agree that Cambridge must answer for its decisions. They say that the ordeal has fueled racism and cast unjustified aspersions on accomplished scholars of color.
Cambridge said on Friday that it was “desperately saddened” to hear of Dr. Arday’s death. An administrator, in a letter to the faculty on Tuesday, called the misconduct accusations “an aberration” and “troubling.” A spokesman separately declined to answer a list of questions about his hiring and his time there, citing a planned independent investigation — a difficult inquiry that will likely be made even more uncomfortable following Dr. Arday’s death.
Dr. Arday, for his part, had worked hard to silence any questioning of his credentials. When a journalist for Times Higher Education, a respected academic industry publication, asked about plagiarism last year, a prominent British defamation law firm helped kill the article, the journalist said. Dr. Arday later reported the journalist to the police.
When a scholar from another university questioned his work, Dr. Arday turned the tables and filed a racism complaint with the other school, according to someone with direct knowledge of the complaint. That person, like some others who spoke to The Times, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being dragged publicly into the controversy.
Dr. Arday never squarely addressed the questions of plagiarism and fabrication.
But what is clear from interviews and public records is that elements of the story would have been easy for Cambridge to check.
‘It Just Stretches Credulity’
Dr. Arday, the child of Ghanaian immigrants, grew up in public housing in an ethnically mixed, working-class quarter of South London. Early on, he was identified as having learning difficulties.
Dr. Arday has claimed that before age 11, he could understand language but not speak. In 2022, before interviewing with Cambridge, he said that he had been educated exclusively in a special-needs school “with other pupils that had very severe learning difficulties and physical disabilities.”
In his memoir, published on Tuesday, he gave a different account, saying he attended a mainstream school but spent time sequestered alone in a classroom, again without speaking.
Both tales are false, according to people who knew Dr. Arday as a child and spoke with The Times before his death.
A speech professional who worked closely with the young Dr. Arday recalled him having a language delay but speaking with both children and adults.
One former schoolmate, Jonathan Stewart, recalled Dr. Arday cracking jokes and putting on playful accents in a minivan on the way to church activities as children.
While nonverbal children can certainly learn to speak, even at a late age, the rapid development described by Dr. Arday has no precedent in clinical literature, three experts on autism and speech said.
“In over 40 years of practice and being very acquainted with literature, I’ve never heard of that happening,” said Stephen Camarata, a speech science expert with Vanderbilt Health’s Developmental Disabilities Lab. “It just stretches credulity.”
Cambridge’s Youngest Black Professor
An established chair at Cambridge, a permanently funded position that comes with prestige and research support, is among the academic world’s most sought-after jobs.
Dr. Arday applied for an established chair of education. The university advertised internationally for the job and convened a panel of nine experts to review the candidates.
The panel selected four finalists, inviting them to Cambridge for two days of interviews. Dr. Arday was up against three more senior scholars, including two women of color, according to a person familiar with the hiring process.
Dr. Arday’s published papers and his thesis had dozens of grammatical errors, along with identical quotes attributed to different people.
At Cambridge, the finalists were asked to submit just one piece of research, according to the person familiar with the process.
It is not clear which piece he submitted, or whether members of the hiring panel reviewed Dr. Arday’s speeches and interviews. If they had, they would have found elements of his story that stretched belief, like the marathon claim, or were demonstrably false, like his public assertion that he had been on the British television series “Seven Up.” (Dr. Arday’s spokesman recently said that the assertion should not have been taken literally.)
Experts said that Cambridge’s hiring panel was well equipped to question Dr. Arday’s very public claims about his childhood. Some committee members had published papers about teaching students with learning disabilities and about inclusion in education.
One influential member of the hiring panel, the child psychiatrist Paul Ramchandani, had published a paper on music therapy for children with autism. Given his expertise, he would have been in position to question Dr. Arday’s assertion that he learned to speak at 11 and read at 18, said Howard Shane, the director emeritus of the Center for Communication Enhancement at Boston Children’s Hospital.
“That should raise a red flag,” he said in an interview early this week. “There’s no question about that.”
Dr. Ramchandani and others on the panel did not respond to requests for comment.
The committee hired Dr. Arday, in a decision that the education department chair described at the time as unanimous. Cambridge’s lengthy hiring announcement highlighted his remarkable personal story, which garnered media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic.
Cambridge had so few Black professors that it was under pressure from faculty and students to diversify. It had set modest targets for increasing applications from people of color for academic posts.
On the BBC, the education department chair, Hilary Cremin, told Dr. Arday that he was “the best in the world in terms of the research you do.” She did not respond to requests for comment.
The First Questions Surface
Three months after Dr. Arday’s hiring, two British scholars, Martyn Hammersley and David Harris, privately wrote to Cambridge, alerting administrators to potential plagiarism in one of Dr. Arday’s papers.
Dr. Cremin, the department chair, replied that she had met with Dr. Arday, and that he had agreed to address concerns in the paper. She also mentioned his “ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism,” along with “significant health issues” that had affected his work on the paper in question, according to an email, which was first reported on a former professor’s newsletter and the academic integrity website Retraction Watch.
Dr. Harris, whose work has challenged whether racism is ingrained in society, responded by suggesting that Cambridge also review Dr. Arday’s other papers and his thesis. “Prof Arday badly needs critical friends, in my view, not sycophants,” he wrote.
He never got a reply, he said.
Nor did Cambridge act months later after journals appended corrections on two of Dr. Arday’s papers. Then, in September 2025, Times Higher Education sent Cambridge a dossier of more than 60 pages that detailed apparent plagiarism in Dr. Arday’s work.
A reporter and editor at the publication, Jack Grove, had enlisted experts to review Dr. Arday’s thesis.
One of them, David Sanders of Purdue University, told The Times that, going into the review, he knew nothing about Jason Arday. But when Dr. Sanders sat down to analyze the thesis, he concluded it was “extensively plagiarized.”
Cambridge continued to back its star professor, telling Mr. Grove that questions about Dr. Arday’s thesis would have to be addressed by the school that had awarded his doctorate, Liverpool John Moores University. Concerns about his research, Cambridge said, would similarly have to be handled by others. Liverpool John Moores stood by his doctorate.
At Cambridge, faculty members and allies hurriedly drafted a letter in anticipation of Mr. Grove’s article. “The integrity of higher education is at risk if we do not take a stand and speak out against the systematic attempts to erase Black scholarship,” they wrote in the letter, a copy of which was seen by The Times.
But Mr. Grove’s article never ran. Dr. Arday’s lawyers threatened legal action, and Times Higher Education spiked it. Dr. Arday also filed a police complaint against Mr. Grove, which led to a harassment investigation that was later dropped.
A Scandal Erupts
The plagiarism charges burst into public view last month when a former Cambridge scholar, Nathan Cofnas, wrote about them in his newsletter. Dr. Cofnas is known for his work suggesting that Black people were genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than white people. The university had cut ties with him in 2024.
Retraction Watch quickly expanded on Dr. Cofnas’s reporting. But once again, Cambridge defended Dr. Arday, saying he was “the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop,” according to an email seen by The Times.
After new questions surfaced, casting doubt on Dr. Arday’s story, he resigned. Cambridge’s tone shifted.
But the fallout from Cambridge’s enthusiastic promotion of Dr. Arday’s story could last for years. “This has really done some harm,” Dr. Camarata, the speech specialist, said before Dr. Arday’s death.
He said that over the years, he heard from families of children with severe autism hoping for a miracle. “I never want to take away anybody’s hope,” he said, “but this story really has created some unreasonable expectations and false hopes, and I hate that.”
Heidi Mirza, an emeritus professor of education at University College London who once mentored Dr. Arday, said in an interview this past week that he had been ill-served by university administrators’ carelessness in their efforts to demonstrate their commitment to diversity.
“He’s a pawn,” she said, “whose ambition made him vulnerable.”
Georgia Gee, Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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10) Europe’s Great Rivers Are Dying. The Continent Is In for a Shock.
By Ben Coates, Aug. 15, 2026
Mr. Coates is a journalist based in the Netherlands and the author of “The Rhine: Following Europe’s Greatest River from Amsterdam to the Alps.”
The Danube River in Novi Sad, Serbia. Marko Djurica/Reuters
All across Europe, shipwrecks and skeletons are rising from the deep.
Near Prahovo, Serbia, Nazi ships scuttled in 1944 now lie broken-backed on sandbanks. In Croatia, a 1930s cargo ship protruded from the water. On the newly exposed riverbed of the Danube in Bulgaria, what local experts say is most likely part of the skeleton of an ancient mammoth was found scattered across the sand, like discarded bones after a giant’s picnic.
Much of Europe is in the middle of a severe drought, and major rivers have been reduced to a fraction of their usual size. Europe’s second-longest river, the Danube, is now facing record lows, recently measuring just 9 inches deep in Budapest. Part of Italy’s mighty Po River is also at a record summertime low. And the Rhine, a major outlet for trade flowing from the Alps to the North Sea, is now shallower than at any time since records began.
This summer, the transport of chemicals, oil products and other goods on the Rhine and the Danube ground almost to a halt in places. Romania shut down a nuclear plant cooled by the Danube, and Hungary narrowly avoided doing so. The carmakers Dacia and Ford agreed to temporarily cease production in their Romanian factories to save power.
For some in Europe, climate change seemed like a problem that mainly afflicted faraway places. In recent years, wildfires on the continent, together with heat waves and the drying of the rivers, have brought it home, where it’s beginning to alter the old map of Europe’s power and wealth. If the Rhine and Danube run even drier, the map will have to be redrawn.
Over the past 80 years or so, these rivers have served as the crucibles of the continent’s industrial power and the outlets for its trade. German industry, which powered the country’s famous postwar growth, was heavily concentrated around the confluence of the Rhine and Ruhr. The port at the Rhine’s mouth in the Netherlands rose to become the busiest in Europe.
The continent’s rivers also provide power for millions, and the Danube serves as a critical export route for Ukraine’s crops and a supply route for its military.
Against this backdrop, the drying of the rivers presents not only an ecological hazard but also a major strategic challenge for Europe, at a time when fresh problems are as welcome as old bombs revealed on a riverbed.
Europe is already struggling to deal with a once-in-a-generation economic transformation: the rise of Chinese high-tech manufacturing and electric vehicles in particular, which threaten European automotive icons such as Volkswagen and Porsche.
Simultaneously, it is wrestling with a major energy transformation as it seeks to curb its addiction to Russian gas while pivoting to renewables, including wind and solar.
In the face of President Trump’s nationalism and the aggression of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Europe is cutting its reliance on U.S. defense assets in favor of greater self-reliance. Conflict in the Middle East and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz have revealed weaknesses in supply chains.
In conversations about how to respond, the buzzwords most overused in the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels are “strategic autonomy” — the idea that Europe will reduce reliance on foreign goods and military protection, meet the challenge of a rising China and a menacing Russia and deploy new technology to deliver a future that is greener, wealthier and healthier.
On paper, these are worthy goals.
The problem is that the continent’s leaders seem to assume that Europe’s physical geography will remain unchanged and that the huge advantages afforded by rivers such as the Rhine and the Danube can be taken for granted. Those advantages include the ability to transport goods across the continent at low cost, easy access to the ports at places such as Hamburg and Rotterdam, and unlimited access to fresh water for manufacturing, hydropower and cooling nuclear power plants
Now, it is rapidly becoming clear that the terrain on which Europeans live, work and travel is changing before our eyes.
Rivers can no longer be relied on to provide an inexpensive, reliable, relatively low-carbon alternative to road and air freight. Rivers cannot form the industrial backbone of the European Union’s push for autonomy from Chinese and American supply chains if they run dry. Nor can they provide reliable energy independence or guarantee food security.
Responding to these changes will not be easy. Just as the war in Iran is forcing some Middle Eastern countries to develop new supply lines and export routes, Europe needs to think seriously about how to develop alternative transport and energy networks that reduce its reliance on rivers. That could take decades and require huge investment in new infrastructure. Some places that grew rich through waterborne trade, such as the German Rhineland or Rotterdam, may lose out. And rivers may no longer bind together European neighbors in ways that made it easier to avoid relying on the outside world.
Take away Europe’s blue highways, and all the grand talk about building new industries, finding new trading partners and generating clean energy begins to look rather hollow.
One Dutch satirical outlet recently suggested using firefighting helicopters to refill the Rhine. That may be unlikely, but it’s clear Europe needs to begin thinking about its rivers more radically and more seriously — as a strategic asset rather than just an environmental sob story.
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11) Heat Deaths in a ‘Cold’ Country Are a Warning to the Rest of Europe
A June heat wave in Belgium and neighboring countries exposed a lethal lack of readiness. That’s a risk as another wave hits Europe.
By Jeanna Smialek and Koba Ryckewaert, Reporting from Brussels and Liège, Belgium, Aug. 15, 2026
Treating a 77-year-old woman for heat-related illness last month at MontLégia hospital in the Belgian city of Liège. Ksenia Kuleshova for The New York Times
Seniors died in stifling apartments. Emergency calls were left on hold. Doctors treated an onslaught of people sick from heat, sometimes in wards without air-conditioning.
These are scenes that played out in Belgium, one of the world’s wealthiest nations, on a recent summer weekend. They are also a warning to Europe.
Europe is the fastest-warming continent, yet large parts remain ill prepared. As heat waves scorch its nations this summer, they are killing thousands in countries with strong health systems. In just one week in late June, there were around 16,000 excess deaths, or more people who died than usual, in Europe. Belgium, France and Germany were the worst affected, based on data collected by the European Mortality Monitoring Network.
Belgium, known for cold and damp, not searing heat, had the highest excess deaths in Europe, making it a case study into what went wrong. In Wallonia, the region that makes up the country’s south, the death rate was 77 percent higher than what would be expected between mid-June and early July. Some hospitals were overrun, with gurneys and patients lining the hallways and medical staff working without breaks in the unrelenting heat.
“Each crisis is becoming increasingly severe,” said Yves Coppieters, the health minister for Wallonia. “That’s what we’re failing to anticipate.”
Climate change means that the issue is most likely here to stay. Across Europe, “we think the summers are hot now,” said Joan Ballester Claramunt, a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health who focuses on climate change and health. “The future that we’re seeing, it could be much worse.”
Belgium is a stark example of why heat waves can become deadly in countries more accustomed to cool weather. Emergency systems in some cases buckled under the pressure, and structural challenges left the most vulnerable to suffer.
The federal health ministry defended elements of the response and noted that hospital capacity had been scaled up during the crisis, but it acknowledged that some change was needed. “I believe we must indeed learn lessons quickly,” Frank Vandenbroucke, the Belgian minister of social affairs and public health, told lawmakers early last month.
During the late June wave, MontLégia hospital, in the Belgian city of Liège, experienced a rush of patients so intense that in the emergency room healthier people were temporarily lined up in hallways so that those past the point of saving could have privacy while they died.
Dr. Arnaud Detroz, who was working that weekend, said his team was confronted with overheating cases that they had seen mostly in textbooks. “In our countries, at our latitudes, these cases are relatively rare,” he said.
‘Very Crushing’
Belgium is not accustomed to taking heat so seriously.
At the start of the June heat wave, Theo Francken, the defense minister, posted an image on Instagram of himself smiling in the sun with the caption, “It’s warm for two days and we’re all going to die again apparently.” He criticized the press.
“Enjoy the beautiful weather,” he added. “And LIVE!”
The weather quickly turned into a matter of life or death.
Temperatures shot up between mid-June and early July, surpassing 100 degrees in parts of Wallonia. The fact that it was early in the summer, before people had a chance to acclimatize, worsened the danger, experts said.
In the last weekend of June, the Belgian emergency call line was severely overwhelmed, according to medical groups whose representatives signed an open letter protesting the meltdown. In some cases, they said, it took 10 minutes just to get through to an operator. (Bernard Quintin, the Belgian interior minister, told lawmakers that average waits were much shorter and noted that extra staff members were brought in.)
“If you have to wait for 10 minutes if you have a stroke or heart attack, it’s quite a big problem,” said Dr. Pierre-Louis Deudon, a general practitioner in the Brussels region who signed the letter.
Emergency rooms were also overrun in parts of Wallonia. During the peak of the heat wave, the number of emergency vehicles arriving at Grand Hôpital de Charleroi, about an hour’s drive west of Liège, rose from an average of 60 to up to 110 per day, said Dr. Laurent Peyskens, deputy head of the emergency department.
“It was very crushing,” Dr. Peyskens said.
Half of all emergency rooms in Wallonia lacked air-conditioning, said Dr. Phillippe Devos, director general at Unessa, a federation of Belgian health care providers in Brussels and Wallonia.
For Belgium, June 27 appears to have been the second-deadliest day of the 21st century, after a day early in the coronavirus crisis. In Wallonia, June 28 was deadlier than the depths of the pandemic in 2020.
“We should definitely be afraid of a repeat,” said Loïc Gillerot, a climate-health expert at CERAC, an independent Belgian research center that studies climate risk. “The question is: Are we talking about a repeat this summer?”
Pre-existing Conditions
In Belgium, as elsewhere, extreme heat hit the vulnerable the hardest.
The region of Wallonia had more than twice as much excess mortality as the northern region of Flanders.
Part of the problem, experts said, is that people in Wallonia have lower incomes on average. Poor people are more likely to have pre-existing health conditions, and they often lack access to well-ventilated housing.
About 85 percent of the more than 900 excess deaths in Wallonia between mid-June and July 1 were of people 65 or older, according to figures from Sciensano, the Belgian health data institute. Low-income seniors who lived alone were particularly at risk, health care professionals said, as their houses or attic apartments became baking death traps.
“You have people who are isolated, old,” Dr. Devos said. “We saw in the emergency rooms: When people came to the E.R., it was impossible to save them.”
Wallonia’s housing was part of the challenge. Many residential buildings are aging and were constructed to hold in heat, not to keep it out.
“It’s a country that is considered cold, culturally,” said Gilles Vanvolsem, managing director of the Belgian Green Building Council. “People think more about heating their house than cooling their house.”
Nor did behaviors adjust. Belgians, including those with medical conditions and their caregivers, at times appeared unaware of how to handle the heat.
Dr. Deudon in Brussels noted, for instance, that people on antidepressants and other mental health drugs often are not made aware that they are at higher risk, and so they continued to go to work as normal.
Dr. Toon Ceyssens, a general practitioner in Flanders, echoed that concern, noting that blood pressure medications also increase the danger.
During the worst of the heat wave, he was alarmed to see residents at a care institution where he works still taking excursions. “The caretakers and the patients didn’t take the heat wave that seriously,” he said.
Cold Country No More
To limit heat risk, countries like Belgium will need to shake their cold-country mentality, experts said.
Dr. Ceyssens said patients were often hesitant to install air-conditioning, worried that it would make them sick, spread germs and harm the environment.
Belgians do not “want to be Americans,” with the indoor temperature set to 65 degrees, he said, but he saw a middle ground in which vulnerable people would have access.
“The mentality on air-conditioning has to change,” he said.
Others disagree. Even some Belgian officials are wary of relying too much on climate control, concerned that adding it could overwhelm the power grid and leave cities even hotter by pumping hot air into the streets.
“Air-conditioning can be appropriate in specific situations, particularly for vulnerable people or certain buildings,” said Simon Souris, a spokesman for Wallonia’s housing and energy minister. “However, our long-term strategy is not based on its widespread deployment.”
Since June, Belgian experts have issued recommendations for more cooling spaces and resources for the vulnerable. Federal authorities are working toward handling emergency calls differently, doctors said. The housing authorities in Wallonia are instituting policies to encourage housing renovation.
Yet medical workers and public health experts fear that the kind of changes that are needed — like housing and infrastructure improvements — will take more time than Belgium has. At MontLégia, doctors remain concerned that officials will not dedicate enough resources to the ongoing threat of heat.
Late last month, as emergency doctors recalled losing patients in June, another arrived.
A 77-year-old woman was wheeled in with heat stroke, her frail chest heaving, her temperature near the point of organ failure. Doctors cut off her blouse and covered her in ice packs.
They are bracing for more. A supply closet on the emergency-room floor is stocked with fans. Nearby, a refrigerator is filled with cooling IV drips.
“As emergency-room doctors, we can come to terms with fatality, but it’s not the same when you know it’s due to a systemic failure,” said Dr. Michèle Yerna, who runs the MontLégia emergency unit. That, she added, is “much harder to bear.”
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12) As Inflation Eats Up Pay Gains, Workers Fall Behind
When prices spiked in 2021-22, wages failed to keep up for many workers, new research shows. Now the pattern is repeating.
By Ben Casselman, Ben Casselman is the chief economics correspondent, Aug. 15, 2026
The latest shock, driven by the jump in energy prices tied to the war with Iran, has sent measures of consumer sentiment tumbling. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Americans’ paychecks are losing ground to inflation.
Again.
Government data released this week showed that consumer prices rose 3.4 percent in July from a year earlier, outpacing a 3.2 percent increase in hourly earnings over the same period. That means that, for the fourth month in a row, Americans’ real wages — how many sandwiches, haircuts and gallons of gas they can buy with an hour’s pay — actually fell.
Such declines are unusual. In the years before the coronavirus pandemic, real wage growth sped up and slowed down with the ebbs and flows of the economy. But pay never fell outright for more than a month or two at a time.
Then came the pandemic and the ensuing surge in prices, which led to the sharpest decline in inflation-adjusted wages since the 1980s. From February 2021 to June 2022, the buying power of the average American’s paycheck fell more than 4 percent.
The latest shock, driven by the jump in energy prices tied to the war with Iran, hasn’t been nearly as severe. But coming on the heels of the earlier decline in pay — and at a time when affordability and the cost of living remain top of mind for many voters — it has sent measures of consumer sentiment tumbling.
“The real hourly wage is absolutely the fundamental building block of working Americans’ living standards,” said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “When it’s falling in real terms, that’s a huge problem for folks who are already stressed by affordability concerns.”
Mr. Bernstein should know. He was a top economic adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. when the administration was trying to persuade Americans that the economy was improving despite the shrinking value of their paychecks. Those efforts largely failed.
Now, the Trump administration is making similar arguments, so far with the same result. In political polls, voters give the president poor marks for his handling of the economy, which had been an area of strength for him.
On Friday, the University of Michigan said its long-running measure of consumer sentiment fell in early August, partly reversing modest gains when gas prices eased in June and July. Only 8 percent of people surveyed said they expected their income growth to exceed inflation over the next year, down from 18 percent at the end of last year.
Falling real wages aren’t the only sign that households are struggling to manage higher prices. Personal income after taxes — a broader measure that takes into account other sources of cash such as retirement benefits and rental income — also fell in inflation-adjusted terms in the second quarter. And the savings rate has plummeted as Americans try to maintain their standard of living.
The latest inflation data contained some modest good news for Republicans. It showed prices rising more slowly in July than at the peak of the oil shock in the spring. If that trend continues, wages should start rising faster than prices once again.
History Lessons
But even if wage growth does rebound, Americans’ assessment of the economy may not quickly follow suit. Pay gains consistently outpaced inflation during Mr. Biden’s final two years in office, but measures of consumer sentiment barely recovered.
New research from the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago may help explain why. Economists used data from ADP, the payroll processing company, to study pay patterns of millions of workers before and during the pandemic-era surge in inflation.
Before the pandemic, they found, most companies gave nearly all their workers a standardized annual pay increase, often about 3 percent. During a period of low, stable inflation of about 2 percent, that was enough for workers to scratch out modest gains in real terms.
When inflation jumped in 2021 and 2022, however, companies offered only slightly better annual pay increases, meaning most workers fell behind. The only way to get a bigger raise, at least for many workers, was to change jobs. Unsurprisingly, workers did so in droves — the number of Americans quitting their jobs hit a record high in 2021 and 2022, when inflation was at its peak.
Some workers managed to win larger raises by merely threatening to leave, or by getting promotions. But among employees who stayed with the same company from 2021 to 2024, more than two in five, 43 percent, saw their wages decline in real terms, by an average of roughly 9 percent.
“These are big numbers,” said Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago who is one of the paper’s authors.
Economists often think about inflation as having relatively small consequences for a large group of people, unlike job losses, which have large consequences for a relatively small group of people. But if inflation results in large, persistent wage declines for a significant share of employees, Mr. Hurst said, “the cost of inflation to workers is just orders of magnitude more than any of our macro models say.”
Older workers, who have a harder time moving between jobs, were hit especially hard. More than half of workers ages 50 and up lost ground to inflation between 2021 and 2024. Even when they did change jobs, they typically got smaller raises than their younger peers.
Younger workers were more likely to get raises that kept up with inflation. But they had to hustle for them — jumping between jobs or seeking out competing offers — and, even then, their pay typically lagged behind where it would have been had prepandemic trends in pay continued.
“During periods of inflation, wage adjustments are not free,” said Christina Patterson, a University of Chicago economist and another author of the paper. Ms. Patterson was also an author of an earlier paper showing the toll that such fights over pay take on employees. “In order for workers to recover their wages, they had to start fighting for it.”
Less Leverage
Now real wages are falling again just as some workers were starting to make up for lost ground. And while inflation isn’t as high as it was four years ago, the labor market is weaker, making it harder for workers to move between jobs in search of better pay. Wage growth has slowed in recent months even before accounting for inflation, a sign of workers’ reduced bargaining power.
A measure of employee sentiment from the job site Glassdoor hit a record low last month, as workers worried about the shrinking value of their paychecks and about the threat posed by artificial intelligence and other forces.
“Workers have less power now — the pendulum has swung from employees back toward employers,” said Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor. “There’s less incentive for employers to proactively offer a raise or benefits to offset higher prices.”
The recent declines in pay could pose a problem for Republican candidates in this fall’s midterm elections. Research from economists at Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley, recently found that, in the 2024 election, Mr. Trump and other Republicans made their largest gains in the parts of the country where real wage growth was weakest. Now, the same trend could work against them.
“President Trump gained from drops in real wages,” said Francesco Trebbi, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was one of the study’s authors. “Voters punished incumbents for the reduction of the purchasing power of their income.”
But, Mr. Trebbi continued, “the problem is now he is the incumbent.”
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13) Trump Backed Away From a Wall at Big Bend. But the Bulldozers Are Here.
Over the objections of environmentalists, local sheriffs and some state leaders, the Trump administration appears to be moving ahead with border infrastructure in one of Texas’ most beloved parks.
By J. David Goodman, Aug. 15, 2026
Construction workers cleared a road in Big Bend National Park earlier this month. Brian Finke
Texans were caught off-guard several months ago when the Trump administration appeared poised to construct a 30-foot wall through Big Bend National Park, a rugged expanse of moon-like desert that is a point of pride for many in the state.
But after bipartisan opposition grew, the wall was removed from the federal government’s border construction map. Many exhaled, believing that the West Texas park, with its towering mountains and cliffs, would be spared.
Then the bulldozers arrived this month.
The sight of these earth-moving machines along the Rio Grande near the Santa Elena Canyon, one of the park’s major attractions, pointed to the most significant evidence of border barrier construction in the park. Contractors ripped through mesquite trees and brush and leveled the ground for more than a mile of what appeared to be a future roadway.
Big Bend is beloved by Texans and many across the country, even those who are not among its more than 500,000 annual visitors. It is a place to feel the immense and inhospitable wilderness of West Texas, where the stars at night actually are big and bright.
The construction sparked a fresh wave of anger and outrage from all sorts of people — environmentalists, former park officials, local sheriffs — who again insisted that such infrastructure was unnecessary in a border region so remote and dangerous that people have rarely tried to cross there, even at the peak of unauthorized migration.
Both John Cornyn, the state’s outgoing Republican senator, and James Talarico, the Democrat running to replace him, expressed concern this month about the start of construction inside the park.
“My constituents believe that the 1,000-foot riverbank cliffs and remote Big Bend terrain offers its own source of deterrence,” Mr. Cornyn said in a letter last week to the Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin.
Other Republican state leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who defeated Mr. Cornyn in the Senate primary, have not weighed in directly on the construction.
On Friday, a local nonprofit and an outdoor recreation business represented by State Senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat, filed a federal suit to try and halt the project. A day earlier, a bipartisan group of Texas legislators sent Mr. Abbott a letter urging him to ask federal officials to stop the construction.
“It’s gotten to the point where people are picking up the torches and marching in the street right now,” said Tex Toler, a former tourism director for Marfa, Texas, northwest of the park. “This is one of Texas’ and the country’s last wild places.”
After days of confusion among West Texas residents, senior Trump administration officials explained their plans and rationale on Thursday. There would be no wall, but there would be construction.
“C.B.P. is building one new access road, improving existing roads, installing detection technology and placing vehicle barriers in limited, strategic locations,” Rodney Scott, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said in a statement.
The park consists of 118 miles of land on the U.S.-Mexico border, and a patrol road is slated to run along much of it. A few areas would have miles of four- to six-foot-tall vehicle barriers.
The bulldozers and excavators have been engaged this month in “survey and design work,” Mr. Scott said.
Fewer than six migrants a day have been encountered crossing from Mexico in recent months in the entire Big Bend patrol sector, which includes the park and hundreds of miles of border, federal statistics show.
Officials have said that while unauthorized crossings are currently at record lows, they could increase in the future.
The Trump administration has been furiously building new border barriers, and Mr. Scott said the Big Bend construction was necessary to fill in gaps. Southwest Valley Constructors, one company currently at work in the region, was awarded a $1.7 billion contract. The company directed questions to federal officials.
“We will not leave Big Bend as an opening for cartels to exploit by shifting their routes and tactics,” Mr. Scott said in the statement.
Many of those who oppose a wall are also against building a patrol road. They include local sheriffs who have insisted that major border infrastructure projects are not necessary.
“What security problem are we trying to solve?” Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland of nearby Terrell County, a Republican and a former Border Patrol agent, wrote on social media. “Can the same security objective be accomplished more effectively another way?”
On Wednesday, people gathered for a demonstration against the construction at the Santa Elena Canyon. Many carried signs protesting the construction — “Stop the Steel,” “No Wall” — or held handmade depictions of javelinas and other wildlife that could be affected by the construction along the river. Some feared the road plan would require building bridges and blasting along Mariscal Mountain, a remote peak.
“There will be no coming back,” said Michael Ryan, a former Big Bend park ranger who attended the protest. “They’re taking taxpayer dollars to ruin this national park.”
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