*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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-
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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)
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
 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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Articles
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
1) What Visual Evidence Tells Us About Israel’s Use of White Phosphorus in Lebanon
Videos collected by The Times shows how the Israeli military has deployed a munition that can be extremely harmful over populated areas in Lebanon.
By Sanjana Varghese, June 6, 2026
Plumes of smoke with the distinctive shape of white phosphorus are shown over the border between Israel and Lebanon in late April. Credit...Ayal Margolin/Reuters
The Israeli military has deployed white phosphorus, an incendiary substance that can be extremely harmful, over populated areas in Lebanon in its battle against Hezbollah, according to experts, aid groups and visual evidence collected by The New York Times.
Distinctive smoke trails from this type of munition were seen as recently as May 30 in Nabatieh, a city of roughly 40,000, in social media footage verified by The Times, which was filmed as Israeli forces captured Beaufort Castle, a landmark in the area.
Other verified footage showed that white phosphorus had been used in the vicinity of the coastal city of Tyre, as well as near three small towns — Qlayaa, Khiam and Yohmor — in the months since fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, began again in March. The latest fighting erupted after Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, following joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran.
Once exposed to air, white phosphorus spontaneously ignites and is exceptionally difficult to extinguish.
Often deployed by militaries to create fires and smoke screens during combat, white phosphorus is not illegal in itself, but deploying it deliberately against civilians or in an area populated by civilians violates the international laws of war. Human rights advocates have raised concerns that civilians have been affected by the Israeli military’s use of it.
Israel denies using the substance in violation of those laws. It is not clear for what purpose the Israeli military used white phosphorus in these incidents.
The Times asked the Israeli military questions about its use of white phosphorus in Nabatieh, Qlayaa, Khiam and Tyre in four specific instances and provided the coordinates for those incidents. The Israeli military had no comment on those incidents. The Times also asked the military about its internal guidelines for the usage of white phosphorus.
“I.D.F. procedures require that such shells are not used in densely populated areas, subject to certain exceptions. This complies and goes beyond the requirements of international law,” it said in a statement.
Israel uses American-made 155-millimeter M825A1 artillery projectiles that contain 116 felt wedges, in the shape of pizza slices, coated with white phosphorous. They are designed to create five to 10 minutes of dense white smoke, providing cover to fighters.
The shells can be fuzed to break apart and dispense their cargo midair, which will spread their incendiary effect over a wide area. That can be used to create a smoke screen, but also will cause fires on the ground wherever the wedges land.
The munitions can also be set to rupture on impact — to create a single fire, that militaries use as a visual marker to guide additional strikes.
Munitions experts who analyzed recent footage from news agencies as well as social media posts concluded that the imagery showed artillery projectiles bursting midair in Lebanon, releasing streams of burning white phosphorous below — consistent with previous Israeli uses of American M825A1 shells.
In response to questions by The Times, the Israeli military said that, “the primary smoke-screen shells used by the I.D.F. do not contain white phosphorus.”
“Like many Western militaries,” the statement added, “the I.D.F. also possesses smoke-screen shells that include white phosphorous that are legal under international law. These shells are used by the I.D.F. for creating smoke screens and not for targeting or causing fires and are not defined under law as incendiary weapons.”
There are currently no publicly available statistics about the Israeli military’s use of other smoke-screen shells.
Israel’s use of white phosphorus
The substance is “cheap, plentiful and pretty good at what it’s used for,” said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, the director of Armament Research Services, a private intelligence consultancy based in Australia that tracks arms and munitions.
Israel’s deployment of white phosphorus in populated areas has brought about scrutiny in the past.
A 2024 report by Human Rights Watch documented its widespread use in Lebanon and questioned its necessity, pointing out that there were safer alternatives, such as the M150 shells, which the Israeli military reportedly used in 2024. .
The traces of these shells are visually distinct from the feathery trails of white phosphorus, which are more irregular.
Israel has also deployed white phosphorus in Gaza — in 2009, and in conflicts in Lebanon, including 1982 and 2006. In the year following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, the Israeli military used white phosphorus more than 200 times in Lebanon, according to Ahmad Beydoun, an independent researcher who built a visual database of its sightings in the country.
The Lebanese government has filed four letters since October 2023 raising concerns about Israel’s use of white phosphorus to the United Nations and the U.N. Security Council. One of the letters, dated July 3, 2024, cites government figures showing that more than 600 fires have broken out as a result of the use of white phosphorus in southern Lebanon.
What is the impact on civilians?
According to the World Health Organization, white phosphorus causes severe burns if it comes into contact with flesh. It can also cause respiratory and eye injuries if inhaled.
“The harm that white phosphorus causes is horrific,” said Bonnie Docherty, a senior arms adviser at Human Rights Watch. “It inflicts burns that can penetrate to the bone.” The dense smoke it produces, she said, “causes severe respiratory damage, and organ failure. Wounds can reignite when bandages are removed and remnants of the substance are exposed to oxygen.”
White phosphorous can also set homes, cars, buildings, fields and other objects on fire. An Amnesty International report from 2023 found that residents of Dhayra, a town in the south of Lebanon, fled after repeated release of white phosphorus on Oct. 16, 2023, and that cars and homes were still burning when they returned days later.
Traces of white phosphorus can exist in water and soil long after its use, experts said, and forested areas and farmland can be significantly damaged.
“There are understudied risks with long-term exposure to its smoke,” said Wim Zwijnenburg, who works at PAX, a Dutch peace organization, and researches the effects of conflict on the environment. “We also know that residents and farmers can face loss of access to their land and they often need specialized clearance operations after.”
Because white phosphorus munitions are primarily designed as smoke screens and illuminants, they often fall in a loophole in existing international law, Ms. Docherty said.
“Their destructive effects — such as causing fires or severe burns — are seen as a side effect of their use, rather than the main reason a military would use these weapons,” she added.
Although white phosphorous is legal if not deliberately deployed in populated areas, it is often hard to tell whether it was used intentionally. “These munitions are not precision weapons, and they can’t make a distinction between civilians and the military,” Mr. Zwijnenburg said. “It might not be a banned weapon, but we know that militaries don’t always use it as intended.”
The Israeli military is not the only army to use white phosphorus in combat. The United States has used it in several operations in the Middle East, including in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004 and its campaign against ISIS in Syria in 2017. Ukraine and Russia have also accused each other of using white phosphorus since 2023.
Establishing that white phosphorus has been used intentionally against civilians can be difficult. A Human Rights Watch report in 2009 found that the Israeli military had repeatedly used these munitions over densely populated parts of Gaza. Four years later, after international pressure from rights organizations, the Israeli military announced that it would significantly reduce its use of white phosphorus.
John Ismay contributed reporting from Washington.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
2) An Uncertain Win for Immigrants Seeking to Stay in U.S.
After a judge’s ruling, there was a sense of renewed hope that immigration applications that were put on hold would move forward. But how soon that would happen was unknown.
By Jesus Jiménez, June 6, 2026
Immigrants waited in a hallway for their hearings at the Annandale Immigration Court last month. Salwan Georges for The New York Times
A day after a federal judge struck down Trump administration policies that had frozen applications for many immigrants seeking to stay in the country, there was renewed hope that a six-month logjam might be easing.
There are more than a million backlogged applications for citizenship, green cards, work permits and asylum. When those applications would move forward, however, was uncertain.
In a strongly worded opinion on Friday, the judge, John J. McConnell Jr., wrote that the policies enacted by the Trump administration had effectively made it challenging for many immigrants to stay in the United States.
The policies, which were enacted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the legal immigration system and processes paperwork for immigrants already in the country, put a hold on asylum applications. The agency also paused decisions on applications filed by immigrants from 39 countries under a travel ban, many of them in Africa and the Middle East.
“When U.S.C.I.S. first enacted the policies at the center of this litigation, the agency did not simply place a hold on adjudications,” Judge McConnell wrote. “More fundamentally, the challenged policies placed the lives of countless individuals on hold — solely by virtue of their countries of birth. Over six months later, many of those individuals remain without work, without legal status, and without any meaningful ability to plan for their futures.”
The ruling was a victory for labor groups that had filed a lawsuit in March against the federal government over the policies. Among those groups was American Gateways, a nonprofit that provides legal services for immigrants.
Edna Yang, a co-executive director of American Gateways, said in a statement that the ruling “reinforces the integrity of our nation’s immigration system.”
“It allows people who have spent decades waiting for the legal system to work as promised to have certainty and a path forward for hard-fought permanent status and family reunification,” she said. “It is important that no administration excludes people based solely on their country of origin.”
Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said that this decision could allow those with immigration cases to move their applications forward.
But the relief may be short-lived. While it was unclear immediately after the ruling how the Trump administration planned to respond, it was expected that the judge’s order would be appealed.
The White House referred questions about the decision to the U.S.C.I.S.
James Percival, the general counsel for the Homeland Security Department, the parent agency of U.S.C.I.S., said in an emailed statement on Saturday that the ruling was “sabotage dressed in legal clothing.”
Mr. Chishti said the statement by Mr. Percival signaled the Trump administration would push back on the judge’s ruling.
“It’s definitely not the end of this,” Mr. Chishti said, “and this case is definitely headed to the Supreme Court.”
It was unclear how soon Citizenship and Immigration Services would restart processing applications that had been affected.
Kevin Love Hubbard, a lawyer with the Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island, said that barring an appeal, U.S.C.I.S. could no longer rely on the policies enacted by the federal government to refuse processing cases.
“I think the decision is obviously new and complex, and it will take some time to filter down through the administrative system to individual people’s applications,” Mr. Hubbard said. “The hope and expectation is that, unless there is a different decision on appeal, that U.S.C.I.S. will start processing these applications for people who were illegally put in indefinite limbo.”
The policies that prompted the lawsuit were announced in November after officials said an Afghan national had shot two National Guard members in Washington.
Mr. Chishti said that if the case was further litigated, one key question would be whether blanket policies that affect people from certain countries could be put in place in the interest of national security.
“National security concerns are valid — no one can dispute that,” he said. “But it doesn’t merit a blanket ban on all applicants from those countries.”
The policies that were overturned by the court had blocked people from the 39 travel ban countries from receiving final decisions on completed asylum applications, and from receiving green cards through the adjustment of status process, which allows immigrants already in the country to apply for a green card without returning to their native land. It also blocked them from receiving status through employment authorization documents or becoming naturalized citizens.
In 2024, about 240,000 people from those 39 countries received green cards through the adjustment of status process, and about 840,000 became naturalized citizens. In fiscal year 2023, about 22,000 were granted asylum. The countries with the most people to receive green cards or to be naturalized were Cuba, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Haiti.
Jorge Loweree, the managing director of programs at the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy organization for immigrants, said that even before the policies had been enacted by the federal government, asylum cases were being processed slowly.
“It’s fair to anticipate that the administration isn’t going to do something like prioritize asylum adjudications because of this decision,” Mr. Loweree said. “But it should certainly open the door to having many more cases that move than have in the last six months.”
By putting applications on hold, Mr. Hubbard said, the federal government was creating challenges for immigrants who had been trying to follow the proper legal process toward green cards or U.S. citizenship.
“This is about people who tried to follow the process and still are being stymied,” Mr. Hubbard said.
Albert Sun contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
3) Hegseth Criticizes Europe Over Migration ‘Invasion’ in D-Day Speech
The remarks from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reflect many of the Trump administration’s previous assertions on immigrants in Europe, which overlap with the language of European far-right political parties.
By Claire Moses, June 7, 2026
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a D-Day speech in France on Saturday [June 6, 2026] to criticize Europe over its migration policies, saying that 'dangerous ideologies' were storming the continent’s shores, in what he compared to an 'invasion.' ...‘Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,’ he said. ‘Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?’ The comments appear to reflect the United States’ recently updated national security strategy around the world, which warned that Europe was on a path to becoming ‘unrecognizable’ because of migration policies that it said were undermining the national identities of European countries. The document provoked sharp retorts from across Europe.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the U.S. cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, France, at a D-Day commemoration, on Saturday. Jeremias Gonzalez/Associated Press
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a D-Day speech in France on Saturday to criticize Europe over its migration policies, saying that “dangerous ideologies” were storming the continent’s shores, in what he compared to an “invasion.”
On the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, the largest seaborne invasion in history, Mr. Hegseth made the speech at the Normandy American Cemetery before nearly 9,400 graves of American soldiers, most of whom died in the assault on June 6, 1944, and the operations that followed. The anniversary is usually regarded as a time to commemorate unity among Allied countries that fought against Nazi Germany.
In his remarks, Mr. Hegseth said that “freedom is not free” and especially praised the role played by American troops, but said that over the past eight or so decades, some European countries had grown “comfortable.”
“Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he said. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”
The comments appear to reflect the United States’ recently updated national security strategy around the world, which warned that Europe was on a path to becoming “unrecognizable” because of migration policies that it said were undermining the national identities of European countries. The document provoked sharp retorts from across Europe.
Many of the Trump administration’s assertions on immigrants in Europe overlap with the language of far-right political parties in European countries, which have seen an increase in support since a migration crisis that peaked between 2014 and 2016. The European Union’s border agency, Frontex, reported that unauthorized border crossings dropped by a quarter in 2025, continuing a yearslong trend.
On Friday, Vice President JD Vance also criticized European migration policies, when he commented on the 2025 killing in England of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old who had been handcuffed by police as he lay dying after being stabbed by a man, who was Sikh.
In a post on social media, Mr. Vance blamed Mr. Nowak’s death on “European elites” and “the mass invasion of migrants.” Britain’s government condemned Mr. Vance’s comments, according to the BBC, saying that the vice president was interfering in its democracy and seeking to create further division.
In Mr. Hegseth’s speech on Saturday, he praised American veterans of the D-Day invasion, only a few of whom survive today.
“We owe you a debt of gratitude we can never repay,” he said.
Mr. Hegseth’s speech, his second on this anniversary as defense secretary, also comes against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, which started with Russia’s invasion in 2022. He did not mention that war in his speech.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
4) Trump Says Iran Has Made a ‘Big’ Nuclear Promise. It Isn’t New.
President Trump’s boasts of securing a commitment from Iranian leaders not to develop a nuclear weapon have puzzled nuclear experts who note that Tehran has made that pledge for more than 50 years.
By Michael Crowley, Reporting from Washington, June 7, 2026
More than two months of on-again, off-again peace talks have made little progress toward settling the U.S. war on Iran. But President Trump has lately claimed a major breakthrough.
“The one guarantee that I have to have is that there will be no nuclear weapons,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump on Fox News last month. Iran, he added, has “agreed to that, and it was very interesting.”
Mr. Trump emphasized the point again on Monday. “They’ve already agreed they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon,” he told a New York Post podcast. “That was one of the things they’ve had to agree, they’ve agreed to that. That was the big thing,” he said.
Mr. Trump has said the main reason he went to war on Feb. 28 was to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. An official White House fact sheet lists 74 occasions, dating to 2011, when Mr. Trump said that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. And when he posted his latest conditions for a deal on social media last month, the first was that “Iran must agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb.”
But Mr. Trump’s boasts of an Iranian commitment have puzzled nuclear experts. The president appears to be claiming credit for something that is neither new nor, experts say, particularly meaningful.
“It’s not much of a concession,” said Gary Samore, a veteran arms control expert who dealt with Iran as a National Security Council official in the Obama administration.
One reason is that Tehran has forsworn nuclear weapons for more than 50 years, insisting over and over that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes such as electricity and medicine. Its promises have come in the form of written pledges, verbal statements and even a religious ruling, or fatwa, from its supreme leader.
Another is that such a promise means little on its own. Its only value would come as a first step toward subsequent talks that could establish detailed limits on Iran’s nuclear activities, including its uranium enrichment. “The issue is how the pledge translates into limits on Iran’s enrichment program,” Mr. Samore said.
In fact, Iran’s promise is in the first paragraph of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the United States, under President Barack Obama, and several other world powers that Mr. Trump so often denounces.
“Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons,” states the agreement’s preamble of the agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Mr. Trump withdrew from that agreement during his first term, calling it weak and inadequate. Tehran accelerated its nuclear program in response, but continued to insist it was not pursuing atomic weapons.
That position dates back to 1970, when Iran joined an international nonproliferation treaty, which grants members assistance with nuclear technology in return for, among other things, pledges not to develop or acquire nuclear weapons. Iran joined the treaty during the rule of a pro-Western shah who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic revolution, but the country has remained a party to the agreement.
Iran’s leader has even decreed that Islam itself prohibits the development or use of nuclear weapons. At a 2005 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran’s government declared that Ali Khamenei, who was Iran’s supreme leader, had issued a fatwa saying that “the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.”
Many analysts argue that Iran’s promises alone are virtually meaningless and lack credibility.
“An Iranian promise, by itself, is worth very little,” said Daniel Roth, the research director at United Against Nuclear Iran, a nonprofit policy group. “Iran has long maintained that it does not seek nuclear weapons despite a mountain of contrary evidence.”
In 2015, an official International Atomic Energy Agency report concluded that Iran worked on nuclear weapons designs until 2009 before pausing that effort.
An archive of documents stolen by Israeli spies in 2018, for instance, showed Iranian planning for the design and construction of nuclear weapons.
But Mr. Roth said that Mr. Trump’s aggressive approach toward Iran over the past year, which included a round of June 2025 airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities before the current conflict, demonstrates his seriousness about preventing Iran from acquiring a bomb.
In public statements over the past year, Mr. Trump has insisted on “zero enrichment” for Iran, meaning that Tehran must completely surrender its stockpile of nuclear material and dismantle the centrifuges and other equipment needed to refine uranium for use in nuclear weapons.
Iranian officials have publicly rejected that position, insisting they have a sovereign right to pursue nuclear technology.
Asked for clarification about the matter, including what commitment Iran might have made to Mr. Trump, a White House spokesperson had nothing to add to the president’s remarks.
What matters most in any potential agreement with Iran, experts agreed, is what specific limits are placed on Iran’s nuclear program and how they can be enforced.
That is a complex technical matter, and a key reason the Obama-era nuclear deal took more than 18 months to negotiate. The final agreement called for strict monitoring and spot inspections of Iran’s nuclear activities. (Mr. Trump criticized the deal, in large part, because most of its limits were set to expire after 15 years. The Obama administration said that Iran would not accept longer limits, and that the matter could be revisited in future negotiations if necessary.)
For the moment, Mr. Trump’s ambitions are more limited. He is seeking an interim agreement under which Iran would immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz and make broad commitments about its nuclear program whose details would be hashed out in subsequent negotiations.
Ultimately, guaranteeing that Iran never has a nuclear bomb is an impossible goal, said Robert Einhorn, a former senior State Department arms control official and expert on Iran’s nuclear program.
“In reality, no conceivable negotiated outcome can guarantee that Iran will never acquire nuclear weapons,” he said.
Mr. Einhorn noted that many Iranian officials have publicly suggested over the past year that repeated attacks by the United States and Israel may justify Iran’s abandonment of its past pledges not to obtain nuclear devices.
Given its ample scientific knowledge, hardened underground facilities, and the potential ability to conduct nuclear activity in secret, Iran will always be theoretically capable of going nuclear.
“As long as Iran has the knowledge and resources, it could someday disavow or ignore any legal obligations and go for the bomb, overtly or covertly,” Mr. Einhorn said.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
5) In Russia, Rage Is Boiling Over
By Andrei Zakharov, June 8, 2026
Mr. Zakharov is a Russian journalist and the author of “The Russian Cyberpunk.”
Over the past year, Russian authorities have been blocking popular messaging apps and coercing citizens to migrate to MAX, a new state-endorsed messenger platform. The messages there are presumed to be fully accessible to the F.S.B., the state security agency that succeeded the Soviet K.G.B. A recent joke from a comedy show on Channel One, Russian television’s largest outlet, went like this:
“Why are you writing to me in a private chat: ‘Hey everyone!’”? “Well, that’s how it works on MAX!”
That such a joke aired on Channel One — a significant stake of which belongs to Yury Kovalchuk, who also has strong ties to MAX and who is a friend of President Vladimir Putin’s — speaks to the animosity the people of Russia have toward the new app.
Usually the Kremlin faces dissent only from the small, liberal, perpetually-opposed-to-Putin part of society. But the state’s latest policies — blocking the internet on people’s phones, social media and internet messaging apps and running pro-MAX programming around the clock on many other broadcasts on Channel One — are generating criticism among the core of people who favored the war against Ukraine. Exacerbating frustrations at the rising costs of the war — in mid-May, Moscow was hit by a record-breaking Ukrainian drone attack — these internet restrictions have left everybody angry, and the rage is boiling over.
Mr. Putin and his cronies have been trying to restrict Russians’ access to the internet for a long time. The bans are always carried out using the same playbook: While denying people access to a service, the authorities offer them a Russian alternative, owned by people close to the Kremlin. If you can’t use Facebook, just use VK, whose chief executive is the son of Mr. Putin’s curator of domestic policy. If you can’t use YouTube, just use VK Video. These transfers are actively encouraged by the state-controlled media, which loudly accuse Western services of not complying with Russian law.
Only opponents of the regime were sounding the alarm when the government blocked independent media and platforms such as Twitter, popular mostly among urban freethinkers. Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, however, the restrictions have grown much tighter. Now, most international social media platforms with audiences of tens of millions are blocked or slowed down: Facebook and Instagram in 2022, YouTube in 2024 and, most recently, Telegram in 2025.
Restricting Telegram seems to have been a bridge too far for many Russians. Telegram, which combines private messaging and news channels, had essentially become the top Russian media app for both services. After the invasion of Ukraine, the audiences of pro-war Telegram channels grew to millions of users, and the channels became a central means of communication for Russian soldiers at the front line.
Today, the pro-war audience is not happy. In their posts, members are even using the word “grandpa,” a derogatory nickname for Mr. Putin that was previously used mainly by the opposition. It refers not only to his age, 73, but to his relationship with modern technology. The Russian president does not use a smartphone, and only watches television and reads written news reports.
Why have Russians taken the banning of Telegram so personally? Being cut off from both Telegram and WhatsApp seems to have broken the social contract that people made with Mr. Putin’s regime many years ago: As long as the people stay out of politics, the Kremlin will stay out of people’s private lives. Many in Russia viewed the deal as affording a degree of material comfort in exchange for their political loyalty.
For the modern world, unfettered internet access is just as important as a good car or new clothes. Only the Kremlin’s grandpas, who don’t use the internet themselves, seem not to understand that. Along with the app bans, there have been frequent internet shutdowns in the past year across the country. When a shutdown happens, you can gain access only to sites on the so-called white list, the collection of websites and services preapproved by the government.
The official reason for the shutdowns is to minimize the consequences of Ukrainian drone attacks. In practice, they have had no effect on the attacks’ success; one recent wave in March managed to briefly disrupt ports on the Baltic Sea, through which up to half of Russia’s oil exports pass. Many Russians believe that this is a part of the state’s bigger strategy of building a sovereign internet, a corner of cyberspace completely controlled by the Russian state. They also suspect that such internet shutdowns will eventually become the norm. In some regions, especially those near the border with Ukraine, they already have.
Many people are resisting silently, installing VPN services — tools that redirect a user’s traffic through foreign servers and help bypass restrictions. VPN usage in Russia is ubiquitous, with some estimating that roughly 60 million Russians are familiar with VPNs and that around 40 percent of internet users rely on one. Lately, the Kremlin has begun making attempts to suppress these efforts, too: The Russian authorities are putting pressure on Apple to remove VPN apps from the Russian app store and are investing nearly $300 million with the goal of blocking 92 percent of VPN apps by 2030.
Does all of this mean Russians will take to the streets to protest the shutdowns? It’s unlikely, though at least one demonstration, led by young people, did take place in Moscow at the end of March. The authorities responded in their usual way, with repression. Some of the organizers hastily emigrated. Others were arrested.
Still, the fact remains that the Kremlin has broken a longstanding compact with the Russian people. Only a grandpa like Mr. Putin could fail to see that in destroying what remained of a relatively free internet, he was destroying a central foundation of his own power.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
6) Europe Watches Its Economic Recovery Fade Into the Distance
As the war in Iran persists, signs point to a prolonged period of higher prices and slower growth rather than a quick shock.
By Eshe Nelson, Reporting from London, June 8, 2026
A supermarket in Paris. For Europe, the economic drag is now forecast to last into next year. Violette Franchi for The New York Times
When the war began in the Middle East and energy prices soared, Europe braced for a sharp, short economic shock. More than three months later, the region is settling in for a period of higher prices and weaker growth that could last much longer than expected.
For Europe, the recovery from the last energy shock just a few years ago has been cut short in its early stages. The economic drag is now forecast to last into next year as higher energy costs drain money from public budgets, sapping investment for more productive uses. Consumers would be left increasingly nervous about spending.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 cut Europe off from a critical source of natural gas, and inflation raced into the double digits. Policymakers responded by aggressively raising interest rates to thwart price growth, but that also sharply restrained the economy.
The concern today is a more subtle, but still adverse, economic hit: noticeably higher inflation and interest rates into next year at least.
“A short-term shock is being extended in time,” said Mariano Cena, senior European economist at Barclays. The longer the disruption to energy supplies from the Persian Gulf goes on, the worse the effects get, he added.
Initially, after U.S. and Israeli forces attacked Iran, and Iran responded by closing off the Strait of Hormuz, the expectation was for what economists call a V-shaped impact, with a big but short drop in growth and a strong rebound, Mr. Cena said. Now, it’s more U-shaped, where the economy is weaker for longer and the recovery is slower. Barclays recently halved its forecast for European growth this year to 0.7 percent, with just a meager pickup to 0.9 percent next year.
Before the war, Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, proclaimed that interest rates and inflation, both at 2 percent, were in “a good place.” Investors didn’t expect rates to change all year, financial markets showed.
Now, traders are betting that the central bank will raise rates this week by a quarter of a percentage point and again later in the year. Markets are signaling that by next spring, rates will be almost three-quarters of a point higher than they are now.
The continued closure of the strait, a critical waterway for the export of energy, fertilizers and other commodities, has led to quickly rising inflation. The average rate across the 21 countries that use the euro was 3.2 percent in May, its highest level since September 2023. It was 1.9 percent in February, before the war, just below the European Central Bank’s 2 percent target.
“The impact of the energy shock is set to extend into 2027,” the European Commission said recently as it forecast economic growth next year to return only to a “modest” 1.4 percent and for inflation to be 2.4 percent. Even if energy prices have peaked this quarter, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said last week, it expects inflation in the eurozone to be meaningfully above 2 percent for most of next year, higher than it projected about two months ago.
Despite the supply disruptions, Europe has not yet experienced shortages of goods, including jet fuel. Instead, the region is paying a lot more for them. Since the end of February, the European Union has spent an extra 42 billion euros (about $49 billion) on energy — about half on natural gas alone. Concerned about the cost of fertilizers, officials have announced a regionwide plan to support farmers.
As the costs mount, the European Commission, the executive arm of the 27-nation European Union, has relented on strict budget rules and given member governments some flexibility to spend more money on measures that “reduce the dependence on imported fossil fuels.”
Still, the economic slowdown will be difficult for governments to manage. Consumer confidence indicators are at lows last seen in 2022 and could go lower because inflation is starting to outpace wage growth, squeezing household budgets. And research shows that consumers, experiencing their second price shock within five years, are more sensitive and fearful of stagflation, a painful mix of high prices and stagnant economic growth.
Part of the problem is that a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is unlikely to bring prices down quickly, economists say. Supplies will remain tight because it will take time to restart the production that has slowed or stopped since the war, and some of the lost output will take a long time to replace. That will keep prices high, especially as many countries look to build up reserves, Mr. Cena at Barclays said.
Traders are expecting oil and gas prices to slow only moderately over the next year. Futures contracts for Brent crude, the international benchmark, are trading at about $90 a barrel for the end of this year, and $80 a barrel at the end of next year. Before the war, prices were about $70 a barrel. Natural gas prices are following a similar path.
These prices “are high, but they are not extreme,” said Alfred Arnborg, an analyst at Think Tank Europa in Copenhagen. Still, they will “drag on economies who are net importers.”
Governments are “gearing up for a prolonged crisis,” Mr. Arnborg said. Some are extending their relief measures, like tax cuts on fuel, deeper into the year. Broadly, officials are getting ready to continue paying for relief measures and other costs created by higher prices. He noted, for example, that Portugal and Poland are planning new windfall taxes on energy companies.
“You wouldn’t implement windfall tax if you expected this to end tomorrow,” Mr. Arnborg said.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
7) The High Cost of Silent Classrooms
By Shael Polakow-Suransky, June 8, 2026
Mr. Polakow-Suransky is the president of the Bank Street College of Education.
Sara Meneses Cuapio for The New York Times
Last year, I visited a seventh-grade math classroom in a public school in the Bronx. Twenty students sat bent over laptops, working with an A.I. tutor on story problems about converting fractions to decimals. A teacher moved around the room, checking a dashboard that tracked how many tries each student needed to reach the right answer.
On the surface, the classroom was working. Students were engaged, and most of them, eventually, were getting to the right answers.
When I looked closely, though, many of the students were lost. They didn’t understand fractions conceptually. Each time one of them made a mistake, the A.I. tutor backed up and suggested another step, but it never identified the underlying gap in understanding. The teacher could not see it either. Her dashboard showed which students were stuck, but not why.
The core intellectual work of teaching is noticing why a child’s understanding breaks down and then knowing what to do. It might mean pausing the class for a mini-lesson or pulling out fraction tiles for one student who needs to visualize the math. In the class I visited, that work had been handed to a tool that could do neither. No one was arguing about strategy or turning to the kid across the table to ask, “Wait, how did you get that?” Each child sat alone. Silent, in front of a screen, clicking away.
The cost of this silence is both cognitive and social. When artificial intelligence anticipates every step before a student even recognizes a hurdle, it strips away the productive struggle on which learning depends. Students need to wrestle with confusion to build their own understanding. The neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues have shown that deep learning, the kind that sticks, happens when students connect what they are learning to bigger ideas and to their own lives. Replace dialogue and struggle with isolated screen time, and we disrupt the neural circuits that allow students to build knowledge.
Most of us sense this intuitively. Yet the current trend in K-12 educational technology is the “one-to-one” A.I. tutor, backed by significant investments from technology companies. Early research shows some gains in procedural skills. But efficiency is not the same as understanding.
When we isolate a student with an A.I. tutor, we cut her off from the relationships that drive learning. At Bank Street College, we train teachers to use a “developmental-interaction approach,” which recognizes that children learn best in the context of trusting relationships. When a student struggles, a clearer explanation from a bot is rarely enough. The child needs to hear another student explain it in a way that doesn’t quite make sense to her yet, argue back and figure out where they actually disagree. And she needs a teacher who understands her. Someone who can tell a student who is lost from one who is bored, or read her hesitation and know whether it is a language barrier or the normal fumbling before a breakthrough.
Doubling down on isolation is dangerous. We are already witnessing a collapse in teen mental health, as Jonathan Haidt has warned us, driven by a “rewiring of childhood” that replaced play and community with screen time. If schools embrace one-to-one A.I. tutoring as the norm, they will deepen that crisis, exchanging the in-person interactions children need for yet another screen.
For a generation, American schools have been shaped by standardized tests that measure a narrow band of skills. Because the tests carry high stakes, teachers teach to them. The curriculum narrows. Time for projects, argument and problem-solving shrinks. The A.I. tutor drilling concepts a seventh grader doesn’t understand is not an aberration of that system. It is its logical extension.
A.I. also risks becoming a new instrument for educational segregation. In wealthy districts, parents will demand schools centered on human interaction: seminar tables, heated debates, messy projects. Students in poorer schools, often Black and Latino children, will be handed laptops and headphones, “learning” from machines that can correct their algebra but will never care about their curiosity.
Parents and educators across the country are organizing. In New York City, they have demanded a moratorium on A.I. in schools. Nationally, a coalition of more than 250 child development experts and advocacy organizations is calling for a five-year pause on generative A.I. in K-12 classrooms. They are right to be alarmed. But we don’t have to choose between haphazardly embracing A.I. and banning it.
In a world A.I. is already reshaping, what students need to learn is changing. Content knowledge will always matter, but it is not enough. Students must also become original thinkers who can reframe problems, citizens engaged enough to grapple with power and democracy, and generous collaborators who can work across real differences. An A.I. tutor can help a student memorize a formula. It cannot teach her to debate its ethics with a peer who disagrees.
A guiding principle for our work with A.I. in schools should be whether it supports this kind of deeper learning. Take Keisha, a recent graduate of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, also in the Bronx, whose work you can see on YouTube. For her social studies portfolio, she spent weeks doing research on how federal housing policy and the G.I. Bill shaped the racial wealth gap in America. After many drafts, she defended her paper in front of a panel of teachers, who questioned her closely. She could point to specific passages in her sources to answer their questions and confidently explain her reasoning.
Keisha’s school is one of 38 in the New York Performance Standards Consortium, in which students have graduated this way for decades, by presenting and defending portfolios of their work. The teachers in these schools design projects that invite students to wrestle with hard questions over months. Their schools have built the conditions to support this: a curriculum, a culture, schedules that let teachers know their students well. So far, this approach has remained the rare exception because most schools still default to top-down instruction and are not designed to give teachers — or students — the time deeper learning demands.
A.I. could ease one part of that equation. A tool that organizes a student’s drafts across a year, gathers peer feedback and shows a teacher how an argument tightened over time could let her give this kind of attention to more students. The question worth asking is whether A.I. could finally help us measure what we actually care about, instead of only what is easy to count on a test.
This isn’t hypothetical. Last summer, the New York Board of Regents approved a new “portrait of a graduate” framework, signaling a shift away from defining readiness only through standardized exams and toward capacities like critical thinking, communication and creative problem-solving. In practice, this means making space inside traditional schools for longer projects and the kind of inquiry that takes more than a class period to complete. Without tools that make projects like these workable for teachers, the reform risks collapsing back into something easier to measure.
Some of those tools are already being built. Teachers have designed hundreds of A.I. applications and shared them on a nonprofit platform called Playlab. Brendan Harney, a science teacher at the Bronx Lab School, learned the hard way what A.I. in classrooms should not do. With 70 students each designing their own experiments, he hoped A.I. could shoulder some of the coaching. He built a tool in imitation of his voice and tone, an “Alexa for the classroom,” as he put it. His students pushed back. As he came to see it, they wanted to walk through a hard problem with a real teacher, not a machine. He rebuilt the tool with a smaller job: It now helps students probe their assumptions before they sit down with him to talk about their experiments.
When one student proposed testing how substances like caffeine affect memory, the A.I. helped him think through quantities and measurements. Mr. Harney asked the harder question: whether it was ethical to make another student ingest 400 milligrams of caffeine for a class experiment. Teachers like Mr. Harney are working out where A.I. helps and where only a teacher will do.
The seventh graders I mentioned at the outset don’t need a better A.I. tutor. They need a teacher who knows them well and has the capacity to help them work through what confuses them until it doesn’t anymore. The silence of that Bronx classroom is a warning. Real learning requires friction, debate and connection. Used wisely, A.I. could give teachers more time to do that work with their students.
The choice between a classroom that drills a child and one that teaches her to think should not be determined by ZIP code. We can build technology that amplifies what teachers do best, or we can sleepwalk our way into letting it replace them. What we choose now will shape more than how students learn. It will shape who they become.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
8) The American Family Is at a Breaking Point. Our Politics Have Finally Noticed.
Society has treated parenting as a private endeavor. But what if raising children is also a public good?
By Jia Lynn Yang, June 8, 2026
Jia Lynn Yang has two young children. She relied on the work of more than a dozen historians and legal scholars for this piece.
Fighting for child care in New York City in 1950. Getty Images
The sheer logistical and financial madness of raising children in America is now officially a matter of political concern.
The mayors of New York and San Francisco, two cities in which large families have become practically an endangered species, have pledged major efforts to make child care free. Last November, New Mexico became the first state in the country to cover child care for all its residents. High-profile Democratic strategists like David Plouffe are encouraging the party to adopt universal child care as an official part of its platform in 2028.
Even Republicans, long skeptical of public funding for child care, are shifting — slightly. The president’s major domestic policy bill last year, while slashing benefits for low-income adults and children, made four million more families eligible for a child care tax credit. It also added tax credits for employers who offer child care. The Heritage Foundation, alarmed by the country’s plummeting fertility rate, is pushing the White House to do much more, including a “large family bonus” for those raising more than two children.
The challenge and cost of caring for children is hardly new for the American family. Since the 1970s, when women began an astonishing three-decade surge into the workplace, individual households have been reinventing the configurations of work and family. Without public assistance, parenting has become increasingly privatized — an expensive, stressful endeavor that many households manage alone. Half a century into this shift, the American family is buckling under the weight. In 2024, the U.S. surgeon general declared parental stress a public health crisis.
The numbers tell an alarming story: In one survey, 48 percent of parents said that most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared with 26 percent of other adults, a gap that has grown over the last decade. Another poll found that seven in 10 Americans say that raising children is unaffordable, an increase of 20 percent points over the last decade. Indeed, the cost of child care has more than tripled since 1990, far outpacing the rise in wages. To be a parent in America is to race constantly in vain against the clock. In a recent survey of parents of young children under 6, nearly three in four said they wished they had more quality time with their children. Instead, many are working, too crunched financially to contemplate having more hours to enjoy family life.
While this pressure has been building for decades, it’s also relatively new. Millennial parents are raising small children in a world where everyone is now expected to be a breadwinner, with no one at home. For some, this is a choice made possible by professional opportunities for women. But increasingly, it’s a matter of necessity to keep up with the always-growing costs of housing, health care and even a modicum of child care (every parent needs a break, whether they work or not).
Now, in some pockets of the left and the right, an idea is re-emerging that raising children is not a private concern alone. It’s a public issue.
“Parenting has been framed as though it’s a private choice that you make about how you want to live your life,” said Serene Khader, a philosophy professor at CUNY and the author of the 2024 book “Faux Feminism.” “But it’s also something that provides a necessary social good.”
The Privatization of Motherhood
In the 1980s, Robin West, a legal scholar at Georgetown Law, was attending a panel on work-life balance at big law firms when an audience member asked a male lawyer about maternity leave policies. He cautioned that firms could do only so much. The choice to have a child, he explained, was like a decision to sail around the world. In other words, an individual act of extravagance.
The metaphor has remained with West ever since. It seemed to sum up an entire worldview: “If you parent, that was your decision so you’re on your own,” she said. “We don’t owe you anything for that.”
This way of seeing children has become ingrained in American society. Just look at minor cultural flare-ups, like the long-running debates about air travel and whether small children are an intolerable burden for other passengers. It’s little wonder that arguments for publicly supported parenting have felt so impertinent for so long.
But how did Americans come to see parenting as a private issue in the first place?
In the 1970s and 1980s, economists like Milton Friedman hitched their star to an ascendant conservative movement that prized personal liberty and resented federal power. “Free markets” became the order of the day as governments rolled back regulations on businesses and politicians railed against social welfare. These ideas suffused political and cultural life, as well — in the valorization of choice. In this way of thinking, which became known as neoliberalism, the individual is a rational actor in a market who knows best what she wants or needs.
As the historian Sophia Rosenfeld writes in her book “The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life,” having a choice became “itself a moral good, maybe even the moral good, because it is the source of our collective freedom to each live as we wish and, ultimately, to ‘be ourselves.’ In the absence of agreement on the good and the right, choice went from being a benefit of freedom to freedom’s very essence.”
Leading feminists at the time employed this framework, too. Personal choice for women became equated with freedom itself: Each woman who escaped the presumption that she could be only a wife and mother and pressed her way into the male corners of America achieved a win for all. This project amounted to a revolution. From 1950 to 2000, the percentage of women in the work force nearly doubled to 60 percent from 33 percent.
At the same time, the idea of parenting as a personal choice found a powerful and persistent vehicle in the fight over the right to not become a parent. When the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade led to a backlash from the right, feminist leaders searched for an idea that would ring with so much common sense that its opponents would seem out of touch. During a key early strategy session, Planned Parenthood leaders decided to build their fight around an essential right: the “freedom of choice in parenthood.”
West, who supports abortion rights, argues that by emphasizing the right to choose one’s own destiny, these activists also helped shape the public’s perception that becoming a parent was a personal lifestyle decision.
“If you really maintain that individuals are the authors of their own fate, that leads you to strong support for keeping the state out of people’s individual and even work lives,” she said. “That kind of hyper-individualism can lead to a very minimal state but also a minimal attitude toward state assistance or community assistance, a sharing of cost, a sharing of burdens.”
This became especially true in the workplace, where women found that they could be treated like the men, so long as they appeared to have no personal commitments.
Rather than accommodate a wider range of workers, companies largely gained more employees who could behave as if they had no children at all. “The solutions that came out of that moment, and the notions of sex equality, didn’t really force the nation’s power brokers to change much or give much up,” said Katherine Turk, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and the author of the book “Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace.”
Gender roles, at work and at home, have proven easier to bend than corporate America’s picture of an ideal worker. Nearly half of mothers are now their family’s breadwinner. Millennial men participate far more in parenting than their fathers or grandfathers, even if women by and large are still doing more. A typical 35-year-old father who was born between 1981 and 1996 spends roughly 80 minutes per day caring for his child, nearly twice the time spent by baby boomer fathers.
At this point, only the wealthiest can largely obscure the existence of their children — and ailing parents — at work by paying for help. But the people doing the help, more often than not women of color, are almost universally paid too little to care for their own families. With the cost of care rising still, even Americans who hustled to reach the professional class are discovering they can no longer maintain the madness of working while looking out for loved ones.
The Breaking Point, a Way Forward
Modern parents grumbled their way through all of this for years. Then came the Covid pandemic. Rather than the miles that once separated family from work, professional-class Americans now merely had the doors of their homes, easily breached by children no longer in school who barged into Zoom meetings. For the majority of Americans who never had access to remote work to begin with, things were even harder.
The pandemic revealed an invisible world of labor that all along had been holding aloft the working world: the schools and day cares that watched people’s children so that they could go to work. Once that was removed, someone had to make up the difference. Usually, it was a woman, long expected by society to be the first line of defense on the home front.
Many workplaces responded with accommodations — more flexibility, better benefits. But when the pandemic receded, companies began rolling back these policies, presuming that families needed them only during world-historic epidemics, not that many of their employees had barely kept it together before.
The crisis of care is now so acute that it can no longer be treated as a private issue. A number of Democrats have seized on this moment to push for universal child care. New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has aggressively added free child care across the city, while insisting that it is a public responsibility, not a private one — a right, not a privilege. In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie has begun an ambitious plan to subsidize child care. A family of four earning less than $230,000 a year, for instance, can now claim free child care. Those making less than $310,000 will soon receive a 50 percent subsidy.
Many Democrats have long wanted these kinds of programs. But now even a majority of Republican voters support policies like paid leave, affordable child care and tax credits for parents. In Utah, the Republican governor Spencer Cox is trying to end the stigma against people who temporarily leave the work force to care for a child or a parent by hiring them into state government.
Democratic leaders tend to describe the challenge of parenting as primarily one of cost, as if we simply need to solve a budget problem one household at a time; on the right, there are conservatives who believe that all of this could be solved if women remained strictly in the domestic sphere.
But there are voices on the left and the right arguing for a deeper shift in society. They want a redefinition of values — a recognition that raising children is a high collective calling, one that demands the backing of the public so that anyone, regardless of gender, can become a devoted parent.
For all the public discussion of the stresses of parenting, mothers and fathers still report gaining deep joy and satisfaction from their roles raising children. Among fathers, 85 percent say that being a parent is one of the most important aspects of who they are as a person. Among mothers, the number is only just higher at 88 percent.
Society benefits when people get to experience a life in which they have time to care for other people — not just children, but neighbors and friends — and in turn be cared for themselves, argues Erika Bachiochi, a Catholic legal scholar and the author of the book “The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision.” A child surrounded by loving adults represents a robust civic life, filled with strong families, schools, congregations, friends who are so close they are called aunts and uncles. This should be the day-to-day practice of living together in a democracy.
Some feminists have long argued that we undervalue the work of caring for other people. In a society that measures the worth of a person by how much they produce at work, being a parent by definition confers lower status. Sarah Leonard, the editor in chief of Lux, a feminist magazine, believes that Democrats need to not only embrace universal child care but also argue for it in moral, not merely economic, terms. “I think they should do it in a full-throated way that really says not just people are working and need child care and it’s too expensive,” she said. “But we as a society bear collective responsibility for the next generation.”
For half a century, American parents have tried to be exceptional individuals, contorting themselves into every possible shape to make the raising of children possible. They have saved, they have delayed, they have settled for smaller families in smaller homes. They have tried to survive under the strangest logic that the act of caring for others, of all things, should be seen as an individual pursuit or even indulgence. The help that is needed never seems to come: There is no amount of private exertion that can overcome public indifference.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
9) Searching for Shade When It’s 125 Degrees
Every season brings a new struggle for people in Dadu District, Pakistan, an area prone to sandstorms, drought and flooding.
By Zia ur-Rehman, Visuals by Asim Hafeez, Reporting from Dadu District, Pakistan, June 8, 2026
A brick-kiln worker got some relief from soaring temperatures on Wednesday in Dadu, southern Pakistan.
Pakistan ranks among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, and few districts here have experienced as many climate extremes as Dadu.
The temperature in the district, in southern Pakistan, reached 124.7 degrees Fahrenheit, or 51.5 Celsius, on May 28, the highest in the country this year.
“It feels as if the sun has come down closer to the earth,” said Abdul Khaliq, 48, a farmer.
By midday, farmers abandon fields, brick-kiln workers gather in the shade, and vendors pack away stalls. Children jump into ponds, while herders lead buffaloes into the water for relief.
It isn’t just the record heat. The people of Dadu have endured drought, erratic rainfall, water scarcity, sandstorms and the growing threat of destructive floods from glacial lakes in its northern mountains.
Geography makes Dadu unusually vulnerable. Located between the Indus River and the Kirthar mountain range, it faces hazards from both sides. Heavy monsoon rains can swell rivers in the mountains, while the Indus and its canal network threaten low-lying areas. But the monsoons have become more unpredictable, and large parts of the district are prone to drought.
For most of his life in Dadu, Mr. Khaliq divided his year by the seasons — when to plant, when to harvest and when the rains would come. Now, he says, those cycles are gone.
“We used to know what each season would bring,” he said. “Now, every season comes with a warning.”
Recently, blinding sandstorms have swept across Dadu, a sign of the monsoon’s onset and the possibility of floods. While monsoon rains have long been variable, experts have linked the severity of devastating floods in 2022 to climate change.
I first met Mr. Khaliq after that catastrophe. At one point, he was chest-deep in water, trying to save his family and livestock. Much of Dadu had been submerged. Villages became islands, accessible only by boat. Families struggled to find dry land even to bury their dead.
The 2022 disaster caused about $30 billion in damage across Pakistan, and Mr. Khaliq’s family is still recovering, as are many neighbors.
“Each flood made us incur severe debts and forced us to start over,” said Mr. Khaliq, a father of 10.
In the cluster of mud dwellings his extended family shares, watermarks remain visible on the walls, while parts of the property lie in ruins. When those waters receded, they left behind salt deposits that crippled soil fertility. Mr. Khaliq said he harvested almost nothing for two growing seasons.
“It can take two generations for a family to escape poverty, yet floods can destroy decades of progress within days,” Musadik Malik, Pakistan’s climate change minister, said last month at the World Urban Forum, a United Nations-sponsored conference.
Aside from floods, people in Dadu endure long dry spells and droughts.
“The weather has now become our biggest fear,” Mr. Khaliq said. “Without enough rain, our harvests fail. But too much rain destroys everything we have.”
With harvests unpredictable and rising fuel prices increasing the cost of irrigation, transportation and farm equipment, some farmers in Dadu who once grew cotton, rice and onions might now rely on a single wheat crop. Many of the men seek seasonal work in Karachi and other cities.
In Mr. Khaliq’s family, the women and children spend long hours twisting wild plant fibers into rope. This labor-intensive craft earns them all a combined $3 a day.
During cooler mornings, they work outdoors using a hand-operated machine. As temperatures rise, they move into shaded corridors to work under a small solar-powered fan. It runs only after the battery has absorbed enough sunlight to generate electricity.
In dozens of Dadu’s villages, power was never fully restored after the 2022 floods damaged infrastructure. Blackouts can last 14 to 18 hours a day.
“When there is no electricity, the solar panels give us some relief,” Mr. Khaliq said.
But most families in Dadu cannot afford batteries large enough to run fans. Mr. Khaliq bought his system on a $4 monthly installment plan, using savings from selling milk from his two buffaloes.
Recent sandstorms have brought a new worry. “The panels are on the roof, and whenever strong winds come, I fear they could be damaged,” he said. “If anything happens to it, I don’t know how I would afford to replace it.”
Water, too, has become increasingly scarce. In several villages in Dadu, drinking water systems damaged during floods in 2010 were never fully restored, so people here have to buy drinking water and ice.
“Climate change has become a stress test for survival,” said Mashooque Birhmani, head of the Sujag Sansar Organization, a local nonprofit. “It exposes the fragility of everything: governance, agriculture, electricity, water, health and people’s ability to earn a living.”
Looking ahead, Mr. Khaliq said his biggest concern was for his children.
“I don’t know whether my children will still be able to make a living from this land in Dadu,” he said, “or whether they will have to leave and find a future somewhere else.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
10) Israeli Expansionism Is Shaking the Middle East
By Megan K. Stack, June 8, 2026
Ms. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer who has reported extensively from the Middle East.
Israeli flags on a road to Rawabi, a planned city for Palestinians in the West Bank. Samar Hazboun for The New York Times
In the past, Israel has traded land for peace. These days, it’s trading peace for land.
For years, Israel favored cold (or at most lukewarm) wars with unfriendly neighbors: containment, subversion by spies, the occasional assassination or one-off airstrike on a weapons facility or training camp. Not anymore. Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, aggression and expansionism have come to define Israel’s foreign policy.
Israeli troops have taken over a broad swath of southern Lebanon, driving out more than one million residents and demolishing centuries-old villages. Israeli officials call it a “buffer zone” to protect residents of northern Israel from Hezbollah rockets. But some Israeli officials have threatened to flatten the territory, annex it and fill it with settlers.
In Iran, Israel eagerly tried to induce regime collapse, apparently unconcerned with creating a dangerous power vacuum in a country containing 11 tons of enriched uranium.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has bragged that his government helped cause the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, the former president of Syria. As the Damascus government fell, Israel invaded and occupied an area in Syria’s southwest, adjoining the land later seized in Lebanon. In Gaza, the Israeli army will enlarge its control to 70 percent of the enclave, Mr. Netanyahu said, and the expansion is likely to continue. Defense Minister Israel Katz has suggested the entire Palestinian population of Gaza should eventually be concentrated into a dystopian “humanitarian city,” built on the ruins of Rafah. Nobody would be allowed to leave the zone unless they emigrate, which Mr. Katz has called an open goal of the Israeli government. Meanwhile, a terror-fueled campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank continues to push Palestinians off the land and expand Jewish settlements.
Settlers and other religious Israelis who’ve grown powerful in Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition often speak of a “Greater Israel,” with borders eventually expanding to consume all the land bequeathed by God in the Book of Genesis: Jordan and Lebanon, along with parts of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But to Mr. Netanyahu, who’s started referring to Israel as a superpower, the aim is probably more strategic than spiritual — to gain land and weaken or splinter neighbors perceived as hostile.
Emboldened by unstinting U.S. support during its devastation of Gaza, and with American forces by its side in attacking Iran, Israel is moving with disorienting speed on multiple fronts. Mr. Netanyahu attributes his country’s aggression to the bloody lessons of Oct. 7, which he insists was an attack not just by Hamas but “by the Iran axis, to try to annihilate us through a noose of death.”
“I said, ‘We’re going to change the Middle East,’” Mr. Netanyahu told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview last month. “We’re going to change this condition where they’re ganging up on us, thinking they’re going to wipe out the one and only Jewish state.”
This bellicose stance has a whiff of delusion. Fractured, infighting neighbors may look less daunting than the hostile gallery of autocracies that ringed Israel back when Saddam Hussein, Muammar el-Qaddafi and the Assad dynasty still ruled. But failed states nurture terrorists and seed future violence. Gobbling up land deepens resentment.
Most of all, an assumption of impunity and the willingness to use violence as a political tool are turning Israel into a pariah. Flush with U.S. aid, Mr. Netanyahu simply brushes aside the outstanding international arrest warrant accusing him of war crimes in Gaza. But Israeli aggression also threatens to fray the small country’s financial and diplomatic lifeline to the United States.
Between the carnage in Gaza and the widespread (and not unfounded) perception that President Trump started an unpopular war in Iran at Mr. Netanyahu’s prodding, U.S. public opinion has soured radically, and perhaps irrevocably, against Israel. Sixty percent of U.S. adults now have an unfavorable view of Israel; half of U.S. voters believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
“That is a huge threat to Israel’s national security,” said Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel. “Israel needs the U.S. for everything.”
Mr. Netanyahu has argued that Israel, for years the world’s top recipient of U.S. foreign aid, is now wealthy enough to wean itself off American military aid. He may be right. But cash is just one element of crucial U.S. support. The United States allows Israel access to a sophisticated arsenal that can’t be bought elsewhere (the F-35 stealth fighter jet, for example), overlooking U.S. laws that bar weapon sales to foreign military units committing serious human rights violations. Israel also leans heavily on the United States for intelligence, not to mention the U.S. veto at the United Nations Security Council that has repeatedly saved Israel from censure or sanction.
Without that veto, Mr. Freilich said, “Israel would have been under comprehensive sanctions decades ago.”
Perhaps Mr. Netanyahu is moving so fast because he recognizes the risks of dwindling American backing. But his willingness to create disarray has many of Israel’s neighbors eyeing it warily.
“Creating that kind of chaos can lead to a vacuum, factionalism, terrorist violence, insurgencies,” said Mohamad Elmasry, a media studies professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. “But I think Israel is prepared to deal with that, especially if they’re able to expand borders while countries are trying to rebuild.”
In Lebanon, Mr. Katz said, Israel would follow “the model we applied in Gaza’s Rafah and Beit Hanoun.” It was a chilling comparison. Both places were bombed ruthlessly and then razed during Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.
“You drive through a town and there’s not a single house standing, because everything has been destroyed,” Ramzi Kaiss, a Beirut-based researcher with Human Rights Watch, told me.
Israel occupied southern Lebanon for nearly two decades, starting with a 1982 incursion to fight Palestinian militants. That invasion inspired the creation of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia whose guerrilla attacks drove Israel to withdraw in 2000. There is a sense of repetition here, of fruitless cycles of occupation and insurgency.
But what comes next? Israel has now ordered the evacuation of about one-fifth of Lebanon — an area much larger than originally suggested, stretching far beyond any buffer zone. Right-wing Israelis fantasize aloud about settling southern Lebanon, and Israeli officials have warned displaced residents that they won’t be back anytime soon. At the same time, Israel and the United States have been pressuring the Lebanese government to strip Hezbollah of its weapons — an improbable demand given the Lebanese military’s relative weakness and the sectarian volatility of such a move.
Israel may view southern Lebanon as a bargaining chip to wield in negotiations, a prize to claim or a way to pile unbearable pressure on the Lebanese state. Whatever game Israel is trying to play, pushing this demand for disarmament on a weak central government risks setting off a civil war among Lebanon’s finely balanced sectarian communities.
“They don’t seem to be interested in, ‘How do we enable the growth of a stable state on our northern border?’” said Paul Salem, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Syria remains frail and fragmented, with various armed groups controlling parts of the country, Turkish troops in the north and Israeli occupation in the south. In his efforts to pull Syria together, President Ahmed al-Sharaa remains badly hamstrung by a crushing Israeli bombing campaign that all but wiped out Syria’s military capabilities as the former regime collapsed.
In April, the Israeli government agreed to spend $334 million to move thousands of Israeli civilians into the Golan Heights, a Syrian plateau Israel seized in 1967 and later annexed, although international law forbids transferring civilians to an occupied territory. The move illustrates that today’s temporary security needs can become tomorrow’s border expansion. The Golan Heights was, until recently, Israel’s buffer zone against Syria. But now Israel has carved deeper into Syria and is moving to populate the old buffer zone with people who will be protected by the new buffer zone.
There’s no question that Israel is finding new opportunities in weakened states. As preparations to bomb Iran got underway this past winter, Israel secretly set up two covert bases in the remote desert of Iraq — apparently unbeknown to the government in Baghdad. When Iraqi troops approached one of the bases to investigate reports of suspicious military activity, Israel repelled them with airstrikes, killing one soldier and wounding two more.
Israel is even reportedly planning to set up a base in Somaliland (a breakaway state that Israel is alone among United Nations member states in recognizing) in order to fight the Houthis in Yemen and monitor the strategically important Bab al-Mandab Strait, which runs between Yemen and the Horn of Africa.
Oddly, the spate of expansionist gambits comes together with an Israeli push to normalize diplomatic relations with Arab states. The governments of both Israel and the United States are keen to expand the Abraham Accords, the Trump-mediated agreements that normalized Israeli ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. Both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump consider the Abraham Accords a roaring success. But to Palestinians who felt that Arab neighbors ignored their plight to make deals with Israel, the accords suggested the futility of politics. It’s worth remembering that the Oct. 7 attack was launched just as Saudi Arabia, the kingpin of Arab states, was on the brink of normalizing ties with Israel.
It’s hard not to wonder whether the subtext is: Throw the Palestinians under the bus and make peace with us, or you risk becoming the next target.
The region’s power brokers aren’t talking much about the Palestinians these days. Israel continues to restrict aid and keep up a patter of violence in a bomb-chewed and immiserated Gaza Strip, and Palestinians in the West Bank are still suffering daily repression at the hands of settlers and soldiers. But make no mistake: The unanswered demand for Palestinian sovereignty sits at the heart of all the regional upheaval, unacknowledged though it may be.
Mr. Netanyahu and his cabinet are in no mood to take the boot off Palestinians’ necks, however, and the Trump administration — despite growing public disgust — shows little interest in pressuring Mr. Netanyahu on behalf of the Palestinians.
Through money, protection and diplomatic overindulgence, the United States helped to create the aggressive Israel we see today. So what will we do now? Sometimes I recall the conversations, before Oct. 7 changed everything, when U.S. foreign policy experts talked about disengaging from the Middle East. The United States must pivot to China, they’d say. And yet here we are, ensnared in the one big war we didn’t particularly want, and can’t seem to figure out how to end.
Meanwhile, in Washington, legislation now moving through Congress would merge virtually all aspects of U.S. and Israeli defense technology — from research to manufacturing, drones to A.I. to biotechnology — to “promote the long-term integration of joint capabilities.”
Perhaps we are drifting toward a new status quo in which Israel, ever more integrated into the military-industrial complex, manages the region with the United States at its back. Maybe, if you want to empower a new manager, you give them the reins, and stop saying no.
And so we are watching, encouraging and excusing as our closest regional ally keeps slipping deeper into a mess that will, one way or another, belong to us, too.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
