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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) A Shocking Betrayal of Black Americans
By Mara Gay, June 5, 2026
Ms. Gay writes about politics for Opinion. She traveled to Memphis and Montgomery, Ala., for this piece.
Outside the blindingly white antebellum columns of the Alabama State Capitol on a recent Saturday, Martese Chism stood in the Southern heat with thousands of others, rallying for voting rights. It was a show of defiance amid a sweeping attack on Black political power.
To get there, Ms. Chism, 65, left Mississippi before dawn, drove to Memphis and rode a bus five hours to Montgomery with her 8-year-old great-nephew Carson in tow. They made the trip to honor Ms. Chism’s great-grandmother Birdia Keglar, a civil rights activist killed while fighting for the same rights in Mississippi 60 years ago.
Millions of Americans like Ms. Chism live in states where Republicans are drawing maps that dilute the power of Black voters, and those who share their interests. Just on Tuesday, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to eliminate one of only two Black-majority districts. By the fall elections, and almost certainly by the next presidential election, new maps will be in place.
The Supreme Court decision in April severely weakened the Voting Rights Act by allowing political parties to gerrymander voting districts for partisan advantage, no matter the effect on Black voters. The effort to destroy Black political power in the South is among the greatest betrayals of Black Americans, and those who have voted alongside them, by the federal government in living memory. It will have far-reaching consequences for all Americans, and for our democracy. Despite this, the work of mobilizing a response is largely falling to Black people.
In Montgomery, many of these Americans had come from across the South to gather in what was the first capitol of the Confederacy and register their outrage.
Elderly Black people protested in soaring temperatures. Some told me they had marched many times before, over decades. Parents carried small children who had overheated and fallen asleep, fanning them as their brown limbs dangled from their arms. White Americans showed up, too, joining the largely Black rally with signs that said, “No Jim Crow Maps.”
Black Americans have carried extraordinary burdens in the United States, not only to exercise their own rights, but also to make the country a democracy. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965 and strengthened in the decades that followed, had protected them from racial gerrymandering that divided them across multiple districts in order to blunt the impact of their votes. This was just one of a multitude of tactics Southern officials used to limit Black suffrage and stifle competition during Jim Crow.
In more recent years, an increasingly ideological Supreme Court began issuing rulings weakening the Voting Rights Act. On April 29, the court’s 6-to-3 conservative majority eviscerated much of what was left of the law, effectively saying the legislation that Americans marched, bled and died for decades ago was no longer necessary. Congressional maps that diminish the Black vote are now acceptable, according to the court, so long as state lawmakers say they are drawing them based on partisan advantage and not on race.
The suggestion that partisan gerrymandering has nothing to do with race is fantastical. It ignores the defining role of race and racism in shaping partisan affiliation in the United States. For instance, the embrace of the civil rights movement by the national Democratic Party is, according to many historians, the main reason so many white Southerners became Republicans in the second part of the 20th century, a phenomenon known as realignment.
Since the court’s April ruling, largely white Republican-led legislatures across the South have moved to dismantle Black political power at stunning speed, breaking apart voting blocs at the urging of a failing president desperate to keep control of Congress in this fall’s midterm elections. The redrawing of these maps is almost certain to sharply reduce the number of Black Americans serving in the U.S. House and could critically diminish the ability of Black voters and millions of other Americans to elect candidates of their choice. At the same time, they will become less able to hold the elected officials who come to represent them accountable. Redistricting has already happened in Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama. Lawmakers plan to redistrict in Georgia and Mississippi for future elections.
The clearest assessment of this arrangement came from Ms. Chism. “Yes, I can vote, but I have no power,” she told me. She then recalled the U.S. Constitution, which for 80 years when determining congressional seats counted enslaved Black Americans as three-fifths of a person. “They’re using our body, our vote, as part of the census, like they did during slavery. They count us, but we don’t have no voice. We back to that.”
All Americans, everywhere, have a deep stake in what happens to voters in the South. The harm of severely limiting the power of Black voters across the region will not be limited to Black Americans and marginalized people.
The South will be more likely to send members of Congress to Washington who have directly benefited from the erosion of the Voting Rights Act. These lawmakers can be expected to be less responsive to Black constituents and other Democrats in their own districts, but also the interests of voters across the country who hold similar political preferences.
The political careers of these candidates will most likely depend on extreme gerrymanders that limit competition from Black voters and other Democrats, even when those Americans make up large portions of the region’s population. The new map enacted in Louisiana, for example, gives Republicans a solid advantage in five of the six congressional districts, even though Black people make up one-third of the entire state population. And though Black voters are the heart of the Democratic coalition in the South, that coalition includes Latino, Asian, Native and white Americans as well. Polling can be sparse on the subject, but it’s worth noting that Pew found in the 2010s that about one-third of white Southern voters identified as Democrats.
Democrats, facing long odds in the South, will be motivated to engage in aggressive gerrymanders in the states they control, as seen last year in California after Texas acquiesced to a demand by President Trump. This will place even more voters into congressional districts where they are less likely to have a shot at fair representation. Extreme gerrymandering is bad for democracy, making it harder for parties to recruit qualified candidates, gain the support of voters and mount the competition necessary for a healthy democracy.
“You have to view this in historical context,” Eric Holder, who under President Barack Obama was the nation’s first Black attorney general, told me. “If you go from Reconstruction to 2026, the federal government’s support of the voting rights of people of color generally, and African Americans specifically, has ebbed and flowed. What we’re seeing now is consistent with the worst of what the federal government has done along that arc.”
Mr. Holder described the actions of the Supreme Court and the Trump administration as a “betrayal.”
Among the most striking examples of the campaign underway has been unfolding in Memphis, one of the largest majority-Black cities in the country. Court rulings around the Voting Rights Act have for decades acknowledged the need to draw congressional districts that were “compact” and include Americans “of similar interest.” Under the new map, thousands of Memphis voters now sit in the redrawn Ninth District, which stretches over 200 miles through rural Tennessee almost to Nashville. Republicans split the city’s voters into three congressional districts — each with a solid Republican advantage — to bury Memphis’s Democratic votes. Republicans in some Southern states are also planning redistricting that will determine control of state legislatures.
At Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Memphis one evening recently, a crowd of mostly older Black voters gathered with their elected officials, all Democrats, to learn about the redistricting that had taken place the previous week. The sanctuary filled with people and the temperature rose. One woman pulled out a giant fan with a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and used it to create a gentle breeze. When the legislators dimmed the lights and projected an image of the new congressional map onto the wall, loud gasps filled the air.
“I hear you,” Representative Jesse Chism told them. Then Mr. Chism (a cousin of Martese Chism) turned to an old axiom from the Black church derived from Genesis. “What the Devil mean for bad…,” he began. Instead of finishing the verse — “God turns for good” — he paused. The crowd broke out into knowing laughter and applause, transforming the energy in the room.
In a powerful display of grit and tenacity, State Representative Justin J. Pearson, a Black progressive from Memphis, is continuing his bid for the gerrymandered Ninth District congressional seat anyway.
I met him one morning at the Cossitt Library in downtown Memphis, where the novelist Richard Wright had found his way around a rule barring Black people from taking out books by borrowing a white man’s library card. Inside a reading room, the soft-spoken 31-year-old with an Afro whose oration and quiet confidence tends to captivate voters, greeted me with a hoarse and exhausted voice. “My grandparents all grew up during segregation,” he said. “We do not quit because it is hard. We do not yield because of white supremacy. I grew up in a Black prophetic tradition of faith that began before I was born.”
Mr. Pearson said he believed he could build a coalition across race, geography and class and would campaign not only in Memphis but also in every one of the 14 other counties, mostly rural, that now make up the district. “This race is a race for Black folks and for the South, to show our stake in this democracy,” he said.
To build this kind of coalition and win under the new maps, Mr. Pearson and other Democrats in the South will need to increase turnout as well as persuade thousands of new voters to take to the polls. They will also have to do the work of changing people’s minds and persuading at least some Republicans to vote for them instead.
The new congressional maps are very likely to make it significantly harder for generational talents like Mr. Pearson to get to Congress. He has also faced headwinds from curious places inside his own party. Before the Memphis seat was redrawn, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House from Brooklyn, had endorsed Mr. Pearson’s 77-year-old primary opponent, Steve Cohen, the incumbent. Mr. Cohen, who is white, has held the seat for decades. The week after the redistricting, he announced his retirement. Watching Mr. Pearson draw crowds throughout the South, it is easy to see why Republicans in Tennessee and the Democratic establishment alike might want him out of the way.
To understand what’s at stake, consider the impact of veteran Black members of the House elected since the civil rights movement. For decades, members like Bennie Thompson, James Clyburn, John Lewis and Barbara Jordan championed not only issues like Black employment, but policies like Medicaid expansion, funding for poverty programs and public schools, and the Affordable Care Act that have helped Americans across the country. Black Americans elected to state legislatures and local offices throughout the South since the adoption of the Voting Rights Act have often played a similar role.
Then there is the power of the Black electorate. Across the South, Black voters introduce critical competition into a region largely dominated by the Republican Party. They also remain the heart of what has been a growing coalition for the Democratic Party in states like Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina.
It’s not only the speed of the redistricting campaigns underway in the South that is notable, but the spirit and character animating them.
Republicans in Tennessee were in such a hurry to, as one put it, “send an entire Republican delegation from Tennessee” that a state Democrat questioned how they could have known the partisan score of the new districts they were creating. The Democrat said Republicans had used census data to draw the maps, which does not include party affiliation.
Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana suspended an election already underway so the Republican-led Legislature could scrap one of the state’s two majority-Black and Democratic districts, tossing the votes of more than 40,000 Americans who had already cast ballots. I met one of those voters in Memphis, outside the National Civil Rights Museum at the former Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. “I have to vote a second time,” Rosalyn Baty, 67, a Black woman visiting from Louisiana, told me.
Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves plans to wipe his state’s only majority-Black and Democratic House district, now represented by Mr. Thompson, off the map. “Congressman Bennie G. Thompson’s reign of terror on MS-2 is over. It is not a matter of ‘IF…’ Just a matter of ‘WHEN!’” Mr. Reeves wrote on Facebook. Mr. Thompson led the Jan. 6 committee hearings in the House and organized voter registration drives during the civil rights movement as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Georgia Republicans are expected to redraw their maps for the 2028 cycle. In Montgomery, Ala., Republicans continued their vote to approve redistricting legislation even after tornado sirens began to sound, warning of an arriving storm.
Footage from inside capitol buildings across the South shows that Americans of all backgrounds are showing up in protest, a significant point of hope. There have been pockets of opposition from Republicans, too; in South Carolina, a group of state senators blocked an effort to turn the state into a 7-0 map.
But videos have also captured the animus and glee with which largely white Republican caucuses throughout the South have carried out Mr. Trump’s request for widespread gerrymandering. William Arnold, the director of justice and re-entry programs at the advocacy group Memphis for All, said the experience of watching the Republicans vote on the maps in Nashville left him shaken. “They were laughing. Laughing and smiling,” he said. He described it as “one of the most jarring experiences of my life.”
Many Americans outside the South tend to see the region as exceptional. But its politics have long been shaped by national politics, from the decision to abandon Reconstruction, to the infamous 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson upholding Jim Crow, to the Voting Rights Act and its enforcement by the Department of Justice. The recent decision by the Supreme Court, Louisiana v. Callais, weakening the Voting Rights Act, continues that tradition.
The attack on democracy and Black political power in the South was made possible by justices in Washington, a president from Queens and a Democratic Party that has so far failed to stop them. “This is a national movement of national antidemocracy activists who happen to be acting at the sub-national level,” said Robert Mickey, a political science professor at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about U.S. political development. “It’s easiest to do this in the South.” Mr. Mickey said the political system is placing an undue burden on individual citizens. “We’re outsourcing the response to undemocratic laws back to the people who are harmed by them,” he said.
The Democrats were largely unprepared and ill equipped to respond. Democrats have trifectas (control of all three branches of state government) in 16 states; Republicans have trifectas in 23. Of the Democratic-led states, only a handful offer significant opportunities for the party. California voters approved a ballot initiative last year allowing Democrats to redraw maps, an effort that could add up to five Democratic seats this year. Efforts by Democrats in other states have so far yielded little. Virginia’s Supreme Court tossed a ballot initiative approved by voters that could have added four House seats for Democrats.
Wes Moore, Maryland’s Democratic governor, has pushed hard to move forward with a redistricting plan but has so far been stymied by the State Senate president, Bill Ferguson, also a Democrat. Mr. Ferguson is now signaling he may be open to the plan. Democrats in New York are working on a plan that could add several Democratic seats, but, for process reasons, not until 2028.
Many of the same people who are mobilizing across the South right now are also in mourning. The oldest Black Americans, who grew up during Jim Crow, are now watching key gains of the civil rights movement being dismantled. Generations of Black Americans are coming to terms with the exhaustion, rage and grief from knowing that they and their children will most likely continue to face exceptional headwinds in the United States, a country their ancestors helped build.
At the voting rights rally in Montgomery, U-Conjay Nelson, a 31-year-old Navy veteran from Tuscaloosa, Ala., held a sign that read, “By any means necessary, so don’t let the necessary occur.” I noticed that she seemed to be staring off into the cloudless Alabama sky. Temperatures had risen to nearly 90 degrees, and her three young children rested on the ground beside her. The youngest, a 3-year-old boy, wore Spider-Man Crocs and was sitting on a curb, staying as still as possible to try to keep cool. I asked Ms. Nelson whether she was OK. “People thank you for your service all the time, and you come home to this,” she answered. “It makes you wonder: What did we serve for?”
Martese Chism was just 4 years old in 1966 when her great-grandmother Birdia Keglar — who had housed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activists and faced threats — traveled to Jackson, Miss., and never made it home. Local authorities at the time said that she and a fellow activist, Adlena Hamlett, were killed in an accidental head-on collision, a story the family never accepted. Ambushing cars on the roadway was a known tactic of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ms. Keglar began organizing in earnest in 1955, incensed that she and other Black residents were barred from the all-white jury that had failed to convict the white men who lynched 14-year-old Emmett Till. The day she died in 1966, she had gone to Jackson to attend a civil rights meeting.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation reopened the case of her death in the 2000s, part of a review of possible hate crimes that took place before 1970. By that time, 40 years after the deaths, investigators said they had “insufficient evidence” to indicate a hate crime had taken place. The car the women were driving in, which belonged to Ms. Keglar, was never returned, according to the family. Vernon Dahmer, a prominent Black civil rights leader in Mississippi, was assassinated just one day earlier by the Ku Klux Klan. The Voting Rights Act had been signed into law months before.
These are the Americans who made the freedoms that we have enjoyed possible. In their stories are indispensable lessons about how to keep the country moving forward.
In a moment when many things are calling for our attention, it is tempting to look away. But there are tectonic, generational shifts in power unfolding before our eyes that demand action. This is about the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans to achieve the permanent dominance of a single political party. This is about the rolling back of the clock to a time that many Americans living today do not recognize, and others fear because they do.
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2) The White House’s Latest Provocation Is ‘Grotesque and Terrifying and Juvenile’
By M. Gessen, Opinion Columnist, June 5, 2026
Will Matsuda for The New York Times
“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And the scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.
“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll.
This web page, which invites users to look up the number of immigrants supposedly arrested on charges of criminal activity in American cities and towns, belongs to a subgenre of Trumpian gestures that are menacing and sophomoric at the same time. “Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile,” is how Ernesto Verdeja, a genocide-prevention expert at the University of Notre Dame, described it to me. These gestures are hard to write about: The ugliness is undisguised, so what is there to say? And yet, these statements, step by preposterous step, change the world we live in.
With phrases like, “They do not belong here” and, “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”
Valentino co-founded the Early Warning Project, which assesses the risk of mass atrocities around the world. To be sure, anti-immigrant violence in the United States does not approach the scale of the atrocities Valentino usually studies. But the dehumanizing language of the sort used by the Trump administration is, he said, “a pretty standard indicator” of risk, a necessary if insufficient condition of mass violence directed at a particular group.
“It’s not that it turns normal people into murderers,” Valentino said. “It’s that it turns them into bystanders.”
To the extent that the Trump administration has pulled back on its violent anti-immigrant campaign, it has done so because nonimmigrants have stepped up — in the courts and, especially, in the streets. The most dramatic confrontations took place this past winter in Minneapolis, but in the months since the federal government ended its occupation of that city, resistance has continued. In Newark, N.J., demonstrators have been protesting the conditions at the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility. At least 63 people have been arrested in the past week alone. In New York City, a relatively new coalition called Hands Off NYC has, since January, trained more than 7,000 volunteers to peacefully resist ICE. The Aliens web page, Valentino thinks, is intended to discourage this kind of activity.
“The key is that you are supposed to see your city with a big red dot over it,” Valentino said, referring to a map on the website, then click to read, supposedly, the number of immigrants who have been charged with crimes. (For example, “Jamestown, N.Y.: 10; Larceny, Obstructing the Police; Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nigeria.”) “And you see the charges — do you want to risk your life for this kind of person?”
When the page went up, the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration advocacy organization, happened to be hosting a gathering of data experts. Participants thought they saw something interesting. “The page is poorly coded, badly designed, and yet weirdly transparent about some things the administration hasn’t been transparent about before,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the council, told me. It appeared that the map was based on raw data of ICE arrests — information that the government had mostly kept secret since the beginning of President Trump’s current term. The map is possibly the best document to date of the scale of the ICE campaign, which, it shows, has raged not only in big cities but in small towns, where it’s sometimes less visible.
As is usual for the Trump administration, the figures are decontextualized and misrepresented. In addition to the map, the page contains a supposed tally of “encounters,” a term that has one meaning in 1970s sci-fi and another in Customs and Border Protection-speak, where it typically refers to instances in which immigrants are apprehended. What struck me after spending too much time staring at the page was that it wants you to be afraid of all aliens: the space kind and the “illegal” kind, but also the “legal” kind, foreign-born people who have been living in this country for decades. As for the counter, it’s tracking nothing. The numbers just tick upward at a perfectly steady pace, one every second and a bit.
Underscoring the sophomoric aspect of this astonishing document is the fact that it’s shot through with references to “The X-Files.” I caught only one of them: The last lines say, “The truth is no longer out there. It’s right here. Right now” — a nod to the show’s tag line. Verdeja, the Notre Dame professor, grew up with the show, so he pointed out some other echoes, such as the combination of interplanetary warfare and a deep-state conspiracy. But superimposed on all that pop culture are the white supremacist tropes. The sentences about aliens “walking among us, living in our neighborhoods,” Verdeja said, read to him like invocations of the Great Replacement theory, which has become so familiar as to seem almost mainstream. “It’s similar to the way Jews were talked about in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s,” Verdeja said.
He made the comparison gingerly, wary of falling into an alarmist cliché. But the ideologues of Trump’s immigration policies are taking no such pains. A couple of days after the “Aliens” page was published, Gregory Bovino, the former head of the U.S. Border Patrol who oversaw the federal immigration operation in Minneapolis, traveled to Portugal for a meeting of far-right politicians to discuss “remigration,” a concept that refers to the forcible displacement of millions of people on the basis of their ethnicity in the wake of World War I — what we now call ethnic cleansing.
Driven by the same nativist and xenophobic ideas, the United States adopted the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, which ended mass immigration by introducing national-origin quotas designed to favor Northern and Western Europeans and exclude nonwhite immigrants almost entirely. These quotas stayed in place for four decades — until they were repealed just over 60 years ago, which is when the White House page claims the story of the aliens begins.
The point of making historical connections is not to say that any two actions, or any two eras, are exactly alike. Context always changes. But it’s important to see that this web page isn’t just a troll. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Provocations like this are part of an old and terrible story, and it’s still being written today.
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3) It’s No Wonder Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers
By Molly Jong-Fast, June 5, 2026
Ms. Jong-Fast is a contributing Opinion writer.
Sam Gulliver for The New York Times
Commencement address season hasn’t been going well — for the commencement speakers.
I’m sure you’ve seen the videos on social media. The big shots who have been brought in to inspire a next generation of graduates have used their speeches as opportunities to extol the limitless possibilities that artificial intelligence will bring. They’re speaking to graduates who are entering a shaky job market and are already burdened by tens of thousands of dollars of student debt. However, companies of all stripes are using A.I. as an excuse to slow entry-level hiring and lay off workers. Tech executives have been warning (though it sometimes seems as if they are bragging) that their technologies will be job destroyers.
Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive who spoke at the University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities, told graduates that “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” Scott Borchetta, the chief executive of the record label Big Machine, told the graduates of Middle Tennessee State University that “A.I. is rewriting production as we sit here.” In each case, the students expressed their displeasure at the speakers’ blatant A.I. boosterism the best way they could: with loud boos.
When Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive of Google, told graduates at the University of Arizona about their A.I.-shaped future, the shouting got so intense that he paused and said that graduates feared “that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.” Mr. Schmidt told them to make the best of it. “The question is not whether A.I. will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.”
Mr. Schmidt’s solution to world-upending technological change is … what? To pull yourself up by your bootstraps? His approach is peak billionaire brain, directed at the young people who have, for the better part of a decade, been treated as woke, lazy, avocado-toast-eating snowflakes. All these speakers just don’t get it. The problem isn’t woke; the problem is work. It’s a lack of social mobility. It’s that college may no longer elevate a graduate to the middle class. It’s that nobody even bothers to pretend that a house, a good job and the ability to start a family are at all guaranteed.
Think of this from the graduates’ perspective: Wealthy old people telling you your future is being pulped by acres and acres of electricity-sucking, water-guzzling data centers feels dystopian because it is. Companies are trying to automate your future away. No wonder you’re furious.
Young people are facing what M.I.T. Technology Review calls a “looming crisis in entry-level work,” and college, once assumed to be a prerequisite for a secure job, no longer feels worth it. The general gestalt coming from a certain sliver of affluent Americans is that college graduates are more liberal trouble than they’re worth and perhaps could be replaced by bots. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and G.O.P. megadonor, mused to Joe Rogan that a bot “never gets drunk, never gets sick, never gets high” and “never files H.R. complaints.” (It never boos a smug commencement speaker, either.)
According to a recent working paper from researchers at Harvard, hiring for entry-level roles at companies that have adopted generative A.I. has dropped each quarter since 2023. What is not clear is whether A.I. is taking people’s jobs or if companies are using A.I. as an excuse for not hiring. Either way, A.I. is not exactly popular with people entering the work force for the first time.
I’ve spent the past six months obsessing about giving a commencement address to Bennington College, where I earned my M.F.A. It’s a truly bizarre moment to speak at a college, in light of the way technology is changing the work force so rapidly and the way the White House has waged war on colleges, professors and education writ large. Even in the best of times, commencement speeches are uncomfortable: The kids you’re speaking to are basically hostages; they can’t leave without their diplomas.
When I finally gave my speech on Saturday, I didn’t talk about A.I. with the Bennington graduates. I talked about the role their magical little college played in my life. Getting a master’s saved me; it gave me a bit of a foundation, perhaps a little authority in a world where I often felt like an impostor. I told the kids the truth: that I would love to give them advice about how to avoid the messiness of one’s 20s, but the messiness is the point. “That eyebrow pierce will leave a scar,” I said. “You’ll have trouble getting the barbell out and eventually someone will have to use tiny pliers to cut it out of your face.”
(I worried initially that this advice might be too specific, but looking around the tent, I could see that getting a piercing out was something at least 30 percent of the graduating class would have to grapple with sooner or later.)
If I were to tell these graduates the truth about artificial intelligence, it would be this: You are right to be worried. But none of this is as inevitable as it seems. Remember putting everything on the blockchain? Remember NFTs? Hell, some of us are old enough to remember that the world was supposed to end in the year 2000.
Right now, A.I. is in its dark hype period — great for Anthropic’s I.P.O. — but who knows how useful any of this actually will be in the end in creating efficiencies (a.k.a.: replacing the youngs with bots). It’s within young people’s power to stop. Demand regulation of tech companies. Elect people who will legislate that regulation. Organize against data centers in your hometowns.
Don’t just boo — do something.
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4) Granted Clemency by Trump, Scores of Jan. 6 Rioters Have Been Accused of New Crimes
At least 97 of those who were charged in connection with the Capitol riot have reoffended in the years since the attack, the nonprofit publication Lawfare has found.
By Luke Broadwater, Published June 4, 2026, Updated June 5, 2026
Luke Broadwater covers the White House. He reported from Washington.
President Trump has made clear that he believes the Jan. 6 rioters should not only be praised, but that they should be compensated with taxpayer money. Kenny Holston/The New York Times
One was arrested after allegedly threatening a person with a gun in a church parking lot. Another was convicted of felony charges of grand larceny and burglary. Still another was convicted of child molestation.
At least 97 of the nearly 1,600 people who were charged in connection with the Capitol riot have been accused of new crimes since Jan. 6, 2021, according to a study released on Thursday from Lawfare, the nonprofit legal issues publication.
The figure, which is larger than previously known, includes 19 cases that happened after Mr. Trump granted clemency to Jan. 6 defendants on the first day of his second term, according to the study’s author. The rest of the cases happened in the years after the riot.
“The pardons closed a chapter for these individuals politically. What I found is that for a significant number of them, the behavior that defined Jan. 6 didn’t stop when they left the Capitol,” said Katherine Pompilio, the study’s author. She said the report likely misses some cases of recidivism by the Jan. 6 defendants.
Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and the editor in chief of Lawfare, said researchers mined court documents and called county clerks’ offices as part of the study.
A previous study of Jan. 6 recidivism found at least 40 defendants faced other criminal charges, with 12 taking place after Mr. Trump’s clemency order. That study was done by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit legal watchdog group that has been critical of the administration. The Lawfare study found 19 criminal cases that occurred after the clemency.
In one of his first official acts of his second term, Mr. Trump issued a sweeping grant of clemency to nearly all of the people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militias, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, suggested that the Jan. 6 defendants were victims of a “weaponized justice system” under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“The White House has a rigorous pardon review process, which includes the White House counsel, the Department of Justice and ultimately the president as the final decider,” she said.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly tried to revise the history of the deadly attack by a pro-Trump mob, who defaced the halls of Congress and attacked and injured more than 150 officers.
Although the administration has scrapped its plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate allies that Mr. Trump believes have been politically persecuted, the president made clear on Wednesday that he still believes the rioters deserve a payout.
“These are great people that were destroyed, their families have been destroyed,” he said, adding, “They went there with love.”
But the study found that dozens of those involved in the riot have been less than model citizens since the mob violence.
The study found that Jan. 6 defendants had been charged with crimes that range from relatively low-grade offenses like property damage, possession of drug paraphernalia and trespassing to serious felonies like grand larceny, stalking, planning to assassinate law enforcement officials and prominent politicians, and defrauding government agencies. One was convicted in 2025 of reckless homicide.
At least 16 have been charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child sexual abuse material and at least six have faced domestic violence charges. Others have faced charges for physical assaults, illegal firearms possession, or other violent crimes. At least 20 have been charged with driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs or public intoxication.
The Trump administration has been eager to promote crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, often promoting posters and images with their names and offenses listed. But Mr. Trump and his allies have portrayed the Jan. 6 offenders as victims.
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5) The Gold Mines at the Heart of This Ebola Outbreak
Mining has been the lifeblood of this remote Congolese hill town for decades. Now, it is fueling the spread of a devastating virus.
By Declan Walsh, Visuals by Arlette Bashizi, June 5, 2026
Declan Walsh and Arlette Bashizi reported from a gold mine in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak.
Red Cross workers removing the disinfected body of a gold miner, Mumbere Saidi, in Mongbwalu, Democratic Republic of Congo, last week.
After the local Islamic State affiliate attacked his farm, Mumbere Saidi fled to the gold mines in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, trekking 200 miles across one of Africa’s most dangerous war zones.
He found backbreaking work in a remote mining town where he panned for gold. When times were good, Mr. Saidi, 27, sent a few dollars back to the parents he left behind. When they were bad, he struggled to feed his wife and baby daughter.
At least he felt safe, until last week, when an invisible enemy struck Mr. Saidi inside his home.
“The disease got him,” said his brother, Kondu Ganda, also a miner, using a common euphemism for Ebola in a town where many avoid the word.
Behind him, Red Cross workers in white protective suits removed Mr. Saidi’s body from their mud-walled home and carefully placed it in a coffin.
For over a century, gold has been the lifeblood of Mongbwalu, a remote hill town in Ituri province that draws people looking for work from across Congo and beyond. But now Mongbwalu is at the epicenter of the devastating Ebola outbreak sweeping this region, and gold is helping to drive it.
Experts now believe that the outbreak, already the third largest on record, began in Mongbwalu as early as February. Yet the authorities failed to detect it until May 15, in part because it was caused by a lesser-known virus, Bundibugyo, for which there is no treatment.
By the time a crisis was declared, the Bundibugyo virus had already been spreading for weeks through Mongbwalu’s gold mines, among men who work cheek by jowl in rough conditions, trading gold that often crosses nearby borders.
Now, they are falling sick and dying.
When Mr. Saidi fell ill last month, it first seemed to be malaria. As his condition deteriorated, increasingly desperate relatives carried him to six different clinics in search of a cure, his brother said. Nothing worked.
After his death, neighbors clustered quietly outside Mr. Saidi’s home, which is perched on a hillside amid banana groves and twisting paths. Five people had already died on their street, they said; word came through that a sixth had fallen ill.
“Another person has started bleeding up there,” Mr. Ganda said, pointing to a house.
Mongbwalu, in the Kilo-Moto gold belt, has long embodied the tragedy of Congo’s abundance. Belgian colonists opened the town’s first mines over a century ago, using forced labor. Cycles of exploitation, corruption and conflict followed. Under the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, the mines were badly mismanaged. After Mobutu was ousted in 1997, and Congo fell into turmoil, militias and warlords battled over Mongbwalu’s riches.
During one particular brutal period between 2002 and 2003, at least 2,000 civilians were killed in and around Mongbwalu, Human Rights Watch later found.
Now Mongbwalu is largely peaceful, even as ethnic conflict rages in the surrounding countryside, and most of the mining is done by small-scale miners who work the informal mines dotting the town’s edge. Many come from other provinces of Congo, especially North Kivu, which itself suffered an Ebola outbreak between 2018 and 2020.
A mineral-rich region
But the lure of Mongbwalu is what is making it so dangerous.
The gold economy fuels a flow of workers, traders, prostitutes and smugglers from Congo and neighboring countries. Town authorities now believe that more than 80 people died from Ebola in the weeks before the outbreak was detected, and things have only gotten worse.
“We fear we are just at the start of our misfortune,” said Jean-Pierre Bikilisende, a former town mayor.
On the edge of town, gold seems to be everywhere. Following a winding path through tall grass, Arlette Bashizi, a photographer for The New York Times, and I suddenly found ourselves next to a wide stream where dozens of men in mud-splattered clothes shoveled sediment.
They sifted the sandy goop by feeding it into wooden sluices powered by clattering generators, then mixed it with mercury to extract gold nuggets. Given the perils of the work and the threats many had fled, few said they were bothered by Ebola.
Bienvenue Bironyi, a miner from North Kivu, had heard that people were dying. But, he added, he did not know what precautions he could realistically take.
“We’re still working from morning to evening,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”
The pay was an indisputable factor. Gedeon Abimana said he made between $136 and $272 a week, depending on his team’s gold haul. That is great money in rural Congo, although it came with considerable health risk: his job involves handling mercury with his bare hands, which can cause serious illness, including neurological damage.
He shrugged. “What can we do?” he said. “We have no choice but to work.”
The town could not stop, either. Heavy-duty mining trucks rolled down the unpaved main street. Motorcycle taxis clustered on corners, waiting for fares. Children in neat school uniforms skipped home. Soldiers and miners chugged beer in bars.
Michel Anguma, a gold miner in rubber boots, downplayed the calamity. Certainly, people were dying, he said as he strolled home after work. “Just back there, I saw people going to bury someone,” he said.
But gold workers could not afford to worry.
“Nothing is above God,” he said with a shrug.
He spoke under a cluster of trees filled with screeching fruit bats, which scientists say can act as a natural reservoir for the viruses that cause Ebola.
As with much in this outbreak, little is certain, including how many people are actually sick. In recent days, a surge in testing capacity at government laboratories was starting to give a clearer picture of the number of confirmed Ebola cases in Congo. About 300 people are suspected to have died so far.
But the head start the virus enjoyed as it spread undetected through Mongbwalu this spring means the true extent of the outbreak remains unknown. And with gold prices hovering near historic highs, the incentive to keep mining is powerful.
Beyond the town, Chinese operators run semi-industrial gold plants, government officials said. Last year, a British company called Horizon announced it was building a major new gold plant.
“We didn’t come here to spend five years studying,” a Horizon executive told a packed public meeting in September, according to the provincial government website. “We came to build.”
At a separate informal mining site, known as Kanza Kanza, miners were taking some precautions. Some local leaders wore face masks and told me they had reduced the number of miners sleeping in each tent from five to three.
But mostly, it was business as usual in Mongbwalu. Armored vehicles carrying U.N. peacekeepers lumbered through rutted streets. Nightclubs remained open, including one located yards from the hotel rooms where officials from the World Health Organization, here to help fight Ebola, were staying.
The town airstrip was temporarily closed due to Ebola restrictions, and at a nearby military base, soldiers observed strict hand-washing regulations. “At first, people didn’t believe the virus existed, but slowly they are coming around,” said their commander, Col. Bahati Nuru.
The virus seemed to be seeping in everywhere, including the military. At the beleaguered town hospital, health workers had just defused a crisis created by a distraught soldier.
After the soldier’s son died from Ebola, he blamed the medical staff for the boy’s death. “Fortunately, he was not armed,” said Dr. Alex Bogole, a hospital medic. “But he was carrying a knife, and threatening people with it.”
During a visit to the regional capital, Bunia, last week, the Congolese health minister, Dr. Samuel Roger Kamba, said the greatest difficulty in an Ebola outbreak was not deploying medical teams, but persuading communities to follow public health measures.
Like others in Mongbwalu, many gold miners appear to think that Ebola either does not exist or is a moneymaking scheme concocted by local doctors and foreign aid groups. With no treatment or approved vaccine available, many patients go to the hospital only to die soon after, deepening the distrust.
“Crazy stories are going around,” said Shadrack Toko, an official at Kanza Kanza. “They say that people brought to the hospital are being injected with poison, or even having their genitals cut off.”
As we walked back to our car, we came across Deborah Singo, a village leader, gold miner and virus skeptic. “I heard about it,” she said cagily of Ebola. But to really believe in it, she said, “I need to see it first.”
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6) They Shut the Golden Gate Bridge for 4 Hours. Now They Face Up to 15 Years in Prison.
Activists blocked the iconic span to protest the spending of American tax dollars on Israeli military efforts in Gaza. San Francisco’s prosecutor is now seeking a strict punishment.
By Heather Knight, Reporting from San Francisco, June 5, 2026
Pedestrians and bicyclists waited outside the pedestrian gate on the south side of the Golden Gate Bridge when the bridge was closed because of protesters in 2024. Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated Press
It began like any other Monday morning commute, with drivers zooming south from Marin County to the Golden Gate Bridge as they headed toward San Francisco.
At 7:55 a.m. on April 15, 2024, some cars stopped in unison, right in the middle of one of the world’s most iconic spans. Out poured 26 protesters, determined to make a dramatic statement on Tax Day against American tax dollars funding Israel’s military while it attacked Gaza.
Most of them stood in front of their vehicles and held banners, including one that read, “Stop the World for Gaza.” A smaller group — some remaining in their cars, others standing just outside them — locked their arms together in metal tubes and refused to budge.
It did not take long for traffic to clog, and thousands of vehicles to snake through the rainbow-painted Robin Williams Tunnel and into the lush green hills to the north. Many people missed work that day. Others missed important medical appointments. Nobody died and no one was believed to have been injured, but the protest infuriated plenty of people.
The protesters were arrested and their vehicles towed after about four hours. Traffic moved on, but the protesters’ lives did not. The seven who chained themselves together are now in a multiweek criminal trial in San Francisco Superior Court, where they could face up to 14 or 15 years in state prison.
In a liberal region where roadway protests have been part of the fabric for decades, many activists see the possible sentence as extraordinarily severe. In the past, protesters have avoided felony charges and agreed to perform community service and pay restitution, as was the case for activists who blocked the Bay Bridge in 2023 to call for a cease-fire in Gaza when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was in town for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit.
“Saying that you will face 15 years in jail, that’s outrageous,” Walter Riley, an Oakland civil rights lawyer who was at the courthouse to offer moral support, said during a trial break. “We cannot support this D.A.”
San Francisco is far removed from its Haight-Ashbury counterculture days of more than a half-century ago. The city has become a tech mecca, with seemingly endless riches pouring into companies that are part of the A.I. boom. Voters in 2024 elected a wealthy heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, Daniel Lurie, to run the city as a moderate Democrat.
As part of the city’s centrist tack, residents ousted Chesa Boudin, their social reform-minded district attorney, in 2022 as frustrations mounted over crime, drug use and homelessness. His replacement, Brooke Jenkins, was appointed with something of a mandate to punish criminals, violent or not, and improve the city’s quality of life.
The jail population in the city is now 50 percent higher than it was in 2022.
Ms. Jenkins declined to address the specifics of the Golden Gate Bridge case, saying she could not comment on a trial currently underway, but she discussed protests generally.
“When it violates the law and puts public safety in jeopardy,” she said, “I have a job to do.”
But to the protesters and their supporters, Ms. Jenkins’ charges are shockingly draconian in modern-day San Francisco. The seven on trial are facing several misdemeanor charges and one felony count of conspiracy.
After starting on May 20, the trial began winding down with closing statements on Thursday, and jurors will likely begin deliberating Friday.
Joseph Cotchett, a Bay Area trial lawyer who is not involved in the case but has been following it, said that if the jury finds the defendants guilty, he would expect Judge Teresa Caffese to hand down time behind bars. But 15 years in prison would “be absurd,” he said.
For much of the past couple of weeks, scores of people, many of them wearing a kaffiyeh, the scarf that signifies support for Palestinians, have filled a courtroom across the street from San Francisco’s gold-domed City Hall in support of the defendants.
Some of them are the ones who held banners but did not link arms during the bridge closure. Those protesters planned the demonstration with those now on trial, but they had their records wiped clear after they paid restitution and performed five hours of community service.
Still, the group has banded in solidarity, calling itself the Golden Gate 26.
Ms. Jenkins asked that kaffiyehs be banned from the courtroom, along with the word “genocide” in testimony, but Judge Caffese declined both requests.
On the trial’s opening day, Angela Roze, an assistant district attorney, told jurors that the protesters had prioritized their personal cause over the well-being of everybody else trying to cross the bridge.
“Children were forced to defecate in bags. People had little to no water,” she said in her opening statement. “Because these seven individuals decided that their cause, their message, was more important.”
She added that the protest ended only when law enforcement officers told the seven that they would cut into the vehicles to remove them. The protesters were using metal tubes that law enforcement officers call “sleeping dragons” because the devices seem innocuous but are actually difficult to extricate people from.
The seven protesters, each with a different defense lawyer, have stressed that they tried other, lawful ways of protesting first. They called their representatives in Congress. They wrote postcards. They attended rallies. Nothing worked to stop the war.
Rocky Chau, 37, grew up in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco and now works by providing in-home care for his mother, who is elderly and disabled, in the city of Richmond, across the bay.
He testified that he started following news of Israel’s attacks on Gaza and grew increasingly disturbed. One article, about a 92-year-old grandmother in Gaza who was found dead weeks after an Israeli raid, left him particularly distraught, he said.
“It reminded me of my mom,” he said, pausing as he wept on the stand. “I knew I needed to do more.”
He said he had heard before the protest about the “necessity doctrine” — a legal theory that criminal behavior can be defensible if it prevents a greater harm from occurring during an emergency — and believed it applied in this case. He added that the protesters had taken care to assign one person to be a liaison to the police, leave space for emergency vehicles and bring food and water for people who were stuck.
“The only thing I wanted to do, the only thing I ever intended, was to send a message and get the United States government to stop the genocide,” he said.
Regina Schneider, a retired legal secretary who lives north of the Golden Gate Bridge, in Novato, Calif., testified about the effects of being stuck in her friend’s car for hours. In an interview later, she said she missed an important oncology appointment.
She said that she wanted the defendants to be sentenced to some detention time, though she declined to say how much.
“A lot of us are horrified by things that are happening in Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, all around the world,” she said. “You do not adversely impact the lives of thousands of people to make your point.”
In the hallway, as the court proceedings continued, Mr. Riley, the civil rights lawyer, consoled Amy Ferrell, whose daughter, Sarah, is on trial.
“Here in San Francisco, to have this outcome is shocking,” Ms. Ferrell said.
Ms. Ferrell said her daughter had educated her about the war in Gaza, but she did not know about her daughter’s participation in the bridge protest until she received a call that night.
“Mom, I’m in jail,” she recalled hearing, adding she was inspired by her daughter’s commitment to social justice and shocked by the charges against her.
Ms. Ferrell said she lives in Baltimore and flew to San Francisco to attend the trial on a one-way ticket. She will not leave, she said, until she knows her daughter’s fate.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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7) As Trump Toughens Rules on Cuba’s Economy, Hotel Chains Pull Out
The Trump administration’s efforts to tighten the economic noose on Cuba appear to be working, as more international firms announced they would leave the island.
By Frances Robles, Reporting from Florida, Published June 4, 2026, Updated June 5, 2026
The Catedral in Havana is one of 15 hotels in Cuba run by the Spanish firm, Meliá. Credit...Yamil Lage/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Trump administration’s campaign to force Cuba’s economic unraveling achieved key gains this week, when three international hotel chains and a bank that processes Visa and Mastercard transactions withdrew business from the communist nation to avoid violating new U.S. regulations.
Foreign businesses have until Friday to pull out of any venture in Cuba run by the Cuban military conglomerate that controls about half the nation’s economy. On Thursday, the U.S. government announced that it was imposing sanctions on another swath of Cuban officials and entities, including the armed forces.
Business leaders whose companies stay in Cuba risk losing their visa to travel to the United States and having their assets frozen. The companies themselves could also face sanctions, such as losing access to American banks.
The increasing exodus of businesses from Cuba will lead to increased unemployment and fewer financial resources for Cuba’s government, aggravating an increasingly untenable economic crisis.
While the United States has long prohibited most American companies from trading with Cuba, these new regulations, called “secondary sanctions,” are a major escalation, because they target foreign companies and financial institutions.
Cuba’s Central Bank announced Wednesday that a bank that processes Visa and Mastercard transactions had withdrawn to comply with a recent executive order from the White House that threatened sanctions against foreign companies doing business in Cuba.
The Cuban government, which did not name the bank, called the decision part of President Trump’s “strategy to strangle the Cuban people.”
The Spanish hotel operator Iberostar said it would end its partnership to run 12 hotels for Gaviota, Cuba’s tourism company, which is part of the Business Administration Group, a military conglomerate known by its Spanish acronym, GAESA.
Another Spanish firm, Meliá, said it would withdraw from its partnership running 15 Cuban hotels. Blue Diamond, a Canadian company that ran dozens of hotels in Cuba, also announced that it was pulling out.
Citing an announcement from the company, news reports said the Indonesian chain Archipelago International had also closed shop. The website for the company’s Aston Hotels in Cuba showed they were “no longer available for accommodation.”
The proposed U.S. sanctions are part of a series of stringent measures by the Trump administration designed to cripple Cuba’s economy and force economic and political change.
Mr. Trump on Thursday told reporters in Washington that Cuba had “sort of collapsed.”
Repeating a statement he had made in the past, he said he would “handle” Cuba as soon as his administration moves on from the conflict with Iran. “As soon as that’s done, on our way back, we’ll just make a little brief stop,” the president said without providing specific details.
Mr. Trump’s tightening vise on Cuba, including an effective oil blockade, is worsening a humanitarian crisis, leaving millions of people enduring extended power outages and struggling to find food and gasoline.
The U.S. State Department said on Thursday that it was adding five more Cuban officials and five entities to a list of sanctioned people and companies, including President Miguel Díaz-Canel and his family.
Vast neighborhood groups organized by the government, called the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and known for spying on local residents, were also targeted, as was Cuba’s gold mining venture.
“The entities and individuals designated today direct or fund the regime and its efforts to mobilize its radical revolutionary movements in the United States and around the world,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.
Two major shipping companies, one German and the other French, had already announced plans to cease operations in Cuba.
The United Nations’ World Food Program was forced to put off plans to purchase nearly 3,000 tons of food for Cuba “because we cannot find a shipping solution to bring it to Cuba,” said Etienne Labande, the agency’s Cuba country director.
The World Food Program, which was helping supply provisions for Cuba’s subsidized food rations, is also trying to find other ways to pay for fuel it used to buy from private companies, because it can no longer pay with Visa or Mastercard, he said.
The Trump administration’s sanctions against foreign companies, announced in May, largely targeted GAESA, the military conglomerate that operates everything from retail businesses to the tourism industry.
GAESA was born out of Cuba’s economic crisis in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had been the island nation’s main benefactor.
The U.S. State Department, relying on media reports suggesting GAESA was sitting on enormous piles of cash even as the nation suffers, said the moves would deprive Cuba’s military “access to illicit assets.”
The Cuban government did not respond to a request for comment, but released a scathing statement denouncing the Trump administration.
The U.S. government, the statement said, had “once again acted with premeditated intent in its eagerness to manufacture pretexts to discredit the Cuban Revolution, its historic leadership, its current leaders, and, in doing so, confuse both our people and international public opinion.”
Mr. Díaz-Canel said on social media that GAESA was not “a path to enrichment for a few.’’
“On the contrary, it is one of the many examples that, along our path, has allowed us to resist the permanent aggression of the United States government.”
Seth Eisen, a spokesman for Mastercard, said the decision to withdraw had not been made by Mastercard.
The bank that had managed the company’s transactions decided to limit operations in Cuba, and without the foreign financial partner, Mastercards will not work to make purchases in Cuba, he said.
Visa, Iberostar and Blue Diamond did not respond to a request for comment. Meliá, in a statement, said its decision to leave Cuba “was made out of a deep sense of corporate responsibility,” but that the impact of its decision was limited because most of its hotels were already closed.
Cuba’s tourism sector has largely collapsed. In January, the Trump administration blocked fuel deliveries to Cuba, which limited the availability of jet fuel and led several airlines to cancel service.
“The reach of these sanctions was much wider and stronger, especially among the hotel chains,” said Paolo Spadoni, a political economist at Augusta University in Georgia who studies Cuba’s tourism industry.
He noted that not all of Cuba’s hotels are run by the military conglomerate, and the Spanish hotel companies were continuing to operate hotels run by Cuban entities not tied to GAESA and not targeted with sanctions.
John S. Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, said the latest measures could lead the Cuban military conglomerate to dismantle its operations to comply with the new rules.
“In the last 30 days, there has been more commercial, economic and financial destruction in Cuba than in any period since 1959,” Mr. Kavulich said, referring to the year of the Cuban revolution that eventually ushered in Communist rule.
The U.S. administration, he said, “achieved so much without firing a shot or one boot on the ground.”
The State Department acknowledged that the withdrawal of the hotel firms was precisely what the measures were intended to accomplish.
“Our sanctions are deliberately targeted to prevent the Cuban military and security services from profiting off international investment in Cuba to fund their continued oppression of the Cuban people and threat to U.S. national security,” the State Department said in a statement provided to The New York Times.
“Companies choosing to exit the Cuban market are making a prudent decision to comply with U.S. law and avoid enriching a regime that routinely violates fundamental human rights.”
David C. Adams contributed reporting from Madrid, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Edward Wong contributed from Washington.
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8) As Trump Pushes Deportations, a Skyrocketing Caseload Strains Immigration Courts
A federal surge has more than doubled caseloads within some immigration courts nationwide. Lawyers say the tactic is causing errors and confusion.
By Jazmine Ulloa and Hamed Aleaziz, June 6, 2026
Jazmine Ulloa, who reported from Chicago, and Hamed Aleaziz, who reported from Washington, cover immigration.
Immigrants waited in a packed hallway for their hearings at the Annandale Immigration Court in Annandale, Va., on Tuesday. Salwan Georges for The New York Times
Federal officials have quietly begun fast-tracking cases through immigration courts, pushing dozens of additional cases onto the dockets on certain days in an effort to more quickly process asylum and other claims.
The fast-tracking, which is also intended to increase the pace of deportations, started without any formal notification or announcement from the Trump administration, according to immigration lawyers and court officials interviewed by The New York Times. But a surge of cases has been apparent in numerous courts around the country. Some judges have seen their caseloads double and triple, prompting worries that cases are being rushed through, violating due process rights.
At separate courthouses in Annandale and Sterling, Va., in recent days, Times reporters observed long lines and packed dockets. Some immigration judges saw their caseloads more than double, with as many as 100 adults waiting for their cases to be heard. In Annandale, the caseloads have included dozens of unaccompanied minors.
Lines were also evident at a courthouse in downtown Chicago on a recent weekday, with families spilling out of waiting areas and into hallways. Many cases were being processed in small groups, or in several instances with more than two dozen people appearing at once.
And in New Orleans, lawyers saw the number of cases increase to more than 200 on Monday and Tuesday in one courtroom alone. The judges at that courthouse typically take only about 30 to 40 cases per day, lawyers said. The morning dockets were so packed and chaotic that lawyers wishing to observe or monitor the proceedings were not allowed in to watch.
Federal officials say that speeding through cases will help alleviate backlogs that have led some asylum and immigration relief claims to languish for years. The slow pace of the process, they contend, creates incentives for people to enter the United States to file claims that may be weak or invalid.
The Justice Department said in a statement that clearing the court backlog was a top priority for the administration, and that it was hearing the cases fairly and in accordance with the law.
An official with the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is part of the Justice Department and oversees the immigration court system, said the larger caseloads were a result of the court hiring new immigration judges, and described them as necessary to clear a backlog of upward of 3 million cases this year, according to federal figures.
But immigration lawyers and rights groups counter that the sudden acceleration of the process risks errors, denies immigrants due process and leaves people with little time to find lawyers.
“Everything related to these large dockets or mass dockets is shrouded in such a strange secrecy,” said Gracie Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, a nonprofit that provides legal services for immigrants. “Our confirmation that they were even happening really came from going to the court on Monday and seeing the large lines of people standing outside,” she added, referring to the proceedings she observed in New Orleans.
The surge comes at a time of upheaval for Mr. Trump’s immigration strategy. On Friday, a federal judge rejected the government’s indefinite hold on asylum applications filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and on immigration applications from people from 39 countries who had been unable to obtain green cards and citizenship. The ruling is not expected to have a major impact on immigration courts.
This week, the Supreme Court also declined to review a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit requiring the government to take more steps to notify immigrants of their hearing dates if their notices are returned in the mail.
Unlike judges in criminal and civil courts, immigration judges are part of the executive branch, and the Trump administration has taken steps to align them with the president’s pledge to deport record numbers of people. The administration has fired judges seen as insufficiently supportive of the agenda, and has narrowed the factors that qualify people for asylum.
The judges who remain have been under pressure to issue deportation orders and rule against asylum cases, a Times investigation found. The rate of asylum grants is the lowest since 2009, according to data analyzed by The Times.
Typical “master” calendar hearings are already crowded sessions where an immigration judge can handle dozens of cases at a time, all of which can be in different stages. They review claims, consider challenges and schedule court dates for people seeking asylum, humanitarian protections and an array of other forms of legal relief that can temporarily shield immigrants from deportation or set them on the path to legal permanent residency.
Many attorneys have taken to informally calling the new, heavily packed proceedings “mega master” calendar hearings.
In New Orleans, Ms. Willis, the attorney, said the dockets she watched included a mix of people: respondents who were appearing in immigration court for the first time, along with immigrants who had trials already set for 2027 but were called in for minor updates on their cases, such as the verification of their addresses.
Some had received notices of their new court appearances the month before, but others had been called in only two weeks earlier, or even more recently, she said.
Lawyers said that they had observed judges taking in groups of people at a time, despite their different pleadings and cases. In one instance, a judge saw 15 people at once, running through Arabic, Spanish and Creole interpretations, Ms. Willis said.
On Monday and Tuesday, 89 people in one court alone were declared absent, and were therefore deportable, she added. “And that is not because they were ‘the worst of the worst.’ It is because they had a hearing scheduled that they were not able to attend for a variety of reasons,” Ms. Willis said.
In Courtroom 11 in Chicago on May 26, Judge Peter A. Kim addressed a group of more than 20 immigrants, a reporter observed. He told them that they had 20 days to submit their cases in writing, and warned that the next hearing would be their final opportunity to make the case to remain in the United States.
Alex, a maintenance worker from Honduras, and his adult son were among the immigrants who received the warning. Alex spoke to The Times on the condition that only his first name be used, because he fears government retaliation.
He and his son applied for asylum and obtained temporary humanitarian passage into the country in 2023, but the form of relief is set to expire in December, and their asylum petition remains pending.
He said that he worried that the government’s push to quickly close their case would leave them with no relief. “All we can have is hope and faith in God,” he said.
“It is not a bad thing to want to prioritize older cases,” Briana Carlson, an immigration lawyer who represents clients in Sterling, Va., said of the case dockets. “But when we are taking away the power of judges to have individualized hearings, that is problematic.”
In Annandale, immigrants and their children recently filled a courtroom as a judge heard about 60 cases during hearings that stretched more than seven hours last week.
Yuvora Nong, an immigration lawyer in Virginia, showed up to the courthouse for a separate hearing scheduled for his client at 1 p.m. one day. But the judge, Raphael Choi, was still working through the day’s caseload surge, and had 15 cases left to hear by day’s end.
Judge Choi told Mr. Nong that his client’s case would have to be postponed — to May 2027.
On May 29, Maria Martinez, another Annandale lawyer, had clients from El Salvador and Venezuela sitting in her law office for more than eight hours as they waited to go before a judge by video. They had been scheduled to appear around 8:30 a.m., but as the judge toiled through a packed caseload, the wait stretched on.
“Family members had to bring them food because they were too scared to leave the office and miss their hearing,” Ms. Martinez said.
Minutes before the judge’s computer shut down for the day, he bunched the last six cases together, Ms. Martinez said. Speeding through, he did not even have time to check whether her clients were present, she added.
Reporting was contributed by Robert Chiarito from Chicago, Madeleine Ngo from Annandale, Va., Orlando Mayorquín from San Diego and Allison McCann from New York.
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9) ICE Says Detainees Are ‘Worst of the Worst.’ Government Data Disagrees.
Federal officials said they are removing killers and rapists from the streets. Data obtained by The New York Times indicates most detainees at a Newark facility haven’t been convicted of crimes.
By Ed Shanahan and Hamed Aleaziz, June 6, 2026
Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in New Jersey, has been the site of persistent and at times violent clashes between law enforcement officers and protesters over the past two weeks. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
When reports emerged last month that immigrants held at a Newark detention center were staging a hunger strike to protest conditions there, demonstrators mobilized and New Jersey’s governor, Mikie Sherrill, demanded to be let in so that she could inspect the building.
Federal officials rejected her demand and said that she and other Democratic officials in New Jersey should be grateful that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was removing killers, rapists and other criminals — “the worst of the worst,” they said — from the state.
But the federal government’s own data, including some from internal documents The New York Times obtained this week, indicates that people with criminal convictions account for just a fraction of the detainees at the Newark center, Delaney Hall.
In early April, ICE stopped updating its once-regular public reports on the number of people being detained at its facilities. The internal data obtained by The Times shows that of 591 people held at Delaney Hall this week, 76 — about 13 percent — had criminal convictions and 123 — about 21 percent — had pending criminal charges.
The detainees had been at the center for about 80 days on average, the data shows.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement on Friday that it was “working rapidly and overtime to remove these aliens from detentions centers to their final destination — home.”
Delaney Hall’s population has dropped sharply since ICE’s April report, which showed 891 people (833 men and 58 women) being held there as of April 2. Less than 10 percent — 61 men and two women — were classified as criminals.
When people are detained, and then periodically during their detention, they are divided into categories that reflect the level of security risk they are believed to pose and then housed accordingly, according to ICE.
The categories — low, medium low, medium high and high — are based on factors such as previous convictions, disciplinary records and “special management concerns,” ICE says. As of April 2, just one Delaney Hall detainee was considered a high security risk, ICE data shows; 789, or just under 90 percent, were deemed low risk.
Immigration officials also assign detainees to “ICE threat level” categories determined by their “criminality,” including “the recency of the criminal behavior and its severity.” They are ranked on a scale of 1 to 3, with 1 being the most severe. Detainees with no criminal convictions are classified as “no ICE threat level.”
As of April 2, just six detainees were classified in the highest threat level. About 90 percent were said to be no ICE threat, agency data shows.
“If you were looking for an ICE facility that holds a large number of dangerous criminals,” Austin Kocher, a political and legal geographer and research assistant professor at Syracuse University, wrote in a recent edition of his newsletter on Substack, “Delaney Hall just isn’t it.”
Professor Kocher, whose research focuses on the politics and policies of the U.S. immigration and refugee system, did a more fine-grained analysis of the criminal detainee population. He used data from the Deportation Data Project, which collects and posts government immigration enforcement data sets, some released voluntarily by the government and some obtained through public records requests.
He found that of 844 people detained at Delaney Hall as of March 10, about 12 percent were convicted criminals, about 18 percent had pending criminal charges and about 70 percent had been accused only of immigration violations.
Of the 99 people with criminal convictions, none had been found guilty of homicide, sexual assault or drug trafficking. About 70 percent were convicted of misdemeanors; just nine had felonies, according to Professor Kocher.
For the past two weeks, Delaney Hall has been the site of steady and sometimes violent confrontations between protesters and law enforcement officers. At least 90 protesters have been arrested since May 26.
As Ms. Sherrill sought access to the center, federal officials insisted that detainees were being well cared for and denied there was a hunger strike. They accused her of engaging in a “political stunt.”
“These sanctuary politicians should be thanking ICE law enforcement for removing murderers, rapists, pedophiles and drug traffickers from their communities,” Lauren Bis, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said in a statement on May 25. “We need these sanctuary politicians to stop peddling this garbage and cooperate with us.”
The statement was accompanied by a list of 16 detainees who had been arrested in New Jersey, with brief descriptions of what was described as each one’s “criminal history.”
The offenses cited included homicide, sexual assault, drug trafficking, aggravated assault, illegal possession of a weapon and enticement of a minor for indecent purposes. It was unclear whether a “criminal history” reflected convictions, charges or some combination.
Delaney Hall is run by GEO Group, one of the largest private prison operators in the United States, under a $1 billion, 15-year federal contract.
The two-story center has 1,000 beds, according to a GEO Group news release from last year, and a permitted capacity of just under 1,200 beds, according to filings in a company lawsuit against New Jersey officials.
Asked this week for current data on the detainees and their criminal records, the Department of Homeland Security responded with a statement that did not include the requested information.
“It is a crime to enter the United States illegally,” the statement said. “Everyone being held inside Delaney Hall broke the law. If you come to our country illegally, we will find you and arrest you.”
Allison McCann contributed reporting.
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10) Fight Erupts After Newark Mayor Scales Back Police Presence at ICE Facility
The mayor, Ras Baraka, said the city would not spend taxpayer money to safeguard Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark run by a private prison company.
By Christopher Maag and Andy Newman, Published June 5, 2026, Updated June 6, 2026
On Friday evening, a day after Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark decided to scale back police presence at Delaney Hall, a fight broke out between protesters and security guards. Lexi Parra/The New York Times
One day after the mayor of Newark said the city’s police department would scale back its presence outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center, a melee broke out in front of it between dozens of protesters and employees of the Geo Group, a private prison company that operates the facility.
Unlike previous confrontations at Delaney Hall, many of which happened at night, the altercation on Friday happened in broad daylight, at around 5:30 p.m. Scrums of people punched and tackled one another to the ground. Several protesters were also pepper-sprayed by Geo Group employees. The fights were broken up by other protesters and Geo Group workers.
There were no officers from the Newark Police Department or the New Jersey State Police present throughout the melee, which sprawled across Doremus Avenue, the busy industrial thoroughfare where Delaney Hall is located. The closest law enforcement presence appeared to be a number of Newark police cars parked about a quarter of a mile north of Delaney Hall, where officers were controlling traffic.
Minutes after the fight ended, a number of Newark police cars arrived. Officers arrested one protester, placed him in a police vehicle and drove away, once again leaving no local or state law enforcement officers present at the scene. Separately, officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement exited Delaney Hall soon after the melee, took a male protester into custody, and took him into the facility.
The man arrested by the Newark police was later identified as Zion Napier, 28, of Seattle. Catherine Adams, a spokeswoman for the Newark Police Department, said that Mr. Napier was seen smashing car windows near Delaney Hall on Friday. He was charged with three counts of criminal mischief.
In a video released by the police department, a protester can be seen climbing onto the hoods of three cars as they leave the Delaney Hall parking lot. In two of the cases, the protester snaps off the cars’ windshield wipers.
Officials with the New Jersey State Police and ICE did not respond to questions about the incident. Sean Higgins, a spokesman for Gov. Mikie Sherrill, referred questions about law enforcement at Delaney Hall to the mayor, Ras Baraka. After the police left, several protesters toppled a barrel of sand, which had been placed in the middle of the street to control traffic.
Later in the evening, ICE officers arrested three more protesters. Separately, a protester was hit by a car driven by someone leaving Delaney Hall in a convoy of vehicles. He received care from medics on the scene and was then driven by friends to a nearby hospital.
Mayor Baraka said on Thursday that the city police department would scale back its presence outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center, where local, state and federal officers have confronted protesters on and off for the past two weeks at demonstrations that have sometimes turned chaotic.
Mr. Baraka said the city would not spend local taxpayers’ money “in an already strapped budget to safeguard a privately owned facility, especially when it places our officers at unnecessary risk.”
The mayor took credit for what he called a “significant reduction in unrest” in recent days and said in a statement that starting on Friday, the Newark police “will focus on traffic management and public safety, ensuring the protection of both protesters and motorists.”
Before the altercations on Friday, it was not immediately clear whether ICE or the New Jersey State Police, both of which have clashed with demonstrators during this wave of protests, would increase their presence at Delaney Hall. Usually, the state police will assist municipal law enforcement agencies only upon request, so Newark would need to reach out if it wanted help from the state.
Mr. Higgins, Ms. Sherrill’s spokesman, said in response to questions about the state police’s plans that “the governor’s focus is on fighting for humane treatment for detainees and their families inside Delaney Hall. Newark is keeping us updated on the situation outside the facility, and we continue to urge all those protesting to remain peaceful.”
Before the violence erupted, ICE said in a statement that “the perimeter around Delaney Hall is FULLY closed. No rioters have breached the perimeter. Our ICE operations continue undeterred. ANYONE who attempts to obstruct law enforcement or disrupt our operations will be prosecuted and face justice.”
Since the mayor lifted the curfew on Tuesday, three people were arrested on Wednesday and accused of assaulting a police officer and setting a dumpster fire. On Thursday night, tensions flared again when protesters briefly blocked a road with metal barricades.
And before the melee began on Friday, a small group of protesters stood at the end of a driveway at Delaney Hall and tried to physically block Geo Group employees and vehicles from leaving.
The policing of the protests at Delaney Hall, where at least 90 people have been arrested since May 26, has been complicated and contentious. Delaney Hall is one of the largest immigrant detention centers in the Eastern United States and has been a magnet for opponents of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. It is also in a very Democratic city in a Democrat-led state, and both Mr. Baraka and Ms. Sherrill have at times joined with the protesters.
Last week, after several days of clashes between protesters and federal agents who fired pepper balls and spray to control the crowds, Ms. Sherrill sent in the state police to de-escalate the situation. But last Friday, after demonstrators shoved barricades at officers, threw bottles of liquid and set fires, state troopers charged the crowd and set off smoke grenades.
After Mr. Baraka instituted a 9 p.m. curfew on Sunday, 61 protesters were arrested on charges of violating the curfew, rioting and resisting arrest. On Friday, the New Jersey public defender’s office moved to dismiss charges against 45 of those 61 protesters, arguing that the complaints against them were so generic and similar that they failed to articulate any probable cause to charge the individual defendants.
Lexi Parra and Mark Bonamo contributed reporting.
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11) 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.
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