March for Peace & Justice, not more WAR
Saturday, March 14th, in the annual Saint Patrick’s Day Parade.
Veterans For Peace (VFP) San Francisco chapter #69 has marched in the huge annual SF Saint Patrick’s Day Parade since 2012, marching for Palestine and against All Wars. Now the U.S. and Israel are bombing Iran! Join us!
The Irish government and People were the First in Europe to stand up to Israeli genocide and Call for a Ceasefire. They are again calling for a Ceasefire in the Entire Middle East.
VFP & “About Face – Veterans Against the War” (POST 9/11 vets), along with CodePink will be the official organizations representing our contingent. All Anti-War individuals are ASKED TO JOIN US!
The parade is viewed by thousands. We will be handing out an Informational Leaflet to those watching the parade.
Two years ago we had a very large contingent, with lots of Palestinian flags, and won First Place for a “Military” Unit!
Join us!
LOGISTICS:
· Saturday, March 14th. Muster by 11:30 AM on Second Street, between Bryant & Brannan – 5 ½ blocks South of Market St. on Second.
· We will have a vehicle as well. Our Official Number in the parade is #87.
· Bring Veterans For Peace banners, flags, etc. We will have US, Irish and VFP flags and banners - and a Palestinian flag as well. All to be carried by participants or taped to the vehicle.
CONTACTS: VFP SF Chapter 69 Organizers:
Nadya Williams - CELL: (415) 845-9492, EMAIL: nadyanomad@gmail.com
Louis Flores – CELL: (925) 550-9775, EMAIL: louisflores2468@comcast.net
Mike Wong - EMAIL: mikevfp69@gmail.com
Please join us on March 14 as we march for peace and justice through diplomacy not more war!
Eleanor Levine
CodePink, SF Bay Area
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March 19: The Voice of Hind Rajab Screening @ Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) Offices
1101 Eighth St, Berkeley, CA 94710, USA
Join the Middle East Children's Alliance for our screening of The Voice of Hind Rajab. This tragic docudrama, written and directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, follows the Red Crescent response during the killing of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl, by the Israel Occupation Forces during the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip. It stars Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel, and Clara Khoury.
Tickets: $10.00
https://events.humanitix.com/the-voice-of-hind-rajab?emci=a59ade92-0318-f111-a69a-000d3a1f0a97&emdi=7c21261a-2118-f111-a69a-000d3a1f0a97&ceid=2453624*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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Saturday, March 28
11:30 A.M. – 3:00 P.M.
Embarcadero Plaza
Market and Steuart Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
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Veterans For Peace Condemns
U.S. Attack on Iran
Military Members and Civilians:
Resist Illegal Wars!
Veterans For Peace condemns the U.S./Israeli attack on Iran in the strongest possible terms. We call on our members, friends, and allies to resist this dangerous and illegal war. We offer our support to members of the military who decide to refuse illegal orders and resist an illegal war.
A War Based on Lies
The Trump administration’s ever-changing rationales for going to war against Iran are lies. Iran posed no threat to the United States. This military operation is not a defensive war, but rather a war of choice by Israel and the U.S., a war of aggression, a war for regime change – very much like the disastrous U.S. wars that killed millions of people in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – wars that many veterans remember with horror and regret.
Contrary to President Trump’s oft-repeated lie, Iran has repeatedly stated that it has no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons. Rather, the United States, the only country to attack another nation with nuclear weapons, has unilaterally abrogated multiple arms control treaties, and is investing Two Trillion Dollars in a new generation of nuclear weapons. It was the U.S., not Iran, that violated and withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. Israel also has nuclear weapons – undeclared and uninspected. Two nuclear powers attacking Iran, claiming to stop it from pursuing a nuclear program, is the height of hypocrisy.
The aggression against Iran follows by less than two months the U.S. attack on Venezuela and the unlawful abduction of its president and wife. It comes amid the ongoing war threats and oil blockade of Cuba. This complete disregard and abuse of the process of negotiations only encourages nuclear proliferation around the world.
Illegal and Unconstitutional
The U.S. war on Iran is illegal in multiple ways. It is a violation of the UN Charter, a treaty which is the “supreme law of the land” under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The unilateral war of aggression against Iran is a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly grants Congress the sole authority to declare war. This power was intentionally given to the legislative branch to prevent unilateral military action by a single executive.
These legal and constitutional issues may seem quaint to those of us who have seen them routinely violated by president after president with the complicity of a supine Congress. Nonetheless, they constitute both international and domestic law. They are the legal codification of a moral framework for international peace and cooperation. Peace-loving people must struggle to ensure that these laws are followed. We must hold our government officials accountable when they are not.
Refuse Illegal Orders – Resist Illegal Wars
Veterans For Peace reminds our sisters and brothers, children, and grandchildren in the U.S. military that an order to participate in an illegal war is, by extension, an illegal order. You have the right and even the duty to refuse illegal orders. Veterans For Peace and many others will stand with you when you do, and provide helpful information and resources. Whatever legal consequences you may endure pale compared to risking your life in an illegal war or living with Post Traumatic Stress and Moral Injury.
Veterans and civilians also have the right and the responsibility to resist the illegal actions of our government at home and abroad. This attack is a very critical moment in the history of the United States and the world. We must be in the streets protesting. We must be on our phones telling our representatives to Vote Yes on the Iran War Powers resolution. We must be on our keyboards, writing letters to the editors. Tell them to:
IMMEDIATELY HALT U.S. MILITARY ATTACKS ON IRAN!
· End U.S. Support for Israel and Genocide in Palestine!
· End Economic Warfare against Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba!
· End ICE and Authoritarian Repression in U.S. Cities!
· Abolish Nuclear Weapons and War!
PEACE AT HOME, PEACE ABROAD!
https://prod.cdn.everyaction.com/emails/van/EA/EA015/1/94223/Alqa3p0mdFGQOfwCaEOYO6dpWCJEn2qC1GPoEaid_7O_archive?emci=6196a802-9415-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&emdi=d3c0d4a7-a515-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&ceid=10474381
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Tell Congress: No War On Iran!
On Saturday, February 28th, the United States and Israel bombed Iran’s capital. Shortly after, President Donald Trump announced a planned prolonged war against Iran and stated that American servicemembers would likely be killed in the process. He addressed Iranians, telling them to stay inside because bombs would be dropping all over Iran, and called on them to overthrow their government. The self-proclaimed “peace president” has launched yet another endless war – risking millions of human lives. The entire world should be outraged.
Tell Congress we want PEACE with Iran, we don’t want the US bombing Iran, we don’t want a regime change war, and we want to lift the sanctions that are hurting everyday Iranians.
https://www.codepink.org/iranaction
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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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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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 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) What the U.S. and Israel Have Targeted in Their Iran Blitz
The waves of bombings reveal a broad effort to ravage the country’s leadership and security services.
By Adam Goldman, Samuel Granados, Ronen Bergman and Eric Schmitt, March 7, 2026
Intelligence Ministry Source: Satellite image by Vantor. The New York Times
A week into their war on Iran, the United States and Israel have attacked a vast array of targets — about 4,000 in all — from the land, air and sea.
The bombing campaign, one of the most intense periods of strikes involving U.S. forces in decades, reveals a broad strategy. The United States and Israel are seeking to loosen the grip of Iran’s repressive security and intelligence services and possibly topple its authoritarian government. They are also trying to eliminate Iran’s ability to produce and launch missiles, to seriously degrade its navy and to prevent the country from being able to produce nuclear weapons.
President Trump said on Friday that the conflict would continue until Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” indicating that the war may just be getting started. But so far Iran has not folded.
The bombing has killed the country’s supreme leader and other top officials, but the Islamic government that has ruled the country since 1979 remains in place. Though it has been weakened, Iran’s military is still firing missiles and drones at Israel and at countries in the region where U.S. troops are deployed. The vast Iranian security forces also appear to be intact. And while the United States and Israel have struck at least one site at the heart of Iran’s nuclear program, the extent of the damage is unclear.
In the first minutes of the war, Israel sought to paralyze the chain of command in Iran. Israeli warplanes fired a barrage of missiles that struck the Iranian leadership compound in central Tehran.
At the time, senior Iranian national security officials had gathered in one building at the compound. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was in another building.
Among those who died in the attack last weekend was Ayatollah Khamenei. Israel later hunted down the highest-ranking Iranian commander responsible for operations in Lebanon, killing him in Tehran.
Mr. Trump has said that several potential successors to Khamenei are now dead, and that he wants a say in the selection of Iran’s next leader. The United States and Israel are undoubtedly looking for opportunities to kill more Iranian officials they want out of the picture.
Intelligence and Security
The bombing campaign has targeted the security and intelligence agencies responsible for the repression of dissent in Iran. The aim is to weaken the regime’s grip on power.
Among the targets is Iran’s most powerful military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Basij, a plainclothes militia affiliated with the Guards. Israel said it had used dozens of warplanes in one attack to blast a compound in eastern Tehran that served as the headquarters for the Basij, the Guards and the Quds Force, the arm of the Guards responsible for foreign operations.
Israel estimates that hundreds of Basij and Guards personnel have been killed, along with thousands of other security personnel. The Pentagon said it had bombed sites linked to the Guards, which, along with its proxies, has targeted Americans in numerous attacks over the decades. In addition, the United States and Israel have struck detention centers and television and broadcasting facilities.
Perhaps the most vital part of the U.S.-Israeli campaign has been the effort to establish air superiority with attacks on Iranian air defenses, missile depots and launchers, and air bases.
The Israeli military says that more than 300 Iranian missile launchers and about 150 air defense systems have been disabled, and that it was continuing to target the country’s ballistic missiles and launch sites.
The United States says it has crippled Iran’s navy, destroying 30 vessels, including a submarine. The American military used a submarine to fire a torpedo and sink an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean and also struck an Iranian drone carrier ship.
The aim of the naval operations is to weaken Iran’s capacity to menace shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, which carries a fifth of the world’s oil exports and significant quantities of natural gas.
Nuclear Program
The United States and Israel say they are determined to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.
In June, the two nations carried out attacks in Iran that Mr. Trump said had “destroyed” the country’s nuclear potential. But U.S. and Israeli forces have resumed striking the Iranian nuclear infrastructure, attacking the Natanz site, where Iran has produced a vast majority of its nuclear fuel.
The site is considered the heart of the country’s nuclear program. Satellite imagery shows that the new strikes destroyed the entrances to an underground cavern at Natanz that held centrifuges for uranium enrichment. It is not clear whether Isfahan and Fordo, two other sites that were struck in the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June, have been targeted again.
This week, Israel destroyed a previously secret underground facility in Minzadehei, northeast of Tehran, that it said was used to develop parts for a nuclear weapon. Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, said Iran had “intended to pair nuclear-enriched uranium with a missile delivery system” at the compound.
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2) There Is One Crucial Reason We’re Talking About Boots on the Ground
By W.J. Hennigan and Massimo Calabresi, March 7, 2026
Mr. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion. Mr. Calabresi is an Opinion editor at large.
Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
Somewhere in the mountains of Iran lies a hidden stockpile that is poised to define the future of America’s war against the theocratic regime: 18 to 20 scuba-tank-like canisters, each of which contains up to 55 pounds of highly enriched uranium, the main material for making a nuclear weapon.
Iran spent decades and billions of dollars amassing that material, prompting Democratic and Republican presidents alike to insist America would do whatever was necessary to prevent Iran from getting a bomb. Iran’s nuclear program has been severely damaged by U.S.-led air attacks over the past nine months. American officials and experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency believe the uranium has nonetheless survived.
The latest conflict, deliberately or otherwise, has forced the uranium issue to the fore, setting off a showdown over Iran’s nuclear future and a scramble to secure its components. If President Trump ends the war without getting control of the canisters, Iran will almost certainly speed toward going nuclear. Grabbing it, on the other hand, would entail huge risk and the inevitable deployment of American or Israeli ground forces.
“They have to deal with this,” said David Albright, the dean of Iran nuclear analysts and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank. The stockpile gives whoever emerges in power after the war “a residual nuclear weapons capability,” he said.
That leaves no good options for a very urgent problem. The United States and Israel could dispatch special forces teams, with nuclear experts embedded in them, in the hope of finding, securing and removing or destroying the canisters, perhaps with the help of local insurgents. There have been few attempts to secure a nuclear program in the middle of a war, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how things could go terribly wrong.
The other approach is diplomatic. Weeks of bombing might force Iran to surrender its enriched uranium and other elements of its program. Intermediaries from Oman suggested recently that Iran might be willing to go this route, but that was before the latest attacks began. This is also not a new idea. One way or the other, America and Iran have been negotiating over this question for more than a decade.
The United States and Israel believe most of the highly enriched uranium is in a tunnel complex outside the city of Isfahan, which has not been the target of major bombing attacks during this campaign. “We’re always highly focused on” the uranium, the under secretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, said at the Council on Foreign Relations on March 4.
After Mr. Trump’s decapitation of much of Iran’s leadership, the security of the stockpile is at risk. Converting the highly toxic material in the canisters into the metal for a weapon is probably beyond the abilities of terrorists, but rogue forces might view it as a decent insurance policy amid the chaos of war. The regime might try to disperse the canisters around the country for safekeeping. Iran has retained other parts of its nuclear program despite the relentless air attacks, and no matter what, the scientific knowledge underpinning the effort can’t be bombed away.
Mr. Trump’s war against Iran has triggered the most consequential nuclear moment in the Middle East in a generation. It’s no exaggeration to say the future of the region may well depend on whether the United States, having triggered the crisis, is successful in finding and securing the stockpile. Representative Bill Foster, Democrat of Illinois, who attended a classified briefing with administration officials on Tuesday, said Iran does “not need to enrich further to make a usable nuclear weapon. It’s true that what they have can’t be launched atop a missile, but unfortunately there’s different ways to deliver such a weapon.”
The confrontation over Iran’s enriched uranium has been building for years. Unlike in Iraq two and a half decades ago, when American intelligence agencies incorrectly argued that the country had a secret nuclear program, there is no doubt about Iran’s nuclear stockpile, which has been independently verified by the I.A.E.A. The organization significantly ramped up monitoring of the country’s nuclear program in 2003.
Under the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration, Iran agreed to limit the enrichment of its uranium to less than 4 percent purity until 2030 in exchange for sanctions relief. The agreement was significant because it lengthened the breakout time it would take for Iran to produce a nuclear weapon to more than a year. Mr. Trump abandoned the deal in 2018, and within years, the Iranians began enriching their uranium beyond 20 percent, well higher than could be justified for civilian or scientific use, the I.A.E.A. reported. By the time the United States started its attacks last June, which were designed to debilitate Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran had amassed an estimated 970 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity.
That brought Iran within days of producing the 90 percent uranium necessary to fuel devastating nuclear weapons. Even 60 percent enriched uranium, when converted to metal, can be used for a crude weapon with roughly the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Shortly after Mr. Trump’s June attack, Iran kicked the I.A.E.A. inspectors out of the country, and the agency’s head, Rafael Grossi, has said he can no longer say for sure where the enriched uranium is. He assumed it remains at Isfahan, but he said at a March 2 news conference that “we hope it has not been removed.”
Knowing where to find the material is just the first challenge. Mr. Foster said after the classified briefing on Tuesday that the administration did not answer whether it had a strategy for dealing with the problem when it started the war. “We did not hear any plan from the administration to seize it, destroy it or make it subject to international inspection,” he told The Times.
The United States and Israel have the capability to secure Iran’s nuclear materials; this is one scenario in which there could be boots on the ground. Elite commando units among America’s special forces train to conduct high-risk operations to detect, seize and neutralize chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear threats. The United States maintains a system, called the Mobile Uranium Facility, that allows American scientists to quickly characterize, stabilize and package uranium. It’s made up of several shipping containers that can be loaded aboard military cargo planes and sent anywhere in the world from its current location in Tennessee at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Israeli special operations forces units have been training toward a mission to seize Iran’s nuclear material for more than a decade, according to several former U.S. government officials. Israel’s ability to conduct such raids came into public view in September 2024 when commandos stormed a Hezbollah facility in Syria, rappelling from helicopters to get to rooms that were buried deep in a mountainside. “Putting troops on the ground to remove this material is an option,” said Richard Nephew, an Iran nuclear expert who served in the Obama and Biden administrations. “But it’s highly risky.”
Securing the nuclear stockpile after the bombs stop falling would be much easier. The United States and the United Nations have experience in such operations. Even then, it would be a daunting challenge to account for Iran’s nuclear material in all its forms, as well as whatever remains of centrifuges and related equipment involved in the program. “The list of objectives gets long fairly quickly,” said a former Iraq weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States devised a disarmament program that stretched across 15 sovereign states, involving 30,000 nuclear weapons and an estimated 40,000 tons of chemical weapons. The lesson there was that securing the nuclear material was only the start. It will be important to have a full accounting for the machinery, technicians and scientists involved to prevent problems popping up elsewhere. “What we don’t want is a post-Soviet Union environment where people with nuclear expertise are in the wind,” said Corey Hinderstein, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s deputy administrator for nonproliferation in the Biden administration.
The biggest obstacle to the peacetime approach — beyond the fact that the United States and Israel continue to attack Iran around the clock — is the Iranian regime itself. Mr. Trump launched the war amid negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. That would make talks based on trust hard to restart. And after years of on-again, off-again diplomacy and enormous military attacks, Iran’s leaders might well have concluded that their only true guarantee for staying in power is to acquire a nuclear weapon as soon as possible.
There is a third possibility, of course. The war could end with Iran’s nuclear capabilities intact. That outcome looks even less appealing now than it did over the past few decades, in which one American president after another swore to prevent it. The regime’s track record of targeting the United States and its allies around the world would only get worse with the protection a nuclear arsenal would provide.
In a war filled with open questions, the fate of the Iranian uranium canisters is a terribly concrete determinant of what the future holds. The nuclear question is likely to be the most consequential one, however it is solved. That may be the most reckless part of Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran: forcing a final resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue with no clear path to success.
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3) How War in the Middle East Could Sow Hunger
The Persian Gulf is a major source of fertilizers, making the conflict disruptive to the global production of food.
By Peter S. Goodman, March 7, 2026
Peter Goodman, a global economics correspondent, extensively covered the supply chain crises of the Covid-19 pandemic and wrote about fertilizer during the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Workers sprinkling fertilizer in a paddy field in India, which buys some 40 percent of its urea and phosphate-based fertilizers from the Middle East. Amit Dave/Reuters
The longer the conflict in the Middle East continues, the greater the likelihood that people around the globe will pay more for food. And those in the most vulnerable countries could face hunger.
The Persian Gulf is a dominant source of fertilizer. Though the region is best known as a prodigious source of oil and natural gas, its abundance of energy has spurred the development of factories that make the raw materials for many types of fertilizer, especially those that deliver nitrogen.
Nitrogen fertilizers are essentially natural gas reconfigured as plant nutrients. They nourish crops that yield roughly half the world’s food supply.
For now, most factories in the Gulf that make nitrogen fertilizers are continuing to produce them. But delivering their wares to farmers is suddenly impossible, given the effective shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel linking the Gulf to the Indian Ocean.
The cessation of marine traffic on the strait is the primary reason that oil and gas prices have surged. If the waterway remains off limits, prices for key fertilizers, and the chemicals used to make them, will go up. That could prompt farmers to limit their application, reducing the world’s food supply while making sustenance less affordable.
“It’s bad — there’s no other way of putting it,” said Chris Lawson, vice president of market intelligence and prices at CRU Group, a London-based research and data firm focused on commodities. “The world is highly reliant on fertilizer and associated raw materials supplied out of that region.”
War has a way of exposing vulnerabilities that arise from interconnection. Four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the world gained a wrenching lesson in the geography of agriculture. Both countries were substantial sources of wheat and other grains. Shortages of bread soon emerged from West Africa to South Asia.
Russia and Ukraine also produce significant quantities of fertilizer. The enduring conflict made those products scarce, driving up prices and prompting farmers to conserve their use of fertilizer. The result was depleted harvests.
The latest upheaval in the Middle East does not affect the harvesting of grain, but its impacts for fertilizer may be even more profound.
“The volumes are greater this time around, potentially, than in the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” said Sarah Marlow, global editor for fertilizers at Argus Media, a news and data service focused on commodities. “You’ve got multiple producing countries.”
Fertilizers can be divided into three basic types that deliver particular nutrients to soils: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Five primary fertilizer exporters — Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — rely heavily on the Strait of Hormuz to export their wares.
Collectively, these countries supply more than one-third of the world’s trade in urea, the dominant form of nitrogen fertilizer, as well as nearly one-fourth of another type, ammonia, according to data compiled by the International Fertilizer Association, a trade group based in London. The same five countries produce nearly one-fifth of phosphate fertilizers.
One major source of urea, QatarEnergy, halted production this past week when it lost access to natural gas after strikes from Iranian drones and missiles. Other factories are continuing to make urea, stockpiling it near ports and waiting for shipping to restart.
“No one knows how long this could go on and still have enough storage,” said Laura Cross, director of market intelligence at the International Fertilizer Association.
Some view the evolving crisis confronting agriculture as a warning sign about excessive reliance on a handful of fertilizer producers to satisfy humanity’s need for calories.
The pandemic exposed the risks of depending on a single country, China, for basic ingredients for medicines. The upheaval in the Middle East has underscored the dangers of relying on the Gulf for oil and gas, prompting talk that countries must move faster to deploy renewable sources of energy like wind and solar. And the disruption of the fertilizer industry is a reminder that the same volatile region is a vital part of the world’s food supply.
“The long-term solution is not to be dependent on fertilizer that has to be trafficked through Strait of Hormuz,” said Raj Patel, a political economist and expert in sustainable food at the University of Texas at Austin. “We have become rather hooked on these imports.”
One potential solution, he added, is found in India and Brazil, where governments have encouraged farmers to slash their application of imported fertilizers by diversifying their crops and adding locally available nutrients to soils.
“More sustainable production is the long-term switch we need,” Mr. Patel said.
Many experts agree, but Mr. Patel’s favored solution does not solve the immediate problem of how to produce this year’s harvest.
The timing of the crisis is especially troubling for farmers in the Northern Hemisphere, now faced with the need to apply fertilizer for crops they will plant in the spring.
The situation is acute for American agriculture. President Trump’s tariffs had already raised the costs of imported fertilizer, forcing many farmers to hold off stocking up. The White House exempted fertilizers from its latest tariffs last month. But millions of tons of urea cannot quickly be summoned from points around the globe.
India is uniquely vulnerable, given that it traditionally buys some 40 percent of its urea and phosphate-based fertilizers from suppliers in the Middle East.
As the world seeks other sources, the most obvious alternative is China. But the Chinese government, seeking to cushion its own farmers from the very sort of geopolitical turmoil now at play, last year imposed restrictions on the export of fertilizers.
Already, traders are reacting to the threat of a shock to the supply of fertilizers. Over the past week, urea sold in Egypt — a widely watched market — has climbed from about $485 per ton to $665 per ton, or roughly 37 percent, according to Argus.
That is far from the $1,000-plus fertilizer prices seen after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the longer that Gulf suppliers remain disrupted, the greater the risk of similar increases.
A sustained rise in the cost of fertilizer could force governments in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to subsidize the cost of growing crops or otherwise watch food prices climb. That could add to debt burdens afflicting many lower-income countries.
Adding to the strain is the fact that fertilizers are generally traded in the American dollar. The U.S. currency has benefited from its status as a safe haven since the war began, gaining value against others. But that makes imported fertilizer and components more expensive in local currencies.
Farmers in much of Africa suffered the most from increased fertilizer prices in 2023, according to a paper published last year.
Globally, higher fertilizer prices could reduce yields, limit the supply and raise the price of food.
“The price of food will go up,” said Jan Willem Erisman, a chemical engineer and fertilizer expert at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Higher food prices generally prompt increases in malnutrition in poor countries, researchers have found.
Another focus of concern is sulfur, a yellow, powdery substance that is a byproduct of refining oil and gas. Sulfur is shipped in bulk freighters to ports around the world and then used to make both phosphate fertilizers and metals.
Nearly half of the world’s sulfur is now on the wrong side of the Strait of Hormuz, effectively stuck in place, according to the CRU Group.
Roughly a quarter of that sulfur is destined for China, where it is used to make phosphate fertilizer. A similar share is sent to Indonesia, both as an ingredient for fertilizer and as an element used to produce nickel. African agriculture is also heavily dependent on sulfur from the Gulf.
Sulfur stocks were already lean in much of the world before the war. Given already-high prices, buyers had been reluctant to build up inventories.
Now, prices are rising further.
If sulfur becomes scarce, that will be felt most acutely in Morocco, where factories use it to make phosphate fertilizer.
“Sulfur is essentially the commodity that is most exposed,” said Mr. Lawson at the CRU Group. “It’s fairly astonishing, the exposure that all these different markets have to sulfur as a raw material.”
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4) In War’s First Week, a Punishing Military Campaign With No Coherent Endgame
The U.S. and Israel have pounded Iran’s leadership and undercut its defense capabilities, but President Trump has offered wildly different explanations for what he hopes to achieve.
By Mark Mazzetti, Tyler Pager, Ronen Bergman, Farnaz Fassihi, Eric Schmitt, Erika Solomon and Julian E. Barnes, Published March 7, 2026, Updated March 8, 2026
The volley of Israeli missiles that slammed into a government compound in central Tehran last Saturday morning was by any military standard a successful opening strike by the United States and Israel as they went to war with Iran.
The blasts killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as a cadre of other senior military and intelligence officials. The war’s first salvo left Iran without many of its top commanders to lead the response.
The reckoning, it turned out, was more complicated. The Israeli strike also killed another group of Iranian officials who had been meeting in a different part of the compound. Among them were people the White House had identified as more willing to negotiate than their bosses, and who might help bring a swift end to the conflict, according to American officials.
The strike on the compound in Tehran was emblematic of the muddled reality of the war’s first week: a withering air campaign by American and Israeli forces against an overwhelmed enemy, but few answers about what victory might look like. Iran, its government still in place, has remained defiant and expanded the battlefield across the region, inflicting the first American casualties of the conflict.
Even as senior administration officials in the United States spent the week trying to narrowly cast the war’s goals around denying Iran any chance of gaining a nuclear weapon, President Trump has bounced between wildly divergent explanations for what he hopes to achieve.
In his first message after the war began, Mr. Trump called for a mass uprising in Iran against the country’s leaders. In subsequent days, with little evidence that Iranians were moving to overthrow their own government and with intelligence reports concluding that the clerical regime would likely hold on to power, he indicated he cared little about Iran’s future after the military campaign ends.
Then, on Friday, he said he would be directly involved in choosing Iran’s future leader, and indicated he was committing the United States to Iran’s long term future. And in a bellicose social media statement on Saturday morning, Mr. Trump warned Iran that “areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time” might now be targeted by the United States and Israel.
The changing narratives have whipsawed the American public, which polls show broadly opposes the war. At the same time, the spreading violence is triggering rising oil prices and other economic shocks that could bring further election-year political problems for Mr. Trump and the Republican Party at home.
The war’s first week had echoes of the past: For the first time since World War II, an American submarine destroyed an enemy ship using a torpedo. And it provided glimpses of the future: The Pentagon employed artificial intelligence to help pick its targets.
Interviews with dozens of officials in the United States, Israel, Iran and across the Middle East suggest that while American and Israeli military capabilities have proven to be overwhelming during the war’s first seven days, the violence that has metastasized across the region could yield all manner of fraught outcomes.
Thousands of strikes on Iran’s ballistic missile sites, military headquarters and ships transiting the Persian Gulf have impaired Tehran’s ability to expand the war even further. American and Israeli military officials say they are confident that, with Iran’s air defenses mostly battered, they can continue the campaign for weeks with little risk to their pilots.
This week, Pentagon officials told Congress that the first week of the war had cost approximately $6 billion, and Republicans are expecting the administration to seek more funding from Congress for the war.
For their part, Iranian officials have said they are confident that the government can survive the barrage and that, over time, the Americans and Israelis will lose their appetite for a war. They have given a code name to their strategy of raising the costs of the conflict to get the United States and Israel to blink: Operation Madman.
Progress of the Military Campaign
The war began 12 hours earlier than planned, after Israeli and American intelligence agencies received urgent new information: that meetings of the senior military and intelligence officials at the compound in Tehran had been moved from last Saturday evening to Saturday morning — and that Ayatollah Khamenei would be at the compound at the same time.
Israel launched both cruise missiles and supersonic ballistic missiles that arc high into the atmosphere. When they landed, they flattened the compound, which occupied several blocks in central Tehran.
Since then, American and Israeli military officials have said that a punishing air campaign has killed senior members of Iran’s military leadership, sunk much of the Iranian navy, and was wearing down the Iranian government’s ability to mount a potent armed resistance.
The U.S. combat forces in the region have swelled to more than 50,000 troops — including two aircraft carriers and a dozen warships — with dozens of additional bombers and attack planes still flowing in. Approximately $4 billion of the first week’s cost of the war for the United States was spent on munitions, mostly interceptors to shoot down Iranian missiles.
Israel and the United States have divided the campaign based on both geography and types of targets. Israel initially aimed at Iranian clerical and military leaders, including Ayatollah Khamenei, while the American military focused on hitting Iranian air defenses. Then, the air forces of both countries turned their focus to ballistic missile launchers and storage sites — with Israel focusing on the north and America on the south.
There have also been grave mistakes, in particular a Feb. 28 strike that hit an elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab. It is the deadliest known episode of civilian casualties during the war thus far — with at least 175 people killed there, according to Iranian health officials and state media, including many schoolchildren. No side has yet taken responsibility, although an analysis by The New York Times shows that the school was most likely hit by an American airstrike.
Israeli and American forces have struck about 4,000 targets, eroding Iran’s capability to launch missiles and drones at Israel, U.S. bases in the Middle East and other allies in the region, officials said. Total deaths in Iran are about 1,000, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society.
Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, said on Thursday that the number of ballistic missiles that Iran has fired is down 90 percent from the first day of fighting. Iran’s ability to fire one-way attack drones, among its most plentiful and menacing weapons, is also now more constrained, Admiral Cooper said, with drone launches down 83 percent from the first days of the conflict.
Yet Iran still has a formidable arsenal of both. By some estimates that U.S. officials provided to Congress in classified briefings this week, Iran still retains as much as about 50 percent of its missile program, and even more of its drones, one of which killed six U.S. Army reservists in Kuwait last Sunday. U.S. and Israeli officials say they are reducing that remaining Iranian capacity every day.
The destruction of Iran’s air defenses is allowing the Pentagon to adjust its attack strategy by shifting away from missiles, which are expensive and in relatively short supply, and toward cheaper and more plentiful precision-guided gravity bombs delivered by aircraft.
U.S. military commanders say the next several days will be critical to determine whether Iran can maintain a meaningful barrage of retaliatory missile strikes as the American and Israeli militaries target Iran’s arsenal.
“It’s a race,” said Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a former head of U.S. Central Command.
No Endgame
During the first days of the war, both Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel suggested that the real change in Iran would come from within, with mass protests on the streets toppling a government made weaker by the military campaign.
That has not yet happened, and Mr. Trump has changed his public position by the day — or the hour — about just how big a role the United States would take in trying to engineer Iran’s political future. On Friday, he said he would be happy if Iran was left with an autocratic, religious leader after the war, as long as the new leadership treated the United States and Israel “fairly.”
Inside the White House, officials had identified some pragmatic Iranian officials who they believed might be convinced to negotiate a relatively quick end to the war if the upper echelon of Iranian leadership were killed. The White House saw the potential Iranian negotiating partners not so much as moderates, but as people who would have a self-interest in remaining in power even if it meant reaching a deal with the United States for the end of hostilities.
Some American intelligence assessments were more hedged, suggesting there were few moderates within the Iranian government capable of exerting power, though they acknowledged there were some who might be more willing to negotiate with the United States.
But, after some of the individuals identified by the White House as potential negotiating partners were killed during the initial attack, and more killed in other strikes on Tehran, the White House began scrambling for a different political endgame.
“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates” to lead Iran, Mr. Trump said last Sunday. “They’re all dead. Second or third place is dead.”
But for now the basic power structure in Iran remains intact, with the heads of the branches of government and many top political leaders still alive and military commanders replaced. That has left Mr. Trump and his senior aides feeling their way for a path forward.
Now with Mr. Trump on Friday demanding an “unconditional surrender” from Iran, American officials are preparing for a conflict that could last weeks.
The president has asserted he will have a say in who takes over in Iran should the current government collapse, but there is now a struggle to determine who might have both the stature inside the country to lead a postwar Iran willing to work with the United States and the ability to gain the support of the Iranian people.
Intelligence reports have suggested that whatever comes next and whoever takes power, the theocratic structure of the government is likely to endure.
White House officials cautioned that the president could quickly change his mind and declare victory, but American officials noted his insistence on having compliant leaders and the difficulty of achieving that after their targets were killed, which they suggested means he is not ready for an immediate solution.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said, “President Trump and the administration have clearly outlined their goals with regard to Operation Epic Fury: destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and production capacity, demolish their navy, end their ability to arm proxies and prevent them from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
“Operation Madman”
After the end of the 12-day conflict last June in which the United States and Israel pounded Iranian nuclear sites and killed key figures in the country’s nuclear program, Iranian officials developed a strategy for a second war they considered to be inevitable. It came to be known as “Operation Madman.”
Ayatollah Khamenei’s orders, according to six Iranian officials, were clear: Take steps to set the Middle East aflame if Iran were attacked again and, specifically, if Ayatollah Khamenei himself was killed. He also appointed four layers of succession for military commanders and officials to ensure there would be no power vacuum during the war.
The plan was to make a war with Iran extremely costly for not just Israel and the U.S., but also Arab countries, their economies, tourism, global energy, transportation and shipping.
“We know America is extremely worried about a regional war, its economy will be impacted, its allies will be hurt,” said Mahdi Mohammadi, the senior adviser to Iran’s speaker of the parliament, in an audio analysis of the war posted on his social media account.
“Our plan is to expand the war’s reach and expand the time. It’s the biggest blow we can deliver to Trump and we have no other choice.”
The first phase of the plan called for strikes on Israel. The second phase focused on attacking American military bases in Arab countries, and the third phase for escalating even further — attacking civilian sites in Arab countries such as airports, hotels and embassies where Americans might be congregating.
Iran had carried out all three phases of the plan within days of the beginning of the war.
“This is not a knee-jerk reaction, it’s not impulsive,” said Sina Azodi, an expert of Iran’s military and history, and an assistant professor of Middle East politics at George Washington University. “Iran’s military plan has long been developed and thought out to impose as much cost as they can on America’s allies in the region and by extension the United States.”
Widening Violence in the Middle East
In the weeks before the war began, Iran made no secret to its neighbors of what its strategy would be. Iranian officials made frequent visits to their Arab counterparts around the region to warn that, if they came under attack, they would do their best to target U.S. interests wherever those might be — even at the cost of dragging the entire region into the fray.
In neighboring Iraq, militias aligned with Tehran publicly solicited volunteers for “martyrdom” units to help their longtime patron wage “jihad” with attacks on U.S. bases and other U.S. allies or interests across the region.
Arab officials took those warnings seriously, repeatedly lobbying the Trump administration to refrain from an attack.
By firing missiles and drones at Gulf countries, Iran has found an effective way to apply economic pressure on Mr. Trump and other international leaders. The fossil fuel-rich region’s waterways and cities are crucial nodes for global trade, finance, travel and energy production. Iran’s attacks have already choked off the Strait of Hormuz, a key passageway for oil tankers, and shut down major international transit hubs, stranding tourists around the world.
They have also hit oil and gas infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain. After a drone attack targeted an energy installation in Qatar — one of the world’s largest exporters of natural gas — the country announced that it was halting production of liquefied natural gas indefinitely. All of these shocks have helped push up the price of energy, including for American consumers at the gasoline pumps. The average price of a gallon of regular gas in the United States rose nearly 27 cents in the first week of the war.
Shortly after a statement on Saturday by Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, apologizing to Arab countries in the Persian Gulf for shooting scores of missiles and drones at them in retaliatory strikes, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said in a statement that it had launched another wave of attacks on American and Israeli targets as well as a hotel in Dubai and a port in Bahrain.
Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militia that has long been Iran’s most powerful proxy army, has also joined in the conflict, firing projectiles into Israel provoking an Israeli military retaliation into Lebanon. There is broad consensus among diplomats and analysts in Beirut that the Revolutionary Guards have taken greater control over Hezbollah since the group’s last conflict with Israel ended in 2024.
“It’s become clear that the Iranian involvement in Hezbollah has become far greater than what we had imagined,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
That dynamic was laid bare on Monday when Hezbollah fired on Israel in retaliation for the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei — a move that will likely have disastrous repercussions for the group within the country, analysts say.
Its core support base among Shia Muslims in Lebanon is increasingly weary of war, fearful of permanent displacement from the south if Israeli forces launch a wide scale ground invasion, and has shown growing frustration with the group.
Hezbollah’s base “is very tired of these endless wars, they want to just live their lives,” said Ms. Yahya. “But they also feel that they are in an existential position because they are under some sort of existential threat.”
Christina Goldbaum, Vivian Nereim and Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
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5) A Trump Order Protected a Weedkiller. And Also a Weapon of War.
Citing national security, an unusual executive order gave protection to the herbicide Roundup. It also protected the U.S.’s only supply of a controversial, highly flammable munition.
By Hiroko Tabuchi, March 8, 2026
“Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank, said white phosphorus munitions were typically used in ground operations and by special forces, not in airstrikes of the kind the United States is pursuing in Iran. But if, for example, the administration were to take action against drug cartels in Latin America or to launch a ground operation in Cuba, forces might be expected to use “these types of white phosphorus munitions to disguise their movements,” said Dr. Kavanaugh, formerly the director of the army strategy program at the RAND Corporation. Using it isn’t illegal, though deploying it deliberately against civilians or in a civilian setting violates the laws of war.”
When President Trump issued an abrupt order last month compelling the production of glyphosate, the controversial weedkiller known as Roundup, he angered health activists who have long campaigned to ban the product for its links to cancer.
But largely overshadowed in the furor was the order’s mention of something contentious in another way: the manufacture of munitions used by the United States military.
Bayer, which makes glyphosate, is also the only company in the United States that manufactures a form of elemental phosphorus called white phosphorus, which it uses to make the weedkiller. That white phosphorus is also used to make munitions deployed as smoke screens and incendiary devices that can violently burn property or people.
Concerns about the availability of phosphorus for defense played a significant role in Mr. Trump’s move to deem Bayer’s operations a national security priority, according to two people with direct knowledge of the administration’s deliberations. One of the individuals also stressed its importance in light of recent United States military actions.
When asked about the significance of munitions in the Trump executive order, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a phone call, “The president made this decision based on national security priorities.” She added that the administration is funding research into alternatives to the herbicide glyphosate.
Bayer’s place in America’s military and industrial supply chain is a little-known aspect of a German company that’s behind household pharmaceuticals including Aspirin and Alka-Seltzer. White phosphorus ignites spontaneously when it comes in contact with oxygen. It produces a thick white smoke and can reach temperatures high enough to burn through metal.
Bayer, through its acquisition of Monsanto in 2018, operates the only facility in the United States that produces white phosphorus. It is in Soda Springs, Idaho, and uses phosphate rock the company mines locally.
Bayer uses most of that white phosphorus to make the glyphosate in Roundup, a powerful weedkiller that is a cornerstone of American food production. Roundup has been the target of thousands of lawsuits for its alleged health harms, and the company has already spent billions of dollars on settlements.
The company has pushed measures in Congress, as well as in state legislatures across the country, that would shield it from such lawsuits. Bayer has also petitioned the Supreme Court to weigh in on a case that could limit the company’s liability. The court is scheduled to hear arguments in that case in April.
Bayer also supplies some white phosphorous, via intermediaries, to the United States military, which uses it to fill white phosphorus munitions at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas.
President Trump’s executive order declared elemental phosphorus crucial to “military readiness and national defense,” and ordered measures to ensure a continued supply. It’s a key component, the order said, in smoke, illumination and incendiary devices, as well as a critical component in semiconductors used in defense technologies.
Bayer’s role as the sole U.S. maker of white phosphorus gives the German pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals giant a position of leverage in both the agriculture and defense industries. It also carries reputational risks for Bayer, associating the company with a widely criticized herbicide as well as with the U.S. military at a time when the president has put the country on a war footing.
Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank, said white phosphorus munitions were typically used in ground operations and by special forces, not in airstrikes of the kind the United States is pursuing in Iran.
But if, for example, the administration were to take action against drug cartels in Latin America or to launch a ground operation in Cuba, forces might be expected to use “these types of white phosphorus munitions to disguise their movements,” said Dr. Kavanaugh, formerly the director of the army strategy program at the RAND Corporation.
Using it isn’t illegal, though deploying it deliberately against civilians or in a civilian setting violates the laws of war.
Some environmental groups said the president’s focus on military applications is detracting attention from the health concerns linked to a weedkiller. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has deemed glyphosate “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
Bayer’s Lobbying Efforts
Bayer spent more than $9 million last year to pay 53 lobbyists registered to represent the company’s interests with the White House and various federal agencies as well as in Congress, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks lobbying and campaign finance data.
Some of the Bayer lobbyists have close ties to the Trump campaign and administration. Among them is Brian Ballard, who raised more than $50 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and whose former partners include the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and the attorney general, Pam Bondi.
In June, Bill Anderson, Bayer’s chief executive, met with Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to request an update on glyphosate as well as the Supreme Court case, according to internal emails obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity through a public records request.
“We’re getting a much clearer picture of the unfettered access one of most powerful pesticide corporations in the world has to top officials,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health director at the center, which sued the administration over glyphosate, saying the E.P.A. was ignoring independent science on glyphosate’s links to cancer.
Brian Leake, a spokesman for Bayer, said the company “meets with agencies as a normal part of the regulatory process” and that the company has been “transparent about our position on these topics and very public about the issues we face as a company.”
Ms. Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that “to suggest the administration has succumbed to lobbying efforts in the decision making process, on this issue or any issue for that matter, is completely false.”
The administration’s actions on glyphosate have been deeply unpopular among parts of Mr. Trump’s political base, including some supporters of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. The corps of health conscious and mostly female voters had embraced Mr. Trump for his pledge to address Americans’ concerns about “toxins in our environments and pesticides in our food.”
There has also been criticism of the company’s lobbying efforts from within the Republican Party. Speaking on the House floor on Feb. 20, Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, criticized Bayer’s lobbying drive, saying, “All three branches of this government are under siege by lobbyists and lawyers from a German company named Bayer.”
Uses of ‘Willy Pete’
White phosphorus, sometimes known by the nickname Willy Pete, can be used as a smoke screen to mask troop movements or to mark targets. But it can severely burn people who come into contact with it.
In 2023 the Biden administration said it was looking into reports by Amnesty International and in the Washington Post that Israel had used white phosphorus supplied by the United States in Lebanon in violation of international law. Israel has denied it used white phosphorus illegally.
“It has horrible humanitarian consequences,” said Bonnie Docherty, a senior adviser at Human Rights Watch and director of the Armed Conflict and Civilian Protection Initiative at Harvard Law School. “It causes really deep burns,” she said. “It’s notorious because it burns when exposed to oxygen, and wounds often reignite when bandages are removed.”
The concern within the Trump administration is that if Bayer’s glyphosate business doesn’t receive protections, the United States could lose both its sole domestic supplier of the weedkiller, as well as its sole domestic source of white phosphorus for defense and other applications. Bayer executives have said publicly that the company could stop selling Roundup altogether because of the billions of dollars that the company has paid out toward its Roundup litigation.
“Right now, there’s a single point of failure in Soda Springs,” said Matt Scholz, a senior project manager at the Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance and a research professor at Arizona State University, referring to the site in Idaho where the Bayer subsidiary makes white phosphorus. “It does give pause that there’s a lack of redundancy for something that’s so essential.”
In recent weeks the administration has enacted a string of policies favorable to Bayer. In October, the federal government approved Bayer’s bid to open a new phosphate mine in Idaho. Then late last year, the Trump administration backed Bayer in the Supreme Court case, which could block many of the Roundup lawsuits.
On Feb. 17, Bayer moved to end the bulk of its current Roundup litigation, proposing a $7.25 billion class-action settlement. The next day, Mr. Trump issued his executive order in support of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate.
“It’s been an exceptionally good few weeks for Bayer,” said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a professor at Stanford Law School who has studied Bayer’s litigation and lobbying strategy.
Last week, the Trump administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court saying it formally backed Bayer in its case before the court. That legal brief referred only to food security concerns.
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6) A Year After His Arrest, Mahmoud Khalil Lives in Limbo and in Fear
President Trump made Mr. Khalil the face of his crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests. Mr. Khalil is now living with uncertainty as the courts consider his deportation.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, March 8, 2026
Mr. Khalil was detained while his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, was pregnant. Now they have a son, Deen. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Mahmoud Khalil has memorized the license plates of the vehicles that park on his block. He keeps an eye on reflective surfaces — storefront windows, car mirrors — that help him monitor his surroundings. When strangers walk behind him, he stops to let them pass.
A year ago, Mr. Khalil, a graduate of Columbia University and legal permanent resident, was detained and became the face of the White House’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators. And more than 250 days after he was released by a judge, he is still living the life that the Trump administration imposed on him.
The government has accused Mr. Khalil, 31, of spreading antisemitism in the demonstrations that roiled the Columbia campus and, after he was already in detention, of failing to disclose pertinent information on his application for permanent residency. Mr. Khalil has said that criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic and that there was no failure of disclosure.
But the Trump administration has continued its efforts to deport him, leaving Mr. Khalil in a tense limbo, concerned that the courts might tip against him and that, even before that, the administration might arrest him once again, in violation of the law.
“The uncertainty really is like torture,” he said in a recent interview. He added: “I literally cannot plan anything. Whatsoever. A piece of furniture we cannot buy right now because we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment on this article. The Justice Department referred to its filings in the case.
Mr. Khalil cannot work a regular job. Few employers are willing to take the risk of drawing attention from the Trump administration. And he will not go out alone with his 11-month-old, Deen, for fear that he will be detained and that the baby, an American citizen, will be taken.
Instead, Mr. Khalil fills his days by writing. He is working on a memoir for Metropolitan Books, an imprint within Macmillan, using his arrest last year as a jumping off point for the story of his life: a Palestinian refugee born in Syria and an heir to a generations-old family tradition of seeking a permanent home.
Mr. Khalil’s case is proceeding along two separate tracks — in federal court and immigration court — and in both venues, he has recently suffered losses. While Michael E. Farbiarz, the federal judge who ordered him released, has a standing order prohibiting the Trump administration from deporting Mr. Khalil, that ruling could be mooted in the coming months.
Mr. Khalil was arrested last year in his Columbia-owned apartment building as his pregnant wife, Noor Abdalla, an American citizen, looked on in horror. He was held for months in a detention center in Louisiana, even as other campus demonstrators were freed. In June, Judge Farbiarz ordered his release.
For a time, Mr. Khalil was winning.
Along with releasing him, Judge Farbiarz said that the legal basis for his original arrest — Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s determination that he must be removed for spreading antisemitism — was unconstitutional.
But in January, a U.S. appeals court said that Judge Farbiarz had not had the authority to free Mr. Khalil or weigh in on the constitutional issues in his case. The proper venue, they said, was immigration court, which is under the control of the Justice Department.
After the January ruling, Mr. Khalil did not leave his apartment for several days, until his lawyers received confirmation from the Justice Department that the administration understood it would be unlawful to seek to detain him again. (Mr. Khalil asked that the location of his apartment not be disclosed, out of concern for his safety.)
Mr. Khalil’s legal team could ask a full panel of judges on the federal appeals court to review the decision. The deadline to make that request is later this month. If the judges decide not to review the case, Mr. Khalil’s next step would most likely be an appeal to the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, his immigration case is proceeding in front of the Board of Immigration appeals, a part of the Trump administration. Though for now, Mr. Rubio’s determination in regard to antisemitism is not a part of the case, an immigration judge has still recommended that Mr. Khalil be deported, determining that he declined to include pertinent information on his 2024 residency application.
His lawyers filed their brief last week, arguing that the immigration judge ignored “the overwhelming weight of evidence showing that Mr. Khalil did not engage in fraud or misrepresentation” on his application, and neglected to consider his argument that his arrest was a clear example of retaliation for his First Amendment protected speech.
The immigration board could also rule as soon as this month. If it upholds the immigration judge’s finding that Mr. Khalil could be deported, Mr. Khalil’s legal team would then ask a different federal appeals court to review that decision.
For the legal team, there is a perfect storm scenario: The Supreme Court decides not to pause his case. The appeals courts, in tandem, throw out any bar on removing him from the country. At that point, which could come in the next several months, he could be deported.
There is a potential lifeline. Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City last month asked President Trump to end Mr. Khalil’s case and that of four other immigrants from the New York-area.
Mr. Khalil said he was grateful for Mr. Mamdani’s support, and that he and Dr. Abdalla hope to raise their son in a New York with Mr. Mamdani as mayor. But he does not feel he can rely on a change of heart from Mr. Trump, who last year called Mr. Khalil a “radical foreign pro-Hamas student.”
Mr. Khalil sees an irony in the fact that his green card application, which brought him a permanent sense of home, is the tool the government is using to try to remove him. When he lived in Syria, he said, he’d had a temporary ID as a Palestinian refugee, and the same was true on his travel documents. “When I got a permanent resident card, that was the first permanent thing that I was able to get all my life,” he said.
In writing his book, Mr. Khalil is relying in part on diary entries he wrote during his months in detention in Louisiana, some contained in a little black notebook, others on loose leaf paper covered in flowing blue Arabic script. He kept the material hidden under a mattress in his cell.
“I felt like I needed to document this moment,” he said. “But at the same time I couldn’t write my thoughts on paper because I feared the government may take these pages at any time.”
He solved the issue by jotting notes on his immediate surroundings. The entries record images from detention: sitting in the yard, watching detainees play soccer and line up for a haircut. A young man asking whether his mother can visit him, terrified that she too will be arrested because she is undocumented.
As he writes, the entries are reminding him of that time, and the emotions are bubbling up.
He recalls sitting on the plane after being detained and sneaking a glance at the phone of one of the immigration agents sitting one seat over. On it there was a message telling the agent not to let Mr. Khalil speak to anyone, under any circumstances.
“Imagine at that moment how nervous I got,” Mr. Khalil said. “Why don’t they want me to have that phone call?”
ICE did not respond when asked about this episode.
Above all, Mr. Khalil sought to emphasize that his was not an isolated experience. His hypervigilance is shared by many, many others. “We see it across the country with immigrants deciding to stay inside, not going out, fearing that ICE will come after them,” he said.
At one point during the interview, he considered whether it would be appropriate to call himself paranoid.
“That was the brief feeling I felt before my detention, ‘Am I paranoid?’” he said. He remembered feeling he was, last March in the moments before he was arrested.
He was approaching his Columbia-owned apartment building, feeling nervous about the way he was being targeted for deportation online by pro-Israel critics and Trump administration supporters. He walked by the familiar bar on the corner and felt relief for a moment.
“I was like: ‘Oh, I was paranoid for nothing. Nothing’s going to happen,’” he recalled. He mounted the stairs of his building. And suddenly, he said, “someone was walking behind me who eventually asked me, ‘Are you Mahmoud Khalil?’”
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7) ICE Detention of Teen Musicians Roils Texas Mariachi Community
Two brothers who were recognized by their congresswoman last year, along with their parents and younger brother, are facing deportation.
By Orlando MayorquÃn, March 8, 2026
Joshua Gámez-Cuéllar, 12, was detained along with his older brothers, father and mother. Anthony Medrano
Last June, two teenage brothers from South Texas and their high school mariachi bandmates traveled to Capitol Hill. They had been invited there by their congresswoman, Monica De La Cruz. She was going to recognize the band on the House floor for winning a state mariachi competition.
“Your community is so so proud of your hard work, your talent and your dedication,” Ms. De La Cruz, a Republican, told the students.
Nine months later, the brothers, Antonio Yesayahu Gámez-Cuéllar, 18, and Caleb Gámez-Cuéllar, 14, along with their parents and younger brother, are in ICE detention and facing deportation.
The family’s detainment has drawn concern and criticism from Texas lawmakers, who have raised questions about the kinds of people the Trump administration is targeting in its mass deportation campaign.
“Donald Trump said he was going after criminals,” Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, said in a video posted to social media on Saturday. “He said he was going after people who were dangerous to Americans. Well, how is it that these two young men were good enough to perform at the United States Capitol at the invitation of their congresswoman?”
Mr. Castro continued: “They were safe enough to tour the White House. And yet, the Trump administration has them sitting in a prison.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The family entered the United States in 2023 at the border crossing in Brownsville, Texas, on an asylum claim and settled in nearby McAllen, according to Luis Antonio MartÃnez, the father.
In an interview last week, Mr. MartÃnez said that he and his wife and children were fleeing threats in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, where he had been kidnapped by cartel members.
The family had been attending its required court dates and last had a check-in with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in January, where they were told to return in June, Mr. MartÃnez said.
Then he received a call from ICE saying that the family needed to check in on Feb. 25. They were detained at that check-in.
In a video posted on Saturday, Bobby Pulido, the Tejano singer who is running as a Democrat to unseat Ms. De La Cruz in Texas’ 15th Congressional District, said the family had passed a credible fear screening.
“They followed the rules,” Mr. Pulido said. “They’re doing it the right way. And now they’re being torn apart.”
In a statement on Saturday, Ms. De La Cruz said the family’s detention “breaks my heart.”
“I have repeatedly urged that enforcement target those who actually threaten our communities, not good, law-abiding, talented people who are working through the legal process,” she said. “My office is closely monitoring their situation and we are doing all we can.”
News of the brothers’ detention roiled the Texas mariachi community, especially in South Texas, where the music is a core part of the culture and has a robust presence in public education.
Antonio and Caleb were part of Mariachi Oro, the mariachi band that represents McAllen High School.
Last month, Antonio was recognized by the Texas Music Educators Association as the top mariachi trumpeter in the state. The youngest brother, Joshua, 12, is also a mariachi student.
“For McAllen, mariachi is like the ‘Friday Night Lights’ of high school,” said Anthony Medrano, a prominent San Antonio mariachi musician. “There’s pride in it.”
Mr. Medrano said he had reached out to Mr. Castro to inform him of the family’s situation. On Saturday, Mr. Castro said he intended to visit the family on Monday.
Mr. MartÃnez, his wife, Emma Guadalupe Cuéllar, who has colon cancer, and Caleb and Joshua were being held in Dilley, Texas.
That detention center has been among the most scrutinized under the Trump administration. It was the site of protests over poor conditions and where Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy federal agents detained in Minnesota, was held with his father.
Mr. MartÃnez said he was distressed that his eldest son, Antonio, who recently turned 18, had been separated from the family and sent to another facility, in Raymondville, Texas, which is more than 200 miles away.
“I told them, he is a child,” Mr. MartÃnez said. “He was in tears when they took him away in shackles.”
Mr. MartÃnez said officials have been pressuring them to volunteer for deportation.
The family is scheduled to see a judge on March 16, Mr. MartÃnez said. They hope to be released by asking for habeas corpus, a last-resort legal procedure that many detained migrants have come to rely on.
Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting.
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8) Palestinian Citizens of Israel Are Not Safe
By Mairav Zonszein, March 8, 2026
Ms. Zonszein is a contributing Opinion writer.
Ammar Awad/Reuters
Before Israel and the United States launched the war on Iran, a very different violence had become increasingly visible in Israeli society — a bloody crime wave in Palestinian Israeli cities and towns.
A Palestinian citizen of Israel has been killed at least once every day on average since the year began. On Feb. 11 and 12 alone, six people were killed in separate incidents, including a woman in the north and the son of a former mayor in the south. These murders are largely the result of Arab organized crime and gun violence. That they continue unabated is the fault of the state.
Palestinian citizens account for about 80 percent of documented murders in the country although they make up only about 20 percent of the population. Last year, 252 Palestinian citizens died in crime-related killings.
The nature of the Israeli state and its laws provide the context for understanding the crime wave. Israel’s founding definition as a Jewish state created structural discrimination against Palestinian citizens. From the creation of Israel in 1948 until 1966, the government imposed military rule over Palestinian citizens. They were stripped of rights enjoyed by Jewish citizens, from land and resource allocations to shares in the national budget. In the years since, Palestinian citizens have faced discriminatory legislation, exclusion from politics and the banning of cultural and political symbols.
Palestinians’ exclusion from Jewish Israeli society was made even more explicit in the 2015 elections, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told voters that Arabs “are heading to the polling stations in droves,” thus using their right to vote as citizens as a form of incitement. In 2018 the passage of the so-called nation-state law further codified Israel as a Jewish state.
Though Israel’s president and police commissioner both called the violence against Palestinian Israelis a national emergency, there is no national plan in sight to stop it. On Jan. 31, tens of thousands of Palestinian and Jewish Israelis marched in Tel Aviv to raise awareness about the violence. They also demanded that Arab politicians unite to boost voter turnout. Many hope to oust Mr. Netanyahu’s government, and with it, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, who holds authority over the police, and who is seen as carrying out a calculated policy to enable Arab organized crime rather than fighting it.
It has been all too easy to ignore this crime spree, even if it should have alarmed any Israeli who cares about the rule of law. Palestinian citizens of Israel are everywhere and yet nowhere. They account for at least 25 percent of the country’s physicians, 49 percent of its pharmacists and 27 percent of its hospital nurses. They are bus drivers, waiters, teachers and professors. Jewish Israelis come into contact with them all the time. Yet Palestinian Israelis live with deep-seated segregation and institutional inequalities when it comes to basic rights, services, housing, security and the economy. That has enabled organized crime groups to step into the vacuum, taking advantage of Palestinian communities. Because only about 2 percent of mortgages are given to Palestinian citizens, they are often forced to turn to loan sharks.
In war, that discrimination becomes terrifying: Nearly half of Palestinians in Israel, more than half a million citizens, live in homes without safe rooms or protected spaces. The largest Arab municipality in Israel, Rahat, is home to some 80,000 people but does not have a single public shelter.
Murders of Palestinian citizens are far less likely to result in indictments than are murders of Jews; while 65 percent of murder cases with a Jewish victim in Israel are solved, only 15 percent of cases involving Palestinian victims result in the successful prosecution of a perpetrator. In Israel, high crime rates in Palestinian communities are often given a racist, determinist spin: Many Jewish Israelis call such criminality an immutable product of Arab mentality and culture — which effectively absolves the state of responsibility for these citizens. Until recently, Palestinian citizens were focused on a fight for greater integration into Israeli politics and society. But now they are making the most basic civic demand: personal security.
The crime epidemic is believed to be largely driven by a network of Palestinian Israeli crime families that the state has long failed to rein in. These families engage in protection rackets, loan sharking and arms and drug trafficking across Palestinian cities and towns in Israel. Murder rates have soared since the Netanyahu coalition took power at the very end of December 2022 and put Mr. Ben-Gvir, a man with a criminal record of incitement to racism against Palestinians, in place. During his tenure, more than 770 Palestinian citizens have been killed in crime-related incidents, more than in the previous eight years combined. (Mr. Ben-Gvir has insisted he has invested resources to tackle the crime wave.)
“There is an understanding that they are trying to push us to leave the country,” Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Palestinian Israeli member of the Knesset, told me. “If in the West Bank the state uses settlers to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, inside Israel they are using organized crime groups.”
She described an atmosphere of persecution and fear. “We have tried, as Palestinians, to expand the scope of our citizenship and develop civic relations with the state, but in recent years, it is clear the state is not interested.”
The police force has grown increasingly politicized under Mr. Ben-Gvir. In 2023 he defunded an effective program from a previous government to combat crimes in Arab communities.
The mistreatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons has also increased on Mr. Ben-Gvir’s watch. He has also forced the demolition of Palestinian homes in Israel where tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens live in so-called unrecognized villages — areas where the Israeli state has not provided basic services like running water and electricity. Mr. Ben-Gvir claims the demolitions are to deter illegal construction, and to show those who live in these villages who really owns the land on which they dwell. He has also instructed the police to crack down on freedom of expression and protest, with Palestinians arrested for social media posts critical of the government.
“In Arab media, crime and violence are the top story every single day,” said Mohammad Magadli, a Palestinian journalist who hosts an Arabic-language radio news show and provides political commentary in Hebrew for Channel 12. “In Hebrew media, it doesn’t exist.” Mr. Magadli told me he believes nearly every Palestinian citizen has lost someone or knows someone who lost someone to the violence. He himself has lost three friends. Palestinian journalists face constant threats from crime groups not to report on the issue.
Mr. Magadli said the main problem is illegal firearms, many of which are stolen from Israeli military bases. A smaller number are smuggled from neighboring countries.
The desperate situation that Palestinian citizens find themselves in has led the four main Arab parties in Israel to declare that they will once again join as a single list for the 2026 general elections expected this fall. It is clear that Palestinian citizens of Israel, some two million in total, will be indispensable to any kind of political coalition shift in Israel’s next elections: Before the current war began, polling data had long shown that the pro-Netanyahu parties that make up the current coalition were nowhere near reaching the 61-seat Knesset majority necessary to form a new coalition. But the anti-Netanyahu parties in the opposition — many of them right-wing — are also short on support.
While the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, only increased opposition to Mr. Netanyahu among Jewish Israelis, they have at the same time intensified anti-Palestinian sentiment across Israeli society, even though Palestinian citizens were themselves also taken hostage and murdered.
This has led to a situation in which, even as many Jewish Israelis have grown more fearful of and hostile to Palestinians, those who want to oust Mr. Netanyahu will need to collaborate with the small Palestinian parties to do so.
The problem is, most opposition leaders have vowed not to work with Palestinians. Over 70 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose including Arab parties in a governing coalition, according to a recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute. That doesn’t mean that certain politicians won’t eventually come around on this issue.
“The Arabs want two things: agency and hope,” Ms. Touma-Suleiman said. Her own hope is “that we are building a new kind of politics of Arab-Jewish cooperation.”
Jewish Israelis who fight to preserve the country’s liberal democratic order must begin to understand that this effort will be undermined if the Palestinian minority remains unprotected, and second-class citizens. Allocation of equal resources to the Palestinian communities is a start.
Whatever happens is too late for Maram Jarban, from the coastal town of Jisr al-Zarqa. Her 23-year-old sister, Rosette, was killed by an errant bullet last summer. “I hear gunshots all the time,” Ms. Jarban said. “There is no security. Since the murder, my mother doesn’t leave the house, and one of my sons has had difficulties studying in school.” All that matters to Ms. Jarban is for the killings to stop.
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9) U.S. Tomahawk Hit Naval Base Beside Iranian School, Video Shows
The evidence contradicts President Trump’s claim that Iran was responsible for a strike at the school that killed 175 people, most of them children.
By Malachy Browne and John Ismay, Published March 8, 2026, Updated March 9, 2026
Malachy Browne is an expert in verifying online imagery, and John Ismay is a former Navy bomb disposal officer.
The Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) is a long range cruise missile used for deep land attack warfare used by U.S. forces and international partners.
A newly released video adds to the evidence that an American missile likely hit an Iranian elementary school where 175 people, many of them children, were reported killed.
The video, uploaded on Sunday by Iran’s semiofficial Mehr News Agency and verified by The New York Times, shows a Tomahawk cruise missile striking a naval base beside the school in the town of Minab on Feb. 28. The U.S. military is the only force involved in the conflict that uses Tomahawk missiles.
A body of evidence assembled by The Times — including satellite imagery, social media posts and other verified videos — indicates that the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as attacks on the naval base. The base is operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Asked by a reporter from The Times on Saturday if the United States had bombed the school, President Trump said: “No. In my opinion and based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.” He said, “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was standing beside Mr. Trump, said the Pentagon was investigating, “but the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
The video of the strike, which was first reported by the research collective Bellingcat, was independently verified by The Times. We compared features visible in the footage to new satellite imagery captured days after the strikes in Minab.
The video was filmed from a construction site opposite the base and shows a worn, dirt path across a grassy area and piles of debris also evident in recent satellite imagery, bolstering its credibility. The video also comports with other verified videos taken in the immediate aftermath of the strikes.
A Times analysis of the video shows the missile striking a building described as a medical clinic in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base. Plumes of smoke and debris shoot out of the building after it is hit as the distant screams of onlookers are heard.
As the camera pans to the right, large plumes of dust and smoke are already billowing from the area around the elementary school, suggesting that it had been struck shortly before the strike on the naval base. This is supported by a timeline of the strikes assembled by The Times that shows the school was hit around the time as the base.
Several other buildings inside the naval base were also hit by precision strikes in the attack, an analysis of satellite imagery showed. Determining precisely what happened has been impeded by the lack of visible weapons fragments and the inability of outside reporters to reach the scene.
The Times has identified the weapon seen in the new video as a Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon that neither the Israeli military nor the Iranian military has. Dozens of Tomahawks have been launched by U.S. Navy warships into Iran since Feb. 28, when the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran began.
U.S. Central Command said a video it released of several Tomahawks being launched from Navy ships was filmed on Feb. 28, the day the Iranian base and school were hit.
The Defense Department describes Tomahawks as “long-range, highly accurate” guided missiles that can fly about 1,000 miles. They are programmed with a specific flight plan before launch, and the missiles steer themselves to their targets.
Each Tomahawk is about 20 feet long and has a wingspan of eight and a half feet, according to the Navy. The most commonly used Tomahawks have warheads that contain the explosive power of about 300 pounds of TNT.
Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician who works with Bellingcat, also identified the missile in the video as a Tomahawk, as did another weapons expert, Chris Cobb-Smith, director of Chiron Resources, a security and logistics agency.
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference on Wednesday that U.S. forces were carrying out strikes in southern Iran at the time the naval base and school were hit. A map he presented showed that an area including Minab, which is near the Strait of Hormuz, had been targeted by strikes in the first 100 hours of the operation, although it did not explicitly identify the town.
“Along the southern axis, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln strike group has continued to provide pressure from the sea along the southeastern side of the coast and has been attriting naval capability all along the strait,” the general said.
It is not the only time that General Caine has acknowledged the role Tomahawk missiles played in the early hours of the war.
“The first shooters at sea were Tomahawks unleashed by the United States Navy,” he said in a briefing to reporters at the Pentagon on March 2, as the Navy “began to conduct strikes across the southern flank in Iran.”
In June, a Navy submarine launched more than two dozen Tomahawks at a nuclear facility in Isfahan, Iran, as part of the 12-Day war.
Shawn McCreesh contributed reporting. Shawn Paik and McKinnon de Kuyper contributed video production.
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10) Israeli Forces Raid New Areas in Southern Lebanon
Israeli fighter jets also bombarded the southern outskirts of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, as part of its escalating military campaign against Hezbollah.
By Aaron Boxerman and Christina Goldbaum, March 9, 2026
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem
An airstrike in the Dahiya neighborhood in the southern outskirts of Beirut, in Lebanon, on Monday. Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Israeli forces advanced in southern Lebanon on Monday, raiding new territory as part of a stated effort to expand a military-controlled buffer zone as it steps up its campaign against the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah.
Israeli fighter jets also bombarded the southern outskirts of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, sending huge explosions echoing throughout the city. Earlier on Monday, Israel had threatened to begin attacking sites affiliated with Al-Qard Al-Hasan, Hezbollah’s de facto bank.
Israeli ground forces began raiding an area close to the border with Lebanon, the military said in a statement, after advancing in the border area over recent days and seizing new sites inside Lebanon.
Nearly 400 people had been killed, including more than 80 children, in the conflict in Lebanon as of Sunday, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Edouard Beigbeder, the regional director for UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, called the death toll “a stark testament to the toll that conflict is taking on children.”
The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had killed more than 190 militants, without commenting on the rest of the dead.
The conflict ignited last week, when Hezbollah launched a rocket attack against Israel, in retaliation for the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom Israel assassinated in the opening strikes of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. Since then, the Israeli military has responded with an escalating military campaign across Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Parliament announced on Monday that it would postpone for two years legislative elections that had been set to take place in May because of the conflict. The Lebanese government has faced considerable pressure to disarm Hezbollah, which is also an entrenched political party and social movement.
Hezbollah is facing rising public frustration at home, where some Lebanese say they have now been dragged unwillingly into a dangerous and deadly confrontation with Israel without any clear benefit.
Analysts say the Israeli actions could signal that a wider ground invasion in Lebanon is in the works. The Israeli military has called up roughly 100,000 reserve soldiers as part of the war with Iran, some of whom have been sent to the northern border.
Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, dismissed that prospect. “This is part of our forward defense posture. This is a measure to make sure that our troops in those positions are safe,” Lt. Col. Shoshani told reporters on Monday.
Reham Mourshed and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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11) Iran’s New Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei’s Son, Is a Mysterious Figure
The succession of the slain leader’s son is seen as a signal of the Islamic republic’s defiance of Israel and the United States, and of continuity during crisis.
By Farnaz Fassihi, Published March 8, 2026, Updated March 9, 2026
Farnaz Fassihi has lived and worked in Iran, has covered the country for three decades and was a war correspondent in the Middle East for 15 years.
Mojtaba Khamenei, center, at a rally in Tehran in 2019. Rouzbeh Fouladi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
There have been only two supreme leaders since the job was created after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Now Iran has a third.
Mojtaba Khamenei, a 56-year-old politician, cleric and son of the previous supreme leader, was appointed to the role by a council of 88 clerics, known as the Assembly of Experts, according to a statement released early Monday morning local time.
As supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei becomes the head of state of the Islamic Republic of Iran, both a spiritual leader and the highest authority in the land. Under Iran’s Constitution, that gives him overarching control of Iran’s politics and its armed forces, as well as leadership in religious affairs.
The supreme leader takes a public stance on foreign policy and military affairs, as well as internal issues — including suppressing dissent.
He rules by issuing decrees, oversees government policy and makes all senior appointments including for the military, the judiciary and the head of the state broadcasting service. The supreme leader can also issue a fatwa, a nonbinding religious opinion on matters of religious and civil life that can carry weight far beyond Iran’s borders.
The role has changed over the years partly because of the differences of the men appointed.
Ayatollah Khomeini was an eminent religious scholar and political revolutionary who inspired a popular following and was a driver in establishing Iran’s theocracy on the principle that an expert in Islamic jurisprudence should oversee the government to ensure justice.
Yet when he died ten years later in 1989, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was less qualified as a religious scholar and did not command such a following among the faithful, was selected.
Iran’s Constitution was amended at the time of his selection to stipulate that the supreme leader only needed to show “Islamic scholarship.” He nevertheless was a Sayed, meaning he was from a family descended from Prophet Muhammad, and was accorded the title of Ayatollah with his appointment.
In his will and last word, Ayatollah Khomeini had set the tone for a transition, telling his people that their loyalty should be to the Islamic Republic. The state itself became the repository of spirituality and religion, said Vali Nasr, an expert on Iran and Shiite Islam at Johns Hopkins University.
“The office under Khamenei essentially became secular in its function,” Mr. Nasr said. “The state promoted him as a very distinguished cleric, but by no means was he recognized by the faithful as the pre-eminent Shia cleric,” such as the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq, Mr. Nasr said.
Ayatollah Khamenei ruled for more than 36 years until he was killed when the United States and Israel opened strikes on Iran on Saturday, Feb. 28. His legacy was of an authoritarian who sought to protect Shia communities abroad but brutally suppressed his own population.
His killing, perceived as martyrdom by the faithful, sparked anger and grief among many of the world’s more than 200 million Shiite Muslims, even while it was celebrated by the many who opposed his harsh rule.
Mojtaba Khamenei also does not have high religious standing, but was groomed for the position, serving in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, studying at a religious seminary and then working closely with his father.
His succession, following his father, marks a break from the meritocracy set by the Iranian revolution, which rejected the monarchy for the undemocratic nature of hereditary rule.
Yet he was considered a front-runner for the post because of the nature of his father’s death and his strong political and military connections, said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London-based research group.
The office he inherits today draws its power from its political and military control.
The supreme leader is the commander in chief of Iran’s military forces and of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a paramilitary force that has become the most powerful branch of the military and controls its ballistic missile arsenal.
Designated a terrorist group by the United States in 2019, the Revolutionary Guard is accused of sponsoring multiple proxy forces in countries across the Middle East to counter Israel and the United States.
Since they opened their military campaign, the U.S. and Israel have targeted bases of the Revolutionary Guard and other domestic security forces, hoping to shake the supreme leader’s hold on the country.
Iran has a nationally elected president who runs its administration. But even he is the second in command of the executive branch after the supreme leader.
The president appoints cabinet members, but they first have to be approved by parliament and the supreme leader. The president is elected to a four-year term and can only serve a maximum of two terms. His election is approved by the supreme leader.
The head of the judiciary is also appointed by the supreme leader. The judicial system in Iran is run by Shia clerics and all decisions must be in accordance with Islamic law, or Shariah. The penal code was rewritten after the 1979 revolution, and harsh punishments are imposed under Shariah including corporal punishments and executions.
None of the men considered contenders for supreme leader were highly ranked clerics, Mr. Nasr pointed out. Those selecting a new leader were most probably focused on continuity, he said.
“I don’t think anybody in Iran right now wants to do something that suggests that the system is breaking,” he said.
Mojtaba Khamenei was a leading contender because of the close connections forged working under his father, Ms. Vakil said.
“Because he’s deeply integrated into to the regime’s networks and he represents continuity, and he will be supported by Iran’s deep state,” she said. “He really will bring the support of elites, the security establishment, and the broad system. This is what he ultimately represents.”
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12) Country Joe McDonald, Whose Antiwar Song Became an Anthem, Dies at 84
One of the starring acts at Woodstock, he and his band, the Fish, came out of the Bay Area’s psychedelic rock scene. He went on to a long career as a solo artist.
By Jim Farber, Published March 8, 2026, Updated March 9, 2026
Country Joe McDonald in 1981. The tone of the politics and social commentary in his songs could range from whimsical to snarky. Credit...United Archives, via Getty Images
Country Joe McDonald, Whose Antiwar Song Became an Anthem, Dies at 84
One of the starring acts at Woodstock, he and his band, the Fish, came out of the Bay Area’s psychedelic rock scene. He went on to a long career as a solo artist.
By Jim Farber, Published March 8, 2026, Updated March 9, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/arts/music/country-joe-mcdonald-dead.html
Country Joe McDonald, whose performance at Woodstock — in which he led a crowd of 400,000 through a subversive cheer before starting his satirical antiwar song “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” — struck a chord so deep, it often obscured the variety and scope of his career, died on Saturday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 84.
His death was announced by his wife, Kathy McDonald. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
In his breakthrough years, Mr. McDonald led Country Joe and the Fish, one of the first and most adventurous bands to rise from the Bay Area psychedelic rock scene of the 1960s. After the band’s main run ended in 1970, he released scores of solo albums in a number of styles over many decades.
Yet, it was his showcase at Woodstock, immortalized by its film and soundtrack, in which he spiked the main refrain of his band’s piece “The Fish Cheer,” with a far more provocative F-word, before beginning his best-known anti-Vietnam War song, that came to define him for many.
“From the moment I yelled ‘Give us an F … ’ it became a folk-protest moment,” Mr. McDonald told the British newspaper The Independent in 2002. “There was a certain in-yer-face Kurt Cobain-ness about it that matched the attitude of the time pretty well.”
Likewise, Mr. McDonald’s albums with the Fish, for which he wrote and sang most of the material, perfectly mirrored the experimentalism and politics of the psychedelic scene that birthed them.
At the same time, the group’s work augmented the era’s usual guitar distortions and drug references with arcane melodies, left-field lyrics and influences that also drew from ragtime, old time folk and the avant-garde.
The Fish’s first single, “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine,” centered on a death-obsessed woman who also had a yen for homicide, while another early song, “Superbird,” imagined President Lyndon B. Johnson as a lunatic cartoon character.
The tone of the politics and social commentary in Mr. McDonald’s songs could range from whimsical to snarky. In “The Harlem Song” he satirized white people’s fetish for Black culture, while in “Fixin’-to-Die,” he sang in the voice of a TV pitchman selling parents on the chance to “be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box!” The song culminated in the ironic refrain, “Whoopee! We’re all gonna die!”
While two of Mr. McDonald’s albums with the Fish broke Billboard’s Top 40, the band never came close to achieving the success enjoyed by other acts from the San Francisco scene like Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead.
And none of Mr. McDonald’s solo works made Billboard’s album chart. Yet, he remained true to his musical instincts and lyrical themes. Long after the Vietnam War ended, he continued to write about its effects and legacy, captured best in his 1986 album “Vietnam Experience,” which feature 12 of his songs on the subject.
Joseph Allen McDonald was born on Jan. 1, 1942, in Washington to Worden McDonald, who worked for the phone company, and Florence (Plotnik) McDonald, a political activist who later became prominent in Berkeley politics. Both his parents were members of the Communist Party, and they named him after Joseph Stalin.
When he was still a child, the family moved to El Monte, Calif., near Los Angeles. “My family were the only Communists in the entire area, and we lived a very isolated life,” Mr. McDonald told Let It Rock magazine in 1974. “My parents never went dancing or drinking — typical Communists.”
At the same time, his father had a Hawaiian guitar that he taught Joe to play when he was 7. When Joe was a teenager in the 1950s, his father was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose aim was to root out Communists in the United States, and as a result he lost his job. (His parents later renounced the cause.) At 17, Mr. McDonald enlisted in the Navy because, as he told Let It Rock, he wanted to “see the world and have sex.”
After serving a little over three years, he tried college for a few semesters before dropping out to move to Berkeley at around the time of the Free Speech Movement. “I went to San Francisco to become a beatnik,” he told Let It Rock.
Mr. McDonald started a small underground magazine called Rag Baby before forming an early version of Country Joe and the Fish with the guitarist Barry Melton in 1965. His stage name wryly reflected the fact that Stalin was sometimes referred to as “Country Joe” because of his rural background. The word “Fish” was taken from Mao Zedong, who wrote that revolutionaries “must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”
In a “talking” version of the magazine, the band included the first version of “Fixin’-to-Die,” performed acoustically. “I was inspired to write a folk song — about how soldiers have no choice in the matter but to follow orders — but with the irreverence of rock ’n’ roll,” Mr. McDonald told The New York Times in 2017.
The group later electrified its sound, moved to San Francisco and was signed by Vanguard Records, which released its debut album, “Electric Music for the Mind and Body,” in 1967. The album’s producer, Samuel Charters (best known as a blues historian), refused to let it include “Fixin’” or “The Fish Cheer” on the debut, fearing it would lead to a boycott by radio stations.
But because no one complained about the anti-Johnson song “Superbird,” which was included on the debut, they were allowed to include it on their second album — as its title track no less.
At a show in Central Park in 1968, the band’s drummer, Gary Hirsh, suggested they change the word “fish” to the epithet to make a free speech statement. While the crowd deliriously cheered the change, Ed Sullivan immediately canceled the group’s scheduled appearance on his popular Sunday night variety show.
After performing the augmented “Cheer” in Worcester, Mass., Mr. McDonald was charged with inciting an audience to lewd behavior, resulting in a $500 fine and lots of publicity. By the time he performed the provocative version of the song at Woodstock, listeners were primed for it.
At the festival, Mr. McDonald played two sets, one with the band and the other solo, a reflection of long-simmering internal tensions that brought the group to an end by the next year. By then Mr. McDonald had already begun recording solo, having released a set under his own name in late 1969 titled “Thinking of Woody Guthrie,” which consisted entirely of songs associated with that folk legend.
While his solo work tended to be less quirky than his recordings with the Fish, his lyrics remained as imaginative: His 1973 album “Paris Sessions” explored feminism, and “War War War” used original lyrics based on the work of Canadian poet Robert William Service. In 2017, he celebrated half a century of his career with an album titled “50.”
Besides his wife of 43 years, Kathy, he is survived by five children, Seven McDonald, Devin McDonald, Tara Taylor McDonald, Emily McDonald Primus and Ryan McDonald; four grandchildren, and a brother, Billy.
Throughout his career, Mr. McDonald’s politics and lyrical concerns avoided the literal or the doctrinaire, extending the tone of his most famous song.
Speaking of the effect of “Fixin’ to Die” to Let it Rock, he said: “You laugh at the war. You laugh at yourself, and you laugh at the left wing at the same time. Something’s very attractive about the song.”
“Something’s very attractive about drugs, too,” he added. “It’s basically an insane song.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
I Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag Lyrics
Well, come on all of you big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
Got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
Put down your books and pick up a gun
We're going to have a whole lot of fun
And it's 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it's 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We're all going to die
Come on generals let's move fast
Your big chance has come at last
Now you can go out and get those reds
The only good Commie is the one that's dead
And you know that peace can only be won
When we've blown them all to kingdom come
And it's 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it's 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We're all going to die
Come on Wall Street don't be slow
Why man, this war-a-go-go
There's plenty good money to be made
Supplying the Army with the tools of the trade
Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb
They drop it on the Viet Cong
And it's 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it's 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We're all going to die
Now come on mothers throughout the land
Pack your boys off to Vietnam
Come on fathers don't hesitate
Send your sons off before it's too late
And you can be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box
And it's 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Angora!
Oh yeah, there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee!
We're all going to die
Hey!
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13) Billionaires Are Swaying Elections in All Corners of America
Billionaires made 19 percent of all reported federal campaign contributions in 2024, a Times analysis shows, and even more in some local elections. Wealthy donors are reaping the rewards.
By Mike Baker and Steven Rich, March 9, 2026
Protesters demonstrated outside the Supreme Court in 2019 as Senate Democrats proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn the court’s decision that lifted many campaign finance restrictions. Win McNamee/Getty Images
Several years ago, before he was elected as a U.S. senator from Montana, Tim Sheehy was running an aerial firefighting business that was struggling to secure clients and desperately hunting for cash to build out a fleet of aircraft.
Then he found a lifeline: As Mr. Sheehy has told the story over the years, Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the private equity group Blackstone Inc., helped steer a $150 million investment from his company into Mr. Sheehy’s.
Both Mr. Schwarzman and Mr. Sheehy came out winners. Blackstone nearly doubled its investment by cashing in many of its shares a few years later, even as the firefighting company continued to struggle. Mr. Sheehy collected multi-million-dollar bonuses that helped him seed his Republican Senate campaign in 2024.
It was an uphill race against a popular, three-term Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester. But with control of the Senate up for grabs and Mr. Sheehy one of the few who could help tip it in favor of Republicans, Mr. Schwarzman came to his aid once again, hosting a fund-raiser for him and also donating $8 million to a political action committee that supported his candidacy.
He was not the only financial heavyweight in Mr. Sheehy’s corner.
At least 64 billionaires and 37 of their immediate family members donated directly to his campaign, a New York Times analysis found. When also accounting for money that flowed through political committees that support Mr. Sheehy, an analysis shows that billionaires contributed about $47 million in the race that Mr. Sheehy went on to win.
The extraordinary spending in Montana is part of a new era of political power for the rapidly growing number of billionaires minted over the past eight years. The Times analysis found that 300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated more than $3 billion — 19 percent of all contributions — in federal elections in 2024, either directly or through political action committees.
Five presidential elections ago, before the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling that lifted many remaining campaign finance restrictions, the share of billionaire spending was almost zero — 0.3 percent, to be precise.
The billionaire families gave an average total of $10 million each in 2024, an amount roughly equal to what 100,000 typical political donors gave, combined. Money at that scale can be game-changing in tight races. TV ads, targeted digital advertising, canvassing technology to aim door-knockers at the right voters — spending money wins elections.
Many of those billionaires are not only hoping to reshape the federal government, as Elon Musk did in the early months of President Trump’s second term, but to win influence in state legislatures, City Councils, school boards and courthouses.
Ultrawealthy donors on both the left and the right have helped overhaul political leadership and policy in states across the country, expanding private charter schools, restricting abortion rights, advancing artificial intelligence in government and blocking laws that would make it harder to evict tenants. And one issue behind many of these big contributions on both sides of the aisle is taxes.
In the Senate, Mr. Sheehy has become a key ally on tax policies that benefit the wealthy and cosponsored a proposal to eliminate the estate tax. This year, ultrawealthy donors are lining up to fight a California proposal to impose the nation’s first statewide tax on billionaires.
In past elections, as ultrawealthy donors became more active, both major parties reaped rewards. But there was a stark divergence in 2024, with less money flowing directly to Democrats and a sharp increase in the amount donated to Republicans.
For every dollar donated by billionaires and their immediate families to a candidate or committee associated with Democrats, five dollars went to Republicans.
Much of that was a result of ultrawealthy people in the tech industry, who aligned with Mr. Trump’s tax and deregulation policies. More than a dozen billionaires were awarded roles in his administration.
As unrestrained campaign spending grows, polls find that some three-quarters of Americans want limits on how much individuals or organizations can spend on political campaigns. But even in places where voters have handily approved new campaign finance rules, wealthy donors have found ways to circumvent the limits without breaking any laws.
The increasing influence of the ultrawealthy in U.S. politics has troubled Marc Racicot, a former Montana governor who served as chair of the Republican National Committee in the early 2000s. He recalled an era not long past when donors were reluctant to contribute too much to political campaigns to avoid being perceived as purchasing influence — and because the law imposed limits on individual donations.
Now, he said, the country is on the verge of becoming a place where wealthy people are able to spend millions of dollars to essentially direct how the government runs — without breaking any laws.
“Does any reasonable person on the planet think that’s appropriate?” he said.
A Wave of Billionaire Influence
Spending by ultrawealthy donors has at times dwarfed that of other contributors, shifting both major statewide elections and lesser-known races where their influence may be harder to discern. Some recent campaigns became duels between competing billionaires.
The Times analyzed federal, state and local campaign finance data, collected documents under public records law and traced money as it bounced through a network of political action committees to examine how contributions from wealthy donors play a considerable new role in political campaigns from California to Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania
One of the nation’s most prolific campaign donors is Jeff Yass, the co-founder of the trading firm Susquehanna International Group. Mr. Yass donated more than $100 million to federal campaigns in 2024, funding a variety of conservative political action committees that sought to sway congressional races toward Republicans. He is also one of the biggest individual donors to campaigns in the period since the presidential election, giving nearly $55 million to federal campaigns in the 2026 cycle. But his influence is perhaps most apparent in his home state of Pennsylvania.
Jeff Yass is the co-founder of the Wall Street trading firm Susquehanna International Group.
Net worth: $59 billion
The state attorney general’s race in 2024 was largely a contest between Republican Dave Sunday and Democrat Eugene DePasquale, who received a combined total of $20 million in direct and outside contributions. Mr. Yass, through a series of committees, provided nearly 90 percent of the $14 million that went to support Mr. Sunday. They were so intertwined that Mr. Sunday wrote a letter authorizing a political committee that was almost entirely funded by Mr. Yass to work with an advertising agency “to purchase television advertising on my behalf.”
Mr. Sunday, who won with 51 percent of the vote, now oversees the office that has been investigating TikTok, the social media app in which Mr. Yass was a major investor through its former Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
Mr. Yass has long championed the cause of school vouchers and the closure of any public schools that are failing students. And the new attorney general had a promising future. Matt Brouillette, a political adviser to Mr. Yass, said that statewide offices are often a steppingstone to become governor, an office that has broader power over setting the state’s education agenda.
“We’re playing the long game,” Mr. Brouillette said.
Colorado
Voters in Denver are among those who have been eager to curtail outsized political spending. In 2018, they passed a measure to lower contribution limits with more than 70 percent of the vote.
But in the city’s most recent race for mayor, in 2023, the new limits failed to hinder Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. Mr. Hoffman had little connection to Denver beyond a growing interest in the candidacy of Mike Johnston, a Democrat who was running to become the city’s mayor.
Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn.
Net worth: $2.7 billion
Mr. Hoffman gave more than $2 million to a super PAC supporting Mr. Johnston. At least four other out-of-state billionaires — hedge fund manager Stephen Mandel, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hedge fund founder John Arnold and businessman Ken Tuchman — together gave nearly another $1 million. Combined, the donations from billionaires through the super PAC totaled more than the entire sum raised directly by the two leading candidates.
The alliance continued after Mr. Johnston won. During his first year in office, according to documents released under public records law, Mr. Johnston sent an email to Mr. Hoffman that began with a friendly greeting: “Reid!!” Mr. Johnston said he was planning to host a convention on artificial intelligence aiming “to have Denver be the earliest and most aggressive adopter of A.I. for good.”
Mr. Hoffman, who had positioned himself as a leading champion of the beneficial aspects of artificial intelligence and a co-founder of two A.I. companies, helped determine the event’s date and then joined Mr. Johnston onstage.
There, he criticized a landmark Colorado measure designed to ensure that companies’ algorithms don’t discriminate against people in areas such as housing, health care and employment. Mr. Johnston is also among those who have criticized the law, and lawmakers have now delayed implementation of the rules while considering substantial changes.
“I would push back pretty strongly on any assertion that Reid Hoffman had anything to do with our position on the A.I. bill,” a spokesman for the mayor, Jon Ewing, said in a statement. Mr. Hoffman declined to comment.
Nevada
In 2022, Robert Bigelow, the ultrawealthy owner of the extended-stay hotel chain Budget Suites of America, threw his weight behind Joe Lombardo, a Republican running for governor of Nevada. His support included some $12.3 million sent to a series of political action committees that heavily backed Mr. Lombardo, along with many donations sent in $10,000 increments from various business entities linked to Mr. Bigelow — each one the maximum allowed during an election cycle in the state.
He sent an additional $12 million to the Republican Governors Association.
Robert Bigelow is the founder of hotel chain Budget Suites of America.
Net worth: Unknown
Mr. Lombardo narrowly won the election with 48.8 percent of the vote, ousting the Democratic incumbent. The next year, Democratic lawmakers passed bills to expand tenant protections and limit evictions. It was a key issue for Mr. Bigelow, who had spoken out vigorously against a federal moratorium on evictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic, calling it “legalized theft.”
Mr. Lombardo vetoed the measures, citing in part the burdens on landlords. Last year, he vetoed another round of similar legislation. Along the way, according to documents released under public records law, Mr. Lombardo has made time to dine with Mr. Bigelow, including a private meeting in the spring of 2024 at DragonRidge Country Club.
Florida, Nebraska, Washington
Ballot measures have been another avenue of billionaire campaign spending.
In Nebraska, the family of the TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, including his son Pete, a U.S. senator in the state, spent nearly $10 million in 2024, accounting for about 21 percent of all donations in the state. Much of it went to help narrowly defeat an initiative that would have enshrined abortion rights in the state Constitution — a measure that received $1.5 million in support from another billionaire, Mr. Bloomberg.
In Washington State, the former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer and his wife, Connie, spent $2.5 million in 2024 to protect a carbon cap program. In Florida, the hedge fund manager Ken Griffin spent $12 million to help vote down an initiative that would have legalized marijuana.
Illinois
The top-spending candidate usually wins the election, the Times analysis of campaign spending showed. But the big political investments by billionaires don’t always pan out, and they have at times found themselves in a spending race with other billionaires.
JB Pritzker's family founded Hyatt hotels.
Net worth: $3.9 billion
That was the case for Mr. Griffin, who spent $50 million to back a Republican candidate, Richard Irvin, for governor in Illinois in 2022. But Mr. Irvin did not make it out of the primary, defeated by another Republican candidate, Darren Bailey. Mr. Bailey was backed by Richard Uihlein, the billionaire founder of the shipping supplies company Uline, who gave $12 million to Mr. Bailey and another $42 million to a PAC aligned with him. But Mr. Bailey also went on to falter against the Democratic candidate, JB Pritzker — himself a billionaire who spent $152 million of his own money on the race.
In total, 87 percent of the money given to the state’s gubernatorial campaigns came from billionaires.
Mr. Bailey is now preparing to challenge Mr. Pritzker again later this year. But some wealthy donors, including Mr. Uihlein, have shifted their allegiance to a new candidate, Ted Dabrowski, a conservative researcher who has vowed to cut taxes.
Wisconsin
Wisconsin has limits on how much donors can give to political candidates, but there are no such controls for donors who contribute through a political party.
In the months before a contested Wisconsin Supreme Court race last year, billionaires from across the country were flooding the state’s major parties with cash.
At stake was a seat that would determine the ideological balance of the court, potentially shaping key rulings on issues such as abortion and redistricting.
The Republican Party received $3 million from Mr. Musk, about $3 million more from the ABC Supply co-founder Diane Hendricks and another $3 million from members of the wealthy Uihlein family. The Democratic Party received $2 million from George Soros, a prominent funder of a wide range of liberal causes, $1.5 million from Mr. Pritzker, and about $900,000 from a different member of the Uihlein family.
Even more money flowed from political action committees, including one led by Mr. Musk that gave out some $1 million in checks to two voters in the state, helping make the election the country’s most expensive ever for a court seat. Susan Crawford, the judge backed by Democrats, went on to win the race.
California
A Times analysis shows that over the past two election cycles, a series of billionaires — led by the Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, a longtime proponent of charter schools, and the Walmart heir Jim Walton — have provided 90 percent of the funding used to support the political advocacy of the California Charter Schools Association. The donations amounted to more than $9 million.
Reed Hastings is the co-founder of Netflix.
Net worth: $5.2 billion
The California group has funded a wide range of legislative and school board races, including one in 2024 for the Sacramento County Board of Education, where the charter schools association backed two candidates, including Vanessa Caigoy, one of its own employees, and another candidate whose spouse worked for the group.
The association provided nearly $100,000 to Ms. Caigoy’s campaign — almost all of her total funding. It was eight times more than what was raised by any other candidate, helping Ms. Caigoy flood the region with mailers that the other candidates could not match. Both Ms. Caigoy and the other candidate backed by the charter group won.
Two of the losing candidates, Moe Sarama and Jay Martinez, got on the phone with each other afterward to commiserate. In interviews, Mr. Sarama and Mr. Martinez said they had been on opposite ends of the political spectrum, with different issues as priorities: Mr. Sarama focused on special education, Mr. Martinez on early reading. Neither had opposed charter schools.
Jim Walton’s father is Walmart founder Sam Walton.
Net worth: $143 billion
Despite their wide differences, Mr. Martinez said he would have rather had someone like Mr. Sarama get elected than have outside money determine the race.
“It’s not fair to shut out folks like that,” he said.
Mr. Hastings said in an interview that he contributes about $50 million a year to various political groups focused on charter schools, which he sees as critical to enhancing education, but that he did not involve himself in deciding which candidates to support in California and did not know Ms. Caigoy.
He said there were limits to the power of big donations to shape political outcomes. But, while reflecting on the state of U.S. politics, he said the current era of big spending is having a “moderately corrosive influence” on the country.
“It has the potential to be tremendously corrosive,” he said.
Federal campaigns
The Sheehy campaign in Montana had initially seemed like an uphill battle.
As a senator for Montana for 18 years, the incumbent, Mr. Tester, a moderate who had shown his willingness to reject the Democratic Party line occasionally, had already survived a series of political challenges. He began his re-election campaign with a commanding financial advantage. But that changed when Mr. Schwarzman and other wealthy donors entered the picture.
After his time as a Navy SEAL, Mr. Sheehy had moved to Montana and launched an aerial firefighting business, Bridger Aerospace, in 2014. But he soon found himself in need of a fleet of aircraft to win contracts, he wrote in his book, “Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting.” It was a gargantuan task, Mr. Sheehy wrote, to find “someone to fund an almost $200 million order of out-of-production aircraft, to be operated by a three-year-old company, led by a nobody, for a contract that didn’t exist, with an agency that couldn’t always agree on the required specifications for their aircraft.”
But Mr. Schwarzman was intrigued by the business, Mr. Sheehy wrote.
“He had once seen the Super Scoopers operating in France and was immediately impressed with their capabilities, like I was,” he went on, referring to a type of firefighting aircraft. “When he heard about our deal, he was very excited to proceed and provided us with a crack team at Blackstone to execute the deal.”
A spokesman for Mr. Sheehy said that the senator was proud to have Mr. Schwarzman “as an investor and mentor during his business career.”
Blackstone began investing in Mr. Sheehy’s business in 2018, though a company spokesman said in a statement that Mr. Schwarzman did not personally meet Mr. Sheehy until 2023, five years later. The investment went through a rigorous review process, the statement said, and there was no indication at the time that Mr. Sheehy intended to run for office.
Four years after the initial investment, the firefighting company was losing tens of millions of dollars; company officials had already turned to local government in Gallatin County with a proposal to expand its work force with the aid of a municipal bond issue.
The county agreed to issue $160 million in bond funds, designed to help private companies acquire lower-interest financing without obligating taxpayer funds.
Federal securities filings show that the bond money largely went at the time not to expanding the work force, but to paying out Blackstone, which nearly doubled its investment in a few years. Mr. Sheehy secured multi-million-dollar bonuses.
By 2024, the company was telling shareholders that its debt and persistent losses “raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
The company’s financial outlook has since improved. It secured new financing last year and “repaid the bonds early and in full,” the company said in a statement. “Over the past decade, we have strengthened our financial foundation, created high-quality jobs, expanded our operational capacity, and built a leading aerial firefighting platform.”
Mr. Sheehy resigned from his chief executive role in the middle of 2024 to pursue his Senate campaign.
The entrepreneur, who had described himself as “poor” at the time he started the firefighting business in 2014, emerged from the deal making with an estimated net worth of more than $100 million, making him one of the wealthiest members of Congress. Part of that was thanks to a drone business that had been spun out of Bridger and sold.
In his Senate campaign, Mr. Sheehy began receiving contributions from dozens of billionaires, including Mr. Yass, the Uihlein family, Mr. Walton, Mr. Griffin and Mr. Schwarzman.
Mr. Sheehy’s arrival in Congress provided an ally for Mr. Schwarzman, who has long been one of the country’s biggest donors, helping the Republican Party in its efforts to control the U.S. Senate. Democrats had for years led efforts to eliminate the carried interest rule that allows executives at private equity firms to pay a tax of about 20 percent on their profits, much lower than even middle-class income tax rates. In 2010, as former President Barack Obama sought to tax carried interest at ordinary income tax rates, Mr. Schwarzman was one of the proposal’s biggest critics, likening it to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
At one point, Democrats were one vote away in the Senate from approving the changes. Mr. Sheehy signed a pledge not to support tax increases, and the new Republican-controlled Congress has blocked action on any such proposal.
Mr. Tester, who had held the seat Mr. Sheehy ultimately won for 18 years, still came home over the years to northern Montana to cultivate wheat and peas. During an era and in a state in which in-person politicking held great value, he connected with voters over tractor-repair policies and the three fingers he had lost to a meat-grinder as a child.
He said he has noticed a drastic change in the role that money now plays in political campaigns. He himself found a network of wealthy supporters he could call on for aid.
“It’s a form of prostitution, quite frankly,” he said. “It’s one of the worst parts of the job. But if you want to effect change and want to make things better for your kids and grandkids going forward, then this is the field that the Supreme Court has laid out that we have to play on.”
Katie Benner and Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.
About this story
To identify campaign donations from billionaires and members of their families, reporters began with each Forbes list of billionaires from 2000 to 2025. For each name on the list, reporters consulted public sources to find the names of their siblings, spouses, and children.
The Times then collected Federal Election Commission records for all contributions made by those people in 2023 and 2024, verifying addresses, occupations and places of work listed in the F.E.C. records. The Times excluded any contribution that it could not confirm through these records; for this reason, some actual contributions from billionaires may be missing from the analysis.
Some billionaires use their companies’ political action committees as a way to contribute to campaigns. Because of the difficulty of separating these committees from other corporate political action committees that might be funded by the company itself, The Times excluded these contributions from its analysis.
The Times classified each contribution as supporting the Democratic Party, Republican Party, independent/third-party or mixed/nonpartisan. The Times counted contributions to candidate committees as supporting the candidate’s stated party. To classify contributions made to PACs, The Times calculated the total funding that each committee dispersed to candidates and other committees. If a committee gave at least three-quarters of its money to one party, the contributions were considered to have gone to that party. Otherwise, The Times classified contributions to those committees as “mixed/nonpartisan.”
The Times also analyzed campaign finance records for a number of states and municipalities to calculate the impact of billionaires in non-federal elections.
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14) The Bank Trump Is Relying On for Rare-Earth Minerals
The Export-Import Bank is providing a $10 billion loan to Project Vault, an initiative to stockpile critical minerals. The project is the administration’s latest effort to reduce reliance on China.
By Alan Rappeport, Reporting from Washington, March 9, 2026
Simon Bailly
When President Trump made his first run for the White House more than a decade ago, he derided the Export-Import Bank of the United States as a “featherbedding” corporate welfare scheme.
“I don’t like it because I don’t think it’s necessary,” Mr. Trump said in 2015, echoing the concerns of many Republicans who wanted to abolish America’s export credit agency.
But the obscure bank, which was established in 1934 to give loan guarantees to foreign buyers of American-made products, survived Mr. Trump’s first term. It is now being reimagined as a government catalyst for imports and sits at the center of the Trump administration’s global race for critical minerals.
In early February, the White House announced a new initiative — Project Vault — to reduce America’s reliance on Chinese rare earths. The government’s plan is to work with the private sector to scour the world for minerals and then stockpile them in the United States. The initiative will be backed by a $10 billion loan from the bank, the largest in its 92-year history, along with $2 billion in private-sector funds.
The effort is an extension of Mr. Trump’s aggressive style of industrial policy, which has included tariffs and government stakes in companies from key sectors. Now Project Vault has emerged as another intervention that aims to shield companies from crisis if China again opts to withhold the critical magnets that power cars and computers, as it did last year.
“It’s actually overdue for there to be coordinated action from some of the largest U.S. companies that are exposed to these supply shocks coming from China to actually insulate themselves from the risk,” said Heidi Crebo-Rediker, senior fellow in the Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former chief economist at the State Department.
The project will establish a U.S. Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve, a public-private partnership. The goal is to store 60 essential raw materials across the United States. The project has already attracted large corporations such as General Motors, Boeing and Google, according to a White House official, and they are joining forces to ensure that they have access to key materials.
Economic security experts and analysts have praised the concept as a novel approach for reinforcing the rare-earths supply chain, which is dominated by China. But details about where the minerals will be sourced remain scarce. It is also not clear what impact a global buying spree will have on minerals markets and if the United States will, at least initially, still need to rely on China for processing the rare earths. Storing the minerals around the United States could also be complicated.
“In the medium term it can source from China, but the strategic goal is to ensure that American manufacturing is not disrupted,” said Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There will be no economic security without mineral security.”
For decades, the United States has relied on stockpiles to stabilize supplies of minerals that are components of military equipment. Project Vault, however, is different because of its focus on businesses and the private sector, reflecting how national security and economic security have merged as government priorities.
China mines 70 percent of the world’s rare earths, and does chemical processing for 90 percent of the global supply. When the Trump administration recently imposed high tariffs and more expansive technology controls, the Chinese government responded by rolling out a licensing system that would give it control over rare-earth shipments even outside China.
China’s export restrictions, which have since been lifted, set off a panic in the Trump administration and within corporate America, which relies on critical minerals for key components of technology that powers cars, computers and phones.
In recent months, the White House has been ramping up a governmentwide effort to make the United States less dependent on China for minerals and processing.
In January, the Trump administration extended up to $277 million in direct funding and up to $1.3 billion in loans to USA Rare Earth, a mining and manufacturing group, to help develop its supply chain for rare-earth metals and magnets. Last July, the Defense Department agreed to take a $400 million stake in MP Materials, a mining company that has struggled to turn profits amid tough price pressure from China.
The United States has also been striking economic agreements with countries around the world as it looks to reshape the market. International policymakers gathered in Washington in February for the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement, which is a successor to the Minerals Security Partnership. The policy frameworks are aimed at improving coordination on pricing and to jump-start investment in mining and processing in countries such as Morocco, Paraguay and Peru.
Jonas Nahm, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said that the creation of a critical minerals supply chain outside China could initially increase prices for certain raw materials but that eventually a stockpile could help reduce price volatility. That could depend on how well the Trump administration, which in many areas of economic diplomacy has chosen to act unilaterally, collaborates with nations, like Japan and South Korea, that have been building their own minerals stockpiles for commercial use.
“This could play a much bigger role in trying to establish a non-China industry if done well,” said Mr. Nahm, who served as an economist in the Biden administration White House focused on industrial policy.
Sushan Demirjian, an assistant trade representative for the Trump administration, said at a trade conference in Washington last month that her agency, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, was working on producing a lengthy and enforceable trade agreement pertaining to critical minerals.
The agreement would help set “minimum, market base price” for critical minerals among like-minded trading partners, she said, to help cover the cost of the production and processing of critical minerals and develop their capacity. Other countries, particularly China, have driven down prices for certain minerals to such a low level that miners and processors in other countries cannot afford to stay in business. The administration would soon begin soliciting public comments on this agreement, Ms. Demirjian said.
Beyond Project Vault, the bank, known as Ex-Im, has over the last year issued letters of interest to consider project financing for lithium extraction in Arkansas, nickel and cobalt production in Australia and tin extraction in Britain.
For years, free-market oriented conservatives assailed such government interventions in the economy.
Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, a libertarian-leaning research organization at George Mason University, lamented that the program lacked oversight. She also argued that since the United States already had a stockpile of minerals for military needs, the private sector should create its own stockpile without government help.
“It is unclear to me that it is the role of the government to guarantee stable prices to the private sector,” Ms. de Rugy said, suggesting that the Trump administration is stretching the definition of national security to justify its stockpiling initiative. “If it really is such an important thing, the private sector will do it.”
That view was once mainstream in Republican policymaking circles, but it has fallen out of fashion.
Fred Hochberg, who led Ex-Im from 2009 to 2017, noted that through Project Vault, the bank was shifting away from its focus on promoting U.S. exports and concentrating more on imports. The embrace of the bank by a Republican administration, he pointed out, is also a shift from when he was in charge of the bank and conservatives who loathed “crony capitalism” tried to shut it down.
“It’s changed because we have a Republican in the White House,” Mr. Hochberg said. “They have taken an about-face on the Export-Import Bank.”
At a Council on Foreign Relations event in Washington in late February, John Jovanovic, the current chairman and president of Ex-Im, said he was prepared to work with American companies that were involved in Project Vault on expanding existing warehouse and storage capacity for minerals. He added that the United States wanted to work closely with American allies on shoring up rare-earth supply chains.
“Fundamentally, this is about de-risking our supply chain,” Mr. Jovanovic said. “In order to de-risk our supply chain, we have to work with our strategic allies.”
Ana Swanson contributed reporting.
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15) U.S. Carries Out Another Boat Strike, Killing 6 in Eastern Pacific
The attack, in the eastern Pacific, was part of a continuing campaign by the U.S. Southern Command to target people suspected of smuggling drugs by sea.
By Eric Schmitt, Reporting from Washington, Published March 8, 2026, Updated March 9, 2026
This image from a video provided by the U.S. military shows what it said was a strike on a boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Sunday. Credit...US Southern Command
The Defense Department said on Sunday that it had blown up a boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean earlier in the day, killing six people. The strike raised the death toll in the campaign by the United States against people it accuses of smuggling drugs at sea to at least 156.
The U.S. Southern Command announced the strike on social media with an 11-second video clip that showed a stationary boat, with two or three outboard engines, floating in the water and then suddenly exploding.
Legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military cannot deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if suspected of engaging in criminal acts. The Trump administration has not provided evidence of drug smuggling.
The Southern Command, which oversees military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean from headquarters near Miami, cited unspecified intelligence in the announcement. It said the boat had been traveling on “known narco-trafficking routes” and was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”
The attack, the 45th since the U.S. campaign against the boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific started in early September, continued a recent increase in the pace of strikes. The six people killed on Sunday marked one of the deadliest boat strikes that the military has carried out in recent weeks.
The U.S. military has carried out strikes every three or four days since the new leader of the Southern Command, Gen. Francis L. Donovan of the Marine Corps, took over in January.
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