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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Iran’s Loyalists Promote a Wider Nationalism, Unveiled Women Included
Government supporters are showing off new ties with alleged former dissidents in a bid to show that they can withstand enemies at home as well as abroad.
By Erika Solomon and Sanam Mahoozi, June 24, 2026
A pro-government demonstration in Tehran last month where some of the women were partially veiled and some dressed more conservatively. Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
Dressed in a pink top and acid-washed jeans, the young woman in the video hardly looked the part of a pious loyalist to Iran’s clerical rulers, standing alongside a crowd of women draped in black from head to toe. That was exactly the point.
Letting her curls spill onto her shoulders, the woman offered an on-camera testimony.
“I was not a supporter of the Islamic Republic, nor the supreme leader,” she told a pro-government filmmaker, Hossein Shamaghdari, who posted their exchange online. After the United States and Israel attacked in February, she said, she began to admire Iran’s hard-line forces, as they battled two of the world’s most powerful militaries.
“If the Revolutionary Guards and Basijis were not fighting, we would not still be here,” she said, holding back tears, and praising the very forces that had once cracked down on unveiled women and protesters. “I am remembering the start of the war, and rethinking my views about the Islamic Republic.”
The woman is never identified in the video, and it is unclear who she is — let alone whether she has indeed changed her mind on Iran’s autocratic government. What is unmistakable about the video, though, is a new kind of nationalism that Iran’s government and its supporters are formulating — one that embraces those who once rebelled against it.
By not only surviving the war, but emerging with a strong hand in ongoing peace talks, Iran’s government feels emboldened. Still, a national reckoning lies ahead, as the country sinks deeper into economic crisis and its population remains deeply divided after antigovernment protests that swept the country shortly before the war.
To head off those challenges, Iran’s government is tapping into popular outrage about the attack on the country by outside powers. The state and its supporters are projecting a sense of unity they believe can reach constituencies far beyond a hard-core base.
Their message is that loyalists and dissenters can find common ground in a fight against foreign aggression. And they aim to present a friendlier, more inclusive face of the regime — even as that regime continues to crack down on critics, seizing their properties and executing people at the highest rate in decades, according to human rights activists.
For weeks, supporters of the government have been posting videos online that claim to show former protesters arguing that, after the war, there is “no alternative” to the Islamic Republic. Others show hipsters with piercings — once disparaged by Iran’s theocratic government — expressing their admiration for the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei.
It is impossible to know how genuine those sentiments are but there is little sign in the videos that their appearances are coerced, and many liberal Iranians have voiced staunch opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
Perhaps most surprising among this genre of videos are those made by Mr. Shamaghdari that feature unveiled women, often portrayed as the epitome of defiance against the regime.
The hijab is still a legal requirement for women in Iran, and women can be arrested or whipped for shirking it. Last week, an Iranian singer, Parastoo Ahmadi, was sentenced to 74 lashes for performing unveiled at a concert in 2024, according to a human rights group.
Many now openly flout the rule, however, and unveiled women have become a common sight on the streets of Tehran and rural towns. But never in state-backed media, until now.
“For decades, mandatory hijab has been one of the deepest fault lines between supporters of the Islamic Republic and its opponents,” said Omid Memarian, an Iran analyst at DAWN, a Washington-based think tank focused on the Middle East.
In the past, Iranians’ stance on compulsory hijab often reflected their views on social freedoms, he said, but now loyalists are willing to look past such differences among those standing with them against the war.
“After the war, the country’s main political and social fault line changed,” Mr. Memarian said.
This messaging stands in stark contrast to imagery of women that was prevalent during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Mr. Memarian said, when veiled women were meant to idealize piety and revolutionary sacrifice.
During the most recent war, state television has shown women’s military parades, featuring pink guns and pink jeeps.
Even more ubiquitous have been the images of unveiled women at pro-government rallies. Some loyalists have highlighted their presence as a sign of national reconciliation after the bloody crackdown on January’s protests that left thousands dead.
“We have been unfair to these very people,” Amir Taha Hussein Khan, a pro-government commentator, wrote in a social media post alongside images of unveiled women at pro-government rallies. “Today, these same people, with all their being, selflessly stand against the enemy.”
Some Iranians interviewed by The Times were skeptical that everyone going to the rallies was there out of genuine conviction, arguing that free meals and money were sometimes offered in exchange for attendance. Those claims could not be independently verified.
Either way, critics say the images smack of government hypocrisy.
“They want to use the lack of hijab to their advantage,” said Maryam, a Tehran resident who asked not to be identified by her full name for fear of retribution. “All of a sudden, in the face of war, the regime says we are all Iranians.”
Some critics have posted images online showing unveiled women at recent rallies alongside photographs of a partly-veiled Mahsa Amini, the young woman who died in police custody in 2022 over charges of improper dress. Her death kindled the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, when women ripped off their veils and took to the streets in mass protest.
The government has occasionally promoted images of unveiled women in the past, usually at state rallies after periods of dissent, said Shima Tadris, who studies Iranian women’s rights movements at the Gerda Henkel Foundation, a research institute in Germany.
That happened after the January protests, she added, and became widespread during the war because it projected an image of broad-based support for the government.
At the same time, Ms. Tadris said, the government wants to demoralize the January protesters who plunged Iran’s leadership into one of its most precarious moments since the revolution that brought them to power in 1979. The Islamic republic, she said, wants to signal to protesters: “‘You are the ones who are alone, more and more people are joining us.’”
The attempts at promoting national unity come as Iranian society feels more fragmented than ever.
Before the war, Iranians were largely split into two camps: pro and anti-government, said Naghmeh Sohrabi, a Middle East historian at Brandeis University.
The opposition has since splintered into those who support the United States-led war, in the hopes of toppling the government, and those who are against it, fearing the destruction it causes. Government loyalists are split, too, between those who want to continue the war and those who want to negotiate a deal to end it.
“What’s happening on the ground is this fracturing of society on a very deep level,” she said. “The question for them is how do you bring society back together again?”
Roya Khoshnevis, an academic and cultural analyst based in Tehran, said that although those rifts could not be healed with nationalistic fervor, there was collective pride in surviving the war.
“People do not necessarily feel more united,” she said. “Despite the wrong actions the Islamic Republic has taken toward its people for ages, like many Iranians, I am proud of how strong they have appeared.”
Some activists worry the state will no longer be as lenient once the threat of war subsides, Ms. Tadris, the researcher, said.
Last month, Iran’s judiciary summoned the editor of the state news agency, IRNA, over a photo essay that featured images of a woman unveiled in her home. Yet it was Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who came out to defend him.
“The same women they say one day should be arrested, you have shown holding up photos of the supreme leader,” Mr. Pezeshkian said during an interview with Iran’s state broadcaster. “We need to accept differences, and not think of these differences as hostile.”
Shirin Hakim contributed reporting.
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2) The Heat Wave in Europe Is Breaking Records. Here’s What to Know.
France had its hottest day ever, and forecasters predicted that Britain’s temperature record for June was likely to be broken.
By Nazaneen Ghaffar and Lynsey Chutel
Nazaneen Ghaffar is a reporter on The Times’s weather team. She is based in London.
London on Tuesday. Britain’s weather service said hot and humid conditions were expected to intensify. Credit...Kin Cheung/Associated Press
Temperatures in Europe are expected to break records as the continent endures its second severe heat wave in two months.
Urgent heat warnings have been issued in more than a dozen countries. That includes France, which on Tuesday had its hottest day on record — not just for June, but for any time of year — and where power grid failures have left more than 60,000 homes without electricity. Britain said its June record of 35.6 Celsius, or 96 Fahrenheit, was likely to be broken on Wednesday.
As global temperatures rise, Europe has been warming faster than any other continent, and officials have scrambled to react to heat waves that are increasingly intense and happen earlier in the year. Making matters worse, most buildings in some European countries are not equipped with air-conditioning, and schools are no exception.
Here’s what to know.
How hot will it get?
· Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Britain, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland are all under high-level heat warnings.
· France’s weather agency, Météo-France, said temperatures were expected to continue reaching “exceptionally high levels” on Wednesday and Thursday, with highs climbing above 40 Celsius, or 104 Fahrenheit. More than half of the country is under the highest-level heat alert through Thursday.
· Spain’s weather service, AEMET, said temperatures were expected to remain high on Wednesday, especially in the north, where highs up to 41 Celsius, about 106 Fahrenheit, were forecast. At least 10 locations exceeded 42 Celsius (107 Fahrenheit) on Tuesday. Forecasters said cooler Atlantic air would arrive on Thursday, bringing a drop in temperatures.
· A rare red extreme heat warning, the highest level, was in effect across large parts of Britain on Wednesday. The Met Office, Britain’s weather service, said hot and humid conditions were expected to intensify, pushing temperatures across central and southern England, and southern Wales, up to 38 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) on Wednesday and 39 Celsius (102 Fahrenheit) on Thursday.
· Much of Italy has been affected by above-normal temperatures. The Ministry of Health has issued red heat warnings, the highest level, for more than half of Italian cities on Wednesday and Thursday. Highs of up to 37 Celsius (97 Fahrenheit) were expected in Florence and Milan. Germany is also sweltering. The country’s weather service, the Deutscher Wetterdienst, said conditions were becoming increasingly hot, especially from Friday onward. The service said temperatures could peak at 41 Celsius (close to 106 Fahrenheit) on Saturday.
· Forecasters said temperatures were expected to gradually return to more seasonal levels across Western Europe starting Friday. However, countries in Eastern Europe were bracing for a scorching weekend, with temperatures expected to climb into the high 30s Celsius by Sunday.
How is the heat affecting people’s lives?
· At least 40 people drowned in France in the past week, officials said. Many were teenagers swimming in unsupervised areas. Marina Ferrari, a government minister whose responsibilities include young people, said in a radio interview on Tuesday that the drownings were mostly in bodies of water such as lakes or canals. “During heat waves like this,” she said, “it’s no small matter to go swimming in areas that aren’t supervised.”
· In Britain, National Rail warned passengers on Wednesday to travel only if necessary. Multiple routes in the south of the country were affected, including in and around London.
· In France, 68,000 homes were without electricity on Wednesday after power grids failed, the national network, RTE, said on social media. During heat waves, every degree hotter leads to one megawatt more of electricity consumption because of air-conditioning needs, the company said.
Europe has been heating up fast.
While tying a single heat wave to climate change requires extensive analysis, scientists have no doubt that heat waves around the world are becoming hotter, more frequent and longer-lasting, and Europe is warming faster than any other continent.
In 2025, almost the entire continent was hotter than normal. Researchers estimate that in recent years, Europe has seen tens of thousands of heat-related deaths annually.
Many homes, schools and businesses across Europe were built for an older, cooler climate. In Britain, many were even built to retain heat, making cooling off amid heat waves especially difficult. Air-conditioning is not a quick fix. In France, installing such systems has become a political flashpoint, while in Britain, high energy prices deter many.
Even in hotter Mediterranean cities, where old-fashioned courtyards, heavy shutters and white-stone facades can keep homes cool, many newer buildings have been constructed using techniques that trap heat.
How to cool off.
Staying cool and hydrating often are the two most important things to do to avoid feeling sick and discomfort in extreme heat. Here are some other ways to keep cool:
· Block out the windows in your home — especially those that get afternoon sun — with a blanket or a darker sheet during the day to keep the heat out. At night, keep windows open and run fans to circulate the air.
· Spritz your skin with a mist of cool or room-temperature water or wipe your forehead with a cool cloth. Cold showers can also help you cool down.
· If you need to be outdoors, put ice cubes in your water bottle and drink cool liquids. If you plan to exercise, douse your head in cold water. Swimming is also a great way to exercise and keep cool.
· When exploring or sightseeing, seek out cooler attractions such as museums, cathedrals or even subterranean exhibitions. Some cities have created public spaces to cool down: Barcelona has climate shelters and Paris has drinking fountains, for example. London has a Cool Spaces map to find spots.
· Watch out for signs of heat stroke. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists some of them as dizziness, a rapid pulse, nausea, headache and fainting. But symptoms can vary.
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3) The War Forgotten by the World Is an Apocalypse Now
By Hannah Beech, Visuals by Daniel Berehulak, June 24, 2026
Hannah Beech and Daniel Berehulak spent nearly a week with rebel forces in Anyar, a devastated interior region of Myanmar.
Many places in Anyar have almost no contact with the outside world — no reliable cellphone signals, no internet.
From a lonely hilltop in Myanmar, an unlikely commander peered at the enemy on the next crest. He squinted through dust-covered glasses. As the wind whipped up dry earth, Dr. Lone Lone, a rebel leader of five years’ vintage, swallowed a cough, then emitted a slight wheeze.
His men saluted. Their bearing was impeccable, even if their weaponry was not.
Throughout Myanmar’s heartland, where a civil war rages fierce and forgotten, rebel groups are outgunned and undermanned. The civilians who support them face unrelenting raids by the military, which abruptly ended a brief period of electoral governance with a coup in 2021. Myanmar’s generals returned the country to full army dictatorship, fractured the nation and ignited a humanitarian crisis.
Far from the spotlight fixed on Iran, Ukraine, Lebanon and other global conflicts, Myanmar, a Southeast Asian nation of about 50 million people, has quietly collapsed.
Recently, The New York Times photographer Daniel Berehulak and I traveled with Dr. Lone Lone to a rebel-held region. It was in Anyar, a part of central Myanmar where the rebels say no foreign journalists had gone since the military toppled the civilian government and erased political and economic reforms.
A rebel soldier — a boy, really — pointed to the sky where he had been told an armed drone was prowling. Over the previous three days, Dr. Lone Lone and a group of his men had evaded drones, fighter jets, attack helicopters and even paraglider pilots intent on chucking hand-held bombs at them. They had passed through villages that had been assaulted by howitzers or set on fire by the Myanmar military. A drone somewhere in the distance was not Dr. Lone Lone’s biggest concern.
Still, he urged us to retreat.
“I wish you could come to Myanmar without the bombs,” he said. “I love my country.”
After the 2021 coup, anti-military forces rose up and took control of more than half the country. Some of the rebel groups say they are fighting for Myanmar to become a federal democracy, with more rights for individual regions.
Rebel groups have worked with a government in exile to set up schools and hospitals in a series of disparate territories they call “Free Myanmar.” They hoped that these liberated zones would expand and merge until the military, which has kept Myanmar cowering since it first seized power from a democratically elected government in 1962, would be forced to relinquish control.
Anyar, in the nation’s arid central region, is one of the most formidable strongholds of armed resistance against the military. In the years since the coup, Daniel and I have reported from border regions where insurgencies by ethnic minorities have simmered for decades. While those zones endure frequent attacks by the Myanmar military, they also have supply lines to other countries. Arms and intelligence — and the occasional reporter — can enter.
By contrast, Anyar is marooned, even as it suffers the brunt of the military’s anger. The area is home to the nation’s Bamar ethnic majority and was historically the wellspring of support for the military, which is also predominantly Bamar. But the coup, which dragged the country back to a grimmer age, turned many people in Anyar against the military. The cost of this perceived disloyalty has been devastating.
Five years into the civil war, far from the reach of international aid groups, we found a heartland that felt lost in an apocalypse. From the skies above dusty villages and patchworks of farmland plowed by emaciated oxen, the Myanmar military’s instruments of death killed with chaotic impunity. In its isolation, Anyar suffers from crippling shortages, too, of weapons, guerrillas and, increasingly, hope.
To maintain his grip on power, U Min Aung Hlaing, the junta leader, stepped down as army chief in March so he could take the civilian post of president. He oversaw stage-managed elections in which the military’s proxy party was effectively the sole choice. (In April, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader he ousted, was transferred from prison to house arrest, according to the military.)
The same month that Mr. Min Aung Hlaing prepared to assume the presidency, human rights groups put the monthly civilian death toll in Myanmar at the highest mark since the coup. Nationwide, over the past five years, more than 90,000 civilians and combatants have been killed and 3.7 million people displaced, the United Nations says. Apart from the Palestinian territories, Myanmar was the most conflict-ridden place last year (although not the deadliest), according to the conflict monitor A.C.L.E.D.
Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the military spokesman, told me in an interview that airstrikes were ordered “because we got solid information” of legitimate military targets.
“That many people, civilian people, have been killed in airstrikes is just propaganda,” he said.
Death Along Dangerous Roads
At various stops along our route, bombs fell just before we arrived or just after we left — a measure of how common aerial assaults are in Anyar. Gyrocopters, a light helicopter-like craft, struck a village a couple miles away from where we were at one point. Drones dropped deadly payloads on a community where we had spent the night. We chased the contrails of fighter jets and stared into the sky looking for armed paragliders.
In March, about 240 Myanmar military airstrikes killed more than 400 people, many in Anyar, according to A.C.L.E.D. In mid-April, two gyrocopters attacked a village in Anyar’s Monywa Township, killing at least 17 people. During our time in central Myanmar, we confirmed at least nine killings of civilians that had not been recorded by rights groups. This daily drumbeat of death goes all but unnoticed by the outside world.
“Do foreigners know what is happening to us?” an Anyar resident named U San Nyaung asked me, as he swept rubble from the ruins of his home, which had been burned by Myanmar soldiers.
To reach the front line in Anyar, we traveled by night and by camouflage. It took us three days to traverse what would normally be about a three-hour drive. We went by car, motorcycle, boat and foot, on back roads, mountain paths, rivers and strips of highway that were less than half a mile from the front lines. Many places we visited in Anyar had almost no contact with the outside world because of military blackouts — no reliable cellphone signals, no internet.
Nearly 200 houses in Mr. San Nyaung’s village, which like most of the places we visited we are not naming for security reasons, had been destroyed by fire. Then bombs fell from overhead. Three people were killed by those detonations, including a Buddhist monk. The military had left one final surprise: land mines planted near homes and Buddhist temples, to ensure carnage after soldiers departed.
Mr. San Nyaung began weeping, his tears fat and true.
“I know about Ukraine, Gaza. I feel very sorry for them,” he said. “We share the same sadness.”
Stethoscopes to Guns
The roots of Myanmar’s civil war reach back to 1962, when a general grabbed power, claiming that the army was needed to prevent the country from fracturing amid incursions by ethnic militias. Those insurgencies, in which ethnic minorities demanded autonomy or even independence, have endured for decades, including one that is considered one of the world’s longest running ethnic revolts. But in this latest outbreak of civil war, the rebellion by the Bamar ethnic majority has spread the conflict nationwide.
“The army cannot accept that this time the Bamar are also against them,” Dr. Lone Lone said. “That’s why they are the most cruel to us.”
Dr. Lone Lone, 41, never intended to command a battalion of 120 soldiers. It wasn’t just his nearsightedness, asthma or chronic back pain that made his career as an armed rebel so unlikely. Born in an Anyar town famous for its working elephants, he studied medicine and then ran his own clinic.
In 2021, Dr. Lone Lone was about to go on a grand tour of Europe when the coup intervened and the junta imprisoned Myanmar’s elected leaders. Dr. Lone Lone joined in peaceful protests. But when the military cracked down, killing hundreds of unarmed protesters — including small children — with bullets to the head or heart, he escaped to a border region. There, ethnic militias gave basic training to white-collar urbanites like him.
“I was good at holding a stethoscope, not a gun,” Dr. Lone Lone said.
Still, Dr. Lone Lone commanded respect. He ran a medical corps before coaxing volunteers from his hometown to form a battalion of the People’s Defense Forces, a coalition of militias loosely organized under Myanmar’s government in exile. His soldiers told us about life in what they called the B.C. era — before the coup. One was in the second year of his college physics course. Another worked in marketing. Some of the fighters were teenagers when they took up arms. Two were still only 17 years old. The older soldiers had suspended normal life — date nights, marriage, children, harvests, beach holidays — for what they called “the revolution.”
Nevertheless, some B.C. habits endured. One soldier driving a pickup truck on dirt roads kept using his turn signal, though there was little reason for such politesse near the front line.
Dr. Lone Lone’s soldiers had come to this front line only a week before. In late December, a seven-month battle in northern Shan State ended with 15 rebel battalions, including Dr. Lone Lone’s, retreating. The Myanmar military buys its weapons from Russia and China, and the rebels have long given up hope that the West might finance their fight, as in Ukraine. Dr. Lone Lone’s fighters withdrew so fast they had to leave behind their treasured war elephants, a reminder of Myanmar’s martial past when pachyderms were drafted for duty.
“We have a lack of bullets,” Dr. Lone Lone said. “I feel depressed in our revolution because we do not have support from the United States and Europe, even though we are fighting for federal democracy.”
Myanmar’s generals, for their part, draw support from neighbors like China, India and Thailand, who are mostly interested in trying to keep instability and chaos from sloshing across their borders. Those countries tacitly backed the recent elections, which the United Nations dismissed as a “sham.”
Western investment in the country evaporated after the coup, and the generals rely on projects like a copper mine in central Myanmar, operated by a subsidiary of the Chinese state weapons manufacturer Norinco, to churn out cash. To protect those interests, the military has swept through nearby villages, burning and looting homes and bombing shelters for displaced people.
Ko Thu Rein, an Anyar guerrilla commander who used to work at the copper mine, said that the government in exile loosely coordinating the heartland forces had allocated only five rifles to his unit of 80 soldiers. (Using their own money, the men had managed to scrounge together 10 more.) His soldiers have fashioned mortar launchers out of bits of metal, but there are no mortar shells to fire.
A fighter jet tore through the sky. We tensed and waited to see if the Russian-made plane would circle back for a strike.
“This is my life forever,” Mr. Thu Rein said.
I couldn’t tell if he meant it in defiance, or in acceptance of his fate.
‘There Is Death Everywhere’
There was an airstrike last week, one the week before and another the week before that, the villagers said. There were others that went unmentioned. It was impossible to list them all. There were no more tears to shed, one woman we met at a restaurant said.
We sat eating bowls of noodles. The rebel-controlled village is a transport hub from which fuel and other supplies are disbursed to guerrilla forces. That is one reason the military has been devastating these villages.
Still, people need to eat. The noodles were good. Customers slurped broth as radios on tables squawked a barrage of intelligence. The bomb shelter was out back. It didn’t look large enough to fit all the diners.
I asked Daw Wah Wah, the noodle shop owner, if there had been any attacks over the past few days. She shook her head.
Then she remembered. Less than two miles away, there had been an airstrike. It had killed six people.
When was it, I asked?
“Yesterday,” she replied. “I forgot because there is death everywhere.”
The day before one of three election rounds, two fighter jets reached the village just after noon. Three gyrocopters followed. Ma Khin Moe Hnin, the owner of a fuel depot, kept on working. Then the bombs rained down. Her gas station was charred, as were a medical clinic, guesthouse and cafe where people hooked up to a Starlink satellite for internet access. Ten people were killed, including Ms. Khin Moe Hnin’s brother-in-law.
“I knew it would happen one day,” she said. “The bombs always fall.”
One evening, we were about to cross a river by boat — bridges were bombed too often to use — when a radio alerted us to armed paragliders drifting nearby. In the B.C. years, while in Bali for a medical conference, Dr. Lone Lone had seen paragliders float above the beach, their fabric wings bright against the blue sky. Now, he thought about the soldiers soaring through the inky night, holding bombs. Two officers who deserted from the military told me that paratroopers are considered expendable in a military that depends on conscription and drugs like methamphetamine to keep ranks filled.
We waited for a couple hours until the danger passed.
“The military is creative in one way,” Dr. Lone Lone said, his voice hushed in the dark. “They always find new ways to kill.”
Breaking Point
We kept on traveling through a terrorized heartland. A couple days after we visited the noodle shop, we bumped along back roads on motorcycles for six hours. There was dust in my mouth and deep in my ears. The driver of my motorcycle, a rifle slung over his shoulder and a grenade affixed to his belt, revved the engine. Suddenly, we saw a black sedan, strangely clean, stopped on the road. We stopped, too. Out of the car strode a man with a long beard and gray hair in a ponytail. He wore an army green T-shirt and a sarong, a revolver tucked by his waist. I had no idea who he was. I also had no idea where we were.
The man grinned and stuck out his hand.
“You can call me Brother Zero,” he said. “My unit is the Zero Guerrilla Force.”
Brother Zero, otherwise known as Ko Thet Gyi, operates out of rebel-held territory around Myingyan, close to Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. An artist, he took up arms after the coup. His wife, who was caught in junta-controlled territory, was sentenced to 25 years in prison because of her connection to him. Her face is tattooed on his arm.
At his camp, Mr. Thet Gyi pointed to a crater in the earth where a bomb had struck. Later we looked at another hole, larger and deeper. It was a prison for his soldiers who had tried to run away, Mr. Thet Gyi said. Five years of war, with little hope of respite, had driven up desertion rates.
“We don’t have many options,” he said. “We have to keep our soldiers.”
In February, an Anyar rebel commander who had bickered with other guerrilla leaders, surrendered to the Myanmar military. Soon afterward, precise attacks on Anyar’s resistance forces surged, presumably fed by intelligence provided by him.
In mid-March, after our trip to Anyar, the rebel fighters lost Tagaung, a strategic town that they had captured in 2024. Dr. Lone Lone’s men were forced to retreat from the hilltop front line we had visited. His battalion is now half the size it was when we met him. His deputy commander — who practically hugged me when I gave him a few sachets of Starbucks caramel latte, his favorite drink — has deserted. So has a former teacher who had told me earnestly that he had resigned himself to death if it meant eradicating the military-backed regime.
One evening during our reporting journey, I jolted awake in the back of a truck to find that we had stopped, waiting out another possible airstrike. Dr. Lone Lone grinned at me. He laughed a lot for a commander in what felt like a hopeless war. Then he stopped smiling.
“If I cannot win the revolution, then I will become a monk,” he told me. “I am trying to meditate always, but sometimes in this world, it is too difficult.”
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4) Pregnant and Running for Re-election, a Democrat Faces U.S. Prosecution
Representative LaMonica McIver was charged with assault after an altercation with immigration agents that resulted in no injuries. She faces up to 17 years in prison.
By Tracey Tully, June 24, 2026
Representative LaMonica McIver. Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times
The legal face-off between the Justice Department and Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey is set to continue in federal court this week. And the stakes are high.
Ms. McIver was charged with assaulting federal immigration agents a year ago, and on Wednesday her case will be argued before a panel of appellate judges.
To Justice Department prosecutors, the case will offer an opportunity to limit the bounds of congressional immunity.
To Ms. McIver the prosecution holds personal and political peril: up to 17 years in prison and an estimated $1 million in legal fees, just as she is running for a second term.
And to a bipartisan group of former Congress members, the charges represent an existential showdown between the executive and legislative branches.
“If the Department of Justice is allowed to proceed with this prosecution, it would create a perverse incentive for Executive Branch officials to act in a more chaotic and unsafe fashion, and create new, unprecedented tools to block legitimate legislative oversight,” wrote lawyers for the 20 former members — 17 Republicans and three Democrats — in support of Ms. McIver’s effort to have the assault charges dismissed before trial.
Ms. McIver, a Democrat and an outspoken critic of President Trump, is accused in an indictment of using her forearms to assault, resist, impede and intimidate two federal immigration agents during a May 9, 2025, clash outside Delaney Hall, a large and troubled migrant detention center in Newark. She was there with two of her Democratic House colleagues for an oversight inspection.
Her lawyers have noted that no one was injured and argued that she was being selectively prosecuted because of her politics, citing the pardons the Republican president granted to his supporters after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, where many officers were harmed.
They have also said that she was precluded from criminal liability by a constitutional protection known as the speech-or-debate clause, which shields members of Congress from being prosecuted on charges tied to their work as legislators.
“The indictment charges her for actions she took and judgments she made while exercising her statutory and constitutional responsibilities,” her lawyers wrote.
A trial court judge, Jamel K. Semper of U.S. District Court in New Jersey, rejected both arguments.
Ms. McIver, who is 40 and pregnant with her second child, appealed, putting the case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit at a time when Mr. Trump continues to show a willingness to use the Justice Department to retaliate against political adversaries.
“Members of Congress have many privileges,” wrote Mark E. Coyne, a federal prosecutor who leads New Jersey’s appeals division. “But assaulting federal agents who are trying to arrest someone isn’t one of them.”
The scope of those privileges is at the heart of the disagreement, even though there is consensus on many of the facts surrounding the brief but volatile clash, much of which was recorded.
The confrontation lasted just 68 seconds and began after agents rushed out from behind the gates of the detention center to arrest Ras J. Baraka, the city’s mayor, on a trespassing charge. Mr. Baraka, a Democrat, was running for governor at the time. And his arrest had been ordered by phone by Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, whom Mr. Trump has since nominated to lead the Justice Department, according to body-worn camera footage released as part of the proceeding.
The ensuing chaos resembled a rugby scrum, both parties have noted in legal briefs.
Then, minutes after the alleged assault, Ms. McIver was invited back into the detention center to complete the oversight inspection she had arrived there to conduct.
Her lawyers have said the entire visit was core to Ms. McIver’s duties as a House member, rendering the prosecution unconstitutional.
“After re-entering the secured area,” they wrote in appeal papers, “she quickly returned to her formal tour, diligently continuing her oversight mission.”
Within two weeks, Alina Habba, who was serving as New Jersey’s U.S. attorney, disclosed that she was dropping the trespassing charge against Mr. Baraka. In the same news release, however, she announced she was charging Ms. McIver with assault.
Prosecutors have acknowledged that others were also pushing as a crowd of roughly 40 protesters, lawmakers and reporters moved toward Delaney’s front gate alongside masked agents.
“Other protesters pushed other agents, and one agent shoved McIver; she shoved him back,” Mr. Coyne, the federal prosecutor, wrote in a legal brief.
The constitution, he stressed, does not “prohibit inquiry into illegal conduct simply because it has some nexus to legislative functions” or “immunize members of Congress who engage in violent or forcefully obstructive acts.”
“It’s the ‘speech or debate’ clause, not the ‘speech, debate or conduct’ clause or the ‘anything goes’ clause,” Mr. Coyne wrote.
The three-judge panel is expected to rule on Ms. McIver’s request to dismiss the indictment in the coming weeks.
Delaney Hall, which is the largest migrant detention center on the East Coast, has remained a flashpoint in Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown ever since that spring day.
A month after Mr. Baraka’s arrest, four men escaped through a flimsy wall as unrest over poor conditions gripped the 1,000-bed, privately run lockup, which has a $1 billion, 15-year contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Detainees began a hunger strike in May, and dozens of demonstrators have been arrested outside the facility during recent protests.
“Trump and his administration want us scared and silent,” Ms. McIver said last week during a congressional hearing held in Newark’s City Hall, a few miles from the center. “They want to whitewash our streets. They want to step on the vulnerable. They want to criminalize oversight and lock me up.”
“Whatever they try, we’re not backing down,” she continued.
Regardless of what the appeals court rules, an appeal to the Supreme Court is considered possible, given the constitutional questions at the center of Ms. McIver’s argument.
Josh Chafetz, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who has written extensively about the separation of powers within the federal government, said the prosecution itself could have a chilling effect on lawmakers’ ability to “push back and serve as opposition” to the executive branch.
“If this winds up going to trial,” he said, “it will be a green light to presidents that they can prosecute their enemies in Congress and, indeed, that they can provoke confrontations with their enemies in Congress — and then prosecute them if they respond.”
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5) France Identifies First Case of Ebola
The patient is a doctor who had traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the health ministry said. Workers are racing to trace those who may have had contact.
By Lynsey Chutel, June 24, 2026
Health workers last month in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the center of an Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 200 people. Credit...Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times
French officials on Wednesday confirmed the first case of Ebola in the country, saying that a doctor who had traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an outbreak began last month, had tested positive for the virus.
The humanitarian worker was admitted to a special health care facility and is in stable condition, the health ministry said in a statement. French health workers were racing to trace anyone who may have come in contact with the doctor. Contacts will have to be isolated for 21 days and will be closely monitored, the ministry said.
Congo is at the center of an outbreak in central Africa that was declared on May 15, with most cases in the northeastern Ituri Province. At least 260 people have died, and there have been more than 1,000 confirmed cases in the country, according to the World Health Organization.
The health ministry said the risk of infection for the wider European population was low, citing the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. Most of the positive cases in Congo have been in remote parts of the country, and Ebola spreads only through direct contact with the bodily fluids of a sick person.
Before the confirmed infection in France, the only active case in Europe was an American doctor who was transferred to Germany for treatment after he contracted the virus in Congo. Dr. Peter Stafford was likely infected on May 9 while treating a woman who had a fever and severe stomach pain, according to Serge, the Christian mission organization that he works for. It was not known that the patient had Ebola when Dr. Stafford treated her. After she died and an Ebola outbreak was declared, it was presumed that she had the virus.
Dr. Stafford made a full recovery and was released this month. His wife and four children were also evacuated to the same hospital, where they were monitored for 21 days and did not become sick.
The outbreak is the 17th in Congo in recent decades, and it has tested the country’s expertise and resources. The type of Ebola virus behind this outbreak, known as Bundibugyo, is rare, with no targeted vaccines or treatment.
Conflicts in the region has caused the forced displacement of people, creating conditions for the rapid spread of the virus.
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6) Democrats and Republicans—Two Sides of the Same Coin
By Bonnie Weinstein, July/August 2026
https://www.socialistviewpoint.org
Saikat Chakrabarti
Only a party independent of the capitalist class can represent the interests of the masses of workers and the poor. There is no political party that can fairly represent our interests and the interests of capital at the same time.
For example, and clarity, I am sighting the young and very charismatic, left-leaning campaign of a local, San Francisco Democratic Party candidate for Congress, Saikat Chakrabarti. He was one of the most “radical” candidates for congress in San Francisco vying for Nancy Pelosi’s seat in the 11th District. He lost the election.
Popular slogans—capitalist framework
Chakrabarti rightly called the U.S./Israeli war and occupation of Gaza genocide. He opposed sending any U.S. weapons to Israel. He’s in favor of abolishing ICE. He’s for a “Green New Deal.” He supports Medicare for all. And he is for federally funded universal childcare. And he calls the war on Iran “horrific and illegal.”
He also donated $600,000 to the campaign for Proposition D, known as the Wealth Tax—an initiative that aimed to change the top executive-pay tax that the city collects from some large businesses when their highest-paid managerial employee earns more than 100 times the median compensation paid to other employees. It also sought to increase the top executive-pay tax rates and introduce a voter approval requirement for future changes to the tax rates.[1]
However, Chakrabarti is also a multi-millionaire worth at least $167 million[2] and, had he been elected, would have been one of the top ten richest members of congress.[3]
His campaign centered on the idea that he wanted to “change the Democratic Party.” In one of his many TV advertisements he stated, “We need a Democratic Party that will fight to create a society that works for all, not just the richest few.”
The fox can’t be trusted to guard the hen house
The major flaw to this argument is that you can’t have it both ways—capitalism itself is a system based upon the oppression of the poor and working class in order to protect the wealth of the ruling capitalist class—to constantly insure increasing rates of profits for themselves.
But the American people are becoming more and more aware that the U.S. political system is definitely not run in their interests, but, indeed, in the interests of the wealthy.
In a May 20, 2026, New York Times article by Ruth Igielnik titled “Latest Indicator of Political Discontent: 43 percent of Voters Dissatisfied With Both Parties,” she reported:
“Forty-three percent of voters are dissatisfied with both major political parties, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll—the latest sign that the frustration that has built over the last decade will continue to roil American politics for the foreseeable future. …Overall, the Times/Siena survey found that just 26 percent of voters felt satisfied with the Democratic Party and that 33 percent felt satisfied with the Republican Party. …Eighty percent of dissatisfied voters said the economic and political system needed major changes or to be torn down entirely, and 77 percent said the economic system was generally unfair.”[4]
The American working class is finally realizing that the economic interests of the overwhelming majority of workers and the poor—are diametrically opposed to the interests of the capitalist class—because the only ways the capitalist class can increase their rate of profits are to cut the costs of production by:
· replacing workers with machines;
· using cheaper materials resulting in inferior products that workers have to buy;
· speeding up production by reducing workers’ health and safety regulations on the job;
· ignoring environmental safeguards;
· limiting workers’ pay.
All of which negatively effects the economic welfare of the masses while insuring increasing profits for the capitalist class.
Mr. Chakrabarti left these points out of his campaign promises. If he were serious about his left-leaning politics he would have been championing a mass, independent workers’ party in opposition to the capitalist class and their two-party system of economic and social exploitation of the working class for their own selfish interests.
The power of workers’ solidarity independent of capitalist interests
Capitalism can’t end income inequality any more than the capitalists can end wars. Wars are how they maintain and expand their power in the world. Wars target the masses not the wealthy elite.
It is the poor and working class in every country that fight and die in the catastrophic battles for control of the world’s resources.
The capitalist governments bomb infrastructure forcing the masses to flee their homeland because under capitalism, it’s profitable for them to do so. The victors of war aim to gain control over natural resources, and at the same time, profit from the necessity to rebuild a new infrastructure that they can then own and control.
Three concrete examples showing how capitalism holds hostage over the world
1. In an April 25, 2026, New York Times article by Stephanie Nolen titled, “AIDS Creeps Back in Parts of Zambia, a Year After U.S. Cuts to H.I.V. Assistance,” exposes that U.S. H.I.V. aid is tied to U.S. access to Zambia’s mineral resources.
“During President Trump’s first month in office, his administration upended much of the flagship global H.I.V. program that had saved the lives of hundreds-of-thousands of people in Zambia. … Today, a pared-down system is operating on reduced U.S. support, and Zambia may lose that help entirely in the next few days. The Trump administration has set an April 30 deadline for the Zambian government to accept a new health funding agreement that is tied to giving the United States expanded access to the country’s mineral resources.”[5]
2. And in a more recent New York Times article dated May 26, 2026, also by Stephanie Nolen titled, “A Powerful H.I.V. Drug Lands in Zambia. But Will It Reach Those Who Need It?” Nolan explains:
“The Trump administration’s other aid cuts have left the country’s health system so fragile that it may not have the infrastructure—to do tests, to deliver the drug, to keep records—necessary to get the drug to all those who need it. And it’s not clear whether Zambia will receive enough donated doses—or be able to buy enough—to have a meaningful impact on rates of H.I.V. transmission. Gilead Sciences, which developed lenacapavir, sells the drug for more than $25,000 per patient per year in the United States.”[6]
3. In another example of capitalism’s “profit over people” choices, in an earlier, May 11, 2026, Times article by Bernard Mokam, titled, “They Were Promised New Septic Tanks. Trump Called It ‘Illegal DEI’” the author reported:
“Behind Dana Anderson’s home in central Alabama, a plastic pipe carries waste from her toilet through her backyard, discarding it outdoors. Three or four times a year, a spell of heavy rain forces the excrement back up into the house. … The soil is dense and holds onto water. Today there are more than 50,000 people in the region who pipe raw sewage into open trenches and pits. Now, a seeming solution to the public health problem has been stymied by an unlikely force: the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. …The state agreed to an interim agreement that unlocked millions of dollars in federal funding to provide homeowners with septic tanks that could handle the difficult soil. But soon after President Trump returned to office last year, the Justice Department ended the settlement, calling it ‘illegal DEI.’”[7]
Independent workers’ power can change the world to benefit all
The Democratic and Republican Parties are doing what they have always done, pretending to be on the side of the poor while protecting the profits for the rich—ultimately threatening the destruction of the planet rather than share the profits they have stolen from the labor and sacrifices of the masses.
Capitalist “democracy” is democracy for the rich and the rule of capitalist totalitarianism for the masses.
Workers will never prosper under capitalism. We will only proper when we rule ourselves democratically and universally by bringing down capitalism and its private ownership of the means of production, and building socialism—the democratic ownership of the means of production by those who do the producing.
[1] “San Francisco Voters Appear to Reject Tax Hike on Highly Paid C.E.O.s” by Soumya Karlamangla, June 8, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/08/us/politics/san-francisco-tax-proposition-d.html?searchResultPosition=1
[2] “This founding Stripe engineer running to replace Nancy Pelosi may be even wealthier than her,” by Bryan Metzger, Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/saikat-chakrabarti-net-worth-nancy-pelosi-primary-challenger-2025-8
[3] Over half of the members of the U.S. Congress are millionaires, with estimates consistently showing that at least 50 percent to 55 percent of lawmakers have a net worth exceeding one million. This far outpaces the general U.S. population, where millionaires make up roughly seven percent of adults.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/04/majority-of-lawmakers-millionaires/
[4] “Latest Indicator of Political Discontent: 43 percent of Voters Dissatisfied With Both Parties” by Ruth Igielnik, May 29, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/polls/dissatisfied-voters.html
[5] “AIDS Creeps Back in Parts of Zambia, a Year After U.S. Cuts to H.I.V. Assistance,” by Stephanie Nolen, April 25, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/health/pepfar-hiv-aids-zambia.html
[6] “A Powerful H.I.V. Drug Lands in Zambia. But Will It Reach Those Who Need It?” by Stephanie Nolen, May 26, 2026.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/health/lenacapavir-hiv-zambia.html?searchResultPosition=3
[7] “They Were Promised New Septic Tanks. Trump Called It ‘Illegal DEI.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/us/alabama-sewage-trump-dei-voting-rights-act.html
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7) Supreme Court Lets Trump End Deportation Protection for Haitians and Syrians
President Trump has pushed to rescind Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of people from countries convulsed by humanitarian crises.
By Ann E. Marimow, Reporting from Washington, June 25, 2026
The Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 decision in the case divided along ideological lines, with the liberal justices dissenting. Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to end humanitarian protections that have permitted hundreds of thousands of people from Haiti and Syria to live and work legally in the United States.
President Trump has pushed to terminate the program, known as Temporary Protected Status, as part of his broader crackdown on immigration. The program was created by Congress with bipartisan support in 1990 to provide temporary legal status to people whose home countries were deemed unsafe because of war, natural disasters or other crises.
The court’s 6-to-3 decision on Thursday, divided along ideological lines, clears a path for the potential deportation of 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians, and it is likely to have implications for T.P.S. holders from about a dozen other countries.
The ability of the government to quickly expel individuals who previously had protections will depend on whether they already have deportation orders pending. In many instances, T.P.S. holders have not received such orders, which will allow them some ability to contest their removal from the country.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the federal law at issue prohibited courts from second-guessing an administration’s determination, in this case to strip the protections.
“This text is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad,” he wrote.
The court also rejected claims that the administration’s decision was based on overt racial hostility toward Haitians.
The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Elena Kagan quoting extensively from Mr. Trump’s derogatory comments about Haitian immigrants.
“The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country,” she wrote.
Since Mr. Trump returned to office last year, his administration has attempted to end T.P.S. for people from 13 out of 17 countries with the designation when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. left office. The administration has separately halted the resettlement of refugees and has dramatically slowed the consideration of asylum claims. The changes collectively have made it far more difficult for people who come from troubled or war-torn nations to find refuge in the United States.
The homeland security secretary determines when T.P.S. should be available to migrants from any specific country, and the designation can last from six to 18 months. There is no limit to how many times a designation for a particular country can be extended.
The law allows the secretary to periodically review such protections, terminating or extending them for certain countries. But the law requires the secretary to consult with relevant federal agencies, including the State Department, about conditions in a country and then make a decision based on those assessments before initiating a change.
The program had been repeatedly extended, becoming all but permanent for recipients from Haiti, Syria and several other nations where crises have spanned many years. Last year, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary at the time, moved to withdraw the protections from various countries.
Both sides in the case before the court agreed that the law allows the administration to periodically remove countries from the T.P.S. program and that once terminated, beneficiaries lose legal protections and have to leave the United States.
But immigrant rights advocates said Homeland Security Department officials failed to properly assess country conditions as required by the law. In the case of Haitians, they said the administration was motivated by anti-Black and anti-Haitian prejudice in violation of constitutional prohibitions against discriminatory government actions.
Class-action lawsuits were filed by T.P.S. holders, including engineers, students, doctors and caregivers, who want to continue to work and live in the United States because, their lawyers say, they could be killed if they were forced to return to Syria or Haiti.
During oral arguments in April, the court’s liberal justices pressed the administration’s lawyer about whether the decision to end the program for Haitians was racially motivated. The justices cited the president’s false accusations during the 2024 campaign that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, ate their neighbors’ pets and Mr. Trump’s comments in December about Haitian immigrants being undesirable because they come from a “filthy, dirty, disgusting” country.
D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said those statements were “unilluminating” and were references to poverty and crime rather than race. Federal law, he said, makes clear that courts cannot second-guess the government’s decision to extend or to end the protections.
The text of the statute prohibits “judicial review of any determination” of the secretary “with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation.”
Lower court judges, however, sided with the Haitians and Syrians, finding that the secretary’s process was subject to court review and that her decisions had been preordained and not based on meaningful analysis. The judges postponed the terminations, prompting the government’s lawyers to ask the Supreme Court to intervene.
The justices fast-tracked the two cases, scheduling them for the final day of arguments for the term.
In a separate case, the Supreme Court last year allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to lift protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelans who had been living in the United States. The justices ruled twice in that case in emergency orders, providing technically temporary authorization to revoke the protected status while the case went through the courts.
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
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8) Supreme Court Allows Trump to Block Asylum Seekers at Border
A policy of turning back asylum seekers at the border was rescinded in 2021, but the Trump administration wants the flexibility to reinstate it as a tool for border control.
By Ann E. Marimow, Reporting from Washington, June 25, 2026
Migrants approaching the U.S.-Mexico border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, last year. The case before the Supreme Court revolved around what it means to “arrive” in the United States. Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times
The Supreme Court on Thursday said the Trump administration can turn away migrants seeking asylum along the U.S.-Mexico border by physically preventing them from crossing into the United States as they seek protection from persecution.
The administration had asked the court to permit the government to revive a policy, first used in 2016, as part of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Under that so-called turn-back policy, the government had stopped asylum seekers from setting foot on U.S. soil, where federal law would have entitled them to try to claim asylum and receive protections.
The statute at issue says any noncitizen who is “physically present in the United States” or “arrives in the United States” can apply for asylum. Migrants who announce their intention to seek protection are then referred for an interview to evaluate their claims.
A major question in the case was what it meant to “arrive” in the United States. In its 6-to-3 ruling, the court said noncitizens must fully cross the border to gain the right to apply for asylum. The court’s conservative majority said migrants standing in Mexico do not “arrive” by “attempting, and failing, to set foot in this country.”
The three liberal justices disagreed, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor reading a summary of her dissent from the bench.
The Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the asylum process for migrants more broadly and told the Supreme Court it wanted the flexibility to reinstitute the policy if needed to address a surge of migrants at the border. In separate cases, a judge in Rhode Island this month rejected the government’s indefinite hold on asylum applications and an appeals court in Washington said in April that the administration could not categorically deny asylum claims from people crossing from Mexico into the United States.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has generally been receptive to the Trump administration’s assertions of presidential power and has issued a series of temporary orders allowing Mr. Trump to carry out his policies while litigation proceeds in the lower courts.
But there have been exceptions. The court refused to allow the president to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops in the Chicago area over the objection of Illinois officials.
For decades, the government has interpreted the asylum law as providing migrants a right to seek protections at border crossings if they fear persecution because of their race, religion, nationality or political views. With fewer legal pathways to enter the United States, such claims have proliferated in recent years, with backlogs now totaling almost four million cases and lengthy wait times for hearings.
A surge of Haitians at the southern border near San Diego in 2016 first prompted the Obama administration to meter the flow of migrants allowed to cross into the country.
That policy was significantly expanded by Mr. Trump during his first term to all southern entry points — a policy that the administration said was necessary to deal with overcrowding and that immigrant rights advocates said was illegal and inhumane. It was rescinded by the Biden administration in 2021.
Lower courts repeatedly invalidated the policy after asylum seekers from Honduras, Nicaragua and Mexico sued in 2017, saying the policy was illegal and at odds with the nation’s long history of providing refuge to immigrants escaping persecution.
A district court judge said asylum seekers must be processed if they have arrived at the border, even if they are stopped before stepping onto U.S. territory. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed, saying that a person who “presents herself to an official at the border has arrived, no matter which side of the border she is standing on.”
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9) Supreme Court Rejects Lawsuit Alleging Roundup Weedkiller Caused Cancer
The court’s decision is likely to determine the future of thousands of lawsuits against Bayer, which manufactures the weedkiller, over similar claims.
By Abbie VanSickle, Reporting from Washington, June 25, 2026
Roundup, which was created in the 1970s, is one of the most popular weedkillers in the world. Josh Edelson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with the manufacturer of the weedkiller Roundup, overturning a jury award for a Missouri man who claimed the widely used herbicide caused cancer in a decision that could have sweeping impacts on thousands of other Americans who similarly claim the product sickened them.
In the 7-to-2 decision, written by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the majority found that a federal law that regulates pesticides barred the Missouri man’s lawsuit.
Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the Missouri case would “require a cancer warning on Roundup’s label,” which would directly conflict with the label required by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Because of this conflict, he wrote, federal law “expressly pre-empts” the Missouri man’s claim.
The dispute focused on a single case, a $1.25 million award for John Durnell, a gardener in St. Louis who had used Roundup for decades and claimed that years of exposure to the product led him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer. Mr. Durnell claimed that the company had failed to warn consumers of the dangers of the product.
The ramifications of the decision could be enormous, potentially jeopardizing thousands of lawsuits pending in state and federal courts against Bayer, the German company that acquired Roundup’s original maker, Monsanto, in 2018.
The legal question before the justices focused on a narrow slice of the broader litigation: whether Bayer can be sued in state-level courts given that a federal agency decided not to issue a warning label for the weedkiller.
The Environmental Protection Agency, which is in charge of labeling pesticides throughout the country, has determined Roundup is safe. Bayer claims that the finding, which allows Roundup to be sold without a warning label, should override claims by Mr. Durnell and others that under state laws, they were injured by the product.
The Trump administration joined the case on Bayer’s side, reversing the position taken by the Biden administration. The Trump administration’s support for the Roundup manufacturer has been controversial among the Make America Healthy Again movement, whose activists had largely supported the president’s political rise.
Government lawyers asserted that once the E.P.A. determined Roundup was safe, Bayer was in fact required to abide by the agency’s decision in its product labeling.
If the company had tried to unilaterally change the product’s label, they argued, it would have violated the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act.
Roundup, which was created by Monsanto in the 1970s, is one of the most popular weedkillers in the world. But concerns over one of its active ingredients — a chemical called glyphosate that is absorbed by plants, traveling into their roots and blocking an enzyme used for their growth — have prompted one of the biggest waves of class-action lawsuits in U.S. history.
Evidence in lab animals, along with more limited evidence in humans, has shown a link between glyphosate and cancer, and a 2015 report by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified it as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
The E.P.A. has studied the chemical and determined a cancer warning was not necessary. In February 2020, the agency announced findings that “there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label” and that the chemical was “unlikely” to cause cancer in humans.
After a court challenge, the E.P.A. withdrew those findings and the chemical’s safety currently remains under formal review.
In his lawsuit, Mr. Durnell said the company should be liable for failing to warn users about the risks of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma from exposure to glyphosate.
In 2023, a jury in the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis, a state court, sided with Mr. Durnell. The company appealed the case, which eventually landed at the Supreme Court.
Julie Tate contributed research.
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10) Supreme Court Overturns Hawaii Gun Law
The case involved a Second Amendment challenge to a Hawaii law that barred carrying concealed weapons without permission onto private property open to the public.
By Abbie VanSickle, Reporting from Washington, June 25, 2026
Jason Wolford and Atom Kasprzycki were among the plaintiffs who sued to overturn the Hawaii gun law. Credit...Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Hawaii law that required gun owners to get permission before carrying a firearm onto private property like grocery stores, coffee shops and gas stations that are otherwise open to the public.
The case is the latest victory for gun rights advocates before the court since the justices decided in the 2022 landmark Second Amendment ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that Americans have a broad right to arm themselves in public.
In a 6-to-3 decision, split along ideological lines, the court’s conservative majority held that Hawaii’s gun restriction violated the Second Amendment’s protections.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. explained that “the Hawaii law at issue here violates the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”
The decision is the second time in recent weeks that the justices have sided with gun owners who argued that laws restricting firearms violated the Second Amendment. On June 18, the justices voted unanimously in favor of a Texas marijuana user who argued that gun owners should not be automatically stripped of their rights because of illegal drug use.
In the Bruen case, the court’s conservative majority laid out a new test for gun control laws, finding that courts should analyze whether they align with the country’s “history and tradition” to determine if they met constitutional muster.
In response to that ruling, lawmakers in Hawaii revisited state gun laws, quickly passing a number of new restrictions on concealed carrying of handguns. Among them was a ban on weapons in so-called sensitive places such as schools, parks and beaches.
That law also required people to get explicit permission from owners before carrying weapons onto private property otherwise open to the public. It was that portion of the state’s law at issue before the Supreme Court.
A group of individual gun owners in Maui, along with a gun rights organization, sued in 2023 to challenge the law, asserting it violated the Second Amendment.
During oral arguments in January in the case, Wolford v. Lopez, the justices wrangled over how they should apply the Bruen test and how to balance its focus on the country’s history of gun rights with the nation’s tradition of also upholding robust private property rights.
The Trump administration supported the challenge to the gun law. During the argument, Sarah M. Harris, a principal deputy solicitor general, argued that Hawaii’s law would “gut Bruen” by preventing “everyone licensed to carry from doing so at retail establishments or other private property open to the public absent the owner’s express consent.”
Lawyers defending Hawaii’s law asserted that the gun law met the Bruen test and that it flowed from the history and tradition of both the islands and the rest of the country.
The state has long had some of the nation’s tightest gun regulations and is known for rarely granting concealed-carry permits.
State officials pointed to Hawaii’s traditions as a kingdom, including an 1833 law in place during the reign of King Kamehameha III that prohibited “any person or persons” from possessing deadly weapons.
The justices tangled over some of the historical evidence introduced by Hawaii’s lawyers. That included an 1865 Louisiana law that had outlawed carrying guns onto plantations or lands without the owner’s permission, which Hawaii’s lawyers argued showed that the island state’s law had a historical precedent from the mainland as well.
The gun rights activists said the Louisiana law was one of the so-called Black Codes, a series of laws passed by Southern states in a post-Civil War effort to limit the carrying of firearms by formerly enslaved people. While part of the nation’s history, they argued, it was not a statute that should be emulated in the modern day.
Is it not “the height of irony to cite a law that was enacted for exactly the purpose of preventing someone from exercising the Second Amendment right, to cite this as an example of what the Second Amendment protects?” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked a lawyer for Hawaii.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the court’s three liberals and the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court, countered that the Black Codes, too, are part of the country’s history and traditions. The debate, she said, highlighted flaws in the Supreme Court’s new Bruen test.
“To the extent that we have a test that relates to historical regulation, but all of the history of regulation is not taken into account, I think there might be something wrong with the test,” she said.
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11) Inflation Accelerated in May as Iran War Pushed Up Prices
A closely watched measure of inflation ticked up as the conflict in the Middle East inflated energy prices.
By Ben Casselman, June 25, 2026
Ben Casselman is The Times’s chief economics correspondent.
Gasoline prices are up more than 30 percent since the start of the war in Iran. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The war with Iran didn’t just push up energy prices. It made the whole U.S. inflation problem worse.
The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, rose 0.4 percent in May, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said Thursday. Prices were up 4.1 percent from a year earlier, the fastest annual inflation in more than three years.
The recent jump in inflation has been driven by high oil prices, which have receded since the U.S. and Iran reached a deal to end their war, at least for now, and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Many forecasters believe that May could turn out to be the peak for inflation for the year.
But the data on Thursday showed that the inflation problem goes beyond energy. The so-called core measure, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.3 percent in May and was up 3.4 percent from a year earlier — a sign that the pickup in inflation isn’t limited to the categories directly affected by the war.
The pickup in prices poses a challenge for the Fed and its new chairman, Kevin M. Warsh, who is under pressure from President Trump to lower interest rates. At their meeting this month, about half of Fed officials indicated that they instead expected to raise rates by the end of the year, and investors have become increasingly convinced the central bank will have to move to rein in inflation.
“This is not a comfortable report for Fed officials,” Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights, a forecasting firm, wrote in a note to clients on Thursday.
At the same time, the data released Thursday showed that consumers remain resilient in the face of high prices. Consumer spending rose 0.7 percent in May, easily outpacing the increase in prices. Personal income also rose 0.7 percent, suggesting the strong labor market is helping households keep up with higher prices.
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12) U.S. Inflation Problems Are Far From Over
The Federal Reserve’s new chairman has vowed to deliver price stability, but officials are at odds over whether that will require higher borrowing costs.
By Colby Smith and Ben Casselman, June 25, 2026
Colby Smith covers the Federal Reserve. Ben Casselman writes about the economy.
Kevin M. Warsh, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, has expressed interest in examining how it measures and models price pressures. Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
If a preliminary deal to end the war with Iran holds, the worst of the inflation surge that has followed in its wake could soon be over. Oil prices have dropped significantly since the announcement of a truce this month. Gasoline costs have, in turn, begun to fall, and airfares and shipping fees are poised to follow.
But despite this reprieve, the U.S. inflation problem is far from fixed. Measures of underlying inflation were already showing little progress before the war began several months ago. The trend has only worsened as the fighting and other forces, like the boom in artificial intelligence, have stoked prices.
On Thursday, data from the Commerce Department showed that the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, accelerated again in May. Overall prices jumped 0.4 percent during the month, or 4.1 percent from a year earlier. Once food and energy prices are stripped out, “core” inflation notched a 3.4 percent annual pace, a fresh high since 2023.
It is possible that, if the war with Iran has indeed ended, May or June data will mark the peak of the recent run-up in inflation, said Alan Detmeister, who worked at the Fed before joining UBS. The impact of President Trump’s tariffs on prices has finally begun to fade. Housing-related inflation has firmed in recent months but is expected to resume decelerating over time. Wage growth has stayed muted despite the recent stabilization of the labor market. And higher productivity from the proliferation of A.I., if sustained, could eventually help tame prices.
Yet even if these forecasts pan out, Mr. Detmeister reckoned, it will take two more years for the Fed to reach its 2 percent target, having already overshot it for half a decade. The risks to inflation, he added, are also all pointing up.
The question that Fed officials are now grappling with is just how patient they can afford to be in waiting for underlying price pressures to ease. How that is best measured is also up for debate. Thes issues have come to define the divisions dominating the central bank as it weighs the need to raise rates to make good on a pledge to deliver price stability — something Kevin M. Warsh, the new chairman, has repeatedly vowed to do. He has not indicated, however, what it may take to achieve this, reflecting his opposition to the Fed’s sending explicit signals about the path forward for policy.
Many Measures, Mixed Messages
The Fed’s main tool for controlling inflation — raising and lowering short-term interest rates — is a blunt instrument. Interest rates affect the whole economy, not individual sectors, and they don’t have an effect right away.
As a result, central bankers typically try to avoid responding to price changes that they expect to be short-lived. A temporary jump in the price of oil or eggs may be painful for consumers, but there isn’t much policymakers can do about it — and if they try, they may do more harm than good, slowing down the economy in response to a price spike that would have gone away on its own.
“By the time you’ve actually had an effect on inflation, the transitory shock will have passed and you’ll end up tanking the economy for no reason,” said Jonathan Wright, an economist at Johns Hopkins University who used to work at the Fed.
What policymakers care about is the underlying pace of inflation, the rate that prices would rise based on supply and demand in the economy as a whole. But measuring that is tricky — it isn’t always obvious, without the benefit of hindsight, whether an uptick in inflation is a blip or the start of a more troublesome trend.
The best-known method for gauging underlying inflation is also the simplest: Exclude food and energy prices, historically among the most volatile categories. That measure of core inflation gained favor during the 1970s, when repeated oil shocks sent energy prices soaring, and has remained a focus for Fed policymakers.
Still, economists have long recognized that the core measure is imperfect. Food and energy aren’t the only volatile categories — used car prices, for example, soared during the Covid-19 pandemic. And changes in food and energy prices aren’t always temporary. A jump in restaurant prices, for example, may be a result of strong consumer demand — a valuable signal for policymakers.
Economists over the years have developed a variety of more sophisticated methods of measuring underlying inflation. Mr. Warsh highlighted one of them during his Senate confirmation hearing in April: “trimmed mean,” an approach that excludes whichever prices move the most in a given month. As chairman, he has announced a task force to look into how the Fed measures and models inflation.
The most commonly cited version of the trimmed mean measure, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, has fallen since the war with Iran began. That could indicate that policymakers don’t need to be as worried about inflation as the standard core metric suggests.
Some academic research has found that the trimmed mean approach does a better job of estimating the underlying trend in inflation than the traditional core measure, at least on average. But its recent record has been less encouraging. It didn’t begin to rise in 2021 until significantly later than other measures, so if the Fed had been focused on the trimmed mean index, it may have been even slower to respond to the highest inflation in four decades.
The problem may lie in the design of the trimmed mean measure, which was based mostly on data from the 1980s through the early 2000s, when inflation was relatively low and prices of some goods were falling outright. That may have left the measure poorly suited to a period of supply chain disruptions, tariffs and other forces that are creating upward price pressures. Researchers at the Dallas Fed highlighted the potential problem in an April blog post.
“The trimmed mean has a blind spot right now, which is that when a bunch of prices jump at once, it discards them,” said Stephen Cecchetti, a Brandeis University economist who helped develop the approach when he worked at the New York Fed in the 1990s.
Researchers at the Cleveland Fed in recent years have developed an alternative measure that tries to correct for the downward bias in the trimmed mean index. That version shows that underlying inflation has picked up in recent months, though not as much as the core measure suggests. Other measures of underlying inflation mostly tell a similar story.
But the proliferation of different inflation measures creates another risk, economists warn: that policymakers, consciously or unconsciously, will focus on whichever measure gives them the answer they prefer.
“You don’t want to give a policymaker, anyone, the chance to choose whichever one of the measures they prefer on a given day,” said Mark Watson, a Princeton economist who has studied the issue.
To Hike or to Hold?
The debate over how to measure underlying inflation isn’t just an academic exercise. It could help determine how the Fed interprets the state of the economy as the shock of oil prices fades.
Officials are split down the middle as to how to respond to the inflation situation in front of them. The projections released this month alongside the Fed’s decision to hold rates steady for a fourth straight meeting showed nine officials bracing for at least one rate increase this year. Eight expected the Fed to stand pat. Only one person penciled in a quarter-point reduction. Mr. Warsh declined to submit his own estimate.
Policymakers face a gamble in either direction. Waiting to act could leave the Fed late and scrambling to contain an overheating economy if, for example, productivity gains take time to accrue or fail to materialize in size. But raising rates unnecessarily could choke off growth that could have helped to keep a lid on prices over time. It would also risk imperiling a labor market that by most accounts is not contributing to inflationary pressures.
Mr. Warsh still appears to be partial to the Fed’s holding its fire, having echoed, at his first news conference as chairman last week, aspects of the productivity case he backed while campaigning for the job.
“If we do our job, we can make strong growth, low prices and strong employment mutually compatible,” he told reporters. He concluded the news conference by saying that “strong productivity-led growth is not something that we fear but something we embrace.”
Those statements were couched in a broader message from Mr. Warsh that the Fed would “unambiguously and unanimously” get inflation back down to its target. In doing so, he carved out a middle path for the Fed that keeps its option open.
“They’re playing for time,” said Jonathan Hill, head of inflation research strategy at Barclays. “Inflation expectations are tame because the market is anticipating the Fed to hike if needed.”
The team at Barclays does not believe the Fed will have to follow through with rate increases and instead forecasts an “indefinite hold.” But other economists do not think officials will get off so easy.
James Egelhof, who worked at the New York Fed and is now chief U.S. economist at BNP Paribas, expects the central bank to unwind a series of cuts it delivered last year and raise rates three times in succession beginning in December. That reflects his view that inflation is “chronically stuck at a moderately elevated level” and that the Fed’s policy settings are no longer restraining the economy.
“We think Warsh is building a case with markets and the public for better-anchored inflation expectations built around his own personal credibility and a renewed institutional credibility for the Federal Reserve,” Mr. Egelhof said. “After over five years of an inflation overshoot, the words will need to be supplemented with action.”
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13) Here’s What It Means to Be a Democratic Socialist
Universal health care, taxing the wealthy and opposition to military aid to Israel are among the movement’s key tenets.
By Emily Davies, June 25, 2026
“In the United States, democratic socialists’ policies tend to support working within the capitalist system rather than abolishing it outright.”
The Democratic Socialists of America helped organize a “Tax the Rich” rally in February in Albany, N.Y. Graham Dickie for The New York Times
Democratic socialists’ decisive congressional victories on Tuesday night in New York’s primary elections solidified the far-left movement as an ascendant power center in blue states.
Now, as the progressive coalition prepares to expand its footprint in Washington, many Americans are turning their attention to the movement for the first time — and wondering, perhaps, what it actually stands for.
The definition often depends on whom you talk to. But the movement’s standard-bearers are united by their belief that direct government action — not the free market — is a better tool to solve problems for everyday Americans, such as the rising cost of health care and housing.
“Economic stress is something I lived with as a kid, and I feel it in my guts,” Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and an architect of the movement’s modern resurgence, said in an interview with The New York Times. “That’s what makes me a democratic socialist.”
In the United States, democratic socialists’ policies tend to support working within the capitalist system rather than abolishing it outright. Critics typically decry the likely high costs to taxpayers of some of these policies.
Ashik Siddique, a co-chairman of the organization, said the group surpassed 100,000 members earlier this year. About 1,000 more joined after the sweep of victories in New York on Tuesday night, he said.
Here is a closer look at the pillars of democratic socialism.
End Military Aid to Israel
The defining feature of primary races in New York on Tuesday was a litmus test on American support for Israel. Democratic socialists won that ideological battle handily, since staunch opposition to continued military aid is a key part of their campaigns.
The Democratic Socialists of America, a political organization in which members pay dues and are organized around a wide-reaching policy platform, says it “stands for the full freedoms and self determination of the Palestinian people, including the end of Israel’s colonization and occupation of all Arab lands, equality, and the right of all refugees to return to their homes and properties.”
Mr. Sanders said every time he has talked about Gaza at rallies across the country, he has received a standing ovation.
Expand the Social Safety Net
Democratic socialists want the government to lower the cost of living for Americans. Under their platform, child care, pre-K and public higher education amount to a collective good and should be completely free and funded by the government. They also support universal rent control, and want every worker to receive paid family leave.
In New York City, it was the political machine of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, that helped carry three progressive House candidates to victory on Tuesday.
Mr. Mamdani plans to open a free preschool center on the Upper East Side. Although directed at working families, the move has ignited a fierce debate over whether a city facing a major budget deficit should use taxpayer money to fund a free service in affluent neighborhoods.
Guarantee Free Health Care
The D.S.A. wants to create a single, government-run national program providing essential health care for everyone.
Right now, individuals and employers pay insurance premiums. People pay cash co-payments for drugs. And state governments pay a share of Medicaid costs. The system is expensive, but it allows individuals some choice in their care.
In a democratic socialist system, like one long trumpeted by Mr. Sanders, nearly all of that would be replaced by federal spending.
Many democratic socialists want to see private insurance entirely eliminated. Others are open to giving people the option to keep their private insurance plans.
Tax the Rich
There is no consensus about how much such a system would cost the federal government, nor exactly how it would be funded.
Proponents of democratic socialism say that higher income taxes on wealthy Americans and decreases in military spending would cover the costs.
Defund or Abolish Prisons and the Police
The D.S.A. is widely skeptical of police power and the American penal system. The organization wants to “defund the police by rejecting any expansion to police budgets” and calls for “freedom for all incarcerated people.”
In a rare break with Mr. Mamdani earlier this month, the group criticized his plan to add 580 officers to the Police Department.
Members believe that improving quality of life and investing in public services would address the root causes of violence. Most Americans — including many who live in high-crime urban centers — oppose defunding of police, according to numerous national surveys.
Raise the Minimum Wage, Shorten the Workweek
Democratic socialists believe in raising the minimum wage and instituting a 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay or benefits.
Proponents of the movement also fundamentally oppose an electoral system that allows outsize influence from corporations and billionaires. They have called for the current system to be replaced with publicly funded elections.
Mr. Sanders said he watched the results of the New York races come in from Washington and felt that finally, the conversation around the role of government in America was actually changing.
He described “a feeling of delight and joy.”
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14) After Banner Night, D.S.A. Sharpens Its Policy and Political Ambitions
After democratic socialists captured two House primaries and several state legislative contests in New York, the group’s leaders mulled how to use their expanding influence.
By Benjamin Oreskes and Jeffery C. Mays, June 25, 2026
A rally to push the Tax the Rich movement was held in Albany earlier this year, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not attend. Graham Dickie for The New York Times
In February, fresh off helping elect Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, a retinue of democratic socialist officials met with Carl Heastie, the powerful speaker of the State Assembly, who had frequently tangled with Mr. Mamdani and his allies.
Mr. Heastie reiterated his long-held frustration with the group’s penchant for challenging Democrats in primaries and said he wished that they would stop targeting members of the same party, because it was not the best path forward.
The point, which came shortly after a rally D.S.A. members had convened in Albany to push for more taxes on the rich, was not taken to heart.
“We told him then, and we’ll tell him now: That’s not something we can do,” Grace Mausser, a co-chairwoman of the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter, said about Mr. Heastie’s request in the meeting, which has not previously been reported. “We have to continue to grow our numbers and grow our influence, and that means challenging incumbents.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Heastie and other establishment Democrats watched as D.S.A.- backed candidates won two House primaries in New York City, unseating an incumbent in the process, and also claimed several victories in state legislative primaries, including three over incumbents who lost to D.S.A.-endorsed candidates.
All told, there may end up being as many as 16 D.S.A.-backed legislators in Albany come January, and that doesn’t include elected officials who are aligned with their policies but were not on the organization’s slate of officially backed candidates.
“We have pretty much doubled our cohort in Albany, and leaders there are going to have respond to that,” said Gustavo Gordillo, another of the local D.S.A. chapter’s co-chairs, who was in the meeting with Mr. Heastie but declined to discuss its details. (A spokesman for Mr. Heastie confirmed the meeting had occurred but declined to comment.)
The state’s next legislative session does not begin until January, giving legislative leaders plenty of time to prepare for the possible influx of democratic socialists and whatever priorities they choose to push.
Kara Cumoletti, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kathy Hochul, pointed to the governor’s comments from January about not being worried about pressure from the left because, as the head of the state party, she has to consider a broad array of perspectives.
“There are over 140 Democrats serving in the State Legislature, and the governor has worked with all of them to accomplish many shared priorities,” Ms. Cumoletti said in a statement. “The only thing that drives her decisions is what’s best for New Yorkers.”
The most contentious issue is likely to involve higher or new taxes on the wealthy or high earners. Ms. Hochul has insisted that taxes — in contrast to an essential promise of Mr. Mamdani’s mayoral campaign — should not go up.
Yet the governor showed a willingness to compromise by unveiling a new levy on high-priced second homes in New York City, even though the tax, once it goes into effect, is unlikely to bring in as much revenue as what the mayor and his allies desire.
Though Ms. Mausser celebrated the so-called pied-à-terre tax, she made it clear that it was just a starting point on taxing the wealthy.
“I really hope that Governor Hochul is watching closely and understands that her strategy of obstinance and her orientation of ‘I don’t respond to pressure’ is not working and people can, and are willing to, vote out incumbents,” Ms. Mausser said.
With the D.S.A. recording victories across the state — a member won a primary in Buffalo — Ms. Hochul may need to determine how much to entertain the group’s demands amid an increasing pressure campaign. Having Mr. Mamdani play a more vocal role next year in the likely legislative fights over raising taxes could prove pivotal.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, the mayor sidestepped questions on whether he would use his growing influence to pressure the governor or legislative leaders to advance his agenda. At the same time, he reiterated his appreciation for Ms. Hochul’s willingness to prioritize resources for expanding child care in the city and his excitement about the potential new crop of legislators in Albany next year.
“What their successes represent is a shift in the balance of power between working people and special interests,” Mr. Mamdani said on the anniversary of his victory in the Democratic mayoral primary. “And finally, working people are going to have more of a voice in the halls of power, wherever that hall may be — be it Albany or be it in D.C.”
Some of the mayor’s most ardent supporters have questioned whether he should be more confrontational with Ms. Hochul. Earlier this year, for example, he skipped a Tax the Rich rally in Albany that Ms. Mausser, Mr. Gordillo and other D.S.A. members had organized and attended — even though the rally’s theme coincided with the mayor’s agenda.
Some also voiced dissatisfaction that Mr. Mamdani had refused to endorse the D.S.A.’s entire slate of legislative candidates, in apparent deference to Mr. Heastie.
Eon Huntley, a democratic socialist in Bedford-Stuyvesant, handily defeated Assemblywoman Stefani Zinerman on Tuesday. He said that his not having been endorsed by the mayor had not shifted his goals.
“I may not have been endorsed by him, but this campaign also was explicitly about delivering on the affordability agenda,” Mr. Huntley said.
Other candidates, like Eli Northrup and Brian Romero, were endorsed by Mr. Mamdani but not by the D.S.A.
A longtime legislative aide, Mr. Romero watched with disappointment in recent years as Ms. Hochul and legislative leaders rolled back environmental regulations and did not raise taxes to the level he deemed necessary.
After winning a primary for an Assembly seat in Queens on Tuesday, Mr. Romero said he was excited to work on the issues that Mr. Mamdani ran on last year as well.
“I absolutely see myself as part of the ‘Z Caucus,’” Mr. Romero said, using a nickname many of the mayor’s friends use for him. “We are ready and excited to advance his agenda.”
Patrick Jenkins, a lobbyist who once served as an aide to Mr. Heastie, said new members were going to have to figure out the complexities of Albany and how to advance their agenda.
“The rhetoric that you use during a campaign isn’t always reality,” Mr. Jenkins said. “You wind up having to negotiate with people that live in Buffalo and Rochester and Syracuse and you have to now balance limited resources with all kinds of other priorities.” Though the results are not final, a D.S.A.-backed candidate is running neck and neck for an Assembly seat in Syracuse.
The D.S.A.’s ability to shape policy in Washington still seems extremely limited, especially with Republicans in power. House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Wednesday that there were “mini-Mamdanis popping up all over the country.”
He added: “It is a dangerous thing. This is not a joke. We’re in a fight right now to save the Republic.”
The D.S.A.’s influence should be greater in New York, where the group’s leaders are mulling their legislative agenda and already thinking about future elections and greater ambitions.
In an interview, Ms. Mausser mused about a socialist running for president in 2028 and other tantalizing races that year, when Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, is up for re-election.
“Perhaps a socialist running for Senate?” Ms. Mausser said.
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15) Trump’s Heavy Hand in Colombia’s Right-Wing Victory
The U.S. president endorsed the right-wing winner. But his influence went further.
By Annie Correal and Julie Turkewitz, Reporting from Bogotá, Colombia, June 25, 2026
First came President Trump’s “complete and total endorsement” of Abelardo De La Espriella, the right-wing candidate in Colombia’s presidential election.
Then came the support of Republican members of Congress, who asserted that Mr. De La Espriella would have U.S. interests in mind and helped mobilize Colombians abroad, who tend to lean conservative, to vote.
Then, just days before the election, U.S. immigration authorities detained an activist critical of Mr. De La Espriella and who had urged Colombians in the United States not to vote for him. The activist, according to a memo signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, had been interfering with U.S. foreign policy.
Mr. De La Espriella won Colombia’s presidential vote on Sunday by a razor-thin margin — helped by ballots cast outside the country — and will take office in August. Experts say that even in an era when meddling in foreign elections has become increasingly common, the recent involvement of the Trump administration and its allies in Colombia’s election has been heavy-handed.
The detention of an activist who opposed a candidate endorsed by Mr. Trump was particularly striking, experts said.
“The attempt to quash dissent in a coordinated manner with the Trump administration, extending from Colombia to U.S. soil — I can’t think of anything in recent times, in the 21st century, that resembles that,” said Alexander Main, the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
The State Department did not respond to requests for comment about the detention of the Colombian activist.
Mr. Espriella, a lawyer who had never held office, energized millions of Colombian voters, and he appeared likely to win even before Mr. Trump’s endorsement.
But in Colombia, President Gustavo Petro, a leftist and political opponent of Mr. De La Espriella, seized on Mr. Trump’s endorsement as he sought to sow doubt in the result, claiming that American involvement amounted to “cheating” that undermined the vote. This, in turn, set those in his inner circle rushing to stop the president from flat-out rejecting the result and calling for mass protests.
The day after the election, Mr. Petro flew to Panama for an event, but was in such a frenzy over Mr. De La Espriella’s minuscule lead over his party’s candidate — about 250,000 votes, or less than 1 percentage point — that his top ministers convened an emergency meeting in Bogotá to address what Mr. Petro believed were irregularities, according to two people with direct knowledge of the events who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
All the while, Mr. Petro kept sending messages to his millions of followers on X, and supporters streamed into the streets of the capital for a march called “Electoral Steal,” even as his party’s candidate, Iván Cepeda, counseled calm.
On Wednesday, Mr. De La Espriella’s political opponent, Mr. Cepeda, conceded the election after electoral authorities completed a customary vote verification process.
Since Sunday, scattered protests have broken out in Bogotá and the city of Cali, with reports of vandalism and isolated clashes with the police, but there have been no large demonstrations.
The election pitted Mr. De La Espriella, a wealthy lawyer, against Mr. Cepeda, a senator, peace negotiator and stalwart of the left. Mr. De La Espriella used AI-generated images of a tiger as his campaign avatar, promised to “disembowel” political opponents, crush “narcoterrorists,” and strengthen ties to the United States. He lived in Florida for more than a decade and was recently naturalized as a U.S. citizen.
Esteban González Pons, the head of the European Union Electoral Observation Mission in Colombia, told reporters on Tuesday in response to a question about Mr. Trump’s endorsement and the presence of U.S. lawmakers in Colombia that claims of international interference were “absolutely irrelevant” to the election because “the Colombian people had voted freely.”
On Election Day, two members of the U.S. Congress were in Colombia to stump for Mr. De La Espriella. Representative María Elvira Salazar of Florida, speaking in the city of Barranquilla, on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast, told reporters, “We know very well that Cepeda will be Petro no. 2, so that’s why we’re with De La Espriella,” adding that a “profound closeness” with the United States was vital for Colombia’s prosperity.
Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio who was born in Colombia and has emerged as Mr. De La Espriella’s biggest champion in Washington, also traveled to Barranquilla as an election monitor. He had raised alarms for weeks over Mr. Petro’s fraud allegations and supposed vote-buying by the left.
The Republican lawmakers had spent weeks encouraging Colombians in the United States to vote, which analysts say helped tip the results in Mr. De La Espriella’s favor. In an election that saw a record-high turnout, the diaspora vote was, by most calculations, the decisive factor: Mr. De La Espriella received around 65 percent of the total overseas vote and around 80 percent in the United States.
On Monday, Mr. Moreno, after meeting with Mr. De La Espriella, appeared to dangle a carrot: If Mr. Petro behaved for the next several weeks and did not interfere with the peaceful transfer of power, Mr. Moreno told a Colombian news outlet that it was “quite probable” that the U.S. Treasury could remove him from a sanctions list. He was placed on the list last year after objecting to the Trump administration’s military strikes on boats it has said are carrying drugs.
The administration has not publicly commented on the case of the progressive Colombian activist detained last week by U.S. immigration authorities. In an interview with a prominent Colombian journalist on Wednesday, the activist, Franklin Humberto Coral Garrido, better known as Beto Coral, said he had an open asylum case in the United States that gave him the legal right to remain in the country.
Speaking from a detention center in Louisiana, Mr. Coral called his arrest “political persecution,” and added that “my political activism focuses on Colombia, nothing related to the internal politics of the United States.”
Mr. Coral was arrested by immigration authorities the same day Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a memo that said he could be deported from the United States.
In the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rubio noted that Mr. Coral arrived in the United States in 2015 on a tourist visa and had a pending asylum application. But “Coral Garrido has used his presence in the United States to conduct political activity in support of the Petro government” and has advocated against a candidate for president, Mr. Rubio wrote.
The efforts by U.S. officials and members of Congress to shape Colombia’s election have stirred outrage among rights groups and Democrats in Congress, who last week wrote a letter to top officials calling out what they said was “brazen interference.”
It was once considered taboo for heads of state and other politicians to make public statements on foreign elections. Increasingly, though, such public intervention is becoming a regular part of global politics — on the right and the left — with Mr. Trump playing a major role in that trend.
The U.S. president has endorsed Viktor Orbán of Hungary, and paid particular attention to elections in Latin America — supporting right-wing candidates Nasry Asfura in Honduras and Javier Milei in Argentina.
Mr. Milei and President Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, both supporters of Mr. Trump, have also jumped in to endorse Mr. De La Espriella. Jennie Lincoln of the Carter Center, which monitors elections around the world, called this foreign involvement in the Colombian vote part of “an egregious trend of interference.”
Ms. Lincoln is the head of a mission in Colombia to observe the vote, and she pointed out that the Organization of American States, a regional body, prohibits foreign interference in domestic affairs.
Mr. Trump, who had repeatedly posted about Mr. De La Espriella on Truth Social, said on Monday that he had spoken with him by phone to congratulate him.
“He’s going to be a great president,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House, adding that the U.S. relationship with Colombia would be “much better.”
Genevieve Glatsky and Luis Ferré-Sadurní contributed reporting.
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16) Texas Public School Students May Soon Be Required to Read the Bible
Texas is set to pass what may be the first state-mandated book list for public school students. It focuses on classic literature and includes Bible excerpts.
By Sarah Mervosh, June 25, 2026
Most book lists are set by individual teachers or schools. Credit...Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times
Texas is on the verge of passing a sweeping, new state book list, which will establish for the first time a common set of books that millions of students across the state must read, including excerpts from the Bible.
It is highly unusual — perhaps unprecedented — for a state, rather than a school or a teacher, to mandate a reading list for every grade level for all public school students.
If approved, the list will shape what a generation of Texas students grows up reading. The state is home to more than five million public school students, 11 percent of the total U.S. public school population.
The list was being debated by the Texas State Board of Education this week. It is expected to be approved on Friday. While the specific texts were still being edited and finalized, the list is expected to reflect the priorities of the state board, which has a 10-to-5 Republican majority.
The proposal being considered put a focus on classic literature, with books like “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White (third grade), “Night” by Elie Wiesel (eighth grade) and “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare (12th grade).
At least one Bible excerpt is included in most grade levels, starting in late elementary school, which has spurred fierce debate.
Texas education officials say the Bible is an essential piece of literature and important for understanding America’s founding and culture. Critics argue that including it in English class violates separation of church and state, and is part of a broader effort to infuse Christianity in Texas public schools.
“The government of Texas, let alone any American government body, should never be in the business of imposing one religion on everyone,” said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has challenged a law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in Texas classrooms.
The new Texas list is also an effort to raise the level of rigor and get more students reading. Fewer students are reading full books in English class or at home, and U.S. reading scores are in a decade-long slump. Some education leaders and policymakers believe emphasizing whole books is increasingly essential for combating the rise of tech, specifically A.I.
The Texas list comes in response to a 2023 state law that required state education officials to select at least one literary work in each grade level.
The state board went further, outlining a number of texts in each grade. Texas teachers will still be able to teach books off the list, but they will need to find the time, on top of the ones required.
The selections have drawn criticism for putting an emphasis on older texts, often written by white and male authors, in a state where more than half of students are Hispanic or Black.
“With a list that’s so extensive, would teachers have the time or space to choose texts that are a great fit for their students, their classrooms, their region?” said Markesha Tisby, president of the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts, which has argued for narrowing the list to allow teachers more choice.
“Texas is extremely large,” she said, “and very diverse.”
The list focuses on classic literature
The proposed list for K-12 students before the board included about 200 texts.
For elementary school students, the list included classics like “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle. It also had a number of books about U.S. founding fathers and historical figures, as well as excerpts from “The Children’s Book of Virtues,” an anthology of stories edited by William J. Bennett, the secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan.
In middle and high school, two main books would be required each year, along with other related poems, speeches, historical texts and biblical excerpts.
For example, 10th graders would read “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar” by William Shakespeare, and “The Inferno” by Dante Alighieri. Among other texts, they would also read the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” speech; Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven”; Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Mr. Reagan; and an excerpt from the Book of Job.
The list aligns with a classical approach to education, popular with conservatives, that posits students should read texts that have stood the test of time.
“You don’t get to know what a classic is until 50, 60 years after the author is dead,” said Jeremy Tate, the founder of the Classic Learning Test, an alternative to the SAT and ACT.
While deciding upon a shared set of texts is bound to stir debate, he said, “it’s better to have a common canon that can provide some cultural common ground — a basis to argue around — rather than no canon at all.”
Democratic members of the state board and some Texas educators have criticized the list’s lack of diversity across race, geography and time period, arguing that it will make it more difficult to engage students.
“There is a real attempt for students to not see themselves in these lists,” said Jonna Perrillo, an English professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, who noted that there are few Texas authors and few contemporary books on the list, particularly at the high school level.
Biblical passages would be required in most grades
Under the proposed list, students would read at least one Bible excerpt each year, starting in fourth grade.
Excerpts include “The Necessity of Humility” by the Gospel of Luke and “To Everything There is a Season” from the Book of Ecclesiastes. In middle and high school, Bible selections are included in thematic units along with a book. For example, the “Definition of Love,” from First Corinthians, would be taught alongside “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen in 12th grade.
“There is a difference between proselytizing and utilizing great pieces of literature,” said Mandy Drogin, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that has supported the changes.
But the list has drawn objections from teachers, parents, students and religious leaders who testified before the board this week.
David Segal, a rabbi who works for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, testified that the list shows a preference for evangelical Christian versions of the Bible, often the King James version, that risks “an unconstitutional endorsement” of religion.
What’s not on the list
The proposed Texas list does not include some of the most commonly taught books around the country, including “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Great Gatsby,” the No. 1 and No. 2. most assigned books in U.S. high schools, according to the National Council of Teachers of English.
It also avoids some popular classics that have been contested in recent years, like “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Those books are among the top books currently taught in Texas high schools, according to research by Dr. Perrillo, the UTEP professor, and Andrew Newman of Stony Brook University, who surveyed 1,250 high school English teachers, including almost 200 from Texas, in 2024.
On the survey, Texas teachers reported teaching a variety of other books, including some contemporary novels like “All the Light We Cannot See,” a 2014 novel by Anthony Doerr that won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The question of what to include as essential literature is not new. The College Board, for example, has long encouraged teachers to teach certain texts, like “Frankenstein,” in Advanced Placement literature classes because they are likely to show up on the end-of-year A.P. exam.
And some charter school networks like Great Hearts, which runs schools in Texas and Arizona, and Success Academy, in New York City, have rigorous lists of books that students are expected to read.
But the Texas list would be a rare attempt at creating a shared canon for an entire state. The list was still being edited this week. Texas officials voted to remove a picture book on Noah’s Ark for first graders, for example, but keep a book on Johnny Appleseed in second grade.
If approved, the list would be required to be in place by the 2030 school year.
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