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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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.
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) Fearing Deportation, Mothers Give Birth in Shadows
Haitian women are having babies in squalid, unsupervised settings after the Dominican Republic started sending immigration agents to detain migrants at hospitals.
Photographs by Ana María Arévalo Gosen, Written by Hogla Enecia Pérez and Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Reporting from the Dominican Republic, May 26, 2026
Katty Joseph, a Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic, was afraid to go to a hospital to have her baby.
She did not want to get deported.
Dominican immigration officials stationed at public hospitals were detaining undocumented migrants who were then deported, including mothers and their newborns. The dragnet, underway for over a year, has overwhelmingly ensnared Haitians fleeing a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in neighboring Haiti.
Ms. Joseph, 20, arrived in the Dominican Republic a year ago and was living in the backroom of a car repair shop after the owner took her in. That is where, in late October, she said she gave birth.
Propped on a blanket on the grease-stained floor, she said she pushed through the stifling Caribbean heat with the help of a friend. Ms. Joseph cut the umbilical cord herself with a razor, she said, but the baby didn’t cry.
Less than 24 hours later, he was dead, she said.
“It was a very difficult moment,” Ms. Joseph said in Creole, searching for words to describe her loss.
The Dominican Republic is carrying out one of the most extensive mass deportation campaigns in the Western Hemisphere, expelling thousands of Haitians back to a country in shambles.
The effort has extended to hospitals, a contentious move critics have denounced as inhumane and reflecting deep anti-Haitian sentiments on the island nation.
Dominican officials describe the hospital crackdown, which began in April 2025, as a crucial step to remove Haitians they say are draining public resources. By the government’s metrics, the policy has worked: Deportations are up, and the number of Haitians seeking hospital care is down.
But over the past year, it has led a growing number of Haitian women to give birth at home or in other unsupervised and often squalid settings, according to medical professionals and local advocacy groups.
They warn that mothers and infants face life-threatening risks — including infections and hemorrhages — without medical intervention.
The fallout is clear: Hospital births among Haitian women dropped by nearly 60 percent in the 12 months since agents were deployed — to 13,856 from 32,967 in 2024, according to Dominican health statistics.
“It’s been catastrophic,” said William Charpentier, the president of the National Board for Migration and Refugees, a Dominican advocacy group assisting Haitian mothers.
Over several months, The New York Times interviewed nearly a dozen Haitian mothers, as well as doctors and informal midwives helping Haitian women give birth in the shadows. The Times documented the deaths of one newborn from medical complications and one mother who died of septic shock two weeks after delivering twin boys at home.
Giving Birth in the Shadows
Ms. Joseph said the owner of the car repair shop took her baby to a pediatrician four hours after the boy was born in Puerto Plata, on the northern Dominican coast. The pediatrician, Dr. Juan Payero, said the baby’s vital signs were stable, but he was concerned that the infant was hungry and had not yet cried.
Dr. Payero said he urged Ms. Joseph to go to a hospital, but the baby died a few hours later. Ms. Joseph said she dug a hole and buried the baby’s body herself on a hill near the town where she lived. An autopsy was never performed to determine the cause of death, she said.
The baby, Dr. Payero suggested, could have died from malnourishment, lack of oxygen, an infection caused by the unhygienic conditions in which he was delivered, or tetanus from the razor used to cut the umbilical cord.
The crisis is the latest flashpoint in decades of tension on Hispaniola, the Caribbean island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The Dominican economy has long relied on Haitian migration to power its agriculture, construction and tourism industries, but the recent surge triggered a backlash.
Tens of thousands of Haitians have crossed the 240-mile land border in recent years, escaping relentless bloodshed and deprivation in one of the most unstable countries in the Americas.
The Dominican government responded with a far-reaching deportation campaign supported by many Dominicans worried that Haiti’s gang violence would spill over the border and that the exodus was burdening taxpayers.
President Luis Abinader, tapping into a wave of nationalism that fueled his re-election in 2024, imposed weekly deportation quotas that have led to the expulsion of more than 478,000 Haitians since January 2025, including border crossers deported multiple times, according to Dominican officials.
The last government survey, from 2017, estimated that nearly 500,000 Haitians lived in the Dominican Republic, with an additional 252,000 born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents.
Mr. Abinader oversaw the construction of a 100-mile border fence surveilled by soldiers and sensors, but his most divisive move took aim at places traditionally considered sanctuaries: hospitals.
In April 2025, the government began requiring the island’s public hospitals to report patients without proper documentation to immigration authorities so that they could be detained and deported after receiving care. Not even the Trump administration has enacted similar measures at U.S. hospitals as part of its deportation campaign.
Dominican officials said the move was necessary to prevent overcrowding in hospitals they described as inundated by Haitian migrants.
Vice Adm. Luis Rafael Lee Ballester, the general director of migration, said he was unaware of any spike in at-home births among Haitian women.
He stressed that undocumented Haitians face deportation only after receiving and paying for medical care in hospitals. Under current protocols, mothers are detained 72 hours after giving a natural birth, while those who undergo C-sections are detained after seven days.
“We’ve seen ourselves obligated to take a series of measures for national security and to guarantee the safety of our citizens,” Admiral Lee Ballester said in an interview, adding that officials were acting with “a high degree of professionalism and respect for human dignity.”
The policy, which has resulted in the deportation of breastfeeding mothers and their infants, has been denounced by human rights organizations and the United Nations, with a top U.N. official in Haiti saying it raised “serious humanitarian and human rights concerns.”
Cristiana Luis, the president of the Movement of Dominican-Haitian Women, an advocacy group, said, “It’s an affront to the human dignity of women. And their girls and boys.”
Twins, Orphaned at Birth
Over the past year, fear of deportation to their crisis-ridden homeland has kept many Haitians from seeking medical care.
Last November, Linline Poleis, 28, gave birth to twins, Duleyson and Dudleyca, in a house under construction where she was living without permission, according to her family. She refused to go to a hospital for fear of being deported and was alone during the delivery, until a midwife arrived later to help cut the umbilical cords, her family said.
She quickly became ill and began to bleed profusely from her pelvis, according to family members and neighbors interviewed by The Times. Neighbors said they pooled 4,500 pesos, or $75, to send her to a private health clinic, where she was treated for high blood pressure.
The next day, Ms. Poleis collapsed and died on a sidewalk in Santo Domingo, the country’s capital, her family said. Her autopsy report, conducted by Dominican officials and reviewed by The Times, found she died from septic shock, septicemia and endometritis — a uterine infection that is a leading cause of postpartum death.
The orphaned twins are now in the care of their father’s family.
A New Crop of Midwives
The spike in at-home births has revived a cottage industry of parteras or midwives, who were common decades ago but had largely disappeared as the Dominican Republic moved toward a hospital-based maternity system.
Kenya Degraff, a 28-year-old community activist, said that since becoming a midwife last year, she has crisscrossed the island helping more than two dozen Haitian women give birth — never charging them a fee.
“Right now, many Haitians here don’t have money,” Ms. Degraff said, referring to the high costs to give birth at private hospitals to avoid immigration officials. “Are you going to let someone die because of money?”
The Times late last year visited the house of another midwife in northern Dominican Republic crowded with six Haitian women. The midwife said she charged $100 to $250 for her services, from simply cutting the umbilical cord to providing traditional steam baths, which can help soothe new mothers.
“Dominicans don’t know I do this at home,” said the midwife, who requested anonymity out of fear that Dominican officials could deport the women she helps.
Islan Luis, 21, was visiting the midwife’s house after giving birth two days earlier because she did not have the $2,000 she said it cost to give birth at a private hospital.
Ms. Luis said she had gone to shower in her home and felt a pain in her hip when she suddenly went into labor in the bathroom.
“The baby was born immediately after I felt the pain,” said Ms. Luis, who was still suffering from abdominal pain but had not yet seen a doctor.
After 17 hours of labor at the midwife’s house, another Haitian woman, who requested anonymity out of concern that she could be identified and deported, rushed to a public hospital to give birth.
The Times accompanied the woman and her husband to the hospital, where they said they paid a $250 bribe to avoid being reported to immigration authorities, on top of the roughly $85 for the hospital care.
Shortly after giving birth, she said, she had to share a bed with another Haitian mother and both of their babies.
Nearby, she added, Dominican mothers cuddled their babies in their own individual beds.
This report was produced with the support of the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) as part of its Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice in the Americas Initiative. The Times retained full editorial control over the article, and funders do not review stories before publication.
Frances Robles contributed reporting.
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2) Judge to Decide How Long Torture’s Taint Infected the Sept. 11 Case
Eight days of legal arguments at Guantánamo have brought the long-running terrorism case to a moment of truth in the long wait for justice.
By Carol Rosenberg, May 26, 2026
Reporting from the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Washington
A detainee at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay in 2019. The case of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is in its 15th year of pretrial proceedings, with no date set for the trial to begin. Doug Mills/The New York Times
Prosecutors portrayed the prisoners as unrepentant jihadists who bragged about their roles in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to federal agents during their first months in military detention at Guantánamo Bay.
Defense lawyers cast the men as so broken by violence and solitary confinement in their years in C.I.A. prisons overseas that they were groomed to involuntarily confess to U.S. agents.
Over eight days this month, the two sides offered these stark, clashing views to a military judge who is now confronted with the overarching question in the long-running capital case: Did Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of hatching and organizing the Sept. 11 attacks, and two co-defendants voluntarily incriminate themselves to F.B.I. agents years ago, and can their statements be used against them?
The case is in its 15th year of these pretrial proceedings, and no date has been set for the trial to begin. But the judge’s decision could be a turning point almost 25 years after the attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.
The judge, Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, said he would rule this summer.
Stephan Gerhardt, whose brother Ralph was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, said the judge’s decision would provide “a major step forward as it answers probably the biggest legal question that needs resolution before a trial date being set.”
He watched some of the arguments in the court at Guantánamo this month.
The legal question before the judge is not about the crime itself, the largest terrorist attack ever in the United States. That will be left for a trial.
The Secretive World of Guantánamo Bay
· U.S.S. Cole: The Army judge in the bombing case ordered the prosecution to do its “due diligence” in providing defense lawyers with any evidence the U.S. government might have “regarding Iran’s role” in the attack off Yemen 25 years ago. President Trump has said Iran was “probably involved.”
· Torture Ruling: A government lawyer appealed to a Pentagon review court to overturn a torture ruling in the Sept. 11 case that disqualified the use of the confessions of a man accused of conspiring in the hijacking plot that killed nearly 3,000 people.
· Cuban Deportees: The long, circuitous journey of dozens of Cuban men who were designated for deportation from the United States last year but instead taken to a prison at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay ended when they were repatriated to Cuba.
· Guantánamo Prison Enters 25th Year: The prison has outlasted the war in Afghanistan, has employed tens of thousands of temporary troops and holds six men charged but not yet tried in death penalty cases.
· A Curious Collaboration: An unlikely collection of portraits has given the public its only glimpse inside the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay.
It is whether the prisoners were so thoroughly conditioned after more than three years of incommunicado detention, which started off with brutality and continued with years of questioning by U.S. government agents, that they involuntarily told their captors what they wanted to hear.
A crux of the question confronting the judge is the legal principle of attenuation, how to get an untainted confession after a coerced one. Prosecutors say the “clean” interrogations at Guantánamo in 2007 met the legal standard of a change in time, change in place and change in identity of questioners.
Defense lawyers say they did not.
Transfer to Guantánamo
To make his decision, the judge is reviewing years of testimony and reams of classified evidence managed by four previous judges in the case against Mr. Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi to decide whether there was a clear moment of attenuation.
Or, as the judge called it, the pivot.
Military judges have so far thrown out the confessions of two other capital defendants, Ammar al-Baluchi and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, because of what the C.I.A. did to them. Prosecutors are appealing to reinstate Mr. Baluchi’s statements.
“Mr. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed could not shut up about his role as the emir of the 9/11 attacks,” the lead prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., said on the first day of the hearing. Mr. Trivett said Mr. Mohammed boasted about the attacks to C.I.A. interrogators after he was captured in Pakistan in March 2003 and then to F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo in January 2007.
It was in March 2003 when Mr. Mohammed was in C.I.A. custody that he was waterboarded 183 times. His lawyer, Gary D. Sowards, said that after his client was tortured, he was questioned hundreds of times, sometimes three times a day, by C.I.A. investigators.
Then at Guantánamo in 2007, the agents who questioned the defendants did not give them an explicit Miranda warning of their right to remain silent, the agents later testified. The prisoners were also not given a “cleansing statement” informing them that their previous statements could not be used against them.
The men were in their fourth year in U.S. custody and they had not been allowed to consult a lawyer, though Mr. Mohammed had asked for one. That would come more than a year later, after they had confessed and were charged.
Mr. Trivett, the prosecutor, told the judge that the pivot point took place when the prisoners “walked off” a C-17 cargo plane at Guantánamo Bay in September 2006 and were told they were in the custody of the Defense Department. It was Labor Day weekend, and President Bush announced days later that they had been transferred to Guantánamo for criminal prosecution.
In court, defense lawyers showed the judge classified photos of the men on the airstrip in shackles and blindfolds, like the chains and hoods the C.I.A. had used to move them around the world between secret prisons. To the prisoners, their lawyers said, it was another stop on their odyssey through the black sites that began with their capture and torture in 2003.
The two weeks of arguments toggled between these narratives.
Secret Recordings
Defense lawyers described the early years of C.I.A. custody when the defendants were beaten and shackled upright and nude in agonizing ways to deprive them of sleep. Their heads were repeatedly slammed into a wall, and agency records showed they were subjected to humiliating rectal abuse.
After the men were broken, they continued to cooperate under a threat of returning them to “the hard times,” a term used by agency psychologists who had violently interrogated them, their lawyers said.
Conditions at Guantánamo were somewhat different, the lawyers said, but not different enough in the minds of men who had been conditioned to cooperate in years of isolation. Before his F.B.I. interrogations at Guantánamo, each man was held alone in his cell 23 hours a day, then let out into an open-air portion for conversation with another prisoner two cells away, the testimony showed.
The prisoners saw representatives of the International Red Cross for the first time after more than a thousand days of detention, and could write home that they were alive. But the prison copied those messages and, over the objections of the Red Cross, gave them to prosecutors to use against the prisoners.
Two agents testified that, on his first day of interrogation in 2007, Mr. Bin Attash blurted out a request to “tell the judge” that he was proud of his contributions to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Defense lawyers described once-classified episodes of abuse in court to persuade the judge that the men were still in the thrall of C.I.A. conditioning when they were questioned in 2007 at Guantánamo.
Matthew Engle, who is representing Mr. Bin Attash, said C.I.A. records show that his client was at first chained and left wearing only a diaper, and then, in his second year of agency custody, starved into submission. Mr. Bin Attash “came to adopt a persona he had never had before,” the person who defiantly told F.B.I. agents to send a message to an imaginary judge, as no case had yet been charged.
Walter Ruiz, the lawyer for Mr. Hawsawi, said the C.I.A. had secretly held him at Guantánamo for a few months starting in late 2003, and brought him there with a torn, hemorrhaging rectum from a brutal cavity search at the last black site. He was still bleeding when he was brought back to the base in late 2006 and told he was in military custody.
Prosecutors played covert prison recordings of the defendants discussing their 2007 interrogations to show that their confessions were voluntary.
“The C.I.A. time is over,” Mr. Mohammed is heard saying on a tape, quoting his questioners. “Now the choice is in your hands.”
Defense lawyers said the recordings were cynically chosen selections of prisoners describing what they had been told in their interrogations, not necessarily their acceptance of the claim. Mr. Engle asked the judge to listen to other recordings.
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3) Cubans Deported to Mexico Live a Precarious Existence, Report Finds
A Human Rights Watch report found that many Cubans deported to Mexico by the Trump administration are living in an “indefinite legal limbo” and struggling to get by.
By Patricia Mazzei, Reporting from Miami, May 27, 2026
More than 4,300 Cubans were deported from the United States to Mexico between President Trump’s 2025 inauguration and March 9, 2026. Eva Marie Uzcategui for The New York Times
Record numbers of Cuban nationals have been deported from the United States since President Trump returned to office last year, but most have not been repatriated to Cuba. Instead, they have been sent to Mexico, where many arrive with little documentation or money — and in some cases wind up living on the street, Human Rights Watch reported on Wednesday.
The group found that Cuban deportees, many of them older men who had lived in Florida or other U.S. states for decades, have struggled to find shelter, receive medical care and generally get by in Mexico. Unable to return to Cuba, or to legally work or relocate within Mexico for many months, some of the men are living in an “indefinite legal limbo,” the report said.
The report was based on interviews with 53 recent deportees, 41 of them Cuban, conducted between February and March. The oldest man was 83. Several had lived in the United States since they were children or teenagers. Others were once legal permanent residents, but lost their green cards after criminal convictions. Cuba usually will not accept deportees with criminal convictions.
Cubans had long benefited from legal privileges unavailable to immigrants from other countries, but the Trump administration has not hesitated to deport them, all but ending legal immigration from the island.
The New York Times interviewed several of the men before the report’s release. One 59-year-old, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation against his relatives in the United States, described being sent on a 38-hour bus journey from the southern border to Villahermosa, in southern Mexico. There, he said, the Mexican authorities simply told him and other deportees to get off the bus.
Some men eventually made their way to a temporary shelter. But months later, Human Rights Watch found others living across the street from a hospital. In Tapachula, another city in southern Mexico with many Cuban deportees, some have been living in a public park, the report said.
The report laid out numerous concerns about the Trump administration’s so-called third-country deportation policy, which sends deportees not to their home countries, but to other nations that have agreed to accept them. Some have been sent as far as to African countries.
But a vast majority have ended up in Mexico, where Cubans in particular are effectively without a country. Cuban consular authorities typically decline to assist Cuban nationals deported to Mexico, the report found. The Mexican government does not ensure services for deportees from other countries, according to Human Rights Watch, and requires them to navigate a complicated system to apply for asylum.
“Once in Mexico, the avenues for regularizing their status are largely limited to seeking asylum,” the report said, noting that deportees often lack cellphones or email accounts, yet are required to have regular in-person check-ins.
Between Mr. Trump’s 2025 inauguration and March 9, 2026, the United States deported to Mexico nearly 13,000 people who were not Mexican, the report noted. Of those, more than 4,300 were Cuban, the most from a single country.
A significant portion of the Cubans, 41 percent, had been detained in Florida, and 37 percent in Texas. A Human Rights Watch analysis of data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement found that 27 percent had no criminal records in the United States.
The Trump administration has said that third-country deportations allow ICE to enforce final removal orders for people who cannot be returned to their home countries. The White House did not respond to a request for comment late on Tuesday.
In the past, many Cubans with deportation orders ended up staying because repatriating them was not a priority. Many built families and businesses in South Florida, the heart of the Cuban exile community.
But last year, some South Florida Cubans with old criminal convictions began getting detained at their regular ICE check-ins, as the Trump administration was doing with other foreign nationals. Many were sent to a new detention center in the Florida Everglades known as Alligator Alcatraz.
Then, word began to spread across the Miami area that some of the men were being taken to the border, released into Mexico and bused by the Mexican authorities to the southern part of the country.
Their families called elected officials and immigration lawyers in South Florida for help. Few spoke publicly about the deportations, both out of fear of retaliation and out of apparent shame over their relatives’ convictions.
One of the Miami men deported to Mexico last August, Raúl Hernández, posted a TikTok video sharing his story. He built a following while streaming live from Mexico and interviewing other deported Cubans.
He considers himself luckier than most: His father already lived in Cancún, so he had a place to go after the bus dropped him off in Villahermosa, more than 500 miles away, he said in an interview.
Mr. Hernández, 29, who arrived in the United States when he was 6, acknowledged that he had a long criminal record that began when he was 15. But he said he has met plenty of Cuban deportees in Mexico who do not, he said.
For many of them, he added, life without legal status in Mexico has been “hell on earth.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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4) The Battle Over Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Comes to a Parking Lot
For five days, activists have gathered outside a detention center in New Jersey to denounce conditions inside. Federal officials have rejected those concerns.
By Ana Ley and Mark Bonamo, May 27, 2026
Demonstrators confronted federal agents on Tuesday outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark. Dakota Santiago for The New York Times
Atop an empty patch of pavement in Newark, dozens of demonstrators arrived at dawn on Tuesday hoisting cardboard protest signs. In front of them, an armored vehicle rolled up to a cordon of federal agents who carried rifles and metal batons, their bodies concealed beneath the rising sun in helmets, flak vests and balaclavas.
For five days, the two sides have been in a volatile standoff outside Delaney Hall, a federal detention center that has become a symbol of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. A stream of activists have cycled in and out of a parking lot to support what they described as a hunger strike by detainees. For months, the incarcerated migrants have complained to family members and elected officials about rotten food and inadequate medical care. Democratic elected officials have expressed outrage over the migrants’ living conditions.
On Tuesday, emotions were inflamed. Some activists taunted the agents, and one woman sobbed inside a tent. As the day grew hotter, the stench from the nearby Passaic River, fetid from raw sewage, permeated the air.
“Do you ever feel bad for the people inside the facility?” Adam Crai, an activist, asked one of the masked agents.
Rebecca Brunner, 37, volunteers for an organization called the Radical Hospitality Zone that seeks to comfort relatives and friends of people who are in Delaney Hall, which is part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s network of detention centers.
“I care what happens to these people and their families,” Ms. Brunner said as her eyes welled with tears. “This whole thing is going to escalate.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which is the parent agency of ICE, dismissed accusations that detainees were being subjected to inhumane living conditions. In an email sent on Tuesday afternoon, the agency said that there was no hunger strike at Delaney Hall “at this time” and urged people who are being detained to self-deport.
“For many illegal aliens, this is the best health care they have received their entire lives,” the Department of Homeland Security said. “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”
Not long after the federal agency’s email arrived, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey issued a statement insisting that for days, hundreds of detainees at Delaney Hall participated in a hunger strike to protest mistreatment. The A.C.L.U. of New Jersey said that migrants at other detention centers had engaged in similar acts of resistance.
Some Democratic officials in New Jersey had called for the closure of Delaney Hall since the Trump administration reopened it last year, including Gov. Mikie Sherrill, Senator Andy Kim and Representatives LaMonica McIver, Analilia Mejia, Rob Menendez, Frank Pallone and Nellie Pou.
Cori Herbig, 49, lives in Parsippany and works in government affairs. She periodically joined the protests outside Delaney Hall during the weekend and was among a group of demonstrators who were the target of pepper balls and spray on Monday during a clash with the agents. Senator Kim, who said that he had tried to de-escalate the standoff, was among those affected.
The crowd of protesters has ranged from a few dozen to more than 100, with dozens of federal agents responding.
“I was at the Memorial Day parade in my hometown watching my son march in the marching band, and then I was getting tear-gassed,” Ms. Herbig said. “If they’re doing that to us outside, I can only imagine what’s happening inside where no one is looking.”
The Department of Homeland Security said that no one was hit directly by projectiles on Monday and described the protesters as rioters who had obstructed law enforcement officers from leaving the ICE facility. According to the department, the agents told the protesters to move out of the way at least twice, but the protesters refused. The agents used the minimum amount of force necessary to protect themselves, the public and federal property, the Department of Homeland Security said.
“The First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly — not rioting,” the department said. “D.H.S. is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters.”
Representative Menendez, who spent hours outside Delaney Hall since the protests began on Friday, criticized the federal government’s deportation campaign during a news conference on Tuesday outside the detention facility.
“Why are we holding our neighbors and our community members in this privately run detention center that can’t do anything right?” Mr. Menendez said. “In the last 24 hours, they have tried to shift the focus into what is happening out here, because they want to shift the attention away from all the conditions inside.”
Abdur Yasin, 47, a firefighter from West Orange, N.J., was among the group of demonstrators outside Delaney Hall.
“The conditions in this facility are outrageous,” Mr. Yasin said. “We have to show dignity.”
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5) Two Survivors Left at Sea After U.S. Attacks Boat in Pacific
One person was killed in the U.S. military’s 58th strike against vessels it accused of smuggling drugs.
By Eric Schmitt, Reporting from Washington, May 27, 2026
Gen. Francis L. Donovan of the Marine Corps, the head of the Southern Command, ordered the strike. Eric Lee for The New York Times
The U.S. military conducted an airstrike on Tuesday against a vessel it accused of smuggling drugs, killing one person and leaving two survivors in the eastern Pacific, U.S. Southern Command said in a social media post.
The result of the strike was unusual. There have rarely been survivors in the 58 attacks against boats the United States has claimed were engaged in drug trafficking in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. And in all but two cases, survivors were lost at sea.
Military experts say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings.
The strike on Tuesday, the first in nearly three weeks after the military accelerated its recent pace of attacks, brought the death toll to at least 194 since September. Bad weather has hampered strike operations in recent weeks, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.
Gen. Francis L. Donovan of the Marine Corps, the head of the Southern Command, ordered the strike, the command said in a statement on social media, which included a 19-second video showing a boat speeding along in the water and then exploding.
Southern Command said in its social media post that it had notified the U.S. Coast Guard to activate a “Search and Rescue system.” A second U.S. official said on Wednesday that the Mexican Navy was in charge of the search for the survivors.
Citing unspecified intelligence, the U.S. military claimed that the boat was operated by “Designated Terrorist Organizations” and was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”
The Trump administration has not provided evidence that the boats that have been attacked were involved in drug smuggling.
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6) The Viruses Causing New Outbreaks Are Much Less Familiar to Science
The types of Ebola and hantavirus panicking officials are very different from the species identified decades ago, raising new questions about how to respond.
By Carl Zimmer, May 27, 2026
A scanning electron micrograph of Ebola virus particles. There are six known species in the Ebola genus. Science Source
This month, a pair of viruses seized the headlines. First came a hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship, which caused as many as 13 infections, three of which were fatal. Then an Ebola outbreak flared in Africa, so far leading to more than 900 infections and 220 deaths.
In both cases, the news has been not only frightening but also confusing, even to scientists. The hantaviruses didn’t seem to be acting like hantaviruses, and the Ebola viruses weren’t behaving like Ebola viruses.
Hantaviruses are carried by rodents and other animals, and typically infect people who inhale dried animal urine and saliva. But aboard the cruise ship M.V. Hondius, hantaviruses were moving from person to person.
As for the African outbreak, scientists have made huge strides in fighting Ebola in recent years. They’ve created vaccines that can slow the spread of the disease and antiviral drugs that can cure infections.
But these treatments are probably going to be weak or useless. This is a very different Ebola virus.
What gives? There is a vast diversity of viruses, but we employ a limited vocabulary to talk about them. It would be just as confusing to treat blue whales like fruit bats and Siberian tigers, simply on the grounds that they’re all mammals.
Jens Kuhn, a virologist who serves on the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, said that the recent outbreaks point to yawning gaps in our understanding of the so-called virosphere, the millions — perhaps even trillions — of virus species thriving around us.
“These are case-use examples of why taxonomy is important,” he said. “Is something the same, or is it different? Well, if it’s different, then stuff we know about the other thing will not work on it.”
Ebola viruses got their names from the site of one of the first documented outbreaks in 1976: the Ebola River, in what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. When scientists examined blood from the victims, they isolated long, snakelike viruses distinct from any previously known.
But 1976 saw another outbreak that also caused deadly, bloody fevers — this one hundreds of miles to the east, in what was then Sudan, now South Sudan. The infected also harbored snakelike viruses.
When scientists compared the viral genes, however, they found a striking number of differences. In later years, Ebola outbreaks occurred dozens of times, and in most cases the viruses resembled either the type first seen in Zaire or the type seen in Sudan.
Eventually, Dr. Kuhn and his colleagues formally recognized the two kinds of viruses as two distinct species. And, as taxonomists do in such cases, they gave each species a Latin name: Orthoebolavirus zairense and Orthoebolavirus sudanense.
But in the 50 years since the first Ebola outbreak, scientists have found other relatives of these viruses. In 2007, for example, 149 people in the Bundibugyo District of Uganda came down with hemorrhagic fevers, and 37 died.
The virus they harbored was, genetically speaking, over 30 percent different from the viruses isolated in Zaire and Sudan — a new species, known now as Orthoebolavirus bundibugyoense.
The Bundibugyo virus caused a second small outbreak in 2012 before exploding back on the scene this month. The vaccines and the drugs that were developed for the Zaire species don’t work against the Bundibugyo virus, which belongs to a different evolutionary lineage. That’s one reason the new outbreak has public health experts so worried.
Hantaviruses also got their names from a river: the Hantan River, which flows through North and South Korea. It’s in a region where a mysterious kidney disease struck people every year. In 1978, researchers isolated the cause: a virus carried by striped field mice.
Since then, scientists have discovered hantaviruses lurking in rodents and other mammals around the world. Some of them also cause kidney damage, while others strike the heart and the lungs.
The actor Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, died at their New Mexico home last year after being infected with a type of hantavirus called Sin Nombre. Diagnosed earlier with Alzheimer’s, Mr. Hackman died days afterward.
As hantaviruses have adapted to rodents and other mammals across much of the world, they have evolved an enormous diversity — Dr. Hoeg and his colleagues recognize 38 species in the genus Orthohantavirus. (The Ebola genus, by contrast, includes only six species.)
Each species in turn may harbor a lot of diversity. As viruses replicate, strains can pick up new mutations that can drastically change their biology.
The outbreak on M.V. Hondius this spring was caused by a species called Orthohantavirus andesense, carried by a number of rodents in South America. But there are four strains of this species; the outbreak was caused by one called Andes virus.
Unlike the other three strains — and unlike the 37 other species of hantaviruses — Andes virus can spread directly from one person to another.
“It seems like there are some mutations that under certain circumstances can make Andes virus person-to-person transmissible,” Dr. Kuhn said. No one knows what those mutations are.
Dr. Kuhn suspects that the other strains related to Andes virus are lurking in rodents and share this ability to spread among people. After the M.V. Hondius outbreak, he predicts, scientists in Argentina and Chile will “go into their freezers with all the samples and sequence the crap out of everything and figure out — what are all these things?”
As for Ebola, Dr. Kuhn expects more unpleasant surprises. He points to Orthoebolavirus taiense, also known as Taï Forest virus.
The first and last time anyone saw this species was in 1994, when it infected a scientist dissecting a dead chimpanzee. She developed Ebola symptoms but eventually recovered.
“I’m sure it’s still out there, but nobody focuses on it because it caused only one case,” Dr. Kuhn said. “I think that’s a big mistake.”
Other Ebola-like species that have yet to be discovered and named may be lurking in African animals. The classification system that Dr. Kuhn has helped create will hopefully make it an easier process.
He doesn’t expect people to learn to rattle off Orthohantavirus andesense and other Latin names in casual conversation. But instead of referring to the cause of the outbreak in Africa as the Ebola virus, he suggests calling it Bundibugyo virus. (It’s pronounced boon-dee-boo-joh.)
“The moment you mix up Bundibugyo virus and Ebola virus, the impression will be, ‘Oh, we’ve got something for that,’” Dr. Kuhn said. “But we don’t.”
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7) Trump Is Remaking the World Map. What Could Go Wrong?
By Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, May 27, 2026
Mr. Hanson and Mr. Kopstein are the authors of “The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future.”
A week after launching the war with Iran, President Trump was asked whether the map of the country would still look the same after the end of hostilities. His response was striking: “That I can’t tell you. Probably not.”
In an administration that frequently confuses swagger with strategy, this remark was nonetheless extraordinary. Iran is one of the largest countries in the world. Redrawing its borders might unleash political, ethnic and religious conflict that could destabilize the entire region. This is only one example of a much larger pattern: Mr. Trump’s notion of international borders is, in a word, fuzzy.
Mr. Trump has threatened to use the U.S. military in Colombia and Mexico and promised to “take back” the Panama Canal. His administration claims to be in armed conflict with drug cartels while U.S. forces attack boats across the Caribbean and Pacific, killing almost 200 people. His long-running obsession with acquiring Greenland — backed by escalating diplomatic, economic and military pressure on Denmark and other NATO allies — has almost brought down the already-tottering Western alliance. After repeatedly musing aloud about turning Canada into the “51st state,” Mr. Trump now indulges in social media posts depicting Venezuela covered with the American flag.
Where is all this going? The president has embraced an openly imperial approach to foreign policy, one that regards treaties as provisional, allies as obstacles and military power as a personal instrument of rule. While commentators have noted the “neo-royalist” cast of Mr. Trump’s worldview, his patrimonial understanding of geopolitics threatens something even more basic: the clearly defined international boundaries that are the very foundation of state sovereignty in the modern world. For someone who talks endlessly about borders, Mr. Trump has a porous idea of what they are. The result of this thinking will be a world of fuzzy borders, leading to a cacophony of territorial claims by rival states across the globe.
Today, international borders feel natural, even inevitable. Look at any standard map of the world, and the planet appears to be neatly parceled out, each country cleanly ending where another begins, rendered in distinct colors and locked in place by default settings. Disputes still exist — over Taiwan, Israel, Kashmir, Western Sahara — and they force awkward political compromises among mapmakers and in corporate boardrooms, where a misplaced line can trigger diplomatic backlash or regulatory punishment. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to redraw the map unilaterally and erase Ukraine’s sovereignty over its legally defined territory is shocking precisely because it violates these taken-for-granted conventions. Still, for most of the world, borders appear to be fixed, legible and uncontroversial.
That stability is a historical anomaly. Before the 20th century, international borders were vague, shifting and endlessly contested. The very notion of a crisp line dividing one state from another is a modern invention. Empires continually expanded and contracted through war, marriage, purchase and inheritance. Sovereignty was personal rather than defined by clear jurisdictions, tied to dynasties rather than fixed land. Territory was treasure, to be acquired and exploited.
Imperial frontiers were zones of ambiguity and friction. They sometimes sheltered dissenters and renegades escaping imperial repression, but authority over these borderlands was almost always unstable, contested by rival powers and enforced through unpredictable bursts of violence. Fuzzy borders were not romantic spaces of freedom. They were engines of conflict.
Europe learned that lesson the hard way in 1914. An assassination in Sarajevo set off a chain reaction of incompatible territorial claims in the Balkans. Each great power felt compelled to defend its interests, its allies or its imperial future. The result was four years of industrial slaughter and more than 14 million dead.
After the devastation of World War I, the victorious allies tried to solve the problem of fuzzy borders — and failed miserably. President Woodrow Wilson’s dream of neatly aligned nation-states collapsed under political opposition at home and ethnic reality abroad. The Versailles settlement left Weimar Germany humiliated and territorially dismembered, undermining democratic legitimacy and feeding the resentments Adolf Hitler would later exploit. The Treaty of Trianon similarly left Hungary territorially diminished and politically embittered, fueling irredentist claims against neighboring states that now governed large ethnic Hungarian populations.
World War II began the same way: with border disputes. Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938 met only token opposition from the international community and was rationalized by influential elites as a “natural” unification of German-speaking peoples. That concession made every border in Central and Eastern Europe negotiable. The Munich Agreement gutted Czechoslovakia by handing the ethnic German areas over to Hitler. The Nazi-Soviet pact carved up the borderlands between two totalitarian regimes. Poland was erased. The result was another global war and the deaths of some 50 million people, including the near annihilation of European Jewry.
The new global order created after World War II, despite its many shortcomings, has been remarkably successful in dealing with the fuzzy border problem. We tend to think of the global liberal order as resting primarily on the creation of new international institutions such as the United Nations, NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Less often noticed is the invention of a world system where, in principle, the linear boundaries of every state on the planet can be demarcated and are recognized by all. This arrangement has often been violated, including by the Western powers that set it up. It took many bloody decades of struggle for former European colonies to obtain state sovereignty, and the legacies of imperial boundary-drawing continue to bedevil politics in much of the post-colonial world. Yet the post-World War II border system is still far more precise and institutionalized than that of any previous era.
Mr. Trump’s cavalier dismissal of the relevance of state borders to American foreign policy threatens to bring humanity back to the dangerous world of never-ending geopolitical struggles over contested borderlands. The intractability of the conflict now emerging over who exactly has sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz is only a foretaste. In his second inaugural speech, Mr. Trump called for “a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory.” But if the United States can claim all or part of Canada, Panama, Venezuela, Greenland or Cuba, why should powerful states on other continents continue to observe international law in relations with neighbors whose territory they consider to be part of their own national patrimony?
A system of fuzzy borders, in which powerful states treat territory as negotiable and sovereignty as conditional, is not a viable alternative to the liberal world order. It would mean the re-emergence of a much older political logic in which power, not law, determines the boundaries of political community. The great powers of the 21st century — the United States, China and Russia — may each be tempted by this patrimonial vision of international affairs. But the price of returning to that world would not be paid in prestige or rhetoric, but in blood.
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8) What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity
By Rebecca Winthrop, May 27, 2026
Ms. Winthrop is the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution and led its global task force on A.I. and education.
Kevin Van Aelst
I am a big fan of technology. I’ve blissfully given over my spatial reasoning to Google Maps. I use artificial intelligence to chase down articles, do research, fix my grammar mistakes and whip up last-minute school-night recipes.
But I’ve recently drawn a sharp line in the sand: no A.I. for writing. I’m not talking about expense reports or routine emails. I mean actual writing, and the creative brainstorming that precedes it to explore different perspectives or develop novel insights. Increasingly, many people I talk to — from students to teachers to peers — tell me that they think it’s OK to use A.I. chatbots for brainstorming as long as they do the “real work” of writing.
But this misunderstands something critical: Brainstorming is the work that’s fundamental to writing. As a researcher studying A.I.’s effects on education, I have concluded that these tools only superficially improve writing. The bigger and more alarming impact they have is to constrict our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and useful ideas — what we call creative thinking. This seems to be especially true for students. A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge into a few homogenized categories.
The erosion of creative thinking means young people will struggle to navigate uncertainty. Workers will strain to adapt to a shifting labor market. And society will miss out on the new ideas that can solve complex problems and enhance lives.
For the past eight years, the Georgetown University neuroscientist Adam Green has been leading a national research team tracking the range of novel ideas that college-bound high school students present in their application essays, before and after the introduction of ChatGPT. In one study, he and his team examined personal statements from more than 370,000 students, and found that after ChatGPT became available, their essays suddenly used diverse and colorful language, but lacked truly creative ideas. And the linguistic coverup worked; post-ChatGPT essays were rated as more “creative” by human judges, even if the substance of the essays trod familiar territory.
In a separate study, the team found that human-written essays offered up to eight times more new ideas than those produced by A.I.
Another experiment run by a different research team compared short stories written by humans to those written with A.I. assistance. As with the student essays in Dr. Green’s study, A.I.-assisted essays had more interesting vocabulary and were rated more enjoyable to read, but the underlying story lines were more homogenous. Distinctive and offbeat ideas — with surprising characters or unusual settings — are often shunted to the side when A.I. is involved.
For the first time in human history, we have a technology that can generate words separately from the thoughts they represent. When a chatbot writes, it is predicting the next word that is most likely to make a “good” sentence or essay, based on the text it’s been trained on. It can identify sophisticated and creative word patterns independently of whether the underlying ideas represent something new.
When teenagers write their own essays, the work reflects their thoughts and personalities, their attempts to make meaning of their experiences. When we search for words, we are sifting through the same brain networks that form connections between ideas. A student who writes, “I’ll always think of learning to swim when I see a kite flying,” is connecting unique personal experiences in her life, which until recently, is a clear signal of truly creative thinking.
Another way A.I. interaction can narrow ideas is through the power of suggestion. Once a chatbot suggests a direction, humans tend to lock in on it. The conversational nature of A.I. can make it difficult to distinguish where the user’s thinking ends and the bot’s begins, making it effortless for people to adopt A.I.-generated perspectives as their own. It’s easy to see how an impressionable teenager could forgo writing the unconventional essay — about, say, what it feels like to play jazz or cook with your grandmother — in favor of whatever A.I. suggests.
Even more problematic, Dr. Green’s research shows that A.I. has the largest homogenizing impact on students who are farthest from the mean and have unique perspectives, including neurodivergent students and those from racial and linguistic minorities.
This is not to say that A.I. can never support human creativity. Workers with deep knowledge of their craft can use A.I. to streamline technical or administrative tasks in order to focus on the parts of their jobs where originality lives — including teachers having more time to devise engaging lessons and illustrators devoting more attention to developing visual concepts. A.I. gives specialists the time they need to do what humans do best: brainstorming ideas to creatively solve problems.
Our species’ ability to come up with unexpected and original ideas is something to protect and nurture. That’s especially true for today’s adolescents. A world where creative thinking flourishes is a world that has a better chance to weather the changes that A.I. will bring.
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9) The Mideast Is Baffled by Trump’s Call to Expand Abraham Accords
The president said more countries should be required to recognize Israel as part of a deal to end the war with Iran. Analysts say the chances of that happening are close to zero.
By Vivian Nereim, Isabel Kershner and Elian Peltier, May 28, 2026
Vivian Nereim reported from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem and Elian Peltier from Kabul, Afghanistan.
President Trump with leaders from Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates at the signing of the Abraham Accords in Washington in 2020. Doug Mills/The New York Times
The social media post by President Trump made it sound straightforward. The United States would orchestrate a deal to end the war with Iran and, in exchange, a slew of countries across the Middle East and South Asia would join an agreement, called the Abraham Accords, establishing relations with Israel.
In fact, he said, that “should be mandatory.” But half of the countries he named — such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey — already have relations with Israel. And the other half — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan — have no interest in establishing them anytime soon.
As a result, the meandering ultimatum that Mr. Trump shared on Monday was met with a mix of silence and bemusement across the Middle East. Regional analysts said they were not even sure that they understood the rationale behind his proposal. Why would ending the war, which the United States and Israel initiated by bombing Iran on Feb. 28, provide an incentive to recognize Israel for countries like Qatar, which had lobbied desperately to prevent the war in the first place?
“It’s just bizarre,” said Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel. “What’s the connection between a deal with Iran and that? I’m honestly puzzled.”
Two Western diplomats in the region said that no one was really taking the idea seriously. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomacy.
Asked to explain the connection between peace negotiations with Iran and expanding the Abraham Accords, a White House spokeswoman did not answer directly. Instead, she referred to remarks made by Mr. Trump on Wednesday, when he suggested that U.S. agreement on a deal with Iran could be made contingent upon countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar agreeing to recognize Israel.
“I think those countries owe it to us,” he said. “I’m not sure we should make the deal, if they don’t sign.”
The Saudi and Qatari governments did not respond to requests for comment.
Under the Abraham Accords — a deal brokered by the first Trump administration in 2020 — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco agreed to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. A wide range of American politicians have portrayed the pact as a major diplomatic achievement, and have frequently referred to the accords as a “peace deal.”
Scholars from the region say that is merely a turn of phrase, belying the fact that there has never been a war between Israel and Bahrain or the Emirates. In effect, the deals bypassed the central conflict — between Israel and the Palestinians — declaring harmony between parties that were not fighting.
Since then, the Abraham Accords have created opportunities for expanded trade, security cooperation and tourism between the countries that signed them. The Emirates, the Arab architect of the accords, has grown especially close to Israel. But the accords did not usher in a new era of regional peace — far from it — and the Emirates’ warm ties with Israel have increasingly made it an outlier in the Middle East.
For Israel, the crowning of the Abraham Accords would be the normalization of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, the largest Arab economy and home to Islam’s holiest sites. Saudi Arabia does not formally recognize Israel, although successive U.S. administrations have made it their goal to change that.
Few consider that a possibility now. Over the past couple of years, Saudi officials have consistently predicated ties with Israel on the creation of an independent state for Palestinians. Israel’s current government — the most right-wing in the country’s history — vehemently opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state and is unwilling to even talk of a pathway to one.
“Saudi Arabia will not be rushed into a historic decision that ignores Palestinian statehood,” said Salman al-Ansari, a Saudi political analyst. “Saudi Arabia’s commitment to a two-state solution is not a slogan, and it is not a bargaining chip.”
Mr. Trump’s language implied that he was giving an order, not making a request.
“It should start with the immediate signing by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and everybody else should follow suit,” he said. “If they don’t, they should not be part of this Deal in that it shows bad intention.”
Perhaps even Iran — Israel’s archenemy — could join the Abraham Accords, Mr. Trump mused.
“Wow, now that would be something special!” he wrote.
Soon after, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who had recently slammed the potential deal with Iran, wrote his own post on social media calling it a “simply brilliant” idea to link the deal with the expansion of the Abraham Accords.
“I expect our Arab allies to embrace this,” he wrote.
If taken at face value, those statements would seem to indicate an ignorance of political dynamics in the Middle East, analysts said. An association with Israel — never popular among Arab populations — has become even more toxic for many governments in the Middle East as a result of the devastating wars that Israel has waged in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran since the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023.
The more that American officials push for normalization as an imposition rather than as part of a mutually beneficial deal, “the more unpalatable it becomes,” said Abdulaziz Alghashian, a Saudi scholar and senior nonresident fellow at the Gulf International Forum, a research organization.
Under the Biden administration, the Saudi crown prince had been seeking substantial incentives from the United States in exchange for establishing ties with Israel, including access to American nuclear technology and a U.S.-Saudi defense pact.
The extent to which Mr. Trump’s mandate came across as a complete non sequitur in the Middle East made Mr. Alghashian think that the Abraham Accords were possibly “the only clear strategy the U.S. has in the region,” he said.
A deal with Iran appears shaky at best, and fighting has continued to flare as diplomats have negotiated the details. In Israel, Mr. Trump’s linkage between that deal and an expansion of the Abraham Accords has been largely met by baffled silence.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has not reacted publicly to Mr. Trump’s pronouncement. Analysts have said that the phased deal with Iran the president has proposed would most likely be hard for Mr. Netanyahu to swallow. If the bid to include an expansion of the Abraham Accords were meant as some kind of sweetener, the Israeli prime minister was not letting on.
Asked about the Abraham Accords becoming part of any Iran deal, or if Mr. Netanyahu had discussed this issue with Mr. Trump, the Israeli government responded with a statement saying only that “Israel is keen on expanding the circle of peace, which will be most beneficial to all signatories of the Abraham Accords.”
With Israeli elections expected this fall, and Mr. Netanyahu’s political future on the line, the prospect of Saudi Arabia or other Muslim-majority states handing him such a prize appears even more remote.
“Those countries won’t take a step before the elections in Israel and before seeing what the deal with Iran yields,” Mr. Guzansky said, adding, “We are still in such a fog of war.”
Mr. Trump even suggested that Pakistan — which has mediated between the United States and Iran to end the war — should join the accords.
In Pakistan, one of the world’s most populous Muslim-majority countries, officials and analysts greeted that call with a flat no. Pakistan does not recognize Israel, and its passports explicitly state that holders are barred from traveling there.
Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, said on local television that joining the accords would clash with the country’s “fundamental ideologies.”
Mr. Trump’s statement might have been an attempt to please parts of his domestic audience — such as Iran hawks who view the potential deal with the Iranians as a disappointment — Pakistani analysts said. They called the proposal a distraction from the peace negotiations between the United States and Iran.
“Trump may be trying to divert attention with his Abraham Accords statement, but it is a poor effort at that,” said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States and the United Nations.
In the end, Mr. Trump appeared to give himself an offramp — raising questions about why he had made the proposal in the first place.
“It may be possible,” he wrote in the post, that some of the countries he named have acceptable reasons for not recognizing Israel, he said.
But the rest of the countries, he said, should be ready to join in — making his settlement with Iran “a far more Historic Event than it would, otherwise, be.”
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Adam Rasgon from Tel Aviv.
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10) Prices in the U.S. Are Rising at the Fastest Pace in Years
Officials at the central bank have embraced the possibility of higher interest rates to get resurgent inflation under control.
By Colby Smith, Colby Smith covers the Federal Reserve., May 28, 2026
Vincent Alban/The New York Times
A measure of inflation closely watched by the Federal Reserve accelerated in April to a three-year high, reinforcing the central bank’s budding support to consider raising interest rates if price pressures do not ease.
The Personal Consumption Expenditures index rose 3.8 percent from the same time last year. It was the fastest annual pace since May 2023, when the Fed was in the midst of raising rates to tame a burst of inflation that had emerged in the wake of the pandemic.
A measure of underlying inflation that strips out volatile food and energy prices also notched a multiyear high. That measure, “core” inflation, increased at an annual pace of 3.3 percent, the fastest since November 2023.
On a monthly basis, inflation rose slightly less than expected. Overall prices jumped 0.4 percent and those excluding food and energy prices ticked up 0.2 percent.
That was a welcome reprieve, but on the whole, the latest data, which the Commerce Department released on Thursday, underscored the difficult position that officials at the central bank are now in with price pressures intensifying because of the war with Iran.
This month, the Consumer Price Index, another inflation gauge, also showed that consumer prices had risen at the fastest pace since May 2023.
Consumers have started to moderate their spending in the face of resurgent prices, according to Thursday’s data. Spending, once adjusted for inflation, rose just 0.1 percent in April, as incomes flatlined and the savings rate dropped to the lowest level since June 2022.
The Commerce Department also revised lower its assessment of growth in the first quarter, noting that the economy expanded 1.6 percent on an inflation-adjusted basis compared with its initial estimate of 2 percent.
The war, which began in late February, has severely disrupted global energy markets, raising the urgency of a deal between President Trump and Iranian officials. No agreement has emerged, however, and renewed hostilities in recent days have dimmed hopes that a crucial shipping pathway, the Strait of Hormuz, will be reopened soon.
The Fed typically ignores or “looks through” supply shocks because they historically tend to affect prices only temporarily. John C. Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, appeared to back this approach in remarks on Thursday. He acknowledged that continuing supply chain disruptions caused by the war were worrisome, but he estimated that the impact on inflation could peak in a few months.
But other officials have begun to question whether the look-through approach is the right one, given that the war with Iran is the fourth shock in five years to push inflation further from the Fed’s 2 percent target. The U.S. economy has weathered a series of events that have raised prices, including the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Mr. Trump’s global trade war.
Since 2021, inflation has been higher than the central bank would like. Expectations about inflation in the next five or 10 years still reflect confidence that the central bank will eventually succeed in bringing inflation down to 2 percent. But the longer inflation stays above that target, the more likely that confidence could begin to ebb.
With the labor market on firmer footing than just a couple of months ago, more Fed officials have embraced the possibility that rates may need to rise to get inflation fully under control.
“I want to be clear about my risk assessment: The risks remain tilted toward higher inflation,” said Lisa D. Cook, a Fed governor, in remarks on Wednesday. “I am prepared to raise rates, if the expected disinflation does not appear in a timely manner.”
That followed a speech last week from Christopher J. Waller, another governor, who made clear that he could “no longer rule out rate hikes further down the road if inflation does not abate soon.” That, he added, was “especially true if measures of inflation expectations, some of which have risen lately, show signs of becoming unanchored.”
The specter of higher rates comes amid a leadership transition at the Fed. Kevin M. Warsh, whom Mr. Trump picked to replace Jerome H. Powell as chair, was sworn in to the top job at the Fed last week. Mr. Trump has long berated the Fed for not lowering rates quickly enough.
Mr. Trump has hinted he will try to ease up on his pressure campaign now that Mr. Warsh is at the helm. At Friday’s swearing-in ceremony, which was held at the White House for the first time since 1987, the president said he wanted Mr. Warsh to be “totally independent.”
But that leeway could quickly disappear, especially if the Fed begins to more seriously consider rate increases, which would make all types of borrowing more expensive.
Traders in federal funds futures markets expect the central bank to eventually raise rates early next year.
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11) Five Takeaways From Our Investigation Into Texas School Police
The state’s ambitious school policing initiative has few safeguards to prevent overreach by officers.
By Clare Amari, Kristian Hernández and Asher Lehrer-Small, May 28, 2026
This article was reported in collaboration with The San Antonio Express-News as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
Anabelle Jaramillo is among the thousands of students in Texas who have had physical encounters with school police officers in recent years. Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Anabelle Jaramillo’s first and only encounter with the police officers in her Texas high school happened when she was accused of stealing a $13 classroom doorbell in 2024.
Anabelle, a 17-year-old honor student, told an assistant principal that she had accidentally knocked the bell loose, she said in an interview. Still, the administrator called the officers, who arrested the teen for theft. When Anabelle pulled away, the officers wrestled her onto her belly and handcuffed her.
The student, who is asthmatic and has panic attacks, gasped for air on the floor for three minutes, video footage shows.
Anabelle is among the thousands of students in Texas who have had physical encounters with school police officers in recent years. Many of these interactions have occurred since state lawmakers passed legislation in 2023 requiring an officer on each public school campus.
To understand how this initiative has played out, The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship collaborated with The San Antonio Express-News to examine thousands of pages of records describing use of force in schools. We also reviewed more than two dozen videos of police encounters on campuses and interviewed hundreds of students, educators, parents and officers.
Here are five takeaways from our reporting:
When it comes to school policing, Texas is different.
School districts across the United States have police officers assigned to their campuses. Most are employed by municipal police departments or sheriff’s offices. In Texas, however, nearly 400 of the state’s more than 1,000 public school districts have a different approach: Instead of tapping local police agencies for officers, they created their own departments.
School-district police departments are not unheard-of in other states, but typically only large school systems have them. In Texas, many small- and medium-size districts do, too.
The officers who work for these departments have the power to make arrests and usually carry firearms. Their chiefs report to the superintendent of schools.
After the 2022 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas made a major investment in school officers.
The shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde left 19 students and 2 teachers dead. The grief was felt in every corner of the state and across the nation. A year later, lawmakers in Texas approved the legislation requiring an officer on every campus, saying it would help prevent similar tragedies.
After the law passed, annual spending on school security statewide increased to more than $1.3 billion from about $900 million. The number of officers trained to work in schools rose to more than 11,000 from about 8,000, an analysis of state police certification data shows.
In recent interviews, dozens of students, parents and educators said that they welcomed the presence of police in their schools. Many raised concerns about violent fights and school shootings.
School officers across Texas have used physical force on students thousands of times in recent years.
The state does not maintain an official count of use-of-force episodes in schools. But our reporters found that school officers across Texas used physical force at least 2,600 times from January 2022 through December 2025.
That number — which we calculated by requesting use-of-force data and records from hundreds of school districts and police agencies — is an undercount. Some districts and departments ignored our requests or declined to share the information. About 200 provided some data, but few of them provided comprehensive figures.
Officers used heavy-handed tactics in response to misbehavior or often minor misconduct.
A state law in Texas says that school districts should not assign officers to handle “routine student discipline.” But our reporters found that school officers grabbed, tackled and used Tasers or pepper spray on students in response to misconduct that often appeared to be minor.
We were able to obtain case-level records for more than 450 episodes in which officers had used physical force in schools. Many of them began over misbehavior such as swearing, vaping or schoolyard scraps. More than 100 times, students were left with bruises, scrapes or other injuries. About two dozen of the overall cases involved students in elementary school who were handcuffed or restrained in other ways.
Police chiefs told our reporters that force was sometimes necessary when students were likely to hurt themselves or others. One chief said his officers used force largely to restrain or redirect students.
Texas has embraced school policing without establishing a clear system of oversight and accountability.
Regulatory agencies in Texas do not have the power to routinely review school officers’ actions and weigh in on possible overreach. State officials said that school boards and police agencies were responsible.
But many school boards play limited roles in police matters. Two dozen board members from across Texas said they did not believe law enforcement oversight was within their purview. Additionally, many use-of-force policies used by school-district police departments lacked specific guidance on handling students.
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12) Cuba Just Lost Its Next Best Chance for Fuel
A Russian tanker seemingly en route to Cuba with a lifeline of fuel has changed direction, a painful development for the island suffering under a U.S. oil blockade.
By Jack Nicas, May 28, 2026
Jack Nicas has been tracking fuel tankers trying to challenge the U.S. blockade on Cuba.
Yankiel Perez carried buckets of water on Monday outside a building in Havana. Credit...Jorge Luis Banos/Associated Press
Cuba’s desperate wait for fuel seems to have just gotten longer.
A Russian tanker that had appeared headed to Cuba — with 242,000 barrels of badly needed diesel — has turned away from the island and now appears to be on its way to South America.
The diversion is a brutal development for the Cuban government and its people, who have been enduring a worsening energy crisis since the Trump administration imposed an effective oil blockade against the island in January.
Russia has so far been the only nation allowed to break that blockade, with a March shipment of 730,000 barrels of crude oil. That oil, however, has largely already been used, and Cubans had hoped they were about to receive a new lifeline. But with the tanker’s left turn, any more help will now most likely take weeks to arrive, if it ever does.
Pentagon and U.S. Coast Guard spokespeople declined to comment, but expressed puzzlement at the tanker’s new route.
The Russian government did not respond to a request for comment.
Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, said that while he didn’t have details on the Russian tanker, Cuba was counting on Russia to help it survive what he called an illegal U.S. blockade.
“It’s hypocritical — cynical — that on one hand they talk about making efforts to open the Strait of Hormuz and so on, while on the other hand they are effectively imposing a naval blockade against Cuba,” Mr. Soberón Guzmán told The New York Times on Wednesday, referring to the U.S. government. “A fuel blockade that in practice constitutes an act of war.”
The tanker’s detour is a victory for the Trump administration, which has been trying to strangle Cuba into making major changes to its political and economic system. Cuba has said it has now depleted its fuel reserves and is surviving off domestic oil production, solar power and small fuel shipments to private enterprises on the island.
As a result, daily life is becoming increasingly difficult. Electricity works just a few hours a day, Cubans are cooking with charcoal and firewood, aid distribution is complicated by a lack of gas, and fuel is essentially available only on the black market, where it can cost upward of $40 a gallon.
Cubans are bracing for the summer heat, when demand for power generally increases, while the Trump administration is hoping the situation forces Cuban officials to accept U.S. demands.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio denied that the United States was responsible for the crisis. “The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people,” he said in a video addressed to the Cuban people last week.
Washington has been intensifying its pressure campaign. Last week, the Justice Department charged Raúl Castro, Cuba’s former president, with murder stemming from the 1996 downing of two civilian planes near Cuba that killed three American citizens.
The U.S. government halted shipments of Venezuelan oil to Cuba after intervening militarily in the South American nation. President Trump then threatened tariffs on any nation sending fuel to Cuba. And in one case, the U.S. military escorted a tanker away from the island.
Up until changing its route this week, the Russian tanker, called the Universal, showed numerous signs that it was headed to Cuba. On March 31, the same day that the last Russian tanker arrived in Cuba, the Universal left Russia loaded with diesel, according to Kplr, a ship-tracking data firm. Its destination was left vague.
Shortly after, Russian officials confirmed they were sending a second tanker to Cuba. “We won’t abandon the Cubans,” Russia’s energy minister, Sergei Tsivilyov, told reporters.
The Universal passed through the English Channel on April 9 and continued straight toward Cuba until April 21, when it suddenly stopped in the Atlantic Ocean, according to ship-tracking data. The ship then drifted, largely in place, for a month — until it abruptly headed south this week.
Pausing in the middle of the ocean for so long is highly unusual. Fuel tankers operate on strict schedules to deliver their cargo. But it followed the same pattern as another recent ship carrying fuel for Cuba.
The Sea Horse, a tanker owned by a Chinese firm, spent weeks drifting in the Atlantic this year before it gave up and delivered its cargo elsewhere. The ship’s owners had feared consequences from the U.S. government, The New York Times reported.
The United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions against the Universal for its links to Sovcomflot, a Russian state-owned shipping company.
Jorge Piñón, a University of Texas researcher who studies Cuban energy, said that the Universal’s diesel would have been an enormous, albeit temporary, lift for Cuba. Trucks and tractors need the fuel, but Cuba can’t produce it from its domestic oil.
Mr. Piñón estimated that the ship’s cargo, which was likely to be donated to Cuba, was worth $25 million. “So now Russia is going to make a pretty hefty profit,” he said.
Lazaro Gamio, Eric Schmitt and Christiaan Triebert contributed reporting.
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13) Guatemala Agrees to Joint Strikes With U.S. Against Drug Gangs
The deal is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to press Latin American countries to agree to joint operations inside their borders.
By Maria Abi-Habib and Eric Schmitt, May 28, 2026
“One of the next countries that the Defense Department intends to press to accept joint military action is Honduras, said two of the people familiar with the plans. The Trump administration is targeting Guatemala and Honduras to pressure Mexico into accepting joint counterdrug operations, those two people said. While Washington has been pushing for U.S. boots on the ground and drone strikes, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has staunchly rejected the requests. The White House’s broader strategy is to normalize an American military presence across Latin America to gain leverage over Mexico, according to the two people.”
Maria Abi-Habib reported from Mexico City and Eric Schmitt from Washington and Miami.
Security forces outside a prison in Guatemala City after a wave of riots and gang violence in January. Credit...Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
Guatemala has agreed to carry out joint strikes with the United States military inside its territory to target drug trafficking groups, according to three people familiar with the talks, in a further expansion of the Trump administration’s military campaign across Latin America.
Last week, President Bernardo Arévalo of Guatemala agreed to both airstrikes and other military action in a call with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, two of those people said, with operations to start as early as next month. It was unclear what other military activities could be included in the agreement.
Guatemala has formally requested “cooperation in operations led by Guatemalan security forces against drug trafficking organizations” in a letter to Mr. Hegseth, Mr. Arévalo’s office confirmed in a statement to The New York Times. His office said that Mr. Arévalo and Mr. Hegseth spoke by phone on May 19 to finalize terms but did not disclose specific details.
Guatemala would become the second country in the region to allow joint military action against criminal groups inside its borders; Ecuador agreed to a similar deal earlier this year. Under that arrangement, U.S. forces are advising and assisting Ecuadorean troops on raids and airstrikes against suspected drug gangs that have turned Ecuador into one of the deadliest countries in Latin America.
One of the next countries that the Defense Department intends to press to accept joint military action is Honduras, said two of the people familiar with the plans.
The Trump administration is targeting Guatemala and Honduras to pressure Mexico into accepting joint counterdrug operations, those two people said. While Washington has been pushing for U.S. boots on the ground and drone strikes, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has staunchly rejected the requests. The White House’s broader strategy is to normalize an American military presence across Latin America to gain leverage over Mexico, according to the two people.
That strategy is being advocated by Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, as well as Joseph M. Humire, for now the Pentagon’s top policy official for homeland defense and the Americas, the two people said.
Mr. Miller chairs a bimonthly meeting — called a “wins” meeting — at which various government agencies report on recent successes, with the Pentagon’s death toll from boat strikes regularly highlighted as one of the biggest, according to those two people and one other person familiar with the meeting.
The people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The White House denied the characterization of Mr. Miller’s so-called wins meeting. “The administration continues to work to carry out the President’s agenda,” the White House said in a statement to The Times.
The deal with Guatemala, which has not yet been publicly announced, is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to press countries throughout the region to allow joint operations inside their territories, according to those three people and a fourth person with knowledge of the strategy. Nearly 20 Latin American countries are already part of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, which was formed earlier this year by the Trump administration to target cartels and organized crime across the Western Hemisphere.
President Trump met with conservative and right-wing Latin American leaders in Florida in March, promising that together they would “eradicate the criminal cartels plaguing our region.”
The U.S. military is “knocking the hell out of them where we can, and we’re going to go heavier,” Mr. Trump told the leaders. “We need your help, you have to — just tell us where they are.”
The administration has deployed U.S. military resources to the region on a scale not seen in decades and designated more than a dozen Latin American and Caribbean groups as foreign terrorist organizations.
Joel Valdez, the acting Pentagon press secretary, declined to comment on any agreement with Guatemala, citing operational security.
So far, most countries in the coalition have been reluctant to allow the Pentagon to strike inside their nations because of concerns about domestic backlash, said three of the people familiar with the effort.
While many citizens across Latin America want their governments to do more to curb drug-related violence, they remain weary of the U.S. military operating inside their countries after decades of intervention by Washington, including bloody political coups.
In January, a delegation from the Pentagon, including Mr. Humire, visited Guatemala to meet with the country’s president and defense minister. They agreed to “reaffirm the strong alliance” between their security forces, according to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala, but neither government released more details.
At a security conference at Florida International University earlier this month, Mr. Humire said new regional partnerships like the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition have given countries in the region a “platform to be able to elevate their partnership with the United States.”
“The Department of War wants to work with other countries, but they have to show that will and capacity to go after the problem set,” said Mr. Humire, referring to what the administration now calls the Department of Defense. “Part of what we’re doing is showing you that we are going to win.”
Earlier this month, Guatemalan military officials were hosted on the aircraft carrier Nimitz as the Pentagon sent equipment and troops to help train Guatemalan forces.
Last September, the Pentagon began striking boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean, in what it said was an effort to deter drug traffickers from using those routes. So far there have been 59 strikes that have killed at least 196 people, according to a tally by The Times, though the Trump administration has given scant evidence that the targets were drug smugglers.
Experts say the boat strikes may be illegal and carry legal risks for the Pentagon. An expansion of that effort inside Latin American countries may come with even more legal risk, people familiar with the effort said.
Former U.S. officials have said that even if the Defense Department’s leadership approved the strikes, the lower-ranking officers who actually carry them out could be held culpable for killing drug trafficking suspects who may in fact be innocent.
“As with the boat strikes, depending on the facts, further attacks could amount to premeditated killings outside of armed conflict, which some of us lawyers would refer to as murder,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who specializes in the laws of war. “Congress never authorized any of these strikes. So U.S. personnel who participate in these actions could face consequences down the road, after the Trump administration.”
Even if U.S. forces only provide intelligence or other logistical support to Latin American countries to conduct their strikes, they could be culpable for aiding and abetting violations of U.S. and international law, he said.
The U.S. military strikes are part of a shifting strategy in Washington’s war on drugs, which has traditionally been carried out by the Department of Justice and its Drug Enforcement Administration. The antidrug effort has long been seen as a law enforcement issue, with Washington prioritizing the arrest of suspects — whose interrogation can help investigators dismantle smuggling networks — rather than killing them, as in a conventional war.
Many Latin American countries have been bombarded with various requests from the Trump administration that they have tried to accommodate, to placate the region’s superpower. Guatemala last year agreed to accept planeloads of deportees from other countries who were expelled from the United States, and then repatriate them back to their home countries.
While the Pentagon has hailed its joint strikes in Ecuador as an important game-changing chapter in its war against drugs, the operations have not always worked out as planned.
In March, one of those strikes hit a cattle and dairy farm, a New York Times investigation found, not the drug trafficking compound that Mr. Hegseth boasted about when he said the United States was “now bombing Narco Terrorists on land.”
Jody García contributed reporting from Guatemala City, Guatemala.
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14) Online Scams Have Evolved in the A.I. Era. Here’s What to Do.
A criminal could be masquerading as a celebrity, web store or family member asking for your money. Detecting scams requires a new approach.
By Brian X. Chen, May 28, 2026
Brian X. Chen is the author of Tech Fix, a weekly column about the tech we use.
Derek Abella
An email riddled with typos. A customer service agent with a thick accent. A blurry Craigslist photo.
Those used to be telltale signs of internet scams. But today, thanks to generative artificial intelligence, those red flags have mostly vanished. Low-cost chatbots, image generators and voice-cloning tools make it simple for criminals to produce pristine copy, create seemingly legitimate websites and even replicate identities.
A.I.-powered internet scams have become so convincing that I confess I almost fell for one. While mindlessly scrolling through TikTok videos, I came across an ad for a pair of Hoka sneakers marked 80 percent off. When I tapped on it, a website loaded that looked like an authentic clearance outlet for the shoe brand.
But after I added the shoes to the shopping cart, my Spidey sense went off. A quick web search revealed that users on Reddit had been scammed by this site; Hoka had even published a warning about a surge of fake web stores masquerading as its brand.
These look-alike websites are one of several A.I.-fueled internet scams that have recently been on the rise, security experts say. The F.B.I. reported last month that cybercriminals had defrauded Americans of nearly $21 billion last year, with about $893 million in losses linked to A.I.
Because A.I. makes it effortless to build websites and digital avatars, we may have to rethink our approach to protecting ourselves from online fraud.
“Instead of looking for indicators of what’s bad, now you need to be verifying if it’s good,” said Mark Beare, a general manager for Malwarebytes, an internet security firm. “It’s not a Nigerian prince anymore. It’s a look-alike site for REI or eBay or any one of those known, reputable brands.”
Scam ads have been so rampant that legal complaints against the social media giant Meta are mounting. Last month, the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit advocacy group, filed a complaint accusing Meta of misleading users about its efforts to combat scams. The complaint cited examples including scam ads for baby gear and free phones. California’s Santa Clara County filed a similar lawsuit against Meta this month.
In response, Meta said that last year, it removed 159 million scam ads and took down nearly 11 million accounts on Facebook and Instagram associated with known producers of scams. It added that it was investing in new technology to combat scams.
A TikTok spokeswoman said that the company prohibited deceptive practices and misleading content in ads, and that attempts to defraud users were not allowed on the platform. She added that in the fourth quarter of 2025, 97 percent of violating spam content that TikTok removed was taken down before users reported it.
Other than fake stores, scammers have used A.I. to pretend to be someone close to their victims, including family members and old flames. To put it another way, A.I. has made it possible for criminals to tailor their attacks to be more personal than ever before.
Here’s what to know about the most common A.I. scams and what to do.
A.I. Cat Fishers and Impersonators
Everyone is familiar with the text message coming from an unknown number saying something along the lines of “It’s been a long time. How have you been?” Engaging with the sender could end with a phone conversation and the scammer asking for cash. Today, that conversation is likely to shift to a video call because fraudsters have discovered they can use A.I. tools that digitally transform them into someone else.
“It’s very easy and very cheap to do a real-time Zoom call with whole body replacement and voice changing in a way that’s completely realistic,” said Andrew Yoon, a researcher at CivAI, a nonprofit that teaches people about A.I.’s capabilities.
This scheme could take on different forms depending on the victim’s interests and weaknesses. A lonely male may be tricked into believing that an attractive woman from his past is hoping to reconnect. A job seeker could be duped by a phony A.I. interviewer into doing work for a bogus company.
And because phone numbers are easy to fake and the names and contact information for our relatives are publicly available online, the scams can get much more personal. A mother could receive a fraudulent text message from her son’s phone number and eventually get on a video call with an A.I. simulation of him, where the impersonator asks for money.
Mr. Yoon suggested a low-tech antidote: Have conversations with family members, especially any older relatives inexperienced with tech, to discuss the possibility that they might get a call from an impersonator. Establish a secret safe word that can be used to test whether someone is real, whenever in doubt.
The Fake Celebrity
Since the arrival of instant video generator apps like OpenAI’s Sora, social media has been flooded with A.I.-fabricated slop. Fake videos featuring Hollywood celebrities and high-profile business executives are widespread because so many images and videos of them are available on the web to help A.I. models generate near-perfect imitations.
Some scammers have tried to exploit celebrities by using their star status to market nonexistent products. Deepfake videos of the chef Gordon Ramsay, for instance, circulated on social media in the last few years endorsing a cookware giveaway; victims who thought they were paying a small shipping fee for free frying pans were handing their credit card numbers to criminals.
Abusers also generated deepfake videos of Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, to lure his fans into making phony investments. It happened so often, he posted an Instagram video educating his followers on how to spot these types of scams.
Mr. Branson’s advice was spot on. Trust only information from official sources — for example, in the case of Mr. Branson, a webpage published on Virgin.com. Blue checkmarks on social media sites are not foolproof indicators that people are who they claim to be, so don’t let them lure you into shady get-rich-quick schemes.
The Cloned Store Brand
Ads that direct you to A.I.-generated scam sites, like the sneaker shop that almost tricked me, are prolific on social media. The ads may be directly relevant to your personal interests — for instance, if you encounter a fake store selling a bicycle.
That’s because the scammers pay for ad space on TikTok and Instagram to leverage the same tools that real marketers use to target ads at people with relevant interests, said Mr. Beare of Malwarebytes. Criminals can afford to spend those dollars on ad-targeting because — unlike real brands — they have no product to ship.
There are ways to quickly determine whether an online store posing as a brand is fake. A simple method is to do a Google search for the store’s web address and see what people are saying about it on sites like Reddit.
For more thorough scam detection, you can also ask an A.I. chatbot for help. Malwarebytes recently teamed up with OpenAI and Anthropic to connect its free scam-detection app to the ChatGPT and Claude chatbots. You can paste a web address and screenshots into the chatbots and ask Malwarebytes to run an analysis on whether a site is legitimate.
If that sounds like too much work, there’s one age-old piece of conventional wisdom that is still true in the era of A.I.: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
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