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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, 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 authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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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.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
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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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
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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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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1) Who Is Mariann Edgar Budde, the Bishop Who Made a Plea to Trump?
The first woman to serve as the spiritual leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, Bishop Budde had a message for President Trump during his first term, too.
By Elizabeth Dias and Tim Balk, Jan. 21, 2025
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde speaking Tuesday at the Washington National Cathedral during a prayer service President Trump attended. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, whose direct appeal to President Trump for mercy on behalf of immigrants and the L.G.B.T.Q. community made headlines on Tuesday, was also publicly critical of Mr. Trump during his first term.
Bishop Budde, 65, is the first woman to serve as the spiritual leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, and she has led the diocese since 2011.
Before moving to Washington, she spent nearly two decades as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis. She is an alumna of the University of Rochester in upstate New York, and she grew up partially in New Jersey and partially in Colorado. She enjoys biking around Washington.
Since last summer her diocese, which includes the National Cathedral, planned to host a prayer service the day after the inauguration regardless of who won the presidency. No matter the outcome, she intended to preach, she said.
In 2020, Bishop Budde wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times saying that she was “outraged” and “horrified” by Mr. Trump’s use of the Bible, which he held aloft at St. John’s Church after officers used tear gas against protesters for racial justice in nearby Lafayette Square. She wrote that Mr. Trump had “used sacred symbols” while “espousing positions antithetical to the Bible.”
On Tuesday, she again had a message for Mr. Trump.
With the president seated in the front of the church, she closed her sermon by urging him “to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”
She cited L.G.B.T.Q. people and immigrants — apparently responding to the president’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration and to dismantle federal protections for transgender people.
The bishop said that unity required honesty, humility and recognition of the dignity of all humans by “refusing to mock or discount or demonize.”
Mr. Trump looked down. Vice President JD Vance, seated nearby, raised his eyebrows.
“I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President,” she said, adding: “We were all once strangers in this land.”
Mr. Trump did not appear to enjoy the service. Later in the day, he told reporters that it was “not too exciting.”
“They could do much better,” he added, apparently referring to the organizers of the service.
In a phone interview, Bishop Budde declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s reaction to the service.
She said that she “wasn’t necessarily calling the president out,” but that she had decided to make her plea “because of the fear” she had seen in Washington’s immigrant and L.G.B.T.Q. communities.
She wanted Mr. Trump to “be mindful of the people who are scared,” she said.
“I was trying to say: The country has been entrusted to you,” she added. “And one of the qualities of a leader is mercy.”
But she also hoped her remarks would echo far beyond Mr. Trump’s ears, she said.
A little more than half of the country now expresses some support for deporting every unauthorized immigrant living in the United States, according to a recent poll from The New York Times and Ipsos.
And Bishop Budde said she felt there had been a shift in the “license” Americans felt to be “really quite cruel.”
“I wanted to remind all of us that these are our neighbors,” she said.
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2) Justice Dept. Orders Investigations of Any Officials Who Refuse to Enforce Trump’s Immigration Policies
By Glenn Thrush, Reporting from Washington
The interim leadership of the Justice Department has ordered U.S. attorneys around the country to investigate and prosecute law enforcement officials in states and cities if they refuse to enforce the Trump administration’s new immigration policies, according to an internal department memo.
The three-page memo, intended as guidance to all department employees for carrying out President Trump’s executive orders seeking to limit immigration and foreign gangs, asserts that state and local officials are bound to cooperate with the department under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and could face criminal prosecution or civil penalties if they fail to comply.
The memo came as the Department of Homeland Security prepared to make targeted raids in cities, including Chicago and San Diego, with high numbers of undocumented immigrants — setting up a possible confrontation with local officials. The document underscored the central role the Justice Department will play in enforcing Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda.
“Federal law prohibits state and local actors from resisting, obstructing, and otherwise failing to comply with lawful immigration-related commands,” wrote Emil Bove III, the department’s interim deputy attorney general and a former member of the president’s criminal defense team.
U.S. attorneys’ offices and officials from various branches of the department’s Washington headquarters “shall investigate instances involving any such misconduct for potential prosecution,” Mr. Bove wrote, pointing to the same federal obstruction law used in the federal indictment against Mr. Trump that accused him of inciting the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Bove also warned localities against taking action to contradict the new federal policies and instructed the department’s civil lawyers to “identify state and local laws, policies, and activities” that flout Mr. Trump’s executive orders and “where appropriate, to take legal action to challenge such laws.”
The memo did not provide information about how extensive the planned raids or other actions would be. But it cited the fentanyl and opioid crisis, gang activity and crime by immigrants as justifications for the impending immigration crackdown.
The unusual missive, written in blustery language, doubled as a warning shot to department employees who slow-walk or refuse to aggressively enact “the president’s actions” or federal law.
A copy of the memo was obtained by The New York Times and was earlier reported by Bloomberg Law.
The Trump team, concerned that career department employees will not execute orders they deem to be immoral or unlawful, has considered transferring or instigating disciplinary actions against prosecutors who refuse to comply with commands.
They have also been making plans to transfer prosecutors to five U.S. attorneys’ offices near the border with Mexico, and have discussed tactics to pressure recalcitrant departmental employees to unpalatable jobs in an effort to encourage their mass departure, according to people familiar with transition planning.
In the memo, Mr. Bove ordered prosecutors to immediately step up immigration investigations against the most dangerous undocumented immigrants, and warned employees that “any deviations” from that policy had to be cleared with supervisors.
In addition, prosecutors will be required to file an “urgent report” if they decide not to bring charges against serious offenders. The department will also begin tracking cases brought by each U.S. attorney’s office on a quarterly basis.
The memo also instructed other parts of the Justice Department — including the Bureau of Prisons, F.B.I., Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — to share any information they have regarding the immigration status of people they investigate or regulate.
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3) One Family in Gaza Returned Home. But Home Was Gone.
“It took us a few minutes to accept that this pile of rubble was our home,” said Islam Dahliz, whose family was ordered by Israeli forces to evacuate Rafah in May.
By Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair, Jan. 22, 2025
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo, and Bilal Shbair from Rafah, Gaza.
Displaced Gazans returning to Rafah on Monday. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
Minutes after the fighting stopped in Gaza on Sunday, Islam Dahliz and his father and brother set out for the neighborhood where they had lived until Israeli forces ordered them to leave. They were looking for the family home, but the landscape around them scrambled the senses. Familiar landmarks, streets, neighbors’ houses — everything was rubble.
Then Mr. Dahliz recognized the local wedding hall, he said, or what remained of it. That meant their home stood — had stood — behind them, in a spot they had already passed. They just hadn’t recognized it, this house that Mr. Dahliz’s father had built more than 50 years ago.
“It took us a few minutes to accept that this pile of rubble was our home,” said Mr. Dahliz, 34, who works with local aid groups. They stood there, speechless.
His 74-year-old father, Abed Dahliz, felt the wind knocked out of him, he said. His sons had to help him back to their tent to rest.
“I was shocked when I saw my entire life — everything I worked for — flattened to the ground,” said Abed Dahliz, a farmer all his life, his voice soft and trembling. “The home I spent so many years building, pouring my savings into, is gone.”
This was not the moment they had hoped for and pictured all these months, as they were forced to move from tent to tent to tent, packing up and starting over four times in all. They had imagined a return. A resumption of their lives.
In their latest makeshift tent in a park in western Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, they had huddled on Sunday morning, when the cease-fire was supposed to take effect, glued to the radio. Islam Dahliz was on his phone, refreshing social media accounts for the latest news. The whole family tensed when they heard that the truce might collapse over a last-minute hitch: Hamas, Israel said, had not handed over the promised list of Israeli hostages to be freed from Gaza.
Then, at 11:15 a.m., the radio reported that the cease-fire was on. The father and the brothers got in the car, they said, and set out for home.
Home had been a spacious two-story house on al-Imam Ali Street in Rafah, built in 1971 and shared, like many homes in Gaza, by three generations of the same family. The parents lived in one apartment, and Mr. Dahliz, his wife and their children had another. He had put his savings toward a new kitchen, furniture and bedding when he came back to Gaza from Hungary, where he had been studying agricultural science, he recalled.
His brothers Mohammed and Anas had also lived there with their families, with another brother a half-mile away. It was big enough that during the first seven months of the war, the Dahlizes could host around 10 other families that had evacuated from elsewhere in Gaza.
Next door was their farm, started by their father and tended by Mohammed, 40. Olive trees and date palms stood side by side with greenhouses where they grew parsley, lettuce and arugula. They had had rabbits, chickens and 40 sheep, which Mohammed used to lead to the fields to graze every morning.
Mohammed Dahliz could remember his father planting the palm trees when he was a little boy, he said. He could remember his own young children before the war, he said, chasing the chickens around and laughing, gathering their eggs for breakfast.
The Israeli military has said that it struck residential areas because Hamas fighters were embedding themselves in civilian buildings, though a New York Times investigation found that Israel also weakened civilian protections to make it easier to bomb Gaza during the war.
When Israeli forces invaded Rafah in May and ordered everyone in eastern Rafah to leave, Islam Dahliz said, the vegetables were just starting to sprout. The families who had been sheltering at the Dahlizes’ dispersed. The Dahlizes packed up some clothes, tarps and other materials for a makeshift tent, and picked a spot for it as close as they could find to home.
But they didn’t lay eyes on it for months, despite being just a few miles away.
Their cousins managed to sneak into the neighborhood from time to time, bringing back updates. Their home was still standing, they reported. Then they said it was standing, but some of its doors and windows had been blown out.
In the fall, the Dahlizes scoured satellite images circulating on social media: still intact. Then they checked again on Dec. 8, Islam Dahliz recalled. All they saw where the house had been was a gray shadow.
Now their palm and olive trees were knocked down, trunks scattered on the ground. Israeli tanks had left tracks all over their land. Little stood straight on their property other than a few concrete pillars with rebar sticking out of them.
“I feel lost, utterly lost,” said Mohammed Dahliz. Then, becoming angry, he said: “This was an agricultural area, a place of peace. It posed no threat to anyone, no danger to soldiers. We had no ties to politics, no reason to be caught in this violence.”
Islam Dahliz’s daughter Juan, 9, screamed when he showed her pictures of the destruction, he said. “Remember, Daddy, when you threw me a birthday party in the big hall?” she asked, sobbing.
On Monday morning, the brothers and their father drove to their neighborhood a second time, down a road jammed with other families, every vehicle overflowing with passengers and bundled belongings. They were all there to salvage whatever they could. All over Rafah, people filled tattered flour sacks and patched-up bags with scraps of metal they could perhaps sell or reuse and wood they could perhaps burn.
Mohammed Dahliz was just hoping to find some of his 14-year-old daughter Jana’s old toys, the kind he had brought her on her birthday or every time she reached a milestone in school. She had begged him to look for them, he said.
“I just want to find a piece of her childhood,” he said. “I’ve been searching since morning, hoping to find anything that belonged to her.”
Digging through the grayness, Islam Dahliz stumbled on his old school certificates, a discovery that produced a smile. But otherwise, they hadn’t found much. Firewood, a few pillows, an empty tank they hoped to repair.
He was clinging to plans, however fragile.
If — if — the two sides negotiated a permanent end to the war, as they are supposed to attempt during the cease-fire’s initial phase, the Dahlizes would hire a bulldozer to clear the rubble, first from the farm, then from the house. They would install some pipes, build a basic toilet and set up a water tank, he said.
“It won’t end the suffering,” he said, “but at least it’ll be closer to the home where we created so many memories.”
But for now, dusk was falling. They would have to return to their tent. What remained of the Dahlizes’ old lives barely filled the back of one small car.
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4) Israel Presses Ahead With Raids in the West Bank
At least 10 people have been killed in the raids, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Dozens have been arrested, Palestinian officials told the Wafa news agency.
By Lara Jakes, Fatima Abdul, Karim and Hiba Yazbek, Jan. 22, 2025
Israel’s military said on Wednesday that it was pressing ahead with what it called a new counterterrorism operation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Palestinian officials said that at least 10 people had been killed.
A spokeswoman for the military said that 10 militants were “hit” in the operation, without giving further details. Earlier, Israel said that it had killed eight militants since the start of the raid. The Palestinian health ministry said that 10 people had been killed in Jenin and its outskirts since the start of the raid.
At least four people were injured Wednesday in Jenin, where the new rash of raids were focused, according to Palestinian officials cited by Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency. Other West Bank cities were also targeted in raids.
The Palestinian Authority’s commission of prisoners’ affairs said that Israeli forces had arrested at least 25 Palestinians across the West Bank since Tuesday evening.
Enhanced security at Israeli checkpoints across the territory slowed or stopped traffic; in one case a 45-year-old woman died at a checkpoint outside Hebron while waiting to be allowed to go to a hospital, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
In Jenin, Mayor Mohammad Jarar told Wafa that Israeli forces had held as many as 600 people overnight at the Jenin Governmental Hospital, but that they were allowed to leave Wednesday morning. The news agency described Israeli bulldozers blocking the hospital’s doors with dirt from nearby streets.
Mahmoud al-Saadi, the head of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin, said that patients who had been evacuated were led to a checkpoint to be searched and that their identification cards were checked before they were allowed to pass. Some people were detained there, Mr. al-Saadi said.
“The situation is very difficult,” Muhammad al-Masri, a resident and former member of the local committee that administers Jenin’s refugee camp, said in an interview on Wednesday.
Mr. al-Masri said his family fled their home when the Israeli raid began, because “there’s no water or electricity.” He said that Israeli forces had divided parts of Jenin into blocks, and began ordering people in several to evacuate while the men were detained.
Mr. Jarar also said people had been forced to leave their homes, a claim that Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, denied. “There’s no evacuation order in Jenin,” he said.
Briefing reporters about the operation, Colonel Shoshani said people at Jenin Governmental Hospital were held temporarily to ensure they were not hurt by explosives that the military was detonating nearby.
Since a temporary cease-fire took hold in Gaza over the weekend, Israel has turned its attention to the West Bank, where tensions have risen as militants have grown in power and Israeli settler violence against Palestinian civilians has soared.
Colonel Shoshani said the operation in the West Bank was similar in scope to one that the military carried out in August. That 10-day raid in Jenin killed 21 people, according to Palestinian news media and residents. It was one of the most extensive and deadly raids in the West Bank in years.
The colonel said the operation was Israel’s latest effort to curb militant attacks, many of which involved improvised explosives that had been planted under both civilian streets and Israeli military vehicles.
“Our strategy is to fight those terrorists while we enable the civilian population to go on with their lives,” Colonel Shoshani said.
The Jenin battalion of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an armed group loosely affiliated with Fatah, the political faction that controls the Palestinian Authority, said in a statement on social media that its fighters were engaged in “fierce clashes” with Israeli forces in several areas of Jenin and had detonated explosive devices.
A spokeswoman for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Nebal Farsakh, said that Israeli forces continue “to impose a tight siege on Jenin camp and the surrounding neighborhoods” that have stopped ambulances from reaching wounded people. Additionally, she said, Israel’s military had fired warning shots at ambulances on Tuesday.
In a series of social media posts on Wednesday, Roland Friedrich, the West Bank director of the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians, said the Israeli operation was “expected to last days” and was using advanced weapons on Jenin, including with airstrikes.
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5) Change to Birthright Citizenship Would Affect Visa Holders, Too
President Trump’s public rhetoric has focused on undocumented immigrants, but the raft of new orders he signed would also affect those seeking to enter the U.S. legally.
By Michael D. Shear, Reporting from Washington, Jan. 21, 2025
Migrants from Venezuela looking toward the border from Ciudad Juárez on Tuesday. There are serious questions about how the Trump administration would impose such a dramatic change in policy on birthright citizenship. Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times
President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship declares that babies born to many temporary residents of the United States — not just those in the country illegally — must be denied automatic citizenship, a dramatic rejection of rights that have been part of the Constitution for more than 150 years.
If the courts do not block the order, babies born to women living legally, but temporarily, in the United States — such as people studying on a student visa or workers hired by high-tech companies — will not automatically be recognized by the federal government as U.S. citizens if the father is also not a permanent resident.
Aides to Mr. Trump had told reporters on Monday morning that the order would apply to “children of illegal aliens born in the United States.” In fact, the language in the order Mr. Trump signed, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” goes much further.
“It’s a shocking attack on people in this country who are here lawfully, played by the rules and are benefiting the country,” said David Leopold, the chair of the immigration practice at the law firm UB Greensfelder. “We’re talking about people who are doing cutting-edge research in the United States, researchers, people who are here to help us.”
The order was part of a barrage of actions that Mr. Trump authorized on Monday to carry out his vision of a country with far less immigration. Despite claims he repeated on Monday that “I’m fine with legal immigration; I like it,” the president’s new orders would also severely curtail the options of those looking to enter the United States legally.
Many of the president’s closest advisers, including Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff and the architect of his immigration policy, have urged a tough line on birthright citizenship. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Miller and other aides pushed to make sure that immigrants could no longer establish what they call an “anchor” in the United States by having a baby who automatically becomes an American citizen.
In addition to targeting birthright citizenship, Mr. Trump on Monday barred asylum for immigrants seeking to cross the southern border, imposed an indefinite suspension of the legal refugee system, terminated several legal pathways for immigrants put in place by the Biden administration and declared the existence of an “invasion” from immigrants aimed at giving the federal government broad powers to stop all kinds of people from entering.
How It Could Work
The executive order regarding birthright citizenship says that right will be denied for babies born to parents who are not citizens or permanent residents with green cards, including women who are “visiting on a student, work or tourist visa” if the father is not a citizen or a legal permanent resident. In that case, the order says, “no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship.”
There are serious questions about how Mr. Trump’s administration would impose such a dramatic change in policy.
Currently, the citizenship of babies born in the United States is documented in a two-step process.
First, the state or territorial government will issue a birth certificate confirming where and when the birth took place. The birth certificate does not include any information about the immigration status of the baby’s parents.
Second, when that baby (or the parents, on the child’s behalf) applies for a passport, the birth certificate showing that the baby was born on U.S. soil is enough to prove citizenship. No other documentation is required.
Mr. Trump’s executive order indicates that in 30 days, all federal agencies will be required to confirm the immigration status of the parents before issuing documents like a passport.
Left unclear, however, is how that would be put into practice.
One option would be for state agencies to check the immigration status of parents and include that information on birth certificates. Then, when passports are requested, the federal government would be able to determine which babies qualify for automatic citizenship.
It could take years, however, for states to put in place a system that checks the immigration status of all parents — assuming they are willing to do so. The federal government could establish guidelines for the required information, but it would most likely be up to the states to decide how and whether to gather that data from parents when they issue a birth certificate.
If the states do not overhaul the birth certificate process, the federal government could seek to enforce Mr. Trump’s order by requiring people applying for passports to present both a birth certificate and proof of their parents’ citizenship status when they were born.
That could become extremely cumbersome, legal experts said, particularly for people with complicated family dynamics or missing legal documents.
Several White House officials did not respond to questions seeking clarification about how the order might be carried out.
Legal Challenges
Legal scholars and immigration advocates said on Tuesday that they were stunned by the breadth of the order.
Advocates are hoping that judges will step in and put it on hold before it is set to take effect on Feb. 20. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court in New Hampshire on Monday night challenging the order, just hours after the president signed it.
And on Tuesday, attorneys general from 22 states and two cities sued Mr. Trump to block the executive order. Rulings by either judge could temporarily suspend the order, prompting what could be a monthslong legal battle that could end up before the Supreme Court.
“It’s very clear that they mean to double down on their nativistic anti-immigrant agenda, and that denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. has got to be a core part of their plan,” said Anthony Romero, the executive director of the A.C.L.U. “If we were to repeal birthright citizenship, it would create a legal vehicle for intergenerational stigma and discrimination that would undo the very core of this grand American experiment.”
Birthright citizenship in the United States was put in place after the Civil War to allow Black people to be citizens. The 14th Amendment says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Before the amendment was ratified in 1868, even free Black men and women could not become citizens.
Mr. Trump argues that his administration is within its rights to interpret what the writers of the amendment meant.
“The 14th Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” his executive order said.
Many lawyers say that is flatly wrong. In their legal brief, the A.C.L.U.’s lawyers argued that the meaning of the 14th Amendment had been settled law for more than 125 years. They cited an 1898 case called United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which they said the Supreme Court “emphatically rejected the last effort to undercut birthright citizenship.”
“The executive order is certainly unconstitutional,” said Cecillia Wang, the A.C.L.U.’s national legal director. “It’s fair to say that if the court were to uphold Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, it would lose all legitimacy in the eyes of the people and in the history books.”
Beyond Birthright
The Trump administration has indicated that it plans to harness various tools to restrict those who seek legal entry into the country. Mr. Trump has long supported changes to what is called the “public charge” rule, which would deny entry into the United States if a potential immigrant is likely to need to use public services like food or housing assistance.
The president could also try to restrict the right to travel for some groups of people. In another executive order he signed on Monday, Mr. Trump directed officials to develop a list of countries that would be subject to a travel ban similar to the one he imposed during his first term in office.
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6) Trump’s D.E.I. Order Creates ‘Fear and Confusion’ Among Corporate Leaders
The executive order signals that private businesses and organizations could be investigated over their diversity policies.
By Emma Goldberg, Jan. 23, 2025
"The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but the text of the executive order condemned 'illegal D.E.I.' policies, saying they 'deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.'”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, told employees earlier this month it would end its D.E.I. work, including dropping diversity hiring goals. Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York Times
More than 200 diversity officers, some from Fortune 500 companies and some from nonprofits, gathered last summer at N.Y.U. School of Law and on video to talk about the future of their diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., programs, which had become a legal and social target. Anxiously, they wondered how to protect themselves. Did they need to rethink internship programs for underrepresented workers, or drop certain diversity language from their websites?
Those concerns ratcheted up sharply this week. In his first days in office, with a series of sweeping moves, President Trump took aim at diversity efforts.
Mr. Trump ordered federal officials overseeing government D.E.I. efforts to be put on leave. His efforts did not stop with government employment. He revoked an executive order signed in 1965 that prohibited discriminatory hiring and employment practices for private government contractors. Perhaps most alarming for business leaders was the order’s focus on private corporations, whether they do business with the government or not. “We’re already seeing that this flurry of orders has created fear and confusion,” said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at N.Y.U. Law.
The executive order instructs the federal government to look at private sector D.E.I. initiatives: Each federal agency, it says, will identify “up to nine potential civil compliance investigations” that could include publicly traded corporations, nonprofits and large foundations, among others.
“That discrete number is a way of striking fear into organizations’ hearts,” said Kenji Yoshino, a constitutional lawyer at N.Y.U. who advises some Fortune 500 companies on D.E.I. “They just don’t want to be one of those nine. Until those nine are announced, it’s going to cause others to be risk-averse.”
Civil rights lawyers believe that the D.E.I. programs that are most legally vulnerable are those that give employment benefits, like jobs or promotions, to specific groups on the basis of their race. In 2023, a Supreme Court decision struck down race-conscious preferences in college admissions and was followed by a wave of lawsuits against company diversity efforts.
With the executive order, Mr. Yoshino said, “Trump is putting the muscle of the executive branch” behind the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision.
Plenty of companies, reading the writing on the wall, had begun to shift their approaches to D.E.I. before Mr. Trump took office. Meta told employees earlier this month it would end its D.E.I. work, including eliminating the chief diversity officer role and dropping diversity hiring goals. Tractor Supply, John Deere and Harley Davidson retreated on D.E.I. too. Amazon recently scaled back some of its diversity programming too, with a vice president, Candi Castleberry, writing in a memo to staff in December: “We’ve been winding down outdated programs and materials.”
Some companies, including Walmart, said they would stop sharing data with the Human Rights Campaign, a nonprofit that tracks corporate L.G.B.T.Q. policies.
Mr. Yoshino said he does not think sharing data with the Human Rights Campaign presents any legal risk, and believes companies rolling back this commitment are doing so to avoid social blowback. He views many other D.E.I. programs as legally safe too, including unconscious bias training and fellowships or retreats that are dedicated to advancing employees of color, but are open to anyone’s participation.
Nearly a dozen companies did not respond to requests for comment on the future of their D.E.I. programming, and some declined to comment citing fear of attracting attention to their work.
A managing partner of the law firm Jenner & Block, Ishan Bhabha, said since the executive order came down he has been getting “tons” of calls from clients who are worried about whether their D.E.I. programs are in compliance. He said it’s early days, and there could be legal challenges to the executive order or to administrative actions following it, but “an executive order like this gives a good idea of what this administration’s priorities are going to be.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but the text of the executive order condemned “illegal D.E.I.” policies, saying they “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”
Some companies have stood firm in support of D.E.I., including Costco, Patagonia and Microsoft. For those chief diversity officers who are doubling down on their work, there’s a new sense of isolation, as well as whiplash. Less than five years ago, after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, dozens of companies started announcing new commitments to fighting racial injustice. Walmart set up a Center for Racial Equity. The consulting firm Bain started a new D.E.I. practice. Glassdoor reported a 54 percent rise in job postings for D.E.I. roles in 2020, compared with levels before the pandemic.
Some diversity leaders have begun to brainstorm ways that companies can keep up their efforts without attracting legal scrutiny. Mr. Glasgow said he has begun to wonder if it’s time to drop the term “D.E.I.,” now that those three letters have become politically charged.
“If you had asked me a year ago I would have probably said don’t change it,” Mr. Glasgow said. “Over time I’ve become a little bit more convinced that the acronym may be unhelpful, because empty terms make easy targets.”
Those trying to salvage the goals underlying D.E.I. programs said they are trying to maintain optimism in spite of the chill in their field.
“The backlash has been against a very narrow band of activities,” said Bo Young Lee, who was formerly in charge of diversity at Uber and is now president of research and advisory at AnitaB.org, which supports women and nonbinary people in tech. That “narrow band,” she said, included data sharing with the Human Rights Campaign’s index, as well as offering internships for racial and L.G.B.T.Q. minorities. She views paid parental leave, for example, as a diversity policy that is now deeply embedded in corporate culture and safe from attack.
Denise Young, former worldwide chief of human resources at Apple, said corporate diversity leaders are facing a more complex environment for their work, but she believes that most will find ways of continuing to bring in diverse talent because they know it’s good for business.
“It’s the political environment we now live in, but it doesn’t change the needs of business,” Ms. Young said. “Talent comes in every shape of human existence.”
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7) Hamas Takes Charge in Gaza After 15 Months of War
Israel says it has killed thousands of the armed group’s members and destroyed much of its infrastructure, but since the cease-fire started Hamas has shown it still holds power in the enclave.
By Adam Rasgon and Iyad Abuheweila, Reporting from Jerusalem and Istanbul, Jan. 23, 2025
“The United States has said that a ‘revitalized’ Palestinian Authority, which now has limited autonomy in governing the Israeli-occupied West Bank, should take over Gaza, but Mr. Netanyahu has rejected the idea. The authority governed Gaza until 2007, when Hamas forcibly took over in a coup after winning a majority in parliamentary elections.” [Question: how was it a “coup” when Hamas won a majority in parliamentary elections? —BW]
Hamas militants paraded in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on the first day of the cease-fire on Sunday. Credit...Mohammed Salem/Reuters
The morning the cease-fire in Gaza went into effect, masked members of Hamas’s military wing drove through the streets of Gaza in clean, white pickups, carrying Hamas flags and automatic rifles.
The militants were also carrying an unambiguous message: However weakened, Hamas survived Israel’s 15-month bombing campaign in Gaza and remains the most powerful Palestinian party in the territory.
Since the cease-fire started on Sunday, Hamas has been working overtime in an attempt to show it still controls Gaza, even after Israel killed thousands of its members and demolished its tunnels and weapons factories in retaliation for the Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack that killed an estimated 1,200 people.
Throughout the war, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has vowed to eliminate Hamas, but he never offered a plan for a realistic alternative that could take control of Gaza, leaving behind a vacuum that the armed group filled.
Even for many residents of Gaza, however, the swift re-emergence of the fighters, some in official uniforms, was a surprise.
“They came out of hiding in a snap of a finger,” said Mohammed, 24, who requested his last name be withheld to avoid possible retribution from Hamas. “We had no idea where these people were during the war.”
Later on the first day of the cease-fire, dozens of Hamas militants turned up at Saraya Square in Gaza City to hand over three hostages to the Red Cross for release to Israel, the first of 33 to be freed as part of the deal. The appearance of the militants didn’t suggest they were on their last legs: They appeared to be wearing clean uniforms, in good shape and driving decent cars.
It is not clear just how many fighters, police officers, bureaucrats and political leaders survived the war or just where the militants had been hiding. But by showcasing the handover in such a public way, Hamas made clear that it was still standing in a part of Gaza that had seen some of the most devastating bombing attacks of the war.
“We’re talking about an area that was essentially plowed by the Israelis,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science from Gaza City who is now a visiting scholar at Northwestern University.
Israeli officials have said that they stand behind their goal of dismantling Hamas’s military wing and government, suggesting that they could resume the war after the remaining 30 hostages, of roughly 100 still held in Gaza, are freed over the coming weeks.
Despite its show of force, Hamas likely hopes to relieve itself of the daily burdens of administration and reconstruction of Gaza, but it wants any future arrangement for the territory to leave it as the top security power, and therefore, the main decision maker, Ghaith al-Omari, an expert on Palestinian affairs said. Hamas probably has to make some concessions to enable enough aid to enter Gaza for reconstruction.
Since the cease-fire, Hamas’s government has attempted to impose some sense of security, sending police forces to the streets, directing traffic, protecting aid trucks and offering a degree of law and order, residents say.
On Monday in Gaza City, a senior official in the Hamas-run Interior Ministry identified as Gen. Mahmoud Abu Watfa toured the city center in plain clothes as Gazan journalists took pictures of armed internal security forces participating in a procession.
“The picture is clear,” General Abu Watfa told a reporter. “The ones controlling security, protecting citizens and safeguarding the internal front are the forces of the Interior Ministry.”
Challenges are still evident. An official in Hamas’s internal security service, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, noted that many security workers in Gaza City were using paper records instead of computers, and some were reporting to work at a bombed-out headquarters by foot because Israel had destroyed almost every police car in the city.
The bomb disposal unit in Gaza City, the official said, was struggling to defuse unexploded bombs.
“Hamas is much weaker than it was before Oct. 7,” said Michael Milshtein, a former military intelligence analyst specializing in Palestinian affairs. “But it’s totally clear that it can impose its sovereignty everywhere in Gaza.”
Municipalities in Gaza that coordinate closely with Hamas’s government have sent workers to clear rubble, remove piles of trash and survey damage to infrastructure. In Rafah, the municipal council convened a meeting in a tent outfitted with an official city flag, a desk and chairs, according to a post it shared on social media.
In an interview, Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official, crowed that Israel had failed to destroy Hamas. “They tried to uproot these people and they didn’t succeed,” he said. “They were steadfast on the ground for 470 days.”
Hamas, analysts said, was trying to make clear in its recent moves that it must have an influential role in discussions about the “day after,” referring to the future administration of Gaza.
“Their message to everyone is, ‘You can’t exclude us from the day after,’” said Mr. al-Omari, the Palestinian affairs expert.
Hamas leaders have indeed expressed readiness to give up civilian governance in Gaza, but without dismantling its military wing — a dynamic that would be similar to Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon before its last conflict with Israel.
The United States has said that a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, which now has limited autonomy in governing the Israeli-occupied West Bank, should take over Gaza, but Mr. Netanyahu has rejected the idea. The authority governed Gaza until 2007, when Hamas forcibly took over in a coup after winning a majority in parliamentary elections.
On Sunday, Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, told reporters that Hamas’s rule was dangerous for Israel’s security and emphasized that Israel had not agreed to a permanent cease-fire deal that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza.
While some analysts say Israel could eventually remove Hamas from power, others say it would struggle to resume the war in the face of international pressure. And even if it does, those analysts say, Israeli forces would face immense challenges in uprooting Hamas from Gaza without carrying out a direct occupation.
In Gaza, supporters of Hamas said they felt reassured by its show of force this week. But many people without allegiances to the group worried that if it remained in power, they would be subject to its heavy-handed rule and that there would be another war, sooner or later.
“It may take Hamas time to reach a point where it will provoke Israel into another major war,” said Alaa, 28, who has been sheltering in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, and whose last name is being withheld to avoid reprisals.
“As long as it’s in power, it’s only a matter of time,” he added. “It’s hard to reach any other conclusion other than there’s no future here.”
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8) José Jiménez Dies at 76; Turned a Gang Into a Voice for Puerto Ricans
He retooled the Young Lords into a militant advocacy and service organization, modeled after the Black Panthers. Based in Chicago, it had chapters nationwide.
By Clay Risen, Jan. 22, 2025
José Jiménez in the 1960s. Under his leadership, the Young Lords had an impact on the national conversation about civil rights and urban communities. Credit...Paul Sequeira/Getty Images
José Jiménez, a street-wise Puerto Rican who in the late 1960s transformed a Chicago gang called the Young Lords into a militant voice for expanded social services, fair housing and education for his people, died on Jan. 10. He was 76.
His sister Daisy Rodriguez announced the death on Facebook. She did not say where he died or cite a specific cause, though Mr. Jiménez had been living in Chicago and reportedly experiencing health problems.
Though the revamped Young Lords lasted less than five years, the group made a dramatic impact on the national conversation about civil rights and urban communities in the late 1960s and early ’70s, amplifying Puerto Rican and other Latino perspectives.
Mr. Jiménez, known as Cha Cha, modeled his group on the Black Panthers, the radical Black organization that used confrontational tactics to raise awareness about issues like police brutality and lack of adequate health care in the nation’s cities. At the same time, the Panthers opened clinics, schools and day care centers to provide the services they found lacking from the government.
The Young Lords began in 1959 as a gang on Chicago’s Near North Side, a clutch of neighborhoods populated by recent Latino migrants. In 1968, Mr. Jiménez changed the name to the Young Lords Organization and appointed ministers of defense and education, which followed in the Panther tradition, as did the berets he had his members wear, though the Young Lords’ were purple, in contrast to the Panthers’ black ones.
The Young Lords never released numbers, but they claimed to have 1,000 members at their height, around 1970. Under the leadership of Mr. Jiménez, they spawned chapters nationwide, notably in New York City and the Bay Area of California.
The group grabbed headlines in May 1969 when it occupied the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood for a week, demanding $601,000 in support for community activities. They left when the seminary agreed. A few months later, they took over a local church, where they operated a day care center and a free clinic.
“The survival programs were not reformist, but structures created to provide services while constructing the new world,” Mr. Jiménez told the website Fight Back News in 2019. “We are never a not-for-profit, but revolutionaries.”
José Jiménez was born on Aug. 8, 1948, in Caguas, P.R. His father, Antonio, had already moved to Massachusetts for work, sending home money to his mother, Eugenia Rodriguez. When José was 1, family members joined his father outside Boston, where Mr. Jiménez picked vegetables for a soup company. They moved to Chicago a few years later.
The city’s Near North Side had just 300 Puerto Rican inhabitants in 1940; by 1960, it had 32,000, attracted by its inexpensive if decrepit housing. The neighborhood was also a target for government urban renewal programs, which promised new and better housing for residents but in practice often displaced them to make way for middle-class apartments.
The Jiménez family moved nine times when José was a child, and he attended four different elementary schools; he dropped out of school early. He joined about a dozen other boys and young men to create the Young Lords in 1959; by 1964, he was running it.
The gang was about self-defense, but also petty crime, and Mr. Jiménez was repeatedly behind bars for theft and fighting with other gangs. During one stint, in 1968, he discovered a book by Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, and learned about the life of Malcolm X; in both he saw a lesson about turning his life around.
He began volunteering as an interpreter in jail, and after he was released, he circulated the idea of turning the gang into something positive for the community. Many of his buddies were skeptical, but some joined him, as did waves of newcomers, inspired by the idea of self-defense and self-improvement.
Like the Black Panthers, the group announced itself with marches, fliers and bold public statements. In 1969, the Young Lords joined with the Panthers and a far-left organization of white migrants from the South, the Young Patriots, to form the Rainbow Coalition, a multiracial advocacy organization (unrelated to a group of the same name founded later by the Rev. Jesse Jackson).
The Young Lords drew the attention of the Chicago police and the F.B.I., which targeted the group through its secret Counterintelligence Program, known as Cointelpro, an effort to surveil, infiltrate and disrupt left-wing organizations.
Mr. Jiménez was arrested 18 times during his years running the Young Lords. In 1970, he was charged with stealing lumber from a supply store; he jumped bail and went into hiding in Wisconsin. He returned in 1972 to serve a nine-month sentence.
By the time he emerged, the Young Lords, absent his leadership, had largely disintegrated, while the Near North Side neighborhoods were rapidly gentrifying. Still, he rallied the area’s Latinos in a 1974 campaign for alderman, to serve on the Chicago City Council. He lost the race but received 40 percent of the vote.
Along with his sister Daisy, his survivors include two other sisters, Jenny and Mirna Jiménez; his children, Jacqueline, Sonia, Melisa and Alejandro Jiménez and Jodette Lozano; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Mr. Jiménez later moved to Grand Rapids, Mich., where he worked as a substance abuse counselor. He received a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies from Grand Valley State University, outside Grand Rapids, in 2013; an associate degree in business administration from Grand Rapids Community College in 2017; and a master’s degree in public administration from Central Michigan University in 2020.
He also spent considerable time preserving the history of the Young Lords. Mr. Jiménez helped establish archives and oral history projects dedicated to the group at Grand Valley State and DePaul University, in Chicago.
And he spoke frequently about his group and its legacy, insisting that while its life span might have been short, its impact continues to be felt.
“We call it a 40-year struggle,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2008. “We want people to know the struggle is still going on.”
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9) Trump Drive to Cut Safety Net Could Hit His Voters
The new administration wants to slash aid for health, food and housing, but many of those programs now reach the struggling working class he is courting.
By Jason DeParle, Jan. 23, 2025
Republicans are mulling deep cuts in safety net spending, partly to offset tax cuts for the wealthy. But these could harm some of the voters who helped elect Donald Trump. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
In his first term as president, Donald J. Trump targeted what many Republicans consider blatant welfare waste — a rule that gives food stamps to millions of people with incomes above the usual limit on eligibility.
His proposed change would have saved billions but hurt low-income workers making the bootstraps efforts that conservatives say they want to encourage. Advocates for the needy resisted and the effort to shrink the program died during the pandemic, but it illustrates a challenge Mr. Trump may face as he pledges to cut spending in his second term while courting the working class.
Republicans are mulling deep cuts in safety net spending, partly to offset big tax cuts aimed mostly at the wealthy. But some programs they propose to cut reach not just the poorest Americans but also struggling working class voters, many of whom helped elect Mr. Trump in November.
“There is absolutely a tension,” said Douglas Elmendorf, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who teaches at Harvard. “The Republican Party’s support is increasingly coming from people who would be hurt by standard conservative policy.”
How much the Republicans will cut is unclear, with many forces in play. Reasons to expect deep reductions start with Mr. Trump’s first term, when he sought wholesale cuts in food stamps, Medicaid and housing aid, and nearly repealed the Affordable Care Act, which provides health insurance to 44 million Americans.
Though most of his efforts stalled in Congress or in court, he returns atop a movement with more policy expertise, while pushing tax cuts amid huge deficits, which increases the political pressure on safety net spending.
Days after the election, Mr. Trump created an advisory group known as “the Department of Government Efficiency,” whose leader, Elon Musk, has called for as much as $2 trillion of cuts in a $6.75 trillion federal budget. Mr. Musk referred to such cuts as budgetary “shock waves,” though he has since acknowledged that he expects to fall short. With more than half of the budget likely off-limits (Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest on the national debt), programs for the needy are especially vulnerable.
“This is probably the deepest peril the safety net has been in for at least three decades,” said Robert Greenstein of the Brookings Institution, a longtime advocate for programs to reduce poverty.
Impediments to major reductions of government aid include the Republicans’ narrow House majority, which could give moderates from swing districts veto power. Business lobbies, like hospitals and insurance companies, have stakes in safety net spending, and governors may resist changes that shift costs to states.
Mr. Trump did not campaign against safety net spending and has been more willing than many Republicans to run deficits and accept the rapidly growing national debt. “I don’t see a wholesale revamping of safety net programs,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who runs the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank.
Among the uncertain forces are the views of the working-class voters Mr. Trump wants to maintain. Programs like Medicaid reach higher up the income scale than in previous eras, but whether voters of modest means would punish Republicans for cuts is unclear. The policy details can be hard for ordinary voters to follow, and some working-class voters share critics’ views that the needy abuse aid. Democrats greatly expanded the safety net during the pandemic, only to lose ground with low-income voters.
Here is a guide to some of the programs Republicans may seek to cut:
Health Care
The most significant battles may involve health care, given the cost. Federal spending on Medicaid, which provides health insurance to the needy, tops $600 billion a year, nearly 10 percent of the budget. Subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans have exceeded $125 billion.
The aid has reduced the share of Americans without health insurance to a record low, but critics call the cost unsustainable and say that government control stifles innovation.
Republicans are likely to renew their push for Medicaid work requirements, arguing that the mandates help the needy find jobs. The first Trump administration approved 13 state plans, but they were stopped in court, suspended during the pandemic or blocked by the Biden administration.
Critics say the rules deny people care. They point to Arkansas, which dropped about 18,000 people from the rolls, many with jobs. After the House passed a national work requirement in 2023, the Congressional Budget Office estimated 1.5 million people would lose federal aid (though it predicted states would cover many with their own funds).
Some Republicans would go much further by capping federal funds, which grow automatically as people qualify. That would save large sums, but fundamentally alter the program by giving states an incentive to reduce enrollment or care. The caps proposed by the Republican Study Committee, which includes most House Republicans, would cut spending by more than half.
Politically, one advantage to spending caps is that they let Congress save money while leaving states to specify who loses aid. “They don’t leave any identifiable person worse off,” said Matthew Fiedler, an economist at the Brookings Institution.
The Affordable Care Act, or A.C.A., faces pressure, too. Enrollment in private A.C.A. plans soared after Congress increased the subsidies during the pandemic. But that expanded funding expires this year, and Republicans are unlikely to renew it.
The A.C.A. has also brought Medicaid to the working poor. With federal funds covering most of the cost, 40 states and the District of Columbia cover adults up to 138 percent of the poverty line — about $43,000 for a family of four. Republicans fought the expansion, and some would reverse it by cutting the subsidies.
Although Mr. Trump has said he is no longer determined to abolish the Affordable Care Act, which he continues to criticize, he has offered no specifics.
Nutrition
Mr. Trump has long called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — food stamps — a source of dependency and fraud. As president, he sought to reduce eligibility, expand work rules and partly replace benefits with food boxes.
Republicans may be especially eager for cuts after the Biden administration raised benefits by more than 25 percent, in what critics called an end-run past Congress. Benefits reach about one in eight Americans and cost about $100 billion a year.
Many conservatives argue there is room to cut without imposing hardship or losing political support. “People want to work and provide for their families, not receive government benefits,” said Angela Rachidi of the American Enterprise Institute, who co-authored a recent plan to reduce the SNAP program.
Mr. Trump may renew his first-term effort to deny aid to households above the normal eligibility line. Critics call the rule he tried to change (“broad-based categorical eligibility”) a loophole for people who do not need help. But more than three million people could lose benefits, many of them workers with high rent or child care costs.
He has also supported firmer SNAP work requirements. They apply to less than 10 percent of the caseload — able-bodied adults without dependent children — but those affected are poorer and more vulnerable than others on food stamps. Conservatives say exemptions are too permissive and work rules help the needy. But the Congressional Budget Office found that work programs lowered participants’ income because “far more adults stopped receiving SNAP benefits” than found jobs.
Some Republicans, including the Make America Healthy Again wing of Mr. Trump’s movement, would also ban food stamps from being used to buy what they call junk food.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human services, is a critic of processed food, and Jay Bhattacharya, who is slated to run the National Institutes of Health, coauthored a paper that found banning SNAP purchases of sugary drinks would lower obesity and diabetes.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas cited his research in saying she would seek federal permission to “prohibit using SNAP for junk food.” Critics say the needy deserve the same choices as others, and lobbyists for the beverage industry are fighting back.
Housing and Homelessness
Each of Mr. Trump’s White House budgets sought cuts in housing aid, which is already limited. Only one in four eligible households receives help, and waits last years. Mr. Trump proposed to reduce the number of Housing Choice Vouchers, the main assistance program, by more than 10 percent. The House Appropriations Committee last year voted to do the same.
Soaring private rents, which the vouchers subsidize, make the program increasingly expensive, and some conservatives say the aid saps recipients’ initiative to work and advance. Project 2025, a policy blueprint by Trump allies, called housing programs “poverty traps” that should carry time limits. Scott Turner, Mr. Trump’s choice as housing secretary, has warned of “the perverse incentives created by government and the welfare system.”
While seeking cuts in housing aid, Mr. Trump has promised a tougher approach to homelessness. In a campaign video, he called the homeless “violent and dangerously deranged,” urged cities to ban sleeping in public, and pledged to place unhoused people in camps with services.
He did not mention housing costs, which many scholars blame for record-level homelessness.
Republicans would also end “Housing First,” the doctrine that guides about $3 billion a year in federal grants to homelessness programs. Housing First programs provide the chronically homeless with subsidized housing and offer — but do not require — treatment for addiction or mental illness. The housing saves lives, they say, while treatment mandates drive people away.
Critics, including many rescue missions, say the approach fails to address underlying issues and results in people returning to the street. Robert Marbut, Mr. Trump’s last homelessness coordinator, said he favored “Housing Fourth.”
Other
Amid the promise of budgetary “shock waves,” other cuts could be coming. Project 2025 called for eliminating Head Start, the 60-year-old preschool program, and labeled a summer meals initiative for children a “federal catering service.”
Though Mr. Trump said he had no ties to Project 2025, he chose one of its authors, Russell T. Vought, as White House budget director, a job he held in the first Trump term.
The administration is likely to renew efforts to discourage legal immigrants from receiving aid. The “public charge” rule issued in Mr. Trump’s first term, but blocked in the courts, would have penalized immigrants who get benefits like Medicaid or food stamps by making it harder for them to become permanent residents.
There is one benefit Mr. Trump may be open to expanding. His 2017 tax bill doubled the child tax credit to $2,000 a year, an achievement he highlighted in his campaign. But about a quarter of children do not receive the full sum because their parents earn too little.
Under President Biden, Democrats temporarily raised the credit and gave it to all low-income children, regardless of parental earnings — a policy that sharply reduced child poverty, but that critics called welfare.
The Trump credit remains, but expires this year. Its fate will be part of the looming tax debate, and some Republicans appear willing to make it more generous to low-income households.
Doing so might answer critics who call Republican tax cuts a sop to the rich and strengthen Mr. Trump’s working-class appeal. But Republican support for a credit expansion for the needy is uncertain, and the politics are hard to predict: Democrats wonder why their expansion produced few political dividends.
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10) Gaza at Last Welcomes More Aid. It Needs a Deluge.
Hundreds of truckloads of food, fuel and other supplies have arrived in Gaza each day since the cease-fire took effect. But the need is vast after 15 months of war.
By Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair, Reporting from Cairo and Khan Younis, Gaza, Jan. 24, 2025
Aid trucks crossing from Egypt into the Gaza Strip, on Wednesday. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
Outside a warehouse in southern Gaza one day this week, a small crowd of men and boys waited their turn for a bit of the humanitarian aid that Gaza — sick, starving, freezing Gaza — has desperately needed. They walked away with sacks of flour and cardboard boxes of food, many dragging their precious cargo behind them in two-wheeled shopping carts.
It was an orderly sight that had become rare in the territory since the war began more than 15 months ago. Israeli restrictions on aid, a security collapse that allowed widespread looting of aid trucks and other obstacles had combined to limit the food, water, tents, medicine and fuel that reached civilians amid an Israeli siege on the strip.
In the week since a cease-fire agreement stopped the fighting in Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza and aid officials say that more food deliveries and other much-needed items are streaming in. The question now is how to maintain the level of aid they say Gaza needs, despite many logistical challenges and uncertainties over how long the truce will hold.
The United Nations moved as much food into Gaza in three days this week as it did in the entire month of October, the interim head of the U.N. humanitarian office for Gaza, Jonathan Whittall, said in a briefing on Thursday.
Other U.N. agencies and aid groups were distributing medical supplies and fuel to power hospitals and water wells, among other types of assistance, and helping to repair critical infrastructure. Tents were set to enter soon, and bakeries were expected to start supplying bread by Friday, according to the United Nations.
Since the start of the cease-fire, civilian police officers belonging to the Hamas government have re-emerged, which appears to have restored some security and order to the enclave. The show of Hamas control, however, may complicate prospects for a durable peace in Gaza.
COGAT, the Israeli government agency that oversees policy in Gaza and the West Bank, did not respond to a request for comment, but it said in a post on social media on Friday that 4,200 aid trucks had entered the Gaza Strip over the past week after being inspected.
Throughout the war, Israel said that it was not limiting aid into Gaza and blamed humanitarian agencies for failing to distribute the supplies it admitted into the enclave after screening.
In all, anywhere between about 600 and 900 truckloads of aid have arrived in Gaza each day since the cease-fire took effect on Jan. 19, dwarfing the few dozen trucks that had been entering daily in recent months.
By Tuesday, Kholoud al-Shanna, 43, and her family had received a bag of flour from the World Food Program, the first in two months.
It was welcome. But “we’re still missing the basics,” Ms. al-Shanna said. “My kids haven’t had fresh vegetables in so long that they’ve almost forgotten what they taste like. How are we supposed to survive on just flour?”
Improvements were coming on that front, too. Before the war, Gaza was supplied with a mix of donated aid and goods for sale. Small amounts of imported fresh produce, meat and other food continued to be sold in markets until Israel banned most commercial items late last year, arguing that Hamas was profiting off the trade. Some commercial goods have entered Gaza this week, according to aid workers, bringing fresh vegetables and even chocolate bars to markets at lower prices than shoppers have seen in many months.
Distributing the aid once it enters Gaza remains a work in progress. Many roads are in ruins after 15 months of war, though Gaza municipalities are starting to clear debris. Unexploded ordnance still litters the enclave, making distribution and repairs dangerous.
About 500 trucks carrying a mix of aid and commercial goods entered Gaza each day before the war. The cease-fire agreement envisions 600 trucks entering each day, which aid officials say they will be hard-pressed to sustain on their own.
“It cannot be delivered just by the United Nations, no way,” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, the primary lifeline for Palestinian refugees, said days before the cease-fire took effect.
UNRWA’s precarious situation is another potential hindrance: While U.N. officials say the agency is crucial to the aid effort because it forms the backbone of supply chains and services in Gaza, Israel has moved to ban the agency over accusations that it shielded Hamas militants. Aid officials say there is nothing comparable to take its place.
The biggest challenge of all is the sheer scale of the emergency. Though aid may be rolling in now, aid officials said, Gaza has been so lacking in assistance that it will take a deluge of supplies just to stabilize the population and prevent more deaths, to say nothing of eventual reconstruction.
Gaza will also need educational and psychological services and other support to begin to recover, officials say.
The number of trucks recently entering Gaza “is still a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of aid needed to catch up on what has been a massive dearth over the last year and a half,” said Bob Kitchen, the vice president for emergencies at the International Rescue Committee.
Some obstacles are gradually yielding. Israel’s evident willingness to usher in a surge of aid has resolved what aid officials and governments that donated assistance say was the biggest hurdle to getting Gaza what it needed. Saying its goal was to keep Hamas from resupplying through aid shipments, Israel had imposed stringent inspections on the assistance entering Gaza and restricted its movement once inside Gaza, frequently delaying or outright stopping delivery.
Aid workers no longer need to ask permission from the Israeli military to move around Gaza, except from south to north, speeding up the process. Before the cease-fire, many trucks designated to ferry aid to warehouses around the strip sat paralyzed for lack of fuel; now fuel is entering.
Israel still prohibits agencies from bringing in a long list of items that aid officials say are vital to the emergency response but that Israel deems “dual use,” meaning they could also be used by Hamas for military purposes. That has included everything from scissors to tent materials.
Some of those restrictions have been lifted, however, aid officials say, and talks are continuing about lifting more.
Another problem plaguing aid distribution in Gaza for months was looting, which diverted much of the aid meant for civilians.
The situation in Gaza deteriorated after the Israeli military invaded Rafah, in southern Gaza, in May, seeking to oust Hamas from what Israel said was one of its final strongholds. Hamas’s security forces fled, and organized gangs — with no one stopping them — began intercepting aid trucks after they crossed into Gaza.
International aid workers accused Israel of ignoring the problem and allowing looters to act with impunity. The United Nations does not allow Israeli soldiers to protect aid convoys, fearing that would compromise its neutrality, and its officials called on Israel to allow the Gaza police, which are under Hamas’s authority, to secure their convoys.
Israel, which has sought to destroy Hamas in Gaza, accused it of stealing aid and said the police were part of its apparatus. In the end, security broke down so badly that many aid groups kept their deliveries sitting at Gaza’s borders rather than risk the dangerous drive into Gaza.
But fears that organized looting would continue after the cease-fire have eased. Policemen are once again patrolling much of Gaza. While some people are still pulling boxes from trucks — scenes described by aid officials and witnessed by a New York Times reporter — it is now on a far smaller scale.
Palestinians in Gaza say that as aid becomes more widely available, people will have less incentive to loot.
“I’ve noticed a clear improvement — more people are getting food parcels today,” said Rami Abu Sharkh, 44, an accountant from Gaza City who had been displaced to southern Gaza. “I hope it continues until theft is eliminated completely.”
Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.
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