1/26/2025

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, January 27, 2025

 



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FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA PALESTINE WILL BE 
FREE!
END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
FOR A DEMOCRATIC, SECULAR PALESTINE!

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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 

By Monica Hill

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

Prison Radio is a project of the Redwood Justice Fund (RJF), which is a California 501c3 (Tax ID no. 680334309) not-for-profit foundation dedicated to the defense of the environment and of civil and human rights secured by law.  Prison Radio/Redwood Justice Fund PO Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94141


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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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Articles

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1) It’s a day of mixed emotions for families of the freed Palestinian prisoners.

By Fatima AbdulKarim Reporting from Ramallah, West Bank, Jan. 25, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/25/world/israel-hamas-hostages-cease-fire

Several people stand in an outdoor area as two people carrying weapons walk past.Preparing for the release of the Palestinian prisoners in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, on Saturday. Credit...Afif Amireh for The New York Times


For the families of the 200 Palestinian prisoners released on Saturday in exchange for the four freed hostages, it has been a day of mixed emotions.

 

Roughly 70 of the prisoners will be sent to exile in places like Egypt as part of the cease-fire deal, because Israel refused to allow them to return to their family homes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

 

Nasr Abu Hmeid, 51, is set to be among them. One of three brothers listed for exile, he was jailed in 2002 for his role in terrorist attacks on Israelis. The Israeli authorities consider his convictions too grave to let him return home.

 

On Saturday, Mr. Abu Hmeid’s wife, Alaa Naji, was preparing to travel to Egypt to be reunited with her husband.

 

“It’s a bittersweet moment,” she said in an interview. “We dedicated our lives to fighting for freedom in our homeland, but now we are forced to leave it.”

 

Mr. Abu Hmeid comes from a well-known family of Palestinian militants who are considered heroes by Palestinians and terrorists by Israelis. One of his brothers died from cancer while in Israeli custody, and Israel is still holding the body.

 

Mr. Abu Hmeid’s son, Raed, is also in an Israeli jail and is not listed for release.

 

“Now, our whole family — my mother-in-law, sisters-in-law and I — are preparing to leave for Cairo tomorrow,” Ms. Naji said.

 

She said it would be her husband’s first chance to meet their youngest son, 5-year-old Yaman, who was conceived through in vitro fertilization using sperm smuggled from Mr. Abu Hmeid during his incarceration.

 

Such sperm smuggling, which became popular a decade ago, has led the Israeli prison authorities to try to prevent prisoners from passing their sperm to visitors.

 

“Yaman is so happy to finally meet his baba outside prison, but he’s also heartbroken about leaving,” Ms. Naji said. “He doesn’t want to leave his toys, friends and school behind.”


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2) Deportation Fears Spread Among Immigrants With Provisional Legal Status

President Trump is targeting people who have been living in the country under Biden immigration programs that shielded them from deportation and allowed them to work.

By Miriam Jordan and Edgar Sandoval, Jan. 24, 2025

Miriam Jordan reported from Los Angeles. Edgar Sandoval reported from Brownsville, Texas.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/us/trump-deportation-legal-immigrant-fears.html

People in uniforms use flashlights to check documents in a dimly lit area.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents checking the documents of migrants who arrived for their appointments on Monday at the Paso Del Norte Bridge in El Paso. Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times


Bearing Social Security numbers and employment authorization, workers who recently arrived from places like Haiti and Venezuela have been packing and sorting orders at Amazon; making car parts for Toyota and Honda; and working in hotels, restaurants and assisted-living facilities.

 

On Friday, they woke up to the news from the Trump administration that many of them could be abruptly detained and swiftly deported.

 

A memo issued by the acting secretary of Homeland Security instructs immigration agents to speed up the deportation of immigrants who have been admitted under certain programs that were created by the Biden administration and have benefited about 1.5 million people.

 

Many of them have a protected status that stretches for another year or two. Tens of thousands, who arrived more recently, likely do not.  

 

The memo leaves unclear exactly who could be deported.

 

Frantzdy Jerome, a Haitian migrant who had scheduled an appointment at a port of entry along the southern border, was admitted into the country in June. Within weeks, he was issued a work permit, and he has been working the overnight shift at an Amazon warehouse in the Midwest. He worries that he could be designated for deportation.

 

“The news is overwhelming me with fear,” said Mr. Jerome, 33, who has a young child in the United States and supports 12 people in his home country.

 

“So many Haitians work at Amazon, and we are all nervous about the situation,” he said.

 

At a New York migrant shelter, Elhadi Youssouf Diagana, 34, of Mauritania, said that some people had not left the facility.

 

“There’s people who work, who work for Uber, who deliver food, they don’t want to go outside,” Mr. Diagana added. “They’re there, they don’t move.”

 

Wilfredo O. Allen, an immigration lawyer in Miami, said that when he went to have breakfast at a Cuban restaurant on Friday, several workers — some of whom are already his clients — peppered him with questions about whether they could be deported.

 

“Today, in Miami, there is fear,” he said.

 

Experts said that immigrants had every reason to worry because the memo turned hundreds of thousands of people who have been in the country lawfully into unauthorized immigrants.

 

“After they came in doing everything the government told them to do, they are in the same boat as someone who came here unlawfully,” said Lynden Melmed, former chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

 

“Right now, even though you are holding valid documents that allow you to work and be in the U.S., this guidance makes you vulnerable to being picked up by immigration agents and arrested at any time,” said Mr. Melmed, a partner at the firm Berry Appleman & Leiden.

 

Former President Biden used executive authority to admit people with temporary statuses that do not automatically offer a path to permanent residence. But, crucially, the initiatives shielded beneficiaries from deportation for at least two years and allowed them to work legally

 

The memo issued late on Thursday by Benjamine C. Huffman, the acting homeland security secretary, directs immigration agents to identify for expedited removal the population of migrants who benefited from two specific Biden-era initiatives related to border management.

 

One was a U.S. Customs and Border Protection app called CBP One that migrants used to schedule appointments to enter the United States (and to discourage unscheduled, unauthorized entries). The other was a program that allowed more than 500, 000 people from four  troubled countries — Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti — to fly directly to the United States if they had a financial sponsor in the United States. Both initiatives were popular, and the Biden administration credited them with helping reduce a surge in unauthorized crossings over the southern border.

 

The migrants were given a grant to stay in the country for up to two years under a temporary legal status known as “parole.”

 

Separately, the Trump administration ordered an immediate pause of another Biden parole program that has allowed more than 150,000 Ukrainians to enter the United States if they had financial backers, according to an email obtained by the Times.

 

Advocates of immigrants said they feared that an initiative that has brought Afghans since the U.S. military withdrawal, could also be at risk.

 

President Trump’s executive orders and the memo have ushered in a new era of immigration enforcement that appears to be far more sweeping than anything seen in decades.

 

Previous administrations, even Republican ones, prioritized the arrest and removal of people with criminal records, given the limited resources for enforcement. But while some Trump officials have said they, too, will prioritize people with criminal records, the administration’s early actions have made clear they aim to cast a far wider net.

 

The memo suggests that agents review the cases of immigrants who have not applied for asylum within one year of entering the United States.

 

Many people who entered the country when Mr. Biden was still president have Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., a designation given to people from countries that the executive branch deemed to be in extreme turmoil because of a humanitarian crisis, political upheaval or a natural disaster. That allows nationals from those countries already in the United States to stay.

 

Before leaving office, the Biden administration extended T.P.S. for immigrants from many countries for at least until 2027, and they are likely to remain shielded from removal, even after the recent memo. Others have asylum applications, which should protect them.

 

Experts said that the most vulnerable to immediate enforcement were likely those who crossed the border recently using the CBP One app. Often, they had waited months in Mexico for the moment their phone screens flashed with a notice instructing them to report to a port of entry along the southern border at a specific date and time.

 

They were then paroled into the country. Within weeks, they typically had employment authorization and Social Security numbers and were able to start working.

 

Guillermo Estrada, 40, who was at a shelter in Brownsville, Texas early this week, had used the app. He said he and others at the shelter felt that they “were the lucky ones” for making it into the United States before Mr. Trump returned to office.

 

“We did it the right way. We did not cross illegally,” Mr. Estrada said. “We could have crossed through the river. But we waited.”

 

He and others were left to wonder what Mr. Trump’s aggressive moves would mean going forward.

 

After news on Friday of the memo, one word kept coming up: fear.

 

“Of course we are afraid. We are all feeling the same fear,” Mr. Estrada said on Friday.

 

“If we get deported to Mexico, the mafia is there,” he said. “If we get deported to Venezuela, the government is waiting for us.”

 

Mr. Estrada said he was persecuted in Venezuela for expressing his views against the current government. He pointed to a bullet wound on an ankle that he said was inflicted by a Venezuelan soldier.

 

“Imagine, where are we going to go? I spent thousands of dollars to get here,” he said. “If everything was fine in Venezuela, I would have returned on my own.”

 

The man who runs the shelter in Brownsville, Victor Maldonado, could not offer the migrants reassurance. He said he had seen ICE trucks circling the shelter in the last few days. “It looks like they were scouting,” Mr. Maldonado said. “We just don’t know if they can come in and pick up people who don’t have work permits. There are a lot of unknowns.”

 

Representative María Elvira Salazar, a Miami Republican, sent a letter to Homeland Security urging the department to protect from deportation Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Haitians who do not have criminal records or pending deportation cases.

 

But the memo directs agents to “take all steps necessary” to review immigrants’ cases and exercise discretion to determine whether they can be subjected to expedited removal, which deprives people from going before a judge to fight to remain in the country.

 

Some countries might not accept repatriated nationals. Regardless, many migrants said that they could not countenance a return.

 

Mr. Jerome said that family members in Haiti had been murdered by gangs who have taken control of large swaths of the country.

 

For now, “I will keep working with a lot of fear,” he said a few hours before heading to his shift at the Amazon warehouse. He also wondered whether Jeff Bezos, the founder of the company, might somehow be able to help.

 

“Maybe Bezos can do something for the people working for him because he’s friends with Trump,” he said.

 

Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting from Miami and Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting from New York.


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3) U.S. Military Planes Carrying Migrants Land in Guatemala

The Department of Defense said this week that it would provide planes for deportation flights.

By Annie Correal and Jody García, Jan. 24, 2025

Annie Correal reported from Mexico City, and Jody Garcia from Guatemala City.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/us/politics/trump-us-guatemala-military-migrants.html

People, some in high-visibility vests, are gathered near a parked gray military transport plane.

One of the American military jets that landed in Guatemala City on Friday. Credit...Guatemalan Institute of Migration


Two military jets landed in Guatemala City on Friday carrying deported migrants from Tucson, Ariz., and El Paso, according to local migration authorities and the American Embassy in Guatemala.

 

Guatemala appears to be one of first countries to have struck an agreement with the United States to receive deported citizens transported on U.S. Air Force jets, after the Trump administration this week authorized the military through executive order to assist in securing the border.

 

The acting secretary of defense, Robert Salesses, said in a statement this week that, working with the State Department, the Department of Defense would provide military airplanes to support Department of Homeland Security “deportation flights of more than 5,000 illegal aliens from the San Diego, California, and El Paso, Texas, sectors detained by Customs and Border Protection.”

 

The U.S. Embassy in Guatemala could not confirm how many more military jets were expected to transport deportees to the country or on what timeline.


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4) Live Updates: Hamas Frees 4 Israeli Soldiers in Exchange for Palestinian Prisoners

The releases of the hostages and around 200 prisoners were the second exchange as part of the cease-fire deal in Gaza. Israel said the four hostages, all women, were back in the country.

By Aaron Boxerman and Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 25, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/25/world/israel-hamas-hostages-cease-fire

Israel just announced that the hostages Naama Levy, 20; Liri Albag, 19; Karina Ariev, 20; and Daniella Gilboa, 20, have officially been released to Israeli custody.


Hamas on Saturday released four female Israeli soldiers held hostage in Gaza, in a carefully choreographed show of force that highlighted how powerful the group remains inside the enclave. Hours later, Israel released 200 Palestinian prisoners to complete the exchange, part of the initial six-week cease-fire deal in the Gaza war.

 

The Israeli government said in a statement that the women had been brought back to Israel, where they were reunited with their families after more than 15 months in captivity. In the West Bank city of Ramallah, crowds of Palestinians held aloft the returning prisoners, many of whom had been jailed for deadly militant attacks against Israelis.

 

The swap is seen as a crucial test of how the 42-day truce between Israel and Hamas — the first stage of a multiphase agreement — will develop in the coming weeks. Mediators hope the deal leads to a permanent end to the devastating war, which has killed tens of thousands in Gaza and destroyed large parts of the enclave.

 

Israel’s government identified the released women as Karina Ariev, 20; Daniella Gilboa, 20; Naama Levy, 20; and Liri Albag, 19. All four were abducted from the military base near Gaza where they had been serving during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which started the war.

 

On Saturday, in scenes streamed live on Al Jazeera and watched breathlessly in Israel, armed and masked Hamas fighters marched the four soldiers past a cheering crowd in downtown Gaza City. They paraded them — in military-style clothes — onto a makeshift stage that displayed a banner reading “Zionism will not prevail” in Hebrew.

 

After a brief ceremony, Hamas gunmen handed the women over to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which transported them to Israeli forces. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, called Hamas’s display with the four hostages “a cynical show.”

 

In central Tel Aviv, crowds of family, friends and supporters, who had gathered to watch the handover live, were cheering, chanting the hostages’ names and crying with joy. “After 477 tumultuous days of pain, worry, and endless anxiety — we finally got to embrace our beloved Karina,” Ms. Ariev’s family said in a statement.

 

Here is what else to know:

 

·      Returning north: Under the terms of the cease-fire deal, Israeli forces are expected to partly withdraw from a major zone in central Gaza, enabling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return to their homes in northern Gaza. But that was uncertain on Saturday after the Israeli prime minister’s office said it would not allow Gazans to head north until the release of Arbel Yehud, one of the last civilian women in captivity, “is arranged,” as it says is stipulated by the deal.

 

·      Prisoner releases: Many of the 200 Palestinian prisoners whom Israel released on Saturday were serving life sentences for involvement in attacks against Israelis. Around 70 are being exiled abroad as part of the agreement and will not be allowed to return to their homes in the West Bank and Jerusalem, according to a list provided by the Palestinian authorities.

 

·      Four soldiers: The hostages had been recent recruits, working as “spotters” for Israel’s army, reporting on suspicious activity across the border. Here is more detail about them.

 

·      Cease-fire deal: Hamas agreed in the deal to release 33 of the nearly 100 hostages who remained in Gaza over the first six weeks of the deal. So far, it has released seven, including the four on Saturday. Israel agreed to free over 1,500 Palestinian prisoners in exchange.

 

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.


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5) Amazon’s Fight With Unions Heads to Its Grocery Aisles

Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia are voting on whether to form the first union in the Amazon-owned chain. The company is pushing back.

By Danielle Kaye. Reporting from Philadelphia, Jan. 25, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/business/economy/amazon-union-whole-foods-philadelphia.html
Two men and a woman, all wearing union badges, outside a store with Whole Foods Market signage.
From left, Rob Jennings, Ed Dupree, and Khy Adams, who are hoping to unionize the Whole Foods Store where they work in Philadelphia. Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

At a sprawling Whole Foods Market in Philadelphia, a battle is brewing. The roughly 300 workers are set to vote on Monday on whether to form the first union in Amazon’s grocery business.

 

Several store employees said they hoped a union could negotiate higher starting wages, above the current rate of $16 an hour. They’re also aiming to secure health insurance for part-time workers and protections against at-will firing.

 

There is a broader goal, too: to inspire a wave of organizing across the grocery chain, adding to union drives among warehouse workers and delivery drivers that Amazon is already combating.

 

“If all the different sectors that make it work can demand a little bit more, have more control, have more of a voice in the workplace — that could be a start of chipping away at the power that Amazon has, or at least putting it in check,” said Ed Dupree, an employee in the produce department. Mr. Dupree has worked at Whole Foods since 2016 and previously worked at an Amazon warehouse.

 

Management sees things differently. “A union is not needed at Whole Foods Market,” the company said in a statement, adding that it recognized employees’ right to “make an informed decision.”

 

Workers said that since they went public with their union drive last fall, store managers had ramped up their monitoring of employees, hung up posters with anti-union messaging in break rooms and held meetings that cast unions in a negative light.

 

Audrey Ta, who fulfills online orders at the store, said that she planned to vote in favor of unionizing with the United Food and Commercial Workers, but that there was unease among the workers. She has stopped wearing her union pin on the job.

 

“People keep their head down and try to talk not to talk about it,” Ms. Ta said. “Management really pays attention to what we talk about.”

 

Whole Foods said it had complied with all legal requirements when communicating with employees about unions.

 

U.F.C.W. Local 1776, which represents workers in Pennsylvania, has filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing Whole Foods of firing an employee in retaliation for supporting the union drive. The union also accused the chain of excluding the store’s employees from a pay raise that had been given this month to all its other workers in the Philadelphia area.

 

“They’re treating them differently,” said Wendell Young IV, president of U.F.C.W. Local 1776. “They’re discriminating against them for trying to form a union.”

 

Whole Foods denied allegations of retaliation. The company argued that it cannot legally change wages during the election process, and that it had delayed a raise until after the election to avoid the appearance of trying to influence votes.

 

A majority of the store’s workers signed union authorization cards last year before the union filed a petition for an election. But Ben Lovett, an employee who has led the organizing, said he expected the election to be close.

 

Whole Foods is the latest segment of Amazon’s business to confront the prospect of a union. In 2022, workers on Staten Island voted to form Amazon’s first union in the United States; it is now affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Amazon disputed the election outcome and has refused to recognize or bargain with the union pending a court challenge.

 

Delivery drivers, who work for third-party package delivery companies serving Amazon from California to New York, have also mounted campaigns with the Teamsters.

 

Rob Jennings, an employee in the prepared foods section of the Philadelphia store, has worked there for nearly two decades. He said he noticed a series of changes after Amazon bought the chain in 2017: a program that offered employees a portion of the store’s budget surplus was scrapped, part-time workers lost health insurance, staffing levels started to decline.

 

Even though Whole Foods had never been a worker paradise, Mr. Jennings said, “I have a fantasy about bringing back all the things they took away.”

 

Whole Foods said in a statement that the abandoned profit-sharing program did not evenly benefit all employees; that part-time workers receive other benefits like in-store discounts and a 401(k) plan; and that the company is committed to keeping stores appropriately staffed.

 

Khy Adams first knew the Philadelphia store as a high school hangout. She had been wanting to work there for years when, in August, she landed a job overseeing the hot foods bar.

 

But she did not find the work-life balance she had sought, she said, with management expecting an unreasonable level of availability. She said she hoped a union could help improve conditions.

 

In addition to Amazon’s pushback, the political transformation in Washington may pose hurdles. After the Biden administration’s embrace of unions, President Trump is expected to appoint a new N.L.R.B. general counsel whose approach could make it harder for organizing campaigns to succeed.

 

“Amazon has the machine behind them to prolong this, to shut this down, to make it the hardest thing for us to continue to work toward,” Ms. Adams said of the campaign to unionize.


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6) In the Gaza Rubble, the Living Envy the Dead

By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, Jan. 25, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/opinion/gaza-israel-ceasefire.html

a photograph of a father and child in front of rubble

Khamis Saeed/Reuters


Over the course of the Gaza war, I’ve occasionally quoted a linguistics scholar in Gaza, Mohammed Alshannat, who is pretty much the opposite of Hamas.

 

In his writings before the war, Alshannat admired Western democracy, condemned suicide bombings and yearned for Arabs and Jews to live in peace and harmony. With the cease-fire, he is now trying to recover the bodies of relatives and bury them.

 

“Our beloved Gaza is gone,” he texted in English, adding that the survivors envy the dead: “They don’t have to see it.”

 

I understand this exhausted man’s heartbreak, after months of hunger and homelessness and seeing his son injured. The cease-fire is welcome, but there’s no clear path forward and not much to celebrate.

 

“All I want to do is put my tent on the rubbles and cry,” Alshannat wrote. “Pray for us.”

 

The Gaza war has been a tragedy and a failure for all. Hamas committed horrific atrocities in October 2023 that didn’t empower Palestinians but left them in misery. Israel then waged a war that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians without so far accomplishing its goals either of completely dismantling Hamas or of freeing all the hostages. Americans enabled this killing by providing billions of dollars in weaponry without meaningful restriction, making a mockery of our lofty talk of a “rules-based international order.”

 

What has all this war achieved? Hamas is degraded militarily but remains in charge and continues to hold Israeli hostages. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders for suspected war crimes. Thousands of Palestinian children are amputees, and 377 aid workers have been killed. And the holy grail of a sustainable peace in the Middle East seems no closer.

 

Today Hamas in Gaza appears under the control of Mohammed Sinwar, the hard-line younger brother of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader killed by Israel in October. Hamas officers are again patrolling Gaza streets. “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,” my Times colleagues wrote.

 

Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a farewell speech that “we assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.” Blinken emphasized that Israel needs to outline a post-conflict future for Palestinians and that “Hamas cannot be defeated by a military campaign alone.”

 

I fear that the message about the futility of endless war hasn’t gotten through to either Israel or Hamas.

 

A reciprocal process of dehumanization has led each side to conclude that the only thing the other understands is brute force. So both have engaged in horrific violence, with credible accounts of torture, rape and atrocities by each side.

 

Too many people denounce the atrocities of one side while making excuses for those on the other. Hamas kidnapped an 8-month-old Israeli baby, Kfir Bibas. And Palestinian children have been “killed, starved and frozen to death,” the U.N. chief for humanitarian affairs, Tom Fletcher, said, with more than 3,000 children under the age of 5 killed in Gaza, according to Save the Children.

 

Israel hasn’t shown much humanity toward the children of Gaza — a Times investigation found that the Israeli authorities severely weakened protections for civilians during its bombings — but then neither has Hamas. At one point, Yahya Sinwar suggested in private messages that Palestinian civilian bloodshed would benefit the cause, according to The Wall Street Journal.

 

Now we have a cease-fire, but is it more than a pause? I normally corner the market for hope, but I find it hard to be optimistic about Middle East peace.

 

Violence has grown in the West Bank, settlers are out of control even as President Trump has lifted sanctions on them, and there is more talk of annexation of the West Bank by Israel, which would most likely mean denying Palestinians democratic rights.

 

Meanwhile, negotiators on Gaza pushed the knottiest issues to later phases of this agreement. That’s what Middle East negotiators always do, because it’s the only way to get anywhere. But I fear we won’t reach the end of Phase 2 and Phase 3 of this cease-fire agreement, any more than we got to the end of the Oslo peace process.

 

If you squint just so, it’s possible to visualize a way through the minefield ahead with leadership by Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, using the leverage America has over Israel as a friend and arms supplier. That would mean a road to a Palestinian state in exchange for Saudi recognition of Israel, and I’m skeptical this will happen — but to Trump’s credit it was pressure from him and his team that helped achieve the cease-fire.

 

Any architecture for a lasting peace will involve complex negotiations with Saudi Arabia and many other players, along with painful concessions by both Israelis and Palestinians. Yet ultimately any peace will require a moral foundation as well as a geopolitical one.

 

I don’t believe that Hamas and Israel are morally equivalent: On my visits to Gaza before the war, I always found Hamas to be repressive, misogynistic and homophobic, while Israel is better than Benjamin Netanyahu and has a rich civil society and a still vibrant democracy within its borders. Yet there is no hierarchy of human life: I absolutely believe in the moral equivalence of Palestinian, Israeli and American children — and a recognition of that shared humanity is the best scaffolding for lasting peace.


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7) Live Updates: Israel’s Cease-Fires in Lebanon and Gaza Appear Fragile

Israeli forces killed at least 15 people and injured dozens more in southern Lebanon on Sunday, Lebanese officials said, in one of the deadliest days since Israel’s truce with Hezbollah took effect. In Gaza, Israel said Hamas had violated the terms of the cease-fire.

By Isabel Kershner, Christina Goldbaum and Euan Ward, Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, Christina Goldbaum from Damascus, Syria, and Euan Ward from Beirut, Lebanon, Jan. 26, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/26/world/lebanon-israel-hezbollah

Many people are crowded onto a street near a roadblock.

Residents and Lebanese Army soldiers near a roadblock secured by Israeli forces on Sunday in Burj al-Muluk, Lebanon. Credit...Karamallah Daher/Reuters


The cease-fires in Lebanon and Gaza appeared increasingly fragile on Sunday after Israeli forces killed 15 people in southern Lebanon, Lebanese officials said, while in Gaza, Israel prevented Palestinians from moving back north, saying Hamas had violated the terms of the truce.

 

In Lebanon, Israeli forces remained in southern Lebanon beyond the 60-day deadline for both Hezbollah and Israel to withdraw and opened fire as thousands of Lebanese displaced by the war poured onto roads leading south back to their homes. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that at least 15 people were killed and more than 80 were injured.

 

The Israeli military said in a statement that it had fired “warning shots” after what it described as “suspects” approached their forces. It also said that an unspecified number of people had been arrested and were now being questioned at the scene.

 

The cease-fire agreement, which was signed in November and halted the deadliest war in decades between Israel and Hezbollah, stipulated that both sides withdraw, while the Lebanese Army and U.N. peacekeepers would be deployed in force to secure the area. Negotiators had hoped the cease-fire deal would become permanent, returning a measure of calm to a turbulent region. But as the deadline passed on Sunday, Israeli forces failed to withdraw, stoking fears of a sustained Israeli occupation and renewed hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.

 

In Gaza, Israeli troops were preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes in the north of the Gaza Strip on Sunday because Israel said Hamas had violated the terms of their cease-fire agreement that went into effect a week ago. Hamas accused Israel of stalling.

 

Despite the shakiness of the truces, all the warring sides appeared to want the cease-fires to hold, on condition that the terms were upheld by their adversaries.

 

Here is what else to know:

 

·      Southern Lebanon: Residents of some southern Lebanese towns had called for their neighbors to gather early Sunday morning and head to their homes in a convoy, despite the warnings from Israel not to return. The Lebanese military said it was accompanying civilians returning to several border towns to try to ensure their safety. The military said in a statement that a Lebanese soldier was among those killed by Israeli fire. Israel did not immediately comment on that claim.

 

·      Returning north: Displaced Palestinians in southern and central Gaza were left wondering when Israel would permit them to return to their homes in the northern part of the territory, as Israel and Hamas sparred over the implementation of the cease-fire deal. The holdup left many Palestinians in a state of anxious waiting, as they were already packing their belongings, including kitchen supplies, clothing and mattress pads.

 

·      Displaced Palestinians: A suggestion by President Trump to “clean out” the Gaza Strip and ask Egypt and Jordan to take in more Palestinians raised new questions on Sunday about United States policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and two of its most important allies in the Middle East. Mr. Trump’s comments appeared to echo the wishes of the Israeli far right that Palestinians be encouraged to leave Gaza — an idea that goes to the heart of Palestinian fears that they will be driven from their remaining homelands.


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8) Israel is blocking Gazans from returning north and accusing Hamas of violating the cease-fire.

By Isabel Kershner and Hiba Yazbek, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 26, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/26/world/lebanon-israel-hezbollah

A crowd of people stands by a beach.Displaced Palestinians gathered with their belongings near a roadblock as they waited to return to their homes in the northern part of the Gaza Strip on Sunday. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press


Israeli troops were preventing Palestinians from returning to their homes in the north of the Gaza Strip on Sunday as Israel said Hamas had violated the terms of the cease-fire agreement that went into effect a week ago while Hamas accused Israel of stalling.

 

Officials on both sides said they were in contact with mediators to try to resolve the crisis — one of the most significant between the parties since the cease-fire brought at least a temporary halt in fighting after 15 months of devastating war.

 

Under the terms of the initial phase of the deal agreed to this month, Israel had been expected to withdraw some of its forces to allow hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans to head north after a hostage and prisoner exchange on Saturday.

 

But the Israeli government said Hamas had violated the deal by not returning female captive Israeli civilians first and by failing to provide Israel with information regarding the status of other hostages, as stipulated by the agreement.

 

Israeli officials said that under the agreement, Arbel Yehud, an Israeli civilian held hostage in Gaza, was supposed to be one of the four women released on Saturday.

 

The hostages released were all soldiers who had been lookouts at a base on the Gaza border and were abducted from there on Oct. 7, 2023, during the Hamas-led attack on Israel that began the war.

 

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that it would not allow Gazans to head north “until the release of the civilian Arbel Yehud has been arranged,” leaving the timing of the troop withdrawal and the residents’ return unclear.

 

The Israeli government reiterated in a statement on Sunday that Mr. Netanyahu was “standing firm” on that decision. Ms. Yehud had also been expected to be released along with about 100 other hostages during a weeklong cease-fire in Nov. 2023.

 

In addition, Hamas was supposed to have provided Israel with a list by late Saturday detailing the condition of the remaining 26 hostages expected to be released over the next five weeks. An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue, said on Sunday afternoon that Israel had still not received the list.

 

Israeli officials have said that they believe many or most of the hostages scheduled to be released in the first phase of the deal are alive, but the status of some of them is not clear.

 

Hamas on Sunday accused Israel of stalling and of breaching the agreement by preventing displaced Gazans from moving north.

 

In a statement, Hamas said that it had informed the mediators that Ms. Yehud was alive and had given “all the necessary guarantees for her release,” adding that it was following up with the mediators in the hope of resolving the dispute.

 

The cease-fire deal was mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt. The Israeli official said on Sunday that Israel had not received any proof from Hamas regarding the status of Ms. Yehud.

 

But it appears that Hamas may not be holding Ms. Yehud. In a statement issued on Sunday, Al-Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, one of the smaller armed groups that is supported by Hamas in Gaza, said Ms. Yehud had been captured during the 2023 attack by a joint force of its fighters and the Quds Brigades of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another armed group that sometimes rivals Hamas. Ms. Yehud would be handed over according to whatever agreements were reached between the Hamas negotiators and the mediators, the statement added.

 

Images of a large crowd of displaced Palestinians waiting near the Netzarim corridor, a zone built by Israeli forces that splits Gaza in two, to return to the north were circulating in Palestinian media on Sunday.

 

Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reported that one person was killed and several others were wounded west of Nuseirat in central Gaza after Israeli forces fired at the crowd of people waiting to return to the north. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reports.

 

Ghada al-Kurd, 37, said she had chosen to remain in central Gaza on Sunday despite longing to return to her home in the north. “I will not leave until everything becomes clear,” she said. “I will not risk my life — those soldiers cannot be trusted,” she added.

 

Ms. al-Kurd, who left her home and her two daughters behind in Gaza City in the early weeks of the war, was once again left wondering when she would finally get to see them. “Here we are just waiting, feeling stressed and anxious,” she said. “They are playing with our fate,” she added.

 

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

 

Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting from Istanbul.


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9) Trump Pushes Jordan and Egypt to Take in Palestinians to ‘Clean Out’ Gaza

President Trump said he had spoken to Jordan’s leader and planned to call Egypt’s. Mr. Trump’s suggestion echoes proposals from far-right Israelis. A Hamas official rejected the idea.

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Vivian Yee, Jan. 26, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/world/middleeast/trump-gaza-jordan-egypt.html

A camp with displaced people and tents can be seen through a hole in a damaged building.

Displaced Palestinians waiting to return to their homes on Sunday in northern Gaza. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock


A suggestion by President Trump to “clean out” the Gaza Strip and ask Egypt and Jordan to take in more Palestinians raised new questions on Sunday about United States policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and two of its most important allies in the Middle East.

 

Mr. Trump’s comments appeared to echo the wishes of the Israeli far right that Palestinians be encouraged to leave Gaza — an idea that goes to the heart of Palestinian fears that they will be driven from their remaining homelands.

 

“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Mr. Trump said of Gaza on Saturday. “I don’t know. Something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now.”

 

Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he had spoken to King Abdullah II of Jordan about the issue, saying, “I said to him, ‘I’d love for you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess.’” He added that he would also like Egypt to take in more Palestinians and that he would speak to the country’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, about the issue.

 

He said that Palestinians could be in Jordan and Egypt “temporarily, or could be long-term.”

 

It was unclear from Mr. Trump’s comments if he was suggesting that all of the people in Gaza leave. The enclave has a population of about two million.

 

The suggestion by Mr. Trump was rejected on Sunday by Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza.

 

“The Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have endured death and destruction over 15 months in one of humanity’s greatest crimes of the 21st century, simply to stay on their land and homeland,” said Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, referring to the war that started with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. “Therefore, they will not accept any proposals or solutions, even if seemingly well-intentioned under the guise of reconstruction, as proposed by U.S. President Trump.”

 

But the idea appeared to be welcomed by two hard-line Israeli politicians.

 

Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted a statement on X on Sunday that appeared to refer to Mr. Trump’s comments, although he did not mention the U.S. president.

 

“After 76 years in which most of the population of Gaza was held by force under harsh conditions to maintain the ambition to destroy the State of Israel, the idea of ​​helping them find other places to start a new, good life is a great idea,” he said. “After years of sanctifying terror, they will be able to establish a new, good life elsewhere.”

 

Mr. Smotrich has long advocated for helping Gazans who want to leave to depart and for the Israeli military to remain in the enclave in order to pave the way for eventual Jewish settlement there.

 

Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right former minister who resigned from the government over the Gaza cease-fire deal but said he would return if the fighting resumed, said on X, “Congratulations to US President Trump on the initiative to transfer residents from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt.”

 

Millions of Palestinian refugees are already living in camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, while others now live in other Arab countries — including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates — and around the world. But Palestinians and their Arab allies have long rejected any further resettlement outside Palestinian territories, saying that forcing Palestinians to leave would mean erasing any hope of a future Palestinian state. Without land, they say, there is no country.

 

Egyptian fears that Palestinians moving en masse into Egypt could threaten the country’s security also make it unlikely that it will consent to any such arrangement. Jordan also opposes forced resettlement of Palestinians. Neither country had publicly responded to Mr. Trump’s suggestion by early Sunday afternoon.

 

Early in the war, Egypt became so concerned about the prospect of any move that would send Gazans spilling into its territory that it warned Israel that it was jeopardizing the decades-old Israel-Egypt peace treaty, an anchor of Middle East stability since 1979.

 

Mr. Trump made his remarks about Gaza on an evening flight after a rally in Las Vegas. It is unclear whether they signal a change in U.S. policy toward Palestinians.

 

Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other recent presidents other than Mr. Trump, the United States officially supported establishing a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one, criticized Israeli extremist attempts at seizing more Palestinian land by building settlements on it and assured Egypt that it would not be forced to take in more Palestinians.

 

But with Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, all of the assumptions that had undergirded American relationships in the Middle East may now be upended.

 

Egypt and Jordan are both major U.S. partners in the region, and successive U.S. administrations have regarded their stability as crucial to that of the wider Middle East. They both receive significant U.S. funding, with Egypt the second-largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel.

 

The Trump administration issued a memo on Friday suddenly freezing all foreign aid for a 90-day reassessment period, but laid out two major exceptions: weapons support to Israel and Egypt. It is unclear if Mr. Trump would try to use the military aid that Egypt receives as leverage to try to force it to accept more Palestinian refugees.

 

The fear of being driven from Gaza runs especially deep among Palestinians, who reject it as a replay of what they call the Nakba — or “catastrophe” in Arabic — the mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 during the war surrounding Israel’s creation as a state. Many Palestinians still yearn to return eventually to their pre-1948 homes, even if they now sit on Israeli territory.

 

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are trying to return to their homes as the cease-fire between Hamas and Israel enters a second week. It is only the second pause in fighting between the two since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas led an attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 Israelis. Since then, Israel’s military has killed at least 46,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. It has also destroyed thousands of homes and buildings in Gaza and killed many of Hamas’s leaders.

 

Most of the two million Palestinians in Gaza have had to flee their homes at least once. And though aid in recent days has increased, the humanitarian situation remains dire, with water, food and medicine running low and few working hospitals left.

 

Andrés R. Martínez and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.


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10) ‘People Will Be Shocked’: Trump Tests the Boundaries of the Presidency

Even more than in his first term, President Trump has mounted a fundamental challenge to the norms and expectations of what a president can and should do.

By Peter Baker, Jan. 26, 2025

Peter Baker is covering his sixth presidency and wrote a book with his wife about President Trump’s first term.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/us/politics/trump-boundaries-presidency.html

Elon Musk standing with members of Mr. Trump’s family and other people in suits inside the Capitol Rotunda.

Elon Musk and other billionaires were invited to join the inaugural platform on Monday. Credit...Pool photo by Kenny Holston


On his first full day back in the White House, President Trump reveled in his return to power and vowed to do what no president had ever done before. “We’re going to do things that people will be shocked at,” he declared.

 

Of all the thousands of words that Mr. Trump uttered during his fact-challenged, talkathon-style opening days as the nation’s 47th president, those may have been the truest. No matter that much of what he was doing he had promised on the campaign trail. He succeeded in shocking nonetheless.

 

Not so much by the ferocity of the policy shifts or ideological swings that invariably come with a party change in the White House, but through norm-shattering, democracy-testing assertions of personal power that defy the courts, the Congress and the ethical lines that constrained past presidents.

 

He freed even the most violent of the rioters who assaulted the Capitol in his name four years ago. Out of pique over questions of loyalty, he stripped former advisers facing credible death threats of their security details. Disregarding a law passed with bipartisan support and upheld by the Supreme Court, he allowed the Chinese-owned TikTok app to remain in use in the United States despite serious national security concerns.

 

Not satisfied to simply eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, he ordered government workers to snitch on anyone suspected of not going along or face “adverse consequences,” a practice familiar to anyone of a certain age who lived in Russia. He fired at least a dozen inspectors general who monitor departments for corruption and abuse in a late-night purge on Friday, ignoring a law requiring him to give Congress 30 days’ notice and provide specific reasons.

 

In doing so, Mr. Trump in effect declared that he was willing and even eager to push the boundaries of his authority, the resilience of American institutions, the strength of the nearly two-and-a-half-century-old system and the tolerance of some of his own allies. Even more than in his first term, he has mounted a fundamental challenge to expectations of what a president can and should do, demonstrating a belief that the rules his predecessors largely followed are meant to be bent, bypassed or broken.

 

“He’s using the tools of government to challenge the limits on the post-Watergate presidency,” said Brendan Nyhan, a government professor at Dartmouth College. “Some of these efforts will be turned back by the courts, but the level of anticipatory obedience we’re seeing from business, universities and the media is unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

 

Not everything that shocked people in Mr. Trump’s first week necessarily violated presidential standards. Any time a president from one party takes over from one of the other, the shifts in policies can be head-snapping, and Mr. Trump has been particularly aggressive in reversing the country’s direction ideologically and politically.

 

It is broadly within a president’s power, for instance, to order mass deportations, to pull out of an international climate agreement or to fire holdover political appointees, however debatable the decisions might be. But as so often happens with Mr. Trump, he takes even those decisions one step further.

 

“The theme of this week was vengeance and retribution when all other presidents have used their inaugurations to heal wounds, bring people together and focus on the future,” said Lindsay M. Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library and the author of several books on the presidency. “That sounds like a norm, but it’s actually fundamental to the survival of the republic.”

 

Mr. Trump has never been too impressed with the argument that he should or should not do something because that is the way it has previously been done. As a government novice during his first term, he found himself flummoxed at times by how Washington worked and unable to exert his will to achieve major priorities.

 

He returns for this second term more prepared and more determined to crash through obstacles and any supposed “deep state” that gets in his way. Ideas that establishment advisers talked him out of the last time around, he is pursuing this time around with a new cast of more like-minded aides who share his willingness to disrupt the system.

 

He decided to rewrite the 14th Amendment to the Constitution as it has been understood for more than a century to declare that it does not guarantee automatic citizenship to all children born in the United States. It took just three days for a federal judge to step in and temporarily block the move, which he called “a blatantly unconstitutional order,” but the issue will surely go to the Supreme Court.

 

While other presidents put their assets in a blind trust or otherwise distanced themselves from their personal business interests upon taking office to avoid even the whiff of a conflict of interest, Mr. Trump exploited his political celebrity to make enormous amounts of money in a scheme that could potentially be fueled by investors with a stake in federal government policies.

 

Just three days before his inauguration, he released a crypto token called $Trump that together with other family tokens rose to around $10 billion in value on paper. The tokens create new opportunities for companies and other financial players inside and outside the United States to curry favor with the new administration.

 

Moreover, while other presidents had wealthy patrons who enjoyed access to the Oval Office, Mr. Trump has gone so far as to surround himself with billionaires on the inaugural platform and give Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, a mandate to revamp the federal government that puts billions of dollars in his pocket through various contracts.

 

And unlike any president in modern times, Mr. Trump has taken it upon himself to redraw the map of the world, both symbolically and otherwise. He has unilaterally declared that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, sought to pressure Canada into becoming the 51st state and held out the possible use of force to take over Greenland and seize the Panama Canal. Unlike mass deportation or new tariffs, none of these were major topics on the campaign trail.

 

“The imperialist policy was not on the ballot, and so it represents a challenge to democratic norms,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University. “Under no definition of the term could President Trump be said to have a mandate to take the Panama Canal treaty away from Panama or Greenland from Denmark.”

 

Mr. Naftali, who was founding director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum and is currently writing a biography of John F. Kennedy, said Mr. Trump had single-handedly altered the terms of the national conversation in less than a week in office in a way that none of his predecessors did.

 

“Some of this is evanescent, but the vibe has changed,” Mr. Naftali said. “Our political and cultural vibe, to the extent that we have a national one, has changed in a matter of days. Yes, F.D.R. made people feel better about banks reasonably fast, but he didn’t alter the political culture in the first four days, and even after the first 100 days it took a while.”

 

Mr. Trump is hardly the first president to push the limits of presidential power, of course. Mr. Nixon comes to mind, among others. Indeed, some of Mr. Trump’s allies see a more immediate precedent for violating the conventions of the office in his own predecessor: President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who spoke strongly in favor of traditional standards even as he stretched his authority.

 

In his final days in office, Mr. Biden issued pre-emptive pardons to a half-dozen members of his own family and other targets of Mr. Trump’s wrath, a first-of-its-kind move he described as a means to prevent political prosecutions against them. Mr. Trump has in fact made such threats, but even some Democrats objected to the pardons, describing them as self-serving and a terrible precedent.

 

Mr. Biden also declared in his final days as president that the Equal Rights Amendment had met the requirements of ratification and therefore was, in his view, now the 28th Amendment of the Constitution. In doing so, he disregarded time limits established by Congress that were exceeded. Some analysts asked how it was different for Mr. Biden to declare his interpretation of the Constitution in this way than for Mr. Trump to try to impose his own interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

 

“Joe Biden vastly expanded the presidential parameters of everything from executive orders to border nonenforcement to Biden family pardons, all to implement policies and agendas that for the most part did not enjoy popular support,” said Victor Davis Hanson, a scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of “The Case for Trump.” He added that Mr. Biden “thereby ironically empowered Trump to follow that latitude, but to enact agendas that did earn public approval.”

 

Not all of Mr. Trump’s assertions are popular. A new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found widespread disapproval of the Jan. 6 pardons and not much support for eliminating birthright citizenship.

 

But Jonathan Madison, who studies democracy and governance at the R Street Institute, a free-market research organization in Washington, said that Mr. Biden “used executive power in unprecedented ways” after the election and that “Trump’s first week in office has reinforced this shift” in power.

 

“Notably,” Mr. Madison added, “members of Congress from both parties have shown little inclination to challenge executive overreach when it comes from their own side.”

 

But Mr. Trump, so far, has proved far more effective at squelching opposition than Mr. Biden ever was. He dominates his own party as no president in generations. Through force of will and fear of reprisals, Mr. Trump has compelled Republicans to bend to his wishes repeatedly since his re-election, and even give support to cabinet nominees who would not have passed muster in the past, like Pete Hegseth for defense secretary.

 

Beyond his own party, Mr. Trump has forced technology billionaires, Wall Street tycoons, corporate executives and media owners who previously opposed him to show newfound deference and, in many cases, flood his political accounts with millions of dollars. The resistance that sprang up when he was first inaugurated eight years ago has faded, with many progressives and anti-Trump conservatives deflated or afraid of being targeted.

 

That leaves Mr. Trump as the single most important player in any decision he cares to involve himself in, whether it be who is the speaker of the House or what the fact-checking policies should be at Meta’s Facebook. Even the bureaucracy is to be tamed if he has his way, as he moves to convert nonpartisan civil servants into political appointees answerable to him.

 

“We’re not talking about drilling for oil, where obviously he’s going to pursue different policies; we’re not talking about supporting Ukraine,” said Michael J. Klarman, a professor of legal history at Harvard Law School. “These are all signs that he’s not going to have opposition from the Republican Party, he’s not going to have opposition from the civil service, he’s not going to have opposition from the media. Those are all part of the authoritarian playbook.”

 

Mr. Trump’s allies reject the notion that he has authoritarian aspirations. After all, he is still subject to the 22nd Amendment, which bars him from running again in four years. Yet just last week, Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee, introduced a constitutional amendment to allow Mr. Trump to run for a third term.

 

It has no realistic chance of passing, but as it happens, the congressman’s campaign finances are under investigation by the F.B.I., a bureau overseen by the new president. “It would be my greatest honor to serve not once but twice,” Mr. Trump told an audience on Saturday. “Maybe three times.”


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11) The Devastating Legacy of Lies in Alzheimer’s Science

By Charles Piller, Jan. 24, 2025

Mr. Piller is an investigative journalist for Science. This essay is adapted from his upcoming book, “Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/opinion/alzheimers-fraud-cure.html

An image of a pill bottle with pills spilling out made with paper clips.

Illustration by Tamara Shopsin


Medical advances have beaten back many relentless assassins in recent decades, such as cancer and heart disease. A wide range of treatments share credit: surgery, medicines, radiation, genetic therapies and healthful habits. Mortality rates for those two diseases, the top causes of death in the United States, have fallen sharply. But in an aging population, Alzheimer’s death rates have gone in the opposite direction.

 

The disease afflicts nearly seven million Americans, about one in every nine people over the age of 65, making it a leading cause of death among older adults. Up to 420,000 adults in the prime of life — including people as young as 30 — suffer from early-onset Alzheimer’s. The annual number of new cases of dementia is expected to double by 2050.

 

Yet despite decades of research, no treatment has been created that arrests Alzheimer’s cognitive deterioration, let alone reverses it. That dismal lack of progress is partly because of the infinite complexity of the human brain, which has posed insurmountable challenges so far. Scientists, funders and drug companies have struggled to justify billions in costs and careers pursuing dead-end paths. But there’s another, sinister, factor at play.

 

Over the past 25 years, Alzheimer’s research has suffered a litany of ostensible fraud and other misconduct by world-famous researchers and obscure scientists alike, all trying to ascend in a brutally competitive field. During years of investigative reporting, I’ve uncovered many such cases, including several detailed for the first time in my forthcoming book.

 

Take for example the revered neuroscientist Eliezer Masliah, whose groundbreaking research has shaped the development of treatments for memory loss and Parkinson’s disease, and who in 2016 was entrusted to lead the National Institute on Aging’s expanded effort to tackle Alzheimer’s. With roughly 800 papers to his name, many of them considered highly influential, Dr. Masliah seemed a natural choice to steer the project, with billions in new funding. He hailed the moment as the dawning of “the golden era of Alzheimer’s disease research.”

 

Last September in Science magazine, I described evidence that for decades Dr. Masliah’s research had included improperly manipulated photos of brain tissue and other technical images — a clear sign of fraud. Many of his studies contained apparently falsified western blots — scientific images that show the presence of proteins in a blood or tissue sample. Some of the same images seem to have been used repeatedly, falsely represented as original, in different papers throughout the years. (When I reached out to Dr. Masliah for the story, he declined to respond.)

 

It’s true that some image abnormalities can be errors introduced by the publication process. Others might contain innocuous visual artifacts or human errors that sometimes appear to be image doctoring. But in some cases, the volume and nature of the evidence (and the failure of authors to provide raw, original data and images to clear up any confusion) have convinced outside experts that something more troubling has occurred. On the day my story was published, the National Institutes of Health announced that it had found that Dr. Masliah engaged in research misconduct and that he no longer held his leadership position at the National Institute on Aging.

 

Dr. Masliah epitomized a deeper malaise within the field — a crisis that goes far beyond him. Many Alzheimer’s researchers, including some once considered luminaries, have recently faced credible allegations of fraud or misconduct. These deceptions have warped the trajectory of Alzheimer’s research and drug development, prompting critical concerns about how bad actors, groupthink and perverse research incentives have undermined the pursuit of treatments and cures. It haunts me that this may have jeopardized the well-being of patients.

 

In my reporting, I asked a team of brain and scientific imaging experts to help me analyze suspicious studies by 46 leading Alzheimer’s researchers. Our project did not attempt a comprehensive look at all 46, let alone the multitude of other Alzheimer’s specialists who contributed to those projects. That would take an army of sleuths and years of work. But our effort was, to my knowledge, the first attempt to systematically assess the extent of image doctoring across a broad range of key scientists researching any disease.

 

Collectively, the experts identified nearly 600 dubious papers from the group that have distorted the field — papers having been cited some 80,000 times in the scientific literature. Many of the most respected Alzheimer’s scholars — whose work steers the scientific discourse — repeatedly referred to those tainted studies to support their own ideas. This has compromised the field’s established base of knowledge.

 

In some cases, the data problems might have an innocent explanation. Some researchers who put their names on papers may not have been aware of errors made by co-authors, but other cases most likely involve serious negligence, misconduct and outright fraud.

 

Such wrongdoing in any health-related research is lamentable. But fraud in the pursuit of treatments for Alzheimer’s is especially tragic because it’s a disease apart, different in kind from other major killers of the aging. It generally begins by gradually degrading a person’s command of routine activities, then stealing cherished memories and finally the very identity that makes each of us human.

 

Alzheimer’s families face incalculable emotional costs. In the United States, more than 11 million family members and other unpaid caregivers (such as friends and neighbors) care for fathers and mothers, spouses and grandparents who have fallen prey to dementia. For many this means financial impoverishment. These caregivers in the United States provided the equivalent of nearly $350 billion in care to dementia patients in 2023 — nearly matching the amount paid for dementia care by all other sources, including Medicare. The world desperately needs a cure, which makes any misconduct all the more insidious. And it raises an urgent question: Why would a scientist do it?

 

***

 

For decades, Alzheimer’s research has been shaped by the dominance of a single theory, the amyloid hypothesis. It holds that amyloid proteins prompt a cascade of biochemical changes in the brain that cause dementia. The supremacy of that hypothesis has exerted enormous pressure toward scientific conformity.

 

Even many of the most hardened skeptics of the hypothesis believe that amyloids have some association with the disease. But since the early 2000s, doctors, patients and their loved ones have endured decades of therapeutic failures stemming from it, despite billions of dollars spent in grants and investments. Its contradictions — such as the presence of massive amyloid deposits found in the brains of deceased people who had no symptoms of Alzheimer’s — have long exasperated critics and prompted doubts among many supporters.

 

Still, the hypothesis retains enormous influence. Nearly every drug approved for Alzheimer’s dementia symptoms is based on it, despite producing meager results. The anti-amyloid antibody drugs approved in the United States cost tens of thousands of dollars per patient per year, yet they slow cognitive decline so minutely that many doctors call the benefits imperceptible. The drugs are also not benign, posing risks of death or serious brain injury, and they can shrink the brain faster than Alzheimer’s itself.

 

The entrenchment of the amyloid hypothesis has fostered a kind of groupthink where grants, corporate riches, career advancement and professional reputations often depend on a central idea largely accepted by institutional authorities on faith. It’s unsurprising, then, that most of the fraudulent or questionable papers uncovered during my reporting have involved aspects of the amyloid hypothesis. It’s easier to publish dubious science that aligns with conventional wisdom.

 

I learned about Dr. Masliah’s apparent deception while reviewing suspicious research papers flagged on PubPeer, a website where scholars and sleuths challenge scientific papers. A few posts about his work caught my eye. I asked the neuroscientist Matthew Schrag of Vanderbilt University, the neurobiologist Mu Yang of Columbia University, the independent forensic-image analyst Kevin Patrick and the microbiologist and research-integrity expert Elisabeth Bik to examine his work closely. (Dr. Schrag and Dr. Yang worked independently from their university jobs.)

 

Over several months the group created a 300-page dossier comprising 132 papers by Dr. Masliah that they deemed suspicious. (Although the papers were written with colleagues, Dr. Masliah was the sole common author and usually played a leading role.) The experiments in those papers had been cited more than 18,000 times in academic and medical journals. The scale of apparent misconduct, including in many papers related to the amyloid hypothesis, uncovered in just a fraction of Dr. Masliah’s work stunned leading experts.

 

Although an extreme example, Dr. Masliah fits a pattern of researchers whose work has been called into question.

 

There’s Berislav Zlokovic, a renowned Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Southern California, whose research informed the basis of a major federally funded stroke trial. My 2023 investigation for Science, aided by the same image sleuths, revealed decades of apparent image manipulation in his studies. The N.I.H. quickly suspended the stroke trial. An attorney representing Dr. Zlokovic claimed that some of the concerns raised about his studies were “based on information or premises Professor Zlokovic knows to be completely incorrect” or were related to experiments not conducted in his lab.

 

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University, was known as a global leader in research on the brain’s circuitry in Alzheimer’s and other neurological conditions. He resigned in 2023 after an intrepid student journalist revealed numerous altered images in his research. Dr. Tessier-Lavigne didn’t personally falsify data or coerce junior colleagues to do so. But he failed to correct dubious results that came to his attention and may have provided inadequate oversight of his lab — allowing apparently doctored studies that helped build his reputation to remain on the scientific record, according to an investigation by a special committee appointed by the university’s board of trustees. In his resignation letter, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne denied that he had engaged in any unethical research but admitted that there were instances in which he “should have been more diligent in seeking corrections.”

 

Questionable and potentially fraudulent studies by Dr. Masliah and that of many others, have helped lay the foundation for hundreds of patents related to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s treatments and techniques, now being pursued by leading pharmaceutical companies.

 

For example, Hoau-Yan Wang, whose work contributed to the development of simufilam — an Alzheimer’s drug tested on thousands of patients — has faced credible allegations of image doctoring and manipulated test results. Dr. Wang was indicted by the Department of Justice in June 2024 on charges that he defrauded the National Institutes of Health of $16 million in grants. He has pleaded not guilty. The biopharmaceutical company backing the drug, Cassava Sciences, settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on charges that the company and key executives had misled investors on research around the drug. The executives did not admit wrongdoing.

 

When extensive and credible doubts cast a pall over a scientific portfolio, it’s natural to question the integrity of the researcher’s entire body of work. But not all the research I examined from those scholars was touched by apparent misconduct; some of them have even made contributions that could advance neuroscience, which makes this all the more complicated.

 

Most Alzheimer’s scholars operate with determination and integrity, and there are many independent-minded scientists advancing our understanding of the brain and memory loss. Recently, alternatives to the amyloid hypothesis have begun to find support. Promising approaches include exploring the role of viruses in cognitive decline, treating brain infections and reducing brain inflammation — potentially with GLP-1 drugs that have transformed weight loss. There’s also growing evidence that healthy lifestyle choices, as well as controlling blood pressure and cholesterol, can slow the disease’s progression.

 

But widespread misconduct wastes time, steals precious resources and skews thinking by honest scientists. Meanwhile, the staggering scale of Alzheimer’s grows year by year.

 

***

 

The question of why any scientist would resort to cheating looms large. Alzheimer’s disease remains one of the most formidable challenges in medicine, and the persistent lack of progress can feel like a deeply personal failure. Such frustration seemingly can, at times, drive normally ethical people to publish provocative results based on doctored data. The lure of prestige, fame and potential fortune from developing desperately needed drugs — even those with little or no realistic hope of benefit — has apparently led astray many who entered the field as seekers of truth. After all, top Cassava Sciences executives made millions in salary and stock trades despite simufilam crashing and burning, as had been long predicted by many experts.

 

“As a field, we’ve had a lot of dead ends” that have left patients waiting endlessly for treatments, said Donna Wilcock, an Indiana University neuroscientist who edits the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia. “Some people have put their ego and fame ahead of performing rigorous science.”

 

That phenomenon is not isolated to Alzheimer’s research. The broader incentive structures in science — where pressure to publish, secure funding and achieve breakthroughs is immense — can lead even well-meaning scientists to make shocking choices.

 

A slippery slope sometimes begins when a researcher alters highly enlarged pictures of brain slices to enhance them aesthetically — seemingly “harmless” doctoring to clarify biology’s inherent messiness and ambiguity. Beautiful images increase a paper’s curb appeal for publishers. (That temptation has been especially enticing amid a publish-or-perish imperative for scientists that’s so extreme it has spawned an industry of pay-to-play paper mills. Shady companies churn out phony scholarly papers, then sell author slots to desperate or ethically challenged academics.)

 

Scientists may then find themselves changing an image to strengthen its frail support for an experimental premise. They might rationalize their behavior as simply polishing a potentially important outcome. Scholarly journals have overlooked or been fooled by such deceits over and over. Scientists who are devoted to their assumptions regardless of the evidence — or outright cynics — may then take that deceit a step further. They fundamentally change images to fit their hypotheses: unambiguous misconduct.

 

Decades of complacency by funders, journals and academic institutions that manage the research enterprise means that relatively few cases of such fraud have been caught. For example, few peer reviewers who certify a paper’s scientific quality have the skill to check for image tampering. Despite years of scandals, many journal editors don’t verify images either. And few perpetrators face meaningful consequences.

 

So with professional rewards potentially great, many scientists, including those of high standing, seem to roll the dice. They surely know that misconduct investigations are nearly always conducted by an accused researcher’s home university, which fears the loss of face and funding that might follow a prompt, robust and open process. Such investigations — often lasting many months or years — usually start and finish behind a bureaucratic veil, hidden from public view.

 

Dr. Schrag of Vanderbilt, one of the neuroscientists I’ve worked with to uncover cases of scientific fraud, told me he used to view misconduct in Alzheimer’s research as rare, but has since gone through a “stages-of-grief process.”

 

“It doesn’t take that high a percentage of fraud in this discipline to cause major problems, especially if it’s strategically placed,” he added. “Patients ask me why we’re not making more progress. I keep telling them that it’s a complicated disease. But misconduct is also part of the problem.”

 

Exposing misconduct is the first essential, painful step for course correction, both to clean up the scientific record and to alert people to how compromised the field has become. Fixing a broken system — and accelerating the hunt for effective Alzheimer’s treatments — will also require new thinking about academic incentives and culture. One place to start: Train young researchers to value ethical conduct as the fundamental basis of science, and to hone their powers of skepticism. Advance them based on the quality rather than the quantity of their research products.

 

Government agencies that oversee Alzheimer’s research and enormously influence the field also need to rethink how they operate, and to move with urgency. Officials of the National Institutes of Health, of which the National Institute on Aging is a part, didn’t inspire confidence in response to the questions I sent them about Dr. Masliah as I conducted my 2024 investigation for Science. The N.I.H. acknowledged that the agency does not routinely check scientists’ work for fraud as part of the hiring process. “There is no evidence that such proactive screening would improve, or is necessary to improve, the research environment at N.I.H.,” said an agency spokesperson.

 

Hubris and lassitude about misconduct — shared by other funders and regulators, journals and universities — has to change. Alzheimer’s research must start self-policing effectively. That means journals and funders should invest more heavily in software tools and specialists to detect doctored images in article and grant submissions before they pollute the scientific literature. And it will require moving reviews of serious fraud allegations to experts outside an accused researcher’s home institution.

 

If the field’s institutional authorities fail to act, skeptics of science itself, most likely including those inside the Trump administration, surely will. Almost certainly, an ensuing overkill would describe ambiguity or innocent human error as fraud and eschew the thoughtful respect and due process needed to preserve what remains vital and true in neuroscience. That would enforce a new calamity on everyone who plans to grow old.


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12) Monuments in Australia Are Vandalized to Protest National Day

The vandalism unfolded in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. Australia Day is a divisive holiday that critics see as a symbol of racism and oppression.

By Mike Ives, Jan. 26, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/world/australia/australia-day-statues-vandalized.html

A crowd of protesters walking down a street.A protest outside a state Parliament in Melbourne on Sunday. Credit...Diego Fedele/EPA, via Shutterstock


Some Australians were in no mood to celebrate the country’s national day on Sunday because they had long seen it as a reminder of colonial oppression. A few protesters took that antipathy a step further — by vandalizing statues to British settlers and an English king.

 

The damage done in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra was a fresh sign that Australia Day, which commemorates when a British fleet sailed into Sydney Harbor to start a penal colony in the late 18th century, remains divisive.

 

Even as some Australians mark the holiday with barbecues and pool parties, critics note that it set in motion centuries of oppression of Indigenous people. Some prefer to call it Invasion Day or Survival Day, and they make their displeasure clear through protests or other actions.

 

In Sydney this week, a statue of Captain James Cook, who claimed part of the Australian continent for the British crown in 1770, was drenched in red paint. Its hand and nose were severed, too. The statue had been restored after facing a similar attack last year.

 

In Melbourne, a monument to John Batman, an explorer who settled the city on lands occupied by Aboriginal people, was toppled and destroyed early Saturday. Protesters in Melbourne also spray-painted the words “land back” on a memorial for Australian soldiers who died fighting in World War I.

 

And on Sunday in Canberra, the capital, there was graffiti on a statue of King George V. “The colony is falling,” someone had written on its base in red paint.

 

Australian officials condemned the vandalism.

 

“We should find it in our hears and in our minds to respect differences of views but not let it turn ugly,” said Jacinta Allan, the state premier of Victoria, according to a report by the television station 9News.

 

Representatives for the police in the states of Victoria and New South Wales said on Sunday afternoon that there had been no arrests or charges in connection with the vandalism in Sydney and Melbourne. The police in Canberra did not immediately respond to an inquiry.

 

People have protested Australia Day for decades. Recent protests were bolstered by the global Black Lives Matter movement, in which people in the United States, Britain and elsewhere toppled statues they saw as symbols of racism and oppression.

 

Last year in Melbourne, a Captain Cook statue was sawed off at the ankles, and a monument to King George V was beheaded.

 

Many Australian officials are keenly aware of their country’s racist colonial past, and they’re not afraid to say so publicly. In one example, the City of Melbourne’s website has a section on “truth-telling” that talks about developing “a shared understanding of the impacts of colonization and dispossession on Aboriginal peoples.”

 

But merely acknowledging historical wrongs is not enough for some Indigenous activists. That was clear when King Charles III visited Australia last year.

 

“You are not our king,” a voice rang out shortly after Charles, who retains the ceremonial title of head of state in the former British colony, finished addressing Parliament. “Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us.”

 

The voice belonged to Lidia Thorpe, an Indigenous senator and activist for Aboriginal rights. As security guards hustled her out of the chamber, she accused British colonizers of genocide and demanded that Britain enter into a treaty with Australia’s Indigenous population.

 

The king watched impassively from the stage.


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13) Colombia’s President Says He Will Not Accept U.S. Military Deportation Flights

Gustavo Petro said on X that the United States should not treat Colombian migrants as criminals and that he had already turned away U.S. military flights carrying deportees.

By Genevieve Glatsky and Simon Romero, Jan. 26, 2025

Genevieve Glatsky reported from Bogotá, Colombia, and Simon Romero from Mexico City.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/world/americas/colombia-us-deportation-flights.html

A close-up of Gustavo Petro at a microphone.

President Gustavo Petro of Colombia last year. On Sunday, he said the United States should not treat Colombian migrants as criminals. Credit...Raul Arboleda/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Colombia will not accept military deportation flights from the United States until the Trump administration provides a process to treat Colombian migrants with “dignity and respect,” the country’s president, Gustavo Petro, said on Sunday in a series of posts on X.

 

Mr. Petro also said that Colombia had already turned away military planes carrying Colombian deportees. While other countries in Latin America have raised concerns about President Trump’s sweeping deportation plans, Colombia appears to be the first to explicitly refuse to cooperate.

 

“I cannot make migrants stay in a country that does not want them,” Mr. Petro wrote, “but if that country sends them back, it should be with dignity and respect for them and for our country.”

 

Mr. Petro’s stance is likely to put him on a collision course with Mr. Trump, who since taking office last Monday has issued a series of executive orders and made other moves aimed at laying the groundwork to try to deport an enormous number of migrants.

 

The U.S. Embassy in Bogotá did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

Among other things, Mr. Petro said he would be willing to allow civilian planes carrying deportees to land in Colombia, but not military aircraft. “A migrant is not a criminal,” he wrote on X.

 

He did not include details about when or how many military planes and migrants had been turned away.

 

There were 190,000 unauthorized Colombian immigrants living in the U.S. in 2022, according to the most recent data available from the Pew Research Center.

 

A representative for the president confirmed that the planes had been turned away, but did not immediately respond to other questions. Representatives for Colombia’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

 

The announcement comes as countries around the world are grappling with how to prepare for the mass deportations of illegal immigrants that Mr. Trump has threatened.

 

Officials in Mexico, the source of the largest number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States, have said they remained open to receiving deported citizens and routine deportations have taken place to Mexican cities along the U.S. border in recent days.

 

“When it comes to repatriations, we will always welcome Mexican men and women back to our territory with open arms,” Mexico’s foreign affairs ministry said in a statement on social media on Friday night.

 

Still, Mexican authorities have not disclosed whether they plan to accept deported migrants from other countries, as Mexico has sometimes done in the past.

 

Other countries are crafting their own responses to Mr. Trump’s push for more deportations. Honduras, for instance, warned that expelling migrants could push the country closer to China’s political orbit.

 

Brazil’s foreign ministry complained of “degrading treatment” of its citizens after 88 migrants arrived in the country handcuffed on Friday.

 

On the other hand, Guatemala, Central America’s largest source of unauthorized migrants, appears to be one of the first countries to reach an agreement with the United States to receive deported citizens transported on U.S. military planes.

 

About 4 million unauthorized immigrants from Mexico live in the United States, representing about 37 percent of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center.

 

But while Mexico is still the most common country of birth for unauthorized immigrants in the United States, that number is down from a peak of 6.9 million 2007.

 

The unauthorized immigrant population from other countries has grown in recent years, especially from the Caribbean, South America and Asia.


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14) Despite anxieties, ‘There’s no moment more joyful than returning home.’

By Patrick Kingsley and Bilal Shbair, Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem and Bilal Shbair from the coastal road in Gaza, Jan. 27, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/27/world/israel-hamas-lebanon-gaza

A car loaded with mattresses and blankets drives on a dirt road.A car loaded with mattresses and blankets crossing the Netzarim corridor from southern Gaza into northern Gaza. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


They marched for hours in flip-flops and sandals, bags of clothes dangling from the crooks of their elbows. They trudged for miles with toddlers in their arms, mattresses slung from their shoulders. Some hobbled on crutches, others pushed wheelchairs and one child dragged his earthly possessions on a sled.

 

For nearly 16 months, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from northern Gaza have lived in tents, barred by Israel from returning to their homes after being forced to flee south at the start of its military offensive against Hamas.

 

On Monday, shortly after sunrise, many thousands of them began the painful trek back. After disagreements between Israel and Hamas delayed their return over the weekend, the Israeli military finally withdrew from Gaza’s coastal road by 7 a.m., allowing displaced people to move north on foot. Car owners were later allowed to drive north along an inland road, subject to inspections.

 

The pedestrians soon formed a human column that stretched as far as the eye could see — miles in length and some twenty people abreast. Rarely, perhaps, has such an uncomfortable journey felt like such relief.

 

“We’re so overjoyed,” said Malak al-Haj Ahmed, 17, a high-school student who was taking selfies with her family beside the coastal road. “There’s no moment more joyful than returning home.”

 

To mark the moment, some people distributed sweets. Some flashed victory signs at passing photographers. A group of small boys led a celebratory chant. “Right or left, north is best,” they sang. “To the north we go!”

 

There were so many people trying to leave that it became hard to walk through the central city of Deir al Balah, a hub for displaced Gazans. Family after family was taking down tents and packing belongings into plastic bags. Some people heaved gas tanks onto their backs. One man fixed wheels to a plastic box, turning it into a makeshift stroller for his baby.

 

As they walked, they envisaged the jubilation of being reunited with relatives who had ignored the Israeli evacuation orders and stayed north at the start of the war.

 

“The first thing I’ll do is hug my mother at her shelter,” Anwar Abu Hindi, 41, a housewife heading north with several children. “Our emotions are all over the place.”

 

But amid the euphoria, there were some notes of caution and frustration. For a start, the people heading north by car, along the inland highway, encountered long traffic jams; private security contractors were screening northbound vehicles, slowing cars to a crawl.

 

And many feared what awaited them when they arrived. Northern Gaza has become a wasteland, following intense Israeli airstrikes and the military’s demolition of scores of buildings, many of which had been rigged with traps and explosives by Hamas. In recent months, fierce fighting between Israel and Hamas, which continued until the start of the cease-fire this month, caused particularly widespread damage north of Gaza City.

 

Many of those returning on Monday did not know if their houses were still standing.

 

“Thank God we survived this war,” said Shorouq al-Qur, 27, a law graduate returning to Gaza City. But, she said, “no matter where we find shelter, whether here or there, it’s still a life in tents, surrounded by destruction and sadness.”


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15) Israeli forces again open fire as civilians try to return home in southern Lebanon, officials say.

Euan WardReporting from Beirut, Lebanon, Jan. 27, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/27/world/israel-hamas-lebanon-gaza

A bulldozer, seen from an elevated position, clears a pile of mud and rubble from a road.A bulldozer opening a blocked road in Meiss al-Jabal, southern Lebanon, on Sunday. Credit...EPA, via Shutterstock


Israeli forces opened fire toward residents of southern Lebanon for a second straight day on Monday as people pressed on with attempts to return to their homes along the border, a day after at least two dozen people were killed and scores injured in Israeli attacks, Lebanese officials said.

 

The Israeli fire on Sunday was the deadliest bout of violence in Lebanon since the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, ended with a truce in November. In the renewed violence on Monday, at least one person was killed and seven others injured, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The Israeli military said in a statement that it had fired “warning shots.”

 

The Israeli military said on Monday that it had redeployed in areas of southern Lebanon, and repeated calls for Lebanese residents to wait for their approval before returning home. The Lebanese military had sent reinforcements to parts of southern Lebanon earlier in the day, preparing to enter some towns and safeguard civilians, Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported.

 

Israeli forces killed at least 24 people and injured over 134 others on Sunday, Lebanese officials said, after thousands of Lebanese marched to southern towns and villages. Those areas remain occupied by Israel past a 60-day deadline for its withdrawal under the November cease-fire agreement, which called for both Israel and Hezbollah forces to leave southern Lebanon and for the Lebanese Army and U.N. peacekeepers to deploy in force there.

 

The Israeli military said in a statement on Sunday that it had fired “warning shots” to disperse what it called “rioters.” Last week, Israel had indicated that it would remain in southern Lebanon despite the deadline, amid doubts about the Lebanese Army’s ability to stymie Hezbollah’s resurgence.

 

Negotiators had hoped that the U.S.-brokered cease-fire by now would have given way for a more permanent settlement. But as the 60-day deadline elapsed on Sunday, the White House issued a statement stating that the initial agreement would be extended until Feb. 18. The Lebanese prime minister’s office confirmed the extension, which they said followed discussions with U.S. officials. The flurry of diplomatic activity appeared designed to buy time and stave off further bouts of violence.

 

The bloodshed on Sunday sparked urgent calls for restraint by the U.N. amid growing fears of a sustained Israeli occupation and renewed hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. Hezbollah, however, stopped short of their characteristic calls for revenge in the wake of the killings.

 

Battered by the deadliest war with Israel in decades, experts say the group has little impetus to reignite a conflict that would only weaken the group further as it attempts to recover. Instead, Hezbollah called on the international community in a statement to “assume its responsibilities” and pressure Israel to “withdraw completely from our lands.”

 

Myra Noveck contributed reporting.


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16) Born in the U.S.A. Doesn’t Mean What It Used To

By Carlos Lozada, Opinion Columnist, Jan. 27, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/opinion/trump-birthright-citizenship-14th-amendment.html

Family photographs and religious images decorate a wall.

Brayan Enriquez


Consider the idea of a birthright. Historically, it has been an exclusionary concept: a title of nobility passed on to the firstborn male, an inheritance of wealth and status, a claim to land that must remain within a family or a clan. A birthright, by definition, belongs to one person at the expense of someone else. It is not shared.

 

It is “mine,” not “ours.”

 

America’s tradition of birthright citizenship — specified in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, passed and ratified after the Civil War — upends that understanding. The American birthright is encompassing rather than exclusionary. It is, by definition, for all. Though the United States is hardly the only country to grant citizenship to those born within its borders, the practice has become an essential trait of our national character.

 

The old notion of birthright reinforces class division, even class oppression. America’s birthright, in contrast, is a source of equality before the law, a starting point for the pursuit of happiness. The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause is not just in the Constitution; it identifies the source of the document’s enduring legitimacy. If the Constitution was ordained and established by “we the people,” then it helps to know who counts among the people, who is included in that “we.”

 

During its first days, the Trump administration announced several orders and policies that would radically transform America’s posture toward immigration — blocking asylum seekers at the southern border, deploying the U.S. military to help seal that border, cracking down on undocumented immigrants already in the country and suspending the entry of refugees from around the world, as well as rejecting the principle of birthright citizenship. This last effort, in particular, seems unlikely to survive judicial scrutiny: More than 20 states have immediately challenged the citizenship order, and a federal judge in Seattle has temporarily blocked it, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”

 

Yet it is that very unlikelihood that renders the administration’s action especially noteworthy. In trying to unmake this American birthright, President Trump is doing much more than taking control of the border or creating a disincentive for future immigrants to the United States. He is seeking to limit and redefine that “we” that makes up America. He doesn’t have to win this battle right away (though I am sure he’d like to). By questioning birthright citizenship at all, he aims to erode its legitimacy. By tossing it into the political and judicial fray, he succeeds in having the American birthright bruised and weakened.

 

The text of the executive order is impressive in its sleight of hand. The title, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, is the precise opposite of what the document seeks to accomplish. Trump’s order does not protect the meaning of citizenship but threatens it. His order does not enhance the value of citizenship but cheapens it by making it conditional rather than universal. The order calls U.S. citizenship a “priceless and profound gift.” It is indeed priceless and profound. But describing it as a “gift” gives the game away. After all, the recipient of a gift has no prior right to it, no claim to uphold; the gift is bestowed at the whim of the giver.

 

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” the 14th Amendment begins, “are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Immigrants to this country can strive to become U.S. citizens — establishing residence, filling out forms, passing tests, swearing oaths — but their native-born children gain that status automatically. “Persons born” here need not swear an oath; their citizenship is instantly conveyed, their allegiance automatically assumed. It need not be earned or demanded, and it is not doled out selectively through the benevolence of a fickle leader. It simply is.

 

The first words of constitutional clauses are telling. That “we” that leads off the preamble is aspirational, an imagined community as much as a real one. “The Constitution opens by speaking on behalf of a united people when, in fact, the unification of that people is among its foremost goals,” Yuval Levin writes in his recent book “American Covenant.” No coincidence, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence begins with the same first-person plural form: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” it reads, even if at the time those self-evident truths were far from self-fulfilling, limited to a narrow interpretation of “we.”

 

The 14th Amendment, our longest single tweak to the Constitution, affirmed “due process of law” and “equal protection of the laws” as fundamental concepts. Yet birthright citizenship retains pride of place at the beginning of the amendment’s text: “all persons born or naturalized.”

 

The amendment’s citizenship clause was aimed primarily at redressing the ills of Black enslavement and clarifying the status of the nation’s newly emancipated people. But as Eric Foner writes in his 2019 book, “The Second Founding,” it would grow to include much more than even that. “Adopted as part of the effort to purge the United States of the legacy of slavery,” he explains, “birthright citizenship, with which the 14th Amendment begins, remains an eloquent statement about the nature of American society, a powerful force for assimilation of the children of immigrants and a repudiation of a long history of racism.”

 

That “all” at the beginning of the 14th Amendment is remarkable in its expansiveness. “All” knows that there are many more to come, and it does not mind. “All” admits no difference between American-born citizens who can trace their ancestors to the Mayflower and those whose parents only recently landed. “All” proclaims that U.S. citizenship must not distinguish by race, language, wealth, education or faith, those contested markers of belonging that have caused so much strife in so many places at so many times. “All” is all.

 

Foner, a historian at Columbia University, describes the 14th Amendment — together with the 13th, which abolished slavery, and the 15th, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting — as a “second founding” of the Republic. These three Reconstruction-era amendments transformed the national government into the ultimate guarantor of people’s rights and empowered “movements for equality of all kinds to be articulated in constitutional terms,” he writes. Those amendments are bound up with the Constitution’s preamble, “a step toward making the Constitution what it might have been if ‘we the people’ (the document’s opening words) had been more fully represented at Philadelphia.”

 

It took some eight decades after ratification of the Constitution, not to mention the small matter of a civil war, for the United States to take that step. And it took 30 years longer for the Supreme Court to make plain the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause. Let it not be said that “we the people” are a precipitous lot.

 

“All persons born or naturalized” seems clear enough. I was naturalized as a U.S. citizen just over a decade ago, whereas my wife and children were born to that station, but we are all citizens with the same privileges and immunities. The difference is logistical, whether we applied for that status or assumed it at birth. But the phrase that follows — “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” — became a matter of greater dispute, including in the case of Wong Kim Ark, a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents in 1873.

 

When Wong was in his early 20s and returning from a trip to China, authorities denied him re-entry to the United States on the grounds that he was not a citizen. In a 6-to-2 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that, based on the 14th Amendment, he was indeed a citizen, fulfilling the “ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory.” The few exceptions the court acknowledged to that fundamental rule included children whose parents were diplomats working for a foreign government in the United States at the time of the birth (and thus not subject to U.S. jurisdiction) and children born to “alien enemies in hostile occupation” in the United States.

 

Wong met no such exceptions. “Upon the facts agreed in this case,” Justice Horace Gray affirmed in the 1898 majority ruling, “the American citizenship which Wong Kim Ark acquired by birth within the United States has not been lost or taken away by anything happening since his birth.”

 

Trump’s executive order asserts that the 14th Amendment “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.” That is both true and severely misleading. There are exceptions, of course, but they are few and constrained and specific, as the Wong case shows.

 

In the decades since Wong was decided, birthright citizenship has been further affirmed by additional Supreme Court rulings and federal statute, yet Trump still appears to find the very concept absurd. Shortly after winning the presidential election last year, he promised to eliminate birthright citizenship on his first day in office. “Because it’s ridiculous,” he told NBC News. When pressed on the 14th Amendment, he suggested repealing or otherwise remaking some portion of it. “We’re going to have to get it changed,” he said. “We’ll maybe have to go back to the people.”

 

It is somehow fitting that Trump proposes going back to the people as a means to reduce their ranks. For populist politicians, “the people” is a conveniently elusive category, one that over time can become limited to supporters of the leader. Jan-Werner Müller, a political scientist at Princeton, has summed up populism’s core proposition: “Only some of the people are really the people.”

 

Perhaps the White House truly believes that the conservative majority currently on the court will aid the president in ending birthright citizenship or that Trump can persuade enough people in enough states to support a new amendment on the issue. (A New York Times poll this month found that while 55 percent of Americans favor deporting all immigrants who are here illegally, the same percentage opposes ending citizenship for children born here to undocumented parents.) Some have also suggested that Trump is challenging birthright citizenship merely as a diversionary tactic while he proceeds to remake immigration enforcement.

 

It is also possible — and more likely, I believe — that the president and his aides are attempting to begin an effort that could, in decades to come, chip away at birthright citizenship, much as the right did with Roe v. Wade.

 

Trump’s citizenship order covers enough scenarios to imagine some assortment of Supreme Court justices parsing its various elements. It would end birthright citizenship not just for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants, for example, but also for those born to a mother who is here legally but only temporarily — whether on a student or work or tourism visa — if the father is neither a citizen nor a legal permanent resident. Might some justice find the restrictions on the parents here legally but temporarily too onerous yet the ones on undocumented parents more reasonable? Might an intermediate decision uphold birthright citizenship in principle but constrain it in practice, much as Planned Parenthood v. Casey did in 1992 with abortion rights? These battles are waged slowly. Roe was not overturned in a day, and birthright citizenship will not die with a single signature.

 

Whatever approach the administration pursues, I suspect Trump’s advocates will also invoke an exception cited in Wong’s case and argue that the influx of undocumented immigrants constitutes a hostile enemy occupation. During her recent Senate hearing, Kristi Noem, Trump’s choice to serve as secretary of homeland security, referred to the “invasion” of immigrants and the “war zone” at the southern border. This echoes Trump’s standard phrasing: During his speech accepting the 2024 Republican nomination, Trump claimed that the United States was suffering the “greatest invasion in history,” and in his latest Inaugural Address, he pledged to “send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”

 

Opponents of birthright citizenship, even those who may not see an invasion underway, worry that undocumented immigrants are gaming a flawed system, that they arrive here simply to bear children who will be citizens and therefore avail themselves of the nation’s services and privileges. This may be the case for some. But in my experience, many more immigrants are committing to the American system rather than gaming it, and first-generation Americans are not taking advantage of the United States but embracing its endless possibilities.

 

Does birthright citizenship offer immigrants an incentive to come here? Of course it does. But the appeal of America is not just the stuff the country provides; it is also the stuff the country is made of.

 

In his 1988 book, “Constitutional Faith,” Sanford Levinson suggests that Americans’ devotion to the Constitution has contributed to “the historically remarkable acceptance of immigration by a wide variety of ethnic groups into the United States.” Despite his significant reservations about this devotion, he understands that the Constitution is revered in part because our leaders, most notably Abraham Lincoln, saw no other means to unite such a varied and fractious country. “The Constitution thus becomes the only principle of order,” Levinson writes, “for there is no otherwise shared moral or social vision that might bind together a nation.”

 

You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar or even a U.S. citizen to understand that.

 

If America’s constitutional tradition of birthright citizenship reverses the standard historical meaning of “birthright,” Trump is seeking to transform that meaning once more. Instead of assuming allegiance at birth, the president who once warned that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the nation is now treating illegality as a birthright, an unavoidable and damning inheritance. If your parents violated a law to come here, their actions are passed on to you, automatically, at birth, the sins of the fathers ever laid upon the children.

 

Trump is not binding a nation together; he is tugging at its weakest threads.


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