1/30/2025

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, January 31, 2025

 



 *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  


Demand Medical Transfer & Treatment for 81-year-old Imam Jamil Al-Amin (formally known as H. Rap Brown)

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  



*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


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

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

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

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*




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

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*

  *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*




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


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


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)


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


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


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


Articles

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


1) Transgender Americans say Trump’s orders are even worse than feared.

By Amy Harmon, Jan. 28, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/29/us/trump-federal-freeze-funding-news#transgender-americans-say-trump-orders-are-even-worse-than-feared

A person in a camouflage top and bluejeans stands in a field beside a wooden fence.Nicolas Talbott is one of several transgender members of the military who are plaintiffs in a suit against the Trump administration. Credit...Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times


It was no secret to transgender Americans that the Trump administration was planning to roll back anti-discrimination protections provided under the Biden administration. Before his latest election, President Trump made gender identity a focal point of his campaign, and many Democrats believe the strategy helped him win.

 

But in the first eight days of his term, President Trump has signed three executive orders limiting transgender rights. The breadth of the areas they cover and starkness of language that appears to impugn the character of anyone whose gender identity does not match the sex on their birth certificate have stunned even transgender people who had been bracing.

 

“The rapid escalation of these assaults on the trans community, in just over a week of his presidency, paints a grim picture of what lies ahead,” Erin Reed, a transgender activist and journalist, wrote in a Substack post.

 

In his first gender-related order, Mr. Trump instructed government agencies to ensure that federally funded institutions recognize people as girls, boys, men or women based solely on their “immutable biological classification.” It included a specific provision requiring the Bureau of Prisons to house transgender women in prisons designated for men and to stop providing prisoners with medical treatments related to gender transitions.

 

On Monday, Mr. Trump directed the Pentagon to re-evaluate whether transgender troops should be permitted to serve. And on Tuesday evening, he issued an order taking steps to end gender-transition medical treatments for anyone under 19, directing agencies to curtail puberty-suppressing medication, hormone therapy and surgeries.

 

Court challenges of the first two orders are already underway, and trans advocates said on Tuesday evening that they would challenge the order on medical treatment as well.

 

“We will not allow this dangerous, sweeping and unconstitutional order to stand,” said Chase Strangio, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who was the first openly trans lawyer to appear before the Supreme Court last year in a case about medical treatments for minors.

 

Transgender people account for less than 1 percent of the adult population in the United States, according to an estimate from the Williams Institute at U.C.L.A., which performs research on the L.G.B.T.Q. population. Polling shows that Americans have mixed views on the inclusion of transgender girls and women in sports and whether minors should be allowed to obtain medical treatment to transition.

 

On social media, conservative activists struck a celebratory tone.

 

“Dear trans activists,” the account called Libs of TikTok posted on X. “You lost. We won.”

 

In interviews and on social media in recent days, transgender advocates have responded in strong terms. Many suggested that the language of the order aimed at limiting transgender people from military service reflected anti-trans bigotry rather than substantive policy concerns.

 

“Adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life,” the executive order reads.

 

Nicolas Talbott, 31, of Akron, Ohio, a transgender second lieutenant in the U.S. Army who is a plaintiff in a legal challenge to the order, said that “this time not only are they attacking our ability to do our jobs, now they’re trying to attack our character and the core of our being.”

 

The language appeared to surprise even some conservative commentators.

 

“Trump just signed an Executive Order saying transgender individuals are too mentally ill to be soldiers, and too lacking in honor and discipline in their personal lives,” Richard Hanania, a conservative writer and podcaster, wrote in a post on X. “Really.”

 

Brianna Wu, a transgender woman and a Democratic strategist who has criticized some aspects of the trans rights movement, such as the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports, said the series of orders would push trans people out of public life.

 

“If you’re asking me if I’m a natal male, I have no issue about admitting biology,” Ms. Wu said in an interview. “The question is not, ‘Are trans women biological men?’ The question is, ‘Do trans women deserve dignity as your fellow citizens?’

 

“It’s disheartening to see the Trump administration come down so hard on the other side.”


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


2) American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows

With little post-pandemic recovery, experts wonder if screen time and school absence are among the causes.

By Dana Goldstein, Jan. 29, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/us/reading-skills-naep.html

A child’s hands are shown writing in a notebook and holding a math textbook.

Test results showed progress in math, but not enough to offset the losses of the pandemic. Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times


In the latest release of federal test scores, educators had hoped to see widespread recovery from the learning loss incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Instead, the results, from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, tell a grim tale, especially in reading: The slide in achievement has only continued.

 

The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.

 

There was progress in math, but not enough to offset the losses of the pandemic.

 

Recent reading declines have cut across lines of race and class. And while students at the top end of the academic distribution are performing similarly to students prepandemic, the drops remain pronounced for struggling students, despite a robust, bipartisan movement in recent years to improve foundational literacy skills.

 

“Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which gives the NAEP exam. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

 

But the tumult of the new presidential administration may threaten that focus. The federal test scores began to circulate on the same day that many educators across the country fell into panic as they tried to discern how a White House freeze on some federal funding would affect local schools.

 

On a Tuesday phone call with reporters, Dr. Carr did not directly address President Trump’s campaign promise to shut down or severely reduce the federal Department of Education, the agency for which she works. But she did mention that education data collection could change because of changes to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, including a change allowing greater flexibility in how racial and ethnic groups are categorized. (The agency later clarified that the change happened in 2024.)

 

The NAEP exam is considered more challenging than many state-level standardized tests. Still, the poor scores indicate a lack of skills that are necessary for school and work.

 

In fourth-grade reading, students who score below the basic level on NAEP cannot sequence events from a story or describe the effects of a character’s actions. In eighth grade, students who score below basic cannot determine the main idea of a text or identify differing sides of an argument.

 

Dr. Carr did point to Louisiana fourth graders as a rare bright spot. Though their overall reading achievement was in line with the national average, a broad swath of students had matched or exceeded prepandemic achievement levels.

 

Louisiana has focused on adopting the science of reading, a set of strategies to align early literacy teaching with cognitive science research. The resulting instruction typically includes a strong focus on structured phonics and vocabulary building.

 

That approach has become widespread over the past five years, but does not seem to have led to national learning gains — at least not yet.

 

Experts have no clear explanation for the dismal reading results. While school closures and other stresses associated with the Covid-19 pandemic deepened learning loss, reading scores began declining several years before the virus emerged.

 

In a new paper, Nat Malkus, an education researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, points out that declines in American children’s performance are echoed in tests of adults’ skills over the same time period. So while we often look to classrooms to understand why students are not learning more, some of the causes may be attributed to screen time, cellphones and social media, he argues.

 

Children and adults both watch more video on their phones, meaning “there is a displacement of reading text, which is probably increasing over time in degree and severity,” he said. “The phone’s ability to make our attention spans shorter and give kids less ability to stay focused is quite likely to come home to roost.”

 

In math, higher-achieving fourth graders — those performing at the 75th percentile and above — are doing as well as similar fourth graders were in 2019. But fourth graders performing below average in math had not made up the lost ground.

 

In eighth-grade math, only higher-achieving students showed improvements, but they remained below prepandemic levels.

 

“It’s great that more kids are getting to basic, but that’s a midpoint. We need to be thinking hard about getting more kids to proficiency,” said Bob Hughes, director of K-12 education at the Gates Foundation, a philanthropy that has recently focused on improving math education. “Higher-level math, beginning in middle school, is mission critical.”

 

A student survey distributed alongside NAEP found that 30 percent of eighth graders were enrolled in algebra, down from 32 percent in 2019.

 

Student absenteeism has improved since 2022 in both fourth and eighth grade, with about 30 percent of students reporting missing three or more days of school in the previous month. But at both grade levels, absence rates remain significantly higher than they were prepandemic.

 

Dr. Carr said she had an important message for parents: If they want their children to excel academically, they must attend school regularly.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


3) He Survived 15 Months of War in Gaza, Then Died as Cease-Fire Neared

Fighting claimed lives until the final moments before the truce between Israel and Hamas took effect. For some, an unexpected delay of a few hours proved deadly.

By Bilal Shbair and Erika Solomon, Jan. 29, 2025

Bilal Shbair reported from Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/world/middleeast/gaza-cease-fire-deaths.html

Dark smoke billowing over a scenes of destruction.

The aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip on the day of the cease-fire, before it came into effect. Credit...Atef Safadi/EPA, via Shutterstock


After more than a year of Israeli bombardment in Gaza, there were few blessings left for Talal and Samar al-Najjar to count by the time a cease-fire deal was agreed to this month. Their home was in ruins, they and their children were displaced, and they were staving off hunger.

 

Yet they counted themselves lucky: Their family of seven was intact, something to feel grateful for in the war between Israel and Hamas, which has killed tens of thousands. Many more are likely to be unearthed from the rubble.

 

Then, with only hours until the Palestinian enclave’s 15-month nightmare was set to pause, disaster struck.

 

Their 20-year-old son, Amr al-Najjar, had rushed to their village in southern Gaza, hoping to be the first one home. Instead, he became one of the last lives claimed before the fragile truce began.

 

“We’d been waiting so long for this moment, to celebrate the cease-fire, but our time of joy has turned into one of sorrow,” Mr. al-Najjar, 49, told The New York Times in an interview after the funeral for his son.

 

Not long after 8:30 a.m. on Jan. 19, when he thought — mistakenly — that the cease-fire had begun, Amr al-Najjar was killed alongside two cousins in what survivors said was an Israeli strike. The Israeli military denied it had attacked the area.

 

Their funeral was a humble affair. A cluster of relatives sat in a circle of plastic chairs to pray outside a dusty, sprawling camp of tarpaulin tents and wooden shacks on the outskirts of the southern city of Khan Younis. This is where the al-Najjars, like hundreds of other families, had sought refuge from Israeli bombardment in its campaign against Hamas.

 

Over the course of the war, which began in October 2023 after Hamas led an attack on Israel that, the Israelis say, killed about 1,200 people, more than 47,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gazan health authorities. They do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

 

The night before the cease-fire, the al-Najjars had packed up belongings in their makeshift tent. Ms. al-Najjar, 44, was eager to return to Khuzaa, their verdant farming village along Gaza’s southern border. She wanted to see what was left of their home, she said, and imagined herself greeting friends, relatives, and neighbors with a joyful embrace.

 

But as they waited for sunrise, Ms. al-Najjar could not repress a growing unease. Her son, Omar, who departed in the early hours of the morning, had left behind his bag. “He’d told me: I have a feeling I won’t come back,” she recalled, then broke into sobs.

 

The family knew that returning quickly to their home, less than a mile away from the frontier with Israel, to which Israeli tanks and troops would be withdrawing, might be risky.

 

But to many Gazans, all too familiar with periodic wars and the cease-fires that eventually end them, the first tentative hours of a truce are critical: Many race home to protect whatever has been spared in the war from looters who swoop in to snatch whatever can be sold from the ruins — everything from rebar to kitchen utensils.

 

Amr al-Najjar’s brother Ahmad, who survived the attack, said the pair waited early on the Sunday the cease-fire was to take effect, along with two of their cousins, on the outskirts of Khuzaa, ready to enter at 8:30 a.m., the scheduled start of the truce.

 

“They hoped to save whatever they could, like pieces of wood or any belongings,” their father said. The family could use the materials to build a shelter in their destroyed homes until aid groups could provide them with tents.

 

For Gazans, Mr. al-Najjar said, the end of the fighting was not an end to their worries: “It’s another struggle — an internal battle to survive and rebuild whatever we can.”

 

As the two al-Najjar brothers set out, a cousin filmed Amr smiling on a motorbike, wearing a red T-shirt, a brown jacket and jeans.

 

“You’re going to be the first people there!” the cousin shouted, laughing.

 

“And I’m going to return a martyr,” he replied with a smile.

 

For his parents, it was an unnerving premonition.

 

Not long after his sons left, Mr. al-Najjar saw on the news that the truce had been delayed until 11:15 a.m. In a panic, he and his wife tried repeatedly to call and text their sons and nephews. But the young men were in an area without reception — and had no way to learn of the cease-fire’s postponement.

 

From the outskirts of Khuzaa, Amr al-Najjar’s older brother Ahmad said, they listened and waited as fighting continued right up to 8:20 and then grew quiet. Shortly after 8:30, they entered the town, encouraged by the arrival of others doing the same.

 

Ahmad al-Najjar peeled away from the group after stumbling upon a gas cylinder, from which he hoped to retrieve a bit of fuel.

 

“Suddenly, I heard the whooshing sound of a missile,” he said. He dived behind a pile of rubble as an explosion shook the earth around him. “When I looked up, I saw smoke rising from the place they had been standing,” he said. “I couldn’t see them — only smoke.”

 

Mr. al-Najjar fled the village amid tank, drone, and sniper fire, he said, shocked and confused until he later learned that the truce had been delayed.

 

Gaza’s emergency rescue services say 10 Gazans lost their lives between the time the cease-fire was meant to take effect and when it actually did. Residents of Khuzaa say the number killed in their village alone was 14.

 

None of the Najjar cousins who were killed, who ranged in age from 16 to 20, had ties to militant groups, their parents said.

 

Not long after the strike, Amr al-Najjar’s relatives began to search for the missing men. As one of them filmed himself trekking through torn-up roads and rubble in Khuzaa, he stumbled upon the lifeless body of a young man in a red T-shirt, brown jacket and jeans.

 

“Oh God, have mercy on you, Amr,” he can be heard moaning as he films the body. “God’s mercy upon you.”

 

Ms. al-Najjar described her son as the kind of person who loved to tease and joke, and who as a grown man still begged her to make sweets.

 

More than a week into the cease-fire, his father is still struggling to find any solace in the moment he had so yearned for. Hope is a feeling from the days when he imagined that an end to the fighting would bring him the chance to watch his son build a future.

 

“All I wanted was to see him fulfill his dreams,” Mr. al-Najjar said. “Now, my son is gone, and our dreams are gone with him.”


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


4) Citizenship by Birthright? By Bloodline? Migration Is Complicating Both.

In a world where people are more mobile than ever, nations are struggling to recalibrate who can be a citizen.

By Emma Bubola, Reporting from Rome, Jan. 29, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/world/europe/citizenship-rules-debate.html

A woman in black stands in a narrow alley.

Noura Ghazoui, 34, in Genoa, Italy, this month. “I feel Italian, I think in Italian, I dream in Italian,” Ms. Ghazoui said. “But I am not recognized in my country.” Credit...Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times


For two summers during high school, instead of joining her classmates at the beach, Noura Ghazoui had an internship at the town hall of her hometown, Borghetto Santo Spirito, on the Ligurian coast.

 

But when she tried to apply for a job there at age 19, she found herself ineligible because, like hundreds of thousands of children born to immigrants in Italy, she could not get Italian citizenship.

 

“I feel Italian, I think in Italian, I dream in Italian,” Ms. Ghazoui said in Ligurian-accented Italian. “But I am not recognized in my country.”

 

For generations, European countries have used mostly bloodlines to determine citizenship. The United States was an exception in the West as one of the last countries to grant citizenship unconditionally to virtually anyone born there.

 

President Trump’s order seeking to end birthright citizenship for the American-born children of undocumented immigrants, which a judge temporarily blocked last week, would bring the United States one step closer to Italy and other European countries.

 

But rising numbers of migrants in the United States and Europe have set off debates on both sides of the Atlantic over whether the systems for bestowing citizenship need to be updated in some way, either moderated or stiffened.

 

Each approach — known by the Latin terms “jus sanguinis,” or right of blood, and “jus soli,” or right of soil — has its critics, and increasingly, countries have sought to rebalance the two.

 

Since the 1980s, Britain and Ireland (as well as Australia and New Zealand), which still had unconditional birthright citizenship, have moved in a direction similar to that Mr. Trump has chosen, limiting it.

 

But others, like Germany, have gone the other way, making it easier for people born to immigrants to gain citizenship. The shift, supporters say, nodded to the changing realities of a country where one in four people now comes from an immigrant background.

 

“Citizenship is a politically contested issue,” said Maarten Vink, the co-director of the Global Citizenship Observatory. “When it changes it reflects the outcome of a political struggle.”

 

A Tug of War in Europe

 

In Europe, bloodline citizenship has helped maintain ties with citizens who leave the country, and their descendants. But most countries in Europe also offer some form of birthright citizenship, though usually with tough restrictions.

 

In Europe, citizenship has at times been mixed with dangerous concepts of racism and ethnic purity, especially in colonial times and during the Nazi era, when Hitler’s regime stripped Jews of their citizenship before killing them.

 

Today support for limiting access to citizenship for immigrants, as well as securing borders, is not found only on the far right. But the arguments have been harnessed by some of the continent’s extreme right-wing forces, who speak of a need to preserve cultural and ethnic identity.

 

“We must stop migratory flows,” Jordan Bardella, the president of the far-right National Rally in France, said earlier this month. “Many French people, including even some who are of immigrant descent, no longer recognize France and no longer recognize the country they grew up in.”

 

Mr. Bardella’s party wants to abolish law that allows the children of foreigners born in the country to apply for citizenship at 18, as long as they meet minimal residency requirements.

 

While citizenship has often been described as a vehicle for belonging, it has also been a powerful means of exclusion, said Dimitry Kochenov, a professor at the Central European University and the author of the book “Citizenship.”

 

“Citizenship has been used by the state in order to denigrate certain groups,” Mr. Kochenov said.

 

The Italian Example

 

In previous centuries, a much poorer Italy was a country from which millions of citizens emigrated abroad, mostly to the Americas, in search of a better life. Generous bloodline citizenship rules helped Italy maintain a link with the diaspora.

 

Even today churches and town halls around Italy are clogged with requests from Argentines, Brazilians and Americans who have the right to claim citizenship through distant Italian ancestry. (Most recently, President Javier Milei of Argentina obtained Italian citizenship.)

 

But Italy has in recent decades turned from a land where people emigrate into one that also receives large numbers of immigrants. And while Italy has changed, its citizenship law has not.

 

Italy does not grant citizenship to the children of immigrants who have legal status in the country. The Italian-born children of immigrants can only apply for citizenship once they turn 18; they have one year to apply and must prove they have lived in the Italy the whole time.

 

That ruled out Ms. Ghazoui, who spent part of her childhood in Morocco, where her parents are from. Now, 34, an employee at a company providing naval supplies, she has an Italian husband and an Italian child, and applied for citizenship based on protracted residency in the country.

 

“I am the only one in the house who is not Italian and not recognized,” she said.

 

While the public health-care system in Italy makes no distinction between citizens and noncitizens, second-generation children of immigrants face numerous hurdles. About 600,000 children born to immigrants study in Italian schools. They have often known no other country than Italy, but with no claim to citizenship, their lives are complicated.

 

Many cannot travel around Europe on school trips, and have to miss school or renew their residence permits. They also say they are constantly reminded that they are different from their classmates. Many Italian-born adults are in the same situation.

 

“Precariousness becomes the basis of your life,” said Sonny Olumati, 38, a dancer and choreographer who was born in Rome to Nigerian parents and still does not have Italian citizenship. “You create a sense of non-belonging.”

 

Italy’s leaders support the law as it currently stands. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a hard-line conservative whose Brothers of Italy party has post-Fascist roots, has said that “Italy has a great citizenship law.”

 

Tying the citizenship of children to that of their parents is convenient, Ms. Meloni argues, in case the immigrants return to their countries. She also said that she had higher priorities than changing the citizenship law.

 

Despite the government’s position, grass-roots associations proposed a referendum that would reduce the period of uninterrupted residence in Italy needed to become an Italian citizen to five years from 10. The vote is set to happen in the spring.

 

“This law does no longer represent the real Italy,” said Alba Lala, 27, the secretary of CoNNGI, a group that represents new Italian generations. “It’s completely outdated.”

 

Birthright in a Modern Age?

 

Some critics say much the same about unconditional birthright citizenship.

 

About 20 percent of countries use it, most in North and South America. The United States and Canada inherited the law from Britain, but birthright citizenship also fulfilled an important role in the newly independent countries as a way to constitute a nation.

 

Like those who favor bloodline citizenship, birthright advocates say it promotes social cohesion, but for a different reason — because no child is left out.

 

In the United States, the 14th Amendment allowed men and women of African descent to become citizens, and millions of children of Irish, German and other European immigrants became citizens as well.

 

But unconditional birthright citizenship remains an exception.

 

“In a world of massive migration and irregular migration, unconditional ius soli is an anachronism,” said Christian Joppke, a professor of sociology at the University of Bern.

 

Still, some argue that the Trump’ administration is not setting out to modernize a law but instead is trying to redefine the nation itself.

 

“It rejects the idea of America as a nation of immigrants,” said Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration and citizenship expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law.

 

Even under the current rules in the United States, birthright citizenship is not absolute. They exclude, for instance, the children of diplomats born in the United States. And most children of American citizens born abroad maintain an automatic right to American citizenship — in effect bloodline citizenry.

 

Citizenship by descent “is a really good way to connect with people who live outside the borders of a state,” said Mr. Vink. “But if you want to ensure you are also being inclusive within the borders of a state, you have to also have territorial birthright.”

 

Otherwise, he said, countries would have millions in their population who are not citizens.

 

“In a democracy,” he said, “that is not a good principle.”

 

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin, and Aurelien Breeden from Paris.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


5) U.S. President Orders Deportation of Pro-Palestinian Foreign Students

By teleSUR, January 30, 2025

https://www.telesurenglish.net/u-s-president-orders-deportation-of-pro-palestinian-foreign-students/?utm_source=planisys&utm_medium=NewsletterIngles&utm_campaign=NewsletterIngles&utm_content=12

*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


Law enforcement arrest a pro-Palestinian protestor on April 29, 2024, at the University of Texas at Austin. Renee Dominguez/KUT News


The Secretaries of State, Education, and Homeland Security will report on activities that could be considered ‘anti-Semitic’.

 

On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to identify and deport foreign students and professors who participated in pro-Palestinian protests.

 

He instructed the Secretaries of State, Education, and Homeland Security to ask universities to monitor and report on activities by foreign students and professors that could be considered “antisemitic.”

 

His executive order includes several provisions regarding antisemitism but focuses particularly on the protests that erupted on U.S. campuses, where approximately 3,100 people were arrested last year.

 

Between April and June 2024, thousands of students and academics across the United States protested against the genocide in Gaza and against Washington’s support for Israel.

 

“Jewish students have faced an unrelenting barrage of discrimination; denial of access to campus common areas and facilities, including libraries and classrooms; and intimidation, harassment, and physical threats and assault,” the order said referring to the 2024 protests.

 

However, members of the American academic community have repeatedly argued that the protests were not intended to be anti-Semitic, but rather sought to highlight the consequences of the Israeli military offensive in Gaza, where the Zionist army killed more than 47,000 Palestinians.

 

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the country’s leading organizations defending Muslim rights, warned that it would challenge the order in court if it is implemented.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


6) With Sweeping Executive Orders, Trump Tests Local Control of Schools

The orders seek to encourage “patriotic education” and restrict discussions about racism and gender by threatening to withdraw federal funding. But schools are often resistant to change.

By Dana Goldstein, Jan. 30, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/trump-executive-orders-local-control-schools.html

A student walks down a school hallway.

President Trump’s orders seek to exert more federal control over schools. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times


With a series of executive orders, President Trump has demonstrated that he has the appetite for an audacious fight to remake public education in the image of his “anti-woke,” populist political movement.

 

But in a country unique among nations for its hyperlocal control of schools, the effort is likely to run into legal, logistical and funding trouble as it tests the limits of federal power over K-12 education.

 

On Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump signed two executive orders. One was a 2,400-word behemoth focused mainly on race, gender and American history. It seeks to prevent schools from recognizing transgender identities or teaching about concepts such as structural racism, “white privilege” and “unconscious bias,” by threatening their federal funding.

 

The order also promotes “patriotic” education that depicts the American founding as “unifying, inspiring and ennobling” while explaining how the United States “has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history.”

 

The second order directs a swath of federal agencies to look for ways to expand access to private school vouchers.

 

Both orders echo energetic conservative lawmaking in the states. Over the past five years, the number of children using taxpayer dollars for private education or home-schooling costs has doubled, to one million. More than 20 states have restricted how race, gender and American history can be discussed in schools. States and school boards have banned thousands of books.

 

It is not clear what real-world effect the new federal orders might have in places where shifts are not already underway. States and localities provide 90 percent of the funding for public education — and have the sole power to set curriculums, tests, teaching methods and school-choice policies.

 

The orders are likely to strain against the limits of the federal government’s role in K-12 education, a role that Mr. Trump has said should be reduced.

 

That paradox is a “confounding” one, said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, a nonpartisan group that supports private school choice. He applauded the executive order on vouchers and said that taken together, the two orders mark a major moment in the centuries-old debate over what values the nation’s schools should impart.

 

“You can like it or not, but we’re not going to have values-neutral schools,” he said.

 

Still, there are many legal questions about the administration’s ability to restrict federal funding in order to pressure schools.

 

The major funding stream that supports public schools, known as Title I, goes out to states in a formula set by Congress, and the president has little power to restrict its flow.

 

“It seems like a significant part of the strategy is to set priorities through executive order and make the Congress or the Supreme Court respond — as they are supposed to in a system of checks and balances,” Mr. Bradford said.

 

The executive branch does control smaller tranches of discretionary funding, but they may not be enough to persuade school districts to change their practices.

 

In Los Angeles, Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the nation’s second-largest school district, said last fall that regardless of who won the presidential election, his system would not change the way it handles gender identity.

 

Transgender students are allowed to play on sports teams and use bathrooms that align with their gender identities, policies the Trump order is trying to end.

 

On Wednesday, after it became clear that Mr. Trump would attempt to cut funding, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles public school district released a more guarded statement, saying, “Our academic standards are aligned with all state and federal mandates and we remain committed to creating and maintaining a safe and inclusive learning environment for all students.”

 

One big limit to Mr. Trump’s agenda is that despite official federal, state and district policies, individual teachers have significant say over what gets taught and how.

 

Even in conservative regions of Republican-run states, efforts to control the curriculum have sometimes sputtered.

 

In Oklahoma, for example, where the state superintendent, Ryan Walters, is a Trump ally, some conservative educators have pushed back against efforts to insert the Bible into the curriculum.

 

Nationally, surveys of teachers show that the majority did not change their classroom materials or methods in response to conservative laws. Some educators have reported that they are able to subtly resist attempts to control how subjects like racism are talked about, for example, by teaching students about the debate for and against restrictive curriculum policies.

 

Florida has been, in many ways, an outlying case — and one that has served as a model for the Trump administration.

 

There, Gov. Ron DeSantis created powerful incentives for teachers to embrace priorities such as emphasizing the Christian beliefs of the founding fathers and restricting discussions of gender and racism.

 

Teachers could earn a $3,000 bonus for taking a training course on new civics learning standards. If their students performed poorly on a standardized test of the subject, their own evaluation ratings suffered.

 

On race and gender, the DeSantis restrictions were broad and vaguely written. Schools accused of breaking the laws could be sued for financial damages, and teachers were threatened with losing their professional licenses.

 

This led many schools and educators to interpret the laws broadly. Sometimes they interpreted them more broadly than intended, the DeSantis administration claimed. A ban on books with sexual content led one district to announce that “Romeo and Juliet” would be pulled from the curriculum.

 

A ban on recognizing transgender identities led to schools sending home nickname permission slips to parents, which were required even if a student named William wanted to be called Will.

 

Public school educators are often fearful of running into trouble with higher-level authorities. It is possible, and even likely, that Mr. Trump’s executive orders will lead to some measure of self-censorship.

 

Adam Laats, an education historian at Binghamton University, said one potential historical antecedent for Mr. Trump’s executive order was the Red Scare in the mid-20th century, during which many teachers accused of Communist sympathies lost their jobs or were taken to court.

 

“To my mind, this executive order is a blast of steam,” he said, “dangerous especially because it can encourage local aggressive activism.”

 

But, he noted, political attempts to ban ideas from the classroom have rarely been successful.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


7) Trump Order Pushes Universities to ‘Monitor’ Protesters on Student Visas

An executive order signed this week would push colleges and universities to combat antisemitism specifically by monitoring and reporting international students.


“A growing number of universities, including N.Y.U. and Harvard, are recognizing a definition of antisemitism that considers some criticism of Israel — such as calling its creation a “racist endeavor” — antisemitic. This has prompted concern among pro-Palestinian students and professors that their freedom of speech and their ability to protest Israeli actions will be severely curtailed. The presidential order comes against a backdrop of both debate over what constitutes antisemitism and Republican insinuations that foreign students have played a particular role in the protests. Foreign student visas were discussed in a December 2024 staff report on antisemitism, conducted on behalf of six House committees in coordination with the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.”


By Sharon Otterman and Anemona Hartocollis, Jan. 30, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/trump-executive-order-antisemitism.html

Student protesters holding flags and signs, including a large Israeli flag, face off on Columbia University’s campus.

Students supporting Palestinians and students supporting Israelis gathered at Columbia University in October. Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times


Universities have set up task forces, tightened discipline policies and used surveillance cameras to track protesters’ movements. They have hired private investigators to examine cases of anti-Israel speech and activism.

 

These are just a few of the measures administrators have taken to curb criticisms that they have allowed antisemitism to fester as pro-Palestinian demonstrations spread across campuses during the last academic year.

 

On Wednesday, President Trump signed an order meant to push them to do more — to “prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”

 

Specifically, it directed several agencies, including the State and Education Departments, to guide colleges to “report activities by alien students and staff” that could be considered antisemitic or supportive of terrorism, so that those students or staff members could be investigated or deported as noncitizens.

 

The wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel have mostly been nonviolent. Protesters have said they are exercising their right of free expression, by demonstrating against Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza. But some protests have led to vandalism and clashes between pro- and anti-Israel demonstrators. The police have been called to campuses to break up encampments and protests, and in the process, hundreds of students have been arrested.

 

Many Jewish students have said they felt unsafe or unsettled by the yelling outside their dormitory and classroom windows and threatened by the chanting of slogans that some construe as antisemitic.

 

After several university presidents were pulled in front of congressional committees to testify about their responses to the unrest, many have taken action to quell protest activity.

 

At Columbia, for example, administrators pledged quick disciplinary action this month after four masked protesters interrupted a “History of Modern Israel” class and handed out fliers with antisemitic themes, such as one image of a jackboot crushing a Star of David. Three of the protesters have been identified; one, a Columbia student, was suspended. The other two, students of an “affiliated school,” were barred from campus.

 

“Disruptions to our classrooms and our academic mission and efforts to intimidate or harass our students are not acceptable, are an affront to every member of our University community, and will not be tolerated,” the institution said in a statement.

 

At New York University, administrators updated the nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy to clarify that discriminatory or hateful language against protected groups, even if masked in “code words, like ‘Zionist,’” could be examples of potentially discriminatory speech at the school that merits punishment.

 

“For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity,” the document states, referring to the belief that Jewish people should have a state in their ancient homeland. “For example, excluding Zionists from an open event, calling for the death of Zionists, and applying a ‘no Zionist’ litmus test for participation in any N.Y.U. activity” would all be discriminatory actions.

 

A growing number of universities, including N.Y.U. and Harvard, are recognizing a definition of antisemitism that considers some criticism of Israel — such as calling its creation a “racist endeavor” — antisemitic. This has prompted concern among pro-Palestinian students and professors that their freedom of speech and their ability to protest Israeli actions will be severely curtailed.

 

The presidential order comes against a backdrop of both debate over what constitutes antisemitism and Republican insinuations that foreign students have played a particular role in the protests.

 

Foreign student visas were discussed in a December 2024 staff report on antisemitism, conducted on behalf of six House committees in coordination with the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.

 

The report complained that three weeks after the Hamas attacks on Israel, Alejandro Mayorkas, the former homeland security secretary, declined to say whether foreign students should have their visas revoked if they “advocate for the elimination of Israel and attacks on Jewish individuals.” He said it was a matter of legal interpretation.

 

The report said that the Biden administration had rebuffed requests from the House Judiciary Committee for documents and information, such as nationality, on “aliens on student visas who endorse Hamas’s terrorist activities.”

 

In May, the State Department told the committee that it had not revoked any visas for students related to their on-campus protest activity.

 

During testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in December 2023, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. were grilled on whether they had suspended or planned to suspend foreign students who violated the law or school policies.

 

Claudine Gay, then the president of Harvard, who was later forced to resign in part over her testimony on antisemitism, replied that international students were a source of pride and that all students were held accountable in the same way.

 

At Harvard’s commencement, hundreds of students walked out in protest over the university’s decision to bar 13 seniors from the ceremony in the wake of campus protests against the war in Gaza. Among 25 students who were punished for their participation in protests were two Rhodes scholars. One of the Rhodes scholars was an international student from Pakistan.

 

At Cornell, Momodou Taal, a British national in his third year of Ph.D. studies, was among a group of about 100 protesters who shut down a recruitment event last fall that included weapons manufacturers.

 

Suspended twice by the university for his pro-Palestinian activism, Mr. Taal was at risk of losing his student visa, which could lead to deportation. In the end, the Cornell provost allowed him to retain his official status as an enrolled student, although he was banned from campus.

 

Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


8) Live Updates: Israel Releases Prisoners After Chaotic Hostage Handover

The release of more than 100 Palestinian prisoners as laid out in the Israel-Hamas cease-fire deal had been in doubt after crowds in southern Gaza surrounded hostages who were being freed.

By Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 30, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/30/world/israel-hamas-hostage-release-gaza

A large crowd of people trying to catch a glimpse of the handover of hostage Arbel Yehoud in Khan Younis on Thursday. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press


Israel on Thursday released more than a hundred Palestinian prisoners — including some convicted of deadly attacks against Israelis — in exchange for hostages held in Gaza after a chaotic Hamas-led hostage handover in Gaza cast doubt on whether it would go ahead.

 

Hamas released a total of eight Israeli and Thai hostages after a year in captivity, including one in a tightly choreographed ceremony in northern Gaza that went relatively smoothly. But in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, the handover devolved into tumult, with the hostages surrounded by crowds of people, including some chanting support for Hamas or other armed groups.

 

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said after that tumult that he had suspended the prisoners’ release until cease-fire mediators — which included Qatar, Egypt and the United States — secured guarantees from Hamas of “the safe exit of our hostages in the next rounds.”

 

The government later said that mediators had guaranteed the hostages safe passage in future releases. Not long after, buses carrying 110 Palestinian prisoners were seen leaving the Ofer prison in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

 

The Palestinian prisoners were being freed as part of the third hostage-for-prisoner swap in the ongoing cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. During the first 42 days of the agreement, Hamas pledged to free at least 33 hostages in exchange for over 1,500 Palestinians jailed by Israel.

 

On Thursday, large numbers of Palestinians gathered before the hostage release in Khan Younis near the home of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza who was killed by Israel in October. A small white van surrounded by armed gunmen slowly pushed its way through yelling crowds of people seeking any glimpse of the captives.

 

The militants later carved a path through the surging crowd as many pushed their way to the front with cameras. Photos and video showed hostages walking through the chaotic crowd. In one video, Arbel Yehud, 29, one of the last living female hostages, at times appeared afraid while surrounded by rifle-wielding militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad as they made their way toward the Red Cross convoy that would take her to Israeli soldiers.

 

Under the terms of the cease-fire, Israel is to release 110 Palestinian prisoners on Thursday, including 32 serving life sentences for deadly attacks against Israelis. One of them is Zakaria Zubeidi, who was a prominent militant in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank during the second intifada. He joined a 2021 prison break before being arrested again.

 

Here’s what else to know:

 

·      A closer look: The three released Israeli hostages include a young Israeli army lookout, an 80-year-old farming expert and a woman who worked as a guide at a space and technology center.

 

·      Thai hostages: The Thai hostages were abducted during the Hamas-led attack in 2023 from four farms close to the Gaza border, where they were agricultural workers. Dozens of Thai farmworkers were kidnapped or killed during the assault, making them the second-largest group of victims in the Oct. 7 attack, after Israelis.

 

·      Exiled prisoners: About 20 of the Palestinian prisoners are set to be expelled abroad and will not be allowed to return to their homes in the West Bank or Jerusalem, according to the Hamas-linked prisoners’ office. Expelled prisoners can head to the Gaza Strip or leave for Egypt, where discussions over their final destination are ongoing, according to the Palestinian commissioner for prisoners’ affairs.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


9) Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World

By Lydia Polgreen, Opinion Columnist, Jan. 31, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/opinion/trump-migration-world.html

An illustration shows a figure with a bag over one shoulder standing in front of the sea.

Illustration by Kyutae Lee


We are living in an age of mass migration.

 

Millions of people from the poor world are trying to cross seas, forests, valleys and rivers, in search of safety, work and some kind of better future. About 281 million people now live outside the country in which they were born, a new peak of 3.6 percent of the global population according to the International Organization for Migration, and the number of people forced to leave their country because of conflict and disaster is at about 50 million — an all-time high. In the past decade alone, the number of refugees has tripled and the number of asylum seekers has more than quadrupled. Taken together, it is an extraordinary tide of human movement.

 

The surge of people trying to reach Europe, the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia has set off a broad panic, reshaping the political landscape. All across the rich world, citizens have concluded — with no small prompting by right-wing populists — that there is too much immigration. Migration has become the critical fault line of politics. Donald Trump owes his triumphant return to the White House in no small part to persuading Americans, whose country was built on migration, that migrants are now the prime source of its ills.

 

But these vituperative responses reveal a paradox at the heart of our era: The countries that malign migrants are, whether they recognize it or not, in quite serious need of new people. Country after country in the wealthy world is facing a top-heavy future, with millions of retirees and far too few workers to keep their economies and societies afloat. In the not-so-distant future, many countries will have too few people to sustain their current standard of living.

 

The right’s response to this problem is fantastical: expel the migrants and reproduce the natives. Any short-term economic pain, they contend, must be borne for the sake of safeguarding national identity in the face of the oncoming horde — a version of the racist “great replacement” theory that was once beyond the pale but has become commonplace. But we can see how this approach is playing out, in a laboratory favored by Trump and his ilk.

 

In Hungary, object of much right-wing admiration, the government of Viktor Orban’s twin obsessions are excluding migrants and raising the country’s anemic birthrate. But reality has proved to be stubborn. Hungary has made almost no progress on the latter, and on the former, the government has been courting guest workers in the face of a chronic labor crisis. That’s despite Orban having declared, in the teeth of the Syrian migrant crisis in 2016, that “Hungary does not need a single migrant for the economy to work or the population to sustain itself or for the country to have a future.”

 

Hungarians, especially young, skilled and ambitious ones, disagree — and are voting with their feet by themselves becoming migrants. Faced with a weak economy, 57 percent of young Hungarians said in a recent survey that they planned to seek work abroad in the next decade; just 6 percent said they definitely planned to stay in Hungary. One-third of those who leave the country have a college degree, another survey found, and nearly 80 percent are below 40 years old. The government has spent millions to try to lure young Hungarians back home, with little to show so far. Demographers say that the population could drop to 8.5 million by 2050, a loss of about a million people.

 

Orban’s Hungary should be a cautionary tale for other nations, not a model. But its trajectory tells us a lot. Change is always hard, and the more rapid and unexpected the change, the more difficult it is to accept. We are lousy at predicting how many humans there should be and where they should live; the timing and geography of demographic shifts is often off kilter to human needs. Migration messily brings both difficulties to the fore, offering both a challenge and an opportunity. It also eludes easy fixes and lazy characterizations.

 

Yet despite migration’s centrality to our politics and our world, nobody really understands it.

 

Political debate about migration today appears to be dominated by a set of assumptions: that migration will be from the global south to the global north; that the richer countries will always control the terms on which that happens; and that rich countries will always be able to pick and choose among the most talented people and turn away the rest.

 

But what if it doesn’t work out that way? There are plenty of reasons to believe that over time these assumptions will founder in the face of a vast reordering of the map of opportunity across the globe, set in motion by the political ferment and economic torpor besetting wealthy democracies.

 

Already we see the young people of many European countries leaving their homelands in search of opportunity — many to other wealthy countries in the West but also to the rapidly growing economies in the Gulf States and Asia. As European economies struggle to grow and more people leave the work force, these trends are likely to accelerate. Trump, now the leader of the world’s most sought-after migrant destination, has proposed policies that could lead the United States down a similar path.

 

What leaders and policymakers in the rich world don’t seem to grasp is that the roster of countries that will need more people is growing fast, as birthrates plummet much faster than anyone expected in countries that have long been a source of migrants. Our politics revolve around the idea that scarce resources mean keeping people out. We are utterly unprepared for a world in which perhaps the scarcest resource will be people.

 

“In this hyperpolarized environment and debate, many people have missed the big picture,” said Marco Tabellini, an economist who studies migration and political change at Harvard University. “Countries in the global north will have to really compete for migrants.”

 

If you think that sounds preposterous, it is worth considering that this competition is already happening and has been for some time. After the toppling of the cruel Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, governments across Europe wasted no time announcing that they would pause asylum applications from Syrians, clearly eager to see the back of the Syrians who fled the country’s gruesome civil war. But in Germany, health officials fretted that amid a broad shortage of medical workers, losing thousands of Syrian doctors would be a heavy blow to the country’s already overmatched health system.

 

But it is not just doctors whom countries in the rich world lack. Canada, amid an excruciating housing shortage, needs skilled construction workers. Italy needs welders and pastry cooks. Sweden needs plumbers and forestry workers. As for the United States, it is hard to imagine how profoundly people’s lives will change as Trump attempts to carry out his promised mass deportation program. What Americans eat, how they care for their children and elders, how many homes get built — all will be transformed with powerful effects not just for the economy but also for how people organize their lives, on where they set their sights and ambitions.

 

The right has no real answer to this problem and continues to argue for harsher restrictions. Centrists the world over have broadly capitulated to the right’s framework, turning away from the postwar commitments to asylum and promoting technocratic solutions like skilled migration, arguing that the rich world will be able to sluice through the rivers of humanity, discarding the pebbles and selecting the nubs of gold.

 

But they do so at their peril. Restrictive policies, once imposed, tend to last a very long time and have far-reaching, unforeseen consequences. People turned away from one country or offered a place on unattractive terms in an unwelcoming environment will find a way to build lives elsewhere, bringing their ideas, talents and drive to other places. That’s because of a powerful and often ignored force: the agency of migrants.

 

The pull of remaining in the place of your birth is one of the most powerful and enduring human impulses. It is easy to forget that even in this age of mass movement of people, where vast distances can be crossed more quickly than ever before, more than 96 percent of the world’s people live in the countries in which they were born. Most who flee disaster don’t go very far, traveling to relative safety within their own country or one next door, hoping to return home as soon as the catastrophe has passed.

 

Migration to another country, especially one a fair distance away, isn’t undertaken by people who are truly destitute or who lack ambition. It requires resources, documents, connections. Having the will to leave, to seek out something new and leave everything and everyone you know behind, is a profound act of self-creation.

 

The panic about migration, it strikes me, is really a panic about the future — and about progress. Migrants are individuals making a profound, risky bet that by undertaking the rare and difficult decision to leave home, they can build something new. Behind opposition to migration is often the reverse: a belief that the only way to protect the future is to make it more like the mythic past, to build something old. But this approach, as we will see, has never been a formula for human flourishing.

 

At the end of World War II, the victorious powers in Europe decided that ensuring peace on the continent required moving large numbers of people into more broadly homogeneous states. One of the biggest and most pressing orders of business was to uproot millions of ethnic Germans who had long lived in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and beyond and force them to move within Germany’s new border.

 

This was a pitiless, brutal process. Writing in this newspaper in 1946, the journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick described her reaction to witnessing the forced resettlement of Germans: “No one seeing its horrors firsthand can doubt that it is a crime against humanity for which history will exact a terrible retribution.” This quote appears early in Tony Judt’s masterwork, “Postwar,” and Judt delivers a typically pitiless assessment of it: “History has exacted no such retribution.”

 

These events are largely forgotten today. But this period of score-settling remade the demographic map. Many Ukrainians wanted to be rid of Poles, and many Poles wanted to be rid of Ukrainians. Hungarians were expelled from Czech territory. Astonishingly, 4,000 Jews in Central and Eastern Europe were among those forced from their homes as part of this postwar upheaval.

 

At the time, all the uprooting seemed to make a certain kind of sense. At the end of the war, even though so many had died, there was a concern that Europe had too many of the wrong people living in the wrong places and that this was part of the problem that led to war. When closing some of the last of the lingering camps for those displaced by the war, one top official called those forced to flee “an excess of people in Europe whose very presence constitutes a threat to political and economic stability.”

 

And yet almost immediately, the vision of largely homogeneous states ran up against the reality that the relatively free movement of people would be required to rebuild the shattered countries in the aftermath of the war. Amid the sudden prosperity of the postwar economic boom, a great voluntary uprooting began, sending Europeans across borders in search of work. Countries also looked farther afield — Germany to Turkey, France and Britain to their former colonies in Africa and Asia and so on. Indeed, over time the benefits of diversity and ease of movement of people and goods led to the creation of the European Union.

 

“It is often said by opponents of migration that ‘Europe is full,’ as if a continent or a country is a fragile vessel at risk of capsizing under the weight of migrants,” the British historian Peter Gatrell wrote in his magisterial history of this migration, “The Unsettling of Europe.” “The metaphor is a powerful one. But it can be turned on its head. Migrants have made all kinds of contributions to Europe. Indeed, they helped to build the boat.”

 

For the United States, founded by European settlers on the premise that outsiders were essential to the nation’s prosperity, the problem for much of its early history was a scarcity of people. Its settlers acquired vast stretches of land through genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous inhabitants, then populated and worked that land with migrants, indentured servants and enslaved people. For a century, almost any free person who could manage to reach the United States could stay there.

 

But gradually attitudes turned against migration. Some of the earliest federal policies of restriction targeted Chinese immigrants, beginning in the 1880s, and the 1924 Immigration Act was designed to discourage unskilled workers from countries in Southern and Eastern Europe and bar almost all immigrants from Asia. These laws were driven by racist ideas in vogue at the time, notions that suggested only white, Protestant Europeans and their descendants represented true American identity and that other groups, such as Catholics and Jews, could not be counted on to integrate and contribute to American society.

 

In recent years, scholars have used data from that era of restriction to try to understand how these laws affected American prosperity. One Harvard study found that Chinese exclusion depressed economic growth in the western United States, where a vast majority of Chinese immigrants lived, and had negative consequences for most workers. The effects lasted until just before the United States’ entry into World War II.

 

Another piece of research demonstrated how strict quotas on immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe hampered American innovation — characterized by a significant drop in the number of patents issued to American scientists in certain fields. What is most striking about this study is that the quotas on Southern and Eastern Europeans did not apply to students and professors. But the quotas had a strong effect on dissuading academic scientists from these regions anyway, one of the paper’s authors, Petra Moser, a professor at New York University, told me.

 

“If I face a country that doesn’t want other people of my nationality, I may just not want to come,” she said. Her paper describes the loss to American science during this period as “equivalent to eliminating the entire physics department of a major university each year between 1925 and 1955.”

 

These findings are especially poignant when you think about who was excluded. The United States maintained its strict quota system despite the desperate plight of European Jews trying to flee the Nazis. Astonishingly few German Jews managed to get visas to emigrate under the quota system. Eastern European Jews, citizens of countries explicitly discouraged under the law, had almost no chance at all. Millions of them would perish in the Holocaust.

 

These horrors led directly to the creation of international laws governing the rights of refugees and of the responsibility to provide asylum to those in need of safety. It is also part of the reason so many Syrian refugees are in Germany today. In 2015, when Europe faced record-high numbers of asylum seekers, most of them from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, made her famous declaration: “We can manage.”

 

In retrospect, it is hard not to see that moment as a hinge of history. Almost immediately, public opinion turned against Merkel, and right-wing, anti-immigrant politics surged across Europe. Less than a year later, Britain voted to leave the European Union, with many leave voters citing immigration as their top concern. And not long after that, Trump rode fears about migrants massing at the southern border to the presidency, promising to build a wall and bar Muslims from entering the country. Across the developed world, far-right parties gained support and started taking power.

 

This anti-migration rightward march has continued. A decade after Merkel’s stirring pro-refugee declaration, the far-right Alternative for Germany party is consistently polling in second place, with a fifth of the vote, going into elections in February. The global consensus that we have an obligation to protect the most vulnerable has all but collapsed, like so many other pillars undergirding the world order since World War II.

 

I have come to wonder if the political response to anti-migrant sentiment — the steady erosion of principles of free movement and refuge that were the bedrock of the postwar era — might in time look like a terrible failure of imagination on a civilization-altering scale. Governments shut themselves off from migrants at their peril.

 

There’s also no guarantee it will actually work. Harsh attempts to control the size and movement of a population often have unanticipated consequences. Just look, for an inexact but apt analogy, to China’s one-child policy. Nearly five decades ago the edict that most couples should have only one child might have seemed a necessary step for dragging China out of poverty, even if it required brutal enforcement in the face of a strong preference for larger families.

 

But it seems that even Maoist revolutionaries struggled to imagine how quickly the world can change. Perhaps China’s leaders thought this policy would be required indefinitely and assured themselves that if the spigot needed to be reopened, the assumedly natural impulse to have more children would hardly require encouragement. Having bent human will before, why would they not believe they could do it again?

 

It has not worked out that way, and underpopulation is now a major challenge for China’s prospects. In the mid-2010s, China had roughly seven workers for every retiree. In 2050 there may be only two. It will almost certainly be among the nations competing with the West for migrants in the decades ahead.

 

Throughout history, generally speaking, migration tends to produce two seemingly contradictory results: sharp but short-term backlash among those who already live in the migrants’ destination, followed in the medium to long term by greater abundance and prosperity. Whatever nightmare pressed people to leave home — war, famine, natural disaster — their arrival unleashes torrents of human dynamism. The movement of people, even or especially under duress, is inextricably tied with human progress.

 

Partly, that’s economic. The relationship between human talent and economic growth is extremely clear, and history is replete with examples of liberal migration policies leading to broad prosperity. As we’ve seen, periods of strict immigration restriction have often had surprising and, in retrospect, unwanted results: less innovation and more stagnation.

 

But I would argue that economic growth is actually downstream from something more important yet intangible: the human desire for flourishing and to set one’s own path in life. People have moved for many reasons, but always because they sought something they wanted that they could not get at home. It’s an act of faith, fundamentally, kindled by the fire of human aspiration. It can never fully be snuffed out.

 

In our vastly more interconnected world, hard borders and iron-fisted control is a fantasy. Migration has always involved great sacrifice, especially for those who leave home. But it also requires the people in the places migrants alight to see beyond the immediate shock of living alongside new people from different places and conceive the long-term possibilities such arrivals always bring.

 

Right now, with Trump seizing the levers of power in Washington and promising to send migrants to Guantánamo Bay, that might seem extremely unlikely. But the long history of migration, and its unknowable future, suggests the wisdom in trying. In any case, the West may not like migrants — but like aging German patients in search of the healing hand of a doctor, it is sure to miss them when they are gone.



*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


10) How the World Is Reeling From Trump’s Aid Freeze

President Trump’s order to halt most foreign aid has intensified humanitarian crises and raised questions about the United States’ reliability as a global leader.

By Sui-Lee Wee, Declan Walsh and Farnaz Fassihi, Jan. 31, 2025

Sui-Lee Wee reported from Bangkok, Declan Walsh from Nairobi and Farnaz Fassihi from New York.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/world/asia/trump-usaid-freeze.html

Women and children sit on the ground under a structure made of wood.Burmese refugees at a temporary shelter in the Thai-Myanmar border district of Mae Sot in Thailand, in April. Credit...Somrerk Kosolwitthayanant/EPA, via Shutterstock


In famine-stricken Sudan, soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in a war zone have shut down.

 

In Thailand, war refugees with life-threatening diseases have been turned away by hospitals and carted off on makeshift stretchers.

 

In Ukraine, residents on the frontline of the war with Russia may be going without firewood in the middle of winter.

 

Some of the world’s most vulnerable populations are already feeling President Trump’s sudden cutoff of billions of dollars in American aid that helps fend off starvation, treats diseases and provides shelter for the displaced.

 

In a matter of days, Mr. Trump’s order to freeze nearly all U.S. foreign aid has intensified humanitarian crises and raised profound questions about America’s reliability and global standing.

 

“Everyone is freaking out,” Atif Mukhtar of the Emergency Response Rooms, a local volunteer group in the besieged Sudanese capital, Khartoum, said of the aid freeze.

 

Soon after announcing the cutoff, the Trump administration abruptly switched gears. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that “life-saving humanitarian assistance” could continue, offering a respite for what he called “core” efforts to provide food, medicine, shelter and other emergency needs.

 

But he stressed that the reprieve was “temporary in nature,” with limited exceptions. Beyond that, hundreds of senior officials and workers who help distribute American aid had already been fired or put on leave, and many aid efforts remain paralyzed around the world.

 

Most of the soup kitchens in Khartoum, the battle-torn capital of Sudan, have shut down. Until last week, the United States was the largest source of money for the volunteer-run kitchens that fed 816,000 people there.

 

“For most people, it’s the only meal they get,” said Hajooj Kuka, a spokesman for the Emergency Response Rooms, describing Khartoum as a city “on the edge of starvation.”

 

After the American money was frozen last week, some of the aid groups that channel those funds to the food kitchens said they were unsure if they were allowed to continue. Others cut off the money completely. Now, 434 of the 634 volunteer kitchens in the capital have shut down, Mr. Kuka said.

 

“And more are going out of service every day,” he added.

 

Many of the aid workers, doctors and people in need who rely on American aid are now reckoning with their relationship with the United States and the message the Trump administration is sending: America is focusing on itself.

 

“It feels like one easy decision by the U.S. president is quietly killing so many lives,” said Saw Nah Pha, a tuberculosis patient who said he was told to leave a U.S.-funded hospital in the Mae La refugee camp, the largest refugee camp on the Thai-Myanmar border.

 

Mr. Nah Pha, who fled Myanmar in 2007 to escape the fighting there, said the staff gave him a week’s supply of medicine and told him that was all they could provide. “Once my medicine runs out, I have nowhere else to get it,” he added.

 

The public health implications of the aid freeze are broad, health workers say. In Cambodia, which had been on the cusp of eradicating malaria with the help of the United States, officials now worry that a halt in funding will set them back. In Nepal, a $72 million program to reduce malnutrition has been suspended. In South Africa and Haiti, officials and aid workers worry that hundreds of thousands of people could die if the Trump administration withdraws support for a signature American program to fight H.I.V. and AIDS.

 

Some programs that don’t fit the category of lifesaving aid remain frozen, while others are explicitly barred because they fall outside of the administration’s ideological bounds, including any help with abortions, gender or diversity issues.

 

The United Nations Population Fund, the U.N.’s sexual and reproductive health agency, said that because of the funding freeze, maternal and mental health services to millions of women in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza, Ukraine, and other places had been disrupted or eliminated. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban has banned women from working, 1,700 Afghan women who worked for the agency would no longer be employed.

 

At stake is not just the good will that the United States has built internationally, but also its work to promote America’s security interests. In Ivory Coast, an American-sponsored program collecting sensitive intelligence on Al Qaeda-related incidents has been interrupted.

 

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, some of the funding to United Nations agencies supporting more than 4.5 million people displaced by a rapidly growing conflict in the country’s east has been frozen, according to a U.S. humanitarian official on the continent.

 

Even with Mr. Rubio’s announcements that lifesaving efforts could resume, much of the American aid system in Africa remained paralyzed by the confusion and disruptions, including in conflict-hit areas where every day counts.

 

“When they issue these broad orders, they don’t seem to understand what exactly they are turning off,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior U.S.A.I.D. official under the Biden administration who is now the president of Refugees International. “They’re pulling levers without knowing what’s on the other end.”

 

Some of the roughly $70 billion in annual foreign aid approved by Congress has been directed at supporting civil society in countries with authoritarian regimes, especially in places where the United States sees democratic gains as furthering American security or diplomatic interests.

 

In Iran, where the work of documenting detentions, executions and women’s rights abuses is done by outside entities funded by the United States, activists say the U.S. pullback now means that there will be few entities holding the Iranian government accountable.

 

A Persian-language media outlet funded by the U.S. government said their employees were working on a voluntary basis to keep the website going for now, but they had fired all their freelancers. Without money, they said they could not keep going.

 

“While Trump campaigned on a promise of maximum pressure on the Iranian government, his decision to cut funding for dozens of U.S.-supported pro-democracy and human rights initiatives does the opposite — it applies maximum pressure on the regime’s opponents,” said Omid Memarian, an expert on Iran’s human rights issues at DAWN, a Washington-based group focused on American foreign policy.

 

In Cambodia, Pa Tongchen, 25, was relying on American funding for journalism in a country where nearly all independent media has been crushed. He was scheduled to start work on Feb. 3 as a staff reporter at a media outlet run by a nonprofit that was set up with U.S. support.

 

Mr. Pa said he had hoped to shine a light on corruption through his work. “I want to help people who are vulnerable in our society,” he said. “They are ignored if no journalists report about them.”

 

In Egypt, where the United States funds scholarships for more than 1,000 undergraduate students at private and public universities, students were left in limbo.

 

“I was in real shock, and I didn’t know what to do, especially since they told us to leave the dorm immediately,” said Ahmed Mahmoud, 18, a student who was about to start classes next semester at the American University but instead had to throw all his belongings into five boxes.

 

The fallout from the aid freeze is likely to reverberate geopolitically, giving American rivals, like China, a window of opportunity to present itself as a reliable partner.

 

“That will set China apart from the U.S. to win the hearts and minds of many of the global south countries,” said Jingdong Yuan, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s China and Asia Security program.

 

In Africa, America’s well-run aid machinery was one of the factors that differentiated the United States from China and Russia. While Moscow deploys mercenaries and Beijing mines for rare minerals, Washington has reached across the continent with aid programs worth billions of dollars that not only save lives, but also provide a powerful form of diplomatic soft power.

 

Now much of that is in doubt. In Africa’s war zones, some are already regretful of their dependence on American aid.

 

“It was our fault to rely so heavily on one donor,” said Mr. Atif, of the Emergency Response Rooms in Sudan. “But this has really shocked us. You can’t take food off people who are starving. That’s just insane.”

 

On the border of Thailand and Myanmar, the implications of Mr. Trump’s decision were stark. There, a four-year civil war and decades of fighting between Myanmar’s military junta and ethnic armies have pushed thousands of refugees into Thailand.

 

Saw Tha Ker, the camp leader for the Mae La camp, said he was told on Friday by the International Rescue Committee, a group that receives U.S. funding, that it would stop supporting medical care, water and waste management for all of the seven refugee hospitals managed by his camp.

 

“The first thought that came to my mind was that whoever made this decision has no compassion at all,” said Mr. Tha Ker.

 

Mr. Tha Ker said he and his staff had to tell 60 patients in one hospital that they had to go home. Videos posted on social media showed men carrying patients on makeshift stretchers through unpaved streets.

 

“We explained to them that the hospital itself is like a person struggling to breathe through someone else’s nose,” he added. “Now that the support has stopped, it feels like we are just waiting for the end.”


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


11) Hamas Names 3 Hostages It Says Will Be Freed This Weekend

Keith Siegel, an American-Israeli, will be released along with Yarden Bibas and Ofer Kalderon in exchange for about 90 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons, the group said.

By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 31, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/world/middleeast/hamas-hostages-israel-prisoners-release.html

A person holds a sign with a photograph of a man, his name and age and the message "bring him home now."

Aviva Siegel, a former hostage, with a photograph of her husband, Keith Siegel, who is set to be released by Hamas this weekend. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times


Hamas on Friday announced the names of three hostages — including an American citizen — whom it said it would release this weekend as part of its cease-fire with Israel to end the war in Gaza, an agreement that has now held for nearly two weeks.

 

Abu Obeida, the spokesman for the group’s armed wing, named the three as Yarden Bibas, 35, Ofer Kalderon, 54, and Keith Siegel, 65, an American-Israeli. Israel is slated to release about 90 Palestinian prisoners this weekend in exchange for the three men, according to a Hamas-linked prisoners’ information center.

 

The three were abducted during the Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attack on Israel when Hamas and its allies killed roughly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 hostage, according to the Israeli authorities, setting off the war in Gaza. Israel’s subsequent military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has lasted for over a year and killed more than 45,000 people, according to local health officials.

 

In a multiphase cease-fire deal that Israel and Hamas agreed to this month, Hamas pledged to free at least 33 of the 97 remaining hostages over the first six weeks in exchange for over 1,500 Palestinians jailed by Israel.

 

About 10 Israeli captives have been freed so far, in addition to five Thai workers who were taken hostage in the October 2023 attack while working in Israeli villages near the Gaza border. Israel has released more than 300 Palestinian prisoners, including many who were serving life sentences for involvement in deadly attacks against Israelis.

 

For many Israelis, the abduction of Mr. Bibas’s family has become emblematic of the cruelty of the Hamas-led attack. Militants also abducted his wife, Shiri Bibas, and their two children, Ariel, who was 4, and Kfir, who was 9 months old.

 

Hamas later said that Ms. Bibas and the two children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Israeli officials have not publicly confirmed that assertion, but have said that they are gravely concerned for the fate of the three captives.

 

Mr. Siegel was taken hostage from his home in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz close to the Gaza border. His wife, Aviva Siegel, was held captive with him until late November 2023, when she was one of about 105 hostages released as part of a weeklong cease-fire deal.

 

Shir Siegel, his daughter, shared a video on Instagram showing her embracing her mother after receiving the news on Friday. “Dad’s coming back, Dad’s on the list,” Aviva Siegel says, choking up.

 

Mr. Kalderon, a French-Israeli dual citizen, was taken captive when Palestinian militants raided his hometown, Nir Oz. His two children, Erez and Sahar, were freed in the November 2023 truce.

 

Shortly after her release, Sahar described being afraid of her Hamas captors — and also of being killed in Israel’s relentless aerial bombardment of Gaza. She was 16 at the time.

 

“What about my father, who has been left behind?” she told The New York Times. “I ask of everyone who sees this: Please, stop this war; get all the hostages out.”

 

Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*


*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*