1/28/2025

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, January 29, 2025

 


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

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

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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether! 

—Bonnie Weinstein

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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky 

By Monica Hill

In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.

Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: 

“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”

Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.

A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.

To sign the online petition at freeboris.info

Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024

https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. 


Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky

We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.

Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.

The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.

On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.

The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.

The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.

There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.

Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.

We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.

We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.

Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky

https://freeboris.info

The petition is also available on Change.org

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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!

FREE HIM NOW!

Write to Mumia at:

Smart Communications/PADOC

Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335

SCI Mahanoy

P.O. Box 33028

St. Petersburg, FL 33733


Join the Fight for Mumia's Life


Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.

Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024

Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.

Send to:

 Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio

P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103

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


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Updates From Kevin Cooper 

A Never-ending Constitutional Violation

A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee

 

      On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.

      On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.

      On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.

      On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.

      These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.

      The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.

      It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.

But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?

      This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.

      Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?

      Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?


An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:


Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213

 

www.freekevincooper.org

 

Call California Governor Newsom:

1-(916) 445-2841

Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish, 

press 6 to speak with a representative and

wait for someone to answer 

(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)


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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression

https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/

 

Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests. 

 

The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page. 

 

Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.

 

Emergency Hotlines

If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities. 

 

State and Local Hotlines

If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for: 

 

Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312

San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org

Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963

National Hotline

If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:

 

National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811


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Articles

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

By Charles Piller, Jan. 24, 2025

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

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

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

Illustration by Tamara Shopsin


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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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


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2) Monuments in Australia Are Vandalized to Protest National Day

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

By Mike Ives, Jan. 26, 2025

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

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


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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Australian officials condemned the vandalism.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The king watched impassively from the stage.


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

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

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

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

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

A close-up of Gustavo Petro at a microphone.

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


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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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


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

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

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

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


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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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


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

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

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

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


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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Myra Noveck contributed reporting.


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

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

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

Family photographs and religious images decorate a wall.

Brayan Enriquez


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

 

It is “mine,” not “ours.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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


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7) Homeland Security Begins Immigration Enforcement Operation in New York

The agency’s new secretary, Kristi Noem, announced that she was on hand to witness the arrest of an unauthorized immigrant connected to criminal activity.

By Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Jan. 28, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/nyregion/ice-raid-nyc-noem.html

Federal agents, each wearing vests that identify their agencies, crowd an apartment building hallway during an immigration enforcement effort in the Bronx on Tuesday.

In a photo provided by United States Drug Enforcement Administration New York Division, agents from multiple federal agencies participated in the immigration enforcement effort in New York City on Tuesday. Credit...United States Drug Enforcement Administration New York Division


President Trump's newly installed Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced on Tuesday morning that federal immigration agents had begun an enforcement action in New York City.

 

Ms. Noem, who oversees the federal agency that runs the nation’s immigration system, posted a video on X that she said showed an “enforcement operation” in New York that had led to the arrest of an unauthorized immigrant with kidnapping, assault and burglary charges.

 

The video, which seemed to have been taken before dawn, shows two officers outside an apartment building in the Bronx guiding a man in handcuffs to an S.U.V. with flashing lights. A spokeswoman for the Immigration Customs and Enforcement field office in New York City declined to provide any additional details of the arrest or say whether other operations were in progress.

 

Ms. Noem wrote on X that “dirtbags like this will continue to be removed from our streets.” She arrived in New York to accompany the enforcement effort; in her first predawn post on the social media platform, she said she was “live this AM from NYC. I’m on it.”

 

It was not immediately clear how many arrests ICE was conducting in the city or where, but a spokeswoman for Ms. Noem said there were “multiple” enforcement operations in New York on Tuesday.

 

Pictures posted on social media by two Justice Department agencies involved in the operations — the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — appeared to show multiple people being taken into custody.

 

A spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams of New York, a Democrat who has said he wants to collaborate with Mr. Trump to deport criminals, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

 

Ms. Noem’s arrival in New York City, and the accompanying publicity blitz, came two days after a multiagency immigration crackdown in Chicago on Sunday. The Trump administration is heavily publicizing such arrests across the nation, from Colorado and the Atlanta suburbs to Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

 

ICE, which has started posting daily tallies of arrests on social media, has reported more than 3,500 arrests nationwide since Mr. Trump took office, and a total of 1,179 in a single day on Monday. That daily count is larger than the average 310 arrests a day during former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s final year in office.

 

Federal officials did not say how many people they had arrested in Chicago, but Thomas Homan, the president’s border czar, told The Times on Sunday that ICE had targeted those with criminal backgrounds. He also confirmed that there had been “collateral arrests” of immigrants who were near the targets of the operations.

 

Trump officials have indicated they are focused on people who threaten the public before casting a wider net.

 

“My goal is to arrest as many public safety and national security threats as possible and move on to the other priorities,” Mr. Homan, the face of the crackdown, told CNN on Sunday.

 

ICE has a field office in Lower Manhattan with a staff of nearly 400 people in charge of conducting arrests of noncitizens in New York City, Long Island and parts of the Hudson Valley.

 

Under Mr. Biden, the agency arrested 4,667 people in the 2024 fiscal year in the region, or an average of about 12 a day. That was down from 9,229 people in 2023, or about 25 a day.

 

The Senate confirmed Ms. Noem, a former South Dakota governor and longtime ally of Mr. Trump, as Homeland Security secretary on Saturday by a vote of 59 to 34. Most Democrats opposed her, but she received scattered support from some Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey.

 

Ms. Noem is tasked with leading counterterrorism efforts, as well as Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. As governor of South Dakota, she sent members of her state’s National Guard to Texas to address the immigration crisis. She has described the high levels of illegal immigration in the United States as an “invasion.”

 

Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.


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8) Trump Administration Halts H.I.V. Drug Distribution in Poor Countries

PEPFAR’s computer systems also are being taken offline, a sign that the program may not return, as Republican critics had hoped.

By Apoorva Mandavilli, Published Jan. 27, 2025, Updated Jan. 28, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/health/pepfar-trump-freeze.html

A view inside an AIDS clinic, with large cardboard boxes of medications being tended to by a worker in a red shirt and white hat.

A shipment of medications in an AIDS clinic in Johannesburg. The freeze means many people with H.I.V. are facing abrupt interruptions to their treatment, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics awaiting distribution. Credit...Foto24/Gallo Images, via Getty Images


The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics.

 

The directive is part of a broader freeze on foreign aid initiated last week. It includes the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the global health program started by George W. Bush that is credited with saving more than 25 million lives worldwide.

 

The administration had already moved to stop PEPFAR funding from moving to clinics, hospitals and other organizations in low-income countries.

 

Appointments are being canceled, and patients are being turned away from clinics, according to people with knowledge of the situation who feared retribution if they spoke publicly. Many people with H.I.V. are facing abrupt interruptions to their treatment.

 

But most federal officials are also under strict orders not to communicate with external partners, leading to confusion and anxiety, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.

 

U.S. officials have also been told to stop providing technical assistance to national ministries of health.

 

“The partners we collaborate with are in shock, and they do not know what to do because their lifesaving mission and commitment has been breached,” said Asia Russell, executive director of the advocacy group Health Gap.

 

Late on Sunday night, according to an email viewed by The New York Times, employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were instructed, effective immediately, to stop communicating with personnel at the World Health Organization.

 

They were later directed not even to be in the same meeting room — real or virtual — as W.H.O. employees or to participate in email conversations in which W.H.O. staff members are also engaged.

 

Some said they had been too afraid to contact colleagues they consider friends, even if just to say goodbye, and did not wish to be identified for fear of retribution.

 

On Monday afternoon, officials worldwide were alerted that PEPFAR’s data systems would shut down at 6 p.m. Eastern — roughly three hours after the email was received — immediately closing off access to all data sets, reports and analytical tools.

 

“Users should prioritize copying key documents and data,” said the email viewed by The Times.

 

The message prompted speculation that the program would not resume, as its future was already in question.

 

Some Republican senators have campaigned against PEPFAR’s reauthorization for five years, alleging that the program promoted abortions. In March, the program was renewed for one year.

 

Without treatment, virus levels in people with H.I.V. will quickly spike, hobbling the immune systems of the infected people and increasing the odds that they will spread the virus to others.

 

About one in three untreated pregnant women may pass the virus on to their babies.

 

Interrupted treatment may also lead to the emergence of resistant strains that can spread across the world.

 

One study estimated that if PEPFAR were to end, as many as 600,000 lives would be lost over the next decade in South Africa alone. And that nation relies on PEPFAR for only 20 percent of its H.I.V. budget. Some poorer countries are almost entirely dependent on the program.

 

“This is another domino in the devastating impact of the harmful freeze to programs, leaving lives hanging in the balance,” said Jirair Ratevosian, who served as chief of staff for PEPFAR during the Biden administration.


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9) Israel Says 8 of the 26 Hostages Listed for Imminent Release Are Dead

An accounting provided by Hamas over the weekend confirmed intelligence assessments, Israeli officials said.

By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 28, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/world/middleeast/israel-hostages-dead-hamas.html

Protesters hold up placards and a banner, partially reading “Stop the Killing!”

Families and their supporters at a demonstration in Tel Aviv on Saturday calling for the release of the remaining hostages. Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times


Eight of the 26 hostages that Hamas is expected to release in the coming few weeks are no longer alive, according to Israeli officials.

 

Late on Sunday, Hamas provided Israel with long-awaited information about the status of the hostages listed for release during the first phase of the cease-fire agreement in the Gaza war. The move followed intense negotiations over the weekend to resolve a dispute that had threatened to derail the deal.

 

Under the cease-fire deal, 33 hostages were to be released in the first phase in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Seven have already returned home, after more than 15 months in captivity in Gaza. Three civilian women were freed on Jan. 19, the day the provisional cease-fire came into effect, and four female soldiers were released on Jan. 25.

 

An Israeli government spokesman, David Mencer, said on Monday that Hamas had provided a list indicating that 25 of the 33 hostages were alive and that eight had been killed.

 

“The list from Hamas matches Israel’s intelligence,” Mr. Mencer added.

 

The list did not specify who was alive and who was dead by name, but it provided numbers that accorded with more detailed information already in Israel’s hands, according to two Israeli officials.

 

The Israeli authorities have spoken with the families of the 26 hostages set to be released in the coming weeks after Hamas provided its account, according to the government, though confirmation of the deaths in the form of bodies or DNA evidence is still pending. As a result, eight families of hostages have been told so far only that there is a high probability that their relatives will not return alive.

 

Speaking at the Israeli Parliament on Tuesday, Dani Elgarat, brother of the hostage Itzik Elgarat, said that the family was probably going to receive his body based on what they had been told so far. Had a cease-fire deal been reached earlier, Mr. Elgarat told lawmakers, he believed that his brother’s life could have been saved.

 

Israel has said that 87 hostages remain in Gaza out of a total of about 250 captured during the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which prompted the war. Another three have been held by Hamas since 2014, and two of them are believed to be alive. Israeli officials have said they believe that at least 35 of the total 90 remaining captives are dead.

 

Israel had demanded the release of what it considered the most urgent cases in the first phase of the deal: civilian women, followed by female soldiers, then men aged over 50 and several younger men who were sick or injured, with priority given to those still alive.

 

The dispute over the weekend was caused by Hamas’s failure to release a civilian woman, Arbel Yehud, on Saturday. Israel accused Hamas of violating the terms of the cease-fire by releasing four female soldiers first and responded by delaying the return of displaced Palestinians to northern Gaza.

 

Under a new understanding reached via mediators late Sunday, Hamas agreed to release Ms. Yehud before Friday, along with the last female soldier held in Gaza, Agam Berger, and a third hostage who has not yet been named by Israel. Three more hostages are expected to be released on Saturday.

 

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller armed group that says it has been holding Ms. Yehud, released a video of her on Monday as proof of life.

 

Ms. Yehud is the last female civilian hostage believed to be still alive.

 

Another civilian woman, Shiri Bibas, remains in Gaza after she was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz with her two young sons, Ariel, who was 4 at the time, and Kfir, who was 9 months. The Israeli military has expressed grave concern for the lives of Ms. Bibas and her children, though their deaths have not been confirmed.

 

Gabby Sobelman and Myra Noveck contributed reporting.



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10) For Gazans Returning North, Elation Mixed With Despair

As families reunite, they also confront the devastation wrought by the 15-month war. Tens of thousands of tents are being sent to northern Gaza, where entire neighborhoods have been flattened.

By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 28, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/world/middleeast/gaza-city-return-palestinians-israel.html

Two women hug, their faces pressed against each other.

Palestinians hugging in Gaza City on Monday. Credit...Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters


For the first time in over a year, tens of thousands of Palestinians have reached their homes in the northern Gaza Strip, giving way to a mix of elation and despair.

 

On Tuesday, throughout Gaza City, people had emotional reunions with family members who had remained in northern Gaza during the war. But the return home was also shocking and depressing: Israel’s bombing campaign had flattened entire neighborhoods, making them barely recognizable piles of rubble.

 

“We’re overcome with joy — we’re finally in our neighborhood near friends and family after a year living on the sidewalk and the sand,” said Rajab al-Sindawi, 49, a salesman of secondhand clothing from Gaza City who had traveled to Rafah, Deir al Balah and Nuseirat after leaving the north. “But our home is gone and it feels like our future is gone, too.”

 

The mass return to northern Gaza began after Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza’s coastal road on Monday under the terms of the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, allowing displaced people to move north.

 

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from northern Gaza had fled south at the start of Israel’s military offensive against Hamas. For nearly 16 months, they lived in tents, makeshift shelters, schools and the homes of friends and relatives.

 

For now, Mr. al-Sindawi, his wife and their seven children are staying at his parents’ home, which survived the war but lacks water and power.

 

As he walked for five hours on Monday from Nuseirat in central Gaza to Gaza City, Mr. al-Sindawi passed one demolished building after another, he said, which made him wonder how long Gaza would take to rebuild.

 

“The whole city is wrecked,” he said of Gaza City. “It will be years before we get our house back.”

 

Northern Gaza was one of the places in the coastal enclave hit hardest during the war. It was where the Israeli military had focused its campaign in the initial aftermath of the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on southern Israel that left roughly 1,200 people dead and 250 others taken hostage. Israeli forces caused immense damage to apartment blocks, hospitals and schools — places Israel accused Hamas militants of exploiting for military purposes and using to hide among civilians.

 

With the ubiquitous destruction, northern Gaza badly needed tents and temporary housing units, according to Samah Hamad, the Palestinian Authority’s social development minister.

 

Tens of thousands of tents awaited Israel’s approval to enter Gaza, said Ms. Hamad, who has been involved in the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to send relief to the territory. While the authority, based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, doesn’t control Gaza, it has some active employees there.

 

“These tents need to reach the people immediately,” she said in an interview.

 

Under the terms of the initial phase of the cease-fire deal, at least 60,000 temporary housing units and 200,000 tents are supposed to enter Gaza. COGAT, the Israeli government agency responsible for coordinating the delivery of aid to Gaza, said tens of thousands of tents had entered the territory in the past two weeks, including 15 truckloads to northern Gaza in the past day.

 

On Tuesday, Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for the foreign ministry of Qatar, which has acted as a mediator in the cease-fire talks alongside Egypt, said there were challenges related to the kind of relief that was entering Gaza and the areas it was reaching.

 

“The entry of aid is not an easy issue,” he told reporters.

 

Thousands of trucks carrying humanitarian relief have entered Gaza since the start of the cease-fire, but aid workers have said that much more was needed to meet the needs of the population.

 

The cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas hit some snags over the weekend, but Mr. al-Ansari said he did not believe there had not been a “real violation” of the agreement that could lead to an escalation.

 

On Saturday, Israel said it would prevent the movement of Palestinians to the north of Gaza until plans were set for the release of Arbel Yehud, one of the last civilian women in captivity in Gaza. Israeli officials said the agreement had required Ms. Yehud to be released on Saturday.

 

A day later, the issue was resolved when Hamas confirmed Ms. Yehud and other hostages would be freed this week and Israel agreed to allow displaced Palestinians to return to the north starting on Monday.

 

As Israeli and Hamas officials prepared for a new round of negotiations aimed at cementing the cease-fire and allowing more exchanges of hostages and Palestinian prisoners, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, was scheduled to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on Tuesday, according to a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu.

 

Mr. Witkoff played an important role in brokering the initial cease-fire deal, teaming with officials from the Biden administration, Qatar and Egypt in the days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

 

Mr. Witkoff was also expected to visit the Gaza Strip during his trip. Last week, he told Fox News that he would go to Gaza to be a part of an inspection team visiting two parts of the coastal enclave.

 

“We have to make sure the implementation goes well,” he said.

 

On Monday, Anwar Abu Hindi, 41, walked for more than four hours from Deir al-Balah to reach her home in Gaza City, an exhausting journey that required frequent rests. Even though she described the devastation as being “beyond nightmares,” Ms. Abu Hindi said her spirits were still lifted by returning home.

 

“I can feel the atmosphere of my city,” she said. “The gentle breeze feels like it’s welcoming us back,” she added. “It’s a special moment, despite all the hardships.”

 

Bilal Shbair contributed reporting.


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11) 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.”


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12) 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.


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13) 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.”


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14) 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.


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