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URGENT STEP ONE:
Demand EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER & TREATMENT
FOR IMAM JAMIL
The Bureau of Prisons is denying medical treatment to Imam
Jamil Al-Amin, 81 years old, formerly known as H. Rap Brown.
He has a potentially life-threatening growth on his face, on
top of his multiple myeloma (cancer) & other significant
medical issues.
A civil and human rights leader, wrongfully imprisoned for
the past 24 years, he needs Your Help to avoid his
Death By Medical Neglect
CALL TUCSON COMPLEX 520-663-5000
EMAIL WARDEN Mark Gutierrez, mggutierrez@bop.gov
Give Name & Inmate Number: Jamil Al-Amin, #99974-555
Demand they grant Imam Jamil an EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER from United States Penitentiary (USP) Tucson to Federal Medical Center (FMC) Butner for his Immediate Medical Treatment NOW!!
***Deputy Director of BOP [Bureau of Prisons], (202) 307-3198
URGENT STEP TWO:
Tell his Congressional Delegation of his condition, Urge them to use their offices to inquire the BOP & demand that their constituent (Imam Jamil, West End Community Masjid, 547 West End Pl., SW, Atlanta) receive the emergency medical transfer, diagnosis & treatment.
- Email GA Cong. Nikema Williams PressGA05@mail.house.gov
- Email US Sen. Rafael Warnock press@warnock.senate.gov
- Email US Sen. Jon Ossoff press@ossoff.senate.gov
- Email Atlanta City Councilman Jason Dozier jdozier@atlantaga.gov
- Email GA State Rep Park Cannon park.cannon@house.ga.gov
- Email GA State Sen. Sonya Halpern sonya.halpern@senate.ga.gov
This is most urgent step before Step Three: campaigning for Medical Reprieve by the GA Bd. Of pardons & Parole, THE entity standing in the way of freeing Imam from his unjust conviction by granting a Medical Reprieve.
IMAM JAMIL ACTION NETWORK.ORG
216.296.4617
NATIONAL
347.731.1886
MEDIA
252.907.4443
SOUTHERN
347.731.1886
NJ/NY
202.520.9997
WASH., DC
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Israeli Troops Withdraw From Key Zone Bisecting Gaza
During the war with Hamas, troops patrolled the Netzarim Corridor, which splits Gaza, preventing evacuated Palestinians from returning north.
By Lara Jakes and Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 9, 2025
A traffic jam as Palestinians headed north from southern Gaza on Sunday after Israeli troops withdrew from the Netzarim Corridor. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israel’s military withdrew Sunday from a key corridor dividing the Gaza Strip, leaving nearly all of the territory’s north, as required by a tenuous cease-fire with Hamas ahead of any negotiations for a longer-lasting agreement.
The military’s departure from the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza came as the Israeli government sent a delegation to Qatar over the weekend to discuss the next group of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners to be freed during the cease-fire agreement’s initial phase, which went into effect last month and is ongoing.
The gaunt appearances of three Israeli hostages who were released on Saturday, stoking public comparisons to Holocaust victims, heaped new pressure on the negotiations.
In a statement on Sunday, the Israeli military said troops were “implementing the agreement” to leave the corridor and allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to continue returning home to northern Gaza.
Two Israeli military officials and a soldier in Gaza who were not authorized to discuss the situation publicly or by name said the troops had already left the Netzarim Corridor by Sunday morning.
Hamas also said that Israeli troops had left the zone, saying in a statement that it was “a victory for the will of our people.”
Sunday’s withdrawal from the corridor means that the presence of Israeli troops in Gaza is now mostly limited to a small sliver of land in southern Gaza, near the Egyptian border, and a buffer zone along the Israeli border.
Gaza’s interior ministry alerted Palestinians heading north on Sunday that their vehicles could still be inspected by foreign security contractors there to prevent weapons from being transferred from the south.
“We call on citizens to be careful and adhere to moving according to the currently permitted mechanism for their safety,” the interior ministry said Sunday in a statement.
The Israeli military had ordered a mass evacuation of northern Gaza in the early days of the war and patrolled the corridor, in part to prevent Palestinians from returning. Israeli troops had already partly withdrawn from the Netzarim Corridor last month, leaving the foreign contractors to fill the void.
Their complete withdrawal from the corridor was required under the first 42-day phase of the cease-fire deal — which is now at the halfway point — and necessary to advance to its next stage to end the war in Gaza fully.
Significant new pitfalls to reaching an agreement for the next phase — which could involve a complete Israeli military withdrawal from all of Gaza — emerged over the past week, however, after President Trump said that the United States could take over Gaza and turn it into the “Rivera of the Middle East” by relocating its Palestinian residents.
On Sunday, Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry again rejected the proposal, repeating that no lasting peace agreement could be reached without creating a sovereign Palestinian state — a diplomatic goal for generations, but one that officials and experts now say is probably all but impossible to achieve.
The emaciated appearance of three Israeli hostages who were freed by Hamas on Saturday has also spurred widespread concern in Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not acted quickly enough to ensure their or others’ release — increasing the pressure on the Israeli government to bring the rest of the captives home and advance to the second phase of a deal.
But despite the weekend meetings in Qatar, little to no progress was expected on negotiating the next stage until Mr. Netanyahu convenes a meeting of his top security officials in the coming days.
In an interview on Saturday in Washington, where he had been meeting with the Trump administration, Mr. Netanyahu said Hamas, not he, was to blame for the hostages’ conditions. He predicted that at least a half-dozen more hostages would be released by the end of next week.
“We have three war aims in Gaza,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an interview with Fox News. “One, destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. Two, get all the hostages out. Three, make sure that Gaza never poses a threat to Israel again. And I’m committed to achieving all three.”
Even as Israeli troops left the key corridor in Gaza, they continued raids and patrols in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian health officials there said at least two people, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, were killed in the Nour al-Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm. The Israeli military said that its police criminal investigation unit had begun an investigation.
Hiba Yazbek and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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2) Amid Concern Over Trump Order, New Yorkers Rally to Support Trans Youth
Thousands of protesters in Union Square called for action against an executive order that threatens to withhold federal funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care.
By Alyce McFadden, Nell Gallogly and Wesley Parnell, Feb. 8, 2025
Bells, drums and chants rang out Saturday afternoon in Union Square in Manhattan as thousands of New Yorkers gathered to protest an executive order from the Trump administration targeting transgender children and teens.
The order, which threatens to withhold federal funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming treatments to trans youth, has left many local families worried and reeling.
At the rally, parents and children came together with activists and lawmakers to share their stories and call for action against President Trump’s policies.
Juno Krebs, 10, a nonbinary student from Brooklyn, said the executive order was “scary” and that it felt like the administration was “trying to take away our rights.”
“I don’t identify as a girl or a boy, and I should be respected for that,” Juno said. “It doesn’t feel any different. It just feels like me, honestly.”
For Michelle Byron, the mother of a transgender and nonbinary teenager, the order has raised painful and frightening questions about her child’s ability to continue receiving gender-affirming care, which can include hormone therapy, puberty blockers and surgery, though such procedures are rare for minors.
“It’s always been a little bit scary because there’s so much hate out there, but the most important thing for me as a mom is to support my child no matter what,” Ms. Byron said.
Access to that care, she added, holding back tears, probably saved her child’s life.
Parents, transgender children, faith leaders and L.G.B.T.Q. activists addressed the crowd near the center of the square in Lower Manhattan, while demonstrators held signs reading “Protect Trans Kids” and “Trans Healthcare Saved My Life.”
At one point during the rally, the crowd sang along to the tune of “This Little Light of Mine,” swapping some of the lyrics to fit the occasion: “Trans kids everywhere, we’re gonna let them shine. Let ’em shine, let ’em shine, let ’em shine.”
Among the speakers was Mirah Curzer, whose 6-year-old daughter is trans. “Fear is not the answer,” Ms. Curzer told the crowd.
“Our kids are on the front lines of the great battles of our time” she said. “They are fighting for you, so will you fight for them?”
Eliel Cruz, a founder of the Gender Liberation Movement, one of the rally’s organizers, said that he hoped the demonstration would show trans children and young people that there was a community of New Yorkers who cared about them and who saw them “as they are.”
“The few people in power currently who are trying to demonize them and take away their health care are not the majority of people,” Mr. Cruz said.
New York City hospitals have been leaders in providing gender-affirming care. But after President Trump signed the executive order threatening to withhold federal funding, some hospitals have begun canceling appointments and postponing surgeries for pediatric transgender patients.
If hospitals resist, the order threatens to end their research funding and cut off their access to government insurance programs, like Medicare and Medicaid. But if they comply, hospitals could find themselves in direct conflict with New York State’s anti-discrimination laws, and doctors could risk abandoning their patients and their ethical duties to care for them.
Mr. Cruz said that the rally on Saturday was intended as a demonstration of force and to remind those hospitals that have canceled appointments that this “cannot stand.” “We expect them to reverse their decisions,” he said.
An Winslow, a transgender and nonbinary 12-year-old who uses the pronouns they and them, attended the rally with their mother.
“I don’t want to see our whole country become transphobic and homophobic,” An said.
Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic mayoral candidate and a state assemblyman from Queens, said he attended the rally “to stand up for these children.”
“You need not even know a trans New Yorker to stand up for trans New Yorkers,” he said. “This is a trial of all of us to see who we are willing to give up. And our answer is no one.”
Claire Valdez, a Democratic assemblywoman from Queens, attended the rally and said that gender-affirming care was a human right that every New Yorker deserved.
“New York City has long been a sanctuary for all kinds of communities, trans communities especially, and for our hospitals to be falling short of their promises to our kids who need that health care — it’s unconscionable,” she said.
Justin Krebs, Juno’s father, described the news of the canceled appointments as “a sign of cowardice on the part of institutions.” While his family hadn’t been directly affected by the cancellations, Mr. Krebs said, he knew families who had.
“We’re scared and angry on their behalf,” he said.
Among the children addressing the crowd was Simon, a nonbinary 11-year-old who uses they and them pronouns and who did not want to share their last name because of safety concerns.
“Being a trans and nonbinary kid in these times can be tough, sometimes it really hurts. But I think it’s important to pick yourself and go on,” Simon said. “This is what the world is, and it’s important to fight on.”
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3) A Sweeping Ban on D.E.I. Language Roils the Sciences
President Trump’s executive order is altering scientific exploration across a broad swath of fields, even beyond government agencies, researchers say.
By Katrina Miller and Roni Caryn Rabin, Feb. 9, 2025
Internal documents at the Brookhaven National Laboratory were being scrubbed of references related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Credit...Brookhaven National Laboratory
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, or NASEM, is an independent, 162-year-old nongovernmental agency tasked with investigating and reporting on a wide range of subjects. In recent years, diversity, equity and inclusion — collectively known as D.E.I. — have been central to its agenda.
But the Academies’ priorities changed abruptly on Jan. 31. Shortly after receiving a “stop work” order from the Trump administration, the institute closed its Office of Diversity and Inclusion, removed prominent links to its work on D.E.I. from its website’s homepage and paused projects on related themes.
Now the website highlights the Academies’ interest in artificial intelligence and “our work to build a robust economy.”
The quick about-face reflects the severe impact that President Trump’s executive order on D.E.I. is having on scientific institutions across the nation, both governmental and private. The crackdown is altering scientific exploration and research agendas across a broad swath of fields.
NASA cut requirements for inclusivity from several of its programs. The National Institutes of Health removed the application for its new Environmental Justice Scholars Program. National laboratories under the Department of Energy took down web pages that had expressed a commitment to diversity, while the department suspended its promotion of inclusive and equitable research.
None of these federal agencies responded to requests for comment.
Many organizations initiated D.E.I. programs as a way to correct historical underrepresentation of minorities in the sciences. According to one report, in 2021, just 35 percent of STEM employees were women, 9 percent were Black and less than 1 percent were Indigenous.
“If we want to be the best country for the world in terms of science, we need to leverage our entire population to do so,” said Julie Posselt, an associate dean at the University of Southern California. D.E.I. programs, she added, “have ensured that the diverse population we have can make its way into the scientific work force.”
Federal frenzy
One NASA program affected is FarmFlux, a research initiative on agricultural emissions that redacted plans to recruit from “diverse student groups” for its team. Mentions of another, called Here to Observe, which partners with smaller academic institutions to expose historically underrepresented students to planetary science, have been removed from the space agency’s website.
Peter Eley, a dean at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University who, in 2023, worked as a liaison for minority-serving institutions in NASA’s Office of STEM, noted that such programs often support students from lower-income rural communities, regardless of their racial background.
Many of these students “don’t know what’s out there,” Dr. Eley said. “They don’t have the opportunity to see what is possible.”
At the National Science Foundation, an agencywide review of current awards supporting D.E.I. initiatives is underway. Part of the agency’s grant criteria includes “broader impacts,” defined as the potential to benefit society. That encompasses, but is not limited to, efforts to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in science.
According to a program director at the N.S.F., who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, a software algorithm flagged grants that included words and phrases often associated with D.E.I., including “activism” and “equal opportunity.” Other words it searched for were more nebulous — “institutional,” “underappreciated” and “women” — or can mean something else in scientific research, like “bias” and “polarization.”
N.S.F. officials were instructed to manually review grants flagged by the algorithm. Some staff members, including the N.S.F. program director, made a point of removing the flag from most awards. “I’ll probably get in trouble for doing that,” she said. “But I’m not in the business of McCarthyism.”
The N.S.F. did not answer questions sent by The New York Times regarding its ongoing review of awards. Scientists funded by the agency whose research has D.E.I. components said that they had not received enough information about how to comply with the executive order.
“Do you drop what you’re supposed to do as part of your N.S.F. proposal, or do you risk being noncompliant with this very vague guidance?” asked Adrian Fraser, a physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Diana Macias, an N.S.F.-funded forest ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, worried that her involvement in recruiting people from tribal communities to manage the local environment would end. Threats to the forest “require a broad coalition of people” to mitigate, she said, adding that the executive order would have ramifications on the landscape.
‘Obeying in advance’
Several scientists expressed concern that organizations within the federal sphere seem to be overcomplying, prompting confusion and resentment.
“They’re obeying in advance, they’re going beyond what the executive order says,” said Christine Nattrass, a physicist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who conducts research at Brookhaven National Laboratory and emphasized that she was not speaking on behalf of her institutions.
According to Dr. Nattrass, internal documents at the lab are being scrubbed of references related to D.E.I. efforts. At least one code of conduct, which outlines expected professional behavior within research collaborations — such as treating others with respect and being mindful of cultural differences — has been taken down.
The community of people involved with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory — a worldwide group that includes independent scientists, data managers and other workers — noticed last week that private Slack channels set up for L.G.B.T.Q. members were quietly being retired. At Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, researchers noticed that a prominent rainbow Pride flag had been removed from inside the lab’s main building. Scientists at all three federal facilities were left uncertain whether the executive order actually extended to internal documents, internal communication channels or flags.
“It was devastating,” said Samantha Abbott, a physics graduate student who conducts research at Fermilab. To Ms. Abbott, who is transgender, the flag represented years’ worth of advocacy efforts at the lab. “And it’s just all gone in a matter of days.”
Neither the observatory nor the labs responded to requests for comment.
That sense of compliance appeared to extend beyond federal institutions. Two decades ago, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine helped to highlight the issue of racial disparities in health care, with a landmark report recommending that minorities be better represented in health professions. More recently, NASEM participated in an ambitious effort to root out the use of race in clinical algorithms that guide medical treatment.
The quick retreat this week from a core mission stunned many NASEM employees. “D.E.I. has been at the center of what the institution has focused on for the last decade,” said one staff member, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. “It shows up in everything we do.”
The Academies are privately operated, but they receive a majority of their support from government contracts. Fifty-eight percent of their program expenditures came from federal government contracts last year, according to Dana Korsen, a spokesperson for the institute.
The independent Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the largest basic biomedical research philanthropies in the world, recently canceled a $60 million program called Inclusive Excellence that aimed to boost inclusivity in STEM education.
A spokeswoman for the institute, Alyssa Tomlinson, said the institute “remains committed to supporting outstanding scientists and talented students training to become scientists” through other programs. Ms. Tomlinson declined to explain why the institution had cut off the funding.
Scientists abroad also worried about the D.E.I. rollbacks. One American working in Canada was concerned how his grant applications, which describe research that will be conducted on U.S. soil, would be received by Canadian funding agencies in light of the federal changes.
“With tariff threats, America first and no more D.E.I., there’s a lot less incentive for the Canadian feds to fund anything in the U.S.,” said the scientist, who asked not to be identified. “And then there goes 95 percent of my research program.”
Johan Bonilla Castro, a nonbinary Latinx physicist at Northeastern University who emphasized that they were not speaking for their employer, has decided to continue their D.E.I. initiatives, which involve promoting particle physics research in Costa Rica. They also have chosen to continue writing about their racial and gender identity in grant proposals, even if it ultimately results in being denied funding.
“I will continue to say it and have it rejected,” Dr. Bonilla Castro said. “I can sterilize my research, sure. But that impacts my dignity.”
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4) Alarmed, Employers Ask: What Is ‘Illegal D.E.I.’?
Companies navigate a legal minefield as President Trump wages war on diversity programs, but they still have to guard against complaints of bias.
By Emma Goldberg, Feb. 10, 2025
Companies that just one year ago celebrated Black History Month and stocked Pride products on their shelves are in a new phase — what some lawyers refer to as “rainbow-hushing,” meaning dropping or quietly rebranding their diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
They are retreating, or clamming up, as they brace for lawsuits encouraged by President Trump’s war against D.E.I. Employers are walking a narrow path: They are trying to keep enough of their diversity efforts in place to remain protected from future discrimination lawsuits, while also avoiding Mr. Trump’s ire, federal investigations and lawsuits from anti-D.E.I. conservatives.
Some corporate initiatives that fall under the D.E.I. label — like mandatory training on avoiding bias and discrimination — were created to break down discriminatory barriers as the work force became more diverse.
“D.E.I. programming grew popular because it was responding to real challenges organizations were facing,” said Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist and an assistant professor at Stony Brook University who has written extensively on diversity programs. “Basically they’re being told to do nothing about these problems. That seems nonviable from a legal standpoint.”
Many types of D.E.I. programs could draw lawsuits now that Mr. Trump has signed an executive order threatening federal investigations for “illegal D.E.I.,” a term that has caused widespread confusion and has lawyers scrambling to interpret what it might mean.
“We’re in a brave new world,” said Jon Solorzano, a partner at Vinson & Elkins, who is counseling dozens of companies on their approaches to D.E.I. “People are freaked out.”
For private companies (at least those that are not federal contractors) the letter of the law on D.E.I. has not fundamentally changed. But the spirit of how it is interpreted and is expected to be enforced has undergone a major shift.
The primary law on anti-discrimination in private-sector employment is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legislation that came out of the civil rights movement, which says employers cannot make employment decisions on the basis of race, sex or other protected classes.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent agency, enforces this law, and changes in staffing there portend a shift in its approach. Mr. Trump quickly ousted two of the Democrats on the five-person commission. He named as acting chair a commissioner, Andrea Lucas, who said her priorities included “rooting out unlawful D.E.I.-motivated race and sex discrimination.”
“Instead of focusing on discrimination against Black workers and women, they’re going to focus on discrimination against majority groups in the form of D.E.I.,” said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at New York University’s law school.
Mr. Trump also issued an executive order charging each federal agency to identify nine entities to investigate for “illegal D.E.I.”
A memo from the Department of Justice last week indicated that the department would be involved in enforcing the executive order and could introduce criminal investigations, a prospect that has left organizations “quite alarmed,” Mr. Glasgow said.
A coalition of professors, diversity officers and others has sued to block the executive order.
Meanwhile, corporate executives are hustling to interpret what the administration means by “illegal D.E.I.” The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions offers a clue. Though the court’s decision did not extend to private-sector employment, lawyers are advising clients that fellowships, internships and mentorship programs that are open only to people of certain protected classes could now put them at legal risk.
“Anything that could be considered exclusive is, I believe, what the administration would say is illegal D.E.I.,” said Craig E. Leen, a partner in the employment practice at the law firm K&L Gates.
Jocelyn Samuels, one of the Democrats removed from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by Mr. Trump, said she worried about the doubt being cast over D.E.I. programs, like collecting data on the diversity of a work force, which she views as lawful and important.
“It is a heartbreaking conundrum for employers,” Ms. Samuels said.
Edward Blum, a lawyer who was the architect of the Supreme Court case that ended race-conscious college admissions, has since pressured several high-profile law firms to open up fellowship programs originally directed toward people from underrepresented groups. Mr. Blum said he believed that corporate counsel had known for a long time that such diversity programs were on legally tenuous ground.
“I don’t think this is a head-scratcher for the legal community,” Mr. Blum said in an interview. “They know now, and probably knew seven or eight years ago, that raising the bar for applications to their company based on an applicant’s race and ethnicity really was problematic.”
There are plenty of diversity programs that carry little legal risk, lawyers emphasize. Employee resource groups that are nonexclusive tend to be safe. That is also true of unconscious-bias training required for all staff, as well as educational events, Black History Month celebrations and mentoring workshops that are open to all.
“If it’s not conferring a preference on any protected groups, I feel pretty good about those D.E.I. practices,” Mr. Glasgow said.
But that leaves a lot of gray area. What if companies post language about diversity goals on their websites or share data with external groups like the Human Rights Campaign, which tracks L.G.B.T.Q. progress? Would doing so draw scrutiny from federal agencies?
Mr. Solorzano said tying executive compensation to meeting diversity goals could put companies in the government’s cross hairs, because it arguably offers people an incentive to make employment decisions on the basis of race or sex.
Yet pulling back too far on D.E.I. could also put companies at risk.
“In a lot of firms, legal counsel tells the chief executive that if they get rid of diversity training it will look bad if they’re ever sued for discrimination,” said Frank Dobbin, author of “Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t.”
Fair-employment lawyers, suddenly flooded with calls from frightened corporate clients, are developing a playbook for executives trying to protect themselves legally and politically.
Mr. Solorzano has made a checklist of sorts for clients calling in a panic. He advises them to assess the different groups that they’re accountable to in making any change on D.E.I. strategy: Will investors approve? Could consumers boycott? Will employees complain? Will talent look elsewhere for job opportunities?
Consumer-facing companies like Target, which recently pulled back its D.E.I. commitments, or Costco, which has doubled down, have more complex factors to consider: They could face boycotts from either supporters or opponents of D.E.I.
Mr. Solorzano also advises his clients to consider disclosing in their filings to investors the risk that they might be sued or boycotted because of their diversity programs.
Target offers an example of the bind that so many companies now face: It is being sued by shareholders who claim that it concealed the risks of its D.E.I. approach. It is also facing calls for a boycott from consumers who support D.E.I. and are upset about the rollback.
Not all the criticism of identity-based programs comes from the right. Some on the far left view corporate D.E.I. as a distraction from labor organizing that would address economic inequality. Even some people who have created and led diversity programs across the private sector feel D.E.I. programs haven’t always served their purpose. They are asking executives to use this moment of chaos to take stock of which diversity initiatives are effective and which were mostly used for public relations value and should be discarded.
“A lot of these moves have been for optics,” said Lily Zheng, a D.E.I. strategist and the author of “Reconstructing DEI.” “If you can get rid of D.E.I. in a day, that tells you those D.E.I. commitments were the flimsiest of flimsy commitments.”
Alarm over how to navigate this new D.E.I. terrain pops up anywhere corporate leaders gather. In January, leaders in artificial intelligence, including representatives from OpenAI and DeepMind, gathered in Gloria Steinem’s living room, convened by the media start-up Charter and Bloomberg Beta, to talk about gender equality in their industry. A computer scientist described her worries over an organization she works for that supports underrepresented groups in the A.I. industry, wondering whether its website should drop its language about focusing on Black, Latina and nonbinary people.
Ms. Steinem offered her own perspective on the long history of counterattacks on efforts to boost representation of women and minorities in any industry: “There’s always a backlash,” she said. “As soon as you’re approaching a place of real power.”
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5) Trump Killed a Major Report on Nature. They’re Trying to Publish It Anyway.
The first full draft of the assessment, on the state of America’s land, water and wildlife, was weeks from completion. The project leader called the study “too important to die.”
By Catrin Einhorn, Feb. 10, 2025
Each of the 12 chapters in the assessment was written by a team of a dozen or so specialists. Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times
The draft was almost ready for submission, due in less than a month. More than 150 scientists and other experts had collectively spent thousands of hours working on the report, a first-of-its-kind assessment of nature across the United States.
But President Trump ended the effort, started under the Biden administration, by executive order. So, on Jan. 30, the project’s director, an environmental scientist named Phil Levin, sent an email telling members of his team that their work had been discontinued.
But it wasn’t the only email he sent that day.
“This work is too important to die,” Dr. Levin wrote in a separate email to the reports’ authors, this one from his personal account. “The country needs what we are producing.”
Now key experts who worked on the report, called the National Nature Assessment, are figuring out how to finish and publish it outside the government, according to interviews with nine of the leading authors.
“There’s an amazingly unanimous broad consensus that we ought to carry on with the work,” said Howard Frumkin, a professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Washington School of Public Health who was leading a chapter on nature’s effects on human health and well-being.
The study was intended to measure how the nation’s lands, water and wildlife are faring, how they are expected to change, and what that means for people.
Most of the 12 chapters were written by teams of a dozen or so specialists. While some were federal employees, a vast majority of the authors came from outside government — academia, nonprofit groups and the private sector — and they were already volunteering their time. Most or all the teams were expecting to continue their work, the authors said.
The first completed draft had been due Feb. 11. When the researchers were told the project had been canceled, some had almost finished their chapters and were simply polishing. Others had been racing against the deadline.
Rajat Panwar, a professor of responsible and sustainable business at Oregon State University who was leading the chapter on nature and the economy, was preparing slides to present his section when he got the news. He said the team he recruited saw, and still sees, the work as a calling to help solve one of its generation’s most pressing problems, the loss of nature and biodiversity.
“The dependence of the economy on nature,” a theme explored in his group’s 6,000-word chapter, “is understated and understudied and underappreciated,” Dr. Panwar said.
But the effort to publish outside the government raised major questions that are under discussion. What is the best way to publish? How will the authors ensure rigor and peer-review? Who is their target audience? Since federal employees will not be able to continue, who will pay for certain critical coordinating roles? Who will provide the oversight that came from a federal steering committee?
And perhaps the trickiest question: How can the report maintain the stature and the influence of a government assessment now that it won’t be released by the government?
“We just want to make sure that whatever product is produced really has the potential to move the needle on the conversations, all the way from the dinner table in individual families to the halls of Congress,” said Chris Field, director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, who was leading the chapter on nature and climate change.
Legal issues related to ownership of the work should not be a problem, said Peter Lee, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in intellectual property law and was not involved in the effort.
“As a general rule, government works are not subject to copyright,” Mr. Lee said.
The draft was developed under the auspices of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the same federal group that oversees national climate assessments. But while those reports are mandated by Congress, the nature assessment received authority through an executive order issued by President Biden.
That left the project more vulnerable. It became one of a slew of Biden-era environmental orders that Mr. Trump revoked on his first day in office. Mr. Trump has also frozen climate spending, begun withdrawing the United States from the main global pact to tackle climate change and launched an assault on wind energy while seeking to expand fossil fuels.
By the end of January, the federal web page for the National Nature Assessment had been taken down.
“Nature supports our economy, our health and well-being, national security and safety from fire and floods,” said Dr. Levin, the former director of the report. “The loss of the National Nature Assessment means that we’re losing important information that we need to ensure that nature and people thrive.”
Dr. Levin declined to comment on the report’s future.
The Trump administration did not address questions about why it canceled the effort. But Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman for the White House, said Mr. Trump would “unleash America’s energy potential” and “simultaneously ensure that our nation’s land and water can be enjoyed for generations to come.”
Christopher Schell, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the lead author of a chapter called “Nature and Equity in the U.S.,” said he believed that a focus on environmental justice made the assessment more of a target for the Trump administration, which has attacked diversity, equity and inclusion programs and placed workers from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice on leave.
Biodiversity, the variety of life on Earth, is declining faster than at any time in human history, according to a landmark global scientific assessment. The National Nature Assessment was intended to provide a much more robust picture of the state of play for the United States, the authors said.
Danielle Ignace, an associate professor in the department of forest resources at the University of Minnesota and the lead author of a chapter on the drivers of change in nature, said her team felt the importance of the work more strongly than ever.
“It’s a calling to this cause to see this through,” Dr. Ignace said. “We’re not going to stop.”
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6) Israeli Police Raid Palestinian Bookshops in East Jerusalem
The police said the stores were selling books that supported terrorism and that two members of the family who owned the business had been arrested. A lawyer said their detention was “political” rather than legal.
By Natan Odenheimer and Lara Jakes, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 10, 2025
For decades, the Educational Bookshop has been a cultural cornerstone of East Jerusalem, its two outlets hosting foreign diplomats, feting prominent authors and providing readers with both sides of the story in the conflict between Israel and Palestinians.
This weekend, the Israeli police raided the stores and arrested two members of the family that owns the business who were working at the time after concluding that books being sold there — including a children’s coloring book — could incite violence. The police said they seized a number of books in the raids on Sunday.
The shops were initially closed on Monday, but later opened despite a judge ordering the two men, Mahmood Muna and Ahmed Muna, to remain in detention until Tuesday morning amid a police investigation. They were also ordered to be held under house arrest for five days following their release and banned from returning to their bookshops for 15 days.
Murad Muna, a relative of the two men and who reopened one of the stores on Monday afternoon, denied that the books sold there promoted violence. In fact, he said, the books passed Israeli censors when they were imported from abroad.
“We believe that this is a political, not a legal detention,” the lawyer for the two arrested men, Nasser Oday, said outside the courthouse in Jerusalem after the hearing.
In a statement, the police said the shops were searched on Sunday for books suspected of containing “inciting content.” It said detectives “encountered numerous books containing inciteful material with nationalist Palestinian themes, including a children’s coloring book titled ‘From the Jordan to the Sea.’”
The slogan “from the river to the sea” has long been a rallying cry for Palestinian nationalism and is usually interpreted by Israelis as a denial of their country’s right to exist.
Mahmood Muna's wife, Mai Muna, was in the courtroom on Monday as her husband was brought before the judge after spending the night in jail.
“They started throwing books off the shelves,” Ms. Muna said in a phone interview on Monday, describing the raids. “They were looking for anything with a Palestinian flag.”
But hours later, one of the shops was jammed with customers and supporters as Murad Muna tried to keep up with nonstop sales that he said were a sign of solidarity.
“Today is overbusy,” Mr. Muna said from behind the cash register. If the Israeli authorities were seeking to make Palestinians fearful, he said, “This is our answer.”
The arrests reflected how Israel is tightening restrictions on free speech and cultural activities for Palestinians across the country. Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli police have increasingly arrested Palestinian citizens of Israel on charges of incitement to terror on social media and have shut down film screenings critical of the Israeli military or government in Haifa and Jaffa.
The Educational Bookshop outlets are in East Jerusalem, a part of the city that Israel captured from Jordan in 1967 and later annexed. Israel considers all of Jerusalem to be its undivided capital but most East Jerusalem residents are Palestinians, and the United Nations has deemed it occupied territory.
Over the years, the Muna family’s stores have hosted talks, film screenings and book launches, including one last July for the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” at another shop that they own nearby.
Its author, Nathan Thrall, was among a small crowd of protesters on Monday who gathered across from the entrance to the courthouse during the hearing. He and his wife, Judy, heard about the arrests through social media and WhatsApp groups.
He said the arrests will send “a very strong message” about police authority.
“It reflects a boldness, a sense that there will be absolutely no consequences, that they have total impunity, that they can go after two of the most well connected Palestinians in East Jerusalem” Mr. Thrall said.
David Grossman, a prominent Israeli novelist, said he knew Mahmood Muna and had visited his shop. “His arrest is outrageous,” he said in a phone interview.
The police also confiscated several books as part of the investigation. They did not return repeated calls and messages on Monday about their titles, content or how they were deemed offensive.
Diplomats from nine European countries, plus the European Union, attended the court hearing on Monday to show support for the two men. “I, like many diplomats, enjoy browsing for books at Educational Bookshop,” the German ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, said in a social media post. ”I am concerned to hear of the raid and their detention in prison.”
An Israeli human rights group, Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said the arrests were another step in efforts to intimidate and silence Palestinians by the Israeli authorities.
In a statement, the group added that the raids and arrests “cannot be separated from the unprecedented number of interrogations and arrests of Palestinians over expression-related offenses, nor from the broader trend of silencing the Palestinian voice and any social initiative or activity.”
Standing among the protesters at the courthouse, Eliana Padwa said she had visited the bookstores often since moving to Jerusalem from New York.
“They’ve been huge in my journey throughout the years, politically, learning about Palestine,” said Ms. Padwa, 26. “They provided a safe space for me to learn about this, to ask questions.”
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7) Trump Calls Gaza a ‘Big Real Estate Site,’ Reiterating Plan for U.S. Takeover
President Trump, speaking on his way to the Super Bowl, also mentioned building “beautiful sites for the people, the Palestinians, to live in.”
By Claire Moses, Feb. 10, 2025
Palestinians returning to the north of Gaza on Sunday. President Trump has proposed for the United States to take over Gaza. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
President Trump again reiterated his proposal for the United States to take over Gaza, telling reporters on Air Force One on Sunday that the strip of land was “a big real estate site” that the United States was “going to own.”
He also mentioned building “some beautiful sites for the people, the Palestinians, to live in.” The location of such sites was not clear. Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested that the two million Palestinians from the enclave be relocated.
Mr. Trump’s comments added even more confusion around the proposal, which he first announced last week at a news conference at the White House alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. The idea has drawn widespread international condemnation, with some critics likening it to ethnic cleansing. The forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international law and a war crime, according to experts.
Top officials in the Trump administration attempted to walk back the president’s comments on Wednesday, a day after he first announced the idea. They insisted President Trump had not committed to sending American troops to Gaza and that any relocation of Palestinians would be temporary.
On Sunday, as Mr. Trump was traveling to attend the Super Bowl in New Orleans, he raised the proposal again.
“Think of it as a big real estate site, and the United States is going to own it,” he said of Gaza, according to an audio recording from Air Force One that was shared with reporters.
“There won’t be anybody there,” Mr. Trump added. “Hamas won’t be there,” he said, referring to the militant group that led the assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that touched off the war in Gaza. “We’ll be building through other of the very rich countries in the Middle East; they’ll be building some beautiful sites for the people, the Palestinians, to live in,” he said.
Mr. Netanyahu, at a government meeting in Israel on Sunday, praised Mr. Trump’s vision for the region following the war. “There are opportunities for possibilities that I think we never dreamed of, or at least a few months ago they did not seem possible — but they are possible,” he said.
“President Trump came with a completely different vision,” for the future of Gaza, Mr. Netanyahu said, “much better for the State of Israel, a revolutionary and creative vision, which we are discussing. He is very determined to carry it out.”
When Mr. Trump introduced the proposal at the White House last week, his administration had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. It would involve displacing two million Palestinians from Gaza; Mr. Trump suggested they should be relocated to countries like Egypt and Jordan, both of which swiftly rejected the idea.
At that news conference, Mr. Trump said that the United States would take over the Gaza Strip, “and we will do a job with it too.” He said the U.S. would be responsible for disposing of unexploded munitions and rebuilding Gaza, ultimately turning it into what he called, “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Hiba Yazbek and Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.
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8) A California Battery Plant Burned. Residents Have Gotten Sick, and Anxious.
Heavy metals detected in the soil have also created health implications for Monterey County’s agriculture industry, and the workers who pick the produce.
By Orlando Mayorquín, Reporting from northern Monterey County, Calif., Feb. 10, 2025
The vast farmlands just off the coast of California’s Monterey Bay are usually quiet during the winter, when there are no crops to pick.
This winter, a different kind of stillness has taken hold. First, fears of immigration raids paralyzed the immigrant communities that make up the agricultural work force. And now, anxiety has spread over what some in the region believe is a sprawling and silent environmental disaster.
Last month, a battery-storage plant went up in flames and burned for days, prompting the evacuation of more than 1,000 residents and shutting down local schools. The plant, located in Moss Landing, an unincorporated community in Monterey County, is the largest facility in the world that uses lithium-ion batteries to store energy. Residents have reported feeling ill, and many of them worry that the fire polluted the air, soil and water with toxins.
“Now you don’t see anybody walking outside because it’s terrifying, everything that’s going on,” said Esmeralda Ortiz, who had to evacuate from her home in Moss Landing after the plant began burning on Jan. 16.
She noticed an odd metallic odor as she and her two young children fled. She said she later took her children to the doctor after they complained of headaches and sore throats, symptoms she also had. Eventually, her children felt better, but Ms. Ortiz said she worries about the potential long-term health effects and whether the strawberry fields where she and her husband plan to work during the harvest have been contaminated.
No homes were damaged in the fire, which unfolded more than 300 miles north of the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in the Los Angeles area. For weeks, residents, officials, researchers and environmental and public-health experts have been trying to understand the scale of damage, but so far there have been few answers. What was unleashed by the plumes of smoke from thousands of burning lithium-ion batteries? And where did it go?
“A lot of people are concerned about the ingestion of heavy metals,” said Brian Roeder, who moved his family into a rental home for the next month after they felt ill at their home in Prunedale, about eight miles southeast of the fire.
“Most people can’t do that,” Mr. Roeder, 62, said of temporarily relocating. “But we have a 7-year-old and we’re like, ‘We got to get him out of here.’”
Vistra, the Texas-based energy company that operates the plant, said there were approximately 100,000 lithium ion battery modules inside the storage facility and that most of them had burned. The company said an exact accounting had yet to be done, because crews were still prohibited from entering the facility to do a visual inspection.
Tests conducted by a state agency, the Department of Toxic Substances Control, detected cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese — heavy metals found in lithium ion batteries — at wide-ranging levels in soil sampled at eight sites near the plant and up to roughly five miles away from it. Officials said the data was preliminary and still needed to be thoroughly analyzed. Tests of the local drinking water found the presence of the metals but at safe levels. Air quality monitoring has not detected heavy metal particles or hydrogen fluoride, a gas associated with the batteries, county officials said.
In a separate study, researchers at San Jose State University’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in the Elkhorn Slough Reserve, an estuary next to the battery facility, found that the levels of cobalt, nickel and manganese had significantly increased in topsoil samples in the area compared to levels from studies conducted before the fire.
The results of soil testing by the state agency and the university lab were cited in a lawsuit filed on behalf of four residents by a legal team that includes the environmental activist Erin Brockovich.
The suit alleged that the amount of cobalt, manganese, nickel and copper in the preliminary state data exceeded federal Environmental Protection Agency risk levels for residential soil, including for children. The lawsuit claimed the facility’s fire-suppression system was deficient. It was filed against Vistra as well as other defendants, including the state’s largest utility company, Pacific Gas & Electric, which operates another energy storage facility at the Moss Landing plant.
Vistra declined to comment on the lawsuit. The company said in a statement that it was working closely with local officials and community partners. “We have and will continue to do everything we can to do right by our community and are working in concert with federal, state and local agencies to ensure public health and safety,” Vistra’s statement read.
PG&E said it was reviewing the complaint. In a statement, the utility said the fire was not a PG&E incident. “The Moss Landing power plant is located adjacent to — but walled off and separate from — PG&E’s Moss Landing electric substation,” the statement read.
Mr. Roeder has helped lead residents in collecting more than 100 of their own soil samples for testing. The preliminary results detected varying concentrations of lithium, cobalt, nickel or manganese as far as 46 miles away.
Haakon Faste, 47, who lives in Ben Lomond, a mountain community roughly 25 miles northwest of the plant, recalled a metallic taste in the air in the days after the fire broke out on Jan. 16. He and his wife experienced a number of symptoms: sore throat, headaches, bloody noses.
“It feels like you’re breathing — I don’t know if it’s like breathing acid or it’s like the air is so incredibly dry that it burns deep down into your lungs, so it hurts to swallow,” Mr. Faste said.
The couple evacuated and moved to a short-term rental. Trips to urgent care have yielded few answers about what may have sickened them.
People who inhale high concentrations of heavy metals experience profound health effects, said Dr. Justin Colacino, an associate professor of environmental health science at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Throat irritation, lung inflammation and difficulty breathing can occur with heavy-metal inhalation, and manganese can have neurological effects if inhaled at high levels.
“If people in the community are reporting these, that would be consistent with what we know from folks that breathe in metals like this in an occupational setting where the levels tend to be high,” Dr. Colacino said.
Even without a full understanding of the environmental and health effects, the fire has raised questions about the safety of energy storage technology that California is relying on to meet its ambitious timeline for a clean-energy future. The Moss Landing Power Plant has stood tall over the region since 1950, generating gas-powered electricity for the state’s grid. Vistra’s lithium-ion battery facility went online at the site in 2020, in an expansion approved by the California Public Utilities Commission.
Facilities like the one in Moss Landing store excess energy collected during the day and release it as electricity into the grid at night. Presented as a step toward a carbon-free future, the expansion received little attention or resistance from the public or from interest groups, said Glenn Church, a county supervisor who represents northern Monterey County.
“We are right now in a place where government does not have the knowledge to regulate this technology and industry does not have the know-how to control it,” Mr. Church said.
When a lithium-ion battery catches fire, industry best practice is to let it burn. Dousing it with water is ineffective and can cause a chemical reaction.
“I know of no other industry that does that,” Mr. Church said of letting the material burn.
He is pushing to keep the facility off line until there is a full accounting of the cause of the fire and its fallout. In addition, Dawn Addis, the state assembly member who represents the central coast, has introduced a bill to require local input in the permitting process and new regulations for new energy storage facilities. And the utilities commission has proposed the implementation of new safety rules.
The depositing of heavy metals onto soil carries added implications for a region known for growing strawberries and other produce, and for the workers who pick the fruit.
At a forum on immigrant rights hosted by the local school district in nearby Castroville in late January, many hands shot up when the presenter asked how many farmworkers were in the room.
“People are in a such big moment of stress that they say it’s one thing and another,” Maria Tarelo, who works packing berries, said of the fears of federal raids and the battery plant fire.
Ms. Tarelo has advised her fellow workers to take precautions by wearing masks and gloves, as they face the potential of working land that could turn out to be hazardous to their health. For many men and women who labor in the fields, the pressing concern is that contaminated crops could result in less work.
“Then we don’t have anything to pay for food or rent,” Ms. Tarelo said. “Sometimes, no matter the state of the environment, we have to go work.”
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9) Top Judge Favors a Second Chance for Those Languishing in Prison
Rowan Wilson, the chief judge of New York State’s highest court, used his State of the Judiciary address to push back against prolonged incarceration.
By Hurubie Meko, Feb. 10, 2025
Rowan D. Wilson, chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, favors legislation that would allow prisoners who have served 10 years or more to apply for reduced sentences. Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times
The chief judge of New York State’s highest court urged the State Legislature on Monday to pass a bill that would allow prisoners who have been locked up for years to apply for reduced sentences.
The judge, Rowan Wilson, who oversees the state’s entire court system, said in his annual address at the Court of Appeals in Albany that the proposed legislation, known as the Second Look Act, would give people who committed crimes years ago an opportunity to show they no longer pose a danger and could be a benefit to society.
“Put simply, our criminal justice system isn’t working. Maybe it hasn’t really ever worked,” Judge Wilson said. “Prolonged incarceration is very expensive, and it does not make us safer.”
The speech by Judge Wilson, the first Black judge to lead the Court of Appeals, stands in contrast to a growing push for tough-on-crime policies in New York State. After embarrassing losses to Republicans in the midterm elections in 2022 and gains by President Trump among New York voters in November, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has made public safety a keystone of her re-election campaign.
Judge Wilson was confirmed in 2023 following a tumultuous fight among State Democrats and Ms. Hochul over her initial nominee for the post, Hector D. LaSalle, who progressive legislators said was too conservative. The previous chief judge, Janet DiFiore, had wielded her influence to push the court to the right during her tenure.
In contrast, Judge Wilson, who first joined the Court of Appeals in 2017, quickly established himself as a prominent liberal voice.
During his time on the bench, he helped expand the rights of workers and criminal defendants. And in last year’s address, his first as chief judge, Judge Wilson centered his message on the state’s diversionary courts — like drug treatment courts, mental health courts and veterans courts — which he said were “unorthodox approaches that have been spectacularly impressive.”
His State of the Judiciary speech on Monday further marked Judge Wilson’s departure from his predecessors.
The second-look bill would allow people serving prison terms of 10 years or longer to apply to judges and ask them to re-evaluate their sentences. The aim is to “address the harms caused by New York’s history of imposing overly harsh sentences, including those required by mandatory minimums,” according to its language.
The bill has failed in the Legislature in recent years, but has been reintroduced this cycle and is being sponsored by State Senator Julia Salazar and Assemblywoman Latrice Walker, both of Brooklyn. It has about two dozen co-sponsors in the State Senate, all of them Democrats. It is not clear whether it is likely to pass.
The endorsement from Judge Wilson is meant to bolster support for the measure, which was also backed in an editorial earlier this year by the state’s Chief Administrative Judge, Joseph A. Zayas.
On Monday, Judge Wilson was joined by Daniel F. Martuscello III, the commissioner of the state’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, who oversees the state’s prisons and parole.
He was also joined by former prisoners and two incarcerated men. One of them was Christopher Martinez, 40, who was convicted of murder when he was 17 and is serving a sentence of 65 years to life at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County.
Mr. Martinez spoke of being shuffled among five homes and seven schools in Brooklyn and landing in foster care before dropping out of high school. He matured into adulthood in prison, he said, constantly exposed to violence and contemplating suicide.
But in his 23 years behind bars, he has worked to turn his life around, he said. He completed his high school equivalency, becoming the first person in his family to graduate. In 2023, he earned a bachelor’s degree. He is now a father and a husband.
“I have devoted myself to the ideas of redemption and rehabilitation, to proving that I can be a productive member of a community,” he said. “To proving that others can live safely around me.”
The bill gives him hope that “we can work to redraw the line at imposing punishment that is sufficient but not greater than necessary,” Mr. Martinez said.
In his speech, Judge Wilson highlighted what he said were signs that the “traditional” model of the legal system was not working.
He pointed out that the United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population, but 20 percent of its incarcerated people; that the felony conviction rate is significantly higher for New Yorkers of color than their white peers; and that the age of incarcerated New Yorkers is rising because of longer prison sentences.
“Over-incarceration has everything to do with the courts,” he said. “No prosecutor, jury, legislator or executive branch official imposed a prison sentence. Everyone sentenced to a New York prison was sentenced by a judge of the Unified Court System.”
New York is “behind the curve” when it comes to allowing for sentences to be adjusted, especially for people who were convicted when they were young adults, said Nazgol Ghandnoosh, director of research at the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit in Washington.
Based on scientific research that shows the brains of young adults are not fully developed, many states have adopted statutes that allow young people to apply for resentencing when they grow older, Ms. Ghandnoosh said. “At this point, we don’t see New York law reflecting that science,” she said.
New York Democrats have also introduced a measure aimed at eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and another that would allow credit for good behavior to be applied toward sentences.
But it is the second-look bill that would directly address the state’s problem of overly lengthy sentences, Judge Wilson said in an interview last week. For that reason, his team has been working closely with lawmakers to help craft the measure to have the maximum effect, he said.
“If you stick with the traditional model, then a judge is making a determination about how long to incarcerate someone shortly after the person has committed a crime,” he said. “And it’s sort of blind to the possibility that people change.”
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10) Trump to Meet Jordan’s King as Gaza Truce Hangs in the Balance
Hamas and President Trump have threatened to upend the cease-fire. Analysts say those words could prove hollow, but the deal still may not last beyond early March.
By Patrick Kingsley and Ronen Bergman, Feb. 11, 2025
A shelter amid the rubble in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, on Monday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The future of the cease-fire in Gaza, along with the territory’s long-term fate, hung in the balance on Tuesday as President Trump prepared to meet with King Abdullah II of Jordan amid a public spat between the American leader and Hamas.
Mr. Trump envisions taking over Gaza and expelling Palestinians to nearby countries, including Jordan. He has threatened to end American financial support for Jordan if the king refuses to accept that vision.
The dispute is one of several that imperil the fragile truce between Hamas and Israel. Hamas threatened to derail the agreement on Monday night, warning that it would delay the release of some hostages on Saturday if Israel did not send more aid to Gaza.
In response, Mr. Trump threatened “all hell” if every hostage were not released by the weekend. Hamas later softened its position, while Mr. Trump included a caveat that suggested his threat was a negotiating tactic, not an ultimatum.
While the immediate crisis is likely to be resolved soon, analysts said, another hurdle looms in March, when the cease-fire is set to elapse unless Hamas and Israel negotiate an extension.
“It’s likely that they will reach a compromise before Saturday,” said Ibrahim Dalalsha, director of the Horizon Center, a political research group in Ramallah, in the West Bank. “But this crisis is a prelude for a much bigger crisis that is coming in early March.”
All the major players have made negotiations harder.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has delayed the talks, wary of an extension that would allow Hamas to remain the dominant military force in Gaza.
Hamas, though nominally willing to share control with other Palestinian factions, has given no sign that it will disarm.
And Mr. Trump’s pronouncements — including his threats to expel Gaza’s residents — have angered Hamas and amplified the sense of chaos surrounding the negotiations.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for the United States to occupy and rebuild Gaza, threatening on Monday to withdraw financial support for Egypt and Jordan if they do not house Palestinians displaced by that effort.
Such a forced migration would destabilize both countries, and King Abdullah is expected to present alternatives to Mr. Trump.
Analysts are divided about whether Mr. Trump’s idea is serious, but the dispute highlights the growing unpredictability about Gaza’s future.
The current standoff stems in part from Hamas’s accusation that Israel has not upheld its promises for the first phase of the cease-fire. Israel was required to send hundreds of thousands of tents into Gaza, a promise that Hamas says Israel has not kept.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, three Israeli officials and two mediators said that Hamas’s claims were accurate.
But COGAT, the Israeli military unit that oversees aid deliveries, said in a written response that Hamas’s claims were “completely false accusations. Hundreds of thousands of tents have entered Gaza since the beginning of the agreement, as well as fuel, generators and everything Israel pledged.”
Regardless, officials and commentators say this dispute can be resolved relatively easily if Israel allows more aid to Gaza.
The more serious issue is the widespread perception that Mr. Netanyahu is undermining the negotiations over an extended truce.
Those talks were meant to begin early last week. Instead, Mr. Netanyahu delayed sending a team to Qatar, which is mediating talks, until early this week.
That delegation consisted of three officials who have not previously led Israel’s negotiating effort, according to five Israeli officials and an official from one of the mediating countries. And their mandate was only to listen, not to negotiate.
That created the perception that Mr. Netanyahu was playing for time rather than trying to extend the truce.
All of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks more freely.
Asked for comment, Omer Dostri, a spokesman for the prime minister, said that Mr. Netanyahu was “working tirelessly to return all hostages held by the Hamas terrorist organization.” Mr. Dostri added that Israel would send negotiators to discuss the deal’s extension after Israel’s position had been set by the cabinet.
Mr. Netanyahu has often said that Hamas will not remain in power after the war. And key members of Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition have expressed a desire to resume the war to oust Hamas, despite calls from much of the Israeli public for an extension of the truce to free more hostages, even if it leaves the militant group in power.
A Hamas official, Mahmoud Mardawi, said that the group’s warning on Monday had been in response only to the disagreements over humanitarian aid. But analysts said that it was also an attempt to force Mr. Netanyahu to negotiate earnestly and was probably a reaction to Mr. Trump’s recent statements about depopulating Gaza.
Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs, said, “There’s an anger among Hamas about the demands of both Netanyahu and Trump that Hamas will be kicked out of Gaza.”
“The announcement yesterday was a kind of a signal that, if you continue demanding this, there will be several dramatic crises,” Mr. Milshtein added.
Natan Odenheimer, Gabby Sobelman and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
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11) Jordan’s King Faces a Bind as He Meets With Trump
King Abdullah II, a close U.S. ally dependent on aid from Washington, is confronting the president’s demands that he take in Palestinians from Gaza, a step the king’s domestic politics will not allow.
By Mark Mazzetti, Reporting from Washington, Feb. 11, 2025
King Abdullah II of Jordan, right, and President Trump at the White House in 2018. Mr. Trump has said he would pressure Jordan and Egypt to take in the estimated 1.9 million Palestinians he would expel from the Gaza Strip as part of his plan for the United States to “own” the territory. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
In July 2021, the first time that King Abdullah II of Jordan met with President Joseph R. Biden Jr., he was greeted warmly as a reliable American partner whose country is a bulwark for security in the Middle East.
“You live in a tough neighborhood,” Mr. Biden said as they sat in the Oval Office.
The king, who will meet with President Trump on Tuesday, may find Washington to be the tougher neighborhood this time around.
Mr. Trump has reiterated his intention to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip as part of his plan for the United States to “own” the territory, and on Monday he suggested he could consider slashing aid to Jordan and Egypt if their governments refused to take in an estimated 1.9 million Palestinians from Gaza.
Both Jordan and Egypt flatly rejected the idea when Mr. Trump first raised it last week, putting King Abdullah in a bind as he prepares to meet with the president.
Rebuffing Mr. Trump’s demands could imperil the more than $1.5 billion in foreign aid that Jordan receives each year from the United States. A separate, classified stream of American money flows to Jordan’s intelligence services.
At the same time, more than half of King Abdullah’s approximately 12 million subjects are of Palestinian descent, and Middle East experts say that the survival of his family’s rule depends on him digging in against Mr. Trump’s plan.
“King Abdullah cannot go along with it,” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “He cannot survive the idea that he’s colluding on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”
“It’s existential for him and his government.”
King Abdullah is also expected to use his meeting with Mr. Trump to push against any attempts by Israel to annex part or all of the West Bank, which far-right members of Israel’s government speak openly about and some of Mr. Trump’s appointees have long advocated. The West Bank sits directly on Jordan’s border, and an Israeli move to take more Palestinian land could lead to violence and unrest that could spill into Jordan.
Jordan is already home to approximately 700,000 refugees, most of them Syrians who fled from that country’s civil war.
Unlike some of its Middle Eastern neighbors that are drowning in oil wealth, Jordan is heavily reliant on American aid. King Abdullah works hard to cultivate close ties across the U.S. government, and makes it a point to be the first Arab leader to meet with every new president.
Jordan allows U.S. troops access to its military bases, and for decades has received millions of dollars from the C.I.A. to support its intelligence services — secret payments that began during the reign of the current king’s father, King Hussein.
American aid to Jordan, including military aid, is currently frozen as part of the Trump administration’s blanket halt to foreign assistance. The U.S.A.I.D. office in the country is being shuttered.
King Abdullah, who assumed the throne in 1999, is the longest currently serving leader in the Middle East. Bruce Riedel, a former top Middle East analyst at the C.I.A., said that the king is likely to use his strong relationships with the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and Congress to try to advise the president that a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip and the expulsion of Palestinians is “a bad idea.”
The king met on Sunday with Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, and Mr. Riedel says that Jordan “has a lot of supporters on the Hill, including a lot of Republican supporters.”
Still, King Abdullah might need to find new patrons if Mr. Trump decides to cut funding to Jordan over its refusal to go along with his plan for Gaza. If this happens, he might find willing donors in the governments of wealthy gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have also strongly opposed Mr. Trump’s plan for an American takeover of Gaza and expulsion of Palestinians from their land.
Mr. Salem believes that Mr. Trump’s biggest goal in the Middle East is still a grand deal that would involve Saudi Arabia officially recognizing Israel, something it would be extremely unlikely to agree to if Mr. Trump follows through on his plans for Gaza.
The Saudi government has said that there must be concrete steps toward an independent Palestinian state before the kingdom considers normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel
For this reason, King Abdullah could have a bit of leverage. He could try to convince a mercurial American president to keep his eyes on the larger prize, and convince him that Jordan is essential to helping him attain it.
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12) Israel’s Security Cabinet Meets as Pressure on Cease-Fire Rises
After Hamas said it would postpone the next release of Israeli hostages, President Trump demanded that all hostages be released Saturday or “all hell is going to break out.”
By Lara Jakes, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 11, 2025
Relatives of hostages held in Gaza block a highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Tuesday. Credit...Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel held an emergency cabinet meeting on Tuesday after Hamas said it was postponing the next release of Israeli hostages from the Gaza Strip, increasing the pressure on an already fragile three-week cease-fire.
The security cabinet was set to consider how — or whether — to move forward with ongoing negotiations to secure the safe release of all hostages this spring. The meeting began shortly after midday in Jerusalem, according to three Israeli officials.
Ahead of the meeting, relatives of the hostages blocked Israel’s main highway Tuesday morning with protest signs and orange smoke bombs. Even as one family rejoiced in receiving a proof-of-life message about 27-year-old twins Gali and Ziv Berman, another was told that Shlomo Mantzur, the oldest hostage at 86, had been killed.
Mr. Netanyahu moved up Tuesday’s meeting after Hamas said on Monday it would indefinitely postpone the release of several more hostages who had been expected to be freed on Saturday. Hamas accused Israel of violating parts of the cease-fire agreement.
Later on Monday night, President Trump threw down a gauntlet of his own, demanding that all of the remaining hostages be released by 12 o’clock on Saturday or “all hell is going to break out.”
Only a handful of Israeli hostages have been released each week since the cease-fire began, coinciding with the freeing of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails as required under the first stage of the negotiated deal.
Sixteen of 33 Israeli hostages have been released so far as required in the initial part of the deal that is set to expire in early March. About 60 other hostages, some of whom are believed to be dead, would be released in a second phase intended to last six weeks.
But some Israeli officials have resisted a second stage of the deal that would include talks on how to fully end the 15-month war, urging instead to continue fighting Hamas and, potentially, rescue the hostages sooner.
“Trump is right! Go back and destroy now!” the far-right lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir said in a social media post on Tuesday morning.
Others want the negotiations, which have been held in Doha with the United States, Egypt and Qatar serving as intermediaries, to continue as the only way to ensure the hostages’ safety and usher in a lasting peace.
“The sign of life from twins Gali and Ziv Berman is a wake-up call this morning to the Israeli government,” the opposition leader Yair Lapid wrote on social media. “Netanyahu, go to Doha. Bring everyone home. Time is running out.”
Hamas’s announcement of a delay in the next hostages-for-prisoners exchange was issued after Mr. Trump repeatedly said that Palestinians should be removed from Gaza and relocated to Jordan and Egypt. The forced deportation of a civilian population is a war crime under international law.
In an interview on Fox News that aired Monday night, Mr. Trump said the roughly two million Palestinians in Gaza would not have the right to eventually return to their homeland, “because they're going to have much better housing — in other words, I’m talking about building a permanent place for them.”
On Tuesday, Hamas appeared undeterred by Mr. Trump’s most recent comments. “Trump should remember that there is an agreement that must be respected by both sides, and this is the only path for the hostages’ return,” Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.
Palestinians, Arab states and even some American allies in Europe have roundly rejected his proposal to force Gazans from their homes.
King Abdullah II of Jordan was to meet with Mr. Trump in Washington on Tuesday. But plans for an upcoming visit by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt appear to have been scrapped, Arab media reported.
Mr. Sisi spoke Tuesday with Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, and the two agreed that negotiations to allow the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners and more humanitarian aid should continue, according to a statement released after the phone call by the Egyptian president’s office.
“They also underscored the imperative to begin the reconstruction of Gaza to make it livable again, without displacing its Palestinian population, safeguarding their rights and ability to live on their land,” the statement noted pointedly.
The specter of the cease-fire falling apart rattled other world leaders.
“We must avoid at all costs resumption of hostilities in Gaza that would lead to immense tragedy,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, wrote on social media. “I appeal to Hamas to proceed with the planned liberation of hostages. Both sides must fully abide by their commitments in the cease-fire agreement & resume serious negotiations.”
Gabby Sobelman, Natan Odenheimer and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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13) Trump Orders Plans for ‘Large Scale’ Work Force Cuts and Expands Musk’s Power
The latest executive order by the president made clear that the billionaire’s cost-cutting team will have continuing oversight of the Civil Service.
By Theodore Schleifer and Madeleine Ngo, Reporting from Washington, Published Feb. 11, 2025, Updated Feb. 12, 2025
President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing agency officials to draw up plans for “large scale” cuts to the federal work force and further empowered the billionaire Elon Musk and his team to approve which career officials are hired in the future.
The order gives the so-called Department of Government Efficiency vast reach over the shape of the Civil Service as the Trump administration tries to sharply cut the number of employees working for the federal government. It states that, aside from agencies involved in functions like law enforcement and immigration enforcement, executive branch departments will need hiring approval from an official working with Mr. Musk’s team.
Each federal agency, with some exceptions, will be allowed to “hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart” after a hiring freeze is lifted, according to Mr. Trump’s order. New career hires would have to be made in consultation with a “DOGE Team Lead,” the order stated. It also said that agencies should not fill career positions that Mr. Musk’s team deems unnecessary, unless an agency head — not a member of Mr. Musk’s initiative — decides that those positions should be filled.
The “work force optimization initiative” was signed by Mr. Trump shortly before he and Mr. Musk spent roughly 30 minutes defending the drastic overhaul in front of reporters in the Oval Office. Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person, has moved rapidly to force change in Washington, an effort he asserted on Tuesday would benefit the public.
In the first three weeks of the new Trump administration, Mr. Musk’s team has inserted itself into at least 19 agencies, according to a tally by The New York Times, where it has begun identifying programs to cut.
The president’s new order instructed federal agencies to start initiating plans for “large scale” reductions in staffing. In the past few weeks, some agency leaders have already warned about impending cuts and urged federal employees to seriously consider the Trump administration’s offer to resign and be placed on paid administrative leave through the end of September. Although the offer was originally set to expire last week, the resignation program is now on pause until a federal judge in Massachusetts rules on its legality.
The order is the latest move by Mr. Trump to bolster the authority of Mr. Musk’s effort. On Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump signed an order that officially created the Department of Government Efficiency and gave the group the authority to install employees across federal agencies. He also signed another order empowering Mr. Musk’s team to work on a plan to slash the size of the federal work force through “efficiency improvements and attrition.”
Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget whom Mr. Musk pushed to fill that role, said Tuesday’s executive order was the “next step” in changing the work force, insisting it was within Mr. Trump’s authority.
“Again, this is more action and activities that we can do,” Mr. Vought told Fox Business soon after the order was signed. “The president can move forward unilaterally using the laws that are on the books to have reductions in force.”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
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14) In Trump’s Cross Hairs Over Taking Gazans, Egypt and Jordan Try Diversion
The U.S. president has repeatedly asked the two Mideast allies to take in two million Palestinians from Gaza. Both Egypt and Jordan have been trying to offer Mr. Trump help in other ways.
By Vivian Yee and Alissa J. Rubin, Feb. 12, 2025
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid enter Gaza from Egypt on Wednesday. Credit...Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press
Finding themselves in the fickle cross hairs of President Trump, Jordan and Egypt are moving with speed — and uncertain prospects of success — to dissuade, distract and divert him from forcing them to take in Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
For the two Arab governments, who view Mr. Trump’s proposal that they take in two million Palestinians as an existential threat, the strategy appears to be to placate the U.S. president with offers to work together to rebuild Gaza, bring peace to the region and expand humanitarian aid efforts. That could help them buy time, analysts say — perhaps enough for Mr. Trump to discard the idea as too complicated, or to recognize the strategic and security drawbacks of destabilizing two of the closest allies of the United States in the region.
Jordan’s King Abdullah employed a conciliatory tone in his meeting with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday, telling the U.S. president that his country would take in 2,000 Palestinian children with cancer and other illnesses from Gaza. Still, he otherwise gave no ground on the question of resettling more Gazans, and later repeated Jordan’s rejection of the plan in a statement on social media.
Jordan has been treating some cancer patients from Gaza for months already, making the offer more of a token than a real concession. But Mr. Trump called it a “beautiful gesture.”
Other world leaders have found that flattering Mr. Trump tends to help them get their way. King Abdullah seemed to be following their example on Tuesday, heaping praise on the president as “somebody that can take us across the finish line to bring stability, peace and prosperity” to the Middle East.
Even as the king pushed back against Mr. Trump in the post to make clear he was rejecting the mass displacement of Palestinians, he noted that the United States had a key role to play. “Achieving just peace on the basis of the two-state solution is the way to ensure regional stability,” he said in the post. “This requires U.S. leadership.”
Egypt, too, said it wanted to work with Mr. Trump to “achieve a comprehensive and just peace in the region by reaching a just settlement of the Palestinian cause,” according to an Egyptian statement released later Tuesday.
But the statement made no mention of participating in Mr. Trump’s proposal, and reiterated Egypt’s position that peace could be achieved only by giving the Palestinians statehood. Palestinians and many other Arabs have rejected Mr. Trump’s proposed forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza not only as ethnic cleansing, a war crime that flies in the face of international law, but also as the death knell for their long-held dream of a Palestinian state.
Egypt sought instead to serve up an alternative plan for Mr. Trump, saying in the statement that it would “present a comprehensive vision for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip in a manner that ensures the Palestinian people remain in their homeland.” The Palestinian Authority joined in with its own plan for helping Gaza recover from the war on Wednesday.
In recent days, as alarm over the president’s idea has mounted in Cairo, Egyptian officials have emphasized that Egypt stands ready to help rebuild Gaza, with which it shares a vital border crossing, as it did after previous conflicts there.
An Egyptian real estate tycoon, Hisham Talaat Moustafa, who like Mr. Trump has developed a chain of residential properties and hotels, went on an evening news show on Sunday to outline a $20 billion proposal for building 200,000 housing units in Gaza, as if trying to talk to Mr. Trump developer to developer.
But Mr. Moustafa, who is closely linked to the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, said he envisioned reconstructing Gaza without moving any Palestinians out of the strip.
During the Tuesday meeting, King Abdullah also alluded several times to the need for consultations with Egypt and other Arab countries before responding to Mr. Trump’s proposal, mentioning an upcoming meeting in Riyadh with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Egypt has also called for a summit of Arab leaders to discuss the issue in Cairo on Feb. 27.
Despite the pushback from Egypt and Jordan, Mr. Trump seems to be sticking to the core of his out-of-left-field proposal for the United States to “own” Gaza and redevelop it into a “Riviera” for tourism and jobs. During the Tuesday meeting with King Abdullah and his son, Crown Prince Hussein, he said that “we will have Gaza” and “we’re going to take it.”
But he appeared to soften his previous threat to cut funding to Jordan and Egypt, two of the top recipients of U.S. aid, if they did not accept Gaza’s Palestinians, saying, “We’re above that.”
Mr. Trump also suggested that he was looking at a broader group of countries that could receive Gazans. “We have other countries that want to get involved,” he said, and when a journalist asked whether two of those countries could be Albania and Indonesia, he responded, “Yeah, sure.” (The leaders of both countries have dismissed any such possibility.)
Middle East experts say Mr. Trump appears to be ignoring previous U.S. calculations about the importance of stability in Egypt and Jordan, Arab neighbors of Israel who both made peace with Israel years ago and cooperate closely with the United States on security matters.
“The way that he talks about these relationships, it is as if these countries are takers, and that we get very little out of them,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who focuses on Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians.
In fact, many human rights advocates and critics of Egypt have questioned how wise the U.S. investment in Egypt is, arguing that it props up a repressive regime that often goes against U.S. interests. But analysts say the cooperation of Egypt and especially Jordan on regional security has been valuable to the United States.
Egypt, which receives $1.3 billion a year in U.S. military assistance to buy weapons, making it the second-largest recipient of such financing after Israel, has worked with the United States on counterterrorism efforts.
Jordan has been the United States’ gateway to the Middle East for decades, hosting a U.S. military base and a large Central Intelligence Agency station and acting as a diplomatic hub. Like Egypt, the Jordanian monarchy shares the U.S. view of militant Islam as a major threat and has supported the United States in its fight against Al Qaeda and then the Islamic State, among other common enemies.
When Iran targeted Israel with missiles and drones last year, Jordan also helped to shoot some of them down.
Jordan has “been with us lock step,” Mr. Katulis said.
Egypt and Jordan both accepted Palestinian refugees after they were displaced during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of the state of Israel, and Egypt has now taken in at least 100,000 Palestinian medical evacuees and other people who fled Gaza.
But analysts say both countries would rather risk losing U.S. aid than alienating their populations by appearing complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
For Jordan, taking in large numbers of Palestinians forced out of Gaza is unacceptable because it could widen an existing rift between citizens who are of Palestinian descent and those who are not, destabilizing the monarchy, analysts say. More than half of King Abdullah’s 12 million subjects are of Palestinian descent.
Jordan already hosts about 700,000 refugees, including Syrians and Iraqis as well as Palestinians. That largely impoverished population has all but overwhelmed the small country’s limited resources.
Mr. Trump’s proposal also inflames fears that Israel will next drive Palestinians out of the occupied West Bank into Jordan, a long-held ambition of far-right Israelis.
The secretary general of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, alluded to such fears on Wednesday, saying, “Today the focus is on Gaza and tomorrow it will shift to the West Bank, with the objective of emptying historic Palestine of its indigenous people, something that is unacceptable.”
Egypt also sees the possibility of Palestinians resettling in Egypt as a serious security threat. Forcibly displaced Palestinians could launch attacks on Israel from Egyptian soil, officials say, inviting Israeli military retaliation.
Rania Khaled contributed reporting from Cairo.
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15) New Hampshire High School Trans Athletes Take Their Fight to Trump
A lawsuit appears to be the first challenge to the constitutionality of an executive order barring trans athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams.
By Amy Harmon and Juliet Macur, Feb. 12, 2025
Parker Tirrell, third from left, and Iris Turmelle, sixth from left, with their families and attorneys in Concord, N.H., in August 2024. Credit...Holly Ramer/Associated Press
Two transgender public high school students in New Hampshire are challenging President Trump’s executive order that seeks to bar trans girls and women from competing on women’s sports teams, according to documents filed in federal court on Wednesday.
The teenagers asked the court on Wednesday to add Mr. Trump and members of his administration as defendants in a lawsuit the students filed last summer regarding their eligibility to play girls’ sports at school. The state had enacted a law in August barring transgender girls in grades 5 through 12 from participating in girls’ sports, and the two students initially sued their schools and state education officials, asking the court to rule that they could compete on teams that aligned with their gender identity.
Their court filing on Wednesday appears to be the first time that the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s executive order, titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” has been challenged in court.
The order, signed last week, effectively bars the participation of trans athletes on girls’ and women’s teams, directing the Department of Education to investigate schools that do not comply and to withdraw the schools’ federal funding. It is one of several orders in which Mr. Trump has sought to roll back government recognition of transgender Americans.
In the lawsuit, the two teenagers call Mr. Trump’s actions “a broad intention to deny transgender people legal protections and to purge transgender people from society.”
A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in September allowing the two athletes, Parker Tirrell, 16, and Iris Turmelle, 15, to play on girls’ sports teams while their lawsuit was pending. Mr. Trump’s directive puts that ability at new risk, the filing states.
“I played soccer — nothing bad happened.,” Parker, a sophomore at Plymouth Regional High School, said in an interview this week. “Not everyone was happy about it, but it seemed like the people I was playing against weren’t overly concerned.” But when she got home from school last Wednesday, she said, “my mom told me that Trump had signed an executive order banning trans girls from playing sports.”
She added, “The amount of effort he’s going through to stop me from playing sports seems extraordinarily high, for not a very good reason.”
Iris, a freshman at Pembroke Academy, a public high school in Pembroke, N.H., once said of a middle-school program called Girls on the Run that she loved everything about it “except the running,” said her mother, Amy Manzelli. Even so, the teenager said in an interview this week that she wanted to preserve her chance to play any sport she chooses:
“Other girls have that,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I?” She said she hoped to try out for her school’s tennis and track teams.
The teenagers are also challenging another executive order that directs federal agencies to end funding for programs that foster “gender ideology,” which the order defined as the idea that a person’s gender identity, rather than the sex on their original birth certificate, should determine whether they participate in men’s or women’s sports, or use male or female bathrooms, or are called by their chosen pronouns.
Mr. Trump’s two directives, the court filing argues, violate constitutional protections against sex discrimination and conflict with Title IX, the 1972 civil rights statute that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs that receive federal funding.
“Our plaintiffs and many other transgender girls and women across the country are being deprived of opportunities in education and beyond, simply because they’re transgender,” said Chris Erchull, a senior staff attorney with GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, which represents the girls and their families. “It’s unconstitutional and it’s wrong, and we’re standing up against it.”
Like several other challenges to Mr. Trump’s executive orders, the lawsuit also argues that the president exceeded his authority by directing the federal agencies to withhold funds appropriated by Congress.
In states where Democrats control the legislatures, transgender student athletes in elementary and secondary schools typically are able to compete on teams that align with their gender identity, leaving federal agencies with numerous enforcement targets for Mr. Trump’s orders. Mr. Erchull said the publicity surrounding his clients’ case might put their schools high on the list. Last week, the Education Department said it had begun investigating two colleges and a state athletic association that had drawn public attention for allowing transgender athletes to compete on women’s teams.
Some players on one of the opposing teams that Parker’s soccer team faced in the fall refused to play because she is trans, according to Parker’s parents. The game was played with other players participating.
At another game, some parents protested by wearing pink wristbands marked “XX,” to represent the typical chromosomal pattern for females. That incident attracted media coverage and sparked a lawsuit on free-speech grounds after the Bow School District responded by prohibiting such protests.
Mr. Trump’s order states that allowing transgender girls and women to compete in categories designated for female athletes is unfair and “results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls.” Nearly 80 percent of Americans do not believe transgender female athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, according to a recent New York Times and Ipsos poll.
The day after Mr. Trump issued his order concerning trans athletes, the National Collegiate Athletic Association fell into line, announcing a sweeping ban on transgender athletes competing at its member institutions. “President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard,” Charlie Baker, the president of the N.C.A.A., said in a statement.
Mr. Baker told Congress in testimony last year that he was aware of fewer than 10 transgender athletes among the more than 500,000 students who play N.C.A.A. sports. Yet they remain at the center of a heated cultural debate, especially when they win.
In 2022, Lia Thomas, a swimmer, competed on the University of Pennsylvania women’s team after taking testosterone blockers and estrogen, and became the first openly transgender woman to win an N.C.A.A. Division I title. The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it wants the N.C.A.A. to strip her and other trans athletes of their titles.
In temporarily shielding Parker and Iris from enforcement of New Hampshire’s law, U.S. District Court Judge Landya McCafferty found last summer that the state had not demonstrated that concerns about fairness and safety were more than a “hypothesized problem’' in their particular cases. Both Parker and Iris said they knew they were girls at an early age, were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and began taking puberty-suppressing medication before the hormonal changes that, according to the opinion, underpin the divergence in average athletic performance between boys and girls.
“Parker’s soccer team had a winless season last year, and Iris did not make the cut for middle-school softball,’’ wrote the judge, an appointee of President Barack Obama.
The potential consequences for not complying with Mr. Trump’s orders have reverberated through the country. A school district in another part of New Hampshire that once defied the statewide ban on trans girls playing girls’ sports felt that it had no choice but to obey Mr. Trump’s orders, for fear of losing federal funding.
Before Mr. Trump took office, the district, the Kearsarge Regional School District, decided to keep its girls’ sports open to any trans girl who wanted to play on them, despite the state ban, because it wanted to remain in compliance with Title IX. It had one trans girl competing in girls’ sports.
But Mr. Trump’s recent executive orders changed — and upended — everything, John Fortney, the district’s superintendent of schools, said in an interview on Tuesday.
The new administration’s interpretation of Title IX is that in that law, “sex” refers to whether someone is male or female at birth, and not the person’s gender identity. Defining it that way meant that the school district was suddenly out of compliance with Title IX, Mr. Fortney said, compelling the district to bar trans girls from its girls’ teams and change “our internal processes and internal expectations.”
“It’s like speeding,” he said. “You say you’re going to drive the speed limit, and then the speed limit goes from 70 to 55, so you’re going to follow it. You may not like it, but you’re going to follow it.”
Mr. Fortney said he hoped the trans athlete in the district could continue to participate in sports with some level of comfort by joining her school’s track and field team in the spring; that team is coed.
“When you look at how the teenagers learn to handle defeat and victory, and how to work hard for a goal, you know, athletics provides a very concentrated bit of that kind of medicine that I think everybody needs access to,” he said. “You want a kid to have the most complete experience that they can.”
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16) The N.E.A.’s New Gender and Diversity Edicts Worry Arts Groups
As the National Endowment for the Arts adjusts to comply with President Trump’s executive orders, “gender ideology” is out and works that “honor the nation’s rich artistic heritage” are in.
By Michael Paulson, Feb. 12, 2025
The National Endowment for the Arts is changing ts requirements to comply with President Trump’s executive orders. Credit...Graeme Sloan/Sipa via Associated Press
The National Endowment for the Arts is telling arts groups not to use federal funds to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” or “gender ideology” in ways that run afoul of President Trump’s executive orders — causing confusion and concern.
Black Girls Dance, a Chicago-based nonprofit that trains and mentors young dancers, was recently approved for a $10,000 grant to help finance an annual holiday show called “Mary.” Now the small company is wondering if it still qualifies for the money.
It was the company’s first grant from the N.E.A., and Erin Barnett, the nonprofit’s founder and executive director, said that receiving it had been “a step of validation — like ‘We see you and we support the work that you’re doing.’” But she said that if the grant were canceled for running afoul of the new requirements, she would persist. “I serve a God that sits on the highest throne of all, and he’s not going to stop this show,” she said.
It is unclear what the new rules will mean for groups seeking grants, or for those that already have them in the pipeline. Many arts organizations have pledged to support diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and several groups that have received funding in the past have presented works about transgender and nonbinary people.
The new N.E.A. rules require applicants to agree not to operate diversity programs “that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws” and call on grant applicants to pledge not to use federal funds to “promote gender ideology.” They refer to an executive order Mr. Trump signed that declares that the United States recognizes only “two sexes, male and female.”
The N.E.A. did not answer questions about whether organizations that have already been told they would receive grant money would be affected.
“It is a longstanding legal requirement that all recipients of federal funds comply with applicable federal anti-discrimination laws, regulations and executive orders,” the endowment’s spokeswoman, Elizabeth Auclair, said in an email. “The N.E.A. is continuing to review the recent executive orders and related documents to ensure compliance and provide the required reporting.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, he called for the elimination of the arts endowment. (It survived, thanks to bipartisan support in Congress, and has a current budget of roughly $200 million a year.) It is not clear what its outlook is now.
The endowment is currently without a full-time leader because its chair since 2021, Maria Rosario Jackson, left the day of Mr. Trump’s inauguration. It is currently being overseen by Mary Anne Carter, who led the agency during the first Trump administration, and who is now serving with the title of “senior advisor.” Agency observers and grant recipients were generally positive about Ms. Carter, saying that things had run smoothly when she previously led the agency.
Last week, the N.E.A. said that it was eliminating its “Challenge America” program, a small grant program supporting projects for underserved groups and communities, and that its general grant program would give priority to projects that “celebrate and honor the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity” during the lead-up to the 250th anniversary of American independence in July 2026.
Latinitas, which offers educational programming for girls in central Texas, received a $10,000 award under that program last month to go toward a $30,000 project to install mosaics that honor inspiring women from East Austin.
“I emailed the N.E.A. today to check in our status, and the response was rather vague,” said Gabriela Kane Guardia, the organization’s executive director. “We’re very concerned because we were absolutely counting on those funds to make this project possible.”
Many groups are unsure whether they can count on funds they were expecting. Elz Cuya Jones, the executive director of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, a nonprofit that won a special Tony Award in 2020 for its work combating racism, is not sure if the $20,000 grant she was counting on from the endowment will arrive. “The new N.E.A. guidelines are solving for a problem that does not exist,” she said.
Some arts makers are circulating a petition, asking the NEA to drop its new rules.
Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the Civilians, a New York based theater company that has received multiple grants from the endowment, said he did not expect to submit the organization’s next grant application if the compliance rules remained in place.
“To apply for a grant now is to agree to a very big and sweeping set of guidelines that have all sorts of problematic ramifications,” he said.
While the endowment’s grants are not large, they can play a crucial role for small organizations, many of which are still struggling after the coronavirus pandemic.
“Having even a one-month hiccup in funding, or pauses, can be devastating to the threadbare entities out there that are just barely getting by,” said Doug Noonan, a director of the Center for Cultural Affairs at Indiana University.
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17) Trump’s W.H.O. Exit Throws Smallpox Defenses Into Upheaval
Health experts see his retreat from international cooperation as disrupting the safe-keepers of one of the world’s deadliest pathogens.
By William J. Broad, Feb. 12, 2025
In 1999, William J. Broad and two colleagues wrote a comprehensive article on the past, present and future of the smallpox virus.
A colorized transmission electron micrograph of smallpox viruses. Credit...Elena Ryabchikova/Voisin/Science Source
President Trump’s order that the United States exit the World Health Organization could undo programs meant to ensure the safety, security and study of a deadly virus that once took half a billion lives, experts warn. His retreat, they add, could end decades in which the agency directed the management of smallpox virus remnants in an American-held cache.
Health experts say discontinuation of the W.H.O.’s oversight threatens to damage precautions against the virus leaking into the world, and to disrupt research on countermeasures against the lethal disease. They add that it could also raise fears among allies and adversaries that the United States, under a veil of secrecy, might weaponize the smallpox virus.
“I’ve been in that lab,” said Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where the American cache resides. “Imagine a submarine inside a building and the people walking around in spacesuits. It looks like something out of a movie.” To reduce smallpox risks and misperceptions, Dr. Frieden added, “we need to open ourselves up to inspection.”
On Monday, Daniel R. Lucey, a Dartmouth medical professor, posted an article on the blog of the Infectious Diseases Society of America warning that Mr. Trump’s W.H.O. exit could imperil “smallpox virus storage, experiments, reporting and inspections.”
A half century ago, the W.H.O. purged the smallpox virus from human populations after the scourge had killed people for thousands of years. Dr. Frieden called it “one of the greatest accomplishments not just of medical science but global collaboration.”
While the germ was eradicated in people, two repositories were preserved to allow study of the virus should it re-emerge: one in Atlanta, the other in Russia. To curb leaks, both caches are stored in special labs classified as Biosafety Level 4, the highest tier of protection.
In recent years, the W.H.O., based in Geneva, has ruled on the safety and scientific merit of proposed studies of smallpox by both the C.D.C. and its Russian counterpart. It has the authority to grant or refuse permission despite its role being described publicly as advisory. The agency also regularly inspects the smallpox labs for safety lapses.
Health experts warn that Mr. Trump’s exit from international oversight could end Washington’s ability to scrutinize Moscow’s smallpox cache. “If we want to inspect the Russian lab,” Dr. Frieden said, “we need to be part of W.H.O.”
Russia probably hides some smallpox virus for military use, according to a federal intelligence assessment. Health experts also warn that the American exit from the W.H.O. could prompt fears that the United States might weaponize the lethal virus.
In his first term as president, Mr. Trump lashed out at the W.H.O. over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic and, in July 2020, ordered a withdrawal. But six months later, before the separation could be completed, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. reversed Mr. Trump’s decision on his first day in office.
This time around, Mr. Trump came on stronger, issuing an executive order within hours of taking office that gave notice of the U.S. withdrawal. He also told his administration to identify U.S. and global partners that could “assume necessary activities” that the W.H.O. had previously carried out.
A week later, the C.D.C. was ordered to end all collaboration with the W.H.O.
It is not clear if the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. have completely ended their smallpox cooperation. Their replies to email queries seemed contradictory, and the White House did not respond.
Christian Lindmeier, a W.H.O. spokesman, said officials at the agency were still seeking to clarify the implications of Mr. Trump’s order. The agency, he added, “is ready to work with the new U.S. Administration to sustain our vital collaboration.” The next smallpox inspection, Mr. Lindmeier added, is scheduled for May 2026.
The C.D.C. is part of the department of Health and Human Services, whose communications director, Andrew G. Nixon, said only that it was complying with Mr. Trump’s order for the U.S. to withdraw from the W.H.O.
Unlike most viruses, smallpox, known as variola, is highly stable outside its host. It can long retain its power to infect, aiding its spread. Victims develop high fevers, deep rashes and oozing pustules. About a third die. In the 20th century alone, the virus is estimated to have taken more lives than all wars and other epidemics put together.
In 1959, the W.H.O. resolved to eradicate the killer in a blitz of global vaccinations and quarantines. Little was achieved until Washington and Moscow in 1966 proposed a stronger effort. That year alone, the disease killed two million people. By 1977, the W.H.O. recorded its last case, defeating the deadly scourge.
Today, the American W.H.O. exit may raise the risk of the smallpox virus escaping confinement and reinfecting the world, some health experts say. They see that threat as implicit in how past W.H.O. inspections of the C.D.C. smallpox labs made scores of recommendations for safety and security upgrades.
The proposals included better security systems, training, risk assessments, inspections of pressure suits, accident investigations and monitoring of staff competency.
David H. Evans, a virologist at the University of Alberta, has twice inspected the C.D.C. virus area and been a member of the W.H.O.’s smallpox scientific advisory panel.
While withdrawing from the W.H.O. may not increase the risk of a leak, he said, collaboration between the U.S. and the W.H.O. works quite effectively at improving research and lowering suspicions of illicit work.
“It keeps people talking to each other,” Dr. Evans said. “It gets back to the idea of transparency. It gives you some idea of what’s going on.”
Last year, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences described the cooperative smallpox research of the C.D.C. and the W.H.O. as “urgently needed.” Looking beyond vaccines, the panel called for a new generation of antiviral drugs that would better fight smallpox in individuals already infected with the pathogen.
The W.H.O. research has had practical payoffs. Antiviral drugs developed by its smallpox program have been deployed to fight Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, which is spreading quickly in parts of Africa, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In 1996, W.H.O. members agreed on a plan to destroy the two remaining stocks of the smallpox virus. Now, increasingly, it aims to prepare for potential outbreaks rather than permanently extinguishing the virus.
But those heightened levels of defensive planning could be undone by the American withdrawal, health experts warn. They fear more countries may leave the W.H.O., spurring new outbreaks.
Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, noted that Argentina, echoing Mr. Trump, withdrew from the W.H.O. early this month, and that Hungary and Russia have also explored the idea.
“Global health safety is effective only if we have global representation,” Dr. Osterholm said. “W.H.O. will do what it can. But at some point, we’re going to have a real challenge.”
Dr. Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, agreed.
“Health is not a zero-sum game,” he said. “When one country is healthy, it helps not only them, but their neighbors and the world.” He cited the purge of the smallpox virus from human populations as a remarkable case study in the benefits of global teamwork.
“There’s no doubt that W.H.O. could be more effective,” Dr. Frieden added. “But there’s also no doubt that it’s indispensable.”
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18) Trump’s War on D.E.I. Is Really a War on Civil Rights
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 12, 2025
Paola Chapdelaine for The New York Times
The genius of the right-wing crusade against “diversity, equity and inclusion” is that the term is amorphous enough that it can mean many different things to many different people.
To a certain set of well-meaning cultural liberals, D.E.I. refers mainly to H.R. mandates and ineffectual diversity training. If those people work in progressive nonprofits or any other space that attracts young, left-leaning people, D.E.I. might also mean the aggravating use of clumsy acronyms like “BIPOC” or linguistic inventions like “Latinx.”
For people of a more moderate or conservative persuasion, D.E.I. might mean affirmative action and the elevation of unqualified people to sensitive and high-status positions. (Although how one knows they are unqualified is often left unsaid.) It might also mean public adherence to liberal shibboleths about diversity — “virtue signaling” by “woke elites” in academia and the corporate world.
There is also a related (and not altogether incorrect) view from the political left that D.E.I. is just a smoke screen for capital and its servants — a multicultural gloss on the neoliberal agendas of the managerial classes, whether corporate bean counters or university administrators.
The upshot of the many meanings of D.E.I. is that when President Trump announced, at the start of his term, that he wanted to uproot D.E.I. from the federal government, there was some sympathy — and even agreement — from those who are otherwise opposed to the administration and its overall program. If nothing else, effectively ending the battle over D.E.I. might clear the space for a different kind of politics, less focused on diversity and inclusion than more material concerns.
But then we have to remember that D.E.I. also means something to people on the political right, from the reactionaries who lead the White House to the propagandists who carry their message to the masses. For them, D.E.I. is less “white fragility” and silly posters about “white supremacy culture” than it is the mere presence of a woman or nonwhite person or disabled or transgender person in any high-skilled, high-status position. And their alternative isn’t some heretofore unknown standard of merit; it is the reintroduction of something like segregation.
Consider the ways the administration has tried to carry out the president’s executive encyclical against D.E.I., which called for federal agencies to “relentlessly combat private sector discrimination” and “faithfully” advance “the Constitution’s promise of colorblind equality before the law.”
At the National Security Agency, it has meant an effort to purge all N.S.A. websites and internal networks of banned words such as diversity, diverse, inclusive, racism and racial identity. Over at the Department of Defense, led by Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, it has meant the end of official recognition of Black History Month, the disbanding of affinity groups at service academies and a move to curb military outreach to Black professionals in engineering and the sciences. Diversity, Hegseth says, is “not our strength.” At the National Institutes of Health, displays honoring women and scientists of color have been removed, and at the National Science Foundation, program officers have reportedly been directed to reject grant applications that mention anything related to diversity, equity, inclusion or accessibility.
There’s more. In addition to purging the Department of Justice of anything that smacks of D.E.I., Attorney General Pam Bondi has instructed the agency to target private-sector diversity programs for potential “criminal investigation.” A company that wants to increase its proportion of female employees or place more Black Americans in corporate leadership may find itself in the cross hairs of the federal government.
You’ll find the surest evidence of the real meaning of the president’s anti-D.E.I. order in the fact that he also dismantled a decades-old requirement, originally promulgated by President Lyndon Johnson, that federal contractors try to employ more women, Black Americans and, in the years since, other people of color. One imagines that Johnson’s opponents, like the segregationist senators James Eastland and Strom Thurmond, would have been pleased to see his handiwork — and that of a generation of civil rights lawyers — tossed aside with the stroke of a pen.
The segregationist intent of the president’s policy is even more apparent when you turn your attention to some of the people he has chosen to place in his administration. For example, not long after Trump pledged to root out every federal worker involved in diversity efforts, he appointed Darren Beattie to serve as acting under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department. Beattie was previously known for being fired from his job as a Trump speechwriter in 2018 for appearing at a conference attended by white nationalists in 2016.
His views haven’t changed. “Competent white men,” Beattie wrote last October, “must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
“Competent white men must be in charge” is as close to a rallying cry as I can imagine for the Trump administration, although, of course, it strains credulity to say that either Trump or his subordinates count as competent.
The president, for his part, has voiced similar sentiments since taking office. In the wake of a deadly air crash, he blamed diversity efforts in hiring for the accident. He has also, as my newsroom colleague Erica L. Green notes, aligned himself with “those who are brandishing the term D.E.I. as a catchall for discrimination against white people, and using it as a pejorative to attack nonwhite and female leaders as unqualified for their positions.”
The administration’s war on D.E.I. is of a piece with a broader effort to turn the nation’s civil rights laws upside down, taking weapons forged to fight racial subordination and wielding them, instead, against any effort, public or private, to ameliorate racial inequality and end invidious racial discrimination. A modest effort on the part of Black female venture capitalists to support Black female entrepreneurs becomes, to conservative legal activists, unconstitutional discrimination against white men (who continue to receive and manage a vast majority of venture capitalist dollars). And in a perverse inversion of disparate impact, a recent lawsuit against the University of California system seems to treat the presence of Black and Hispanic students as evidence itself of “racial discrimination.”
We are three weeks into President Trump’s second term. He won the election, in the main, on a promise to lower the cost of living for millions of Americans. His mandate, if he has one, is to lower the price of goods, services and housing for most families. But Trump, you may have noticed, isn’t really that focused on the economy, other than finding ways to impose his beloved tariffs without too much damage to the stock market. His economic agenda, such that he has one, has been subordinated to his broad — and radical — racial agenda.
His attack on D.E.I. isn’t about increasing merit or fighting wrongful discrimination; it is about reimposing hierarchies of race and gender (among other categories) onto American society. And following the goals of its intellectual architects — one of whom is infamous for his supremacist views — Trump’s war on D.E.I. is a war on the civil rights era itself, an attempt to turn back the clock on equal rights. Working under the guise of fairness and meritocracy, Trump and his allies want to restore a world where the first and most important qualification for any job of note was whether you were white and male, where merit is a product of your identity and not of your ability. As is true in so many other areas, the right’s accusation that diversity means unfair preferences masks a confession of its own intentions.
There is no question that corporate D.E.I. policies are more about legal compliance than they are about some vision of justice or equality. But one does not have to be a fan of the D.E.I. paradigm to understand the actual stakes of this conflict. To concede that this administration has a point about D.E.I., as some of Trump’s opponents have, is not to concede that they have a point about corporate personnel management but to concede that they have a point about rolling back the latter half of the 20th century and extirpating 60 years of civil rights law.
There is no silver lining here. A world in which the White House and its allies have successfully arrested and reversed the march toward greater inclusion is a world in which they have reinscribed old patterns of privilege and subordination. They will have revitalized the worst hierarchies our society has produced, and those hierarchies will shape how ordinary people view their own position and potential allegiances. We should remember that it was not all that easy to build solidarity under Jim Crow.
Most Americans, even those who voted for Trump to serve a second term, do not want this. The question is whether the silent majority in favor of a more inclusive society will stand up and say so.
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