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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) Hamas Signals Progress Toward Resumed Hostage Releases
The group said that mediators were working “to remove obstacles and close gaps” after the cease-fire deal with Israel hit a roadblock.
By Lara Jakes and Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 13, 2025
Aid deliveries in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Thursday. Credit...Hussam Al-Masri/Reuters
Hamas said on Thursday that it was still committed to upholding the cease-fire deal with Israel, including releasing more hostages this weekend, a sign of diplomatic progress amid widespread concern about the future of the precarious truce with Israel.
Mediators between the two sides were following up “to remove obstacles and close gaps” after “positive” talks with senior officials from Egypt and Qatar, Hamas said in a statement. Along with the United States, Egypt and Qatar have been brokering the cease-fire, which began with a six-week truce in late January.
There was no immediate comment from Israel on Hamas’s latest statement. Hamas has consistently said that resuming the hostage releases would depend on Israel’s upholding its end of the deal to the group’s satisfaction.
Basem Naim, a Hamas spokesman, said he believed that the releases would go ahead on Saturday but declined to clarify Hamas’s statement or to definitively confirm that plan.
In late January, both sides agreed to stop the devastating fighting in Gaza, with Hamas agreeing to release at least 33 hostages in exchange for more than 1,500 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. But over the past few days, officials across the region expressed fear that the truce was at risk amid claims of cease-fire violations between the two sides.
Even if the current roadblock is surmounted, the future of the cease-fire is in question: Israel and Hamas have yet to agree on terms to extend the agreement after the initial six weeks.
Earlier this week, Hamas said that Israel was not upholding its end of the deal, mainly by failing to allow enough tents and other aid into Gaza, and suspended the release of the next few hostages in protest. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, then threatened that unless hostages were released by Saturday afternoon, Israel would resume its campaign “until Hamas is conclusively defeated.”
President Trump added a further complication by demanding that all the remaining hostages should be freed by Saturday or “all hell is going to break out.” That message appeared to contradict the cease-fire deal that Mr. Trump’s own envoys had helped to broker, which stipulates a graduated release of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s chief negotiator, recently led a delegation to Egypt for meetings with senior officials in an attempt to resolve the impasse, the group said on Thursday. The talks focused on allowing in heavy equipment for construction and clearing rubble, tents for the hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans and prefabricated homes, Hamas said, as per the terms laid out by the deal.
Although the United Nations and other aid organizations have reported a major rise in aid overall, Hamas says Israel is allowing in not enough tents and no prefabricated shelters at all.
Omer Dostri, Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, confirmed on Thursday that Israel was not allowing any prefabricated homes or heavy machinery into Gaza. He did not explain the rationale or say whether that might change in the future. Israel has at times barred some “dual use” materials from entering Gaza, saying that they could be exploited by Hamas for military purposes.
Three Israeli officials and two mediators, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said earlier this week that Hamas’s claims about not receiving enough tents were accurate. But COGAT, the Israeli military unit that oversees aid deliveries, said in a written response that Hamas’s accusations were “completely false.”
Despite the standoff, the fragile cease-fire was still holding and some tents and other humanitarian aid have been entering Gaza. The United Nations’ relief agency said in a statement on Wednesday that 801 trucks of humanitarian aid entered Gaza that day alone to “seize every opportunity afforded by the cease-fire to scale up” assistance.
But the emergency coordinator in Gaza for the aid agency Doctors Without Borders warned that humanitarian deliveries were not happening quickly enough and that “people are still lacking basic items.”
“We are still not seeing the massive scale-up of humanitarian aid needed in northern Gaza,” the emergency coordinator, Caroline Seguin, wrote in a dispatch from the territory that the agency posted online on Wednesday.
Mr. Trump’s recent interventions in the Middle East have reverberated around the region. Over the past week, he has repeatedly said that the United States should take over Gaza, turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” and not allow displaced Palestinians to return to the territory once it has been rebuilt.
Palestinians, other Arabs and many experts in the field have rejected Mr. Trump’s proposal as ethnic cleansing and a war crime, and any such move to empty Gaza would most likely preclude any future chance of a Palestinian state.
Hamas on Thursday called for mass street demonstrations across the Middle East and in Muslim communities elsewhere to protest any plans to force Palestinians from Gaza.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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2) After Abortion Bans, Infant Mortality and Births Increased, Research Finds
The findings showed the highest mortality occurred among infants who were Black, lived in Southern states or had fetal birth defects.
By Pam Belluck, Feb. 13, 2025
Anti-abortion activists rally in front of the Supreme Court in 2022. Credit...Shawn Thew/EPA, via Shutterstock
Infant mortality increased along with births in most states with abortion bans in the first 18 months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to new research.
The findings, in two studies published Thursday in the journal JAMA, also suggest that abortion bans can have the most significant effects on people who are struggling economically or who are in other types of challenging circumstances, health policy experts said.
“The groups that are most likely to have children as a result of abortion bans are also individuals who are most likely, for a number of different reasons, to have higher rates of infant mortality,” said Alyssa Bilinski, a professor of health policy at Brown University, who was not involved in the research.
Overall, infant mortality was 6 percent higher than expected in states that implemented abortion bans, said Alison Gemmill, one of the researchers, who is a demographer and perinatal epidemiologist in the department of population, family and reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That number reflected increases in nine states, decreases in four and no change in one.
Dr. Gemmill said that among non-Hispanic Black infants, mortality was 11 percent higher after abortion bans were implemented than would have been expected. Also, there were more babies born with congenital birth defects, situations in which women have been able to terminate their pregnancies if not for abortion bans.
Overall, the researchers found that in the states that implemented near-total abortion bans or bans after six weeks’ gestation during that period, there were 478 more deaths of babies in their first year of life after the bans were implemented than would have been expected based on previous years’ data.
Birthrate increases were higher among communities with socioeconomic disadvantages and in states that have the worst maternal and child health outcomes.
“What happens when you ban abortion is that you create enormous inequality in access to abortion,” said Caitlin Myers of Middlebury College, who studies similar abortion data but was not involved in the new research.
The studies evaluated data from birth and death certificates and census records for all 50 states from January 2012 through December 2023. That time frame allowed researchers to compare trends in births and infant mortality in the years before the Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion in June 2022 with data in the 18 months afterward.
At the time, 14 states had implemented near-total abortion bans or bans after six weeks’ gestation during that period. Now 16 have.
While national data has shown that, because of factors like telemedicine and out-of-state travel, overall abortion rates have actually increased since the Supreme Court’s ruling, that does not mean that everyone who needed or sought an abortion could obtain one, Dr. Myers said.
She said the research showed that two dynamics were behind the increase in infant mortality. One aspect is that when women are not allowed to end pregnancies of fetuses with congenital anomalies, the babies often die within days or weeks after birth.
The other aspect is that women who cannot obtain abortions by traveling to other states or by ordering pills by mail are “more likely to be poor, more likely to be women of color, and those populations have higher rates of maternal morbidity and mortality, infant complications, infant mortality,” Dr. Myers said.
Much of the overall increase was driven by data from Texas, said Suzanne Bell, a co-author of the studies and a professor in the same department at Johns Hopkins as Dr. Gemmill. Dr. Bell said all but 94 of the additional 478 infant deaths were in Texas, which has a much larger population than any of the other states with bans.
Infant mortality in Texas was 9.4 percent higher after abortion bans were implemented than would have been expected, the research found. In the eight other states with bans that showed increases, that rate ranged from a 1.3 percent increase in Mississippi to a 8.6 percent increase in Kentucky.
The researchers attributed the dominant influence of Texas on the data partly to the fact that in September 2021, about nine months before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, Texas implemented a strict ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Another factor, Dr. Bell said, was that before that time, a relatively high proportion of Texas women seeking abortions were able to obtain them from health care providers there, but after the bans, clinics and other abortion services closed, forcing women to travel long distances across that sprawling state.
In many of the other states, Dr. Bell said, there were already very few abortion providers before the bans, so women “were already traveling out of state or were already unable to obtain abortion.”
Five states with bans did not show higher infant mortality than expected. In Louisiana, the rate did not change. In Idaho, Missouri, West Virginia and Wisconsin, the rate decreased. The researchers said that was most likely because neighboring states, including Illinois, Washington State and Maryland, were providing expanded access to abortion.
In addition, they said, the demographics and relatively low socioeconomic status of residents in most of the Southern states contributed to higher infant mortality and higher birthrates after abortion bans were imposed.
“There are just very longstanding disparities in these outcomes that are shaped by state policies,” Dr. Gemmill said.
Abortion opponents said they had a different interpretation of the data.
“All of these ‘excess’ children who were born would have been killed in induced abortions,” said Dr. Donna Harrison, who is director of research at American Association of Pro-Life Obstetrician and Gynecologists. “This means that anyone lamenting the results of this study isn’t really concerned that these babies died; rather, they wish they would have been killed earlier: in the womb.”
The analysis of birth data found that in the states with abortion bans, the rate of births per 1,000 women of reproductive age increased by 1.7 percent more than would be expected from previous years’ data.
“It might seem like a 1.7 percent change in the fertility rate isn’t a big deal, but it’s actually a very big deal,” Dr. Gemmill said. She said that demographers considered such an increase very significant and noted that it was higher than the 1.4 percent increase in birthrates related to the Covid pandemic.
In states with abortion bans, that increase translated to 22,180 more births than expected, the researchers said.
Dr. Bilinski, who wrote an editorial accompanying the studies, said that the findings presented an opportunity to galvanize efforts to improve support systems and funding for pregnant women and infants — regardless of one’s views on abortion.
“These papers are not going to resolve disagreements about abortion in this country,” she said. “People are going to look at these papers, and particularly the results about birthrates, and I think have very different reactions.”
But nobody is in favor of infants dying. “We should want to prevent infant mortality, and in many cases infant mortality is preventable,” she said. She added, “If we are in a world where more people who perhaps didn’t plan to and didn’t feel prepared to become parents are becoming parents, we should think about what it means to be supporting those families in a real, intangible way.”
Dr. Bilinski said the study results underscored the need for policies and programs like Medicaid, the child tax credit, parental leave and affordable child care.
“I would hope that as a country, looking at these results,” she said, “we can all kind of agree that those children and families should have an opportunity to thrive.”
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3) Live Updates: In Speech to Europeans, Vance Signals Support for Far-Right Parties
Vice President JD Vance scolded an audience in Munich, saying Europe was failing to uphold democratic values. He said nothing about President Trump’s talks with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, which have stirred anxiety on the continent.
By Jim Tankersley, Ivan Nechepurenko, Lynsey Chutel and Qasim Nauman, February 14, 2025
Vice President JD Vance speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Friday. Credit...Leah Millis/Reuters
As an anxious Europe sought clarity on President Trump’s approach to Russia and Ukraine, Vice President JD Vance instead used a speech in Munich on Friday to signal support for far-right parties, including Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which Moscow has backed through misinformation campaigns.
Addressing European leaders at the Munich Security Conference, Mr. Vance scolded them for not sufficiently upholding democratic values — an accusation many of them have leveled at the Trump administration — and offered what amounted to White House political backing for Europe’s far right. He urged the Europeans to end their opposition to anti-immigration parties such as the AfD, parts of which have been classified as extremist by German intelligence, and said the effort to marginalize them and their radical ideas amounted to antidemocratic action.
Mr. Vance called the parties a legitimate expression of the will of voters angered by high levels of migration over the last decade. His words would appear to play into the hands of Russia, which researchers say is behind a torrent of disinformation that has flooded Germany ahead of a federal election this month.
Much of that campaign appears aimed at undermining trust in mainstream parties and bolstering the AfD. Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s most high-profile adviser, has also supported AfD with posts on X, aligning with Russia’s strategic objective to destabilize Western democracies and support for Ukraine.
Mr. Vance did not mention Ukraine in his speech, despite the high tension in Europe over President Trump’s approach to ending the war, and as an explosion at the former nuclear plant at Chernobyl on Friday illustrated the continued dangers of the conflict.
Mr. Vance earlier met with European leaders who have expressed worries about Mr. Trump’s confrontational attitude toward trans-Atlantic allies, including his demand that they spend more on defense. Those fears have multiplied since Mr. Trump’s phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia earlier this week, when he demonstrated an apparent willingness to offer concessions that Ukraine considers unacceptable, including giving up some of its territory.
Here’s what else to know:
· Chernobyl blast: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said a Russian drone had struck a building at the Chernobyl plant north of Kyiv that sits over its damaged reactor and prevents radiation leaks, and said it was a sign that the Kremlin was not serious about reaching a peace agreement. The Kremlin denied involvement in the blast. The International Atomic Energy Agency said radiation levels outside remained normal.
· U.S. and Europe: After European allies and Mr. Zelensky pushed back against Mr. Trump’s outreach to Mr. Putin — insisting that Ukraine be included in any talks to end the war — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday that the Russian and Ukrainian leaders would be at the table with Mr. Trump, who would lead negotiations.
· Ukraine’s NATO bid: Mr. Hegseth reiterated that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders was “unlikely” in any peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia, and that Ukraine joining NATO was not likely to be part of such a deal. Mr. Zelensky, in a town hall discussion with four U.S. senators, said he had never counted on U.S. support for Ukraine entering the alliance, even under previous administrations. “To be very honest, they never saw us in NATO, they just spoke about it,” he said.
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4) Russian Drone Damages Radiation Shield at Chernobyl, Ukraine Says
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called the damage “significant” but said there were no signs of radiation leaks. A Kremlin spokesman denied that Russia had carried out the strike.
By Kim Barker, Andrew E. Kramer and Qasim Nauman, Kim Barker reported from Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb. 14, 2025
A photograph released by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Friday showed an impact on the roof of the shelter over Reactor No. 4. Credit...International Atomic Energy Agency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Russia’s military used a drone with a high-explosive warhead to hit the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine overnight, damaging the protective shelter that prevents radiation leaks, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Friday.
In a post on social media, Mr. Zelensky called the damage “significant” but said that there were no signs of increased radiation at the plant, the site of the worst nuclear accident in history. Denys Shmyhal, the Ukrainian prime minister, said Friday morning that emergency crews had extinguished a fire at the site. A Kremlin spokesman denied that Russia had attacked the plant.
The structure that was damaged was designed to seal in vast quantities of radioactive isotopes from the fire and meltdown in 1986 at Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4, and was intended to last generations.
The strike comes as pressure grows on Ukraine and Russia to sit down at the bargaining table three years after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion. It also comes as world leaders are gathered in Munich for an annual security conference where the war in Ukraine — and recent statements by President Trump and his team indicating that they want to pursue a quick peace deal — will probably dominate conversations.
Many attending the Munich conference will remember the radioactive clouds that spread over parts of Europe after the accident at Chernobyl, which happened when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. The accident was initially covered up by the Soviet authorities.
“Now the atmosphere is such that everyone is very angry about this news here in Munich,” Andriy Yermak, head of the presidential office in Ukraine, posted on social media. “Not ‘concerned,’ as is often the case, but really angry.”
Mr. Yermak noted that the whole world had helped the Kremlin rebuild after Chernobyl. “Then the whole world invested in the shelter, and today these Russian idiots have launched a drone at it,” he added.
The Kremlin denied that Russia’s military had struck the plant. Its spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said, “The Russian military does not do this.”
“Most likely, we are talking about provocation and fraud,” he added.
The structure at Chernobyl that was hit on Friday is a huge arching shelter covering what remains of the crippled reactor. The meltdown spewed radiation into the atmosphere and contaminated an 18-mile zone around the plant that residents were forced to leave.
The protective structure, which resembles an aircraft hangar, was completed in 2016. It covers another structure known as the sarcophagus that was built immediately after the disaster.
The exploding drone breached the outer shield but did not damage the older, interior containment structure, Leontiy Derkach, a radiological engineer at the site, said in a telephone interview.
The explosion sprayed shrapnel into the space between the two structures, damaging both, he said, but did not spread radioactive materials. Emergency crews responded at about 3 a.m., he said, as the fire still burned.
The first people to approach the site were workers with radiation meters, to ascertain if radiation was leaking, he said. “We are not kamikazes to immediately go into the danger zone,” he said.
Air samples determined no radiation was leaking, Mr. Derkach said. Ukrainian military chemists and radiation specialists are still working at the site to gain a fuller picture of the damage. By around noon, he said, crews had not yet entered the outer containment structure for a closer view.
The drone, he said, had hit about 60 yards from where protective plates covered highly radioactive debris from the 1986 accident. Had it hit at that location, he said, the exploding drone could have spread radiation at least inside the outer containment structure.
Emergency crews, Mr. Derkach said, were assessing how to repair the hole. “The Russians caused us great damage,” he said. “The whole world built this shelter and the Russians destroyed it in one second.”
Greenpeace, the conservation group, issued a statement on the strike on the Chernobyl plant, saying it was “a further escalation of the threat to Ukraine’s nuclear power plants and must be condemned and punished.”
Chernobyl was among the first locations targeted in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as the Russian army captured and occupied the decommissioned plant and used the site as a base for attacks on Kyiv, to the south.
Radiation levels rose for several days, most likely from columns of heavy weaponry stirring dust. During the monthlong occupation of the site, Russian soldiers dug trenches in irradiated soil, and electrical power to a cooling pool for nuclear waste was briefly cut, raising alarms.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said that its staff members at the site of the former nuclear plant had heard the explosion overnight.
The strike on Chernobyl, about two hours north of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the recent increase in military activity around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in a Russian-occupied zone “underline persistent nuclear safety risks,” said Rafael Grossi, the agency’s director general.
Ivan Nechepurenko and Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.
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5) With Fighting Stilled, Gazans Face New Trauma: Searching for Their Dead
Thousands of bodies may be unearthed from Gaza’s ruins, the authorities say. Families with missing loved ones face fresh horrors as they search the rubble.
By Erika Solomon, Aaron Boxerman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Photographs by Saher Alghorra, Feb. 14, 2025
Erika Solomon reported from Berlin, Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel.
After 15 months of war, Hani al-Dibs, a high-school teacher, thought his greatest wish was to see the bombardment of Gaza come to an end. But the long-awaited cease-fire has brought only bitterness and dread.
Mr. al-Dibs is one of countless Gazans burdened with an agonizing duty: trying to recover the remains of loved ones trapped beneath the swathes of rubble left by Israel’s war against Hamas.
Some families have returned home to find corpses of loved ones so decomposed, they cannot tell them apart. Others cannot even enter the wreckage to dig, so strong is the stench of human decay. And some have searched and searched, only to find nothing at all.
As they prepared to return to their hometown, Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, Mr. al-Dibs’s two surviving children kept asking him whether their mother and little brothers might somehow have survived the blast that had trapped their bodies for three months beneath the rubble of the family home.
“They’d ask: What if they were still sleeping after the explosion, and climbed out later? What if, later on, the Israelis heard them screaming, and got them out?” he said in an interview. “Their questions torment me.”
Gazan health authorities have tallied nearly 48,000 among the dead, without distinguishing between civilians and combatants.
Beyond that is an untold toll: those whose bodies have yet to be found.
Families have reported 9,000 people as missing and presumed dead under rubble. Most of those have yet to be unearthed from Gaza’s ruins, health officials said. Several thousand of these are still not counted among the dead, as the authorities investigate the backlog of requests.
In mid-October, amid heavy clashes with Hamas, Mr. al-Dibs said Israeli forces blew up the building that housed three generations of the Dibs family.
Desperate to seek medical help for family members dug out from the rubble, Mr. al-Dibs was forced into a terrible choice: He had to leave behind his wife, his two youngest children, his mother, his sisters and his nieces — 14 loved ones in all — beneath the ruins. As the Dibs family survivors fled south to safety, he vowed to return for their bodies. It was a pledge that took months to fulfill.
For weeks after he fled, Mr. al-Dibs filed repeated requests to Israel to reach the site, using a process the U.N. set up to try to coordinate with Israel to allow Gazan rescuers access to blast sites. Israel denied all of the Dibs family’s requests, the U.N. said.
COGAT, the Israeli military body that handles coordination with humanitarian organizations in Gaza, did not respond to a written request for comment.
Nearly three months later, as the cease-fire began, Mr. al-Dibs and his children finally set off home on foot, picking their way over mounds of rubble and debris.
What they found was worse than they had imagined. Bombings had leveled buildings, scattering piles of rocks on top of his family’s collapsed home.
Relatives arrived, eager to help. But with Israel’s punishing siege still blocking new equipment from entering the enclave, no one had drills or other power tools to break through the rubble.
“We used what we could find: shovels, picks and our bare hands,” he said.
After hours of digging, they finally reached the flattened floor where his family had lived.
Mr. al-Dibs found parts of a skeleton that he believed belonged to his son Hasib, who was 8. But he could find nothing of his wife and 6-year-old Habib — only a few charred fragments of bone that crumbled as he tried to grasp them between his fingers.
An Al Jazeera television segment filming retrieval efforts in the neighborhood caught on camera Mr. al-Dib’s realization that he would never find their bodies. Trembling with fury, he shook out some white plastic body bags.
“I brought big shrouds! And little shrouds! So I could put their bodies inside! But I found their bodies reduced to ashes!” he screamed.
Then, as his 12-year-old daughter Fatima, in a bright yellow jacket, ran up to the ruins, sobbing and calling out the names of her younger brothers, Mr. al-Dibs gently pulled her away: “Oh Habib! Oh Hasib! Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”
“They were deprived of a last goodbye,” Mr. al-Dibs said.
The family has since buried Hasib’s remains, and now his daughter has new questions.
“She keeps asking, why we can’t have graves for her mother and Habib? Where will she go sit and confide in her mother, without a grave?”
Those who find their loved ones’ bodies face other psychological torments.
Ahmad Shbat, 25, found some of his relatives’ bodies in the northern town of Beit Hanoun completely intact, leaving him agonizing over the question of whether they had died, not from the bombing, but from prolonged suffering as they awaited a rescue that never came.
“The feeling of helplessness,” he said, “is overwhelming.”
Since the cease-fire, medical workers have been called to retrieve dozens of unidentified bodies, said Saleh al-Homs, deputy director of the European Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis.
They write the location and any identifying details on the body bags, and place inside any belongings they find, he said, then take them to the closest hospital morgue and post descriptions of their findings on social media.
Gaza’s emergency rescue services, the Civil Defense, have pleaded with residents not to attempt retrievals on their own, warning of the potential for bombs or unexploded ordnance beneath the wreckage. It says it cannot conduct major excavation efforts until heavy equipment, such as diggers, are allowed into Gaza— and which Israel says it will not permit.
But few Gazans, like Ramy Nasr, a trader from Jabaliya, have any intention of waiting on anyone for help.
Mr. Nasr, whose family tragedy was recounted in a report by The New York Times last year, returned to the site of the explosion last October that brought down the building where his siblings and their families had been sheltering.
He paid $500 to construction workers to drill a tunnel into the building to retrieve them. The bodies he found were so decomposed, he said, it was hard to tell them apart.
Eventually he was able to sort them into two piles.
The remains of what he believed to be his brother Ammar Adel Nasr, his wife, Imtiyaz, and their two daughters went into one grave. His brother Aref and sister Ola went into another.
Like so many graveyards in Gaza, he said, his family’s graveyard is now so crammed with new bodies, it has become difficult to secure plots.
“Before the war, every person was put into their own grave,” he said. “These days, there isn’t enough room — or time.”
Nader Ibrahim contributed reporting.
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6) Louisiana Health Department Says It Will Stop Promoting ‘Mass Vaccination’
“Vaccines should be treated with nuance, recognizing differences between seasonal vaccines and childhood immunizations,” Dr. Ralph L. Abraham, the state’s surgeon general, wrote in a memo.
By Tim Balk, Published Feb. 13, 2025, Updated Feb. 14, 2025
Dr. Ralph L. Abraham, the Louisiana surgeon general, wrote that health officials should meet “people where they are.” Credit...Melinda Deslatte/Associated Press
Louisiana’s top health official said in an internal memo to the state’s Health Department on Thursday that it would no longer use media campaigns or health fairs to promote vaccination against preventable illnesses.
The official, Dr. Ralph L. Abraham, Louisiana’s surgeon general, wrote in the memo that the state would “encourage each patient to discuss the risks and benefits of vaccination with their provider” but would “no longer promote mass vaccination.”
The letter came on a day when the U.S. Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has raised questions about vaccines, as the new U.S. health secretary. But it was not clear if the memo had come in response to the change in federal leadership.
“Vaccines should be treated with nuance, recognizing differences between seasonal vaccines and childhood immunizations, which are an important part of providing immunity to our children,” wrote Dr. Abraham, a former Republican congressman.
A spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Health did not immediately respond on Thursday night to questions about the scope of the directive and how it might affect the distribution of vaccines.
The Health Department in New Orleans, Louisiana’s largest city, quickly said that it would not follow the state’s lead.
“We will continue to strongly promote childhood and seasonal vaccination, and expand our efforts locally to fill any gaps left by the state’s new direction,” Dr. Jennifer Avegno, the director of the New Orleans Health Department, said in an email.
The city’s Health Department is the only one in the state that operates independently from the Louisiana Department of Health.
In his memo, Dr. Abraham said that the state Health Department would also stop promoting vaccinations through “partnerships” and “parish health units.”
He wrote that state health officials should not instruct “individuals to receive any and all vaccines” but instead should provide data about the reduced health risks associated with receiving vaccinations.
“For many illnesses, vaccines are one tool in the toolbox of ways to combat severe illness,” Dr. Abraham wrote, adding that state health officials should focus on “meeting people where they are.”
During the Covid pandemic, Louisiana had among the nation’s lowest vaccination rates, and health care workers there struggled to combat misinformation about the safety of coronavirus immunizations.
On Thursday, Dr. Abraham also issued a pointed public statement with his deputy surgeon general, Wyche T. Coleman, criticizing how state and federal health authorities had responded to the pandemic.
Dr. Abraham and Dr. Coleman wrote that the implementation of vaccine mandates had been “an offense against personal autonomy that will take years to overcome.”
In June, Dr. Abraham was appointed as Louisiana’s surgeon general by the state’s governor, Jeff Landry, a Republican. Last year, Mr. Landry replaced John Bel Edwards, the Democratic governor who led Louisiana through the pandemic. Mr. Edwards fought state lawmakers and Mr. Landry — then the state’s attorney general — to implement vaccinate mandates.
Dr. Abraham did not mention Covid in his memo on vaccination, which was provided by Dr. Pete Croughan, the department’s deputy secretary.
The Times-Picayune of New Orleans previously reported on the memo.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Thursday night.
Louisiana is experiencing a surge in flu this winter.
Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.
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7) Why Would We Undermine the Marvel of American Science?
By Harold Varmus, Feb. 14, 2025
Dr. Varmus is a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine. He shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in medicine for the discovery of cancer genes and was the director of the National Institutes of Health in the 1990s.
Fortunate Joaquin
I’ve spent over five decades as a scientist in academia and the federal government, including as director of the National Institutes of Health. Never before have I seen my profession so politicized as it is now under the Trump administration.
Historically, Americans of all political persuasions have respected science and celebrated its breakthroughs. In my field, these range from discovering the fundamental mechanisms of cancer to the development of drugs that improve and extend people’s lives.
And yet, for baffling reasons, the executive branch is now waging war on America’s scientific enterprise. This assault includes nominating leaders hostile to science and unqualified for their roles; issuing a barrage of executive orders that disrupt research by restricting meetings, publications, travel and grant making; censoring ideas and even certain words from scientific discourse; and trying to withhold billions of dollars from universities and other research institutions that help pay the costs of research.
Since 1945, when President Franklin Roosevelt’s science adviser, Vannevar Bush, outlined a blueprint for national research, government agencies have funded basic science conducted at universities, research institutions and government laboratories. Companies then turn their results into products that drive economic growth and improve our lives. In this way, the United States has come to lead the world in nearly all fields of science and technology. The rewards have been evident in virtually every aspect of human life, including medicine, agriculture, national defense and manufacturing.
This process has never been free of disagreement. Interested parties have argued over many things: How much funding should each federal science agency receive from Congress? How should the agencies spend that money? How should grant applications be evaluated? Who owns the products of research? What kinds of research should be exempted from federal support?
These questions are routine, and their answers have shifted across administrations. But one thing has remained constant: Regardless of their personal views on contentious topics, members of the executive and legislative branches have long seen themselves as caretakers of a precious commodity — the nation’s scientific and technological communities.
Today is very different. Scientists working within the federal government or at federally funded research institutions are wondering how their work can possibly continue.
Several of the people nominated to lead federal health and science agencies are hostile to the institutions and people they are meant to serve. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the country’s most notorious vaccine critics, is now the health secretary — despite his history of spreading misinformation, his disparagement of the Department of Health and Human Services staff and his bizarre and immature behavior.
Dr. Dave Weldon, a former congressman tapped to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has pushed the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a health economist nominated to direct the N.I.H., the world’s largest supporter of medical research, seems to harbor grievances against critics of his ideas to forgo certain public health measures to curb Covid-19. He is reportedly considering an outlandish plan that would make institutions accused of stifling “academic freedom” less likely to receive N.I.H. funding.
Such nominations seem unsuitable and yet remain consistent with the Trump administration’s other actions to kneecap America’s science and health security. President Trump is withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization and is dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development. Immigration policies are making America an unattractive destination for talented foreign students who have long contributed to our success in science and technology.
Efforts made last week to deprive universities and other research institutions of billions of N.I.H. dollars needed to support scientific infrastructure have been at least temporarily blocked in the courts. But they reveal the extent to which the new administration is willing to go to disable our scientific enterprise.
This is a time to reflect on the marvels of science, in which America has played a leading role. The wonder of unveiling the genetic blueprint of life. The painstaking brilliance behind deciphering how cells respond to their environment and infectious invaders. If the attacks on our scientists and their institutions are allowed to continue, our envisioned future of longer, healthier lives will happen more slowly, in other countries, or not at all.
Perhaps what’s most disheartening is what feels like the absence of widespread opposition to this unraveling. Thankfully, in a few situations, judges have stepped in, but there have not been the kinds of public demonstrations in support of science that occurred, with less provocation, in Mr. Trump’s first term. Industries reliant on new scientific discoveries to maintain their global market share have largely remained quiet. Republican members of Congress, even those who have typically supported federally financed science, have been subservient to party directives.
Preventing this destruction will require at least two actions. Americans who value the spirit of discovery — and eagerly await new ways to confront disease, strengthen our economy and improve the quality of human life — need to issue a strong outcry. And legislators must exercise their constitutional responsibilities to oppose unqualified candidates for important federal positions, constrain damaging actions by the executive branch and give science agencies the resources needed to do their jobs. This is not a fight that our country can afford to lose.
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8) Trump Will Withhold Money From Schools That Require Covid Vaccines
An estimated 15 colleges still required Covid vaccines for students as of late last year. No states require K-12 students to get the shots.
By Benjamin Mueller, Feb. 14, 2025
The executive order signed by President Trump on Friday largely took aim at vaccine mandates implemented in 2021, shortly after Covid shots became available. Credit...Kevin Mohatt for The New York Times
President Trump ordered on Friday that federal funding be withheld from schools and universities that require students to be vaccinated against Covid, White House officials said, another step in the administration’s campaign against coronavirus vaccine requirements.
It was not clear how widely impactful the order would be. No states require K-12 students to be vaccinated against Covid. Only 15 colleges still required Covid vaccines for students as of late last year, according to No College Mandates, an advocacy group.
Riding the same wave of anti-vaccine sentiment, 21 states had already moved to outlaw student Covid vaccine mandates, the National Academy for State Health Policy, a nonpartisan research group, has said. And Republican elected officials across the country have pursued a tide of anti-vaccine measures, including a proposed ban in Montana on administering mRNA vaccines, which include some Covid shots, and a ban on a local health department in Idaho offering any Covid vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that monitoring has shown that Covid vaccines are safe for children.
Younger people are much less likely to be severely sickened by the coronavirus, but doctors have said that the virus has still harmed many children.
For Mr. Trump, whose first administration accelerated the development and rollout of Covid shots, saving some 140,000 lives in their early months of availability, the latest executive order was a turn toward reining in efforts to promote the vaccines.
Shortly after returning to office last month, Mr. Trump also said he would reinstate more than 8,000 troops who had been dismissed for refusing the Covid vaccine.
The executive order on Friday largely took aim at mandates implemented in 2021, shortly after Covid vaccines became available. Some local school districts, especially in more liberal regions, required the shots for students participating in sports or other extracurricular activities, or for adult visitors to school buildings, including parents.
School-based mandates tend to raise vaccination rates among children, researchers have found. Those vaccinations, in turn, can protect students who might be vulnerable to more serious illness and dampen circulation of the virus, potentially sparing parents or grandparents from being exposed.
But even in more liberal areas, school mandates won only modest support. Some researchers argued they were counterproductive, polarizing communities and damaging trust in scientific institutions. As the pandemic progressed, resistance to mandates mounted. Most of the policies were short-lived.
Covid vaccine mandates at colleges also improved vaccination rates, researchers have found, with health benefits that extended to surrounding communities. In counties whose colleges all mandated vaccines, one study found, fewer residents died from Covid.
Few teachers and school staff members are working under Covid vaccine mandates, either. No state requires them, and the nation’s two largest school districts, New York City and Los Angeles, both lifted teacher Covid vaccine requirements in 2023.
The order applies only to Covid vaccines, leaving untouched state requirements that school children be vaccinated against measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, whooping cough and chickenpox. States excuse children who, for medical reasons, cannot receive vaccines, and many also allow exemptions for religious or other reasons.
At least some medical schools require Covid shots for students. It was not immediately clear if those rules would be affected by the new order.
Dana Goldstein and Tyler Pager contributed reporting.
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9) German Chancellor Rebukes Vance for Supporting Party That Downplays Nazis
At the Munich Security Conference, Olaf Scholz accused the U.S. vice president of unacceptable interference in Germany’s coming elections.
By Jim Tankersley and Andrew E. Kramer, Feb. 15, 2025
Jim Tankersley reported from Munich, and Andrew E. Kramer from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany at the Munich Security Conference, on Saturday. Credit...Matthias Schrader/Associated Press
Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany on Saturday accused Vice President JD Vance of unacceptably interfering in his country’s imminent elections on behalf of a party that has played down the atrocities committed by the Nazis 80 years ago.
A day after Mr. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference by telling German leaders to drop their so-called firewall and allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to enter their federal government, Mr. Scholz accused Mr. Vance of effectively violating a commitment to never again allow Germany to be led by fascists who could repeat the horrors of the Holocaust.
“A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Mr. Scholz said at the conference on Saturday morning, in an address opening the gathering’s second day.
Mr. Scholz said the AfD had trivialized Nazi atrocities like the concentration camp at Dachau, which Mr. Vance visited on Friday. The chancellor said Germany “would not accept” suggestions from outsiders about how to run its democracy — or directives to work with such a party.
“That is not done, certainly not among friends and allies,” Mr. Scholz said. “Where our democracy goes from here is for us to decide.”
Attendees at Mr. Vance’s speech had been expecting to hear details of the Trump administration’s plans for Ukraine peace talks and NATO defense policies. On Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine himself put the focus on the Ukraine war in his remarks, starkly laying out the threat from Russia’s battle-hardened military and making an impassioned appeal for Europeans to take their security into their own hands, including by forming an “Army of Europe” that would supplement U.S. power on the continent.
His speech drew standing ovations, in contrast to Mr. Vance’s speech the day before.
Mr. Scholz’s comments underscored a growing unease among Europe’s leaders about their relationship with the United States, and their own domestic politics. They came as leaders scrambled at the summit to formulate a response to President Trump’s sudden shift in Ukraine policy — and the possibility that he could cut the continent out of negotiations.
Just a few days before Mr. Vance’s remarks, Mr. Trump threatened to impose new tariffs on virtually every country the United States trades with. Then he spoke of negotiating an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine directly with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, leaving Europeans, including Ukraine, wondering if they would be included. Poland’s foreign minister said at the summit that President Emmanuel Macron of France had called an emergency meeting of European leaders to discuss Ukraine on Sunday.
At the same time, far-right parties across Europe have gained ground by tapping into unease over immigration, which also helped propel Mr. Trump back to power in the United States. Mr. Vance’s comments suggested that a new kind of American alliance with Europe was forming, one that bypasses the official leadership in favor of movements like Germany’s AfD and France’s National Rally.
Saturday’s sessions of the security conference were dominated by reactions, predominantly negative, to Mr. Vance’s speech — and Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Mr. Scholz was joined in his criticism by Friedrich Merz, his rival as the chancellor candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats, who polls suggest is the favorite to be Germany’s next leader.
Mr. Vance spent much of his speech on Friday scolding Europeans for what he suggested were Soviet-style restrictions on free speech across the continent. On Saturday, Mr. Merz defended Germany’s laws that prohibit particular forms of speech, including hate speech and banned Nazi slogans, including on social media.
He also suggested that Mr. Trump’s administration was suppressing speech in the United States, after it moved on Friday to kick The Associated Press out of reporting pools and off Mr. Trump’s plane because the news agency refuses to go along with Mr. Trump’s directive to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
“We stick to the rules which are given by our democratic institutions,” Mr. Merz said. “Free speech remains free speech and remains part of our open, democratic society. And fake news, hate speech and offenses remain subject to legal restraints and controlled by independent courts.”
“I think I should say,” he added, “that in front of the events which took place in D.C. yesterday — we would never kick out the news agency, out of the press room of our chancellor.”
Mr. Merz also criticized Mr. Trump’s tariff policy, saying that Germany wanted to reduce tariffs, not increase them, and that “we don’t believe in trade conflicts.”
The White House had no immediate comment on the remarks by Mr. Scholz and Mr. Merz.
The comments were the latest in a series of critiques of Mr. Vance’s speech from German politicians before the election next Sunday. Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats are running third or fourth in most polls. The AfD is running second, and its chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel, met Mr. Vance on Friday in Munich.
Parts of the AfD have been classified as extremist by German intelligence. Some of its members have been convicted of violating German law against the use of Nazi slogans. Others have been arrested for trying to overthrow the federal government. So although AfD candidates have been able to win parliamentary seats, no other party has been willing to form a coalition with them to take control of the government.
That collective shunning of the AfD and other extremist parties is known as the firewall. Mr. Vance took aim at it on Friday, saying the AfD and other hard-right parties across Europe represented legitimate voter concerns about high levels of migration into European countries from the Middle East and elsewhere.
“There is no room for firewalls,” Mr. Vance said.
The vice president also called restrictions on free speech a greater threat to Europe than military aggression from Russia or China.
Mr. Scholz chided Mr. Vance for that focus in a question-and-answer session after his speech. He was asked by Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor in chief of The Economist, if Mr. Vance had made any points in his speech worth reflecting on.
“You mean all these very relevant discussions about Ukraine and security in Europe?” Mr. Scholz said, drawing laughter from the audience.
Then he addressed Mr. Vance’s critique of European speech restrictions directly.
“We should be very clear that free speech in Europe means that you are not attacking others in ways that are against legislation and laws we have in our country,” Mr. Scholz said. “And that’s the case. There is no difference between the digital world and the analog world to say it like this. And we have to be very clear that hate and all this, which is so bad for our societies, should be not the reality of public debate.”
Mr. Zelensky, in his remarks, focused on the question of European defense. He reiterated his position that the United States would be pivotal in securing any cease-fire in Ukraine but that it would need Europe to also step up. He pointed to what he said were intelligence warnings of Russian plans to conduct military exercises in Belarus next summer. He noted that Russia had invaded Ukraine after deploying troops to Belarus under the guise of exercises.
“Europe just needs to come together and start acting in a way that no one can say ‘No’ to Europe, boss it around, or treat it like a pushover,” Mr. Zelensky said.
Mr. Trump has said he wanted access to minerals in Ukraine worth half a trillion dollars in exchange for continued military support; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent opened talks on that issue in Kyiv this past week. “We are still talking,” Mr. Zelensky said on Saturday.
In a conversation with the CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour after his speech, Mr. Zelensky also said that Ukraine needed to be at the table at any cease-fire talks, and he asked to meet with Mr. Trump before any meeting that Mr. Trump has with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“It’s up to them, they can discuss anything they want, but not Ukraine without Ukraine,” he said.
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10) Live Updates: Israel and Hamas Finish 6th Exchange of Hostages for Prisoners
Hamas freed three Israelis who appeared to be in relatively good condition, and Israel released 369 Palestinian prisoners. The exchange will likely sustain a fragile cease-fire, at least for now.
By Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman, February 15, 2025
Hamas freed three Israeli hostages from captivity in Gaza on Saturday, including an American Israeli dual citizen, prolonging a fragile cease-fire with Israel that appeared to be teetering earlier this week.
Israel said it had released 369 Palestinian prisoners in exchange, concluding the sixth such swap under the cease-fire deal.
The Palestinian captors forced the Israelis to mount a stage in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis and give speeches in Hebrew against a backdrop of portraits of Hamas leaders. The Israelis were thinner and paler than when they were abducted, but they appeared to be in better condition than the emaciated captives released by Hamas last week.
Rifle-toting militants affiliated with Hamas and another group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, stood nearby. Some carried Israeli weapons, part of the carefully choreographed theatrics that have also been on display in past releases.
The gunmen did not, however, prod the men into thanking their captors, as happened last week in scenes that shocked Israelis already outraged over their gaunt condition.
The three Israeli civilians were abducted from the Israeli border village of Nir Oz during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the war in Gaza. They are Sasha Troufanov, 29; Iair Horn, 46; and Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36, one of the few American citizens who was still held in Gaza.
Hundreds of people gathered in a Tel Aviv square to watch the televised release, cheering, waving posters with the faces of the hostages and shedding tears of joy.
The Palestinian prisoners who were released included 36 serving life sentences for attacks on Israelis. A first batch of 10 released prisoners arrived in the city of Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. As they stepped off the bus, they were handed jackets to cover the sweatshirts that their jailers had made them wear before they were freed. The sweatshirts bore a phrase in Arabic: “We shall neither forget nor forgive.”
The successful exchange is likely to prop up the cease-fire, at least for a time. The truce wobbled this week after Hamas threatened to delay the hostage release. It accused Israel of violating the deal, including by not sending sufficient tents and other aid into Gaza.
Israel threatened to resume the war if Hamas did not relent. By Friday, both sides signaled that the dispute had been resolved for now.
Here’s what else to know:
· Phase 2: Israel and Hamas were supposed to start negotiations on the second part of the deal — including an end to the war and the full withdrawal of Israeli forces — last week. But there has been little indication that they have begun serious talks. The lull has prompted serious worries about the future of the cease-fire, even though the latest impasse was resolved.
· Held in Gaza: The sides have agreed to the release of 33 Israelis who were taken hostage at the beginning of the war before the deal needs to be extended. If the deal collapses at that point, roughly 60 of those still unaccounted for — many of them presumed dead — would remain in Gaza.
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11) Newly released from jail, one Palestinian has no home to return to.
By Fatima AbdulKarim, Reporting from Ramallah in the West Bank, February 15, 2025
When Hassan Oweis stepped off a bus on Saturday in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, it was a moment of both elation and uncertainty for his waiting family.
Mr. Oweis, 47, was one of 369 Palestinians released from Israeli jails this weekend in exchange for three Israeli hostages. This was the first time that his relatives had seen him outside of prison since his arrest in 2002 — nearly half a lifetime ago. To celebrate, a crowd of well-wishers lifted him onto their shoulders.
“The first time we see him without bars,” said his son Shadi, 25, who was still a toddler when Mr. Oweis was jailed.
“The most precious moment,” said Mr. Oweis’s mother, Mariam.
But the mood also felt “painful and uneasy,” said Ms. Oweis, 75.
The Oweis family lives in Jenin, in the northern West Bank, where the Israeli military is mounting an extensive operation against what it says are militants planning attacks on Israelis. Thousands of Jenin residents have been forced from their homes as the Israeli soldiers battle Palestinian gunmen and demolish scores of buildings.
The Oweis family are among the displaced. Several of them are taking shelter in a farm shed outside the city. Once they return north from Ramallah, via a web of Israeli military checkpoints, they will not be able to return to the home that Mr. Oweis owns with his siblings.
Mr. Oweis, a former a member of the Palestinian security services, is “leaving one prison only to enter another,” said his nephew, Majd, 19.
Mr. Oweis was arrested in a similar Israeli raid on Jenin in April 2002. According to Israeli court records, he was later convicted on several counts of terrorism, including abetting two gunmen who killed two Israeli civilians and wounded scores in northern Israel in November 2001.
Mr. Oweis denied the accusations, according to court records.
In a reminder of those charges, the Israeli prison authorities had dressed Mr. Oweis and his fellow prisoners in sweatshirts emblazoned with a threat in Arabic: “We shall neither forget nor forgive.”
Prison officers had also tied menacing messages around the prisoners’ wrists.
“The eternal nation will not forget,” read the message, an Arabic adaptation of a Hebrew Bible verse. “I pursue my enemies and seize them.”
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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12) The Barrage of Trump’s Awful Ideas Is Doing Exactly What It’s Supposed To
By M. Gessen, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 15, 2025
Ioulex for The New York Times
The first month of the second Trump presidency has put the lie to the widespread wisdom that Donald Trump has no ideology and no ideas, only an insatiable thirst for power and money. Trump has shown that he has ideas. So many ideas. They are just really bad ideas:
The United States can own, ethnically cleanse and redevelop Gaza as a luxury resort. The U.S. will buy Greenland and take possession of the Panama Canal. The government will become more efficient by cutting the Department of Education, U.S.A.I.D., medical and science research and many many jobs. D.E.I. caused the collision of an Army helicopter and a passenger plane in the air near Washington, D.C. Immigrants and transgender people are an existential threat to Americans. The president can and should rule by decree. These are all ideas, in the sense that they are opinions, beliefs or expressions of a possible course of action.
Some of these ideas would have seemed unthinkable just weeks ago. But now that they have been thought and uttered by the man in possession of the world’s biggest megaphone, all of us are forced to engage with them. Otherwise sane people start debating questions like: Could the U.S. really take over Gaza? Would Egypt or Jordan go along with the ethnic cleansing project? Can trillions of dollars really be cut from the federal budget with a few keystrokes? Is there evidence that D.E.I. caused the crash? Are all immigrants criminals? Do trans people exist? Did the founders intend to check the power of the executive?
Flooding the ether with bad ideas isn’t Trump’s unique know-how — it’s standard autocratic fare. Hannah Arendt used the word “preposterous” to describe the ideas that underpinned 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy. By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable — radical changes in the geography of human relationships, the government and the world itself as we have known it — they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.
Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.
Much has been said about the Democrats’ failure to sound the alarm loudly enough, fast enough or broadly enough as Trump has mounted his campaign of destruction. Some of the criticism is not entirely fair. The American system of checks and balances isn’t designed to move as fast as Trump is moving or to stop a bad-faith individual intent on breaking it. A real problem, though, is that Democrats’ objections to these ideas have been primarily procedural. Trump understands politics as the interplay of power and ideology. His opponents see politics as procedure. The contrast has never been starker — and never has the Democrats’ technocratic, legalistic approach been more detrimental to the cause of democracy. It’s not Trump who doesn’t have ideas; it’s the people who should be fighting to stop Trump’s autocratic breakthrough.
It is not enough to say that Trump and his crony Elon Musk are staging a coup, though they are. Many of the people who voted for Trump want to see him smash what he has successfully framed as a useless, wasteful government. It is not enough to say that Trump is destroying American democracy. Many of the people who voted for him did so because they have long felt that the system as it is constituted doesn’t represent their interests — and both Trump and Musk have argued that they are wresting democracy back from unelected bureaucrats. It is not enough to say that Trump’s actions have caused a constitutional crisis or that his executive orders may violate laws passed by Congress. Many of the people who voted for Trump longed to see their frustrations addressed by decisive, spectacular action, which he is delivering.
Not that defending institutions, norms and laws is wrong. It is essential. Contrary to popular opinion, it is institutions, norms and laws — not elections — that constitute a functioning democracy. The mechanisms Trump is destroying are certainly imperfect, but they are also inspired, sometimes brilliantly devised and almost always beautiful in concept, for they are the mechanisms of self-government, the products of deliberation and collective action, the embodiment of our obligations to one another.
It is hard to imagine an American politician saying something like that today. If one did, he would sound like a lunatic, or a pious academic whom Trump would Marx-bait. The idea that government is fundamentally suspect has been around for so long, has become so widely held — and has had such a dumbing-down effect on public conversation — that a full-throated defense of the ideals and institutions of American government seems cringe-worthy.
Trump’s other bad ideas have the same effect. There is no significant political voice promoting our obligations to asylum seekers, arguing against unconditional support for Israel, making the case for the great responsibility that comes with being a great power or mounting a defense of trans rights not merely because trans people are a tiny and maligned minority but because human reinvention is the lifeblood of progress. Instead, the argument Democrats have advanced against all of Trump’s bad ideas boils down to “You can’t do that.”
Actually, it would appear, he can. Less than a month into his second term, Trump cannot yet govern like the emperor he apparently imagines himself to be, but he is actively promoting the idea that he should be able to. His vice president has cast as lawbreakers judges who have tried to stop Trump’s assault on government, and Trump himself has transparently threatened to go after them. Many polls suggest that a majority of Americans like what they have seen and heard so far.
Admonitions to obey the law will not stop Trump and will not dissuade his supporters. Trump’s bad ideas must be countered with good ones. His attack on the government has to be contrasted with a vision of how the system could work and should work — for the people, not the emperor-in-the-making. This is an extremely difficult kind of resistance to muster because it calls for clear thought and inspired vision just when the onslaught of bad ideas, and the anxiety they engender, make it so difficult to think clearly and envision a future.
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13) The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie
By Alexander Clapp, Feb. 14, 2025
Mr. Clapp is a journalist and the author of “Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash,” from which this essay is adapted.
DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times
In the closing years of the Cold War, something strange started to happen.
Much of the West’s trash stopped heading to the nearest landfill and instead started crossing national borders and traversing oceans. The stuff people tossed away and probably never thought about again — dirty yogurt cups, old Coke bottles — became some of the most redistributed objects on the planet, typically winding up thousands of miles away. It was a bewildering process, one that began with the export of toxic industrial waste. By the late 1980s, thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals had left the United States and Europe for the ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of Latin America.
In return for this cascade of toxins, developing countries were offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. The result everywhere was much the same. Many countries that had broken from Western imperialism in the 1960s found that they were being turned into graveyards for Western industrialization in the 1980s, an injustice that Daniel arap Moi, then the president of Kenya, referred to as “garbage imperialism.” Outraged, dozens of developing nations banded together to end waste export. The resulting treaty — the Basel Convention, entered into force in 1992 and ratified by nearly every nation in the world but not the United States — made it illegal to export toxic waste from developed to developing countries.
If only the story had ended there. Despite that legislative success, the poorer nations of the world have never stopped being receptacles for the West’s ever-proliferating rubbish. The situation now is, in many respects, worse than it was in the 1980s. Then, there was widespread recognition that waste export was immoral. Today, most waste travels under the guise of being recyclable, cloaked in the language of planetary salvation. For the past two years I’ve been traveling the globe — from the plains of Romania to the slums of Tanzania — in an attempt to understand the world trash is making. What I saw was terrifying.
I started in Accra, the capital of Ghana, where millions of faltering electronics have been “donated” by Western companies and universities since the 2000s. There I met communities of “burner boys,” young migrants from the country’s desert fringes who make cents an hour torching American cellphone chargers and television remotes once they stop working. They told me about coughing up blood at night. It’s no surprise: The section of Accra they inhabit, a squalid estuary known as Agbogbloshie, regularly ranks among Earth’s most poisoned places. Anyone who eats an egg in Agbogbloshie, according to the World Health Organization, will absorb 220 times the tolerable daily intake of chlorinated dioxins, a toxic byproduct of electronic waste.
It’s not just your old DVD player getting shipped to West Africa. Today’s waste trade is an opportunistic bonanza, an escape valve of environmental responsibility that profits off routing detritus of every conceivable variety to places that are in no position to take it. Your discarded clothes? They may go to a desert in Chile. The last cruise ship you boarded? Hacked to pieces in Bangladesh. Your depleted car battery? Stacked in a warehouse in Mexico. Is some of it run by organized crime? Of course. “For us,” a Naples mafioso boasted in 2008, “rubbish is gold.” But much of it doesn’t have to be. Waste export remains scandalously underregulated and unmonitored. Practically anyone can give it a go.
Nowhere does today’s waste trade reach more boggling dimensions than with plastic. The time scales alone are dizzying. Bottles or takeaway cartons that you own for moments embark on arduous, monthslong, carbon-spewing journeys from one end of Earth to another. Upon arrival in villages in Vietnam or the Philippines, for example, some of these objects get chemically reduced — an energy-intensive task that unleashes innumerable toxins and microplastics into local ecosystems. The process’s ability to produce new plastic is at best dubious, but the environmental and health cost is cataclysmic. Plastic waste in the developing world — clogging waterways, exacerbating air pollution, infiltrating human brain tissue — is now linked to the death of hundreds of thousands every year.
The fate of much other plastic waste that gets sent to the global south is more rudimentary: It gets incinerated in a cement factory or dumped in a field. In Turkey, I met marine biologists who fly drones along the Mediterranean coast to search for stray piles of European plastic waste, which enters the country at the rate of one dump truck roughly every 15 minutes. In Kenya, a country that outlawed plastic bags in 2017 only for the American petrochemical sector to conspire to turn it into Africa’s next waste frontier, more than half the cattle that wander urban areas have been found to possess plastic in their stomach linings, while a shocking 69 percent of discarded plastic is believed to enter a water system of one form or another.
That still pales in comparison to what I witnessed in Indonesia. Across the country’s 17,000-odd islands, domestically consumed plastic is so mishandled that 365 tons of it are believed to enter the sea every hour. And yet, deep in the highlands of Java, there are hellscapes of imported Western waste — toothpaste tubes from California, shopping bags from the Netherlands, deodorant sticks from Australia — stacked knee-high as far as the eye can see. Too voluminous to even attempt to recycle, it is used as fuel in scores of bakeries that supply Java’s street markets with tofu, a culinary staple. The result is some of the most lethal cuisine imaginable, with poisons from incinerated Western plastic ingested hourly by great numbers of Indonesians.
Can the waste trade ever be legislated into oblivion? As with drug trafficking, it may be that there’s too much money going around to fix the problem. Traveling trash, after all, has many advantages. Rich countries lose a liability, and garbage producers are let off the hook. The need to find a place to put all our rubbish has never been more dire: A recent United Nations study found that one out of every 20 objects moving through global supply chains is now some form of plastic — amounting to a trillion-dollar annual industry worth more than the global arms, timber and wheat trades combined.
Most crucially, it’s hard for Western consumers to recognize the extent of the crisis — that the story they’ve been told about recycling often isn’t true — when it is continually rendered invisible, relocated thousands of miles away. Yeo Bee Yin, the former environmental minister of Malaysia, may have put it to me best: The only way to really stop waste from entering her country, she told me, would be to close Malaysia’s ports entirely.
We might at the very least be honest with ourselves about what we are doing. We ship our waste to the other side of the planet not only because we produce far too much of it but also because we insist on an environment exorcised of our own material footprints. Everything you’ve ever thrown away in your life: There’s a good chance a lot of it is still out there, somewhere, be it headphones torched for their copper wiring in Ghana or a sliver of a Solo Cup bobbing across the Pacific Ocean.
Here the adage doesn’t ring true. Rare is the trash that becomes anyone’s treasure.
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14) Protesters Rally Against Deletion of ‘Transgender’ on Stonewall Website
Hundreds of people gathered at the Greenwich Village site to condemn what they saw as a chilling strike against the symbolic heart of the gay rights movement.
By Liam Stack and Nell Gallogly, Feb. 14, 2025
Jay Walker, center, an organizer of a protest at the Stonewall National Monument site, said he wasn’t sure how long a transgender flag would continue to fly there. Credit...Brittainy Newman for The New York Times
A day after the National Park Service deleted the word “transgender” from prominent spots on its Stonewall National Monument website, hundreds of people rallied at the monument site on Friday to protest the move and what they feared might come next there.
It was unclear whether federal officials planned to make physical alterations to eliminate references to transgender people at Stonewall, the first historic site in the United States devoted to the country’s gay rights movement. The Park Service, which had cited a presidential order as the reason for the website changes, did not respond to a request for comment.
So on Friday, at least, a pink, blue and white flag representing the transgender community continued to fly on the flagpole in Christopher Park in the chilly sunshine, and plaques and photo displays honoring well-known transgender activists continued to hang on a park fence.
Still, Jay Walker, a protest organizer, said he was “not sure how long that would last.”
The sudden elimination of the words “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall website on Thursday — part of a larger Trump administration campaign to challenge the legitimacy of transgender identity — struck members of New York City’s L.G.B.T.Q. community and others as a chilling attack on the symbolic heart of the gay rights movement.
“The removal of references to transgender people from federal websites and even from this monument’s history is an act of deliberate erasure,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat, told the crowd. “It’s an attack on the truth.”
Chloe Elentári, a transgender woman who lives in Manhattan’s East Village, was among the protesters at the Stonewall site. She said the move was a reminder that the city might be less of a haven than some residents think.
“People say that you know you’re in a safe state, you’re in a blue state, but we’re not,” Ms. Elentári said. “We can’t live under the illusion of thinking that we’re safe just because we’re in New York.”
The Stonewall Inn, a bar on Christopher Street, has been seen as a cradle of the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement since a police raid in June 1969 set off three days of protests and riots on the surrounding Greenwich Village streets.
Today, the riots are commemorated with Pride marches in New York City and around the world, and many gay rights organizations and venues in other countries use “Stonewall” in their names.
President Barack Obama established the 7.7-acre Stonewall monument, which includes the bar, Christopher Park and several other nearby streets and sidewalks, in 2016. Parts of the site have also been designated as a city landmark and a state historical site.
The Park Service said on Thursday that it had removed references to the transgender community to comply with an executive order signed by President Trump on his first day in office that was described as “restoring biological truth to the federal government,” and with a second order signed by the acting secretary of the interior last month.
The website changes also included the virtual elimination of a page listing interpretive flags associated with the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, including the pink, blue and white one representing transgender people, and the times when the flags typically fly in Christopher Park.
That the executive orders would affect even just the monument website was an indication of how the Trump administration’s antipathy toward transgender rights is affecting the L.G.B.T.Q. community in New York, a liberal bastion.
In recent weeks, transgender New Yorkers and health care professionals in the city have faced executive orders that seek to bar hospitals from providing certain kinds of care for transgender youth. The orders have caused fear among transgender people and their families, at least one lawsuit and protests outside hospitals.
On Wednesday, the Stonewall website had included introductory text that said, “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.”
By Thursday afternoon, the word “transgender” had been removed, along with the letter “T” from the community acronym. By the evening, the word “queer” and “Q+” had also been deleted.
Erik Bottcher, the City Council member who represents the neighborhood that includes the monument, said the removal of some words and letters but not others was an attempt to divide and weaken the community.
“We are here to send a message to Donald Trump,” he said to the protesters. “We will not let you erase the existence of our trans siblings.”
Transgender people played a central role in the Stonewall riots, and two transgender women in particular, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, are celebrated at the site with photo displays and plaques. (As of Friday, biographical pages for Ms. Rivera and Ms. Johnson on the Park Service website still described them as transgender women.)
The displays paying tribute to Ms. Johnson and Ms. Rivera remained in place while the protest proceeded. The two women, and generations of activists like them, were on the minds and the placards of many of those in the crowd.
“The first people that threw the brick at Stonewall, that led the charge at Stonewall, were women of color, trans women of color,” said Eli Shirk, a 19-year-old transgender student at Pace University. “Are we seriously trying to erase, like, entire history?”
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