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) Guantánamo Bay Prepares for President Trump’s Migrant Surge
About 200 Marines and soldiers arrived over the weekend as the base faces its most drastic changes since the Pentagon opened a prison there after the Sept. 11 attacks.
By Carol Rosenberg and Eric Schmitt, Feb. 3, 2025
Reporting from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Washington
The small base in southeast Cuba is on the verge of undergoing its most drastic change since the Pentagon opened its wartime prison there after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
About 200 Marines and soldiers landed at Guantánamo Bay over the weekend to provide security and begin setting up at a new tent city for migrants, as officials comply with President Trump’s order to prepare the Navy base for as many as 30,000 deportees.
The small base in southeast Cuba is on the verge of undergoing its most drastic change since the Pentagon opened its wartime prison there after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The operation will require a surge of staff and goods to the isolated base, which is behind a Cuban minefield and is entirely dependent on air and sea supply missions from the United States.
Everything from pallets of bottled water and frozen food for the commissary to school supplies and government vehicles come twice a month on a barge. Fresh fruits and vegetables for the 4,200 residents come on a weekly refrigerator flight.
Fulfilling the president’s order could grow the population there tenfold because of the staff it would take to operate the encampment, which is on a unpopulated corner of the base, far from the prison as well as the commissary, school and suburban-style neighborhoods for service members and their families.
In response to Mr. Trump’s order, U.S. forces have already put up 50 Army green tents inside a chain-link-fence enclosure, adjacent to a barracks-style building called the Migrant Operations Center.
The first wave of about 50 Marines arrived Saturday night from Camp Lejeune, N.C. The next 50 arrived on Sunday.
The military declined to comment on its current capacity to receive the migrants or on what other provisions were inbound. The Southern Command, which has oversight of the troops assigned to the prison and the migration plan, would not say who is in charge of the operation or discuss a plan from 2017, obtained by The New York Times, for detaining the first 11,000 migrants there.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that dangerous deportees might be put in detention facilities that currently hold 15 prisoners from the war on terrorism, among them five men who are accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks.
The 15 prisoners have been held in two prison buildings with about 275 cells. Detaining migrants at that site would presumably require moving those 15 prisoners into one of the two buildings.
But no decision has been made on whether some migrants would be housed at the wartime prison, a Defense Department official said Saturday. Separately, two people with knowledge of detention operations said the consolidation had already happened this weekend. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security arrangements involving the prison, which are sometimes classified.
In his remarks last week, Mr. Hegseth also mentioned that about 6,000 deportees could be housed “on the golf course,” which is near the base’s McDonald’s, Irish pub and family housing.
In any case, carrying out Mr. Trump’s order would require a huge undertaking, said retired Maj. Gen. Michael R. Lehnert, a Marine who opened the prison in 2002.
General Lehnert, whose expertise as a Marine was in engineering, also managed security for the migrant arrivals at Guantánamo in the 1990s, when tens of thousands of Cubans and Haitians lived in tent cities around the base.
At its peak, he said, in May 1995, the camps held 25,000 migrants, mostly Cubans.
The base was so overwhelmed that a tent camp was even, briefly, put on the golf course. The operation was set up hastily, and it had portable latrines. As the numbers rose, the Navy closed the school and evacuated the families of service members to the mainland for seven months.
The base makes its own water for everything except drinking purposes and, as it did then, would need to make much more.
The two main sites that were used back then — a vast bluff overlooking the ocean and an abandoned airfield — now have new purposes. One is a closed military zone, with the prison buildings and staff. The other has the courthouse facility called Camp Justice.
President Trump’s order called for expanding the Migrant Operations Center to accommodate 30,000 people. It is currently a 120-bed former barracks that in recent years housed Cubans, sometimes families, whom the U.S. Coast Guard found at sea trying to reach Florida. They were housed there until a third country agreed to receive them.
The 2017 plan, reflected in a diagram of preparations for area surrounding the Migrant Operations Center, shows six designated tent camps for more than 11,000 migrants, and a nearby spot to house 3,640 “blue forces,” a military term for forces that are friendly to the U.S. military. The largest camp could house more than 3,000 migrants.
By 2017 contractors had already built crude summer-camp-style showers and toilet houses in cinder-block buildings on the site.
In the 1990s, General Lehnert said, each tent encampment contained 1,500 migrants and was guarded by 200 troops, either soldiers or Marines. And that was just for basic security. The 1990s operation, known as Sea Signal, also had medical, logistics and other support troops as well as a separate “rapid reaction force” in the event of unrest.
It was not known whether the Department of Homeland Security or the U.S. military would handle processing, or what role, if any, would be assigned to the International Organization for Migration, which has an office on the base. Nor was it clear how it would be funded.
Guantánamo is an expensive place to live and work. In 2019, the commander of detention operations estimated it cost more than $100,000 for each guard’s nine-month deployment to the facility. Those troops are provided with housing, clothing, food, health care, entertainment and transportation.
Those living at Guantánamo today, in addition to sailors and their families, include schoolteachers, Filipino and Jamaican guest workers, and the prison guard force of mostly individual soldiers serving on nine-month tours.
Mr. Hegseth did one of those tours, from June 2004 to April 2005. He was the platoon leader of 40 or so men from the New Jersey National Guard who provided perimeter security for the detention center.
But it is a much smaller operation today. Mr. Hegseth was part of a nearly 2,600-member military force that was assigned to the detention operation, which held 600 detainees on the former site of migrant camps. The airstrip was a busy place then, with resupply missions, troops, reporters, and members of Congress and the intelligence community flying in frequently.
Now the prison has a staff of 800 military and civilian contractors and no longer has a media operation.
An additional 111 military police from the New York National Guard were undergoing three weeks of training at Fort Bliss, Texas, before heading to a nine-month security mission at Guantánamo Bay.
The situation was changing so quickly that when the unit departed last month, the Army said it would provide security for the detention facility. But the Pentagon said in a statement released on Thursday that the unit would secure the Migrant Operations Center.
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2) Who Will Govern Postwar Gaza? Four Competing Models Are Emerging.
Hamas still controls most of the enclave, but Israel holds some key areas. International oversight could also be expanded, while the Palestinian Authority has presented itself as another alternative.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 3, 2025
Hamas militants handing over the Israeli hostages Ofer Kalderon and Yarden Bibas in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Saturday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Through nearly 16 months of war in Gaza, politicians and analysts debated competing proposals for the territory’s postwar governance, but no clear direction emerged while the fighting continued.
Now, as a fragile cease-fire holds and as Israel and Hamas prepare for negotiations to extend the truce, four rival models for Gaza’s future have begun to take shape.
Hamas, weakened but unbowed, still controls most of the territory and is trying to entrench that authority. Under the terms of the cease-fire, Israel is meant to withdraw gradually from Gaza, but its troops still occupy key parts of it. Right-wing Israeli leaders want their forces to expand that control, even if it means restarting the war.
A group of foreign security contractors offers another model. At Israel’s invitation, they are running a checkpoint on a crucial thoroughfare in northern Gaza, screening vehicles for weapons. Some Israeli officials say that activity could develop into international stewardship of a much wider area, involving Arab states instead of private contractors.
And in the south, representatives of the Palestinian Authority began over the weekend to staff a border crossing with Egypt, working with European security officials. The authority, which lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007, hopes that it could, in time, replicate those efforts across the entire territory.
For now, it’s unclear which template will emerge as the dominant model. The outcome will likely depend in large part on President Trump, who is set to discuss Gaza’s future on Tuesday in Washington with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. And Saudi Arabia could tilt the scales if it agrees for the first time to forge formal ties with Israel — in exchange for a particular governance structure in Gaza.
Here’s what the models entail and how likely they are to succeed.
Hamas rule
When releasing hostages in recent weeks, Hamas has made a point of showing that it remains the dominant Palestinian force on the ground. Hundreds of masked Hamas militants have assembled at each release point, projecting the sense that the group, though battered by 16 months of war, is still in charge.
Hamas security officials have also re-emerged to assert a semblance of order across the territory, stopping and screening vehicles and trying to defuse unexploded ordnance. Municipal officials have also started shifting rubble.
For most Israelis, Hamas’s long-term presence is unpalatable. Some might accept it if Hamas agreed to release all the remaining hostages held in Gaza. Others, particularly on the Israeli right, want to resume the war, even if it costs the lives of some of those captives, to force Hamas out.
If Hamas does stay in power, it will be hard for the group to rebuild Gaza without foreign support. Because many foreign donors will most likely be wary of helping unless Hamas steps down, it is possible that the group might willingly cede power to an alternative Palestinian leadership, instead of continuing to preside over an ungovernable wasteland. In talks mediated by Egypt, Hamas’s envoys have said they could hand over administrative responsibilities to a committee of Palestinian technocrats, but it’s unlikely that the group would willingly disband its armed wing even if it stopped running Gaza’s civilian affairs.
Israeli occupation
When the cease-fire began last month, Israel retained control of a buffer zone along Gaza’s borders that is several hundred yards wide. To end the war and secure the release of all the hostages in Gaza, Israel eventually needs to evacuate this territory. But that is unthinkable to important members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, meaning that he may extend Israel’s occupation, or even expand it, to avoid the collapse of his government.
To do that, however, Mr. Netanyahu would probably need the support of the Trump administration, which has signaled that it wants to see the cease-fire extended to allow for the release of every hostage. Returning to war would also scupper any short-term chance of a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia — a major international achievement that Mr. Netanyahu has long coveted.
An international force
When Israeli troops withdrew last week from much of the Netzarim Corridor, a strategic area that connects northern and southern Gaza, they allowed a cohort of foreign security contractors to fill the void. Led by Egyptian security guards, the contractors screen northbound traffic for weapons, hoping to slow Hamas’s efforts to rearm its militants in northern Gaza. Two U.S. companies are involved in the process, but it is unclear what role they play on the ground.
For now, the process is a small-scale trial that lacks the formal involvement of Arab countries other than Egypt and Qatar, the two states mediating between Israel and Hamas. But some Israeli officials say that it could be expanded — both in terms of geography and responsibility — to encompass administrative roles across a wider area, backed publicly and financially by leading Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Neither is likely to seek a formal role without the blessing of the Palestinian Authority.
The authority, which Hamas forced from Gaza in 2007, still runs part of the West Bank and is considered the only serious Palestinian alternative to Hamas. But Israeli leaders see the authority as corrupt and incompetent and have dismissed the idea of giving it a major role in Gaza, at least for now. The Israeli right also opposes empowering the authority, lest it emerge as a credible state-in-waiting.
The Palestinian Authority
That said, the authority’s representatives quietly began working in another part of Gaza over the weekend, suggesting that parts of the Israeli leadership may in practice be more flexible about the authority’s involvement.
Israel allowed officials from both the European Union and the Palestinian Authority to restart operations at the Rafah crossing — a checkpoint on the border between Gaza and Egypt. The crossing had been closed since Israel invaded the Rafah area last May.
Publicly, the Israeli government downplayed the authority’s involvement at the checkpoint, partly to avoid angering members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition.
But the operations at Rafah have fueled speculation that Mr. Netanyahu, under pressure from Mr. Trump and Arab leaders in the Gulf, might grudgingly tolerate a wider role for the authority, perhaps in partnership with foreign peacekeepers or contractors.
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3) It’s 89 Seconds Until Doomsday and Her First Day on the Job
Alexandra Bell is bringing more than a decade of experience in nuclear policy to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organization that sets the Doomsday Clock.
By Katrina Miller, Feb. 3, 2025
At the end of January, the keepers of the Doomsday Clock announced that the world was 89 seconds to midnight, a metaphor for our proximity to extinction. That’s one second closer than we were for the past two years, and the nearest the clock has ever inched to global destruction by way of human-made risks, including nuclear weapons, climate change and new technologies like artificial intelligence.
The iconic clock is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization founded by American physicists at the dawn of the nuclear age, months after the United States detonated atomic bombs in Japan. On Monday, the Bulletin named Alexandra Bell, a nuclear affairs expert, as its new president and chief executive. She replaces Rachel Bronson, who served in the role for a decade.
Ms. Bell worked on arms control and nonproliferation issues in the U.S. State Department starting in the Obama administration, where she was involved in securing ratification of New START, the nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. She returned to the department as a deputy assistant secretary in 2021, promoting dialogue on nuclear issues with nations around the world. During the last two years of the Biden administration, she led the U.S. delegation of the P5 Process, currently the only forum where the United States, China and Russia discuss nuclear risk reduction.
In an interview last week, Ms. Bell discussed the ever-evolving threats of the day and the role she wants the Bulletin to play in preventing worldwide disaster. “It’s important to listen to the echoes of history,” she said, to be “informed by the past, but not shackled to it.”
The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How does an 80-year-old organization like the Bulletin stay relevant in an ever-changing world?
When I entered the field, the Doomsday Clock was at five minutes to midnight. I remember being struck by the symbolism. The clock being at its closest point to midnight now is really a warning that we are running out of time. The fact that it ticked one second closer is an indication that every second counts.
We are living through an overload of crisis with a compounding nature of threats. The key is to understand those threats and make sure that we’re transitioning to solutions. It will take work and patience and persistence, and a broad demand from the public, to address these concerns.
Hopefully, the Doomsday Clock pulls people in to help them understand the urgency of the moment. There’s no single, neat solution. But there are things we can do to pull ourselves away from the edge.
How does this era of nuclear risk differ from the past?
Nuclear threats are on vivid display for the first time, really, since we pulled ourselves away from the edge of catastrophe in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The United States and Russia are not in a sustained dialogue about how to stabilize nuclear risk. China has embarked on an unprecedented expansion of their nuclear forces. Iran has the potential to create nuclear weapons, and North Korea continues to flout international law, threaten its neighbors and grow its nuclear arsenal.
We also have structures that we’ve spent the last 50 years building now crumbling under us. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which has held back the tide of nuclear chaos, is under duress. The next steps that we were supposed to take in reducing nuclear threat, like the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, haven’t come to pass yet.
I’m sure people living through the height of the Cold War would not have thought it was uncomplicated. But looking back, that was a bipolar conflict — it was the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Now, it’s more complex.
There are no quick fixes here. This time, it won’t just be the nuclear experts alone who come up with solutions. We have to be talking with experts in A.I., quantum, biotechnology and climate change. These risk areas are overlapping and require coordination we haven’t quite mastered yet. But that cross-pollination of expertise will be key to how we manage these threats.
The looming threat for most people these days seems to be climate change, rather than nuclear weapons.
You’re right, younger generations don’t think about nuclear threat as much. We did a good job of reducing that threat, but it never went away. In some ways, it’s become worse. It’s more complex, more diffuse, and there’s not as much attention on it.
The nuclear issue is a matter of minutes. Intercontinental ballistic missiles in the United States or Russia can reach anywhere in the world in about 33 minutes. If we get the nuclear problem wrong, nothing else matters.
Climate change is a longer-term problem. And the potential conflicts that could arise from it, like mass migration, can increase tension. More nuclear-armed states with climate-related conflicts means the likelihood of nuclear war increases. These threats are tied together. All the more reason to be thinking about both at the same time.
What are your thoughts so far on the direction of the new presidential administration?
I was pleased to see President Trump’s comments in Davos about reducing nuclear threats. That was encouraging. But he is also withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. That is a step in the wrong direction.
Hopefully, the administration will see that there are economic and security benefits to the U.S. pursuing a move to greener technology.
I hope there is an acknowledgment that climate change isn’t a matter of belief. This is happening. You can choose not to believe in it, but I guarantee that your insurance company believes in it. When that starts financially impacting people across the country, they will be looking to their leaders to do something about it.
In what ways do you hope to shape the work of the Bulletin in the years ahead?
The Bulletin is trying to facilitate a public reckoning with human-made existential risk. It’s been an increasingly exclusive conversation, and I don’t want it to be that. I want people anywhere to understand why this is so important, and why they have a part in it.
I am from Tuxedo, N.C. — a place with no stoplights. My folks’ house got 40 inches of rain in two days from Hurricane Helene. The havoc caused by a changing climate has now happened in a place like my hometown. How do we connect those people into the conversation about preventing this? It’s our job to make sure they are a part of it just as much as people in the Beltway are.
It can be easy to look at these challenges and go to a dark place. The harder thing is to let those challenges drive you. My mother is from Finland, and we always talk about this Finnish ethos of “sisu” — unstoppable grit in the face of extreme adversity. We need more sisu in this field. We’ve inherited a mess, and we have to work together to clean it up.
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4) Restored Anti-Fascism Mural by Philip Guston Unveiled in Mexico
In 1934, two young artists drove from Los Angeles in a beat-up car to Mexico, to create a powerful artwork about repression. It was concealed — and then forgotten.
By Victoria Burnett, Published Feb. 1, 2025, Updated Feb. 2, 2025
When an Argentine architect, Luis Laplace, saw a neglected mural by the North American artists Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish at the Regional Museum of Michoacán, in the Mexican city of Morelia, seven years ago, he resolved immediately to try to save it.
“What struck me was the scale of it, the beauty, the history,” he said of the mural, titled “The Struggle Against Terrorism.” It is a kaleidoscope of persecution and resistance made in 1934-1935, when the artists were barely in their 20s.
Painted on a wall in a colonial palace in the heart of Morelia, the pink-stoned capital of Michoacán State, the surreal, Renaissance-influenced composition of broken bodies, ominous hooded figures and tools of cruelty was crumbling and faded. Whole sections of the piece were missing. The patio was being used to store chairs.
“I was quite astonished,” said Laplace, who is based in Paris but at the time was working on a project in Morelia.
On Friday, the 1,000-square-foot mural was unveiled anew in Mexico following a six-month restoration that has re-created missing sections and returned its original vibrancy. It is being inaugurated at a moment of heightened tensions between Mexico and the United States over the steep tariffs President Trump is moving to impose.
As well as a team of conservators and contractors, the effort involved the Guston Foundation, which paid around $150,000 for the project; several Mexican cultural institutions; a local grandee; and a lot of diplomacy, Laplace said. He joked that the people of Morelia had never “seen so many people interested in a single mural.”
Guston (who at the time still went by his birthname, Goldstein) and Kadish were commissioned by the museum to paint the fresco at the recommendation of the renowned Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, whom they had met in Los Angeles in the early 1930s while Siqueiros was working there. They are among a handful of American muralists who produced work in Mexico in the 1930s; a mural by Grace Greenwood, a Brooklyn artist, covers a wall in a different area of the Morelia museum.
The Americans drove some 1,700 miles to Morelia from Los Angeles in a beat-up car in the fall of 1934 and spent six months there, working feverishly with help from Jules Langsner, a friend and future art critic. After the piece was unveiled in early 1935, Time magazine described black-clad civil servants and farmers in straw hats gazing at the mural in “open-mouthed wonder.”
The wonder didn’t last, however. By the mid-1940s, the mural, with its inverted crucifixes and naked bodies, was deemed so offensive to clerics that the museum agreed to conceal it behind a huge canvas screen, said Jaime Reyes Monroy, the musuem’s director. His predecessor, Eugenio Mercado López, said he had been told angry locals had damaged the mural in some way and that the canvas was intended, in part at least, to protect it.
In exchange for obscuring the mural, the church gave the museum an 18th-century oil painting known as “The Transfer of the Dominican Nuns to a New Convent,” which still hangs there.
The mural languished, hidden, until 1973, when it was uncovered during repairs to the patio, Reyes said. Over the next 50 years, there were sporadic efforts to patch up the work, but they were overwhelmed by the strong sun and relentless humidity.
“It had been covered for so long,” said Reyes, “people had honestly forgotten about it.”
It wasn’t only Morelians who overlooked the mural. Ellen G. Landau, an art historian and author of a book about the impact of Mexico on American modernism, said the art world and even Guston and Kadish diminished the importance of the Morelia fresco, which she believes reverberated through their careers.
Mexico gave the artists latitude to explore their preoccupations, Landau said. This was a contrast to the prescriptions of the Works Progress Administration in the United States, for which both artists also produced murals.
“When the W.P.A. wanted a mural for a post office, they wanted a certain topic,” said Sally Radic, executive director of the Guston Foundation. In Mexico, she said, “they just did what they wanted and that’s why it was so universal.”
With that freedom, Guston and Kadish created a work where the horrors of the Inquisition intersected with those of the Ku Klux Klan and the Gestapo, said Landau. The mural includes a swastika and three hooded figures perched on ladders and a scaffold above scenes of torture — images that would recur in Guston’s later work. To the left is a cartoonlike depiction of people being burned alive that Landau identified as a rendition of a 15th-century woodcut showing the slaughter of Jews at Trent.
The references to repression in the mural were personal as well as historical and global, Landau and Radic said. Guston and Kadish had experienced right-wing thuggery in 1933, when members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s so-called Red Squad destroyed portable murals that the artists had helped produce for the Communist-affiliated John Reed Clubs. Kadish’s family’s apartment was ransacked by the police a few years earlier, according to an essay by Landau, and he witnessed a cross burning on the lawn of a Jewish home.
For Mercado, the former museum director, the mural holds an urgent message for Michoacán, a lush, beautiful state that is plagued by brutal drug-related violence.
“It’s agonizing,” he said. “It’s a call to the local community that we can’t be indifferent to suffering.”
Radic said the mural’s resonance made saving it a “pet project.” She and Laplace spent years trying to navigate Mexican bureaucracy before Alejandro Ramírez, a Morelian resident and chief executive of the movie theater chain Cinépolis, helped them find “the right door to knock on,” Laplace said.
Before restoration began, engineers used ground penetrating radar technology to identify the source of humidity that had caused the mural to fade and crumble. They moved downspouts that were causing damp in the wall and used infrared lights and fans to dry it out.
“Humidity is like an illness for frescos,” said David Oviedo Jiménez, a mural conservator at the Mexican Institute of Fine Arts and Literature who was part of a four-person team that just finished restoring the work. When the team started work, the fresco “was in a terrible state,” he added.
Starting in September, Oviedo and his team stabilized the surface with sealant and repaired blank areas with a mixture of slaked lime and marble sand. They used photographs and traced the original outlines of the painting to re-create missing sections. They painted these with vertical brush strokes, a technique called rigatino that is used in fresco restoration so that people looking at the work can distinguish the new paintwork from the original.
Radic, who saw the restored mural for the first time this week, said the transformation was “beautiful.” Speaking from Morelia by phone on Thursday, she said that the greater vibrancy intensified the sense that the colossal figures in the work are descending upon you, adding, “They did an amazing job.”
Laplace, the architect, who has yet to see the restored fresco, predicts that the restoration will rekindle interest in the work among fans of Guston and Kadish but also among Morelians.
“Now that we have created awareness, people will take care of it,” he said. “They know that they have something precious.”
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5) Trump Riles Washington as He Tries to Overthrow the Existing Order
The new president has left virtually no corner of the nation’s capital untouched in a wide-ranging effort to tear down the federal government and refashion it to his liking.
By Peter Baker, Feb. 4, 2025
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, is covering his sixth presidency. He reported from Washington.
President Trump in just two weeks back in office has moved with astonishing speed and boundless ambition to overturn the existing political, economic, cultural and international order in an even more far-reaching way than many of his supporters or critics had imagined possible.
Mr. Trump has thrown the nation’s capital into turmoil by purging enemies at home, attacking allies abroad, shuttering one agency while targeting others, handing the tools of government to an unelected billionaire, ignoring multiple laws, trying to rewrite the Constitution and even flirting with staying in power beyond his two-term limit.
Taking a Gatling gun approach to governing, firing shots in all directions at the same time, Mr. Trump has left virtually no corner of Washington untouched as he seeks to tear down the old apparatus and refashion it to his liking. Day after day, the city has been roiled with one political shock after another, starting with provocative social posts early in the morning, moving to personal conflicts in the middle of the day and finally to threatening staffwide emails after midnight.
A protest on Monday at the headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development turned confrontational when several congressional Democrats tried to enter the building after employees were locked out. Security guards blocked the lawmakers, who vowed to get a court order to prevent Mr. Trump from subsuming the agency into the State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared on Monday that he was now the agency’s acting director.
The aid agency was created through an executive order by President John F. Kennedy implementing the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 passed by Congress, and critics of Mr. Trump argue that only Congress can close it. But the showdown over the agency reflects just one front of the battle.
Mr. Trump effectively moved on Monday to dismantle another agency disliked by conservatives and corporate chieftains. After firing the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mr. Trump designated as its acting director Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who then ordered a halt to all rule-making, enforcement and other activities.
Most strikingly perhaps, the administration in recent days has forced out career prosecutors and F.B.I. officials involved in the prosecution of those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and demanded that all F.B.I. agents who had any role in the investigations report themselves. The top agent in the bureau’s New York field office told colleagues in an email that they were “in the middle of a battle of our own” as “good people” were “targeted because they did their jobs.”
Mr. Trump has eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion offices around the government; fired a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board and its general counsel and deputy general counsel; dismissed two commissioners at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and its general counsel; and threatened to fire 1,000 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The president has talked about eliminating the Education Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And even for agencies he does not want to wipe out, the administration has taken down at least 8,000 government web pages that used language about diversity or other topics disfavored by Mr. Trump.
“He’s now just decided: ‘I’m not going to accept any of the legal limitations. I’m going to do whatever I want to do until the courts tell me otherwise,’” Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, who represents many federal workers, said in an interview on Monday. “And he believes he has enough sway with the courts that he probably will get away with it.”
Mr. Trump has insisted that the government is corrupt and filled with “radical-left lunatics” who need to be purged. His far-right allies have celebrated the multifaceted assault on the status quo, calling it revenge for efforts to investigate and prosecute Mr. Trump, who was convicted in New York on 34 felony charges and indicted three other times after leaving office.
Stephen K. Bannon, who was Mr. Trump’s chief strategist in his first term, called the actions of the president’s early second term “nothing short of magnificent” during his podcast last weekend. “For those of you on the receiving end of this, the blunt force instrument that leaves blunt force trauma, you did this to yourselves,” he said. “You brought this on yourselves.”
Many presidents have come to Washington vowing to shake it up, including Jimmy Carter on the left and Ronald Reagan on the right. But none of them in recent decades went anywhere near as far in four or eight years as Mr. Trump has in just 15 days, particularly by taking action without authorization by Congress in seeming defiance of the constitutional balance of power.
Much of the shake-up is coming at the initiative of Elon Musk, the president’s billionaire patron, who has not shed his private interests and has never been confirmed by the Senate to any position but has been empowered by Mr. Trump to take drastic action to reorganize and shrink the federal government.
In recent days, Mr. Musk, whose SpaceX and other firms receive billions of dollars in government contracts, has obtained access to the Treasury Department’s highly sensitive federal payments system. He has moved to push out many federal employees by offering a version of a payout without outlining any plan for what happens to their duties if they resign.
Surrounded by a crew of young engineers in their early 20s with little if any government experience, including a recent high school graduate, Mr. Musk has reveled in the disruption he has fomented at the aid agency, known by its initials. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on social media on Monday. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
Democratic critics said Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk were wood-chipping government for their own profit and to justify large tax cuts for the wealthy. “There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our government right now is doing it based on self-interest,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told protesters outside the U.S.A.I.D. building.
The president’s eagerness to disrupt goes far beyond the government itself. His order over the weekend imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China threatened to blow up relations with America’s three largest trading partners.
But after markets plunged on Monday, he agreed to grant Mexico and Canada one-month reprieves after what he could present as concessions on stopping drug trafficking and illegal migration over their borders with the United States. Mr. Trump’s tariffs on China took effect at midnight, and Beijing instantly retaliated with its own tariffs on U.S. coal, gas and other goods.
Likewise, Mr. Trump has sought to influence the broader cultural state at home. He has made clear that he wants private companies to get rid of diversity and climate programs. His administration has threatened action against media companies that have angered him with their coverage.
Echoing the president’s complaint, the Federal Communications Commission has demanded a full transcript to examine how CBS edited an interview with his 2024 rival, former Vice President Kamala Harris, a remarkable level of government involvement in how a news organization chooses to present the news.
His Defense Department just ordered four major news organizations, including The New York Times, to give up their longstanding office space in the Pentagon in favor of Breitbart News and other favored outlets. And he has personally continued to press lawsuits against news organizations to extract multimillion-dollar payments.
Mr. Trump, who has objected to redesignating military bases that were named after Confederate generals because, he said, it erased history, has had no such complaints as his appointees have erased history themselves. Portraits of Gen. Mark A. Milley, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, both Trump appointees who angered him, have been taken down in the Pentagon from walls where all past military leaders are traditionally honored.
At the same time, the Trump administration has moved to help those it perceives to be allies. Now under its new management, the Justice Department dropped a case against former Representative Jeffrey Fortenberry of Nebraska, who was charged with lying to the F.B.I. in an investigation of illegal campaign donations. Mr. Trump then hailed the move, saying that Mr. Fortenberry had been “forced to suffer greatly due to the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.”
Last week, federal prosecutors withdrew from a campaign finance investigation of Representative Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, leaving the future of the case uncertain. Their withdrawal came just one week after Mr. Ogles filed a constitutional amendment to allow Mr. Trump to run for a third term, an idea that the president has lately teased about repeatedly despite the two-term limit enshrined in the 22nd Amendment.
Mr. Kaine said what he had seen in the past two weeks reminded him of his time living in Honduras in 1980 and 1981 when it was a military dictatorship. “This one to me seems very unprecedented in the U.S., but pretty precedented in world history,” he said. “It’s like Putin or Berlusconi,” he added, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and former President Silvio Berlusconi of Italy.
Mr. Trump’s insistence on acting on his own rather than seeking approval of Congress even though Republicans control both houses is revealing, he added. “Why is he taking unilateral steps?” Mr. Kaine said. “He is not confident he can persuade Republicans to go along with what he wants to do.”
Democrats and other opponents will count on the courts rather than Congress to stop the president’s most egregious violations of his constitutional authority. But Mr. Trump’s allies said no one should assume that he will back down — or that the flurry of action in his first two weeks will be the end of it or even the extent of it.
“There’s going to be much more of this,” Mr. Bannon said. “This had to be taken care of first, and it’s not stopped. Somebody contacted me the other day and said, ‘Some of the senior guys over there are very worried about their jobs.’ I said, ‘They shouldn’t be worried about their jobs; they should be worried about their criminal defense.’ This is only the first step, stage one, step one.”
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6) Trump Orders Could Drain Millions From Universities, but Few Protest Openly
Efforts by the administration to cut diversity efforts and foreign aid have upended campuses. But many university leaders seem wary of provoking a president who has glorified retribution.
By Alan Blinder and Stephanie Saul, Feb. 4, 2025
The opening weeks of President Trump’s second term have cast America’s campuses into turmoil, with upheaval that threatens to erode the financial foundation of higher education in the United States.
As the administration orders the end of diversity programs and imposes cuts to foreign aid, university presidents and their lawyers fear that millions of dollars in federal funding could ultimately vanish. Some research projects, including many connected to the U.S. Agency for International Development, have been suspended, and program directors have made plans for layoffs.
But universities have largely been quiet. Professors and administrators alike seem wary of provoking a president who has glorified retribution and has already started to tighten the funding spigot. Staying out of the spotlight, some reason, is prudent.
Those who have spoken have often relied on carefully calibrated letters and statements, noting that they are watching but hardly offering any overt opposition. In some instances, researchers and campus leaders have been pressured into silence by a government that has demanded they not speak to reporters as money remains bottled up.
“It’s a hard time and it’s an uncertain time and the combination is nearly paralyzing,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, which counts more than 1,600 colleges and universities in its membership.
The uncertainty, Dr. Mitchell said, has created “reluctance to speak out for fear of repercussions,” a phenomenon he described as “a rational fear.”
The White House’s threat last week to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans posed a major risk to universities, though the plan’s legal fate has been thrown into doubt. Other orders, like ones suspending foreign aid and insisting that federal money not go toward diversity, equity and inclusion work, are still convulsing campuses.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump and others now in his administration crusaded against a cadre of pre-eminent schools, despite the president being an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania and Vice President JD Vance holding a law degree from Yale. But the early policy pushes are striking at campuses far beyond the Ivy League.
That includes public research universities that are the pride of many state systems and that are, in some cases, integral to the Feed the Future initiative at U.S.A.I.D. The project, whose website has been offline for days, promotes global food access. But it is built around “innovation labs” at universities in the United States, many of them juggernauts in red states, like the University of Georgia and Mississippi State University.
The program, which has spent billions over the years, has effectively been on hiatus as Trump administration officials conduct a broad examination of American aid abroad.
“Reviewing and realigning foreign assistance on behalf of hardworking taxpayers is not just the right thing to do, it is a moral imperative,” Tammy Bruce, the State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement announcing the pause. The department claimed last week that it had already “prevented” at least $1 billion in “spending not aligned with an America First agenda.”
As the administration trumpets the closing of the nation’s checkbook, universities have hardly harnessed their own bully pulpits. Despite outrage over campus protests, tuition levels and particular professors and courses buffeting the higher education industry, many individual universities retain enormous sway and good-will in their communities and states.
For now, though, schools seem to be reluctant to try to tap into that. Mississippi State, which leads a Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish under a $15 million grant, declined to comment. A spokesman for the state’s higher education board said officials were “aware of the temporary pause” and would “continue to monitor this directive.”
And the University of Georgia, home to the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut, similarly referred an inquiry about the pause in aid to the state’s higher education system. The system, led by Sonny Perdue, Mr. Trump’s agriculture secretary during his first administration, did not respond to an interview request.
An inquiry to U.S.A.I.D. about claims that it had directed researchers to avoid speaking to the news media went unanswered. The agency, founded in 1961, has itself become a cauldron of worry as top officials have been placed on leave and Elon Musk, who is seeking to cut $1 trillion in federal spending, declared that the administration would close it. (It is not clear whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Musk have such authority.)
On Monday, after agency employees assigned to the Washington headquarters were told to stay home from work, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he was serving as the agency’s acting administrator.
Some of the silence and hesitancy from campuses stems from confusion. In recent days, university lawyers have scrambled to decipher terse stop-work orders, in part to determine whether schools can use their own money to continue research projects that had been receiving federal support.
If legal, such an option might be financially feasible for only some universities. Federal dollars are seen as the only practical, long-term option for most projects that have relied on backing from Washington.
In the 2023 fiscal year, the federal government gave universities almost $60 billion for research.
During a Faculty Senate meeting that was streamed online on Monday, Jennifer L. Mnookin, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, urged professors to “hold off” on optional expenses so the university could help ensure that “you’re making smart choices.”
“The transition has created for us an enormous amount of uncertainty, combined with fast-moving and changing information,” she said. “It’s generated some potentially quite significant threats to important aspects of our mission, as is true for our peer institutions nationally.”
Universities across the country are for now using a subtle playbook to try to stave off funding losses: beseeching their congressional delegations to intervene, and sometimes deploying Republican-aligned lobbyists across Washington.
“These are different times,” said former Senator Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican who became a lobbyist after he left the congressional leadership. “I’m sure everybody is trying to figure out how it’s going to play out and what they need to do. Different team in town and people are going to have to figure out how to deal with it.”
Schools braced for changes after Mr. Trump’s election, including to the nation’s academic research landscape. The first weeks of the new administration have nevertheless been jarring, said Jeffrey P. Gold, the president of the University of Nebraska.
“The abruptness and the scale of the messaging have been the largest elements of surprise,” he said in an interview, adding that the outcomes of many projects could be harmed if more delays and cuts materialize.
Some critics of Mr. Trump’s budget-cutting ambitions have tried to borrow language from the administration’s rhetoric to make their points.
Mark Becker, the president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, said the possible end of U.S.A.I.D. support for research risked the nation’s stature and competitiveness abroad.
“We urge the administration to resume the critical work of U.S.A.I.D. to assure American prosperity and security,” he said. “It is by empowering our nation’s scientists to tackle global challenges that we will secure U.S. leadership for decades to come.”
Mr. Becker is one of the few academic leaders applying such explicit public pressure against a specific set of potential cuts.
But congressional Democrats have assailed the chaos that they say the administration has unleashed in higher education.
Representative Nikki Budzinski, a Democrat whose district includes the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said she had been “in regular contact with the university since the freeze and, now, the miscommunication about the freeze.”
“It’s really, truly creating panic across the board,” she added. In a statement, the university said its Soybean Innovation Lab, which works to improve agriculture in 31 countries, was notified recently that funding had been paused. It has received more $50 million since 2013.
Republicans expect that voters, especially in conservative states, will have some tolerance even for cuts that affect their communities.
“Probably most Nebraskans are in favor of looking for greater efficiencies,” said Tom Osborne, a Republican who coached the University of Nebraska’s football team to three national championships and later served three terms in Congress. “But sometimes it can pinch a little bit here and there.”
Mr. Osborne predicted that changes to some programs would probably go unnoticed by many voters.
“Looking at the papers and talking to people here,” he said, “I have not heard a whole lot of conversation about it.”
But the consequences already feel acute at some campus offices. At Iowa State University, the compensation of at least 11 people is tied, to some degree, to a U.S.A.I.D. grant that promotes curriculum modernization in Kosovo and that grew out of a decade-old “sister-state” partnership between Iowa and Kosovo.
“We are not to put forth any efforts on these activities,” said Curtis R. Youngs, a professor in the Department of Animal Science who works on the project.
The grant is worth $4 million over five years. “By U.S.A.I.D. standards, that’s not a huge grant,” Dr. Youngs said. “But it’s a sizable grant from our perspective.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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7) As Israel Expands West Bank Operation, Two Soldiers Are Killed
Israel’s military said this week that its campaign targeting militants, which local Palestinians have called one of the most destructive in recent memory, was moving eastward.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 4, 2025
Members of the Israeli military at the site of a shooting in the northern West Bank on Tuesday. Credit...Ammar Awad/Reuters
Two Israeli soldiers were killed in a shooting attack in the northern part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Tuesday as Israel pressed ahead with a military operation that has forced many people to flee their homes and caused widespread destruction.
The attack came two days after Israel announced an eastward expansion in its campaign, which it has said is targeting militants, and which Palestinians have said is one of the most severe in the West Bank in years.
Eight other soldiers were injured in the attack on Tuesday, including two who were in serious condition, the military said in a statement. The assailant, the military added, was later killed in an exchange of fire.
It was unclear whether the assailant was a member of a militant group or had acted alone. But Islamic Jihad and Hamas, two groups that have grown in power in the northern West Bank, called the attack “heroic.”
On Sunday, Avichay Adraee, an Arabic-language spokesman for the Israeli military, posted a video of a controlled demolition in the Jenin camp, a marginalized neighborhood where militants had grown in numbers and sophistication in recent years. Mr. Adraee said 23 buildings used by militants were targeted, among the largest-scale controlled demolitions Israel has carried out in the West Bank in recent years.
Israel launched its operation on Jan. 21, two days after a cease-fire came into effect in the Gaza Strip. The beginning of the operation focused on the Jenin camp and it has expanded to the towns of Tulkarm in the west and Tamun in the east.
It came after the Western-backed Palestinian Authority spent more than a month carrying out its own operation against militants in the Jenin area.
The clashes between the Palestinian Authority and the militants were destructive, leaving multiple dead, including six security officers, a journalist and a middle-aged woman. They also led to the displacement of thousands and widespread losses of water and power.
But Israel’s operation — one of dozens in recent years — has been more damaging.
In addition to the housing demolitions, the Israeli military has ripped up roads in what it has said was a tactic to uncover improvised explosive devices. The operation has killed 25 people in the broader Jenin area and wounded about 65 others, according to the Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
On Sunday, the Israeli military said it had killed 35 militants across several cities in the northern West Bank and arrested 100 wanted people.
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8) Population Transfers Sanctioned by America? It’s on the Table.
By Daniel Levy, Feb. 4, 2025
Mr. Levy is the president of the U.S./Middle East Project.
Ali Moustafa/Getty Images
President Trump has introduced a seemingly game-changing, if incendiary, proposal ahead of his meeting on Tuesday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the first foreign leader he will meet since his inauguration. Three times in less than two weeks, Mr. Trump has suggested that Palestinians could be relocated from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan.
It is hard to exaggerate the traumatic resonance of displacement and population transfer in collective Palestinian memory. This history helps explain the Palestinian determination to remain in the newly devastated territory and the widespread outcry to this relocation proposal and its long-term radicalizing potential.
If the two leaders take this idea seriously in their meeting, and, worse, if the idea comes to fruition, it will almost certainly boost hostility to Israel in the region and kick any prospects of U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Saudi normalization — a goal Mr. Trump enthusiastically seeks to pursue — deep into the long grass. The Saudi leadership recently joined many others in designating Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide and has become more forceful in conditioning normalizing ties on the creation of a Palestinian state. Aside from being morally reprehensible, a large-scale population transfer of Palestinians would very likely close the door on a three-way U.S.-Israel-Saudi deal for the foreseeable future.
Having put the idea out there, Mr. Trump may think the storm that followed gives him leverage. He may assume that Arab leaders — in classic transactional terms — could give him something in return if he drops it. The idea has a potentially beneficial domestic political angle for Mr. Netanyahu. It holds strong appeal to the right-wing allies that his coalition government depends on and for whom continuing the Nakba — the expulsion and flight of Palestinians around Israel’s creation in 1948 — seems to be an ideological goal. These potential benefits will neither last long nor get them very far.
Mr. Trump’s relocation idea joins a long list of Washington’s illusions about settling the conflict in the Middle East: that Israel is more likely to make peace if treated with indulgence in response to accusations of violations of international law; that resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories has a military solution; and that normalizing Israel’s relations with Arab states, with which it is not in conflict, can work as an end run around dealing with Palestinian dispossession and denial of self-determination and rights.
In the current environment, suggestions of depopulation, whether intended as a practical proposition or not, cannot be taken lightly. This is not only because of the history of partition and displacement. It is also because of what is happening now. Shortly after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, as Israel expanded its military operations in Gaza, reports surfaced that the government had floated plans — later downplayed by Mr. Netanyahu — to force Palestinians out of Gaza and into Egypt. Proposals of “voluntary” mass emigration of Palestinians have also been aired in Israeli political circles, including by senior officials.
Following Mr. Trump’s recent comments, Israel’s extreme nationalist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, promised to submit an “operational plan” to the government for carrying out the relocation. He and other extremists have repeatedly promoted Israeli-Jewish settlement of Gaza.
These displacement plans do not end with Gaza. The West Bank, where Israel is escalating military operations, is considered by many right-wing extremists in Israel to be the real prize, and Jordan the preferred destination for Palestinians living there.
None of this offers a future of security for Israelis, either. They risk creating an even more destabilized environment for those neighbors being called on to absorb the relocated Palestinians, and the displacements would serve as a rallying cry and recruitment lure for resistance movements across the region.
Of course, Mr. Trump is well known for his bluster, and it is far from clear whether he and Mr. Netanyahu will make this a priority in their meeting. But what if the goal is to actually see this through to implementation? A number of current Trump administration nominees, including Elise Stefanik, to be the ambassador to the United Nations, and Mike Huckabee, to be the ambassador to Israel, openly advocate a greater Israel that belongs to the Jews only. Can it even be done?
Gaza, in many ways, is indeed the demolition site that Mr. Trump has described. Israel’s military campaign has laid waste to 90 percent of the housing stock, most public infrastructure, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches and governmental buildings. If the guns continue to stay silent and Palestinians see no horizon of hope, or even if war resumes, might an atmosphere be created that is more conducive to mass exit? Could the degree of economic aid and military dependence that Jordan and Egypt have on the United States tip the balance?
Probably not. Israel has failed to defeat either Hamas or crush the determination of the Palestinian people. It is hard to find a starker contrast than that between the words uttered by the U.S. president and the resilience of the Palestinian population, as hundreds of thousands have made their way back to northern Gaza in recent days, determined to rebuild their lives.
There is nothing to suggest that Arab states would either fund such an act of displacement or play any role in it, including as recipient countries, despite Mr. Trump’s claim of Egypt and Jordan, “They will do it.” Quite the opposite — all have come out staunchly in opposition, most recently this weekend at a meeting in Cairo of key Arab foreign ministers, who, in a joint statement, rejected “any efforts to encourage the transfer or uprooting of Palestinians from their land, under any circumstances or justifications.”
There is profound contradiction in hearing a president who prides himself on deportations and closing his own borders to migration being so generous in volunteering third countries as recipients of population transfers.
It is even harder to make the case that removing Palestinians should become a policy priority for the U.S. government. After all, what possible core national security interest could it serve? Whatever else there is to say about plans to acquire Greenland or the Panama Canal, America, at least, would be the end beneficiary. Helping to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians? Not so much. It would only further lacerate America’s standing in the world.
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9) These Settlements With Trump Are Weakening Press Freedoms
By Jameel Jaffer, Feb. 4, 2025
Mr. Jaffer is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Judge Learned Hand, revered for his eloquent and consequential defense of free speech at the height of World War I, came to fear, later in his life, that Americans had placed too much faith in lawyers and legal institutions. In 1944, at a celebration of what was then known as “I am an American Day,” which extolled American citizenship, he told an audience of more than a million people in Central Park:
“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”
I remembered Hand’s “The Spirit of Liberty” speech while watching some of the largest American media institutions and technology companies prostrate themselves, one after another, before Donald Trump, offering obscene sums of money to settle feeble or frivolous lawsuits that one would have expected them to contest. The First Amendment gives American publishers and platforms rights that are the envy of their counterparts around the world. That today so many of these organizations evidently lack the will or courage to exercise them is frightening and dispiriting.
The spectacle of powerful media organizations debasing themselves before Mr. Trump has become so familiar that it is beginning to feel like scheduled programming. In December, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle a lawsuit in which Mr. Trump contended that the network’s star anchor, George Stephanopoulos, had defamed him by saying on his weekly television program that a federal jury had found Mr. Trump liable for rape when in fact it had found him liable for sexual abuse. The payment will be earmarked for Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum; ABC also agreed to pay $1 million in legal fees.
Why the network agreed to the settlement is not entirely clear. Mr. Stephanopoulos’s statement was technically inaccurate, but that alone would not have given rise to liability. At trial, the network would have benefited from the robust protection that the First Amendment affords to criticism of public figures. Mr. Trump would also have had a difficult time proving reputational injury. Some have speculated that the material that ABC had been compelled to turn over to Mr. Trump in discovery had weakened its defense, but at least to an outsider the $15 million payment looks less like settlement than submission.
Meta’s settlement with Mr. Trump, which followed a few weeks after ABC’s, smells even more rank. Mr. Trump’s central claim in that case was that the company had unlawfully censored him in violation of the First Amendment by suspending his Facebook and Instagram accounts after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. To settle the case, Meta agreed to pay Mr. Trump $25 million, most of which would be directed, again, to his presidential library. (If things continue this way, the Trump library will rival Alexandria’s.)
But if Mr. Trump’s complaint against ABC was weak, his case against Meta was laughable. Whatever one thinks of Meta’s decision to de-platform Mr. Trump, the decision was an exercise of Meta’s First Amendment rights, not a violation of Mr. Trump’s. If there was ever any doubt about this question, the Supreme Court effectively resolved it last term, when it held that social media platforms’ content-moderation decisions reflect a constitutionally protected exercise of editorial judgment. Mr. Trump had virtually no chance of prevailing in the case, and Meta’s lawyers surely knew it. It appears that Meta just wanted to pay off Mr. Trump, and that settling the case supplied it with a convenient way of doing so.
Now Paramount, which owns CBS News, is reportedly considering settling a lawsuit in which Mr. Trump claims that “60 Minutes” engaged in deceptive trade practices by editing an interview with Kamala Harris in a misleading way. That, too, is an unimpressive suit with essentially no chance of succeeding. That the complaint seeks $10 billion in damages while offering no solid evidence that Mr. Trump was actually injured underscores how frivolous it is.
But Paramount is probably not worried about liability. What it’s likely worried about is being adverse to the president at a moment when it needs his support for its proposed merger with Skydance. It was likely that same worry that led CBS News to say it would comply with the Federal Communications Commission’s demand for unedited tapes and transcripts of the Harris interview. (Anna Gomez, a Democratic commissioner at the F.C.C., called the demand “retaliatory” and said it was “designed to instill fear.”) Perhaps resistance would have been futile; we can’t know. But in a different era — say six months ago — the network would have put up a fight. At the very least, I imagine it would have asked a court to narrow the F.C.C’.s demand, or to examine the transcripts and tapes itself before determining whether they should be turned over.
Mr. Trump captured the spirit of our times when he observed in December that, “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” but “in this term, everybody wants to be my friend.” Certainly, some of the nation’s most powerful media institutions seem to have concluded that it is simply not in their commercial interests to inconvenience the president, even if sparing him inconvenience means abandoning their own First Amendment rights. Whether the tributes they are paying to the new monarch — or in the CBS case, reportedly contemplating paying — bear the anticipated fruit, we’ll see.
What’s certain is that each settlement weakens the democratic freedoms on which these media organizations depend. They create precedents — not legal ones, but precedents nonetheless — that will shape the way that judges and the public think about press freedom and its limits. They also damage the media institutions’ prestige and credibility. CBS is especially respected for its reporting during and after World War II; Edward R. Murrow’s fearless exposure of Senator Joseph McCarthy is the stuff of legend. How will the network be remembered at the close of this era?
Each settlement also increases the pressure on other media organizations to settle their own disputes with Mr. Trump or find other ways of ingratiating themselves with him. In the days leading up to the election, the owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times both quashed editorials that would have endorsed Ms. Harris over Mr. Trump. After the election, Meta and many of the other major American platforms made million-dollar donations to Trump’s inauguration fund. It’s sometimes said that courage is contagious, but cowardice and cravenness can be, too. Soon it may be unusual and even more perilous for a news organization to protest when it is accused by the president of reportorial recklessness, however outlandish the charge might be.
Judge Hand’s celebrated defense of free speech during World War I came in a case involving a radical magazine that the postmaster of New York City had refused to carry on the grounds that it contained articles and images that might interfere with the war effort. In his opinion, Hand rebuked those who would give the government the power to suppress criticism; he described the right to dissent as a “hard-bought acquisition in the fight for freedom.” It’s a mercantile phrase — and so perhaps one that might resonate with media moguls tempted to trade their liberties for profits. In its recognition that freedom has a price, and that it must be fought for, the phrase conveys sentiments similar to the ones the judge expressed in his Spirit of Liberty speech a quarter-century later.
The First Amendment is just words on a page. Giving those words meaning — sustaining their promise, generation after generation — depends on a civic courage that seems, right now, to be in ominously short supply.
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10) No Apology Over Trump Lawsuit, ‘60 Minutes’ Top Producer Says
Bill Owens, the show’s executive producer, addressed his staff as CBS’s parent company, Paramount, pursued a legal settlement with the president.
By Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, Published Feb. 3, 2025, Updated Feb. 4, 2025
The head of “60 Minutes” told the show’s staff on Monday that he would not apologize as part of any prospective settlement in a lawsuit brought by President Trump against their network, CBS, according to people with knowledge of the remarks.
The comments by Bill Owens, the executive producer who oversees the long-running news program, came as CBS’s parent company, Paramount, continued to pursue settlement talks with Mr. Trump. The president is accusing the network of deceptively editing an interview with his rival, the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris. Many legal experts have described the lawsuit as far-fetched and baseless.
“There have been reports in the media about a settlement and/or apology,” Mr. Owens said, according to two people who heard his remarks. “The company knows I will not apologize for anything we have done.”
Many Paramount executives believe a settlement would increase the odds that the Trump administration would approve a pending multibillion-dollar merger with another company, and Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, supports the effort.
But the move has caused deep distress inside CBS News and particularly at “60 Minutes,” which broadcast the interview with Ms. Harris in October. Journalists there believe a settlement would be an extraordinary capitulation because the editing of the Harris interview was in keeping with standard journalistic practice.
In the prime-time version, Ms. Harris appeared to give an answer, to one question, that was different from the response she gave in a preview of the interview that aired the day before. CBS has said that Ms. Harris had given one lengthy answer and that it had chosen to air different portions at different times.
At the meeting on Monday, held at the “60 Minutes” office in Midtown Manhattan, Mr. Owens spoke to several of the show’s correspondents — including Anderson Cooper, Lesley Stahl and Bill Whitaker — along with other on-air journalists and crew members. Some traveled to New York for the occasion.
Mr. Owens said CBS planned on Monday to send an unedited transcript and camera feeds of the Harris interview to the Federal Communications Commission. A CBS spokesman said Monday evening that the network had provided that material. The agency, which is led by Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, formally requested those materials from the network last week.
“The edit is perfectly fine; let’s put that to bed so we can get on with our lives,” Mr. Owens said about the transcript, according to the people who heard his remarks.
Mr. Owens was asked whether Paramount would pay any money as part of the settlement, and he said it would be up to Ms. Redstone. He said he had not spoken with her about the prospect of a settlement.
A spokesman for Paramount did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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11) Live Updates: Allies, Foes and Palestinians Reject Trump’s Gaza Takeover Talk
Middle East partners, world leaders and Gazans swiftly opposed President Trump’s idea to force Palestinians out of the territory and take it over. Experts said the plan would violate international law.
By Qasim Nauman, Lara Jakes and Aaron Boxerman, Feb. 5, 2025
A Palestinian in the ruins of a building in Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Wednesday. Credit...Hatem Khaled/Reuters
President Trump’s brazen proposal to move all Palestinians out of Gaza and make it a U.S. territory met with immediate opposition on Wednesday from key American partners and officials around the world, with many expressing support for a Palestinian state as experts called it a breach of international law.
The proposal also threatens a U.S. ambition for normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In a statement issued before 4 a.m. local time, Saudi Arabia expressed its “unequivocal rejection” of attempts to displace Palestinians and reiterated that it would not establish diplomatic ties with Israel in the absence of an independent Palestinian state.
Egypt’s foreign ministry said in a separate statement that aid and recovery programs for Gaza must begin “without the Palestinians leaving.”
Gaza has been devastated by Israel’s military campaign against Hamas since the militant group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Speaking alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump described Gaza as “a demolition site” that the United States would rebuild into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Hamas has ruled in Gaza for most of the past two decades and has begun re-establishing control there since a cease-fire took effect last month. The group immediately rejected the idea of a mass relocation of the territory’s roughly two million Palestinians, a politically explosive proposal in a region with a long and bloody history of forced displacement.
Riyad Mansour, the leader of the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations, said that world leaders should respect Palestinians’ desire to rebuild Gaza themselves. Those who want to send Gazans “to a happy ‘nice place,’” Mr. Mansour said, using language that Mr. Trump had employed, should “let them go back, you know, to their original homes inside Israel.”
The Geneva Conventions prohibit the forcible relocation of populations. The United States and Israel have both ratified the conventions.
Here is what else to know:
· Around the world: Mr. Trump brought together allies and adversaries alike in opposition to his proposal, though some sought to strike a balance by not criticizing him directly.
· Against the law: The proposition would unquestionably be a severe violation of international law, experts say. Forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity.
· Swift rejection: Mr. Trump has floated the idea of Palestinians leaving Gaza multiple times in recent days, including a proposal to move them to Egypt and Jordan. That was rejected last week by a broad group of Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, in addition to Egypt and Jordan.
· Reaction in Israel: It was not clear whether Mr. Netanyahu was expecting Mr. Trump to announce such a proposal, but he smiled as the president talked about moving all Palestinians out of Gaza. Back home, far-right Israeli politicians celebrated Mr. Trump’s proposals as a vindication of their long-held dreams of the mass departure of Palestinians from Gaza. “It is now clear: this is the only solution,” said Itamar Ben-Gvir, until recently the country’s national security minister.
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12) Trump’s proposal puts Egypt and Jordan in an impossible position.
By Vivian Yee, Reporting from Cairo, Feb. 5, 2025
For decades, the question of whether and how Palestinians might build a state in their homeland has been at the center of Middle East politics — not only for the Palestinians themselves, but also for Arabs around the region, many of whom regard the Palestinian cause almost as their own. Forcing Palestinians out of their remaining territory, Arabs say, would doom that shared desire for Palestinian statehood and destabilize the entire region in the process.
So it was a nightmare for the Palestinians’ closest Arab neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, and a dream come true for Israel’s far-right-dominated government, when President Trump proposed moving everyone out of the Gaza Strip and onto Egyptian and Jordanian soil, an idea he repeated in a White House news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Tuesday.
To the two Arab governments, it is not a matter of real estate or refugee camps, but of compromising their own long-held principles, angering their people, risking their own security and stability and perhaps paving the way for West Bank Palestinians to meet the same fate. They have responded with categorical “nos.”
That refusal has been backed up by politically independent and opposition figures in Egypt alongside mouthpieces for the country’s authoritarian government, underscoring how the Palestinian issue unifies even the bitterest political opponents in Egypt.
But Mr. Trump has shown little regard for the two countries’ concerns, their sovereignty or the idea of Palestinian statehood.
“They say they’re not going to accept,” Mr. Trump said of Egypt and Jordan during an earlier meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in the Oval Office. “I say they will.”
The president may have ways of bending them to his will. Egypt and Jordan are among the top recipients of American military aid worldwide; Mr. Trump has mentioned the funding in recent weeks, though without publicly threatening to pull it over the Gaza issue.
Still, analysts say the financial incentives of keeping that aid, which makes up a limited portion of each country’s budget, are minor compared to the two governments’ fears of alienating their populations by appearing complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and other anxieties. Though the rulers of both countries often brook little dissent on other matters, often using repression to silence internal criticism of their decisions, analysts say they know they cannot afford to ignore public opinion on such a crucial issue.
“It’s no joke going up against Trump, particularly for Egypt and Jordan,” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute. But since “this would really be a bridge way too far for much of public opinion,” he added, “there is no other option for an Arab leader. I don’t see what else they could do.”
For President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, the issue is particularly sensitive because he has tried to rally public support for himself at a time when Egyptians are enduring a prolonged economic crisis by painting himself as a champion of the Palestinians. Egypt also sees the possibility of Palestinians settling en masse in Egypt as a serious security threat, government officials, diplomats and analysts say: Officials worry that members of militant groups among forcibly displaced Palestinians could launch attacks at Israel from Egyptian soil, inviting Israeli military retaliation.
Jordan, with its far smaller population — many of Palestinian descent — and heavy dependence on U.S. support, is perhaps even more vulnerable. Far-right Israelis have long talked of Jordan as the place where Palestinians forced out of Gaza and the West Bank should make their home instead of their current territories, raising fears in Jordan that if people from Gaza are forced out, Israel will next drive Palestinians out of the West Bank and annex it.
Many, if not all, would likely be forced to go next door to Jordan, destabilizing a country already unsettled by tensions between citizens who are of Palestinian descent and those who are not, analysts say.
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13) Gazans condemn Trump’s proposal for a U.S. takeover.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 5, 2025
Palestinians in Gaza expressed a mixture of condemnation and confusion on Wednesday over President Trump’s declaration that the United States should seize control of the devastated coastal territory and forcibly displace its entire population.
A number of Gazans said they found Mr. Trump’s comments reprehensible, noting they were in harmony with plans presented by far-right members of Israel's governing coalition. But while some rejected leaving Gaza under any circumstances, others said conditions were so unlivable after 15 months of Israeli bombardment that they would consider relocating.
“I need to stay in my land. My life, my family, and my memories are here,” said Mohammed Fares, 24, a resident of Gaza City who was displaced to the southern city of Khan Younis. “I have something in Gaza I can’t get anywhere else. I’ll stay, even through hell.”
Mr. Fares said he was staying at a relatives’ home in Khan Younis because his family’s home in Gaza City was in tatters and because there was little water available there.
About two million Palestinians remain in Gaza after a war that has reduced cities to rubble and killed tens of thousands of people. Israel waged a war against Hamas after the armed Palestinian group led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people.
Mr. Trump said that all Palestinians in Gaza should be moved to neighboring Arab countries such as Egypt and Jordan because of the devastation wrought by the war.
Palestinians blasted the notion of forced displacement, though some said they would be open to finding a more stable life outside Gaza.
“It’s unacceptable to expel people from their homes,” said Mukhlis al-Masri, 33, a resident of the northern town of Beit Hanoun displaced to Khan Younis. “But I never thought I would get to this place, where everything is a struggle.”
If he were able to move outside Gaza, Mr. al-Masri said, he would.
“Do I want to live through a tragedy for another 20 or 30 years? Do I want to continue to live through hell? “I can't.”
Since a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas came into effect on Jan. 19, the entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza has surged but residents have said restoring a relative degree of normalcy still feels years away. The simplest of tasks before the war — charging a phone or bathing — have become daily ordeals.
To take a shower, Mr. Mukhlis, his wife, and three sons lay out a sheet of plastic across a classroom at a United Nations school and dump glasses of water on themselves, he said.
Other Palestinians criticized Mr. Trump’s claim that they would live in “peace and harmony” in new places outside Gaza.
Some Arab countries have seriously restricted the rights of Palestinian refugees. For example in Lebanon, they are barred from working in several professions.
“Arab countries consider us 7th-class citizens,” said Abd al-Rahman Basem al-Masri, 27, a doctor from the central Gaza city of Deir al Balah. “Why should I leave the land of my fathers and forefathers for that?”
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14) A question surrounding Trump’s plan: Does he mean it?
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 5, 2025
President Trump’s plan to place Gaza under American occupation and transfer its two million Palestinian residents has delighted the Israeli right, horrified Palestinians, shocked America’s Arab allies and confounded regional analysts who saw it as unworkable.
For some experts, the idea felt so unlikely — would Mr. Trump really risk American troops in another intractable battle against militant Islamists in the Middle East? — that they wondered if it was simply the opening bid in a new round of negotiations over Gaza’s future.
To the Israeli right, Mr. Trump’s plan unraveled decades of unwelcome orthodoxy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, raising the possibility of negating the militant threat in Gaza without the need to create a Palestinian state. In particular, settler leaders hailed it as a route by which they might ultimately resettle Gaza with Jewish civilians — a long-held desire.
To Palestinians, the proposal would constitute ethnic cleansing on a more terrifying scale than any displacement they have experienced since 1948, when roughly 800,000 Arabs were expelled or forced to flee during the wars surrounding the creation of the Jewish state.
“Outrageous,” said Prof. Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian political analyst from Gaza who was displaced from his home during the war. “Palestinians would rather live in tents next to their destroyed homes rather than relocate to another place.”
“Very important,” wrote Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right Israeli lawmaker and settler leader, in a social media post. “The only solution to Gaza is to encourage the migration of Gazans.”
“Comical,” said Alon Pinkas, a political commentator and former Israeli ambassador. “This makes annexing Canada and buying Greenland seem much more practical in comparison.”
But it is the very outlandishness of the plan that signaled to some that it was not meant to be taken literally.
Just as Mr. Trump has often made bold threats elsewhere that he ultimately has not enacted, some saw his gambit in Gaza as a negotiating tactic aimed at forcing compromises from both Hamas and from Arab leaders.
In Gaza, Hamas has yet to agree to fully cede power, a position that makes the Israeli government less likely to extend the cease-fire. Elsewhere in the region, Saudi Arabia is refusing to normalize ties with Israel, or help with Gaza’s postwar governance, unless Israel agrees to the creation of a Palestinian state.
Mr. Trump’s maximalist plans may have been an attempt to get both sides to shift their positions, Israeli and Palestinian analysts said.
Faced with a choice between preserving its own control over Gaza and maintaining a Palestinian presence there, Hamas might perhaps settle for the latter, according to Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs.
And Saudi Arabia is being prodded to give up its insistence on Palestinian statehood and settle instead for a deal that preserves Palestinians’ right to stay in Gaza but not their right to sovereignty, according to Professor Abusada, the Palestinian political scientist.
Saudi Arabia swiftly rejected Mr. Trump’s plan on Wednesday, issuing a statement that underlined its support for Palestinian statehood. But some still think the Saudi position could change. During Mr. Trump’s previous tenure, in 2020, the United Arab Emirates made a similar compromise when it agreed to normalize ties with Israel in exchange for the postponement of Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.
“Trump is showing maximum pressure against Hamas to scare them, so they make real concessions,” Professor Abusada said. “I also think he is using maximum pressure against the region, so they would settle for less in exchange for normalization with Israel. Exactly like what the U.A.E. did.”
In turn, Mr. Trump has given the Israeli right a reason to support an extension of the cease-fire, Israeli analysts said.
For more than a year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing allies have threatened to collapse his coalition if the war ends with Hamas still in power. Now, those hard-liners have an off-ramp — a pledge from Israel’s biggest ally to empty Gaza of Palestinians at some point in the future.
Nadav Shtrauchler, a former adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, referring to those right-wing elements, said, “In time, they will need to see some evidence that it is actually happening.”
But for now, he added, “They will be more patient.”
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.
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15) Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab
In the radical opening weeks of his second term, President Trump has appeared to feel little constraint by any need to show respect for the rule of law.
By Charlie Savage, Feb. 5, 2025
Charlie Savage has been writing about presidential power and legal policy for more than two decades. He reported from Washington.
President Trump has encountered few obstacles so far in his second term’s assault on the federal government. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
In his first term, President Trump seemed to relish ripping through the norms and standards of self-restraint that his predecessors had respected. Three weeks into his second term, hand-wringing about norms seems quaint.
Other presidents have occasionally ignored or claimed a right to bypass particular statutes. But Mr. Trump has opened the throttle on defying legal limits.
“We are well past euphemism about ‘pushing the limits,’ ‘stretching the envelope’ and the like,” said Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University and the author of a casebook on separation-of-powers law. The array of legal constraints Mr. Trump has violated, Mr. Shane added, amounts to “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.”
Mr. Trump has effectively nullified laws, such as by ordering the Justice Department to refrain from enforcing a ban on the wildly popular app TikTok and by blocking migrants from invoking a statute allowing them to request asylum. He moved to effectively shutter a federal agency Congress created and tried to freeze congressionally approved spending, including most foreign aid. He summarily fired prosecutors, inspectors general and board members of independent agencies in defiance of legal rules against arbitrary removal.
More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed so far challenging moves by the Trump administration, though many overlap: At least nine, for example, concern his bid to change the constitutional understanding that babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents are citizens.
Courts have temporarily blocked that edict, along with his blanket freeze on disbursing $3 trillion in domestic grants from money Congress appropriated. And a federal judge has temporarily blocked the transfer of a transgender federal inmate to a male prison, pausing a move in line with one of Mr. Trump’s executive orders.
But those obstacles so far have been rare in Mr. Trump’s blitzkrieg, which has raised the question of whether, in his return to office, he and his advisers feel constrained by the rule of law.
This week, Mr. Trump moved to effectively dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and fold its functions into the State Department, making Secretary of State Marco Rubio its acting director. He had already crippled U.S.A.I.D. by imposing a “temporary” freeze on disbursing foreign aid that Congress appropriated, which as time passes is increasingly at odds with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
Since the first Congress, it has been the legislative branch — not the president — that decides how to structure the executive branch, creating departments and agencies, giving them functions and providing them with funds to carry out those missions. And Congress has enacted laws that say U.S.A.I.D. is to exist as an “independent establishment,” not as part of any executive department.
No matter. On Monday, Mr. Trump was asked whether he needed an act of Congress to do away with the agency. He dismissed that suggestion and insulted the officials who work there.
“I don’t think so, not when it comes to fraud,” Mr. Trump said. “If there’s fraud — these people are lunatics — and if — if it comes to fraud, you wouldn’t have an act of Congress. And I’m not sure that you would anyway.”
Rumors abound that Mr. Trump is weighing executive actions to at least partly dismantle the Education Department, another component of the government that Congress has mandated exist by law.
Mr. Trump and his appointees have also been firing people in naked defiance of statutes Congress enacted to protect against the arbitrary removal of certain officials, like civil servants or board members at independent agencies.
For example, Mr. Trump shut down three agencies by ousting Democratic members before their terms had ended. That effectively hobbled the agencies, the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, because they were left with too few officials to have a quorum to act.
Congress created those agencies to be independent of the White House, and all three have been understood to have forms of protections limiting the president’s ability to remove their leaders without a good cause, like misconduct, although only the labor board statute says that. Regardless, Mr. Trump flouted the limit.
In so doing, the Trump administration appears to be setting up test cases should those officials sue, that would give the Republican-appointed supermajority on the Supreme Court an opportunity to expand on the so-called unitary executive theory. That doctrine, developed by the Reagan administration legal team, holds that the Constitution should be interpreted to prohibit Congress from enacting laws that limit a president’s absolute control of the executive branch.
The Justice Department has fired most of the prosecutors who worked on the cases that led to two indictments of Mr. Trump, along with those who worked on cases against ordinary rioters from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault. Top career leaders across the F.B.I. have been fired as well, and on Tuesday the bureau turned over a list of the thousands of agents who participated in those investigations, raising fears that they, too, will be purged.
None of those firings have complied with laws aimed at protecting the civil service and its senior career officials from losing their posts without a good cause, a process that includes hearings before the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Peter L. Strauss, a professor emeritus of law at Columbia University who is a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, said the Trump administration had embraced lawlessness.
“President Trump and his friends are ignoring both federal law and the, to me, clear limitation of presidential power in Article II of the Constitution,” he said. “The Constitution did not imagine what we are seeing. All one has to do is to read the whole of Article II to understand that.”
Bulldozing Legal Constraints
It is not clear what lawyers Mr. Trump’s team has consulted for all his intended moves, although the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the office of the White House counsel, David Warrington, approved the blanket spending freeze, which has now been suspended and enjoined by a court.
“White House Counsel’s Office believes that this is within the president’s power to do it, and therefore, he’s doing it,” she said at a news briefing last week.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump’s advisers made clear that they would use aggressively permissive legal gatekeepers in a second term.
And the Trump team has at least partly sidelined the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is supposed to review proposed executive orders and substantive proclamations for form and legality.
During transitions, the normal process is for a career lawyer in that office, walled off from the exiting administration’s political appointees, to vet drafts of directives the president-elect is considering issuing upon taking office. But Mr. Trump’s transition team did not use that mechanism for his slew of early directives, instead vetting drafts with handpicked lawyers from outside.
Nothing suggests this practice of shopping around for outside legal advice has abated; the Office of Legal Counsel’s website lists no Trump political appointee currently filling the role of its acting chief. A person familiar with the matter said there is now one political appointee in the office.
Even before taking office, Mr. Trump challenged the rule of law by declaring he would nullify a statute barring TikTok from operating in the United States unless its Chinese owners sold it. He made the assertion even though the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law. And in his directive to the Justice Department forbidding enforcement, Mr. Trump ordered that TikTok and its support services be notified “that there has been no violation of the statute” if they defied it.
Even if that could be seen as a particularly aggressive example of prosecutorial discretion, presidents have never been understood to have the power to make acting contrary to a law not count as a violation of it.
Since then, Mr. Trump appears to have been basically operating with a philosophy that he will do whatever he wants despite any legal impediments, then fight in court if necessary.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump’s advisers outlined their hope to fundamentally overhaul the structure of the federal government to curb the civil service and expand presidential power. But it was not clear at the time that the incursion would be effectively outsourced to Elon Musk, the billionaire whom Mr. Trump has unleashed upon the executive branch in search of “efficiency.”
Mr. Musk and employees from his various companies have also been rampaging through the federal bureaucracy, including by seizing access to a Treasury Department system that handles federal payments and has sensitive information, like Social Security numbers, whose disclosure is limited by the Privacy Act. Mr. Musk’s team also got into a standoff with employees at U.S.A.I.D. over its demand for access to classified information.
Federal employees at both the Treasury and U.S.A.I.D. who resisted him were placed on administrative leave. Mr. Musk’s team also shut down U.S.A.I.D.’s headquarters overnight, emailing employees not to come in, and its website went dark.
The Trump team has been opaque about exactly what legal status allows Mr. Musk to be exercising executive power, even at Mr. Trump’s behest, but The New York Times reported this week that Mr. Musk has been deemed a “special government employee.”
The administration has not said when he acquired that status, nor whether or to what extent Mr. Trump has waived a criminal conflict-of-interest law that binds even special employees from touching government matters that could affect their personal interests. For Mr. Musk, that category is vast given how heavily his companies rely on federal contracts.
Meekness by Congressional Republicans
There were reasons to believe that Mr. Trump’s second term would be more radical than his first even before the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed supermajority last summer proclaimed a new constitutional doctrine that current and former presidents are largely immune from prosecution if they use their official powers to commit crimes.
Unlike last time, the advisers who stuck with him worked to ensure there would be no appointees around him inclined to check his impulses.
Mr. Trump also has little reason to fear impeachment, which he has already survived twice. He has tightened his grip on the Republican Party, which controls Congress and so far has put up scant defense of its institutional prerogatives.
No Republican joined Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a letter on Sunday warning Mr. Rubio that “any effort to merge or fold U.S.A.I.D. into the Department of State should be, and by law must be, previewed, discussed, and approved by Congress.”
A Virginia Democrat, Representative Don Beyer, echoed that point on Monday during a news conference outside the aid agency’s headquarters, calling what Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk were doing “illegal.” He added, “Stopping this will require action by the courts and for Republicans to show up and show courage and stand up for our country.”
Nor have congressional Republicans sharply pushed back against Mr. Trump’s summary firing of 17 inspectors general, the independent watchdogs Congress created to hunt for waste, fraud, abuse and illegality in the government. The firings defied a law that required him to give detailed, written justifications to lawmakers 30 days in advance.
For example, Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee and styles himself as a champion of inspectors general, reacted mildly, issuing a statement and a letter to Mr. Trump that noted that the removals had not followed the law and asked for the rationale behind them. He has not demanded that Mr. Trump rescind the firings, nor unleashed tactics — like holding up cabinet nominees — that lawmakers can use as leverage.
In 1952, when the Supreme Court struck down President Harry S. Truman’s attempt to seize steel mills, Justice Robert Jackson observed that Congress has tools to resist presidential arrogation of its power. But in practice, he added, lawmakers may lack the political fortitude to prevent their authority from slipping through their fingers.
“I have no illusion that any decision by this court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems,” he wrote. “A crisis that challenges the president equally, or perhaps primarily, challenges Congress. If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that ‘The tools belong to the man who can use them.’”
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16) U.S. Postal Service Reverses Decision to Halt Parcel Service From China
The Postal Service will continue to accept parcels from Hong Kong and China despite a new executive order that will require greater inspection of packages.
By Keith Bradsher, Ana Swanson and Jordyn Holman, Published Feb. 4, 2025, Updated Feb. 5, 2025
Keith Bradsher reported from Bangkok, Ana Swanson from Washington, and Jordyn Holman from New York.
The United States Postal Service on Wednesday reversed its decision to temporarily stop accepting packages from mainland China and Hong Kong. Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The United States Postal Service on Wednesday said it would continue to accept packages from China and Hong Kong, reversing a decision to temporarily halt those deliveries after an order by President Trump took effect that ended duty-free handling of many smaller parcels.
Mr. Trump ordered on Saturday that all goods leaving China starting on Tuesday must follow the rules for higher-value shipments. Until the change, parcels worth up to $800 apiece were not required to include detailed information on their contents and were not subject to tariffs.
A spokesman for the postal service said that as of Wednesday, it “will continue accepting all international inbound mail and packages from China and Hong Kong Posts. The USPS and Customs and Border Protection are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery.”
The United States imports close to four million of such lower-value parcels a day with little or no customs inspection and no duties collected, with most of them coming from China.
The Trump administration and other critics have contended that allowing these packages into the United States has created a conduit for fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, and related supplies to enter the United States.
But the duty-free provision on lower-value parcels, known as the de minimis rule, has also been used by many e-commerce companies to bring regular consumer items from China into the United States without paying tariffs on them.
Private shipping companies including FedEx and UPS are also affected by the change in customs rules, as they move a large portion of the parcels, running frequent cargo flights from China to the United States. Neither company has responded yet to questions about how they will handle the new rules.
The de minimis provision was included in a broader order by Mr. Trump that imposed an extra 10 percent tariff on all imports from China.
Lower-value parcels from China, which previously were tariff-free, now face not only the 10 percent tariff but also the many complex tariffs on every category of goods that these shipments previously skirted entirely.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Service did not respond to a question about whether stoppages were related to the change in trade rules, referring to a statement the service had released announcing the suspension.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which is responsible for inspecting imports and assessing tariffs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House did not immediately provide comment. Trade lawyers said the postal stoppage was caused by the executive order.
The rapid rollout of Mr. Trump’s trade orders left little time for postal and customs officials to prepare to scrutinize so many packages. Mr. Trump said on Jan. 22 that he would put tariffs on Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1.
He added China to the list on Jan. 23, but did not say then that he would include a ban on duty-free handling of shipments under $800 from any of the three countries. He signed the executive orders on Feb. 1, including the de minimis ban for all three countries, to take effect just three days later. On Monday, he suspended the orders on Canada and Mexico, but left in place the tariffs and de minimis rule on China.
Supporters of de minimis have long said that eliminating the provision would increase the burden on U.S. customs officials. Customs and Border Protection is also the primary agency responsible for carrying out much of Mr. Trump’s enforcement actions at the border.
In an online event in October, Ralph Carter, the vice president of regulatory affairs at FedEx, observed that resources were stretched for U.S. customs officials and that a change to de minimis rules could lead to bottlenecks for shippers.
“If we convert these millions of shipments from de minimis into formal, informal clearances, we’re going to have serious supply chain backups, because there simply isn’t the resources to manage that,” he said. “And so that’s going to affect all importers, not just importers of de minimis.”
DHL, a global logistics company, said on Monday that applying tariffs to lower value shipments into the United States would require it to assess how it processes packages. The company said it was in discussions with U.S. customs officials.
Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail, a research and consulting firm, said that the decision to stop international packages coming from China and Hong Kong would have its greatest impact on marketplaces like Shein, Temu and to some extent Amazon.
“They are the ones putting millions of packages into the system each week,” Mr. Saunders said in an interview. “That route has now been cut off at least temporarily.”
Shein and Temu are two of the largest e-commerce companies that connect low-cost Chinese factories to millions of American households. Shein declined on Tuesday to comment on the new rules on small packages, while Temu has not yet responded to questions sent on Monday. Amazon also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Raising the duty-free minimum has allowed millions of American households to buy low-cost goods from China. But U.S. manufacturers in sectors like textiles and apparel have contended that the imports of small parcels have undermined their ability to stay in business.
The rapid expansion of e-commerce has for years posed a dilemma for Customs and Border Protection. Customs officials were already starting to be overwhelmed by small e-commerce parcels in 2016, when they persuaded Congress and the Obama administration to raise the minimum value for customs inspection and tariff collection to $800, from $200.
But with the increase in the duty-free limit, the number of duty-free parcels has risen tenfold since 2016. Congress has been debating for the past year how to change the rule on duty-free parcels.
Proposals in Congress had tended to focus on matching the policies of China, which discourages de minimis imports. China restricts de minimis imports to a few kinds of products, closely checks what is imported and sets very low limits on the value of each parcel — for many products, less than $100.
The end of the American de minimis rule for goods from China could particularly complicate American imports of clothing. American law bars the import of any goods produced with forced labor in Xinjiang, a region of northwest China where Beijing has ordered a far-reaching crackdown on Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities.
The legislation requires importers to prove that goods with any content from Xinjiang did not involve forced labor — a hard legal standard to meet because China does not allow independent labor inspections there. And Xinjiang produces much of China’s cotton.
The de minimis imports skirted those rules. The suspension of de minimis rules may make it harder for companies to ship such goods from China.
Traditional retailers with stores, like Gap, ship their merchandise in bulk from overseas and pay tariffs on it, and already must comply with legislation against forced labor. So they may be affected much less by the rule change than e-commerce companies.
Peter Eavis contributed reporting.
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