Stagnant waters and poverty can be found all around in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.
Haiti Action Committee Condemns Trump’s Decision to End Temporary Protected Status for Haitians
Haiti Action Committee denounces the latest white supremacist attack by the Trump Administration directed at Haitians living in the US. The announcement that the US will end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians puts a target on the back of over 500,000 Haitians.
It is, quite simply, a plan for ethnic cleansing – and it must be opposed.
The US government has granted 17 countries Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which allows undocumented people from those countries to work and live legally in this country, but does not provide a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship. A country is designated for TPS when conditions there are so bad that it’s not safe or economically viable for people to return, for instance in case of hurricanes and other natural disasters or war and political instability. Haiti was granted TPS status after the horrific earthquake of 2010 that killed more than 300,000 people. This was followed by Hurricane Matthew that devastated Haiti’s southern peninsula in 2016 and the disastrous 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in August 2021. By July of 2024, over 520,000 Haitians had been granted TPS, and they are now in the crosshairs of ICE and Homeland Security.
Many of the Haitians who are impacted by this inhumane ruling have been in the United States for years and have families with children who are US citizens. They own homes and businesses, and pay taxes. Deportations will break up families with the US-born children having the option to remain in the country (assuming birthright citizenship is not overturned), and their undocumented parents forced to return to a country called a “living hell” by those who live there.
The current conditions in Haiti are exactly what TPS was set up to address, and it’s unconscionable for the Trump administration to pretend otherwise. There are now no elected officials in Haiti, the result of years of rule by decree by imposed and illegitimate governments, installed by the US and its so-called Core Group of foreign occupiers in the wake of the coup d’etat that overthrew Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, in 2004. In the last year alone, over 5000 Haitians have been killed by paramilitary death squads, armed with weapons that enter the country illegally, mainly from the US. Over one million Haitians have had to flee their homes. Nearly half the population is facing acute hunger, as roads are blocked and markets attacked. Tens of thousands of children have been unable to attend schools. Gang rapes have become the norm as paramilitaries aligned with government and business elites escalate their attacks on opposition communities. The despised Haitian Army, disbanded by President Aristide in 1995, has been reconstituted, readying itself to commit yet more human rights violations.
Already there are lawsuits and protests to prevent mass deportations of Haitians. Haiti Action Committee will be doing all we can to advocate for ongoing TPS protection for Haitians in this country and for an end to the death squad terror in Haiti that has fueled Haitian migration. Please join us in this fight.
To contact us, please go to: action.haiti@gmail.com
For more information, please go to www.haitisolidarity.net or our facebook page athttps://www.facebook.com/HaitiActionCommittee
To support the vital work of Haiti’s grassroots movement, please donate to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund at www.haitiemergencyrelief.org--Haiti Action CommitteePO Box 2040Berkeley,CA 9470233 years of solidarity with the grassroots struggle for dignity, democracy and self-determination of the Haitian people! We Will Not Forget the Achievements of Lavalas in HaitiPlease donate to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund www.haitiemergencyrelief.org - all donations are tax-deductible and support Haiti's grassroots struggle for democracy
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URGENT STEP ONE:
Demand EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER & TREATMENT
FOR IMAM JAMIL
The Bureau of Prisons is denying medical treatment to Imam
Jamil Al-Amin, 81 years old, formerly known as H. Rap Brown.
He has a potentially life-threatening growth on his face, on
top of his multiple myeloma (cancer) & other significant
medical issues.
A civil and human rights leader, wrongfully imprisoned for
the past 24 years, he needs Your Help to avoid his
Death By Medical Neglect
CALL TUCSON COMPLEX 520-663-5000
EMAIL WARDEN Mark Gutierrez, mggutierrez@bop.gov
Give Name & Inmate Number: Jamil Al-Amin, #99974-555
Demand they grant Imam Jamil an EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER from United States Penitentiary (USP) Tucson to Federal Medical Center (FMC) Butner for his Immediate Medical Treatment NOW!!
***Deputy Director of BOP [Bureau of Prisons], (202) 307-3198
URGENT STEP TWO:
Tell his Congressional Delegation of his condition, Urge them to use their offices to inquire the BOP & demand that their constituent (Imam Jamil, West End Community Masjid, 547 West End Pl., SW, Atlanta) receive the emergency medical transfer, diagnosis & treatment.
- Email GA Cong. Nikema Williams PressGA05@mail.house.gov
- Email US Sen. Rafael Warnock press@warnock.senate.gov
- Email US Sen. Jon Ossoff press@ossoff.senate.gov
- Email Atlanta City Councilman Jason Dozier jdozier@atlantaga.gov
- Email GA State Rep Park Cannon park.cannon@house.ga.gov
- Email GA State Sen. Sonya Halpern sonya.halpern@senate.ga.gov
This is most urgent step before Step Three: campaigning for Medical Reprieve by the GA Bd. Of pardons & Parole, THE entity standing in the way of freeing Imam from his unjust conviction by granting a Medical Reprieve.
IMAM JAMIL ACTION NETWORK.ORG
216.296.4617
NATIONAL
347.731.1886
MEDIA
252.907.4443
SOUTHERN
347.731.1886
NJ/NY
202.520.9997
WASH., DC
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) What’s Next for the Gaza Truce? Look at the Border With Egypt.
Israeli forces are supposed to begin withdrawing from the Philadelphi Corridor, a sensitive border zone between Gaza and Egypt, this weekend.
By Aaron Boxerman, Feb. 28, 2025
As the first phase of the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas winds down this weekend, the future of the truce remains murky. What happens in a key strip of land along the border between Egypt and Gaza in the coming week could provide an indication of how things will move forward.
Israel is supposed to begin withdrawing troops on Sunday from the border area, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, and leave it completely by the following weekend. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has long said that Israeli control there is a core security national interest, injecting uncertainty over this step.
What is the Philadelphi Corridor?
An eight-mile strip of land that divides Gaza from Egypt, the Philadelphi Corridor emerged as a major sticking point in cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas. The border, which divides the city of Rafah, was set up under the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979.
After Hamas seized full control of Gaza in 2007, its fighters and officials oversaw the enclave’s border with Egypt and the Rafah crossing, the only exit from Gaza to the outside world not directly overseen by Israel.
Israeli officials have argued that Hamas smuggled in arms and materiel for its fighters from across the Egyptian border. In September, Mr. Netanyahu called the Philadelphi Corridor “Hamas’s oxygen valve.”
In May, Israeli troops advanced along the corridor as part of the military’s assault on Rafah. For months afterward, Mr. Netanyahu argued that leaving the area would endanger Israeli security by allowing Hamas to rearm.
But at the same time, Mr. Netanyahu committed to withdrawing from the border area as part of the cease-fire.
What is supposed to happen this week?
Israeli negotiators are in Cairo for meetings with Egyptian and Qatari mediators to discuss the next steps in the truce. Hamas officials visited the Egyptian capital last week for their own deliberations.
According to the three-part cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, Israeli forces are set to begin withdrawing from the Philadelphi Corridor six weeks into the truce, coinciding with the end of the first phase of the agreement, would expire on Saturday night.
The two sides concluded the final hostage-for-prisoner swaps in the first phase of the agreement on Thursday. They have yet to negotiate the next steps, which would include a permanent end to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territory.
Israel is supposed to leave the corridor by the end of next week, according to the cease-fire deal. The vacuum could be filled by Hamas, which has been reasserting its power in Gaza since the truce went into effect in mid-January.
Will Israel actually withdraw?
Israel agreed to leave the border area by the 50th day of the truce, which would be in early March. Refusing to abide by that commitment would be seen as a major violation and add even more uncertainty to the already precarious truce.
But if the withdrawal goes ahead on schedule, that could add momentum to efforts by mediators to secure the next steps in the cease-fire.
Both Israel and Hamas have reasons to avoid another round of fighting, at least for now. Hamas wants to give its forces a chance to recuperate, while Israel wants to bring home the remaining hostages.
But the prospect of a comprehensive agreement between Israel and Hamas still seems remote.
Israel has conditioned a comprehensive agreement on the end of Hamas’s control in Gaza and the demilitarization of the enclave, both of which Hamas has largely rejected. Israel’s leaders vowed to destroy Hamas in response to the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, but failed to eliminate the group in Gaza despite 15 months of relentless fighting that devastated the territory and killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
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2) As Ramadan Nears, Syrians Feel the Pinch of a Cash Shortage
The Assad dictatorship is out, but Syria’s economy is in chaos after a civil war and recent policy shifts. The situation is putting a damper on a typically festive season.
By Raja Abdulrahim, Photographs by Kiana Hayeri, Reporting from Damascus, Syria, Feb. 28, 2025
Days before the start of Ramadan, lines of people snaked down the stairs outside a bank in Syria’s capital, Damascus, waiting for hours to withdraw the equivalent of about $15 for the requisite holiday shopping.
The new government has imposed severe daily withdrawal limits of about that amount at Syrian banks, dampening what would usually be a festive time as many struggle to buy even the basics for the holy fasting month.
“That can buy maybe a kilo and a half of meat,” said Sleiman Dawoud, a 56-year-old civil engineer among those waiting in the A.T.M. line to withdraw that $15 — 200,000 in Syrian pounds. “But what about the bread, and vegetables and fruits? Ramadan is coming, and we need to spend.”
Ra’if Ghnaim, 75, a retired civil servant, fretted about how he would afford the tradition of giving children small amounts of money at the end of Ramadan as he waited to take out some cash.
This year, Ramadan falls three months after the ouster of the Assad dictatorship that ruled Syria with an iron first for more than five decades. The rebel coalition that has taken over the government in Damascus has instituted several economic changes.
It opened the market to imported products. It eliminated bread subsidies — making the staple food 10 times more expensive. It laid off thousands of public-sector employees. And it capped cash withdrawals at A.T.M.s.
The prices of many goods other than bread have fallen since the new government took over, but many Syrians still can’t buy them because of the withdrawal limits in a cash-based economy where the widespread use of credit cards and e-payments has never taken hold.
Getting cash out has become a part-time job of sorts as Syrians spend hours or even days trying to withdraw enough cash to live, much less splurge during a time of large family gatherings and feasts.
As Syrian pounds have dried up and the government has started shifting economic policy, the currency has begun to strengthen after more than a decade of weakening.
Before the Syrian civil war began in 2011, the exchange rate was about 50 Syrian pounds to the U.S. dollar. When the government was overthrown in December, it was about 15,000, but has since fallen.
The Syrian Central Bank, Economy Ministry and Interior Ministry did not respond to questions.
The Central Bank alluded to the withdrawal limits in a December statement, saying the measures would be temporary. But they have now lasted for months.
This month, a planeload of newly minted Syrian pounds arrived from Russia, where they are printed, according to the state news media. The amount was not made public.
“They indeed do not have enough bank notes. They have a liquidity crisis,” said Karam Shaar, a political economist and senior fellow at the New Lines Institute, a Washington-based think tank, who has been meeting with Syrian officials.
“The current monetary policy that the Central Bank is considering is not finalized, and it doesn’t seem to be coherent” he added.
More than 90 percent of Syrians live in poverty, and one in four is unemployed, according to the United Nations. And on the ground, and in long bank lines across the country, many are suffering.
“We’ll have to cancel the suhoor,” Mahmoud Embarak, a 60-year-old retired military officer, said of the pre-dawn meal that Muslims eat before the start of the daily fast.
He said that the new government had recently cut his pension and that his family was now living off his wife’s nursing pension.
“It won’t be as happy of a time as it has been in the past,” Mr. Embarak added.
Ahlam Kasem, 45, cringed at the mention of Ramadan.
She was waiting in the bank line to withdraw 200,000 Syrian pounds (about $15) from her monthly salary of 380,000 (about $28) as a civil engineer with the agriculture ministry.
“They told us the government doesn’t have any money, the Central Bank doesn’t have, the banks don’t have,” she said. “We have so many questions and there are no answers.”
So, along with her husband, she took a minibus from their town of Saboora, about 10 miles away, and paid 10,000 Syrian pounds each to get to an A.T.M. at the Damascus bank.
She will have to make another trip on another day to withdraw the rest of her salary.
That still won’t buy much for her family of five — much less for the large gatherings to break the fast characteristic of Ramadan.
“There won’t be dinner parties or anything” said Ms. Kasem, who is among the many civil servants who have been laid off with a severance of three months’ salary.
As she spoke, a man rapped on the bank’s metal door, trying to get the attention of an employee inside. No one came.
“We have now gotten to point in Syria where even a cup of coffee may be too much of a hardship for someone to offer you,” she said. “We’re a very social people, but we’ve gotten to the point where we don’t want to visit anyone so as not to put any pressure on them for even a cup of coffee, much less lunch or dinner.”
Those concerns were top of mind at the Bab Sraijeh market, a bustling cluster of shops and street vendors along a cobblestone street in the old city of Damascus. The sound of motorcycles driving through occasionally drowned out the competing offers that sellers were yelling out.
“Ten, ten, practically free,” a young man hollered repeatedly, offering a kilogram of olives for 10,000 pounds, less than one dollar.
At a small shop selling Ramadan decorations — wooden crescent moons, colorful lanterns and string lights — it was mostly quiet. Occasionally, someone would inquire about the price of an ornament and then walk off without buying anything.
“People don’t have money,” said Nour al-Hamwi, 37, who was helping her husband at the shop. “The banks don’t have money, Syria doesn’t have money.”
Last year, the items were flying off the shelves, her husband said. Now, people are buying only necessities.
“The Ramadan atmosphere will be weaker this year,” Anwar Hamid said.
Fatima Hussain Ali, 56, and her husband, Ha’il Ali Jasser, 59, were each carrying several stuffed grocery bags of spices, cheese and flour as they made their way through the market.
The staples of Ramadan — olive leaves, oil, rice, bulgur wheat — are cheaper than before the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad. But the couple, who have eight children, were still buying much less than in previous Ramadans.
“Prices are cheaper, but there isn’t money,” she said.
Except for bread, which has gone from 400 pounds to 4,000 pounds.
She doubted they would host any dinner parties this year. If they did, she joked, they might have to ask their guests to B.Y.O.B.: bring your own bread.
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3) Iowa Lawmakers Pass Bill to Eliminate Transgender Civil Rights Protections
If signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds, the Republican-backed measure would eliminate state civil rights protections for transgender Iowans.
By Mitch Smith, Feb. 27, 2025
In 2022, Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill barring transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports. Credit...Nick Rohlman/The Gazette, via Associated Press
Iowa lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill on Thursday that would end state civil rights protections for transgender people. Advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. rights said that Iowa would become the first state to remove such broad and explicit protections for trans people if the Republican-backed measure was signed into law.
The bill, which now goes to the desk of the Republican governor, passed 18 years after the state, then led by Democrats, enshrined those discrimination protections into Iowa code.
The debate this week in Des Moines, where protesters and Democrats tried without success this week to persuade Republican lawmakers to reconsider, reflected how much the discourse over transgender issues has shifted in the country, and how much Iowa has changed.
“The purpose of this bill, the purpose of every anti-trans bill, is to further erase us from public life and to stigmatize our existence,” said State Representative Aime Wichtendahl, a Democrat who is transgender.
But Republicans said they were concerned that maintaining civil rights protections for gender identity would make other state laws — like those restricting gender-transition treatments for minors and sports participation by transgender women — vulnerable to legal challenges.
“All of these common-sense policies are at risk so long as gender identity remains in the Iowa civil rights code,” State Representative Steven Holt, a Republican supporter of the bill, said on the House floor.
The passage of the Iowa legislation comes as the Trump administration has tried to limit official recognition of transgender identity.
The administration has sought to end funding for hospitals that provide gender-transition treatments to minors, to bar transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports, to bar openly transgender people from serving in the military, to house transgender women in federal prisons with men, and to no longer reflect the gender identities of transgender people on passports.
The bill in Iowa defines sex based on a person’s anatomy at birth and removes gender identity from a list of protected groups that employers, businesses and landlords may not discriminate against. The bill leaves in place discrimination protections for gay and lesbian people, which were passed as part of the same measure as the protections for gender identity.
In testimony at the Capitol on Thursday, opponents of the legislation told lawmakers that they feared transgender people would face widespread discrimination and harassment if the civil rights protections were removed. Many supporters of the bill said they believed that sex was determined at birth and that they worried about transgender women using women’s restrooms. Several speakers on both sides of the issue cited their Christian faith.
“I’m outraged that biological males have a legal right in Iowa to force themselves into my wife’s, daughters’ and granddaughters’ private spaces,” Chuck Hurley of The FAMiLY Leader, a group based in Iowa that describes itself as a Christian ministry to government, told a legislative committee on Thursday.
Minutes later, the Rev. Debbie Griffin, who pastors a church in Des Moines, urged lawmakers to reject the bill, warning that it “would endanger people who are already vulnerable to bullying and discrimination.”
On the federal level, the Supreme Court ruled several years ago that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination. Efforts by Democrats in Congress to expand the scope of those protections beyond the workplace have failed.
More than 20 states, most of them led by Democrats, have explicit employment discrimination protections for transgender people, according to information compiled by the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that supports L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
A spokesman for Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican did not immediately respond to questions on Thursday about whether she had a position on the legislation or planned to sign it. She has previously signed laws that banned gender-transition treatments for minors and that kept transgender girls and women from competing in women’s sports.
Those measures have been part of a broader push by Iowa Republicans into social issues that voters have so far rewarded at the ballot box. In recent years, Ms. Reynolds and legislative Republicans have passed laws to restrict abortion, ban school library books deemed sexually explicit and allow for state-level immigration enforcement.
Democrats have struggled to push back. Former President Barack Obama carried Iowa twice, but Republicans have seen their support surge since President Trump became the party’s leader. Mr. Trump carried Iowa last year by about 13 percentage points, winning 94 of its 99 counties, and Republicans retained large state legislative majorities. A surprise win by a Democrat in a special legislative election last month was a rare bright spot for that party.
Amy Harmon contributed reporting.
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4) U.S. Terminates Funding for Polio, H.I.V., Malaria and Nutrition Programs Around the World
Here are some of the 5,800 contracts the Trump administration formally canceled this week in a wave of terse emails.
By Stephanie Nolen, Stephanie Nolen covers global health., Published Feb. 27, 2025, Updated Feb. 28, 2025
Women listen to a public health educator during an mpox awareness campaign at the Muja camp for the internally displaced near Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo last year. Credit...Arlette Bashizi/Reuters
Starting Wednesday afternoon, a wave of emails went out from the State Department in Washington around the world, landing in inboxes for refugee camps, tuberculosis clinics, polio vaccination projects and thousands of other organizations that received crucial funding from the United States for lifesaving work.
“This award is being terminated for convenience and the interest of the U.S. government,” they began.
The terse notes ended funding for some 5,800 projects that had been financed by the United States Agency for International Development, indicating that a tumultuous period when the Trump administration said it was freezing projects for ostensible review was over, and that any faint hope American assistance might continue had ended.
Many were projects that had received a waiver from the freeze because the State Department previously identified its work as essential and lifesaving.
“People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”
The projects terminated include H.I.V. treatment programs that had served millions of people, the main malaria control programs in the worst-affected African countries and global efforts to wipe out polio.
Here are some of the projects that The New York Times has confirmed have been canceled:
· A $131 million grant to UNICEF’s polio immunization program, which paid for planning, logistics and delivery of vaccines to millions of children.
· A $90 million contract with the company Chemonics for bed nets, malaria tests and treatments that would have protected 53 million people.
· A project in the Democratic Republic of Congo that operates the only source of water for 250,000 people in camps for displaced people located in the center of the violent conflict in the east of the country.
· All of the operating costs and 10 percent of the drug budget of the Global Drug Facility, the main supply channel for tuberculosis medications, which last year provided tuberculosis treatment to nearly three million people, including 300,000 children.
· H.I.V. care and treatment projects run by the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation that were providing lifesaving medication to 350,000 people in Lesotho, Tanzania and Eswatini, including 10,000 children and 10,000 pregnant women who were receiving care so that they would not transmit the virus to their babies at birth.
· A project in Uganda to trace contacts of people with Ebola, conduct surveillance and bury those who died from the virus.
· A contract to manage and distribute $34 million worth of medical supplies in Kenya, including 2.5 million monthlong H.I.V. treatments, 750,000 H.I.V. tests, 500,000 malaria treatments, 6.5 million malaria tests and 315,000 antimalaria bed nets.
· Eighty-seven shelters that took care of 33,000 women who were victims of rape and domestic violence in South Africa.
· A project run by FHI 360 that supported community health workers’ efforts to go door-to-door seeking malnourished children in Yemen. It recently found that one in five children was critically underweight because of the country’s civil war.
· Pre- and postnatal health services for 3.9 million children and 5.7 million women in Nepal.
· A project run by Helen Keller Intl in six countries in West Africa that last year provided more than 35 million people with the medicine to prevent and treat neglected tropical diseases, such as trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis and onchocerciasis.
· A project in Nigeria providing 5.6 million children and 1.7 million women with treatment for severe and acute malnutrition. The termination means 77 health facilities have completely stopped treating children with severe acute malnutrition, putting 60,000 children under the age of 5 at immediate risk of death.
· A project in Sudan that runs the only operational health clinics in one of the biggest areas of the Kordofan region, cutting off all health services.
· A project serving more than 144,000 people in Bangladesh that provided food for malnourished pregnant women and vitamin A to children.
· A program run by the aid agency PATH, called REACH Malaria, which protected more than 20 million people in 10 countries in Africa from the disease. It provided malaria drugs to children at the start of the rainy season.
· A project run by Plan International that provided drugs and other medical supplies, health care, treatment of malnutrition programming, and water and sanitation for 115,000 displaced or affected by the conflict in northern Ethiopia.
· More than $80 million for UNAIDS, the United Nations agency, which funded work to help countries improve H.I.V. treatment, including data collection and watchdog programs for service delivery.
· The President’s Malaria Initiative program called Evolve, which did mosquito control in 21 countries by methods that include spraying insecticide inside homes (protecting 12.5 million people last year) and treating breeding sites to kill larvae.
· A project providing H.I.V. and tuberculosis treatment to 46,000 people in Uganda, run by the Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation, Uganda.
· Smart4TB, the main research consortium working on prevention, diagnostics and treatment for tuberculosis.
· The Demographic and Health Surveys, a data collection project in 90 countries that were crucial and sometimes the only sources of information on maternal and child health and mortality, nutrition, reproductive health and H.I.V. infections, among many other health indicators. The project was also the bedrock of budgets and planning.
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5) The Texas Measles Outbreak Is Even Scarier Than It Looks
By Zeynep Tufekci, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 28, 2025
Desiree Rios for The New York Times
The news that an outbreak in Texas has caused the nation’s first confirmed measles death in a decade — an unvaccinated child — is as unsurprising as it is tragic. Spreading largely in rural Mennonite communities that typically have low vaccination rates, the outbreak has already grown to at least 146 cases since late January. Almost all of them are children.
Parents whose children got infected but survived are no doubt grateful that their family was spared. But startling research about the virus unfortunately tells a new and very different story, recasting what was previously known about how measles works and making clear why the Trump administration’s approach to vaccines is nowhere even close to meeting the moment.
That research, conducted over the past decade by the immunologist and medical doctor Michael Mina and others, revealed that measles destroys immune cells. Even people who recover from the virus lose much of their immune memory, and therefore the protection they had acquired from prior infections or vaccines to all the other childhood illnesses. This leaves survivors more vulnerable to many other diseases for years afterward. Worse, these victims may now face those childhood diseases, to which they lost immune protections, as older children, which puts them more at risk for complications.
Before vaccines were introduced, Mina told me, earlier measles infections may have been implicated in as many as half of all childhood deaths from all infectious diseases. Which, given these findings, would mean the true harm of measles is far greater than its death toll, and the legacy of this outbreak may still be felt years after it’s officially contained.
It’s not just those families that opt out of vaccinations who are at risk. Measles is one of the most transmissible diseases known to humanity. Children don’t get their first vaccine dose until after 12 months, and full protection doesn’t kick in until they get their booster, usually when they’re between 4 and 6. Like other vaccines, it is less effective for elderly people whose immune systems aren’t as robust, and aren’t as helpful or even a possibility for people who are immunosuppressed because of other factors such as cancer treatments.
Overall, the vaccine is highly effective and the rare breakthrough cases — a few in a thousand exposures — tend to be mild. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns, however, that those cases can be vectors for the illness.
The only guaranteed way to protect people from this deadly disease is to keep it from circulating in the first place. But nationwide, vaccination rates have been trending downward, producing such large pockets of vulnerable people that outbreaks in one community can now bleed over to another, the way pockets of dry kindling in a forest can help start a conflagration that consumes it all.
Already, there are cases across the border from Texas in New Mexico that may turn out to be related. If the disease starts circulating more widely, a great many people will be at risk — regardless of their or their communities’ beliefs about vaccines.
A newly circulating virus would mean some unvaccinated people would encounter measles for the first time in adulthood, when the danger it poses is much higher. This effect was evident in World War I, when healthy young conscripts from rural areas had their first exposure to the disease in Army training camps. The result was the worst outbreak the military had seen in almost a century. Thousands of soldiers died.
During Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings for health secretary, Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, practically begged him to acknowledge, however grudgingly, that vaccines don’t cause autism. It was the easiest layup ever, but Kennedy just wouldn’t go there. Maybe not so surprising, given that he had previously told a podcaster that he considers it his duty to tell random strangers that they shouldn’t vaccinate their babies. Cassidy, a medical doctor by training, voted to confirm him anyway.
Since then, Kennedy has had a lot to say about the need to investigate the childhood vaccinations schedule (“nothing is going to be off limits”), claiming that despite decades of widespread use and study it had somehow been “insufficiently scrutinized.” He stopped a sensible public awareness campaign during one of the most severe flu seasons ever, and canceled a key vaccine committee meeting, which may endanger the availability of flu vaccines next year. And he talked about instituting an “informed consent” model for parents that emphasizes vaccines’ possible side effects and no doubt would discourage the vaccinations that have protected Americans from the ravages of infectious disease that in earlier centuries were just a standard part of life.
I might run out of not just column space but an entire newspaper if I tried to list all the false and misleading claims Kennedy made about vaccines in his many speeches and books. Even so, I was shocked this week as I watched him brush off the Texas outbreak as no big deal. The situation there is “not unusual,” he said, even as he doubled the known death toll without explanation. About 20 people have been hospitalized, he said, “mainly for quarantine,” a fact that the chief medical officer of the Lubbock hospital where the child died quickly refuted. “We’re watching it,” Kennedy said, with a casual wave of the hand.
You can probably guess which word he didn’t say.
During a deadly outbreak, we’d ordinarily hope for a clear, direct call for parents to vaccinate their children. But this is the man who, during a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people (79 of them children), actively worked to undermine public trust in the one thing that would have helped most. America, brace yourself.
Right now, the United States has an official verification from the World Health Organization as a measles-free country, which makes it easier for its residents to travel abroad. If these outbreaks continue we may lose that designation, and other countries may begin to require proof of measles vaccination before letting Americans enter. That choice would be hard to argue with.
The situation in Texas may be the wake-up call that gets some holdouts to bring their children to the doctor and request the protection they need and deserve. In 2015, when an unvaccinated 6-year-old died a horrible, prolonged death from the “strangulation disease” of diphtheria, the distraught parents vaccinated their surviving child, while lamenting they’d been conned by anti-vaxxers.
We should do what we can to spare other families from having to learn such a brutal lesson.
All governors should be launching campaigns to increase measles vaccination coverage, but some states are led by people who promote falsehoods. And some Americans live deep in echo chambers where most of what they hear about vaccines are lies and disdain. It won’t be possible to reverse all this quickly. Perhaps the best we can do is inform parents skeptical of vaccines what they’re risking, before it’s too late.
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6) Vance Positions Himself as Trump’s Attack Dog During Blowup With Zelensky
The remarkable scene of a vice president injecting himself into a tense diplomatic discussion suggested that JD Vance does not want to be relegated to the B-team of the Trump administration.
By Michael D. Shear, Published Feb. 28, 2025, Updated March 1, 2025
Michael D. Shear covers the White House. He reported from Washington.
Vice President JD Vance and President Trump had a contentious meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office on Friday. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
For 39 days, Vice President JD Vance performed his duties in the shadows of two bigger-than-life figures: President Trump and Elon Musk.
That changed on Friday.
With cameras rolling, the vice president ambushed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, triggering the kind of overheated argument rarely seen in the Oval Office. Mr. Vance repeatedly accused Mr. Zelensky of disrespecting Mr. Trump by refusing to offer thanks for U.S. assistance.
“Do you think that it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?” Mr. Vance asked, yelling over Mr. Zelensky.
It was Mr. Vance’s most high-profile moment since assuming the role of Mr. Trump’s understudy. And it suggested that the 40-year-old, former first-term senator from Ohio is trying not to be relegated to the B-team of what has already become one of the most fast-paced and aggressive administrations in modern history.
The remarkable scene of a vice president injecting himself into the middle of a tense diplomatic discussion in the Oval Office also showcased Mr. Vance’s media savvy. A onetime best-selling author and CNN political contributor, the vice president has demonstrated a knack for seizing on moments that will capture the media’s attention.
On Friday, Mr. Vance found that moment as Mr. Zelensky tried to explain the ways in which President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had reneged on prior diplomatic deals. Rather than engage with the Ukraine leader on the substance of that question, the vice president used a tried-and-true debater’s technique: He changed the subject.
“You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict,” Mr. Vance said, his voice rising.
Mr. Zelensky kept pressing, at one point asking whether Mr. Vance had ever been to Ukraine to see the situation for himself. When that seemed to anger the vice president even more, Mr. Zelensky began to chide him: “You think that if you will speak very loudly about the war, you —”
But that triggered Mr. Trump, who was sitting between the two men.
“He’s not speaking loudly,” the president said. Within moments, it was Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky who were yelling over each other in a confrontation that would ultimately lead to Mr. Zelensky’s early exit from the White House — without the minerals deal that both men had expected to sign.
Still, it was Mr. Vance, not Mr. Trump, who seemed to deliver the opening salvo on Friday, setting in motion the swift collapse of diplomacy between the two countries.
It was a striking moment for Mr. Vance, who has not been the one generating most of the banner headlines alongside Mr. Trump. That role has been reserved for Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man and the leader of the rapid effort to fire federal workers across the bureaucracy.
During Mr. Trump’s first cabinet meeting on Wednesday at the White House, the vice president sat across from Mr. Trump while the president lavished attention on Mr. Musk. Questions from reporters were directed at Mr. Musk — not Mr. Vance — about his demand that federal employees prove their worth by responding to an email with a description of their previous workweek.
And yet, there have been hints over the last six weeks that Mr. Vance was eager to showcase his own ability to shock.
In mid-February, Mr. Vance stunned European officials by declaring during a speech in Munich that they should end the isolation of far-right parties across the continent. The Germans, he said, should no longer refuse to work with a far-right political party that has often reveled in banned Nazi slogans and has been shunned from government as a result.
“There is no room for firewalls,” Mr. Vance said at the Munich Security Conference, referring to the longstanding agreement among Germany’s major parties not to work with the party, known as the Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
Mr. Vance underscored his message by meeting with Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor in last month’s election.
The vice president has also used Mr. Trump’s favorite communications tool — social media — to grab attention.
Roughly two weeks after the inauguration, Mr. Vance reacted to several court rulings against the president’s executive orders by making a sweeping statement about executive power.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Mr. Vance wrote on X, the social media platform owned by Mr. Musk. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
That statement, too, made headlines. Critics said Mr. Vance was claiming powers for the presidency that go far beyond the limits imposed by the Constitution. Article III of the Constitution empowers courts to exercise judicial review over actions of the executive and legislative branches of government.
Mr. Vance was once dismissive of the president and his agenda. In 2016, he called Mr. Trump an “idiot” and warned about his dangerous rhetoric.
That view is gone. In the Senate, Mr. Vance worked tirelessly to advance Mr. Trump’s political agenda, in part by heaping praise on him. When he became Mr. Trump’s running mate in 2024, Mr. Vance was a dutiful soldier on the campaign trail who was careful not to overshadow the candidate.
In an interview with The New York Times in October, just before the election, Mr. Vance said that he understood Mr. Trump’s abrasive approach to politics, but did not necessarily seek to mimic it.
“President Trump’s approach is President Trump’s approach,” he said. “His style is his style. Do I think that his style and his approach is a necessary corrective to what’s broken about American society? Yes, I do. That doesn’t mean I’m going to try to be Donald Trump.”
But neither, apparently, is he trying to be like the Republican and Democratic lawmakers who met with Mr. Zelensky just before the Oval Office meeting that went off the rails on Friday. That meeting went well, with some lawmakers from both parties posting smiling selfies with Mr. Zelensky. Some were anticipating being part of a signing ceremony for the mineral deal that they expected to take place in a few hours.
Instead, a black SUV sped out of the White House gates carrying Mr. Zelensky shortly after the meeting. Mr. Trump wanted him gone, as he made clear in a social media post.
“He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office,” Mr. Trump wrote. “He can come back when he is ready for Peace.”
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7) Musk and Republican Lawmakers Pressure Judges with Impeachment Threats
Democrats say the calls to remove judges who block Trump administration initiatives amount to intimidation. Some senior Republicans were also skeptical of the effort.
By Carl Hulse, Reporting from the Capitol, March 1, 2025
Representative Eli Crane outside the Capitol this week. “If these partisan judges want to be politicians, they should resign and run for office,” he said in calling for a judge’s impeachment. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Congressional Republicans, egged on by Elon Musk and other top allies of President Trump, are escalating calls to remove federal judges who stand in the way of administration efforts to overhaul the government.
The outcry is threatening yet another assault on the constitutional guardrails that constrain the executive branch.
Judicial impeachments are rare and notoriously time-consuming. The mounting calls for removing federal judges, who already face increasing security threats, have so far not gained much traction with congressional leaders. Any such move would be all but certain to fail in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority would be needed for a conviction.
But even the suggestion represents another extraordinary attempt by Republicans to breach the foundational separation of powers barrier as Trump allies seek to exert iron-fisted control over the full apparatus of government. And Democrats charge that it is designed to intimidate federal judges from issuing rulings that may go against Mr. Trump’s wishes.
“The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” Mr. Musk wrote this week on X, his social media platform, in one of multiple posts demanding that uncooperative federal judges be ousted from their lifetime seats on the bench.
“We must impeach to save democracy,” Mr. Musk said in another entry on X after a series of rulings slowed the Trump administration’s moves to halt congressionally approved spending and conduct mass firings of federal workers. He pointed to a purge of judges by the right-wing government in El Salvador as part of the successful effort to assert control over the government there.
The push comes as arch-conservative House Republicans have filed articles of impeachment against federal judges whom they portrayed as impediments to Mr. Trump, accusing them of acting corruptly in thwarting the administration.
“If these partisan judges want to be politicians, they should resign and run for office,” said Representative Eli Crane, Republican of Arizona, in filing articles of impeachment against Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The judge, who was placed on the bench by President Barack Obama in 2011, had temporarily barred those working for Mr. Musk’s government review team from accessing sensitive Treasury Department records.
Impeachments of federal judges, which historically result strictly from serious criminal behavior rather than the content of rulings, are extremely unusual. They also consume copious amounts of time: Lawmakers must conduct a House investigation and a Senate trial, as they do in the case of presidential impeachments.
Those seeking to remove federal judges must meet a high threshold of securing 67 votes in the Senate. Just eight federal judges have been impeached, convicted and removed in the history of the country, most for egregious criminal and personal behavior. Others have been investigated and acquitted or resigned before they could be removed.
Given the slim chance of successful impeachments for rulings rather than criminal misconduct, Democrats say the impeachment drumbeat is an obvious effort to cow judges and discourage them from making what Mr. Trump would consider adverse rulings. They say it follows a longstanding pattern of Mr. Trump and his allies attacking judges when the courts don’t go their way.
“It’s clear they’re trying to create an environment of intimidation to the judiciary to try to make certain that they don’t rule against President Trump and his policies,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
“It is all about raw politics,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and a senior member of the panel. “It may seem absurd and hypothetical to us here, but to judges, it is extremely threatening. It is plainly a device to bully and intimidate judges to think twice about issuing orders.”
Political pressure on federal judges has reached a level that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted it in his year-end report issued in January. He scolded those who would try to browbeat the judiciary, saying that “attempts to intimidate judges for their rulings in cases are inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed.”
The American College of Trial Lawyers has pushed back on the impeachment calls by Mr. Musk and others, saying in a statement that “threats of impeachment for such judicial acts have no constitutional grounding and are patently inconsistent with the rule of law upon which our nation was founded.”
Criticism of the judges has spread beyond Mr. Musk and hardright elements of the House and has been picked up by Senate Republicans and other officials. Mr. Trump, who has a long record of excoriating judges, warned last month that his administration would have to “look at” judges as they stepped in to block the Musk effort. Vice President JD Vance has also sharply questioned the reach of judicial authority.
Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said in a social media post that “corrupt judges should be impeached and removed” after earlier suggesting that rulings against the administration smacked of a ‘judicial coup.”
In an interview, Mr. Lee, a constitutional law expert with extensive legal experience, said it would be up to the House to determine if federal judges who blocked Trump administration proposals should be turned out.
“The question of whether anybody has committed an impeachable offense here first and foremost is a decision for the House,” Mr. Lee said. “We can’t do anything unless or until the House acts.” He noted that the Constitution provides that judges have lifetime tenure during “good behavior.”
“It is not good behavior if you are corrupt, either legally or criminally corrupt, or if you abuse your power,” he said.
Other senior Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voiced caution on lowering the bar for impeaching federal judges in a fit of pique over decisions against the Trump White House.
“The Rolling Stones said it best: You can’t always get what you want,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who has led the panel. “I’m not a big fan of impeaching somebody because you don’t like their decision. They have to actually do something unethical.”
Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a veteran of the Judiciary Committee, called impeachment “an extraordinary remedy for unique cases.”
“Impeachment is a very serious matter and certainly should be handled on a case-by-case basis in a rational, calm way,” he said. “The best recourse for somebody who is unhappy with what a judge decides is to appeal what that judge decides.”
With rulings much of the time going against the Trump administration in its aggressive campaign to reshape the government and with Mr. Musk and others trying to rally opinion against judges handing down the decisions, it is unlikely that calls for impeachment will die down.
But given the lack of leadership support so far and the scant chance the Senate could muster the votes to oust a judge, lawmakers say the fight to watch is how the administration responds to court directives it doesn’t like.
“Ultimately, this is going to be resolved in the courts,” Mr. Durbin said. “The question is whether Trump feels he has to follow court orders.”
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8) Gazans Mark a Somber Ramadan Amid the Rubble
“This Ramadan is nothing like the ones before,” said one resident as the holy fasting month for Muslims began. “The war has drained it of meaning.”
By Bilal Shbair, Abu Bakr Bashir and Aaron Boxerman, March 1, 2025
Bilal Shbair reported from Gaza City, Abu Bakr Bashir from London and Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/world/middleeast/ramadan-gaza-war.html
Decorations in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Friday, in preparation for Ramadan. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Bags of fragrant spices, crates of dates, frozen chicken and fresh produce. Food and other goods that were scarce during the war have returned to the shops and street markets of Gaza in time for the holy fasting month of Ramadan. And the Israeli bombs have fallen silent.
But the shadow of the war hangs heavy over what was once one of the most joyous seasons in the territory, and life in Gaza has not even begun to return to normal. Street vendors have refrained from playing the special songs they normally would during Ramadan and even if there is more food in the shops, many struggle to afford it.
The first phase of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas has lasted a month and a half, but it was set to elapse on Saturday, which coincides with the first day of Ramadan fasting from dawn to dusk. It could be extended but so far, there has been little progress toward doing so.
Maisa Arafa, 29, who said that her brother had been killed during the war, has been living in a tent with other relatives as they clear away rubble from their devastated home in northern Gaza in hopes of moving into one room that is still intact.
“More than anything, I wish my brother could come back. That would be the only thing to make Ramadan feel like it used to,” Ms. Arafa said as she shopped in downtown Gaza City. “This is not the Ramadan we knew, or even the life we knew.”
Before the war, Ramadan was one of the most joyful festivals in Gaza. Crowds flocked to the mosques, and streets were festooned with colorful lanterns typical of the Ramadan period.
But an enormous gap stretches between the happy holiday memories of a seemingly irrecoverable past and the desolation and grief left by the 15-month war in Gaza. Many Palestinians in the territory see little to celebrate.
Since the Israel-Hamas cease-fire went into effect in mid-January, hundreds of truckloads per day of food and other supplies have been entering Gaza, offering a degree of relief from the intense hunger many suffered during the war. The constant bombardment that haunted civilians’ lives every day for more than a year has ceased.
Farah Irshi, 21, described how the previous Ramadan felt during the fighting between Israel and Hamas. There was little food and about 25 displaced people crowded into their home amid constant bombardment, she said.
“Now there’s more food in the local market as more aid seems to be entering Gaza, but people, including us, have no money at all,” she lamented. “So it’s as if there isn’t anything in the markets, anyway.”
Abdelhalim Awad, who oversees a bakery and supermarket in central Gaza, said that prices had dropped since the worst days of the war, when a 55-pound sack of flour could cost hundreds of dollars.
Many goods — like frozen chicken and cooking gas — are now in shops and street markets, although others, like chocolate, are still scarce, he said. But they are still expensive and many people already burned through their savings during the war to buy hard-to-find, overpriced food.
“The goods are now available, but people are still only able to buy what they really need,” Mr. Awad said as he watched holiday shoppers come and go, buying what they could for communal meals to break the fast at night.
The war began after the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killed about 1,200 people and saw some 250 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. The subsequent Israeli military campaign laid waste to large swaths of the Gaza Strip.
Many residents are still displaced or have returned to their homes only to find them ruined by the fighting. Some have returned to the camps for the displaced where they spent much of the last year, while others have pitched tents on the rubble where their houses once stood.
The Israeli campaign killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children, according to local health officials who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The Israeli military said it had “eliminated” nearly 20,000 Hamas operatives, without providing detailed evidence to back up that claim.
This week, Gazans walked through local markets in central and northern Gaza, looking for whatever they could afford. One vendor showcased heaps of green and black olives, piles of dates and other goods.
Muhanned Hamad, an accountant from Gaza City, stood in front of a toy vendor’s stall in what was historically a major downtown market. He said he was looking for a holiday lantern to give to his neighbors, a mother and son who had lost their immediate family during the war.
“This Ramadan is nothing like the ones before,” said Mr. Hamad, 39. “The war has drained it of meaning, he added. “Even with the cease-fire, nothing here feels worthy of celebration.”
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting.
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9) Cuts to National Weather Service Leave Forecasters Reeling
“Lives are being put in danger,” one meteorologist warned, as some experts feared the cuts will harm public safety.
By Amy Graff and Camille Baker, Amy Graff is a reporter on The Times’s weather team, March 1, 2025
The National Hurricane Center in 2022. Employees of the National Weather Service were laid off this week as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to reshape the federal work force. Credit...Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA, via Shutterstock
Twice a day for years, meteorologists in Kotzebue, Alaska, have launched weather balloons far into the sky to measure data like wind speed, humidity and temperature, and translated the information the balloons sent back into weather forecasts and models. It’s a ritual repeated at dozens of weather stations around the United States.
On Thursday morning, the National Weather Service, which for years has struggled with worker shortages around the country, announced that it had “indefinitely suspended” the launches from Kotzebue because of a lack of staffing.
Hours later, word of mass layoffs began to spread at the Weather Service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. More than 800 people were expected to lose their jobs, the latest cuts in the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to reshape the federal work force. As they have elsewhere, the cuts appeared to have been focused on probationary employees who are easier to dismiss.
Though not entirely unexpected, the terminations were shocking to employees of the Weather Service, the government agency responsible for issuing warnings, generating daily forecasts, advising local authorities and collecting the weather data that make these functions possible. The news provoked swift condemnation from people in the field, some lawmakers and the public.
Kayla Besong, a scientist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, a part of the Weather Service, said she had hoped her status as an “essential” employee — which required her to continue working without pay in the event of a government shutdown — would mean her job would be spared.
But on Thursday, Dr. Besong, who had begun her role in September, received a termination notice. She said her bosses at the warning center, which monitors earthquake and ocean data around the clock to prepare for possible tsunamis, did not appear to have received advance notice. “I have been waiting for that email for what feels like four weeks,” Dr. Besong said.
There are 122 Weather Service offices spread across the country that provide regional forecasting and issue warnings for things like violent storms. It was unclear this week just how many of the roughly 4,000 Weather Service employees had lost their jobs.
A meteorologist at a Weather Service office in California, who declined to be identified out of fear of retribution, said there were a lot of tears on Thursday among the team. The office lost three probationary employees, an administrative assistant, a new meteorologist who had been on the job for six weeks and a facilities electronics technician, they said.
A Blueprint for Privatization
The Weather Service collects observations of the land, ocean and atmosphere using tools like satellites, radar and weather balloons, and that data is used by researchers and private companies across the country. It’s where many tech companies get the information for their weather apps.
In 2023, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published Project 2025, a 900-page policy blueprint that envisioned a significantly pared-down federal government. Many of the Trump administration’s early actions have followed that plan. When it comes to NOAA, the plan calls for the agency to be dismantled, and proposes that the Weather Service focus on its data-gathering services and “fully commercialize” its forecasting operations.
Some critics of the cuts said they would lead to the loss of employees most likely to help the Weather Service navigate that future. Others raised concerns for public safety.
Louis Uccellini, who served as the director of the Weather Service between 2013 and 2022, called the terminations “cruel” and said many of the newest employees had been hired to address serious local staffing shortages. “The Weather Service is trying to fill critical needs with these new hires,” he said.
Justin Mankin, a climate scientist and associate professor of geography at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., called the layoffs an “astounding move” and said the expertise that would be lost was essential to the functioning of the economy.
“This is not trivial expertise that can be recovered with a few well-placed LinkedIn ads,” said Dr. Mankin, who uses NOAA data in his research on drought variability and what it implies for ranchers, farmers and municipalities that face water shortfalls.
Neil Lareau studies wildfire behavior at the University of Nevada, Reno, and he has seen many of his students go on to work as meteorologists for the Weather Service. He said many of them could find higher-paying jobs in the private sector but were drawn to public service.
Dr. Lareau said young forecasters are integral to the agency’s relevancy as they have the technological skills that their more established colleagues may lack and have familiarity with cutting-edge technology including artificial intelligence, programming and big data.
“These are the people that have that skill set more than anybody else,” he said.
John Toohey-Morales, a longtime television meteorologist in Miami and former Weather Service forecaster, said that the firings raised serious public safety concerns. “I am telling you, the American people are going to suffer from all this,” he said. “Lives are being put in danger.”
As a broadcast meteorologist in a hurricane-prone area, Mr. Toohey-Morales said he relied continuously on the whole of the Weather Service to do his work. “I can’t do my job without the entire scaffolding that NOAA and National Weather Service provides,” he added.
Specialists who study some of the country’s most severe weather events feared that the staff reductions at the Weather Service would hurt the ability to predict those moments in the future.
On Thursday morning, before the layoff notices were issued, Dr. Lareau ran a training session on identifying extreme hazards during wildfires for dozens of meteorologists, most of them with the Weather Service. These incident meteorologists are trained to provide specialized forecasting during events like wildfires. During the recent Los Angeles fires, for example, incident meteorologists helped keep firefighting agencies informed.
Marty Ralph, the director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the University of California, San Diego, said this data is essential to the research his team is doing to improve forecasting for atmospheric rivers that are hugely influential for the West Coast’s water supply. He’s concerned the staff reductions will affect the abundance and quality of the observations.
“Through our research we’ve developed a state-of-the-art regional weather model that’s the best in the world at predicting atmospheric rivers,” Dr. Ralph said. “For us to do those things, we really need observations that NOAA products collected.”
In a statement on Thursday, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said that the Trump administration’s cutting of federal workers at NOAA was “flatly illegal,” citing a recent ruling by the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent review agency that restored the jobs of six federal workers fired from different agencies. “I can guarantee we will be fighting this action in Congress and in the courts,” he said.
Another Democrat, Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, criticized the terminations at NOAA in a statement on Thursday. “The firings jeopardize our ability to forecast and respond to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, and floods — putting communities in harm’s way,” she said.
Ms. Cantwell had questioned Howard Lutnick, now the secretary of commerce, whose department oversees NOAA, during Mr. Lutnick’s confirmation hearing, about the plan to break apart NOAA and privatize much of the Weather Service outlined by Project 2025. Mr. Lutnick affirmed that he believed in “keeping NOAA together.”
But in an exchange with Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, during the same hearing, Mr. Lutnick appeared to allow for the possibility that the private sector could take up the forecasts that have traditionally been the work of the Weather Service. “I think we can deliver the product more efficiently and less expensively, dramatically less expensively,” he said.
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10) We Need to Talk About the Lying
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, March 1, 2025
Damon Winter/The New York Times
During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised the moon. He promised he would not cut Social Security. He vowed to protect Medicare. He promised free in vitro fertilization. He disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and promised that he had “nothing” to do with it. He promised he would lower the cost of housing, groceries and other necessities. He promised cheaper eggs.
He promised, he promised and he promised.
But the president is not known for his honesty. Just the opposite: He is notorious for stiffing people and reneging on contracts. And true to form, almost none of the promises Trump made to the American people — the promises he made to win a second term in office — were truthful. Virtually all of them were lies.
We know they are lies because his administration has, thus far, done the precise opposite of what he said he would do. Project 2025 is serving as the blueprint for his effort to unravel the federal administrative state and one of its architects, Russell Vought, leads the Office of Management and Budget.
Trump’s allies, specifically Elon Musk, are taking an ax to the offices that run the programs — such as Social Security — that the president said he would protect. And the Republican budget framework, which the White House supports, would require hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, which would harm millions of the president’s supporters.
Trump’s plan for large tariffs on the United States’ most important trading partners — Canada, Mexico and China — would raise the price of goods for most Americans. And it should be said that the cost of eggs is projected to rise to all-time highs. There is no free IVF, no serious plan to end taxes on tips, and no housing assistance for working Americans. At best, the president’s most prominent supporters have cultivated a fantasy that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency will distribute stimulus checks drawn from supposed savings to taxpayers.
I say “supposed” because those “savings” are vastly overstated.
Those of us in the business of professional political commentary are not so comfortable labeling lies as lies and liars, liars. To say that something is a lie is to make a claim about a person’s mental state, and that takes evidence we may not have. But while it’s true that we cannot peer into the psyches of politicians and public figures, we do have the help of past behavior. And Donald Trump’s past behavior tells us that he is a liar who will say whatever he needs to get a vote.
If he needs to tell voters worried about reproductive health that he will subsidize fertility treatments, then he’ll say it. And people will believe it. This week, The Washington Post ran an excellent profile of a young woman who voted for Trump because of that promise. She thought that he would deliver for her.
He didn’t, of course. Not only that, but he fired her. She was a federal worker.
Trump lied. Actively and without remorse. He misled the entire country. And in the alternate scenario in which he told the truth — where he was forthright and honest about his plans for the United States — there is a strong chance that he would have lost the election, given the staggering unpopularity of his current agenda.
Looking ahead, the fact that Trump lied about his plans makes it all the more likely that the public will push back with force as soon as it has the chance. If Trump won on pocketbook issues, then it is hard to imagine he’ll successfully weather the reaction that is certain to come if his actions cause a recession.
One last thought: The reality of Trump’s lies is that they worked. Enough voters believed him to put him over the edge. There is no doubt that we can blame some of this on an overall information environment that is saturated with propaganda, misinformation and, well, fake news.
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11) Trump Administration Live Updates: Britain, France and Ukraine to Develop Cease-Fire Plan to Present to U.S.
Britain’s prime minister announced the move ahead of a meeting with European leaders as the region reeled from President Trump’s confrontation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
By Stephen Castle and Jeanna Smialek, Stephen Castle reported from London and Jeanna Smialek from Brussels, March 2, 2025
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine leaving the West Wing after a heated meeting with President Trump on Friday in Washington. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Here is the latest.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain said Sunday that he would work with the leaders of Ukraine and France on a cease-fire plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, as the region reels from the Trump administration’s recent moves.
The comments came ahead of a summit in London on Sunday, where Mr. Starmer met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and other European leaders to discuss the war. The gathering took on greater urgency after Mr. Zelensky’s heated Oval Office meeting with President Trump and Vice President JD Vance on Friday raised fears the U.S. would try to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into making a peace deal on whatever terms the Americans dictated.
Mr. Starmer gave Mr. Zelensky a warm hug as he arrived at the summit in London. On Sunday morning, Mr. Starmer told the BBC that he had spoken to President Trump by phone a day earlier.
“I’m clear in my mind he does want lasting peace, he does want an end to the fighting in Ukraine,” said Mr. Starmer.
The prime minister said that he, Mr. Zelensky and President Emmanuel Macron of France had agreed they “would work on a plan for stopping the fighting and then discuss that plan with the U.S.” Any peace agreement “is going to need a U.S. backstop,” Mr. Starmer added, saying that British and U.S. teams were discussing the idea.
The angry exchange in the Oval Office on Friday was the latest sign that Mr. Trump was pivoting American foreign policy away from traditional allies like Ukraine and Europe. It also illustrated the seriousness of his plans to quickly end the war in Ukraine, which could result in a deal that empowers Russia.
Sunday’s summit, arranged by Mr. Starmer, was originally set up to inform other European leaders about his own meeting with Mr. Trump in Washington on Thursday. But it gained new importance after Mr. Zelensky’s Oval Office meeting, making the goals of supporting Ukraine and beefing up their defenses more critical than ever. Since Friday, European leaders have lined up behind Ukraine and lauded its embattled president.
Mr. Zelensky is also set to meet King Charles III later on Sunday.
Here’s what else to know:
· British loan: Britain on Saturday announced a nearly $3 billion loan to Ukraine aimed at bolstering the war-torn country’s military capability. It will be paid back using profits generated on sanctioned Russian sovereign assets, and the first tranche of funding is expected to be disbursed to Ukraine next week, Britain’s Treasury said.
· Judge’s order: A federal judge in Washington on Saturday blocked the Trump administration from ousting the top official at a federal watchdog agency, saying that its efforts to do so were unlawful. The judge’s order will allow the official, Hampton Dellinger, to remain the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which protects federal whistle-blowers. Read more ›
· More troops on the border: The Pentagon is sending about 3,000 additional troops to the southwestern border, rushing to comply with Mr. Trump’s order to increase the military’s role in stemming the flow of migrants into the United States. The reinforcements announced on Saturday would bring the total number of active-duty troops on the border to about 9,000, Defense Department officials said. Read more ›
· Park protests: Hundreds of people gathered on Saturday at national parks from California to Maine to protest the Trump administration’s firing of at least 1,000 National Park Service employees last month. Read more ›
Yan Zhuang contributed reporting.
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12) Israel Halts Aid to Gaza and Proposes New Framework for an End to the War
Israel has called for Hamas to accept a temporary extension of the existing cease-fire deal, and to release more hostages.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 2, 2025
Israel announced on Sunday that it was immediately halting the entry of all goods and humanitarian assistance into Gaza, trying to force Hamas into accepting a temporary extension of the cease-fire in the war.
The move disrupts the existing, agreed-upon framework for negotiating a permanent end to the war and puts the fate of the hostages into uncharted territory. The draconian halt on goods and aid, including fuel, is also likely to worsen conditions for the roughly two million inhabitants of Gaza, after the 15-month war left much of the coastal enclave in ruins.
The initial, six-week phase of the original deal between Israel and Hamas expired on Saturday. Though it was punctured by setbacks and mutual accusations of violations, it ultimately saw at least a temporary cessation in the fighting and the exchange of 25 living Israeli hostages and the remains of eight dead ones for about 1,500 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. That deal also allowed for a significant increase of aid into Gaza.
The next phase of the agreement called for a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and a commitment to a permanent cease-fire in return for the release of all the remaining living hostages in Gaza, who are being held in inhumane conditions, according to reports from hostages who have been freed.
Instead, hours before its announcement about the halt of aid, Israel proposed a seven-week extension of the temporary cease-fire, during which Hamas must release half the remaining living hostages as well as the remains of half the deceased ones. Upon conclusion of that extension, if agreement were reached on a permanent cease-fire, then all the remaining hostages would have to be released, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
“Israel will not allow a cease-fire without the release of our hostages,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on Sunday.
“If Hamas continues its refusal, there will be further consequences,” it added.
Hamas immediately rejected the Israeli gambit, issuing a statement on Sunday describing the halt in aid as “cheap blackmail” and “a blatant upending of the agreement.”
Israel attributed the new proposal to the work of the U.S. envoy to the region, Steve Witkoff. The existing deal was negotiated between Israel and Hamas through third-country mediators including the United States, Qatar and Egypt.
Last year, the United Nations and aid organizations repeatedly warned about a looming famine in Gaza amid widespread hunger during the war, which was sparked by the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel. While goods are more available now, many Gazans say they cannot afford to buy them, and many depend on humanitarian assistance.
Palestinians in Gaza were already struggling to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan, which began this weekend, and is normally a joyous time in the Muslim calendar.
Abdulrahman Mohammed, 35, a father of four from Gaza City, said the halting of aid was already affecting the availability of essential goods like milk, fruit and vegetables. Prices had skyrocketed, he said, adding that some traders were hoarding supplies to sell them later at even more inflated prices.
Two Israeli officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the government believed that with the aid and goods that entered the enclave in recent months and during the temporary cease-fire, there were enough supplies in Gaza to suffice for several more months. They did not offer further details.
The officials added that the new restrictions would not apply to the entry of water.
Under the existing cease-fire deal, Israel was by now supposed to have begun removing its troops from the Philadelphi Corridor, a strategic strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt. By Sunday, there had been no such movement.
Mr. Netanyahu said the proposed temporary cease-fire should extend over the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan and through the Jewish holiday of Passover, which ends on April 20.
In broadcast remarks at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said, “Steve Witkoff proposed the framework for extending the cease-fire after gaining the impression that there is no possibility, at present, of bridging between the two positions, Israel’s and Hamas’s, regarding the second stage” of the existing deal.
Mr. Netanyahu added that according to Mr. Witkoff, additional time for talks was needed to achieve a possible agreement. “He even defined his proposal as a corridor for negotiations on the second stage,” Mr. Netanyahu added. “Israel is ready for this.”
But the Israeli government has been categorical that the war in Gaza cannot end unless Hamas is disarmed and removed from power there, terms that Hamas has largely rejected.
Israelis have been shocked by the testimonies of recently released hostages who said they were kept for months in dark tunnels, in constant fear for their lives, with very little food and, in some cases, in shackles. The families of hostages remaining in Gaza have been pleading for the government to end the war and bring them home all at once.
In all, up to 24 hostages are believed to still be alive in Gaza, Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday. Hamas also holds the remains of at least 35 who are believed to be dead, he added in recorded remarks at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting. “We are not giving up on anyone,” he said.
“There will be no free lunches,” Mr. Netanyahu said, adding, “If Hamas thinks that it will be possible to continue the cease-fire or benefit from the terms of the first stage, without us receiving hostages, it is sorely mistaken.”
On Sunday, Hamas reiterated its willingness to begin negotiations for the second stage of the deal and accused Israel of “a blatant attempt to renege on the agreement.”
Hamas is unlikely to accept Israel’s new offer without further negotiations, said Aaron David Miller, a former State Department Middle East analyst and negotiator who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The proposal, he said, “allows Israelis to get hostages back without making reciprocal commitments.”
On Sunday, Israel also raised the specter of resuming fighting in Gaza, noting in the statement that according to the original agreement, Israel could return to fighting at this point “if it gains the impression that the negotiations have been ineffective.”
“Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement on Saturday that he had signed a declaration to use emergency authorities to expedite the delivery of approximately $4 billion in military assistance to Israel.
Eve Sampson contributed reporting from New York, Ameera Harouda from Doha, Qatar, and Myra Noveck from Jerusalem.
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13) ‘Full on Fight Club’: How Trump Is Crushing U.S. Climate Policy
President Trump has quickly transformed America’s approach to the environment, withholding funds and stretching the limits of presidential power.
By David Gelles, Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer, March 2, 2025
In a few short weeks, President Trump has severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet.
With a flurry of actions that have stretched the limits of presidential power, Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry.
He is abandoning efforts to reduce global warming, even as the world has reached record levels of heat that scientists say is driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels. Every corner of the world is now experiencing the effects of these rising temperatures in the form of deadlier hurricanes, floods, wildfires and droughts, as well as species extinction.
To achieve such a wholesale overhaul of the country’s climate policies in such a short time, the Trump administration has reneged on federal grants, fired workers en masse and attacked longstanding environmental regulations.
All new presidents have their own agendas, but the speed and scale of Mr. Trump’s efforts to uproot climate policy is unprecedented. “This is not the kind of stately tennis match of the usual switch-over in administrations,” said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, an environmental law firm. “This is full on Fight Club.”
The Trump administration’s moves have unfolded simultaneously across the sprawling government, affecting federal, state and local agencies and hitting government-funded projects in Africa, Antarctica and around the world. On Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, making it the only nation to walk away.
Mr. Trump has frozen funds appropriated by Congress for clean energy projects, taking particular aim at wind energy, the country’s largest source of renewable power. He has stopped approvals for wind farms on public land and in federal waters and has threatened to block projects on private land.
He has fired thousands of federal workers, dismantled programs aimed at helping polluted communities and scrubbed references to climate change from numerous federal websites.
He has waged a multipronged assault at regulations designed to curb pollution, immediately sweeping some rules to the side and circumventing the normally lengthy rule-making processes. At the same time, Mr. Trump has declared an energy emergency, giving himself the authority to fast-track the construction of oil and gas projects as he works to stoke supply as well as demand for fossil fuels.
“We’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to,” Mr. Trump said just hours after being sworn in for his second term.
The United States is producing more oil than any other nation in history, and is also the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas. The fossil fuel industry donated more than $75 million to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Mr. Trump, in turn, promised to weaken environmental regulations in ways that would lower its costs and increase its margins.
The president has repeatedly mocked climate change, criticized regulations and said that more drilling would bring down energy bills.
In several cases, the administration’s actions have flouted the law, with agencies defying court orders, freezing funds in legally binding contracts and reinterpreting regulations to suit their aims. In doing so, Mr. Trump has busted through many of the barriers that were erected by the officials during the Biden administration who believed that process and the legal system would slow or deter him.
The administration and Republicans in Congress plan to use a legislative maneuver to quickly erase California’s authority to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035. That authority has never before been challenged in this way, and critics say the maneuver is illegal. But it would be much faster than trying to overturn the California ban through the standard process that requires months of public notice and comment.
Until last month, the United States was expected to record significant reductions in its greenhouse-gas emissions over the next decade. But the Trump administration’s changes pave the way for more planet-warming pollution and will likely slow the advance of cleaner technologies like wind and solar energy.
“To power the Great American comeback, President Trump is unleashing American energy and eliminating the Green New Scam,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson. “The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency are working in tandem to implement President Trump’s Day 1 executive action and undo Biden’s radical climate policies that restrained America’s economy and abundant natural resources."
Mr. Trump’s supporters are delighting in the audacity and scale of his attacks on climate and environmental regulations.
“They’re doing all the things I thought they would do, and they’re doing other things that I only dreamed they might do,” said Myron Ebell, a conservative activist who led the E.P.A. transition team during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Many of Mr. Trump’s moves may have a lasting effect on the country’s ability to confront climate change.
Thousands of federal jobs that are eliminated now may be hard to restore. Clean energy projects that were relying on federal funding may not proceed without the expected investments. A sudden stop to scientific work could create gaps in data collection that are impossible to fill. And environmental regulations that are stripped away could be difficult to revive.
Several of the administration’s actions are already facing legal challenges.
After Mr. Trump ordered federal agencies to pause billions of dollars in climate and energy grants that were authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, two federal judges ordered the Trump administration to let the money flow again.
In early February, one of those judges, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court, said the White House was defying his order by withholding funds. Some funds have begun moving, but many remain stalled.
John Podesta, a senior climate adviser in the Biden administration, called many of the Trump administration actions illegal. “We followed the law, and they’re breaking the law,” Mr. Podesta said. “It remains to be seen whether they’ll be allowed to get away with it.”
In the past few weeks Mr. Trump has fired thousands of employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department, the Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government’s premiere climate science agency. On Thursday, a federal judge said directives that led to mass firings were illegal.
And in a move that could have far-reaching implications for government efforts to regulate industry, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has recommended that the agency reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, according to three people familiar with the decision. That would eliminate the legal basis for the government’s climate laws, such as limits on pollution from automobiles and power plants.
“We’re talking about undoing 50 years of environmental regulation and accelerating the extinction crisis and risking the health of the American people,” said Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club. “There’s so much shocking news every day. People are struggling to process all of it.”
Electric vehicles, long a target for Mr. Trump, have lost much of the federal support they gained during the Biden administration.
Mr. Trump has directed Congress to eliminate federal subsidies for E.V.s., including tax credits for consumers, which could hurt the sales of Tesla, the electric car company, despite Elon Musk’s central role in the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts.
The Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, signed an order to loosen fuel economy standards enacted by the Biden administration that were designed to encourage automakers to sell electric vehicles. And the administration moved to freeze $5 billion that Congress approved for the construction of a national network of electric-vehicle charging stations.
The administration is also trying to stop states and even cities from enacting their own climate policies.
Mr. Duffy recently lambasted what he called the “mismanagement” of California’s high-speed-rail project, announcing an investigation into how the state was spending a $3.1 billion federal grant.
And the Transportation Department moved to revoke its approval of New York City’s congestion pricing program, a plan designed to reduce traffic, raise money for public transportation and curb emissions.
“The old paradigm was an administration will come in and do all the hard work of dismantling the old administration’s policies and then replacing with its own,” said Ms. Dillen. “This is a very different strategy, which is that we may not even bother to replace policies because we don’t care about complying with the law.”
Attempts to blunt the Inflation Reduction Act are already delaying projects. Jay Turner, a professor at Wellesley College who is tracking investments related to the law, found that at least nine major projects worth $7.6 billion have been slowed in the past month as funding from the law has been put on hold and renewable energy companies adjust to the new reality.
“You’ve seen some real pullback,” he said. “Established players in the industry are reassessing the market and how much capacity is needed right now, and you also see newcomers that suddenly don’t see a path to bringing their projects to fruition.”
Much of the damage to the country’s environmental regulatory apparatus may be long-lasting.
The E.P.A. said it would try to claw back about $20 billion that was awarded to eight organizations under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in low-income communities. A top federal prosecutor resigned after she declined a request by the Trump administration to freeze the money, saying she did not have sufficient evidence to do so.
While the Energy Department has started releasing some grants for battery factories and electric grid upgrades, other projects remain on hold, according to several awardees. A $500 million program to upgrade hydroelectric dams around the country, for instance, remains frozen, and companies are halting construction or wondering if they will get reimbursed for work that has already been done.
On Wednesday, Trump said he believed Mr. Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, would be cutting about 65 percent of the agency’s more than 17,000 jobs. Mr. Zeldin later said that he thought the E.PA. could cut at least 65 percent of its budget and make cuts to its work force.
The effective dissolution of the United States Agency for International Development has led to the immediate termination of long-running projects in the developing world aimed at helping vulnerable countries adapt to a hotter planet.
And more sweeping actions may still be in store.
“The bigger changes are to come,” Mr. Turner said. “What we’ve seen today has been fast, but it’s just kind of the start of much more extensive efforts to dismantle the Biden administration’s policies.”
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