Surviving State Violence:
The Case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui
and Incarceration in Women’s Prisons
Monday March 24, 2025
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM EDT
Online, YouTube
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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) Israel-Hamas Talks Deadlocked as Trump Envoy Turns to Ukraine
The two sides are supposed to negotiate a second phase of the cease-fire agreement that would end the war, but they remain far apart on how to move forward.
By Aaron Boxerman, March 13, 2025
A soup kitchen in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza this week. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The Israel-Hamas negotiations to extend the cease-fire in Gaza were in limbo on Thursday as the Trump administration turned its attention to talks with Russian officials in Moscow over the Ukraine war.
Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, was expected to leave the latest round of Gaza talks in the Gulf emirate of Qatar for Russia on Thursday. Mr. Trump has effectively charged Mr. Witkoff with working to resolve two of the world’s most fraught conflicts — the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
The latest round of indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas in the Qatari capital of Doha this week have borne little fruit amid entrenched disagreements over the deal’s next steps, according to an Israeli official familiar with the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
In mid-January, the two sides agreed to a multiphase truce that would ultimately end Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza and free the Israeli and foreign hostages held by Palestinian militants there. The cease-fire began with a six-week pause in the fighting, during which Hamas released more than 30 hostages in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
During the initial phase of the truce, Israel and Hamas were meant to negotiate a second phase that envisioned an end to the war, the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and the release of all of the surviving hostages still held in the territory.
But the two sides remain far apart on how to move ahead. Israel is still vowing to destroy Hamas and is insisting demilitarization of Gaza. Hamas has largely refused to disband its armed battalions or send its Gaza leaders.
The 42-day first phase elapsed in early March without a deal on the second phase but the fragile truce has held up so far even without it.
Critics in Israel have accused Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, of dragging his feet on an agreement for fear it would loosen his grip on power. His far-right allies in the governing coalition are pressing to go on with the war against Hamas despite concerns from the families of the remaining hostages that their loved ones will not survive.
Up to 24 living hostages are still being held in Gaza along with the remains of more than 30 others who were taken captive, according to the Israeli government. Hamas seized about 250 people in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel and ignited the devastating 15-month-war in Gaza.
Earlier this month, Israel imposed harsh restrictions on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, barring the entry of food and other much-needed goods. The Israeli authorities later cut off electricity to a wastewater treatment center in Gaza.
That has prompted fears of a resurgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The widespread wartime deprivation had eased somewhat since the cease-fire and trucks of aid had begun to enter freely.
Qatar, which has been brokering the truce alongside Egypt and the United States, has criticized the Israeli decision to close crossings to aid as a violation of the cease-fire agreement.
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2) Syrians Want to Go Home, but Many No Longer Have One to Return To
Syria’s interim president has said that millions would return after President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, but many houses and other buildings were destroyed in 13 years of civil war.
By Raja Abdulrahim, Photographs and Video by Laura Boushnak, Reporting from Damascus, Syria, March 13, 2025
The Yarmouk Camp neighborhood of Damascus is largely destroyed after 13 years of civil war.
Lubna Labaad walked among a flattened wasteland that was once her neighbors’ homes.
The only building left standing was a mosque, a years-old message scrawled on its outer wall from when rebels surrendered control of the area to the Syrian regime during the country’s brutal civil war: “Forgive us, oh martyrs.”
Now, many former residents of the Qaboun neighborhood in the capital, Damascus — like Ms. Labaad, her husband, Da’aas, and their 8-year-old son — are trying to come back. After the 13-year war ended suddenly with the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad in December, the frozen front lines dividing the country melted away overnight.
“We were waiting for that very moment to return,” said Ms. Labaad, 26.
Their home is still standing but was stripped of pipes, sinks and even electrical outlets by a soldier who neighbors said had squatted there for years with his family. Still, the Labaads are luckier than many others who have returned to find nothing but rubble.
Syria’s conflict forced more than 13 million people to flee, in what the United Nations called one of the largest displacement crises in the world. More than six million Syrians left the country and some seven million have been displaced inside Syria, including Ms. Labaad and her family.
In an interview in January, Syria’s interim president, Ahmed Al-Shara, said he was confident that within two years millions of Syrians would come back from abroad. But the war went on for so long that people had established new lives away from their hometowns.
It is not clear exactly how many people have returned so far. Many have come back to see what happened with homes and hometowns, but the decision to return permanently is not an easy one, especially if there is nothing to come back to. Many others have opted to stay put for the time being, including in camps in Turkey and Jordan that have yet to empty out, as they watch what happens in Syria.
An estimated 328,000 homes in Syria have either been destroyed or severely damaged, according to a 2022 U.N. report, and between 600,000 and one million homes are either moderately or lightly damaged. The analysis was done before a devastating earthquake hit parts of northwestern Syria in 2023 that caused the collapse of still more buildings and damage to others.
The government’s housing ministry did not respond to questions about whether or how it planned to help in the country’s reconstruction. The government is grappling with a host of challenges after Mr. al-Assad’s downfall, from a security vacuum to an economy in chaos to Israel’s incursion into parts of southern Syria.
And recent unrest that has left hundreds dead in the country’s coastal region — many of them civilians killed by forces aligned with the government, according to a war monitor — is raising the specter of spiraling sectarian violence.
Even for those who have returned home, the joy has been dulled by the damage already done. People are having to search to find their long tucked-away house keys “and are coming back and not finding their homes,” said Mr. Labaad, 33.
The day after Mr. al-Assad was ousted in early December, the Labaads wasted no time catching a ride with friends from Idlib, in Syria’s northwest, back to the neighborhood they had fled in 2017. But more than three months later they are still not settled.
On a recent day, Mr. Labaad installed a lock on the front door of the family’s home, which for weeks had been secured with a long metal wire through the keyhole. The soldier who had been living in their apartment stripped everything from the third-floor apartment except for sparkly blue lettering on the wall, reading “Ahmad.” The Labaads think it may be the name of the soldier’s son.
“If we had money we could fix it right away,” Ms. Labaad said. “But we don’t.”
Mr. Labaad used to work day jobs when they lived in Idlib. Back in their hometown, he has started working in security with the new government. But he and his fellow security officers have not received salaries yet.
On a nearby street, Khulood al-Sagheer, 50, had come back with her daughter and granddaughter to see the state of their house. They found only one wall left standing.
“I will put up a tent and sleep here,” Ms. al-Sagheer said, vowing to rebuild. “The important thing is that I return to my home.”
Others have also chosen to live in their homes, no matter how damaged. For months, Samir Jaloot, 54, has been sleeping on a thin mattress and two blankets in the corner of the only intact room of what was his late brother’s apartment in the Yarmouk Camp neighborhood of Damascus. Next to his makeshift bed sits a small wood stove and gas kettle.
The window is still broken, but he has repaired two gaping holes in the wall, most likely caused by tank shells, he said. The walls are pockmarked with bullet holes. He has slowly been making repairs, clearing out the rubble and debris and trying to erect new walls so that his wife and five children can join him.
The partially destroyed apartment sits on the second floor of his family’s four-story building in Yarmouk Camp, named because it began as a camp for Palestinian refugees who fled their homes during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s establishment. The Syrian war reduced the building to just a floor and a half.
Around the neighborhood is a sea of gray buildings with missing floors, roofs and walls. Most homes were looted long ago, and the only thing seemingly left in every exposed room is more gray rubble.
“This is the house I got married in; my kids were born here,” Mr. Jaloot said of the building, his clothing covered in dust and splotches of cement. “I have good memories here. My dad lived with me; my mother lived with me.”
Standing nearby was his cousin, Aghyad Jaloot, 41, an aeronautical engineer with a trim salt and pepper beard who had just days earlier come to visit from Sweden, where he and his family had resettled. He craned his neck toward the sky. “This sun is worth all of Europe,” he said.
His former neighbor now living in Canada called him recently and told him he planned to return. So did two other neighbors, one who fled to Lebanon and another within Syria.
Now, Mr. Jaloot wants to come back, too.
“If I don’t return and others don’t return, who’s going to rebuild this country?” he asked.
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3) Columbia Activist Has Not Been Allowed to Speak Privately With Lawyers
Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident who the Trump administration has claimed is a national security threat, is in immigration detention in Louisiana.
By Jonah E. Bromwich and Anusha Bayya, March 12, 2025
Lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate detained by the Trump administration last weekend, have not been able to hold a private conversation with their client since his arrest.
That revelation came during a hearing in Manhattan federal court Wednesday, as lawyers for Mr. Khalil and the government appeared in front of a judge, Jesse Furman, to discuss Mr. Khalil’s detention, which has raised concerns about free speech protections amid President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Mr. Khalil, a prominent figure in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Columbia campus, was arrested by federal immigration agents in New York on Saturday and is being held at a facility in Louisiana.
He has not been charged with any crime. But the Trump administration has accused him of siding with terrorists, and justified his detention by citing a little-used statute that grants the secretary of state the power to initiate deportation proceedings against anyone whose presence in the United States is “adversarial” to the country’s foreign policy and national security interests.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters during a stop in Ireland on Wednesday, accused Mr. Khalil of participating in antisemitic activities, including protests that Mr. Rubio said had expressed support for Hamas. Mr. Rubio said that anyone who did so would be removed from the United States.
“This is not about free speech,” he said. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
Lawyers for Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident, will attempt to fight the government as it seeks to deport their client, but is it not clear in which court that fight will take place. Judge Furman has ordered the government not to deport Mr. Khalil while his case is pending. But the Wednesday hearing related to the circumstances of Mr. Khalil’s detention, not his legal residency.
Early Sunday morning, lawyers for Mr. Khalil filed a petition asking Judge Furman to release their client. They have also asked that the judge order the government to return Mr. Khalil to New York. At the hearing Wednesday morning, one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, said that the distance was hindering his access to his client.
Mr. Kassem said that Mr. Khalil’s legal team had requested a private call with their client to discuss his case, and that the earliest appointment the lawyers were offered was on March 20, nearly two weeks after it was requested.
Judge Furman ordered the government to let Mr. Khalil’s lawyers speak with him Wednesday and Thursday as they prepare a new filing calling for his release. He also set a schedule for the lawyers to file arguments as to where the case should be heard.
It is not clear whether the issue will ultimately be decided in New York. At the conference, a lawyer for the government, Brandon Waterman, said that Mr. Khalil had been transferred to New Jersey by the time his lawyers filed their initial petition in Manhattan court.
Mr. Khalil was arrested on Saturday evening and the petition was filed at 4:40 a.m. Sunday. Amy Greer, one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, has said she believed that Mr. Khalil was in New York at the time. But Mr. Waterman said that Mr. Khalil was in New Jersey no later than 3:20 a.m. Sunday.
Mr. Waterman added that the government would prefer that any further scrutiny of Mr. Khalil’s detention take place outside New York, either in New Jersey or Louisiana.
Judge Furman did not make any immediate decision about where the matter would be heard. But he told Mr. Waterman to be prepared to address a 2004 Supreme Court opinion that could bode well for Mr. Khalil’s lawyers as they fight to keep his case in New York, where Mr. Khalil lives with his pregnant wife, an American citizen.
In the concurring opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy laid out circumstances in which a detainee’s case should be heard in the place from which he was removed. The circumstances included the government’s transportation of a prisoner for the purpose of complicating lawyers’ efforts to seek his release in the appropriate court, and the government’s refusal to communicate where the detainee was being held.
Mr. Khalil’s wife attended the Wednesday conference, sitting in the front row and facing straight ahead. Before the judge entered, she whispered with a lawyer seated beside her, her expression worried and occasionally grim.
A park outside the courthouse was flooded with hundreds of protesters, some wearing kaffiyehs and black masks and waving posters, banners and signs reading “Free Mahmoud.” They were joined by the actor Susan Sarandon, wearing a black beret and leather jacket.
Speaking to the camera crews gathered outside the courthouse, Mr. Kassem said that his client had been “disappeared by U.S. government agents” after criticizing the American and Israeli governments. “That’s not just un-American, it’s also unacceptable,” he added.
Another lawyer read a statement from Mr. Khalil’s wife, who declined to be named for fear of reprisal from online critics or the government. She is expected to give birth next month.
In her statement, she said that Mr. Khalil had been kidnapped from their home, and called his continued detention shameful. She demanded his immediate release and return, saying that his disappearance had been devastating and that every day without him was filled with uncertainty.
President Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, said on Wednesday that the administration considered Mr. Khalil “a national security threat.” As Mr. Homan answered reporters’ questions in Albany, he accused Mr. Khalil of handing out leaflets “inciting violence on campus.”
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday that Mr. Khalil had sided with terrorists and accused him of participating in protests at which pro-Hamas fliers were handed out. She did not respond to an email requesting clarification as to whether Mr. Khalil passed out the fliers himself.
The White House has said that Mr. Khalil is only the first of many whom it plans to detain and deport.
Edward Wong and Benjamin Oreskes contributed reporting.
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4) Starvation Is Not a Negotiating Tactic
By Megan K. Stack, March 13, 2025
Ms. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer who reported in the Middle East for years.
"...to starve Gaza in order to force Hamas to release the hostages is, of course, to starve the hostages, too."
Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
“You do whatever you want,” President Trump said he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu, it seems, took Mr. Trump at his word.
Israel has clamped Gaza back under near-total siege, barring desperately needed humanitarian aid and other goods from entering the hungry and bomb-decimated enclave. Food, medicine, tents, fuel — for the past week and a half, supplies have not been permitted into Gaza, where some two million Palestinians are trying to survive in the wreckage. And Mr. Netanyahu keeps tightening the screws: On Sunday, Israel cut off the last trickle of electricity into Gaza, forcing a key desalination plant that provides drinking water to slow operations. With hunger setting in, people reduced to living in tents or in the precarious shelter of half-crushed buildings, and clean water and fuel in vanishing supply, it feels too generous to say that Gaza is on the brink of collapse; in many respects, Gaza has already collapsed.
Israeli officials are essentially starving Gaza as a negotiation tactic. Rather than proceed on the agreed-upon schedule to the second phase of the cease-fire, Mr. Netanyahu is now demanding a seven-week extension of the preliminary stage.
This makes sense, of course, for Mr. Netanyahu — the first stage is the simplest, allowing for more hostages to be released without grappling with the thornier (and for Mr. Netanyahu, politically radioactive) elements contained in the second phase, including withdrawing troops from Gaza and making concrete plans to end the war. But so far, Hamas has refused to go along, pointing out that Israel is unilaterally veering away from its obligations under the agreement.
And so, consistent with the cruel corporeality of this conflict, Israel has locked the people of Gaza back into an impregnable box, with little access to food or supplies, and warned that if Hamas doesn’t quickly agree to release more hostages, all-out war could resume.
“The Gaza gates will be locked, and the gates of hell will open” if Hamas doesn’t release more hostages, the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, said last week.
Mr. Trump appears to be on board with this disgraceful tactic. As the cease-fire hangs on the edge of failure and negotiations grind along, the exhausted people of Gaza endure a macabre and dehumanizing test of wills.
“Any amount of aid that is prevented from Gaza is a death sentence,” said Majed Jaber, an emergency room doctor who spoke with me from Gaza. His home smashed by bombs, Dr. Jaber sleeps in a drafty tent that floods in the winter rains. Before the cease-fire, he said, food had become so scarce that he’d lost 40 pounds, even as he witnessed some of his patients die of complications from malnutrition.
“I personally was starving,” he said. “Do I believe that may happen again? I do.”
Shortly after speaking with Dr. Jaber, I read an Israeli news story reporting that the recently freed hostages suffered extreme weight loss, dental problems and health issues from drinking dirty water. It was identical to what I’d been hearing from Palestinians in Gaza. Which is not surprising, but highlights the madness of Israel’s approach: to starve Gaza in order to force Hamas to release the hostages is, of course, to starve the hostages, too.
Lately it feels as if the human beings in Gaza are increasingly lost from our understanding. The physicality of their plight fades into the background, then creeps back. Hamas will cling to these 59 human beings it dragged from their home as bargaining chips, dead or alive — its only leverage. And the people of Gaza have themselves been caught for decades in that claustrophobic run of land.
It may be futile to point this out during a war so thick with atrocities, but the deliberate starvation of civilians is a war crime, and so, too, is the taking of civilian hostages. Israeli leaders surely know these laws. It was, after all, the near-total blockade of Gaza just after the Hamas-led massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, that went into evidence at The Hague, helping cement the International Criminal Court’s outstanding arrest warrants against Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
When warnings of famine first started to trickle out of Gaza, Israeli officials furiously denied the assessments of aid organizations, and even some U.S. politicians, that Israel was blocking aid, insisting the hunger in Gaza was the United Nations’ fault, Hamas’s fault, and so on. Under Mr. Trump, it seems, protestations of innocence are no longer required. Since Oct. 7, emboldened Israeli soldiers and settlers are also punishing Palestinians in the West Bank, killing hundreds and displacing tens of thousands while openly discussing annexation. Meanwhile, with Mr. Trump’s evangelical backers pushing for Israel to seize the entire West Bank, the current administration has lifted sanctions against extremist settlers.
I asked the Gazan author Yousri Alghoul whether the people around him were afraid of a return to bombardment. His answer was crushing — grieving and preoccupied with trying to secure basic daily necessities, he said, people hardly have any “interaction with the situation” of geopolitics and negotiations.
“They do not care whether the war is coming again or not, because they feel that they lost everything,” he said. “They lost their houses, they lost their families, children, women, wives, husbands. So people are saying, ‘OK, whatever.’ If it comes back, if it kills us.”
“We’re not living a suitable life,” he added. “It’s like a hell.”
I can’t shake the disconcerting sense that Gaza is already disappearing. The buildings knocked down, the dead scattered in the wreckage, and every time another Gaza journalist is killed, it closes another eye that we used to look through.
And suddenly here comes Mr. Trump with his plan to “own” Gaza, with beach resorts built on boneyards, ethnically cleansing his way to a paradise — for whom?
“The people of the world,” Mr. Trump said.
But not, it seems, for the people of Gaza.
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5) How a Quack TV Doctor Made It to Washington
By Eoin Higgins, March 14, 2025
Mr. Higgins is a journalist based in New England.
Dr. Mehmet Oz’s on-air medical advice on both his show and Fox News has taken on greater significance as he enters the political realm. Credit...Krista Schlueter for The New York Times
Before medical contrarianism became intrinsic to his identity, Dr. Mehmet Oz appeared motivated by curiosity rather than opportunism. Arriving at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in 1986 to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Oz became well respected in the field. But much to the chagrin of administrators and peers, he also showed a penchant for questionable medicine.
In the mid-1990s, he invited a healer into the hospital’s cardiac operating room “to run a kind of energy, which science cannot prove exists,” through patients’ bodies. Proponents claim that kind of practice and its adjacents (think Reiki or “therapeutic touch”) improve people’s health and result in faster recovery times, less pain and better physical function for patients — despite a lack of scientific explanation for how they might do so.
“Not everything adds up,” Dr. Oz told The New Yorker in 2013. “It’s about making people more comfortable.”
This nonconformist approach endeared Dr. Oz to patients and to a public eager for a warmer approach to medicine. At the same time, it became a way to accrue decades of fame and fortune.
Those efforts have culminated in Dr. Oz’s nomination by President Trump to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Senate hearings are to begin Friday. If confirmed, his appointment would be yet another signal to a new wave of charismatic health personalities that science and evidence are negotiable in the service of ambition.
In 1996, Dr. Oz helped transplant a heart for the brother of Joe Torre, then manager of the New York Yankees. It was “his first big splash of publicity,” a former colleague, Dr. Eric Rose, who led the Torre operation, said, “and he loved it.”
Dr. Oz chased the high. He guest hosted Charlie Rose’s talk show, published books and consulted on the Denzel Washington film “John Q.” Starting in 2003, Dr. Oz began hosting his own show, “Second Opinion With Dr. Oz,” on the Discovery Channel. One of his first guests was Oprah Winfrey. Soon, he was making multiple appearances on her show as a medical expert. By 2004, Ms. Winfrey was calling him “America’s doctor.”
Dr. Oz said in a 2003 interview that his approach to medicine, and by extension his show, was about making available to patients the best treatments they could afford. Noting that he had an M.B.A. in addition to a medical degree, Dr. Oz said, “I think as physicians, we are abdicating our responsibility to the society, to our community if we don’t take an active role in figuring out how to spend money.”
Dr. Oz’s answer to the money question was alternative treatments. In some cases, holistic medicine may appeal to patients as an affordable option when expensive conventional therapies failed them. But Dr. Oz’s openness to alternative medicine would gradually give way to the promotion of quackery.
“Second Opinion” lasted only one season, but in 2009, Dr. Oz returned with “The Dr. Oz Show.” By the early 2010s it was in the upper echelon of daytime TV programs. On his own show and elsewhere, he gave credence to any health fad, no matter how flimsy the science behind it. Dr. Oz touted the healing properties of hyperbaric oxygen and colloidal silver (tiny silver particles suspended in liquid), and hosted the antivaccine conspiracy theorist Joe Mercola to promote a dietary supplement.
Still, viewers ate it up — and it’s not hard to see why. In my new book, I show how media figures leverage their positions as established, trusted experts to become iconoclasts. Touting consensus wisdom makes you one of a million. But if you’re a contrarian, you immediately shrink the pool of voices competing for attention.
Dr. Oz is not a public health edge case. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent decades shifting further into vaccine skepticism as his stance garnered more attention; he’s parlayed that attention into a position of power as the new secretary of health of human services. The physician and health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya found fame through his rejection of Covid-19 mitigation policies in 2020, drawing scorn from the medical community; he’s now on track to lead the National Institutes of Health.
This reactionary strain is right at home in our electoral politics, but it marks a change from how the government’s public health policy has traditionally been decided and carried out.
In April 2012, Dr. Oz told his audience that sleeping with a sock full of heated, uncooked rice could help with insomnia; a lawsuit followed after a man taking his advice claimed he was injured. Researchers in 2014 found that only 21 percent of “Dr. Oz Show” recommendations had “believable” evidence behind them.
That same year, Dr. Oz appeared before a Senate subcommittee hearing to defend his advocacy in favor of weight-loss substances and faced pointed criticism from lawmakers. “I don’t get why you need to say this stuff, because you know it’s not true,” Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, said.
In 2015, a group of doctors called on Columbia to cut ties with Dr. Oz, describing him as someone who “has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.” On his show, Dr. Oz fired back, vowing not to be silenced. Two years later, a cohort of academics, writing in the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics, questioned if there should be some sort of sanction for his “inaccurate and potentially harmful” advice.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, he repeatedly appeared on Fox News to promote unverified treatments like hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, leading to intense criticism. Eventually, his show began bleeding viewers and never recovered, after which he ran an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania.
But the reputational damage hasn’t stopped him. He already made the leap from the operating room to the TV screen; now he seems poised to enter the federal government. His fame has endeared him to Mr. Trump, and his nonconformist reputation is perfectly suited for the new health administration.
We don’t know for sure what Dr. Oz will do if confirmed as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He may be an effective leader. But his past is likely to prove concerning for people on Medicare and Medicaid who are counting on stable, reliable access to health care.
Dr. Oz’s confirmation could also encourage a cadre of actors to follow his path and sow more discord in what’s left of the nation’s public health structures. It’s one thing to advocate alternative methods for the benefit of your patients. It’s quite another to build a career on rejecting traditional medicine — an abdication of his responsibility as a health professional.
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6) Young Democrats’ Anger Boils Over as Schumer Retreats on Shutdown
A generational divide, seen in newer lawmakers’ impatience with bipartisanship and for colleagues who don’t understand new media, has emerged as one of the deepest rifts within the party.
By Shane Goldmacher, March 14, 2025
Senator Chuck Schumer’s reversal on a government shutdown enraged fellow Democrats and brought into the open long-brewing frustrations among younger lawmakers with older party leaders. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Senator Chuck Schumer’s sudden decision on Thursday to support a Republican-written bill to avert a government shutdown so enraged his fellow Democrats that some were already talking about primary challenges to the 74-year-old Democratic leader from New York.
The eruption of anger about Mr. Schumer’s seeming surrender thrust into public view a generational divide that has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s deepest and most consequential shifts.
Younger Democrats are chafing at and increasingly complaining about what they see as the feebleness of the old guard’s efforts to push back against President Trump. They are second-guessing how the party’s leaders — like Mr. Schumer, who brandishes his flip phone as a point of pride — are communicating their message in the TikTok era, as Republicans dominate the digital town square.
And they are demanding that the party develop a bolder policy agenda that can answer the desperation of tens of millions of people who are struggling financially at a time when belief in the American dream is dimming.
In other words, the younger generation is done with deference.
Some who argue for more militancy in opposing Mr. Trump say the party’s elders tend to be less comfortable with the type of unbending political warfare that is called for.
“Our party needs more of a fighting spirit,” said Representative Chris Deluzio, a 40-year-old from outside Pittsburgh. “This is not a normal administration, and they’re willing to do dangerous things.”
The split is “not solely along generational lines,” he said. “But I do think the newer, younger members maybe get this intuitively.”
Mr. Deluzio said that Democrats elected before the Trump era tended to be shaped by fond recollections of comity and camaraderie across the aisle. “Those of us who are a little younger or have come to the Congress more recently, we don’t have the experience of some days of yore where things were more functional and the parties all got along,” he said.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who burst onto the political scene by slaying a giant of the party in a 2018 primary challenge, pointedly declined to shoot down a question about a future primary against Mr. Schumer, who is not on the ballot again until 2028. Interviewed on CNN on Thursday, she called his turnabout on the legislation — which every Democrat in the House save one opposed — a “tremendous mistake” and urged him to reverse himself.
Each younger lawmaker’s prescriptions for the party may be different. But many of them speak of an imperative both to fight and to act. Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, 37, said Democrats needed an ambitious strategy to address educational deficits caused by the coronavirus pandemic, promote housing construction and take on social media corporations that are fraying the social fabric.
“I’m interested in ideas. Do we have big ideas for how we’re going to govern better than Trump?” he said. “Younger lawmakers have that sense of urgency and ferocity.”
That urgency is also driving younger Democrats to try to usher their elders out of the way. Some older House Democrats have already been pushed out of key congressional posts. Younger primary challengers are laying the groundwork to try to oust more senior lawmakers from office entirely, with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 84, among those targeted.
And in private, 30- and 40-something lawmakers commiserate about having to decipher the mysteries of the internet for their older colleagues; one said she recently had to explain to another House member what a podcast was.
“The generation that got us to this point does not have the skills or stomach to get us to the next point,” said Amanda Litman, who leads Run for Something, a progressive group that recruits younger and more diverse Democrats to seek local office.
Ms. Litman said she had already heard from at least half a dozen young people — more than ever, she said — who are plotting congressional primary challenges in 2026.
“I would not be surprised to see, if not quite a Tea Party equivalent, a wave of challengers against old Democratic incumbents in particular,” Ms. Litman said. “It is not going to be ideological. It’s going to be style.”
A Biden hangover
A party that fatefully banked its fortunes in 2024 on an 81-year-old standard-bearer now sees reminders everywhere of the perils of relying on older leaders:
Representative John Larson of Connecticut, 76, freezing for more than a minute last month after suffering a “complex partial seizure” on the House floor.
Mr. Schumer and Representative Maxine Waters of California, 86, chanting “We will win!” in a demonstration that inspired little besides eye rolls and cringes among younger Democrats.
Or Representative Al Green of Texas, 77, waving his cane at Mr. Trump during the president’s address to a joint session of Congress. (“If the Democrats want a 77-year-old congressman to be the face of their resistance, heckling the president, then bring it on,” Speaker Mike Johnson, the chamber’s top Republican, chortled a day later.)
“It hangs a shadow over everything,” Tyson Brody, a Democratic strategist, said of the age issue. “And it becomes a very neat explanation for why we lost, and what needs to be fixed, that people of all ideologies can get behind. It’s a shortcut for ‘How do we rebrand Democrats?’”
Age, of course, is an imperfect way to measure all the varied Democratic disagreements.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, 83, has been barnstorming battleground states and drawing large crowds of young people as he makes his populist economic case against the Republicans.
On Thursday, Mr. Schumer explained his decision to vote to keep the government open in an opinion piece in The New York Times, a version of which he read on the Senate floor.
“As bad as passing the continuing resolution would be, I believe a government shutdown is far worse,” Mr. Schumer wrote.
A group of newer Democratic senators have disagreed with his approach, including Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, 48, whom Mr. Schumer had pushed to deliver his party’s response to Mr. Trump’s congressional address this month.
Neither party has a monopoly on the gerontocracy: Senator Mitch McConnell, 83, the former Republican leader, recently announced he would not seek re-election. In December, former Representative Kay Granger, 82, a Texas Republican, was discovered to be residing in a senior living facility while still in office. And there is Mr. Trump, 78, who became the oldest person ever inaugurated as president.
Still, it is chiefly the Democrats who are grappling with the age issue, heading into the 2026 midterms with several 70-plus senators — Dick Durbin of Illinois (80), Ed Markey of Massachusetts (78), Jack Reed of Rhode Island (75) — either running for re-election or not yet ruling it out.
David Hogg, a 24-year-old recently elected as a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee who has said since the election that Mr. Biden should not have run in 2024, said Democrats needed a youth movement.
“This is not to say that we don’t need experienced people in the party. We absolutely do,” Mr. Hogg said. “But for God’s sake, we really need some younger leaders, too.”
A survivor of the 2018 Parkland, Fla., school shooting who built a national profile speaking out against gun violence, Mr. Hogg said the Democrats were especially wanting for leaders capable of exploiting the media landscape as “the asset that it is” rather than “managing it as the liability it has become for many people in our party.”
“We only have one Gen Z member of Congress that has been elected in the last two elections,” he said, alluding to Maxwell Frost, 28, the Florida Democrat. “That’s insane.”
Indeed, younger Democrats tend to communicate with voters in ways that are more authentically online.
Representative Sara Jacobs of California, 36 — who said she recently had to explain what a podcast was to a Democratic colleague she would not name — has started posting “get ready with me” videos on Instagram discussing complex policy issues while applying makeup.
“Democrats won the people who watch cable news and read newspapers,” Ms. Jacobs said. “We lost the people who don’t feel like they’re part of politics at all. And so, how do we go to them, instead of keep trying to force them to come to us?”
‘Old versus the young’
The frustrations of younger House Democrats boiled over even before Mr. Trump took office, when three of them successfully challenged older, more senior colleagues for the posts of ranking member on the powerful Judiciary, Agriculture and Natural Resources Committees.
Of course, youth is relative in Congress: The top Democrat on Judiciary is now 62, instead of 77. And one of the ousted Democrats, Representative Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona, died on Thursday.
A fourth House Democrat, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 35, lost her bid to lead Democrats on the Oversight Committee to Gerry Connolly of Virginia, 74, a month after he said he was battling esophageal cancer.
Representative Pat Ryan of New York, 42, who gave a nominating speech for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, recalled that he had told his colleagues that while they did not agree on everything ideologically, she was the type of “fighter” the party needed now.
Mr. Ryan said the biggest factor in a lawmaker’s effectiveness was not age but length of service in Washington, with newer lawmakers more willing to take risks and able to present themselves fully and authentically.
“If you came up in the old world where you rose in the ranks slowly and carefully, that sort of gets almost trained out of you,” Mr. Ryan said. “Whereas if you came in post-Trump, you were really catalyzed by a lot of that rawness and emotion.”
Newer lawmakers are comparing notes, among other ways, through a text chain limited to House Democrats who have served five terms or fewer.
One incumbent Democrat who could face a 2026 challenger is Representative Stephen F. Lynch of Massachusetts, 69, who took office in 2001. After a woman pressed him at a Boston event last month to be more assertive against Mr. Trump, saying doing so was in the nation’s best interest, Mr. Lynch pushed back.
“I get to decide that,” Mr. Lynch said, repeating the phrase four times. “You want to decide that? You need to run for Congress.”
Among those who saw the exchange was Patrick Roath, 38, a lawyer and onetime aide to former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, who said in an interview that he was considering a primary run against Mr. Lynch.
“It’s not an age thing explicitly,” Mr. Roath said. “But these jobs, they’re not meant to be held for decades.”
One declared challenger elsewhere is Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, a former chief of staff to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who is running against Ms. Pelosi in San Francisco.
“We’re in this crisis moment, and you’re seeing the seniority model of the Democratic Party falling apart,” Mr. Chakrabarti said.
The Democratic old guard, he argued, understands neither the depth of the nation’s troubles nor how intractable Republicans have become in solving them.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 shocking upset of a senior House Democrat was “painted as left versus center,” he said. “It’s not that anymore. It’s change versus status quo now. It’s old versus the young.”
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7) Federal Agents Search Two Dorm Rooms at Columbia University
Department of Homeland Security officials conducted the search as the Trump administration sought to deport a former student and pro-Palestinian activist.
By Jenny Gross, March 14, 2025
Department of Homeland Security officials searched two dorm rooms at Columbia University, days after the immigration authorities arrested and moved to deport a pro-Palestinian activist and recent graduate of the university.
Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, said in a note to students and staff late Thursday that the officials had presented federal search warrants for private areas of the university. She added that no one was detained and nothing was taken, and did not specify the target of the warrants.
“I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) in two university residences tonight,” Dr. Armstrong wrote. She added that Columbia made every effort to ensure the safety of its students, faculty and staff.
The search occurred after the Trump administration said that Columbia would have to make major changes in its student discipline and admissions processes before it would begin talks on reinstating $400 million in government grants and contracts that it canceled last week.
The government said it pulled the funding over the university’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment as pro-Palestinian protests spread on campus last year over the war in Gaza. Some of the demonstrations included chants, signs and literature that expressed support for the Hamas-led terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Mahmoud Khalil, who recently completed a graduate program at Columbia and is a permanent resident of the United States, played a prominent role in the pro-Palestinian student movement at the university. The Trump administration has said that Mr. Khalil, who is of Palestinian heritage, is a national security threat. It has also accused him of participating in antisemitic activities, though officials have not accused him of having any contact with Hamas. He is being held in a detention center in Louisiana.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. Columbia declined to comment beyond Dr. Armstrong’s letter.
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8) Hamas Says It’s Willing to Free American Israeli Captive, but Israel Expresses Doubt
Hamas said it agreed to release Edan Alexander and turn over the bodies of four other hostages. Israel accused Hamas of “psychological warfare,” suggesting a deal wasn’t close.
By Aaron Boxerman, March 14, 2025
Yael Alexander holding a poster of her son, Edan, at a rally in Tel Aviv last month. Credit...Maya Alleruzzo/Associated Press
Hamas said on Friday that it had agreed to free Edan Alexander, an American Israeli soldier who has been held in Gaza for 17 months, and return the remains of four other hostages holding foreign passports, without specifying when they would be released or what it was demanding in exchange.
The Israeli government said that Hamas was engaged in “psychological warfare,” suggesting a deal was unlikely to be imminent. The office of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said Hamas was “continuing to reject” other proposals that Israel had deemed acceptable.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office said he would convene Israeli ministers on Saturday night to get a detailed readout from Israeli negotiators who had been meeting in Qatar to discuss the next steps in the cease-fire with Hamas. The statement did not provide any further details on the Hamas proposal.
Israel and Hamas are supposed to be negotiating the second phase of the Gaza cease-fire and hostage release deal that began in January. But those talks have seen little progress given entrenched disputes between the two sides over who will control the Palestinian enclave.
Last week, the Trump administration held meetings with Hamas, sidestepping the deadlocked Israeli-Hamas negotiations, in an attempt to free the remaining American hostages held in Gaza. Adam Boehler, President Trump’s nominee for special envoy for hostage affairs, met with senior Hamas officials in Doha.
Hamas and other militant groups seized about 250 hostages during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that ignited the war in Gaza. More than 100 have returned alive to Israel after deals with Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Israeli soldiers retrieved the bodies of dozens of others during their ground invasion of Gaza.
Up to 24 living hostages and the bodies of at least 35 others are still in Gaza, according to the Israeli government. They include five Americans: Mr. Alexander, the last American Israeli hostage still believed to be alive, and four others who are presumed dead.
Mr. Alexander grew up in New Jersey to Israeli-born parents. After high school, he moved to Israel to enlist in the military; he was abducted from the post where he was stationed during the Hamas-led attack. Hamas published a hostage video featuring him last year.
Hamas’s announcement could place Mr. Netanyahu in a tight position. Rejecting an offer to bring home Israelis held captive in Gaza — even at a steep price — would spark domestic criticism in Israel, where bringing home the remaining hostages is a national priority.
But the prospect that captives holding another nationality like Mr. Alexander might be prioritized immediately prompted furious denunciation by relatives of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.
“If Israel insists on stopping in the middle and leaves its citizens behind — let every Israeli mother know that she must get her son a foreign passport, or else he’ll be abandoned,” the Hostage Families’ Forum, an advocacy group, said in a statement.
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9) Powerful A.I. Is Coming. We’re Not Ready.
Three arguments for taking progress toward artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., more seriously — whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist.
By Kevin Roose, March 14, 2025
Kevin Roose is a technology columnist and a co-host of the New York Times tech podcast “Hard Fork.”
Here are some things I believe about artificial intelligence:
I believe that over the past several years, A.I. systems have started surpassing humans in a number of domains — math, coding and medical diagnosis, just to name a few — and that they’re getting better every day.
I believe that very soon — probably in 2026 or 2027, but possibly as soon as this year — one or more A.I. companies will claim they’ve created an artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is usually defined as something like “a general-purpose A.I. system that can do almost all cognitive tasks a human can do.”
I believe that when A.G.I. is announced, there will be debates over definitions and arguments about whether or not it counts as “real” A.G.I., but that these mostly won’t matter, because the broader point — that we are losing our monopoly on human-level intelligence, and transitioning to a world with very powerful A.I. systems in it — will be true.
I believe that over the next decade, powerful A.I. will generate trillions of dollars in economic value and tilt the balance of political and military power toward the nations that control it — and that most governments and big corporations already view this as obvious, as evidenced by the huge sums of money they’re spending to get there first.
I believe that most people and institutions are totally unprepared for the A.I. systems that exist today, let alone more powerful ones, and that there is no realistic plan at any level of government to mitigate the risks or capture the benefits of these systems.
I believe that hardened A.I. skeptics — who insist that the progress is all smoke and mirrors, and who dismiss A.G.I. as a delusional fantasy — not only are wrong on the merits, but are giving people a false sense of security.
I believe that whether you think A.G.I. will be great or terrible for humanity — and honestly, it may be too early to say — its arrival raises important economic, political and technological questions to which we currently have no answers.
I believe that the right time to start preparing for A.G.I. is now.
This may all sound crazy. But I didn’t arrive at these views as a starry-eyed futurist, an investor hyping my A.I. portfolio or a guy who took too many magic mushrooms and watched “Terminator 2.”
I arrived at them as a journalist who has spent a lot of time talking to the engineers building powerful A.I. systems, the investors funding it and the researchers studying its effects. And I’ve come to believe that what’s happening in A.I. right now is bigger than most people understand.
In San Francisco, where I’m based, the idea of A.G.I. isn’t fringe or exotic. People here talk about “feeling the A.G.I.,” and building smarter-than-human A.I. systems has become the explicit goal of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. Every week, I meet engineers and entrepreneurs working on A.I. who tell me that change — big change, world-shaking change, the kind of transformation we’ve never seen before — is just around the corner.
“Over the past year or two, what used to be called ‘short timelines’ (thinking that A.G.I. would probably be built this decade) has become a near-consensus,” Miles Brundage, an independent A.I. policy researcher who left OpenAI last year, told me recently.
Outside the Bay Area, few people have even heard of A.G.I., let alone started planning for it. And in my industry, journalists who take A.I. progress seriously still risk getting mocked as gullible dupes or industry shills.
Honestly, I get the reaction. Even though we now have A.I. systems contributing to Nobel Prize-winning breakthroughs, and even though 400 million people a week are using ChatGPT, a lot of the A.I. that people encounter in their daily lives is a nuisance. I sympathize with people who see A.I. slop plastered all over their Facebook feeds, or have a clumsy interaction with a customer service chatbot and think: This is what’s going to take over the world?
I used to scoff at the idea, too. But I’ve come to believe that I was wrong. A few things have persuaded me to take A.I. progress more seriously.
The insiders are alarmed.
The most disorienting thing about today’s A.I. industry is that the people closest to the technology — the employees and executives of the leading A.I. labs — tend to be the most worried about how fast it’s improving.
This is quite unusual. Back in 2010, when I was covering the rise of social media, nobody inside Twitter, Foursquare or Pinterest was warning that their apps could cause societal chaos. Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t testing Facebook to find evidence that it could be used to create novel bioweapons, or carry out autonomous cyberattacks.
But today, the people with the best information about A.I. progress — the people building powerful A.I., who have access to more-advanced systems than the general public sees — are telling us that big change is near. The leading A.I. companies are actively preparing for A.G.I.’s arrival, and are studying potentially scary properties of their models, such as whether they’re capable of scheming and deception, in anticipation of their becoming more capable and autonomous.
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has written that “systems that start to point to A.G.I. are coming into view.”
Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind, has said A.G.I. is probably “three to five years away.”
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic (who doesn’t like the term A.G.I. but agrees with the general principle), told me last month that he believed we were a year or two away from having “a very large number of A.I. systems that are much smarter than humans at almost everything.”
Maybe we should discount these predictions. After all, A.I. executives stand to profit from inflated A.G.I. hype, and might have incentives to exaggerate.
But lots of independent experts — including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the world’s most influential A.I. researchers, and Ben Buchanan, who was the Biden administration’s top A.I. expert — are saying similar things. So are a host of other prominent economists, mathematicians and national security officials.
To be fair, some experts doubt that A.G.I. is imminent. But even if you ignore everyone who works at A.I. companies, or has a vested stake in the outcome, there are still enough credible independent voices with short A.G.I. timelines that we should take them seriously.
The A.I. models keep getting better.
To me, just as persuasive as expert opinion is the evidence that today’s A.I. systems are improving quickly, in ways that are fairly obvious to anyone who uses them.
In 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, the leading A.I. models struggled with basic arithmetic, frequently failed at complex reasoning problems and often “hallucinated,” or made up nonexistent facts. Chatbots from that era could do impressive things with the right prompting, but you’d never use one for anything critically important.
Today’s A.I. models are much better. Now, specialized models are putting up medalist-level scores on the International Math Olympiad, and general-purpose models have gotten so good at complex problem solving that we’ve had to create new, harder tests to measure their capabilities. Hallucinations and factual mistakes still happen, but they’re rarer on newer models. And many businesses now trust A.I. models enough to build them into core, customer-facing functions.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied the claims.)
Some of the improvement is a function of scale. In A.I., bigger models, trained using more data and processing power, tend to produce better results, and today’s leading models are significantly bigger than their predecessors.
But it also stems from breakthroughs that A.I. researchers have made in recent years — most notably, the advent of “reasoning” models, which are built to take an additional computational step before giving a response.
Reasoning models, which include OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1, are trained to work through complex problems, and are built using reinforcement learning — a technique that was used to teach A.I. to play the board game Go at a superhuman level. They appear to be succeeding at things that tripped up previous models. (Just one example: GPT-4o, a standard model released by OpenAI, scored 9 percent on AIME 2024, a set of extremely hard competition math problems; o1, a reasoning model that OpenAI released several months later, scored 74 percent on the same test.)
As these tools improve, they are becoming useful for many kinds of white-collar knowledge work. My colleague Ezra Klein recently wrote that the outputs of ChatGPT’s Deep Research, a premium feature that produces complex analytical briefs, were “at least the median” of the human researchers he’d worked with.
I’ve also found many uses for A.I. tools in my work. I don’t use A.I. to write my columns, but I use it for lots of other things — preparing for interviews, summarizing research papers, building personalized apps to help me with administrative tasks. None of this was possible a few years ago. And I find it implausible that anyone who uses these systems regularly for serious work could conclude that they’ve hit a plateau.
If you really want to grasp how much better A.I. has gotten recently, talk to a programmer. A year or two ago, A.I. coding tools existed, but were aimed more at speeding up human coders than at replacing them. Today, software engineers tell me that A.I. does most of the actual coding for them, and that they increasingly feel that their job is to supervise the A.I. systems.
Jared Friedman, a partner at Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator, recently said a quarter of the accelerator’s current batch of start-ups were using A.I. to write nearly all their code.
“A year ago, they would’ve built their product from scratch — but now 95 percent of it is built by an A.I.,” he said.
Overpreparing is better than underpreparing.
In the spirit of epistemic humility, I should say that I, and many others, could be wrong about our timelines.
Maybe A.I. progress will hit a bottleneck we weren’t expecting — an energy shortage that prevents A.I. companies from building bigger data centers, or limited access to the powerful chips used to train A.I. models. Maybe today’s model architectures and training techniques can’t take us all the way to A.G.I., and more breakthroughs are needed.
But even if A.G.I. arrives a decade later than I expect — in 2036, rather than 2026 — I believe we should start preparing for it now.
Most of the advice I’ve heard for how institutions should prepare for A.G.I. boils down to things we should be doing anyway: modernizing our energy infrastructure, hardening our cybersecurity defenses, speeding up the approval pipeline for A.I.-designed drugs, writing regulations to prevent the most serious A.I. harms, teaching A.I. literacy in schools and prioritizing social and emotional development over soon-to-be-obsolete technical skills. These are all sensible ideas, with or without A.G.I.
Some tech leaders worry that premature fears about A.G.I. will cause us to regulate A.I. too aggressively. But the Trump administration has signaled that it wants to speed up A.I. development, not slow it down. And enough money is being spent to create the next generation of A.I. models — hundreds of billions of dollars, with more on the way — that it seems unlikely that leading A.I. companies will pump the brakes voluntarily.
I don’t worry about individuals overpreparing for A.G.I., either. A bigger risk, I think, is that most people won’t realize that powerful A.I. is here until it’s staring them in the face — eliminating their job, ensnaring them in a scam, harming them or someone they love. This is, roughly, what happened during the social media era, when we failed to recognize the risks of tools like Facebook and Twitter until they were too big and entrenched to change.
That’s why I believe in taking the possibility of A.G.I. seriously now, even if we don’t know exactly when it will arrive or precisely what form it will take.
If we’re in denial — or if we’re simply not paying attention — we could lose the chance to shape this technology when it matters most.
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10) Trump Administration Expels South Africa’s Ambassador to the U.S.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had lashed out on social media over comments critical of President Trump that the ambassador had made to a think tank in Johannesburg.
By Edward Wong and John Eligon, Published March 14, 2025, Updated March 15, 2025
South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool, in Washington in 2013. Credit...Cliff Owen/Associated Press
President Trump’s administration has officially expelled South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, a spokesman for the South African president said on Saturday, calling the decision “regrettable.”
The ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, received an expulsion letter from the State Department, said Vincent Magwenya, the spokesman for President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa. The move comes during a low point in the relationship between the two countries, with Mr. Trump having accused Mr. Ramaphosa’s government of discriminating against South Africa’s white minority and siding with one of America’s enemies, Iran.
A statement from Mr. Ramaphosa’s office called for “the established diplomatic decorum” to be maintained.
“South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States of America,” the statement said.
The first indication of Mr. Rasool’s fate came as Secretary of State Marco Rubio flew back from the Group of 7 allies meeting in Canada on Friday.
Mr. Rubio wrote on social media that South Africa’s ambassador was a “race-baiting politician who hates America” and Mr. Trump. He added, “We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.” That designation requires South Africa to end Mr. Rasool’s role as ambassador.
Mr. Rubio made his comments above a repost of an article from Breitbart, a right-leaning news site, about remarks Mr. Rasool made on Friday via video link to an institute in Johannesburg. The article quoted Mr. Rasool as saying Mr. Trump was leading a “supremacist” movement against “the incumbency, those who are in power,” in South Africa.
The 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations says a host country “may at any time and without having to explain its decision” declare “any member” of a diplomatic mission to be persona non grata, which is Latin for an unwelcome individual. The convention states that in case of such a designation, “the sending state shall, as appropriate, either recall the person concerned or terminate his functions with the mission.”
Mr. Rubio declined last month to attend a meeting of top diplomats from the Group of 20 nations, criticizing the South African hosts for having a focus of the meeting be on “solidarity, equality and sustainability.” Other countries did not follow Mr. Rubio’s boycott.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order last month prioritizing the resettlement in the United States of Afrikaners, a white minority ethnic group in South Africa that descended from European colonizers. Mr. Trump referred to them as “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” falsely claiming that the South African government had seized their land. Mr. Trump’s order came after South Africa’s president had signed a new land reform bill into law.
Mr. Trump also ordered the federal government to cut off all aid to South Africa.
Despite the hostility with the White House, Mr. Ramaphosa has said that he wants to repair the relationship and maintain strong ties with the United States, which is South Africa’s second-largest trading partner. His government has been preparing a trade proposal to offer to Mr. Trump that it hopes will convince him that a relationship with South Africa would benefit America.
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11) Trump Tries to Use White South Africans as Cautionary Tale
The president and his allies accuse South Africa of discriminating against and killing white people, and warn that it could happen in America if attempts to promote diversity aren’t stopped.
By John Eligon, Reporting from Johannesburg, March 15, 2025
“Although white people make up 7 percent of the country’s population, they own at least half of South Africa’s land. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to violent crime than other people. And white South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale. … Many South African voters, regardless of their race, agree that the African National Congress has created a country plagued by corruption, poor infrastructure, high crime and inequality, with persistent poverty among Black people. In the last election, the party lost its outright majority in Parliament for the first time since the end of apartheid. Analysts note that the party went to great lengths to embrace market-oriented policies that allowed white South Africans to maintain their economic power. In fact, many South Africans criticize Mr. Mandela for not requiring a more aggressive redistribution of white-owned land to Black South Africans, whose families had been forced off of it during apartheid and colonial times.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/world/africa/south-africa-whites-trump.html
White South Africans rallying in support of President Trump outside the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, last month. Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
To hear President Trump and some of his closest supporters tell it, South Africa is a terrible place for white people. They face discrimination, are sidelined from jobs and live under the constant threat of violence or having their land stolen by a corrupt, Black-led government that has left the country in disarray.
The data tell a different story. Although white people make up 7 percent of the country’s population, they own at least half of South Africa’s land. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to violent crime than other people. And white South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale.
Yet Mr. Trump and his allies have pushed their own narrative of South Africa to press an argument at home: If the United States doesn’t clamp down on attempts to promote diversity, America will become a hotbed of dysfunction and anti-white discrimination.
“It plays into the fears of white people in America and elsewhere: ‘We whites are threatened,’” Max du Preez, a white South African writer and historian, said of Mr. Trump’s description of his country.
But, Mr. du Preez added, white people have flourished since the end of apartheid in 1994.
The parallels between South Africa’s attempts to undo the injustices of apartheid and the long struggle in the United States to address slavery, Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination have become a common refrain among some Trump supporters.
Ernst Roets, a white activist and author in South Africa, said that when he spoke to like-minded conservatives in the United States, they often told him, “Oh, yes, we need to look at South Africa, because that’s what’s in store for us if we’re not cautious.”
After apartheid fell three decades ago, South Africa’s democratic government rose to power on a promise to undo the inequities of a system that had left much of the country’s Black majority in squalor. Yet President Nelson Mandela largely allowed white South Africans to keep their wealth, in an effort to maintain a peaceful transition to democracy.
His party, the African National Congress, has passed laws to try to close the gap for Black people. Most recently, South Africa enacted one that allows the government to take private land in the public interest, sometimes without providing compensation.
The law has not yet been used, but some white South Africans — and Mr. Trump — say it unfairly targets the country’s landowners and commercial farmers, who remain mostly white despite decades of anti-apartheid policies.
Mr. Trump has built his political identity in part as a protector of white America. He has fought to save symbols of the Confederacy in the South, blasted racial sensitivity training as “un-American propaganda” and publicly defended white supremacists.
Cutting off aid to most of Africa while championing Afrikaners — the white ethnic minority in South Africa that led the apartheid government — appears to be the latest illustration of Mr. Trump’s commitment to white interests.
Last month, the president signed an executive order granting refugee status to Afrikaners and suspending all aid to South Africa, partly in response to its land-reform law. He said on social media last week that the United States would offer a rapid pathway to citizenship to South African farmers, many of whom are Afrikaner. Then on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool, “a race-baiting politician who hates America” and expelled him.
“Trump is signaling to white people everywhere that he will use his power to protect and advance their interests, no matter the facts,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University.
Some Afrikaners have welcomed Mr. Trump’s embrace. Activists traveled to Washington last month to lobby his administration for more support. A White House official described the Afrikaner delegation as “civil rights leaders.”
Many of Mr. Trump’s allies have long spotlighted the grievances of Afrikaners. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa but is not of Afrikaner descent, has accused the country’s government of promoting racist laws, and falsely claimed that white farmers in South Africa were being killed every day.
After Mr. Roets appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in 2018, Mr. Carlson posted on social media that “White farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land.”
Mr. Carlson later ran a segment describing land seizures and homicides. Mr. Trump, who was in his first term at the time, then tagged Mr. Carlson in a social media post in which he said he was ordering an investigation into farm seizures “and the large scale killing of farmers” in South Africa, though to this day no farms have been seized by the government.
In Mr. Trump’s orbit, these themes are now being recirculated as warning signs for the United States.
Mr. Roets said in an interview that he had become close to Jack Posobiec, the American far-right influencer who recently accompanied Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on a trip to Europe.
During an earlier conversation with Charlie Kirk, an influential Trump ally, Mr. Posobiec said that South Africa was in shambles because of its laws meant to produce racial equity. He added that the United States was headed down the same path by hiring “on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation.”
Many South African voters, regardless of their race, agree that the African National Congress has created a country plagued by corruption, poor infrastructure, high crime and inequality, with persistent poverty among Black people. In the last election, the party lost its outright majority in Parliament for the first time since the end of apartheid.
Analysts note that the party went to great lengths to embrace market-oriented policies that allowed white South Africans to maintain their economic power. In fact, many South Africans criticize Mr. Mandela for not requiring a more aggressive redistribution of white-owned land to Black South Africans, whose families had been forced off of it during apartheid and colonial times.
Supporters of the new land law hope that it will speed up the long-held goal of giving back more land to Black South Africans.
But to Mr. Trump, it is Afrikaners who are the “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” as he said in his executive order signed last month.
Descended primarily from Dutch colonizers who arrived in southern Africa in 1652, Afrikaner people became international darlings in the early 1900s as a small tribe that stood up to the mighty British Empire in battles over territory (though they ultimately lost the war). The ruling British then looked down on Afrikaners as uncouth, and those fights sowed bitter divisions between South Africa’s two largest white populations that exist to this day.
While the president has generally tried to prohibit refugees or asylum seekers from entering the United States, he has carved out a special avenue for some white Africans to come into the country.
That has not necessarily lined up with the wishes of his target audience. Many Afrikaners have said that while they appreciate Mr. Trump supporting their claims of persecution, they would rather stay in South Africa, which they consider their rightful home.
Willem Petzer, an Afrikaner online influencer whose social media posts have been shared by Trump supporters, said he was considering Mr. Trump’s offer. But he said he hoped more than anything that South Africa’s government would end what he called its racism toward people who look like him.
“By the time I was a conscious human being, apartheid had been long gone,” Mr. Petzer, 28, said. “All I have ever known is discrimination against white people.”
That sort of rebranding of Afrikaners as victims has great resonance among the American far-right, said Mr. du Preez, the Afrikaner writer and historian, who founded the first anti-apartheid newspaper in Afrikaans.
“They’re playing on the thing of the white Christian civilization being threatened,” he said. “And that has a lot of appeal among the evangelicals and others in the United States.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Washington.
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12) Does Trump Want America to Look More Like Saudi Arabia?
By Quinn Slobodian, March 15, 2025
Mr. Slobodian is the author of the forthcoming book “Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right.”
Nada Hayek
What kind of oil-drunk capitalist pushes their chips onto ultra-prime real estate, tech moonshots and prestige sporting events while covering every surface in gold leaf?
The standard comparisons and analogies don’t quite capture President Trump’s particular economic vision. It is not really an extension of the Gilded Age robber barons, nor — despite his critics’ claims — is it akin to the fascist economic models of 1930s Germany or Italy.
There is another way of thinking about his brand of political economy, and a potential model for it. We might think of the autocratic, oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf. Specifically, we might think of Mr. Trump’s vision as an attempt to transplant the political economy of Saudi Arabia onto the United States.
The relationship between Mr. Trump, his family and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia runs deep. His hotel business dealings in the region have grown since his previous term in the Oval Office, and his ties to Saudi Arabia now extend to golf, a sport the kingdom has aggressively expanded into. One of its tournaments has been hosted by Mr. Trump’s signature course in Miami, and the president made time recently to assist in talks to broker a deal between LIV Golf, which is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and the PGA Tour.
Soon after the election, Mr. Trump attended an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Madison Square Garden with Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and a lesser-known figure: Yasir al-Rumayyan, the head of the Saudi sovereign fund. The kingdom’s sovereign fund bankrolls both stable assets and high-risk prospects. This week, the U.F.C. chief executive, Dana White, a Trump ally, announced the start of a new boxing league in Saudi Arabia to make the sport “great again.”
Sure, one way to interpret this alliance is as purely transactional — a business executive cozying up to a rich country. But a closer look suggests that this is not merely about a series of real estate and entertainment deals.
Saudi Arabia’s economic power rests on its vast oil reserves, and Mr. Trump has embraced a parallel approach — championing “drill, baby, drill,” rolling back environmental restrictions and prioritizing energy expansion.
Last month, Mr. Trump shared on his social media platform an A.I.-generated video of the demolished Gaza Strip reborn as a “Trump Gaza” of casinos, poolside drinks and a massive idol of the developer-president-sovereign himself. That is the embodiment of the shared Gulf state dream: autocratic technocapitalism in glitz and glass.
For at least a decade, Saudi Arabia has sought to move beyond oil. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 plan aims to diversify the kingdom’s economy, imitating the economic models of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. In recent years, the Saudis have expanded into entertainment, luxury architecture and cutting-edge infrastructure, investing in desalination, green hydrogen and major tech ventures. Among those was a $3.5 billion investment in Uber and nearly $2 billion to help Elon Musk purchase Twitter. Most large-scale investments are funneled through the sovereign fund.
Mr. Trump’s own plans increasingly mirror this model. Some fear he could sell off federally owned lands to create a sovereign wealth fund. At a recent event in Miami for Saudi investors, he spoke about the interaction of artificial intelligence and energy consumption. “The world runs on low-cost energy, and energy-producing nations like us have nothing to apologize for,” he said.
In late January, Mr. Trump hosted Sam Altman and Larry Ellison in the White House for the announcement of the $500 billion Stargate infrastructure investment project. Joining them was Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, another major beneficiary of Saudi investment in recent years.
Saudi Arabia and its Emirati neighbors are the global bank where everyone eventually comes knocking, hat in hand.
The kingdom’s political model is also relevant. Mr. Trump raised eyebrows when he posted an image of himself wearing a crown, captioned “Long live the king.” Saudi Arabia’s centralized control mirrors the male-dominated family dynasty Mr. Trump has been cultivating within his own political empire.
His son Eric Trump oversees real estate and resorts, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner operates in adjacent financial spheres. Another son, Donald Trump Jr., serves as a roving scout for new political talent — what he calls a “MAGA bench for the future,” which brought him into contact with JD Vance — and new investments, most recently exploring ventures in Greenland.
The kingdom’s patriarchal governance also aligns with the social vision of Mr. Trump’s allies. The Saudi government enforces strict gender norms and a prohibition on pornography that seems to mirror the rhetoric and demands of the Project 2025 platform written in part by leading members of Mr. Trump’s administration. And Mr. Vance has advocated a rollback of rights for same-sex couples and transgender Americans. Saudi Arabia’s laws, far more extreme than Mr. Vance’s proposals, include strict bans on gender nonconformity and the potential use of the death penalty for homosexual relations.
The Trump administration’s growing hostility toward independent journalism — increasingly selecting allies for press access and triggering investigations into critics of the president — echoes Saudi Arabia’s own disregard for press freedom. The World Press Freedom index ranks the kingdom 166 out of 180 countries.
Still, Saudi Arabia is embraced by elites worldwide — not because of shared values, but because in a time of high interest rates, petro-states are among the few entities with surplus capital to invest.
Mr. Trump’s model of autocratic capitalism relies on the same logic. Like Saudi Arabia, the United States is an indispensable nation — whether for defense, energy or investment.
The Trumpist project is not about “Making America Great Again” in any traditional sense; rather, it is about reshaping America at least in part in the image of a modern petrostate — one that leverages energy wealth, luxury development and financial capital to exert influence on the global stage.
The future of this model of political economy is in flux. Saudi Arabia has begun work on flamboyant megaprojects like a golden cube in Riyadh large enough to hold the Empire State Building and a would-be city in the desert comprising two continuous 100-mile-long mirrored skyscrapers. But oil prices need to stay high for the kingdom’s checks to clear — and the costs are not only monetary. ITV reported that data suggest over 21,000 workers have died since Vision 2030 began in 2016. The shimmering sci-fi city of the promotional videos and prospectuses has so far yielded only a single unfinished seaside resort three times over budget, for a total cost of $4 billion. The techno kingdom’s future vision looks ever more like what The Wall Street Journal called a “dance of mutual delusion” with consultants and starchitects dazzling the monarch just enough to keep extending their contracts.
Mr. Trump’s “everything everywhere all at once” strategy of deregulation and extraction, combined with inflated promises and incoherent trade policy, suggests a similar sense that time is of the essence — and could work against him. Drill too much and oil prices start to fall. Act too erratically and global investors start to flee tech stocks that prop up the whole market. Partner with a chief executive who throws “Roman salutes” and people stop buying his cars. Treat tariffs like tweets and supply chains start to crack. Even the value of the $TRUMP cryptocurrency meme coin has fallen well over 80 percent since its launch just before the inauguration.
This week’s volatile stock markets, with “recession warnings blaring,” might be one of the sharper reminders about the autocratic technocapitalism model: Not all that glitters is gold.
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13) Bread Lines and Salty Drinking Water: Israeli Aid Block Sets Gaza Back Again
Shipments surged into Gaza after Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire, even if they weren’t enough. Then Israel blocked the border again to pressure Hamas in truce talks.
By Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair, Photographs and Video by Saher Alghorra, March 15, 2025
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo, and Bilal Shbair from Deir al-Balah, Gaza, where he interviewed vegetable sellers, police officers and ordinary people searching for food. Saher Alghorra reported from northern and central Gaza.
A family preparing food to break the daytime fast for the holy month of Ramadan in the rubble of their destroyed home in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, this month.
Outside the Zadna Bakery in central Gaza one recent afternoon, the long lines of people waiting for bread were threatening to dissolve into chaos at any minute.
A security guard shouted at the crowds that pushed toward the bakery door to wait their turn. But no one was listening.
Just a few steps away, scalpers were hawking loaves they had gotten earlier that day for three times the original price. The sunset meal that breaks Muslims’ daylong fast during the holy month of Ramadan was approaching and across Gaza, bread, water, cooking gas and other basics were hard to come by — once again.
Lines had not been this desperate, nor markets this empty, since before the Israel-Hamas cease-fire took hold on Jan. 19. The truce had allowed aid to surge into Gaza for the first time after 15 months of conflict during which residents received only a trickle of supplies.
But no aid has gotten in since March 2. That was the day Israel blocked all goods in a bid to pressure Hamas into accepting an extension of the current cease-fire stage and releasing more hostages sooner, instead of moving to the next phase, which would involve more challenging negotiations to permanently end to the war.
Now, the aid cutoff, exacerbated by panic buying and unscrupulous traders who gouge prices, is driving prices to levels that few can afford. Shortages of fresh vegetables and fruit and rising prices are forcing people to once again fall back on canned food such as beans.
Though the canned food provides calories, experts say, people — and children in particular — need a diverse diet that includes fresh foods to stave off malnutrition.
For the first six weeks of the cease-fire, aid workers and traders delivered food for Gazans, many still weak from months of malnutrition. Medical supplies for bombed-out hospitals, plastic pipes to restore water supplies and fuel to power everything also began to flow in.
Data from aid groups and the United Nations showed that children, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers were eating better. And more centers started offering treatment for malnutrition, the United Nations said.
These were only small steps toward relieving the devastation wrought by the war, which destroyed more than half of Gaza’s buildings and put many of its two million residents at risk of famine.
Even with the sharp increase in aid after the truce began, Gaza health officials reported that at least six newborn babies had died from hypothermia in February for lack of warm clothes, blankets, shelter or medical care, a figure cited by the United Nations. The reports could not be independently verified.
Most hospitals remain only partly operational, if at all.
Aid groups, the United Nations and several Western governments have urged Israel to allow shipments to resume, criticizing its use of humanitarian relief as a bargaining chip in negotiations and, in some cases, saying that the cutoff violates international law.
Last Sunday, it severed electricity supplies to the territory — a move that shuttered most operations at a water desalination plant and deprived about 600,000 people in central Gaza of clean drinking water, according to the United Nations.
The Israeli energy minister has hinted that a water cutoff might be next. Some wells are still functioning in central Gaza, aid officials say, but they supply only brackish water, which poses long-term health risks to those who drink it.
Israel had already closed off all other sources of electricity that it used to provide for Gaza, a measure that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel that began the war. That left essential services to run on solar panels or generators, if power was available at all.
Now there is no fuel coming in for anything, including generators, ambulances or cars.
Israel argues that about 25,000 truckloads of aid that Gaza has received in recent weeks have given people sufficient food.
“There is no shortage of essential products in the strip whatsoever,” the Foreign Ministry said last week. It repeated assertions that Hamas is taking over the aid entering Gaza and that half the group’s budget in Gaza comes from exploiting aid trucks.
Hamas has called the aid and electricity cutoffs “cheap and unacceptable blackmail.”
Gaza residents say that, for the moment, at least, they do have food, though often not enough.
But supplies that humanitarian groups amassed in the first six weeks of the cease-fire are already dwindling, aid officials warn. That has already forced six bakeries in Gaza to close and aid groups and community kitchens to reduce the food rations they hand out.
The order to block aid also cut off Gaza’s access to commercial goods imported by traders.
In the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, a street market was quiet this week as the vendors’ stocks of fruits, vegetables, oil, sugar and flour ran low. Vegetable sellers said the price of onions and carrots had doubled, zucchini had nearly quadrupled and lemons cost nearly 10 times as much. Eggplants were hard to find and potatoes impossible.
As a result, the sellers said, the few customers who still came bought only a couple of vegetables, not by the kilogram as many once did. Others had not had the means to buy anything for months.
Many Gazans lost their jobs and spent their savings to survive the war. When prices skyrocketed, they were left almost completely reliant on aid.
Yasmin al-Attar, 38, and her husband, a driver, wandered from stall to stall in the Deir al-Balah market, looking for the cheapest prices on a recent day. They have seven children, a disabled sister and two aging parents to support.
It had been hard enough to afford the bare minimum of ingredients for iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan, Ms. al-Attar said. But with fuel blocked, it was also getting tough to find fuel for her husband’s car and for cooking.
“Just three days ago, I felt a little relief because prices seemed reasonable,” she said. Now, the same money would only be enough for a much smaller quantity of vegetables.
“How can this possibly be enough for my big family?” she said.
That night, she said, they would probably make do with lentil soup, with no vegetables. And after that? Maybe more canned food.
Stall owners and shoppers alike blamed large-scale traders for the shortages, at least in part, saying they were hoarding supplies to push up prices and maximize their profits. Any vegetables available at reasonable prices were being snapped up and resold for much more, said Eissa Fayyad, 32, a vegetable seller in Deir al-Balah.
It did not help that people rushed out to buy more than they needed as soon as they heard about the Israeli decision to blockade aid again, said Khalil Reziq, 38, a police officer in the city of Khan Younis in central Gaza whose division oversees markets and shops.
Hamas police officers have warned businesses against price-gouging, vendors and shoppers said. In some cases, Mr. Reziq said, his unit had confiscated vendors’ goods and sold them for cheaper on the spot.
But such measures have done little to solve the underlying supply problem.
Beyond the immediate challenge of supplying food, water, medical supplies and tents to Gazans — many thousands of them still displaced — aid officials said their inability to bring in supplies had set back longer-term recovery efforts.
Some had been distributing vegetable seeds and animal feed to farmers so Gaza could start raising more of its own food, while others had been working on rebuilding the water infrastructure and clearing debris and unexploded ordnance.
None of it was easy, aid officials said, because Israel had restricted or barred items including the heavy machinery required to repair infrastructure, generators and more. Israel maintains that Palestinian militants could use these items for military purposes.
For many Gazans now, the focus is back on survival.
“There’s no bombing at the moment, but I still feel like I’m living in a war with everything I’m going through,” said Nevine Siam, 38, who is sheltering at her brother’s house with 30 other people.
She said her sister’s entire family had been killed during the fighting. Her children ask her to make Ramadan meals like the ones they remember from before the war. But without an income, she can get nothing but canned food in aid packages.
Where she is, she said, there are no celebrations and no festive decorations for the holy month.
“It feels as if the joy has been extinguished,” she said.
Erika Solomon, Ameera Harouda and Rania Khaled contributed reporting.
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14) U.S. Arrests 2nd Person Tied to Pro-Palestinian Protests at Columbia
The action came less than a week after Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and a prominent figure in campus demonstrations, was arrested.
By Troy Closson, March 14, 2025
“In a separate action on Thursday, Columbia announced a range of disciplinary actions against students who occupied a campus building last spring, including expulsions and suspensions, among the steps that Trump administration officials had called for in their letter. The punishments included ‘multiyear suspensions, temporary degree revocations and expulsions,’ the university said in a statement. It was unclear how many students had been punished. Among those expelled was Grant Miner, a Jewish graduate student who was part of a student coalition that has called for Columbia to divest from companies connected to Israel, according to the student workers’ union at the university, which Mr. Miner leads.”
Demonstrators rallied outside Columbia University’s main gates on Friday to demand the release of a pro-Palestinian activist who has been detained by the immigration authorities. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
A second person who took part in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University has been arrested by U.S. immigration agents, after overstaying a student visa, federal officials said on Friday, the latest turn in the crisis engulfing the Ivy League institution.
The person, identified by the authorities as Leqaa Kordia, is Palestinian and from the West Bank. She was arrested in Newark on Thursday, officials said. Her student visa was terminated in January 2022, and she was arrested by the New York City police last April for her role in a campus demonstration, the Homeland Security Department said in a statement.
The agency also released a video on Friday that it said showed a Columbia student, identified as Ranjani Srinivasan, preparing to enter Canada after her student visa was revoked.
The announcements, by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, reflected an escalation of the Trump administration’s focus on Columbia, where protests over the war in Gaza last year ignited a national debate over free speech and antisemitism, and prompted similar demonstrations at dozens of other campuses.
The actions came during a tumultuous week at the university, which has experienced a series of escalating controversies since the arrest by federal immigration agents last weekend of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and prominent figure in pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations.
On Friday, more than 200 students gathered outside Columbia’s main campus gates to protest the university’s handling of Mr. Khalil’s arrest. Demonstrators wore kaffiyehs, waved Palestinian flags and carried banners with slogans like “Free Mahmoud,” “I.C.E. off our campuses” and “Columbia You Can’t Hide.”
The protest unfolded less than 24 hours after homeland security agents entered the campus with federal warrants and searched two dorm rooms. No one was detained and nothing was taken, according to the university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong.
Social media posts by Ms. Noem on Friday appeared to signal that Columbia continued to be a subject of Trump administration scrutiny.
Ms. Noem posted a video on the social media platform X that appeared to show a woman walking through LaGuardia Airport with a small suitcase. Ms. Noem identified the woman as Ms. Srinivasan and said she had used a U.S. Customs and Border Protection app to notify the government of her intention to self-deport. Ms. Srinivasan’s dorm room was one of those searched, according to her lawyer and roommate.
“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America,” Ms. Noem said in a statement.
Nathan Yaffe, a member of Ms. Srinivasan’s legal team, confirmed in a statement that federal agents had entered her dorm room on Thursday in an effort to detain her or seek information about her whereabouts. A lawyer for Ms. Kordia could not be immediately identified.
The past week has been fraught with crisis on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. The Trump administration demanded on Thursday that the university make far-reaching changes to its student discipline and admissions policies before any negotiations regarding the cancellation of $400 million in government grants and contracts could begin.
Federal officials wrote in a letter that the university had a week to formalize its definition of antisemitism, ban the wearing of masks “intended to conceal identity or intimidate” and put the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department under “academic receivership.”
The government said the moves were necessary because of what they described as Columbia’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment. Officials from three government agencies wrote that Columbia “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment.”
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said during a speech at the Justice Department on Friday that the administration was investigating whether incidents on campus have violated civil rights protections or federal terrorism laws.
“This is long overdue,” Mr. Blanche said.
But civil liberties advocates argued that the government’s demands would not only erode free speech and academic freedom at Columbia but would have a chilling effect on universities across the country. Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, said in a statement that the “subjugation of universities to official power is a hallmark of autocracy.”
Others were particularly concerned by the demand that the university adopt a definition of antisemitism that could penalize those who are critical of Israel.
Tyler Coward, the lead counsel for government affairs at the free speech and legal defense group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, called the letter “a blueprint to supercharge censorship at America’s colleges and universities.”
“Colleges across the country are likely reading this letter this morning and thinking they better censor speech — or they’re next,” Mr. Coward said in a statement.
A university spokeswoman said Thursday evening that Columbia was “reviewing the letter” from the government agencies. “We are committed at all times to advancing our mission, supporting our students, and addressing all forms of discrimination and hatred on our campus,” she said.
After the dorm search, Ms. Armstrong said in a note to students and staff members late Thursday that she was “heartbroken” over the development, and that Columbia was making every effort to ensure the safety of its students, faculty and staff.
In a separate action on Thursday, Columbia announced a range of disciplinary actions against students who occupied a campus building last spring, including expulsions and suspensions, among the steps that Trump administration officials had called for in their letter.
The punishments included “multiyear suspensions, temporary degree revocations and expulsions,” the university said in a statement. It was unclear how many students had been punished.
Among those expelled was Grant Miner, a Jewish graduate student who was part of a student coalition that has called for Columbia to divest from companies connected to Israel, according to the student workers’ union at the university, which Mr. Miner leads.
The union has accused the university of targeting its members. A Columbia spokeswoman said Friday evening that it was “unfortunate” that the group was trying to “conflate student discipline with employment matters,” and that the accusation was false.
Mr. Miner, a doctoral student in the English and comparative literature department, said in a statement that “this is an egregious attempt to break the union and squash the movement against genocide in Palestine.”
“We will not be intimidated on either front,” he said.
Anvee Bhutani, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Hamed Aleaziz, Sharla Steinman and Katherine Rosman contributed reporting.
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15) ‘Extermination Camp’ Found in Mexico, Group Searching for the Missing Says
The authorities are investigating the discovery of cremation ovens, human remains, piles of shoes and other personal effects at an abandoned ranch outside Guadalajara.
By Paulina Villegas, Reporting from Mexico City, Published March 14, 2025, Updated March 15, 2025
A group of volunteers searching for their missing relatives first received a tip last week about a mass grave hidden in western Mexico.
When they arrived at an abandoned ranch outside La Estanzuela, a small rural village outside Guadalajara in Jalisco state, they discovered three underground cremation ovens, burned human remains, hundreds of bone shards and discarded personal items, along with figurines of Santa Muerte — the Holy Death.
The Mexican authorities, who were notified of the grisly discovery, said in several statements that they later found 96 shell casings of various calibers and metal gripping rings at the ranch. By last Friday, the discovery was dominating local newspapers and TV reports, and the search group was referring to the site as an “extermination camp.”
It is unclear how many people died on the site, and none of the remains have been identified. The authorities have yet to say who operated the camp, what crimes were committed there and for how long. But this week, the State Attorney General’s Office took over the investigation at the request of President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Photos taken by the authorities and by the volunteer group, Searching Warriors of Jalisco, at the abandoned ranch showed more than 200 shoes piled together and heaps of other personal items: a blue summer dress, a small pink backpack, notebooks, pieces of underwear. The more than 700 personal items were a chilling hint at the number of people who may have died there.
In a country seemingly inured to episodes of brutal violence from drug cartels, where clandestine graves emerge every month, the images shocked Mexicans and prompted outraged human rights groups to demand that the government put an end to the violence that has ravaged the nation for years.
“The number of the victims that presumably could have been buried there is enormous,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a security analyst based in Mexico City. “And it resurfaced the nightmarish reminder that Mexico is plagued with mass graves.”
More than 120,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in Mexico since such record-keeping began in 1962, according to official data. Human rights groups and collectives of volunteers searching for their missing relatives have warned that the number could be higher.
The discovery at the ranch site comes at a time where Ms. Sheinbaum faces intense pressure from President Trump to crack down on organized crime in order to avoid tariffs on exports to the United States and even possible U.S. military intervention to hunt down cartel members.
Partly because of Mr. Trump’s threats, Ms. Sheinbaum has shifted security issues back to center stage on her agenda and has taken a more aggressive approach to fighting crime than her predecessor, experts and analysts say. But her government faces significant challenges as she tackles the powerful criminal groups that control large areas of the country.
One of the most violent criminal organizations in Mexico, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which emerged in the early 2010s, is now a major producer and trafficker of synthetic drugs, particularly fentanyl and methamphetamine. The group, which operates in the state of Jalisco and across the country, has diversified into other criminal activities like illegal logging, human trafficking and extortion.
The authorities have said that the ranch could have been operated by the Jalisco cartel. The group’s dominance and its rapid expansion in recent years have coincided with a growing number of homicides, forced disappearances and discoveries of mass graves in Jalisco state.
Indira Navarro, leader of Searching Warriors of Jalisco, which found the site, said in interviews with local news media this week that several people had contacted the group to say that they had been recruited and trained at the site in the use of weapons and torture techniques. But the ranch, they said, was also used as a killing site where criminals routinely disposed of their victims.
Ms. Navarro, who could not be reached for comment, told the news outlets that, according to the testimonies, young people from other states were recruited through false job offers posted on social media. Once they accepted the jobs, she said, they were summoned to a bus station in Guadalajara, the state capital, and from there taken to the ranch.
Ms. Navarro recounted how one young man had told her that the young recruits were at times forced to burn their victims as part of their training. If they objected to the orders of their trainers, the recruits were sometimes fed to wild animals, like lions, she said.
“This is not a horror film; this is our reality, and people should know about it,” Ms. Navarro, whose brother went missing nine years ago, said in an interview with a national radio show.
The New York Times could not independently verify the accounts.
The local authorities were familiar with the ranch, first locating it last September and finding weapons, shell casings and bone fragments there, according to official reports, but further investigations were stopped for reasons that are unclear. During the same inspection, officials found and rescued two people who had been kidnapped and held at the ranch, and also discovered a body wrapped in plastic.
Why the authorities did not discover the pile of shoes, clothes and burned remains then is unclear.
The state attorney general, Salvador González, has since told local news media that it had not been possible to search the entire ranch back in September “because there are a lot of hectares in the area.”
Ms. Sheinbaum suggested during a news conference this week that the local authorities might have been omissive in their initial investigation.
The attorney general “is correct in stating it is not credible that a situation of this nature would not have been known to the authorities of that municipality and the state,” she said. “But the first thing we have to do is investigate.”
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16) After $30 Million in U.S. Aid, Haiti’s Biggest Hospital Goes Up in Smoke
A fire set by gangs at the country’s largest public hospital underscores long-simmering problems in Haiti, which is heavily dependent on international aid.
By David C. Adams and Frances Robles, Reporting from Florida, March 15, 2025
"Asked about the hospital’s status, the U.S. State Department, which has assumed control of the aid agency, said it would conduct a review with the goal of 'restructuring assistance to serve U.S. interests.'”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/us/haiti-hospital-fire-usaid.html
Two days before last Christmas, Dr. Pierre S. Prince took an exciting new job as director of Haiti’s largest public hospital, which the United States spent tens of millions of dollars renovating and is so deep in gang territory that it has been closed for a year.
Dr. Prince, a 57-year-old thoracic surgeon, looked forward to returning to the State University Hospital of Haiti, which had been ravaged by the 2010 earthquake that decimated the country’s capital.
He did his residency there and was going to oversee a new wing, a 500-bed facility with nearly $100 million in renovations and a range of services, including operating rooms, orthopedics and a maternity and neonatal unit.
On Christmas Eve, as he headed to work, gangs attacked a news conference scheduled to announce the hospital’s partial reopening, killing a police officer and two reporters, and seriously injuring seven other journalists. The reopening never happened.
The situation worsened last month: Videos that circulated on social media and were verified by The New York Times showed an older building at the general hospital, as it is commonly known, engulfed in flames. Gang members had apparently set it on fire.
“The doctors are scared, and our residents and interns are depressed,” Dr. Prince said. “Some of them have left. The morale is very low.”
The hospital’s fate underscores the increasingly desperate conditions facing Haiti and its international donors as they try to rescue Port-au-Prince from the control of armed gangs, which have targeted foreign-financed health facilities.
Haiti, where the United Nations says about 20 percent of its 10 million people is enduring acute levels of hunger and 1 million have fled their homes because of violence, is particularly dependent on foreign aid and had been receiving up to $400 million a year from the United States alone.
But as Elon Musk takes an ax to American foreign aid around the world, and dismantles the U.S. Agency for International Development, programs like the continued renovation of the general hospital in Port-au-Prince are in the cross hairs.
The hospital’s new wing, which U.S. A.I.D. helped pay for, was already plagued by large cost overruns and a decade of construction delays. Now it is being battered by repeated assaults from criminal groups as Haiti’s capital has become a lawless quagmire despite billions of dollars in international aid.
“The general hospital is sort of like a case study on how it goes wrong,” said Jake Johnston, a researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy and Research who wrote “Aid State,” a blistering account of how billions in international aid failed to bolster Haiti’s public institutions. “And they never finished the work, and the general hospital is closed for all these other reasons.”
Haiti’s general hospital was built next to the presidential palace in downtown Port-au-Prince by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the American occupation of Haiti, from 1915 to 1934.
For years, many patients were gunshot and torture victims. In a country where politicians and wealthy elites travel to the Dominican Republic or Miami for health care, the general hospital served the overwhelmingly poor masses.
“It housed the only dialysis machines in the country,” said David Ellis, an American who runs a medical helicopter service in Port-au-Prince. “It was, when open, the most comprehensive surgical center in the country.”
It was so badly damaged in the 2010 earthquake that no one was able to treat the hundreds of severely injured people gathered outside, their bloody mangled limbs exposed to the dusty air.
Renovating the hospital was one of the first projects approved by an international reconstruction committee formed to rebuild Haiti after the earthquake. France committed $40 million, the United States $25 million.
After a series of delays and contract disputes, it was slated for completion in June 2023 — nine years later than originally planned.
At the same time, the political situation in Haiti deteriorated precipitously. The president was assassinated in 2021, and kidnappings and killings soared.
In July 2022, U.S. A.I.D. increased its contribution by $10 million because the Haitian government could not pay its share, according to a 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog agency.
The hospital was just one of several projects the G.A.O. examined that ended up over budget. The United States spent $2.3 billion to support Haiti’s reconstruction in the decade after the quake, and only half of the eight major projects G.A.O. reviewed were completed.
While a key power plant and roughly 900 homes were built in Port-au-Prince, two projects, including building a new port, were scrapped when costs soared and two others — including the general hospital — were still ongoing.
Technical and political disputes caused significant delays and cost overruns at the hospital, the G.A.O. said.
But the hospital limped along, half-open, while work on the new wing stalled.
Then a year ago, a coalition of gangs banded together to attack police stations, prisons, hospitals and communities. Gangs set homes on fire, and entire neighborhoods — including the downtown area that is home to the hospital — cleared out.
The former prime minister had to dodge gunfire during an official visit to the general hospital last year and was whisked away by his security detail while CNN cameras rolled.
With the area too perilous, the more than 800 people who work at the hospital, including doctors and nurses, have been paid to stay home for nearly a year.
“It seems that there is an intense desire to make us waste time,” said Dr. Stevens Gabriel, a resident surgeon who complained of not being reassigned to another facility to continue advancing his skills and training.
Even though police barracks are nearby, gangs plundered the general hospital. The governments of the United States, France and Haiti had already spent about $90 million on it. Electrical wiring, plumbing and equipment were stolen, though much of the new medical equipment had not yet been installed, Dr. Prince said.
The damage was estimated at $3 million to $4 million and could set the project back another two years — if the security situation ever improves enough for the hospital to reopen, he said. Now Dr. Prince says they are scouting for a new temporary place to work.
Eleonore Caroit, the French member of Parliament for citizens living overseas in Latin America and the Caribbean, who sits on the board of the development agency that helped finance the project, said drone footage was being used to assess damage from the recent fire.
“France is willing to do what it can to help,’’ she said, “but the situation is very complicated. My constituents tell me it’s never been this bad.”
Satellite imagery captured eight days after the fire by the commercial satellite company Planet Labs shows one older building charred and at least two others damaged.
Dr. Barth Green, the chairman of Project Medishare for Haiti, a Miami-based charity and a major supporter of health services in the country, said the attack was particularly dispiriting because the general hospital was where generations of nurses and doctors trained.
“That’s the national university hospital,” he said, “And so, by destroying this, it’s a symbol.”
The issue is critical: Only one of three major hospitals in the capital area is open. Of the 92 health facilities in the metropolitan area, only 39 are operational, according to the Pan American Health Organization.
Under the Trump administration’s new push to eradicate foreign aid, funds for most projects financed by U.S.A.I.D. were frozen, although a judge recently ruled that the agency had to fulfill past contracts.
Asked about the hospital’s status, the U.S. State Department, which has assumed control of the aid agency, said it would conduct a review with the goal of “restructuring assistance to serve U.S. interests.”
“Programs that serve our nation’s interests will continue,” the State Department said in a statement. “However, programs that aren’t aligned with our national interest will not.”
The Haitian Ministry of Health did not respond to requests for comment.
Responding to a post on X criticizing the billions spent in Haiti after the earthquake, Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé agreed that much of the American assistance had been squandered.
“You’re right!!” he wrote in a message directed at Mr. Musk, “USAID spent billion (sic) on Haiti with no accountability. Haiti needs economic development and security, not corruption and cronyism.”
He added that he looked forward to working with President Trump to achieve economic prosperity for Haiti.
Devon Lum contributed reporting. Dmitriy Khavin contributed video editing.
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17) Trade War Retaliation Will Hit Trump Voters Hardest
By Lazaro Gamio and Ana Swanson, March 15, 2025
As President Trump imposes tariffs on products from countries around the world, foreign governments are answering back with tariffs of their own.
China has targeted corn farmers and carmakers. Canada has put tariffs on poultry plants and air-conditioning manufacturers, while Europe will hit American steel mills and slaughter houses.
Since Mr. Trump ordered steep levies on some of America’s largest trading partners in February and March, other countries have begun imposing their own tariffs on American exports in an attempt to put pressure on the president to relent.
The retaliatory tariffs have been carefully designed to hit Mr. Trump where it hurts: Nearly 8 million Americans work in industries targeted by the levies and the majority are Trump voters, a New York Times analysis shows.
The figures underscore the dramatic impact that a trade war could have on American workers, potentially causing Mr. Trump’s economic strategy to backfire. Mr. Trump has argued that tariffs will help boost American jobs. But economists say that retaliatory tariffs can cancel out that effect.
The countermeasures are aimed at industries that employ roughly 7.75 million people across the United States. The bulk of those — 4.48 million — are in counties that voted for Mr. Trump in the last election, compared with 3.26 million jobs in counties that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a calculation by The Times that included examining retaliatory tariffs on more than 4,000 product categories.
These totals are the number of jobs in industries that foreign countries have targeted with their tariffs — not the number of jobs that will actually be lost because of tariffs, which is likely to be significantly lower. But industries hit by retaliatory tariffs are likely to sell fewer goods on foreign markets, which may mean lower profits and job losses.
The jobs that could be hit by retaliation are especially concentrated in pockets of the upper Midwest, South and Southeast, including many rural parts of the country that are responsible for producing agricultural goods. It also includes areas that produce coal, oil, car parts and other manufactured products.
Robert Maxim, a fellow at the Brookings Metro, a Washington think tank that has done similar analysis, said that other countries had particularly targeted Trump-supporting regions and places where “Trump would like to fashion himself as revitalizing the U.S.” That includes smaller manufacturing communities in states like Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, as well as southern states like Kentucky and Georgia, he said.
The message foreign countries are trying to send, he said, is, “You think you can bully us, well, we can hurt you too. And by the way, we know where it really matters.”
Retaliation may also mean concentrated pain for some industries, like farming. In Mr. Trump’s first term, American farmers – a strong voting bloc for the president – were targeted by China and other governments, which caused U.S. exports of soybeans and other crops to plummet.
Chinese buyers shifted to purchasing more agricultural goods from nations like Argentina and Brazil instead, and U.S. farmers had a difficult time winning back those contracts in subsequent years. Mr. Trump tried to offset those losses by giving farmers more than $20 billion in payments to compensate for the pain of the trade war.
One analysis published last year by economists at M.I.T., the World Bank and elsewhere found that retaliatory tariffs imposed on the United States during Mr. Trump’s first term had a negative effect on U.S. jobs, outweighing any benefit to employment from Mr. Trump’s tariffs on foreign goods or from the subsidies Mr. Trump provided to those hurt by his trade policies.
The net effect on American employment of U.S. tariffs, foreign tariffs and subsidies “was at best a wash, and it may have been mildly negative,” the economists concluded.
Rural parts of the country are once again at risk from retaliation. Agriculture is a major U.S. export and farmers are politically important to Mr. Trump. And rural counties may have one major employer — like a poultry processing plant — that provides a big share of the county’s jobs, compared with urban or suburban areas that are more diversified.
The retaliatory tariffs target industries employing 9.5 percent of people in Wisconsin, 8.5 percent of people in Indiana and 8.4 percent of people in Iowa. The shares are also relatively high in Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Kansas.
In an address to Congress earlier this month, Mr. Trump implied that farmers could be hit again, saying there may be “an adjustment period” as he put tariffs in place on foreign products. There may be “a little disturbance,” he said. “We are OK with that. It won’t be much.”
Mr. Trump said he had told farmers in his first term to “‘Just bear with me,’ and they did. They did. Probably have to bear with me again,” he said.
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, said that many of the counties affected by retaliation were rural, and “hard red territory.” The geography of Mr. Trump’s political support, he said, was “no secret to our trade partners.”
“They’re very cognizant of these industries, the geography of these industries, and how American politics work,” he added.
Methodology
The analysis was based on an analytical technique used by the Brookings Institution to examine the first round of Chinese retaliatory tariffs.
To expand on the analysis, The Times collected the lists of U.S. products targeted for retaliatory tariffs by China, Canada and the European Union as of March 14. In total, the six published lists contain more than 4,000 individual product categories, many of which were targeted by more than one country. The tariffs from China and Canada are currently in force. One set of tariffs from the European Union is scheduled to go into effect April 1, while the other set is preliminary, and is subject to change until its implementation in mid-April.
After collecting the list of products, The Times used a concordance table from the Census Bureau, which provides a way to tie a given product category to the general industry which produces it.
To tally the number of jobs, The Times used data from Lightcast, a labor market analytics company. Lightcast provided The Times with industry-level employment data based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. The quarterly census suppresses employment data for industries at the county level to protect the privacy of employers when there are only a handful of establishments. Lightcast uses a proprietary algorithm that draws from a number of related datasets to estimate the employment level for fields that are suppressed in the census.
County election results are from The Associated Press.
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