WATCH THE LIVESTREAM: FREE MAHMOUD FREE PALESTINE!
(Watch livestream at 5:00 P.M. Pacific Time)
TONIGHT: Can't make it in person? Want to join internationally? Watch tonight's livestream
Don't miss this powerful event in support of Mahmoud Khalil, Palestine, and civil liberties. Together we will defend free speech and reaffirm our collective commitment to ending the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Hear from lead organizers with The Palestinian Youth Movement, members of Mahmoud Khalil's legal team, Grant Miner - expelled student & President of UAW Student Workers of Columbia Local 2710, The People's Forum, and artists—including Macklemore, Alana Hadid, and Susan Sarandon—as we stand together against repression and strengthen our movement for a free Palestine.
🗓️ Sat Mar 22
➡️ Livestream at 8pm
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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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National Mass Mobilization to Fight Back Against Trump & Musk
Hands Off!
San Francisco Fights Back!
Saturday, April 5, 2025
1:00 P.M. - 3:00 P.M.
Civic Center Plaza
335 McAllister Street
San Francisco, CA, 94102
Join INDIVISIBLE SF, our friends at 50501, and many other organizations for a national Mass Mobilization on April 5.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. San Francisco is fighting back!
They're taking everything they can get their hands on—our health care, our data, our jobs, our services—and daring the world to stop them. This is a crisis, and the time to act is now.
On Saturday, April 5th, we're taking to the streets to fight back with a clear message: Hands off!
This mass mobilization day is our message to the world that we do not consent to the destruction of our government and our economy for the benefit of Trump and his billionaire allies. Alongside Americans across the country, we are marching, rallying, and protesting to demand a stop the chaos and build an opposition movement against the looting of our country.
A core principle behind all Hands Off! events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values.
Check out handsoff2025.com for more information.
HandsOff Mobilize link here:
https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/event/764837/
Indivisible Mobilize link here:
https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/764736/
Source:: https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/event/764837/
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How Trump Got Rich
It had nothing to do with brains!
Some excerpts from Wikipedia:
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in the New York City borough of Queens, the fourth child of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. He is of German and Scottish descent. He grew up with his older siblings, Maryanne, Fred Jr., and Elizabeth, and his younger brother, Robert, in a mansion in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. Fred Trump paid his children each about $20,000 a year, equivalent to $265,000 a year in 2024. Trump was a millionaire at age eight by contemporary standards. Trump attended the private Kew-Forest School through seventh grade.
He was a difficult child and showed an early interest in his father’s business. His father enrolled him in New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, to complete secondary school. Trump considered a show business career but instead in 1964 enrolled at Fordham University. Two years later, he transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics.
He was exempted from the draft during the Vietnam War due to a claim of bone spurs in his heels. …Starting in 1968, Trump was employed at his father’s real estate company, Trump Management, which owned racially segregated middle-class rental housing in New York City’s outer boroughs.
In 1971, his father made him president of the company and he began using the Trump Organization as an umbrella brand. Roy Cohn was Trump’s fixer, lawyer, and mentor for 13 years in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1973, Cohn helped Trump countersue the U.S. government for $100 million (equivalent to $708 million in 2024) over its charges that Trump’s properties had racially discriminatory practices. Trump’s counterclaims were dismissed, and the government’s case was settled with the Trumps signing a consent decree agreeing to desegregate; four years later, Trumps again faced the courts when they were found in contempt of the decree.
Before age thirty, he showed his propensity for litigation, no matter the outcome and cost; even when he lost, he described the case as a win. Helping Trump projects, Cohn was a consigliere whose Mafia connections controlled construction unions. Cohn introduced political consultant Roger Stone to Trump, who enlisted Stone’s services to deal with the federal government.
Between 1991 and 2009, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six of his businesses: the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, the casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts company.
In 1992, Trump, his siblings Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert, and his cousin John W. Walter, each with a 20 percent share, formed All County Building Supply & Maintenance Corp. The company had no offices and is alleged to have been a shell company for paying the vendors providing services and supplies for Trump’s rental units, then billing those services and supplies to Trump Management with markups of 20–50 percent and more.
The owners shared the proceeds generated by the markups. The increased costs were used to get state approval for increasing the rents of his rent-stabilized units. …Trump has said he began his career with “a small loan of a million dollars” from his father and that he had to pay it back with interest.
He borrowed at least $60 million from his father, largely did not repay the loans, and received another $413 million (2018 equivalent, adjusted for inflation) from his father’s company.
Posing as a Trump Organization official named “John Barron,” Trump called journalist Jonathan Greenberg in 1984, trying to get a higher ranking on the Forbes 400 list of wealthy Americans. Trump self-reported his net worth over a wide range: from a low of minus $900 million in 1990, to a high of $10 billion in 2015. In 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.3 billion and ranked him the 1,438th wealthiest person in the world.
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Hamas Fires Rockets at Tel Aviv as Israel Expands Gaza Ground Operations
A two-month cease-fire in Gaza collapsed this week amid a renewed Israeli bombardment. The fighting now looks like it is escalating back to full-scale war.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 20, 2025
Palestinians standing on Thursday near the bodies of relatives killed in an overnight Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza. A two-month cease-fire collapsed this week with an Israeli aerial bombardment of Gaza that the military said had targeted Hamas. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Hamas fired its first barrage of rockets in months into Israeli territory on Thursday as Israeli troops expanded their ground raids in northern Gaza in what looked increasingly like a slide back into full-scale war.
There were no reports of casualties from the rockets, which were fired at Tel Aviv. The Israeli military said they were either intercepted or fell in open areas. But the barrage served as a show of resilience from the Palestinian armed group despite more than a year of war with Israel.
A two-month cease-fire collapsed this week with an Israeli aerial bombardment of Gaza, which the military said had targeted Hamas. Israel argued that the truce could not continue unless Hamas released more hostages, while Hamas accused Israel of violating the cease-fire agreement.
Israel’s renewed assault has killed more than 500 people in Gaza in three days, including scores of children, the Gaza health ministry said on Thursday. Those figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Earlier on Thursday, the Israeli military said its forces had begun conducting “ground activity” near Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza. That came less than a day after Israel announced that it had recaptured part of the Netzarim corridor in central Gaza, which divides the north of the territory from the south. Israel had withdrawn from the corridor as part of the truce.
Hamas said at least five of its top leaders in Gaza were among about 400 people killed by Israel on Tuesday in a heavy bombardment, according to Gaza officials. Hamas rarely provides information as to whether those killed in Israeli attacks were members of the armed group.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has vowed to step up pressure on Hamas until the group capitulates and releases the dozens of Israeli and foreign hostages still being held in Gaza.
Hamas officials say Israel will not gain more favorable terms for a cease-fire by resuming the war.
The first phase of the January cease-fire ended in early March. Mediators like the United States were trying to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas on the next steps in the truce, including a permanent end to the war and the release of the remaining living hostages in Gaza.
But Israel has been unwilling to end the conflict permanently as long as Hamas remains in power in Gaza. Hamas is refusing to disband its armed battalions, send its leaders in Gaza into exile or release many more hostages unless Israel commits to a permanent end to the war.
About 24 living Israeli and foreign hostages — as well as the remains of more than 30 others — are believed to still be in Gaza, according to the Israeli government.
Hamas and its allies abducted about 250 people during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that ignited the war.
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2) Trump Wants to Take Over Ukraine’s Nuclear Plants. What Would That Mean?
The White House said taking ownership of Ukrainian plants would give them the “best protection.” The idea faces legal hurdles and operational challenges, and it’s unclear if Ukraine would agree to it.
By Constant Méheut, Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, March 20, 2025
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in 2022. Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
During a call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine this week, President Trump floated a highly unusual idea: The United States could take control of Ukrainian nuclear power plants.
“The United States could be very helpful in running those plants with its electricity and utility expertise,” the White House said in a statement after the call on Wednesday. “American ownership of those plants would be the best protection for that infrastructure and support for Ukrainian energy infrastructure.”
The idea surprised officials and energy experts in Kyiv, and it was not clear whether Mr. Zelensky would agree to such a plan. Ukraine owns four nuclear power plants, and it also appears that the two sides do not agree on how many facilities the idea concerns.
Mr. Zelensky suggested at a news conference that the idea was limited to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which is now under Russian control.
The Ukrainian leader described his discussions with Mr. Trump about the plant as “positive steps,” but added, “I’m not sure we will get a result quickly.”
The White House statement echoed a familiar argument from Mr. Trump: that U.S. economic involvement in Ukraine serves as its best security guarantee, because Russia would be less likely to target a country where America has economic interests. Mr. Trump has also applied such reasoning to a potential deal on access to Ukrainian critical minerals.
So what could the United States’ interests be in Ukraine’s nuclear sector, and what challenges might it face?
U.S. Economic Interests
Ukraine’s Soviet-era nuclear power plants have been the backbone of its energy network during the war, supplying up to two-thirds of the country’s electricity. While Moscow has relentlessly attacked Ukraine’s thermal and hydroelectric power plants in an effort to cripple its grid, it has avoided striking nuclear facilities, which could trigger a radiological disaster.
Against that background, the Ukrainian government has initiated plans to build more nuclear reactors, arguing that it is the only viable solution to ensuring long-term energy security.
This is where America’s business interests could come into play.
Shortly before the war, Westinghouse, an American nuclear technology company, signed a deal with Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear company, to build five reactors. After Russia attacked, the number was increased to nine and the two companies agreed to further cooperate to deploy smaller plants in Ukraine.
For Westinghouse, it was a breakthrough after years of struggling to enter a Ukrainian nuclear market long dominated by Rosatom, the Russian nuclear power giant.
Westinghouse has a special interest in the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Russia captured the plant in March 2022, and it no longer supplies electricity to the Ukrainian grid. But before the war, it used fuel and technology from Westinghouse.
Olga Kosharna, a Ukrainian nuclear safety expert, said that Russia’s capture of the Zaporizhzhia plant had raised concerns at Westinghouse about the potential theft of its intellectual property. In 2023, the U.S. Energy Department warned in a letter to Rosatom that the company could face prosecution under U.S. law if it used Westinghouse technology at the plant.
Andrian Prokip, an energy expert with the Kennan Institute in Washington, said that Westinghouse would “definitely benefit” from a return of the plant to Ukrainian hands, as it would expand its market.
It is unclear whether Mr. Trump discussed the fate of the Zaporizhzhia plant with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in a call on Tuesday as he had vowed to.
Westinghouse did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A current Ukrainian official and a former one, both with knowledge of the talks between the United States and Ukraine, also said Kyiv had emphasized to Mr. Trump that if the United States wanted access to Ukrainian minerals, it would require the Zaporizhzhia plant’s power-generating capacity, because mineral extraction and processing is energy intensive.
Possible Challenges
For one thing, all of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants are owned by Energoatom, and Ukrainian law prohibits their privatization.
Amending Ukraine’s laws to allow for U.S. ownership would be politically sensitive in a post-Soviet country where many key industries remain state-owned.
Ukraine has engaged in a wave of privatization during the war. But privatizing Energoatom — the state-owned company that generates the most revenue — would likely be a sticking point.
“I expect there would be great resistance to this idea in Ukraine,” said Victoria Voytsitska, a former Ukrainian lawmaker and senior member of Parliament’s energy committee. “From both sides of the political spectrum.”
Mr. Zelensky alluded to the issue in his news conference after his call with Mr. Trump. If Russia returned the Zaporizhzhia plant to Ukraine — a prospect that many in Ukraine deem unlikely — “simply handing over the plant” to the United States would not be possible, Mr. Zelensky said, because “it’s ours and it’s our land.”
Making plants operational again after three years of war would also pose a considerable challenge. Mr. Zelensky cited a period of up to two and a half years to get the degraded Zaporizhzhia plant running again.
Further, although all six Zaporizhzhia reactors have been shut down, they still require energy to power critical safety systems and water to circulate in their cores to prevent a meltdown.
But the power lines providing power to the plant have been cut on several occasions in the war, and the destruction of a nearby dam, possibly at Russia’s direction, has reduced access to cooling water, raising the risks of a nuclear accident.
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3) Jury Orders Greenpeace to Pay Pipeline Company More Than $660 Million
The environmental group had said the lawsuit, over its role in a protest movement, could mean an end to its operations in the United States.
By Karen Zraick, Reporting from Mandan, N.D., March 19, 2025
Demonstrators against the Dakota Access Pipeline near Cannon Ball, N.D., in 2016. Credit...Andrew Cullen/Reuters
A North Dakota jury on Wednesday awarded damages totaling more than $660 million to the Texas-based pipeline company Energy Transfer, which had sued Greenpeace over its role in protests nearly a decade ago against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The verdict was a major blow to the environmental organization. Greenpeace had said that Energy Transfer’s claimed damages, in the range of $300 million, would be enough to put the group out of business in the United States. The jury on Wednesday awarded far more than that.
Greenpeace said it would appeal. The group has maintained that it played only a minor part in demonstrations led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. It has portrayed the lawsuit as an attempt to stifle oil-industry critics.
The nine-person jury in the Morton County courthouse in Mandan, N.D., about 45 minutes north of where the protests took place, returned the verdict after roughly two days of deliberations.
It took about a half-hour simply to read out the long list of questions posed to the jurors, such as whether they found that Greenpeace had committed trespass, defamation and conspiracy, among other violations, and how much money they would award for each offense.
Afterward, outside the courthouse in Mandan, both sides invoked the right to free speech, but in very different ways.
“We should all be concerned about the attacks on our First Amendment, and lawsuits like this that really threaten our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, a senior legal adviser for Greenpeace USA.
Just moments before, Trey Cox of the firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, the lead lawyer for Energy Transfer, had called the verdict “a powerful affirmation" of the First Amendment. “Peaceful protest is an inherent American right,” he said. “However, violent and destructive protest is unlawful and unacceptable.”
Earlier in the week, during closing arguments on Monday, Energy Transfer’s co-founder and board chairman, Kelcy Warren, an ally and donor to President Trump, had the last word for the plaintiffs when his lawyers played a recording of comments he made in a video deposition for the jurors. “We’ve got to stand up for ourselves,” Mr. Warren said, arguing that protesters had created “a total false narrative” about his company. “It was time to fight back.”
Energy Transfer is one of the largest pipeline companies in the country. The protests over its construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline drew national attention and thousands of people to monthslong encampments in 2016 and 2017.
The demonstrators gathered on and around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, arguing that the pipeline cut through sacred land and could endanger the local water supply. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sued to stop the project, and members of other tribes, environmentalists and celebrities were among the many who flocked to the rural area, including two figures who are now members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
But the protests erupted into acts of vandalism and violence at times, alienating people in the surrounding community in the Bismarck-Mandan area.
Greenpeace has long argued that the lawsuit was a threat to First Amendment rights, brought by a deep-pocketed plaintiff and carrying dangerous implications for organizations that speak out about a broad range of issues. Greenpeace has called the lawsuit a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP suit, the term for cases meant to hinder free speech by raising the risk of expensive legal battles. Many states have laws that make it difficult to pursue such cases, though not North Dakota.
Mr. Cox laced into Greenpeace during closing arguments on Monday. The company accused Greenpeace of funding and supporting attacks and protests that delayed the pipeline’s construction, raised costs and harmed Energy Transfer’s reputation.
Jurors, Mr. Cox said, would have the “privilege” of telling the group that its actions were “unacceptable to the American way.” He laid out costs incurred that tallied up to about $340 million and asked for punitive damages on top of that.
“Greenpeace took a small, disorganized, local issue and exploited it to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline and promote its own selfish agenda,” he said. “They thought they’d never get caught.”
The 1,172-mile underground pipeline has been operating since 2017 but is awaiting final permits for a small section where it crosses federal territory underneath Lake Oahe on the Missouri River, near Standing Rock. The tribe is still trying to shut down the pipeline in a different lawsuit.
Lawyers for Greenpeace called the case against the group a “ridiculous” attempt to pin blame on it for everything that happened during months of raucous protests, including federal-government delays in issuing permits.
Three Greenpeace entities were named in the lawsuit: Greenpeace Inc., Greenpeace Fund and Greenpeace International. Greenpeace Inc. is the arm of the group that organizes public campaigns and protests. It is based in Washington, as is Greenpeace Fund, which raises money and awards grants.
The third entity named in the lawsuit, Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam, is the coordinating body for 25 independent Greenpeace groups around the world.
It was principally the actions of Greenpeace Inc. that were at the heart of the trial, which began Feb. 24. They included training people in protest tactics, dispatching its “rolling sunlight” solar-panel truck to provide power, and offering funds and other supplies. Greenpeace International maintained that its only involvement was signing a letter to banks expressing opposition to the pipeline, a document that was signed by hundreds and that had been drafted by a Dutch organization. Greenpeace Fund said it had no involvement.
On Wednesday, the jurors found Greenpeace Inc. liable for the vast majority of the damages awarded, which came to more than $660 million, according to representatives for both Greenpeace and Energy Transfer. The damages cover dozens of figures that were read out in court for each defendant on each claim.
Separately, Greenpeace International this year had countersued Energy Transfer in the Netherlands, invoking a new European Union directive against SLAPP suits as well as Dutch law.
During closing arguments on Monday in North Dakota, Everett Jack Jr. of the firm Davis Wright Tremaine, the lead lawyer for the Greenpeace Inc., was a study in contrast with Mr. Cox. Both men wore dark suits and red ties to make their final arguments before the jury. But their demeanors were polar opposites.
Mr. Cox was energetic, indignant, even wheeling out a cart stacked with boxes of evidence during his rebuttal to argue that he had proved his case. Mr. Jack was calm and measured, recounting the chronology of how the protests developed to make the case that they had swelled well before Greenpeace got involved.
Given the months of disruptions caused locally by the protests, the jury pool in the area was widely expected to favor Energy Transfer.
Among the observers in the courtroom were a group of lawyers calling themselves the Trial Monitoring Committee who criticized the court for denying a Greenpeace petition to move the trial to the bigger city of Fargo, which was not as affected by the protests. The group included Martin Garbus, a prominent First Amendment lawyer, and Steven Donziger, who is well-known for his yearslong legal battle with Chevron over pollution in Ecuador.
After the verdict, Mr. Garbus called it “the worst First Amendment case decision I have ever seen” and expressed concern that an appeal that reached the Supreme Court could be used to overturn decades of precedent around free-speech protections.
The group also took issue with the number of jurors with ties to the oil industry or who had expressed negative views of protests during jury selection. But Suja A. Thomas, a law professor at the University of Illinois and an expert on juries, said the precedent in North Dakota courts was not to use “blanket disqualifications of jurors just because they might have some kind of interest,” whether it’s financial or based on experience or opinion.
Rather, the judge has to determine whether each individual juror can be impartial. “There can be interest; they have to determine whether the interest is significant enough such that the person cannot be fair,” Ms. Thomas said.
Natali Segovia is the executive director of Water Protector Legal Collective, an Indigenous-led legal and advocacy nonprofit group that grew out of the Standing Rock protests. Ms. Segovia, who is also a member of the trial monitoring group, said her organization was involved with about 800 criminal cases that resulted from the protests. The vast majority have been dismissed, she said.
What had gotten lost during the Greenpeace trial, she said, was the concern about water that had spurred so much protest. She said she saw a larger dynamic at play. “At its core, it’s a proxy war against Indigenous sovereignty using an international environmental organization,” she said.
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4) Administration Officials Believe Order Lets Immigration Agents Enter Homes Without Warrants
It remains unclear whether the Trump administration will apply the law in this way. But such an interpretation, experts say, would infringe on basic civil liberties.
By Devlin Barrett, Reporting from Washington, March 20, 2025
"The men were flown to El Salvador on Saturday and placed in a large prison complex, under an agreement in which the United States will pay about $20,000 a person each year for El Salvador to keep the men locked up."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/trump-alien-enemies-immigration-agents.html
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers during an arrest operation in Florida in 2023. Currently, immigration agents without a warrant can do little more than knock on a door and ask to come in. Credit...Saul Martinez for The New York Times
Trump administration lawyers have determined that an 18th-century wartime law the president has invoked to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant, according to people familiar with internal discussions.
The disclosure reflects the Trump administration’s aggressive view of presidential power, including setting aside a key provision of the Fourth Amendment that requires a court order to search someone’s home.
It remains unclear whether the administration will apply the law in this way, but experts say such an interpretation would infringe on basic civil liberties and raise the potential for misuse. Warrantless entries have some precedent in America’s wartime history, but invoking the law in peacetime to pursue undocumented immigrants in such a way would be an entirely new application, they added.
“It undermines fundamental protections that are recognized in the Fourth Amendment, and in the due process clause,” said Christopher Slobogin, a law professor at Vanderbilt University.
Last week, Mr. Trump quietly signed a proclamation invoking the law, known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It grants him the authority to remove from the United States foreign citizens he has designated as “alien enemies” in the cases of war or an invasion.
His order took aim at Venezuelan citizens 14 or older who belong to the Tren de Aragua gang, and who are not naturalized or lawful permanent residents. “All such alien enemies, wherever found within any territory subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are subject to summary apprehension,” the proclamation said.
Senior lawyers at the Justice Department view that language, combined with the historical use of the law, to mean that the government does not need a warrant to enter a home or premises to search for people believed to be members of that gang, according to two officials familiar with the new policy.
A department spokesman declined to comment.
Christopher A. Wellborn, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, called the old law a relic that is dangerously prone to abuse — particularly when it comes to people’s right to privacy in their homes.
“The Fourth Amendment applies to everyone in the U.S., not just individuals with legal status,” he said. Taking away that right would be an “abuse of power that destroys our privacy, making Americans feel unsafe and vulnerable in the places where our children play and our loved ones sleep.”
The use of the law is contentious to start. It has been deployed just three other times, all during major wars, and it is unclear how the administration has deemed someone a member of Tren de Aragua.
Using the law to avoid warrant requirements would facilitate at least one part of the administration’s bid to deliver on the president’s campaign promise to cut down on immigration. Currently, immigration agents without a warrant can do little more than knock on a door and ask to come in.
Legal scholars have long criticized the law as prone to abuse. During World War II, in one of the darker chapters in the nation’s history, the law paved the way for citizens of Germany, Italy or Japan to be searched and detained.
In the past, the law has been interpreted to “extend the president’s authority to not only detaining and deporting noncitizens but also controlling their speech, movements and livelihoods,” Katherine Yon Ebright wrote in a 2024 study of the law for the Brennan Center for Justice.
Mr. Slobogin warned of the dangers inherent in the administration’s wide-ranging view of the president’s authority. The purpose of the Fourth Amendment, he said, was to ensure that someone independent of the executive branch — a judge — approved any decision to seize people or search their property.
Still, he acknowledged that the language of the Alien Enemies Act, particularly its reference to a “warrant of a president,” gave the government “at least a foot in the door with respect to arguing that the president can order this on his own authority.”
Past court cases leave unclear what a “warrant of a president” means, and whether such an order requires something similar to the probable cause standard of a judicial warrant.
Mr. Slobogin noted that a number of cases dating back to 1819 hold that the act gives the president power to remove people designated as “alien enemies” from the country “without resort or recourse to courts.” However, he added, those cases met a basic threshold that did not apply in the current situation: a declared war, or an “invasion or predatory incursion” by a foreign nation.
“That’s pretty clearly not what’s going on here,” he said.
Mr. Trump has long claimed that the country is being invaded by undocumented migrants, and has compared the problem to a war. But such rhetorical flourishes are far removed from a state of war like the one Congress declared against Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
In the American war effort that followed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify detentions and searches of Japanese Americans and others. Their status as “enemy aliens” was sufficient cause “for warrantless house raids in search of contraband,” Ms. Yon Ebright wrote in her study.
In some cases, she noted, there were warrantless spot searches. In others, search warrants were obtained solely on the basis of someone’s status as a noncitizen of Japanese, German, or Italian descent. Government officials were looking not just for people in those instances, but also for items that had been declared contraband for them to possess, such as cameras and radios.
One U.S. military document from that time declared that all that was needed to justify a search under the wartime law was an official’s belief that an “alien enemy” may be found there. It asserted that “the question of probable cause will be met only by the statement that an alien enemy resides in such premises.”
Courts are only beginning to wrestle with the implications of Mr. Trump’s order after he promptly used the act to expel more than 100 Venezuelan citizens who the administration determined were members of Tren de Aragua.
The men were flown to El Salvador on Saturday and placed in a large prison complex, under an agreement in which the United States will pay about $20,000 a person each year for El Salvador to keep the men locked up.
A federal judge in Washington paused the administration’s use of the law while he considers the underlying legal issues, ordering any planes carrying migrants deported under the act to turn around. He is now weighing whether the administration violated that order.
The Justice Department has argued that it did not defy the judge’s orders, saying that he had limited authority on matters of immigration.
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5) Judge to Consider Block on Trump’s Use of Wartime Law to Deport Venezuelans
A hearing on Friday afternoon could also include some discussion about the Justice Department’s repeated recalcitrance in responding to the judge’s demands.
By Alan Feuer, March 21, 2025
Judge James E. Boasberg scolded the Justice Department in a stern order on Thursday for having “evaded its obligations.” Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
A hearing has been set for Friday afternoon to debate whether a federal judge in Washington acted correctly when he temporarily stopped the Trump administration last weekend from summarily deporting scores of Venezuelan immigrants under a powerful but rarely invoked wartime statute.
The hearing, scheduled for 2:30 p.m. in Federal District Court in Washington, could also include some discussion about the Justice Department’s repeated recalcitrance in responding to the judge’s demands. He has been requesting information about two deportation flights in particular, which officials say carried members of a Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua, to El Salvador.
The judge, James E. Boasberg, scolded the department in a stern order on Thursday for having “evaded its obligations” to provide him with data about the flights. He wants that information as he seeks to determine whether the Trump administration violated his initial instructions to turn the planes around after they left the United States on Saturday evening.
Most of the courtroom conversation, however, is likely to concern Judge Boasberg’s underlying decision to stop the White House for now from using the wartime law, known as the Alien Enemies Act, to pursue its immigration agenda. The statute, passed in 1798, gives the government expansive powers during an invasion or a declared war to round up and summarily remove any subjects of a “hostile nation” over the age of 14 as “alien enemies.”
Almost from the moment Judge Boasberg entered his provisional decision barring President Trump from using the law, the White House and the Justice Department have accused him of overstepping his authority by improperly inserting himself into the president’s ability to conduct foreign affairs.
But Judge Boasberg imposed the order in the first place to give himself time to figure out whether Mr. Trump himself overstepped by stretching or even ignoring several of the statute’s provisions, which place checks on how and when it can be used.
The administration has repeatedly claimed, for instance, that members of Tren de Aragua should be considered subjects of a hostile nation because they are closely aligned with the Venezuelan government. The White House, echoing a position that Mr. Trump pushed during his campaign, has also insisted that the arrival to the United States of dozens of members of the gang constitutes an invasion.
But lawyers for some of the deported Venezuelans dispute those claims, saying that their clients are not gang members and should have the opportunity to prove it. The lawyers also say that while Tren de Aragua may be a dangerous criminal organization, which was recently designated as a terrorist organization, it is not a nation state.
Moreover, they have argued that even if the members of the group have come to the United States en masse, that does not fit the traditional definition of an invasion.
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6) Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages
Israel’s defense minister said it was preparing to seize more territory in Gaza and intensify attacks unless the Palestinian group freed more of the dozens of remaining captives.
By Aaron Boxerman, March 21, 2025
Displaced Palestinians in Gaza City with their belongings after the Israeli military issued warnings to evacuate their homes on Thursday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The Israeli defense minister tried on Friday to turn up the pressure on Hamas to release more hostages, saying Israel was preparing to seize more territory in Gaza and intensify attacks by air, sea and land if the armed Palestinian group does not cooperate.
The remarks by the defense minister, Israel Katz, came days after a cease-fire that had been in place for more than two months was shattered with a renewed Israeli bombardment and more limited ground operations inside Gaza. More than 500 Palestinians have been killed since Israel restarted attacks on Tuesday, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
“The more Hamas persists in its refusal, the more territory it will lose,” Mr. Katz said in demanding the release of more hostages.
He said the Israeli military could expand a security zone inside Gaza where its forces were already stationed and order more Palestinians to evacuate their homes. The captured territory would be held indefinitely by Israel, he added.
There were no immediate reports of new Israeli attacks with heavy casualties in Gaza on Friday. And mediators were still trying to prevent the new escalation of violence from snowballing back into a full-scale war.
Hamas said Friday that negotiations to return to the truce — which began in mid-January — were still ongoing. But it reiterated that any agreement to free more hostages would have to lead to a permanent end to the war, which Israel has been loath to commit to while the Palestinian militant group still is in charge of Gaza.
In Israel, domestic political turmoil over the war in Gaza intensified this week over a decision by Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, to fire Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet intelligence service. Protesters have criticized Mr. Netanyahu for what they call an attempt to purge the security establishment of those he perceives as disloyal.
On Friday, Israel’s Supreme Court issued an injunction freezing Mr. Bar’s dismissal until the justices could hear petitions that had been filed against it. The court ruled that the hearing would take place no later than April 8 — two days before the deadline for Mr. Bar’s exit.
Mr. Netanyahu’s allies quickly denounced the court for intervening as judicial overreach. If the court does strike down the government’s decision to dismiss the Shin Bet chief, the prime minister has yet to say whether he would uphold its ruling.
Over the past three days, Israeli forces have bombarded targets across Gaza, saying they were attacking Hamas sites and operatives. Israeli ground troops have seized a major corridor in central Gaza from which it withdrew during the cease-fire with Hamas, and they have expanded ground raids in northern and southern Gaza.
Hamas’s military response so far has been limited. Its military capabilities were significantly degraded by the war, although the group is still believed to command tens of thousands of armed fighters. Israeli officials say Hamas has been using the cease-fire to regroup, plan for future fighting and to plant explosive devices.
Hamas fired three rockets at Israel for the first time in months, but all were either intercepted or fell without causing casualties, a far cry from the barrages it could muster in the early months of the war.
Israel hopes to compel Hamas to free more of the remaining hostages seized in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war in Gaza. As many as 24 living captives — and the remains of more than 30 others — are still in Gaza, according to the Israeli government.
Even before the cease-fire collapsed this week, Israel had blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, preventing shipments of food and medicine from reaching Palestinians still recovering from more than a year of hunger and wartime deprivation.
In the latest attacks, Israeli troops have not swept through Palestinian cities in Gaza, divided the enclave in two or forcibly evacuated northern Gaza en masse, as they did during the 15-month campaign against Hamas.
Israel has vowed not to end the war in Gaza without Hamas’s destruction. Hamas has said it is willing to hand over civilian responsibilities in the enclave, but it has refused to disband its battalions of armed fighters or send its leaders there into exile.
Diplomats, including from the United States, are hoping to broker at least a partial deal to bring both sides back to the cease-fire, free more hostages and allow humanitarian aid to begin flowing into Gaza again.
Before the Israeli offensive, Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s Mideast envoy, had proposed an extension of the initial cease-fire, which elapsed in early March, in exchange for the release of hostages.
In the meantime, the United States and other mediators would work to find a “durable solution to this intractable conflict,” Mr. Witkoff’s office said in a statement last week.
Israel said it had accepted Mr. Witkoff’s plan, which accorded with Israeli demands for the release of more hostages without an immediate commitment to ending the war in Gaza permanently. Hamas did not immediately agree to the deal, but said earlier this week that it had been considering the proposal.
In an interview on Thursday in Doha, Qatar, Husam Badran, a senior Hamas official, suggested the group was willing to show some flexibility over such an agreement — including by potentially releasing more hostages — to jump-start talks aimed at ending the war.
“The problem isn’t the numbers,” Mr. Badran told The New York Times. “We’re acting positively with any proposal that leads to the start of negotiations” over a permanent truce, he added.
Adam Rasgon and Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.
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7) Musk Offers $100 to Wisconsin Voters, Bringing Back a Controversial Tactic
By offering cash to voters who sign a petition opposing “activist judges,” Elon Musk’s super PAC can help identify conservative voters in a race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
By Theodore Schleifer, Reporting from Washington, March 20, 2025
Elon Musk’s super PAC and an allied nonprofit group have spent over $11 million to try to elect a conservative candidate in this year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Credit...Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times
Elon Musk is bringing back his most controversial gambit from the 2024 presidential election: paying voters as part of a plan to identify and turn out conservative-leaning ones.
The super PAC that Mr. Musk founded to funnel his fortune into Republican causes, America PAC, said on Thursday that it was offering $100 to registered voters in Wisconsin who sign a petition “in opposition to activist judges” or refer others to sign it. Mr. Musk has been using the group to spend millions of dollars to elect a conservative candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an April 1 election.
The petition reads: “Judges should interpret laws as written, not rewrite them to fit their personal or political agendas. By signing below, I’m rejecting the actions of activist judges who impose their own views and demanding a judiciary that respects its role — interpreting, not legislating.”
The purpose of the petition is multifaceted: Drive attention from the news media, increase awareness and voter registration among conservative voters, and help America PAC collect data on the most energized Wisconsinites who are likely to turn out for the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel.
Mr. Musk carried out a nearly identical maneuver in battleground states before the November election, generating significant legal and political debate.
The Philadelphia district attorney sued to stop the distribution of those lottery-style payouts, which went up to $1 million to voters who signed a document in support of the First Amendment. But the day before Election Day, a Pennsylvania judge declined to halt the sweepstakes.
America PAC’s revival of the use of petitions, and the wording of its new document in Wisconsin, reveal two of Mr. Musk’s priorities as he wields wide power in Washington.
The first is his focus on the court election in Wisconsin, which could swing control of the state’s top judicial body back to conservatives after liberals won a major victory there in 2023. Mr. Musk’s super PAC and an allied nonprofit group have spent over $11 million to try to elect Judge Schimel, which would again push the battleground state rightward on issues like redistricting and abortion rights.
Mr. Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, has also sued Wisconsin to challenge a state law prohibiting manufacturers from owning dealerships. In January, eight days after Tesla filed the suit, Mr. Musk wrote on X, “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud.”
The second is Mr. Musk’s budding obsession with removing judges he sees as thwarting President Trump’s agenda. He posts daily on X about his frustrations with the federal judiciary, and the refreshed language of the new petition points to that focus.
But despite the petition from Mr. Musk’s group denouncing judges who are openly political, there are few doubts about where the loyalties of his preferred candidate in Wisconsin lie: Judge Schimel is a longtime defender of Mr. Trump who dressed up as the president last Halloween.
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8) Government Science Data May Soon Be Hidden. They’re Racing to Copy It.
Vast quantities of climate and environmental information have been removed from official websites in the past months. Scientists are trying keep it available.
By Austyn Gaffney, March 21, 2025
Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental scientist who helped found the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, at home in North Carolina. Credit...Sebastian Siadecki for The New York Times
Amid the torrent of executive orders signed by President Trump were directives that affect the language on government web pages and the public’s access to government data touching on climate change, the environment, energy and public health.
In the past two months, hundreds of terabytes of digital resources analyzing data have been taken off government websites, and more are feared to be at risk of deletion. While in many cases the underlying data still exists, the tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use that data have been removed.
But now, hundreds of volunteers are working to collect and download as much government data as possible and to recreate the digital tools that allow the public to access that information.
So far, volunteers working on a project called Public Environmental Data Partners have retrieved more than 100 data sets that were removed from government sites, and they have a growing list of 300 more they hope to preserve.
It echoes efforts that began in 2017, during Mr. Trump’s first term, when volunteers downloaded as much climate, environmental, energy and public health data as possible because they feared its fate under a president who has called climate change a hoax.
Little federal information disappeared then. But this time is different. And so, too, is the response.
“We should not be in this position where the Trump administration can literally take down every government website if it wants to,” said Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental scientist who helped found the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative in 2017 to conserve federal data. “We’re not prepared for having resilient public information in the digital age and we need to be.”
While a lot of data generated by agencies, like climate measurements collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is required by Congress, the digital tools that allow the public to view that data are not.
“This is a campaign to remove public access,” said Jessie Mahr, the director of technology at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, a member group of the data partnership. “And at the end of the day, American taxpayers paid for these tools.”
Farmers have sued the United States Department of Agriculture for deleting climate data tools they hope will reappear. In February, a successful lawsuit led to the re-publication of the Centers for Disease Control’s Social Vulnerability Index. A banner at the top of the C.D.C. webpage now notes that the Department of Health and Human Services was required to restore the site by court order.
The Public Environmental Data Partners coalition has received frequent requests for two data tools: the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, or CEJST, and the Environmental Justice Screening Tool, or EJScreen.
The first was developed under a Biden administration initiative to make sure that 40 percent of federal climate and infrastructure investments to go to disadvantaged communities. It was taken offline in January. EJScreen, developed under the Obama administration and once available through the E.P.A, was removed in early February.
“The very first thing across the executive branch was to remove references to equity and environmental justice and to remove equity tools from all agencies,” Dr. Gehrke said. “It really impairs the public’s ability to demonstrate structural racism and its disproportionate impacts on communities of color.”
Just a dozen years ago, the E.P.A. defined environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income.” The E.P.A.’s new administrator, Lee Zeldin, recently equated environmental justice to “forced discrimination.”
Nonprofit organizations used both screening tools to apply for federal grants related to environmental justice and climate change. But the E.P.A. closed all of its environmental justice offices last week, ending three decades of work to mitigate the effects on poor and minority communities often disproportionately burdened by industrial pollution. It also canceled hundreds of grants already promised to nonprofit groups trying to improve conditions in those communities.
“You can’t possibly solve a problem until you can articulate it, so it was an important source of data for articulating the problem,” said Harriet Festing, executive director of the nonprofit group Anthropocene Alliance.
Christina Gosnell, co-founder and president of Catalyst Cooperative, a member of the environmental data cooperative, said her main concern was not that the data won’t be archived before it disappears, but that it won’t be updated.
Preserving the current data sets is the first step, but they could become irrelevant if data collection stops, she said.
More than 100 tribal nations, cities, and nonprofits used CEJST to show where and why their communities needed trees, which can reduce urban heat, and then applied for funds from the Arbor Day Foundation, a nonprofit organization that received a $75 million grant from the Inflation Reduction Action. The Arbor Day Foundation was on track to plant over a quarter of a million new trees before its grant was terminated in February.
How hard it is to reproduce complex tools depends on how the data was created and maintained. CEJST was “open source,” meaning the raw data and information that backed it up were already publicly accessible for coders and researchers. It was put back together by three people within 24 hours, according to Ms. Mahr.
But EJScreen was not an open source tool, and recreating it was more complicated.
“We put a lot of pressure on the last weeks of the Biden administration to make EJScreen open source, so they released as much code and documentation as they could,” Dr. Gehrke said.
It took at least seven people more than three weeks to make a version of EJScreen that was close to its original functionality, and Ms. Mahr said they’re still tinkering with it. It’s akin to recreating a recipe with an ingredient list but no assembly instructions. Software engineers have to try and remember how the “dish” tasted last time, and then use trial and error to reassemble it from memory.
Now, the coalition is working to conserve even more complicated data sets, like climate data from NOAA, which hosts many petabytes — think a thousand terabytes, or more than a million gigabytes — of weather observations and climate models in its archives.
“People may not understand just how much data that is,” Dr. Gehrke said in an email. It could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per month just in storage fees, she said, without including the cost of any sort of access. She said they were talking to NOAA personnel to prioritize the most vulnerable and highest impact data to preserve as soon as possible.
So far, the data they’ve collected is largely stored in the cloud and backed up using servers around the globe; they’ve worked out pro bono agreements to avoid having to pay to back it up.
Some data have, so far, been left alone, like statistics from the Energy Information Administration, among other agencies. Zane Selvans, a fellow co-founder of Catalyst Cooperative said the group had worked for the past eight years to aggregate U.S. energy system data and research in the form of open source tools. The goal is to increase access to federal data that is technically available but not necessarily easy to use.
“So far we’ve been lucky,” Mr. Selvans said. “Folks working on environmental justice haven’t been as lucky.”
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9) One Doctor’s Quest for the Truth About Convicted Killer Lucy Letby
Dr. Shoo Lee’s research was used to help convict a British nurse of murdering babies, but he says it should never have been cited.
By Megan Specia, Reporting from London,March 21, 2025
Dr. Shoo Lee in London in February, announcing the findings from the expert independent review into the Lucy Letby case. “In summary, ladies and gentlemen, we did not find any murders,” he told the news conference. Credit...Andy Rain/EPA, via Shutterstock
When Dr. Shoo Lee, one of Canada’s most renowned neonatologists, wrote an academic paper in 1989, he never imagined it would one day help convict a British nurse of murder.
But more than three decades after his paper was published, that is what happened.
Lucy Letby, a former nurse in a neonatal unit in northern England, was found guilty in two trials in 2023 and 2024 of the murder or attempted murder of 14 babies in her care, and sentenced to life in prison, where she remains today.
The case rocked Britain, seeming to expose a remorseless serial killer who, prosecutors said, used a bizarre range of techniques to kill her tiny, often very premature, victims: Injecting them with air, overfeeding them with milk or contaminating their feeds with insulin.
For seven of the murder or attempted murder charges, the prosecution’s lead expert witness relied on Dr. Lee’s 1989 paper on a rare complication in newborns — pulmonary vascular air embolism — to argue that Ms. Letby had intentionally injected air into their veins.
The only problem? The expert witness had misinterpreted his work, Dr. Lee says.
“What they were claiming was that this baby collapsed and had skin discoloration, therefore that equals air embolism,” said Dr. Lee, 68, in an interview in London last month. But, he said, “That is not what the research shows.”
That realization set Dr. Lee on a moral mission to review Ms. Letby’s case. Working pro bono, he gathered 14 specialists from around the world to assess the clinical evidence. Last month, he revealed their explosive findings — that “there was no medical evidence to support malfeasance causing death or injury” in any of the babies that Ms. Letby was charged with harming.
“If there’s no malfeasance, there’s no murder. If there’s no murder, there’s no murderer,” Dr. Lee said, adding, “And if there’s no murderer, what is she doing in prison?”
Ms. Letby has exhausted her avenues to appeal in the courts. Her only hope now lies with a small, independent body, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which is responsible for investigating possible miscarriages of justice.
‘I didn’t know whether she was innocent or guilty’
Dr. Lee, who retired in 2021 to a farm in rural Alberta, knew almost nothing about Ms. Letby’s case until an email landed in his inbox in October 2023.
Ms. Letby had always maintained her innocence, and her lawyer wanted Dr. Lee to review the medical evidence. “I thought it was spam at first, because how often do you get an email like that?” Dr. Lee said. After a second email, he realized the request was real.
Dr. Lee had spent his entire career focused on the youngest patients. After completing medical school in his native Singapore, he moved to Canada and trained in pediatrics before undertaking a neonatal fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital and later a Ph.D. in health policy at Harvard.
In 1995, he created the Canadian Neonatal Network, connecting specialists from across the country to improve outcomes for newborns. He became pediatrician-in-chief at Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, and in 2019, he received the Order of Canada for introducing best practices that reduced infant mortality.
As he studied Lucy Letby’s trial transcripts, Dr. Lee immediately knew his research had been misinterpreted. “I didn’t know whether she was innocent or guilty,” he recalls. “But regardless of whether you’re innocent or guilty, you cannot be convicted on wrong evidence. That’s just wrong.”
He agreed to help with Ms. Letby’s request for an appeal, writing to England’s Court of Appeal and later providing live video testimony. But the court ultimately denied her request, saying Dr. Lee’s testimony should have been introduced at trial.
It was then that Dr. Lee decided to assemble a team of neonatal specialists to look into the case.
“This panel, you’re not going to find a better group of people,” he said, rattling off a list that included the head of neonatology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a former president of Britain’s Royal College of Pediatrics and the former director of the neonatal intensive care unit of Boston Children’s Hospital.
The key caveat Dr. Lee insisted on was that the panel’s review would be released no matter their findings — even if they strengthened the case that Ms. Letby was guilty.
‘You’re going to get disasters’
The experts, who all worked on a voluntary basis, forensically assessed the cause of death or deterioration for each of the 17 babies whom Ms. Letby was initially charged with murdering or attempting to murder.
Two experts separately examined the medical notes of each baby. If their assessments differed, a third expert was brought in. The process was painstaking and took four months. But the final results were clear, Dr. Lee said. “In all cases, death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care,” he told the news conference last month.
In the case of one baby, for instance, the prosecution argued at trial that she had been stable and had died from an injection of air into her IV line, causing an embolism. But the independent review found, based on her medical records, that she had died of sepsis and pneumonia, and that the mother, who went into labor prematurely, had not been given antibiotics to prevent infection.
In another case, a baby born at 25 weeks was intubated using the wrong size of endotracheal tube. While the prosecution alleged that Ms. Letby attempted to murder the infant by dislodging the tube, the experts found the baby’s condition deteriorated because of injury caused by intubation with a tube that was too large, and because a doctor did not understand “the basics of resuscitation, air leak, mechanical ventilation, and how equipment that were commonly used in the unit work.”
Some of the hospital staff, the panel concluded, were caring for the most critically ill or premature babies in a unit that was only meant to treat babies with lesser needs.
“You’re asking doctors in places without the expertise, without the infrastructure, to look after babies that they they’re not prepared to do,” Dr. Lee said. “And if you do that, then you’re going to get disasters.”
Nobody ever saw Ms. Letby harming a baby, and major questions were first raised about her guilt in a New Yorker article in May 2024. In the months since, dozens of experts in medicine and statistics have voiced concerns about the evidence.
Dr. Dewi Evans, the prosecution’s lead expert witness, did not respond to requests for comment, but he has publicly criticized the panel’s work and said he stands by his testimony.
The Countess of Chester Hospital, where the deaths took place, said it was focused on an ongoing police investigation and on a public inquiry that was set up by the government last year to investigate how a serial killer could get away with such crimes for so long. Earlier this week, the hospital’s former managers requested a halt to that inquiry, in the wake of Dr. Lee’s review, but the judge refused, saying that the inquiry was never focused on examining Ms. Letby’s guilt.
Mark McDonald, Ms. Letby’s current lawyer, plans to include Dr. Lee’s full expert report in his application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which can refer cases back to the Court of Appeal. The commission said in a statement last month that it had “received a preliminary application in relation to Ms. Letby’s case, and work has begun to assess the application.”
The mother of a child whom Ms. Letby was convicted of attempting to murder denounced the expert panel’s assessment, and a spokesman for the C.C.R.C. asked “that everyone remembers the families affected.”
Dr. Lee insisted that those families were one of his central concerns as he analyzed the cases, after spending four decades caring for babies.
“I can tell you one thing: Families want to know the truth,” he said. “They want to know the truth, regardless of whether it is painful or not painful. They want to know what really happened.”
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11) Trump Threatens to Jail Tesla Vandals in El Salvador Prisons
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador had previously offered to imprison convicted criminals from the United States in his country’s notorious prison facilities, for a fee.
By Chris Cameron, Reporting from Washington, March 21, 2025
Investigators at a Tesla Collision Center after a person set fire to several vehicles on Tuesday in Las Vegas. Credit...Ethan Miller/Getty Images
President Trump escalated his threats against people who vandalize Tesla cars, musing in a social media post on Friday that those convicted of damaging or destroying the vehicles — including U.S. citizens — could be sent to notorious prison complexes in El Salvador.
“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”
In recent weeks, vandals in several cities have defaced or destroyed Tesla vehicles and dealerships in apparent protest of Mr. Musk’s efforts to drastically reshape the federal government and fire much of the federal work force. No serious injuries have been reported.
Last month, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador offered to imprison convicted criminals from the United States in his country’s massive prison facilities.
Then this month, the United States deported Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to El Salvador. The deportation flights landed in El Salvador despite a federal judge ordering that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States. The judge has vowed to continue investigating the flights and has said the Trump administration has not been cooperative.
Human rights groups say that the crowded Salvadoran prisons are holding pens for tens of thousands of people rounded up in arrests that have ensnared innocent people. The Terrorism Confinement Center is a hulking centerpiece of the system that is big enough to hold up to 40,000 inmates, some as young as 12.
Analysts say it is unlikely that a plan to detain U.S. citizens overseas would hold up in court.
Mr. Trump, who pardoned hundreds of people convicted in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, has recently become fixated on delivering outsized punishments to the Tesla vandals after a journalist told the president at an event promoting Tesla on the White House lawn that “some say they should be labeled domestic terrorists.”
“I will do that,” Mr. Trump replied. “I’ll do that. I’m going to stop them."
No immediate action was taken, but a week later, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, made good on the promise and labeled the attacks as acts of “domestic terrorism.”
Then, on Thursday, Ms. Bondi highlighted weeks-old arrests of individuals charged in some of the arson attacks and suggested that they were tied to a larger plot by people “operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.” Earlier this week, Mr. Trump had suggested, without evidence, in a Fox interview that the vandalism was paid for “by people very highly political on the left” — echoing his claims about other protest movements like Black Lives Matter and the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.
Ms. Bondi, who developed a close relationship with Mr. Trump during her two terms as Florida’s attorney general, supported Mr. Trump’s pardon of Jan. 6 rioters, including people who had been convicted of violent crimes and weapons charges. The F.B.I. described those involved in the planning and perpetration of that attack as “domestic violent extremists.”
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12) Why Did Elon Musk Go After Bunkers Full of Seeds?
By Iago Hale and Michael Kantar, March 22, 2025
Dr. Hale is a professor of specialty crop improvement at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Kantar is an associate professor of plant genetics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Ohni Lisle
In a climate-controlled bunker in an unremarkable building in rural Aberdeen, Idaho, there are shelves upon shelves of meticulously labeled boxes of seed. This vault is home to many of the United States’ more than 62,000 genetically unique lines of wheat, collected over the past 127 years from around the world.
Though dormant, these seeds are alive. But unless they are continually cared for and periodically replanted, the lines will die, along with the millenniums of evolutionary history that they embody.
Since its establishment in 1898, the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Plant Germplasm System and the scientists who support it have systematically gathered and maintained the agricultural plant species that undergird our food system in vast collections such as the one in Aberdeen. The collections represent a towering achievement of foresight that food security depends on the availability of diverse plant genetic resources.
In mid-February, Trump administration officials at what has been labeled the Department of Government Efficiency fired some of the highly trained people who do this work. A court order has reinstated them, but it’s unclear when they will be allowed to resume their work. In the meantime, uncertainty around additional staffing and budget cuts, as well as the future of the collections themselves, reigns.
This should unnerve every American who eats. Our food system is only as safe as our ability to respond to the next plant disease or other emergent threat, and a strong N.P.G.S. is central to our preparedness.
Across its 22 stations nationwide, approximately 300 N.P.G.S. scientists maintain more than 600,000 genetic lines of more than 200 crop species. The collections of some crops, like wheat, are in the form of seeds. But others, like apples (2,664 lines), must be maintained as living plants in the open field. The scientists who care for them must follow strict requirements for sustaining genetic purity so they can provide healthy viable seeds or plants to the tens of thousands of researchers and others who request them each year.
But isn’t it overkill to maintain more than 62,000 different varieties of wheat? The thing is, the N.P.G.S. collection of plant genetic diversity is not just a snapshot of what is currently grown to meet today’s demands. It is more like a survivalist cache: our nation’s safeguard against all future challenges to growing the food we need.
For example, when a newly evolved form of stem rust — a devastating fungal disease infecting wheat — emerged in East African fields in 1999, an international group of plant breeders turned to the N.P.G.S. collection for help. There, among the tens of thousands of patiently maintained lines, they discovered previously unknown genetic sources of resistance to the disease. Those genes now protect wheat varieties around the world, silencing for the moment the alarm of a feared global pandemic. (Just like human diseases, plant diseases do not respect borders.)
Such stories are common. In the 1980s, scientists at a gene bank in Geneva, N.Y., helped identify genetic traits that made apples resistant to several destructive diseases, including deadly fire blight. Those traits have since been deployed in the rootstocks of over 100 million apple trees worldwide, not only generating more than $91 million annually in tree sales, but also directly supporting the nearly $23 billion American apple industry.
This is how the system is designed to function. Whatever your diet, from chicken nuggets to organic tofu, the food you consume is the result of generations of work by agricultural scientists and plant breeders to meet the ever-changing needs of farmers and consumers. This work is only possible because of the availability of the N.P.G.S.’s extensive collections of plant genetic resources. Such collections are the raw materials for plant breeders’ craft, and therefore of agriculture itself. They exist thanks to federal support stretching back generations.
The future will certainly bring new crop diseases and pests, as well as greater environmental stresses on our crops from heat, drought and flooding. In the face of such uncertainty, it is wise to gather and maintain as much genetic diversity as possible so that we’ll have the resources to sustain the food system most of us take for granted.
Even in the best of times, the N.P.G.S. budget is shoestring and its staffing minimal, given the magnitude of its mandate. And yet, with a trivial investment of 0.000008 percent of the federal budget, N.P.G.S. scientists quietly enable and safeguard our food system, worth around $1.5 trillion. Talk about return on investment.
Moving fast and breaking things may work in some sectors. But the disruptions underway threaten irreversible losses of crop genetic diversity. Such losses directly undermine the United States’ ability to ensure continued food security and dietary diversity amid challenges to our agricultural systems.
For the sake of all Americans, we denounce any attempts to weaken the N.P.G.S. The generations before us understood that it is the minimum function of a responsible government to invest in the long-term ability to feed its citizens.
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13) ICE Tells a Cornell Student Activist to Turn Himself In
The student, who is from Gambia and was involved in pro-Palestinian activism on campus, was told to report to the immigration agency’s offices.
By Stephanie Saul, March 21, 2025
Momodou Taal was among a group of pro-Palestinian activists who shut down a career fair on the Cornell campus last year. Credit...Seth Wenig/Associated Press
The Trump administration moved early Friday to detain an international student at Cornell University who has led protests on its Ithaca, N.Y., campus, in what appeared to be the latest effort to kick pro-Palestinian activists out of the United States.
A lawyer for Momodou Taal, a doctoral student in Africana studies, said in court papers that he had been notified by email early Friday morning that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was seeking Mr. Taal’s surrender.
Last year, Mr. Taal was among a group of pro-Palestinian activists who shut down a career fair on the Cornell campus that featured weapons manufacturers. As a result, the university had ordered him to study remotely for the spring semester.
Mr. Taal, a great-grandson of Gambia’s first president, Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara, is a citizen of both Gambia and the United Kingdom. According to court documents, Mr. Taal, who is here on a visa, said he feared deportation in part because his name had been circulated on social media and in media reports as a potential ICE target.
The move to detain Mr. Taal comes as the Trump administration tries to deport other pro-Palestinian students and academics.
About two weeks ago, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident of Palestinian descent who recently obtained a master’s degree from Columbia University, was detained in New York. On Monday, the government detained Badar Kahn Suri, an Indian citizen who was studying and teaching at Georgetown University, claiming he had violated terms of his academic visa. Other students have also been targeted.
ICE did not immediately return a request for comment.
Last weekend, Mr. Taal filed a pre-emptive lawsuit to block possible action against him. A hearing had been scheduled in that case for Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y. A lawyer for Mr. Taal, Eric T. Lee, argued in the lawsuit that his client was exercising his right to free speech and that there were no legitimate grounds for his deportation.
The lawsuit also challenged the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order to “combat antisemitism” that instructed federal agencies to deport immigrants whose actions could be regarded as “antisemitic or supportive of terrorism.”
Earlier this week, neighbors saw law enforcement agents near Mr. Taal’s apartment building by Cornell’s campus, according to affidavits filed in the lawsuit in the Northern District of New York.
“This does not happen in a democracy. We are outraged, and every American should be too,” Mr. Lee said in a statement.
Lawyers for Mr. Taal are asking the court to delay his surrender to ICE, pending the outcome of the litigation. On Thursday, hundreds of Cornell students and supporters held a rally in support of Mr. Taal, who is also the host of a podcast called “The Malcolm Effect.”
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14) Rockets Fired From Lebanon Prompt Israeli Strikes
The volley broke months of relative quiet in northern Israel after a U.S.-backed truce. Israel retaliated by attacking sites it said were linked to Hezbollah.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 22, 2025
Smoke rising above a village in southern Lebanon on Saturday. Credit...Karamallah Daher/Reuters
Rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel for the first time in months on Saturday, prompting Israeli forces to strike back hours later at sites in southern Lebanon it said were linked to the militant group Hezbollah.
The attacks were the latest example of how the renewed Israeli offensive in Gaza was rippling across the Middle East. They disrupted months of relative calm in northern Israel, where residents displaced by more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah have begun returning home lately.
The Israeli military said that it had shot down three rockets from Lebanon with no reports of casualties. The volley was the first of its kind since late last year, when Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire brokered by the United States and France.
Hezbollah denied involvement in the rocket fire, which followed Israel’s resumed offensive in Gaza this week against the Lebanese group’s Palestinian ally Hamas. Those Israeli attacks have already killed more than 600 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
After the Hamas-led assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the Gaza war, the militant group’s allies across the Middle East began attacking Israel in solidarity. Last year, that escalated into a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah, in which Israel assassinated Hezbollah’s leadership and launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold.
The truce went into effect in late November and has largely held. Under the terms of the cease-fire, the Lebanese government is supposed to prevent armed groups like Hezbollah from attacking Israel from Lebanese territory.
Lebanese leaders appeared eager to head off any new escalation with Israel. The Israel-Hezbollah war killed about 4,000 people in Lebanon and more than a million people fled their homes, according to the country’s authorities.
After the rocket fire on Saturday, Joseph Aoun, the Lebanese president, condemned what he called “attempts to drag Lebanon back into a cycle of violence.” He called on the committee charged with overseeing the cease-fire — including representatives from the United States and France — to prevent any violations that could threaten Lebanon.
The Lebanese Army said on Saturday that it had located and dismantled rocket launchers in southern Lebanon. The national military is a distinct force from Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia which has long wielded enormous political and military influence in Lebanon.
“Military units are continuing to take the necessary measures to control the situation in the south,” the Lebanese military said.
Israeli officials have expressed skepticism over whether the Lebanese military is up to the task of preventing attacks. And Israel has continued to bombard Lebanon despite the truce, arguing that it is cracking down on militants violating the cease-fire.
While the cease-fire initially stipulated a full Israeli withdrawal by late January, Israeli forces still control five points inside Lebanese territory. Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, said Israeli troops would remain there indefinitely to protect Israeli towns near the Lebanese border.
The truce requires the Lebanese government’s security forces to be the sole armed presence in southern Lebanon, but it is unclear to what extent Hezbollah has actually withdrawn its fighters and weaponry.
The resumed strikes in Gaza this week have brought attacks on Israel from at least one other Hamas ally.
That ally, the Houthi militia in Yemen — which, like Hamas and Hezbollah, is backed by Iran — has resumed firing ballistic missiles at Israel, sending hundreds of thousands of Israelis rushing for fortified bomb shelters. Israel’s aerial defense systems have intercepted the missiles.
Israeli leaders, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have said that they launched the renewed attack in Gaza in part to pressure Hamas to free more of the dozens of remaining Israeli and foreign hostages in the enclave. Hamas has argued that Israel is tearing up the cease-fire deal.
Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s Mideast envoy, said that Israel and Hamas were “talking again” to try and solve the impasse in the negotiations. He made the remarks during an extended interview on Friday with the right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson.
The United States is now discussing how to demilitarize Hamas as part of a postwar settlement for Gaza, Mr. Witkoff said, adding, “That’s the big thing.”
“They need to demilitarize. Then maybe they could stay there a little bit, right? Be involved politically,” he said. “We can’t have a terrorist organization running Gaza.”
Mr. Witkoff said he believed that by resuming the fight against Hamas, Mr. Netanyahu was going “up against public opinion” in Israel — which Mr. Witkoff said broadly backed a deal to free the hostages.
Many relatives of the remaining Israeli hostages and their supporters have been demonstrating regularly to press their government for an immediate cease-fire and hostage-release agreement with Hamas.
Euan Ward and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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15) America Last: Why Shoppers Abroad Are Boycotting U.S. Goods
A growing number of Europeans and citizens of other countries are choosing not to buy American products to demonstrate their anger at President Trump’s policies.
By Jenny Gross, Reporting from London, March 21, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/world/europe/europe-boycott-american-products-trump.html
Some Danish grocery stores added stars to the price tags of European goods to help customers identify local products. Credit...Sergei Gapon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Bo Albertus, a school principal in Denmark, finds the Spanish raisins he now snacks on less tasty than his favorite Sun-Maid ones from California. There is no perfect substitute for Heinz tomato soup, a staple in his pantry. And he misses Pepsi Max.
But as long as President Trump pursues policies that Mr. Albertus, 57, believes put Europe’s economy and security at risk, he will boycott these and other U.S. products. He is one of a growing number of Europeans, Canadians and others who are forgoing American goods to show their anguish and dismay at Mr. Trump’s treatment of longtime allies.
“I felt a sense of powerlessness,” said Mr. Albertus, who is an administrator of a Danish Facebook group dedicated to boycotting American goods that has 90,000 members. “We all feel that we are doing something,” he added. “We are acting on our frustration.”
The strongest momentum behind such consumer action appears to be in countries that Mr. Trump has directly antagonized, like Denmark, whose territory of Greenland he has threatened to take, and Canada, which he has repeatedly said should become America’s 51st state.
But as Mr. Trump embraces President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and imposes tariffs on European goods, groups dedicated to boycotting U.S. goods and swapping tips on local alternatives have popped up in several European countries.
In a Swedish Facebook group with over 80,000 members, users ask for tips on buying non-American laptops, dog food and toothpaste. Members of a French group sing the praises of European laundry detergents and smartphone apps, and debate whether Cognac or Scotch whisky is the better alternative to bourbon.
There are also detailed discussion threads about what exactly constitutes an “American” product — does Coca-Cola manufactured in Europe count, or ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s, now owned by the British company Unilever? — that illustrate how boycotts in an era of globalized commerce are far from straightforward. But the groups are mostly a place for anxious Europeans and others to share stories and vent about their opposition to U.S. policies.
Majken Jensen, 49, a coordinator for a government agency in Copenhagen, acknowledged that many millions of people buy U.S. products worldwide, and boycotts by some consumers in a few countries may not make a huge difference, at first. Still, she has stopped buying Oreos and Heinz ketchup, and has swapped Estée Lauder night serum for a local brand, Beauté Pacifique.
“I’m not even a drop in the ocean,” she said. “But that’s my little way to protest.”
Ms. Jensen emphasized that her decision to stop buying U.S. goods was in opposition to the Trump administration, not the American people. “We want our friends back,” she said.
The backlash has led some stores to implement changes that make it easier for customers to identify local products. Canada’s largest grocery chain, Loblaw, is using a “T” symbol to denote U.S.-made products that are more expensive because of retaliatory tariffs Canada recently put in place. In Denmark, the grocery store chains Netto, Bilka and Fotex added stars to the price tags of European goods after customers requested clearer labeling, their parent company said.
Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said that social media and the interconnected global economy gave consumers more of a voice than ever before.
“America has done many questionable things over the years,” she said, “but I don’t think even the Vietnam War could have triggered a campaign like this, simply because social media was not available.”
Business leaders are aware of the potential costs. Beyond Meat, the plant-based food company with headquarters in California, warned in its latest financial report that it could lose customers internationally because of “anti-American sentiment.”
Michael Medline, the chief executive of Canada’s second-biggest supermarket company, Empire, said this month that the company’s sales of U.S. products were “rapidly dropping” because of a growing demand for non-American products. That decline will continue as the company sources more products from countries other than the United States, the company said, as Canada’s retaliatory tariffs make U.S. goods more expensive to import.
The Swiss chocolate maker, Lindt, said this month that in Canada, it would start selling chocolate made in Europe rather than the United States, both to avoid tariffs and to reduce the risk of a consumer backlash.
One of the hardest-hit American brands abroad may be the electric carmaker Tesla, whose chief executive, Elon Musk, has become a key figure in Mr. Trump’s administration. He has also promoted far-right parties in Europe on X, the social media platform he owns. In Germany, Europe’s largest market for electric vehicles, sales of Tesla cars fell 76 percent in February compared with a year earlier, according to the German Association of the Automotive Industry.
Boycotts have hit the digital world, too, with consumers saying they have canceled subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and other streaming services — even though substitutes with similar offerings were not easy to find. Mr. Albertus subscribed to Viaplay, a Swedish streaming service, where he recently started watching “Monk.” “It’s an American series, but life isn’t perfect,” he said.
Mads Mouritzen, who began the Danish Facebook group, said he had deleted his accounts on Airbnb and Hotels.com, and had stopped using Google and Microsoft Office. (He justified his use of Facebook, based in California, as a platform for the group because it was the easiest way to reach the most people.)
“It’s very important to say we still like the Americans, we still like the country,” he said. “There’s a current situation that we don’t like, and there’s a current administration we don’t like.”
Mr. Mouritzen, a 57-year-old janitor, said he hoped relations between the United States and Europe would eventually get back to where they were. But if that takes time, Mr. Mouritzen is prepared: He has a stockpile of 12 bottles of American-made Tabasco hot sauce, the one thing he can’t live without, purchased just before he started the boycott.
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16) Columbia Agrees to Trump’s Demands After Federal Funds Are Stripped
The administration has moved to cut $400 million in federal funding to the university without changes to its policies and rules.
By Troy Closson, Published March 21, 2025, Updated March 22, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/nyregion/columbia-response-trump-demands.html
Columbia University was accused by the Trump administration of a systemic failure to protect students and faculty members “from antisemitic violence and harassment.” Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times
Columbia University agreed on Friday to overhaul its protest policies, security practices and Middle Eastern studies department in a remarkable concession to the Trump administration, which has refused to consider restoring $400 million in federal funds without major changes.
The agreement, which stunned and dismayed many members of the faculty, could signal a new stage in the administration’s escalating clash with elite colleges and universities. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and dozens of other schools face federal inquiries and fear similar penalties, and college administrators have said Columbia’s response to the White House’s demands may set a dangerous precedent.
This week, the University of Pennsylvania was also explicitly targeted by the Trump administration, which said it would cancel $175 million in federal funding, at least partly because the university had let a transgender woman participate on a women’s swim team.
Columbia, facing the loss of government grants and contracts over what the administration said was a systemic failure to protect students and faculty members “from antisemitic violence and harassment,” opted to yield to many of the administration’s most substantial demands.
The university said it had agreed to hire a new internal security force of 36 “special officers” who will be empowered to remove people from campus or arrest them. The wearing of face masks on campus will also be banned for the purpose of concealing identity during disruptions, with exceptions for religious and health reasons.
Columbia will also adopt a formal definition of antisemitism, something many universities have shied away from even as they, like Columbia, faced pressure to do so amid protests on their campuses over the war in Gaza. Under the working definition, antisemitism could include “targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them” or “certain double standards applied to Israel,” among other issues.
Taken together, the administration’s plan — issued in an unsigned, four-page letter — reflected a stunning level of deference to the Trump administration from a top private research university.
Columbia’s interim president, Katrina A. Armstrong, said in a separate letter that the university’s actions were part of its effort to “make every student, faculty and staff member safe and welcome on our campus.”
“The way Columbia and Columbians have been portrayed is hard to reckon with,” Dr. Armstrong said. “We have challenges, yes, but they do not define us.”
She added: “At all times, we are guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make.”
The Trump administration demanded each of the changes in a letter to Columbia officials on March 13. It was not immediately clear whether the university’s actions would be sufficient to reclaim the $400 million in federal money. A spokeswoman for the Education Department, one of three federal agencies named in the letter, did not immediately respond on Friday to a request for comment, including to questions about the potential restoration of federal funding.
In perhaps the most contentious move, Columbia said it would appoint a senior vice provost to oversee the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department. The White House had demanded that the department be placed under academic receivership, a rare federal intervention in an internal process that is typically reserved as a last resort in response to extended periods of dysfunction.
Columbia did not refer to the move related to the Middle Eastern studies department as receivership, but several faculty members said that it appeared to resemble that measure.
Legal scholars and advocates for academic freedom expressed alarm on Friday over what they described as Columbia’s dangerous surrender to President Trump at a perilous moment for higher education. Some critics of the university’s response said they feared the White House could target any recipient of federal funds, including K-12 public schools, hospitals, nursing homes and business initiatives.
Sheldon Pollock, a retired former chair of the university’s Middle Eastern studies department, said in a text message that “Columbia faculty are utterly shocked and profoundly disappointed by the trustees’ capitulation to the extortionate behavior of the federal government.”
“This is a shameful day in the history of Columbia,” Dr. Pollock said, adding that it would “endanger academic freedom, faculty governance and the excellence of the American university system.”
The moves by Columbia were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The school’s response to the administration’s demands was the latest turn in a turbulent phase that began 17 months ago, when pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students organized competing protests in the days after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Since then, the Manhattan campus has experienced a rare summoning of the police to quell protests, the president’s resignation and the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate, by federal immigration officials.
The extraordinary cancellation of funding for the university escalated the crisis, imperiling research that includes dozens of medical and scientific studies. (The university did not mention the loss of funds in outlining the steps it was taking.)
On social media, Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, called it “a sad day for Columbia and for our democracy.”
Others said that a wholesale overhaul was appropriate in light of the conflict and tension on campus in recent semesters.
Ester R. Fuchs, who co-chairs the university’s antisemitism task force, said that many of the administration’s changes appeared to be issues that the group had previously highlighted.
“What’s fascinating to me is a lot of these are things we needed to get done and were getting done, but now we’ve gotten done more quickly,” said Dr. Fuchs, who is also a professor of international and public affairs and political science.
She added: “We are completely supportive of principles of academic freedom.”
Among other changes, the university also said that the administration would work to adopt a universitywide “position of institutional neutrality.” It said that it would move an independent panel of faculty, students and staff members who handle disciplinary procedures under the provost’s office — and that members would be “restricted to faculty and administrators only.”
The school also agreed to review its admissions policies for potential bias after it “identified a recent downturn in both Jewish and African American enrollment,” and last week announced a range of disciplinary actions against an undisclosed number of students.
Despite the overhaul, the current fraught chapter in Columbia’s 270-year history may not be over. The Trump administration has told the university that meeting its demands was “a precondition for formal negotiations” over a continued financial relationship and that the White House may call for other “immediate and long-term structural reforms.”
Columbia’s changes are notable for their scope and for how quickly they were made. But it is not the only institution to make concessions as the White House indicates that its campaign against elite universities and colleges will not end at the Morningside Heights campus.
Federal money is the lifeblood of major research universities, and some have begun to keep quiet on hot-button issues in hopes of escaping the administration’s ire. Many, including the University of California this week, have retreated from diversity-related efforts.
Many of the changes Columbia agreed to make involve issues that have been points of contention on campus for some time.
Face masks, for example, emerged as a source of conflict last year amid the Gaza protests, with demonstrators saying they should be able to conceal their identities to avoid being doxxed, and others arguing that mask-wearing makes it harder to hold protesters accountable if their actions veer into harassment.
The detainment this month of Mr. Khalil, a prominent figure in the protests who stood out because he chose not to wear a mask, cast a spotlight on the issue.
But putting the Middle Eastern studies department, which has long been in a pitched battle over its scholarship and the employment of professors who describe themselves as anti-Zionist, under outside scrutiny provoked unique outrage.
Columbia said that the senior vice provost would review curriculum and hiring in several of the department’s programs, including the Center for Palestine Studies and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. The university said the move was aimed at “promoting excellence in regional studies.”
But Michael Thaddeus, a Columbia math professor who described reading Dr. Armstrong’s letter with “profound disappointment and alarm,” called it “a giant step down a very dangerous road.”
He worried that the Middle Eastern studies department would effectively be run by “a member of Columbia’s thought police” who could interfere with anything from course offerings to faculty appointments. “It strikes at the heart of academic freedom,” Professor Thaddeus said.
“Of all the bad things,” he continued, “this one is really the worst.”
Katherine Rosman contributed reporting.
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