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Stagnant waters and poverty can be found all around in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.
Haiti Action Committee Condemns Trump’s Decision to End Temporary Protected Status for Haitians
Haiti Action Committee denounces the latest white supremacist attack by the Trump Administration directed at Haitians living in the US. The announcement that the US will end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians puts a target on the back of over 500,000 Haitians.
It is, quite simply, a plan for ethnic cleansing – and it must be opposed.
The US government has granted 17 countries Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which allows undocumented people from those countries to work and live legally in this country, but does not provide a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship. A country is designated for TPS when conditions there are so bad that it’s not safe or economically viable for people to return, for instance in case of hurricanes and other natural disasters or war and political instability. Haiti was granted TPS status after the horrific earthquake of 2010 that killed more than 300,000 people. This was followed by Hurricane Matthew that devastated Haiti’s southern peninsula in 2016 and the disastrous 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in August 2021. By July of 2024, over 520,000 Haitians had been granted TPS, and they are now in the crosshairs of ICE and Homeland Security.
Many of the Haitians who are impacted by this inhumane ruling have been in the United States for years and have families with children who are US citizens. They own homes and businesses, and pay taxes. Deportations will break up families with the US-born children having the option to remain in the country (assuming birthright citizenship is not overturned), and their undocumented parents forced to return to a country called a “living hell” by those who live there.
The current conditions in Haiti are exactly what TPS was set up to address, and it’s unconscionable for the Trump administration to pretend otherwise. There are now no elected officials in Haiti, the result of years of rule by decree by imposed and illegitimate governments, installed by the US and its so-called Core Group of foreign occupiers in the wake of the coup d’etat that overthrew Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, in 2004. In the last year alone, over 5000 Haitians have been killed by paramilitary death squads, armed with weapons that enter the country illegally, mainly from the US. Over one million Haitians have had to flee their homes. Nearly half the population is facing acute hunger, as roads are blocked and markets attacked. Tens of thousands of children have been unable to attend schools. Gang rapes have become the norm as paramilitaries aligned with government and business elites escalate their attacks on opposition communities. The despised Haitian Army, disbanded by President Aristide in 1995, has been reconstituted, readying itself to commit yet more human rights violations.
Already there are lawsuits and protests to prevent mass deportations of Haitians. Haiti Action Committee will be doing all we can to advocate for ongoing TPS protection for Haitians in this country and for an end to the death squad terror in Haiti that has fueled Haitian migration. Please join us in this fight.
To contact us, please go to: action.haiti@gmail.com
For more information, please go to www.haitisolidarity.net or our facebook page athttps://www.facebook.com/HaitiActionCommittee
To support the vital work of Haiti’s grassroots movement, please donate to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund at www.haitiemergencyrelief.org--Haiti Action CommitteePO Box 2040Berkeley,CA 9470233 years of solidarity with the grassroots struggle for dignity, democracy and self-determination of the Haitian people! We Will Not Forget the Achievements of Lavalas in HaitiPlease donate to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund www.haitiemergencyrelief.org - all donations are tax-deductible and support Haiti's grassroots struggle for democracy
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URGENT STEP ONE:
Demand EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER & TREATMENT
FOR IMAM JAMIL
The Bureau of Prisons is denying medical treatment to Imam
Jamil Al-Amin, 81 years old, formerly known as H. Rap Brown.
He has a potentially life-threatening growth on his face, on
top of his multiple myeloma (cancer) & other significant
medical issues.
A civil and human rights leader, wrongfully imprisoned for
the past 24 years, he needs Your Help to avoid his
Death By Medical Neglect
CALL TUCSON COMPLEX 520-663-5000
EMAIL WARDEN Mark Gutierrez, mggutierrez@bop.gov
Give Name & Inmate Number: Jamil Al-Amin, #99974-555
Demand they grant Imam Jamil an EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER from United States Penitentiary (USP) Tucson to Federal Medical Center (FMC) Butner for his Immediate Medical Treatment NOW!!
***Deputy Director of BOP [Bureau of Prisons], (202) 307-3198
URGENT STEP TWO:
Tell his Congressional Delegation of his condition, Urge them to use their offices to inquire the BOP & demand that their constituent (Imam Jamil, West End Community Masjid, 547 West End Pl., SW, Atlanta) receive the emergency medical transfer, diagnosis & treatment.
- Email GA Cong. Nikema Williams PressGA05@mail.house.gov
- Email US Sen. Rafael Warnock press@warnock.senate.gov
- Email US Sen. Jon Ossoff press@ossoff.senate.gov
- Email Atlanta City Councilman Jason Dozier jdozier@atlantaga.gov
- Email GA State Rep Park Cannon park.cannon@house.ga.gov
- Email GA State Sen. Sonya Halpern sonya.halpern@senate.ga.gov
This is most urgent step before Step Three: campaigning for Medical Reprieve by the GA Bd. Of pardons & Parole, THE entity standing in the way of freeing Imam from his unjust conviction by granting a Medical Reprieve.
IMAM JAMIL ACTION NETWORK.ORG
216.296.4617
NATIONAL
347.731.1886
MEDIA
252.907.4443
SOUTHERN
347.731.1886
NJ/NY
202.520.9997
WASH., DC
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Trump Administration Live Updates: Britain, France and Ukraine to Develop Cease-Fire Plan to Present to U.S.
Britain’s prime minister announced the move ahead of a meeting with European leaders as the region reeled from President Trump’s confrontation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
By Stephen Castle and Jeanna Smialek, Stephen Castle reported from London and Jeanna Smialek from Brussels, March 2, 2025
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine leaving the West Wing after a heated meeting with President Trump on Friday in Washington. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Here is the latest.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain said Sunday that he would work with the leaders of Ukraine and France on a cease-fire plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, as the region reels from the Trump administration’s recent moves.
The comments came ahead of a summit in London on Sunday, where Mr. Starmer met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and other European leaders to discuss the war. The gathering took on greater urgency after Mr. Zelensky’s heated Oval Office meeting with President Trump and Vice President JD Vance on Friday raised fears the U.S. would try to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into making a peace deal on whatever terms the Americans dictated.
Mr. Starmer gave Mr. Zelensky a warm hug as he arrived at the summit in London. On Sunday morning, Mr. Starmer told the BBC that he had spoken to President Trump by phone a day earlier.
“I’m clear in my mind he does want lasting peace, he does want an end to the fighting in Ukraine,” said Mr. Starmer.
The prime minister said that he, Mr. Zelensky and President Emmanuel Macron of France had agreed they “would work on a plan for stopping the fighting and then discuss that plan with the U.S.” Any peace agreement “is going to need a U.S. backstop,” Mr. Starmer added, saying that British and U.S. teams were discussing the idea.
The angry exchange in the Oval Office on Friday was the latest sign that Mr. Trump was pivoting American foreign policy away from traditional allies like Ukraine and Europe. It also illustrated the seriousness of his plans to quickly end the war in Ukraine, which could result in a deal that empowers Russia.
Sunday’s summit, arranged by Mr. Starmer, was originally set up to inform other European leaders about his own meeting with Mr. Trump in Washington on Thursday. But it gained new importance after Mr. Zelensky’s Oval Office meeting, making the goals of supporting Ukraine and beefing up their defenses more critical than ever. Since Friday, European leaders have lined up behind Ukraine and lauded its embattled president.
Mr. Zelensky is also set to meet King Charles III later on Sunday.
Here’s what else to know:
· British loan: Britain on Saturday announced a nearly $3 billion loan to Ukraine aimed at bolstering the war-torn country’s military capability. It will be paid back using profits generated on sanctioned Russian sovereign assets, and the first tranche of funding is expected to be disbursed to Ukraine next week, Britain’s Treasury said.
· Judge’s order: A federal judge in Washington on Saturday blocked the Trump administration from ousting the top official at a federal watchdog agency, saying that its efforts to do so were unlawful. The judge’s order will allow the official, Hampton Dellinger, to remain the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which protects federal whistle-blowers. Read more ›
· More troops on the border: The Pentagon is sending about 3,000 additional troops to the southwestern border, rushing to comply with Mr. Trump’s order to increase the military’s role in stemming the flow of migrants into the United States. The reinforcements announced on Saturday would bring the total number of active-duty troops on the border to about 9,000, Defense Department officials said. Read more ›
· Park protests: Hundreds of people gathered on Saturday at national parks from California to Maine to protest the Trump administration’s firing of at least 1,000 National Park Service employees last month. Read more ›
Yan Zhuang contributed reporting.
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2) Israel Halts Aid to Gaza and Proposes New Framework for an End to the War
Israel has called for Hamas to accept a temporary extension of the existing cease-fire deal, and to release more hostages.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 2, 2025
Israel announced on Sunday that it was immediately halting the entry of all goods and humanitarian assistance into Gaza, trying to force Hamas into accepting a temporary extension of the cease-fire in the war.
The move disrupts the existing, agreed-upon framework for negotiating a permanent end to the war and puts the fate of the hostages into uncharted territory. The draconian halt on goods and aid, including fuel, is also likely to worsen conditions for the roughly two million inhabitants of Gaza, after the 15-month war left much of the coastal enclave in ruins.
The initial, six-week phase of the original deal between Israel and Hamas expired on Saturday. Though it was punctured by setbacks and mutual accusations of violations, it ultimately saw at least a temporary cessation in the fighting and the exchange of 25 living Israeli hostages and the remains of eight dead ones for about 1,500 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. That deal also allowed for a significant increase of aid into Gaza.
The next phase of the agreement called for a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and a commitment to a permanent cease-fire in return for the release of all the remaining living hostages in Gaza, who are being held in inhumane conditions, according to reports from hostages who have been freed.
Instead, hours before its announcement about the halt of aid, Israel proposed a seven-week extension of the temporary cease-fire, during which Hamas must release half the remaining living hostages as well as the remains of half the deceased ones. Upon conclusion of that extension, if agreement were reached on a permanent cease-fire, then all the remaining hostages would have to be released, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
“Israel will not allow a cease-fire without the release of our hostages,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on Sunday.
“If Hamas continues its refusal, there will be further consequences,” it added.
Hamas immediately rejected the Israeli gambit, issuing a statement on Sunday describing the halt in aid as “cheap blackmail” and “a blatant upending of the agreement.”
Israel attributed the new proposal to the work of the U.S. envoy to the region, Steve Witkoff. The existing deal was negotiated between Israel and Hamas through third-country mediators including the United States, Qatar and Egypt.
Last year, the United Nations and aid organizations repeatedly warned about a looming famine in Gaza amid widespread hunger during the war, which was sparked by the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel. While goods are more available now, many Gazans say they cannot afford to buy them, and many depend on humanitarian assistance.
Palestinians in Gaza were already struggling to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan, which began this weekend, and is normally a joyous time in the Muslim calendar.
Abdulrahman Mohammed, 35, a father of four from Gaza City, said the halting of aid was already affecting the availability of essential goods like milk, fruit and vegetables. Prices had skyrocketed, he said, adding that some traders were hoarding supplies to sell them later at even more inflated prices.
Two Israeli officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the government believed that with the aid and goods that entered the enclave in recent months and during the temporary cease-fire, there were enough supplies in Gaza to suffice for several more months. They did not offer further details.
The officials added that the new restrictions would not apply to the entry of water.
Under the existing cease-fire deal, Israel was by now supposed to have begun removing its troops from the Philadelphi Corridor, a strategic strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt. By Sunday, there had been no such movement.
Mr. Netanyahu said the proposed temporary cease-fire should extend over the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan and through the Jewish holiday of Passover, which ends on April 20.
In broadcast remarks at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said, “Steve Witkoff proposed the framework for extending the cease-fire after gaining the impression that there is no possibility, at present, of bridging between the two positions, Israel’s and Hamas’s, regarding the second stage” of the existing deal.
Mr. Netanyahu added that according to Mr. Witkoff, additional time for talks was needed to achieve a possible agreement. “He even defined his proposal as a corridor for negotiations on the second stage,” Mr. Netanyahu added. “Israel is ready for this.”
But the Israeli government has been categorical that the war in Gaza cannot end unless Hamas is disarmed and removed from power there, terms that Hamas has largely rejected.
Israelis have been shocked by the testimonies of recently released hostages who said they were kept for months in dark tunnels, in constant fear for their lives, with very little food and, in some cases, in shackles. The families of hostages remaining in Gaza have been pleading for the government to end the war and bring them home all at once.
In all, up to 24 hostages are believed to still be alive in Gaza, Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday. Hamas also holds the remains of at least 35 who are believed to be dead, he added in recorded remarks at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting. “We are not giving up on anyone,” he said.
“There will be no free lunches,” Mr. Netanyahu said, adding, “If Hamas thinks that it will be possible to continue the cease-fire or benefit from the terms of the first stage, without us receiving hostages, it is sorely mistaken.”
On Sunday, Hamas reiterated its willingness to begin negotiations for the second stage of the deal and accused Israel of “a blatant attempt to renege on the agreement.”
Hamas is unlikely to accept Israel’s new offer without further negotiations, said Aaron David Miller, a former State Department Middle East analyst and negotiator who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The proposal, he said, “allows Israelis to get hostages back without making reciprocal commitments.”
On Sunday, Israel also raised the specter of resuming fighting in Gaza, noting in the statement that according to the original agreement, Israel could return to fighting at this point “if it gains the impression that the negotiations have been ineffective.”
“Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement on Saturday that he had signed a declaration to use emergency authorities to expedite the delivery of approximately $4 billion in military assistance to Israel.
Eve Sampson contributed reporting from New York, Ameera Harouda from Doha, Qatar, and Myra Noveck from Jerusalem.
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3) ‘Full on Fight Club’: How Trump Is Crushing U.S. Climate Policy
President Trump has quickly transformed America’s approach to the environment, withholding funds and stretching the limits of presidential power.
By David Gelles, Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer, March 2, 2025
In a few short weeks, President Trump has severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet.
With a flurry of actions that have stretched the limits of presidential power, Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry.
He is abandoning efforts to reduce global warming, even as the world has reached record levels of heat that scientists say is driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels. Every corner of the world is now experiencing the effects of these rising temperatures in the form of deadlier hurricanes, floods, wildfires and droughts, as well as species extinction.
To achieve such a wholesale overhaul of the country’s climate policies in such a short time, the Trump administration has reneged on federal grants, fired workers en masse and attacked longstanding environmental regulations.
All new presidents have their own agendas, but the speed and scale of Mr. Trump’s efforts to uproot climate policy is unprecedented. “This is not the kind of stately tennis match of the usual switch-over in administrations,” said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, an environmental law firm. “This is full on Fight Club.”
The Trump administration’s moves have unfolded simultaneously across the sprawling government, affecting federal, state and local agencies and hitting government-funded projects in Africa, Antarctica and around the world. On Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, making it the only nation to walk away.
Mr. Trump has frozen funds appropriated by Congress for clean energy projects, taking particular aim at wind energy, the country’s largest source of renewable power. He has stopped approvals for wind farms on public land and in federal waters and has threatened to block projects on private land.
He has fired thousands of federal workers, dismantled programs aimed at helping polluted communities and scrubbed references to climate change from numerous federal websites.
He has waged a multipronged assault at regulations designed to curb pollution, immediately sweeping some rules to the side and circumventing the normally lengthy rule-making processes. At the same time, Mr. Trump has declared an energy emergency, giving himself the authority to fast-track the construction of oil and gas projects as he works to stoke supply as well as demand for fossil fuels.
“We’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to,” Mr. Trump said just hours after being sworn in for his second term.
The United States is producing more oil than any other nation in history, and is also the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas. The fossil fuel industry donated more than $75 million to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Mr. Trump, in turn, promised to weaken environmental regulations in ways that would lower its costs and increase its margins.
The president has repeatedly mocked climate change, criticized regulations and said that more drilling would bring down energy bills.
In several cases, the administration’s actions have flouted the law, with agencies defying court orders, freezing funds in legally binding contracts and reinterpreting regulations to suit their aims. In doing so, Mr. Trump has busted through many of the barriers that were erected by the officials during the Biden administration who believed that process and the legal system would slow or deter him.
The administration and Republicans in Congress plan to use a legislative maneuver to quickly erase California’s authority to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035. That authority has never before been challenged in this way, and critics say the maneuver is illegal. But it would be much faster than trying to overturn the California ban through the standard process that requires months of public notice and comment.
Until last month, the United States was expected to record significant reductions in its greenhouse-gas emissions over the next decade. But the Trump administration’s changes pave the way for more planet-warming pollution and will likely slow the advance of cleaner technologies like wind and solar energy.
“To power the Great American comeback, President Trump is unleashing American energy and eliminating the Green New Scam,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson. “The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency are working in tandem to implement President Trump’s Day 1 executive action and undo Biden’s radical climate policies that restrained America’s economy and abundant natural resources."
Mr. Trump’s supporters are delighting in the audacity and scale of his attacks on climate and environmental regulations.
“They’re doing all the things I thought they would do, and they’re doing other things that I only dreamed they might do,” said Myron Ebell, a conservative activist who led the E.P.A. transition team during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Many of Mr. Trump’s moves may have a lasting effect on the country’s ability to confront climate change.
Thousands of federal jobs that are eliminated now may be hard to restore. Clean energy projects that were relying on federal funding may not proceed without the expected investments. A sudden stop to scientific work could create gaps in data collection that are impossible to fill. And environmental regulations that are stripped away could be difficult to revive.
Several of the administration’s actions are already facing legal challenges.
After Mr. Trump ordered federal agencies to pause billions of dollars in climate and energy grants that were authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, two federal judges ordered the Trump administration to let the money flow again.
In early February, one of those judges, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court, said the White House was defying his order by withholding funds. Some funds have begun moving, but many remain stalled.
John Podesta, a senior climate adviser in the Biden administration, called many of the Trump administration actions illegal. “We followed the law, and they’re breaking the law,” Mr. Podesta said. “It remains to be seen whether they’ll be allowed to get away with it.”
In the past few weeks Mr. Trump has fired thousands of employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department, the Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government’s premiere climate science agency. On Thursday, a federal judge said directives that led to mass firings were illegal.
And in a move that could have far-reaching implications for government efforts to regulate industry, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has recommended that the agency reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, according to three people familiar with the decision. That would eliminate the legal basis for the government’s climate laws, such as limits on pollution from automobiles and power plants.
“We’re talking about undoing 50 years of environmental regulation and accelerating the extinction crisis and risking the health of the American people,” said Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club. “There’s so much shocking news every day. People are struggling to process all of it.”
Electric vehicles, long a target for Mr. Trump, have lost much of the federal support they gained during the Biden administration.
Mr. Trump has directed Congress to eliminate federal subsidies for E.V.s., including tax credits for consumers, which could hurt the sales of Tesla, the electric car company, despite Elon Musk’s central role in the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts.
The Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, signed an order to loosen fuel economy standards enacted by the Biden administration that were designed to encourage automakers to sell electric vehicles. And the administration moved to freeze $5 billion that Congress approved for the construction of a national network of electric-vehicle charging stations.
The administration is also trying to stop states and even cities from enacting their own climate policies.
Mr. Duffy recently lambasted what he called the “mismanagement” of California’s high-speed-rail project, announcing an investigation into how the state was spending a $3.1 billion federal grant.
And the Transportation Department moved to revoke its approval of New York City’s congestion pricing program, a plan designed to reduce traffic, raise money for public transportation and curb emissions.
“The old paradigm was an administration will come in and do all the hard work of dismantling the old administration’s policies and then replacing with its own,” said Ms. Dillen. “This is a very different strategy, which is that we may not even bother to replace policies because we don’t care about complying with the law.”
Attempts to blunt the Inflation Reduction Act are already delaying projects. Jay Turner, a professor at Wellesley College who is tracking investments related to the law, found that at least nine major projects worth $7.6 billion have been slowed in the past month as funding from the law has been put on hold and renewable energy companies adjust to the new reality.
“You’ve seen some real pullback,” he said. “Established players in the industry are reassessing the market and how much capacity is needed right now, and you also see newcomers that suddenly don’t see a path to bringing their projects to fruition.”
Much of the damage to the country’s environmental regulatory apparatus may be long-lasting.
The E.P.A. said it would try to claw back about $20 billion that was awarded to eight organizations under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in low-income communities. A top federal prosecutor resigned after she declined a request by the Trump administration to freeze the money, saying she did not have sufficient evidence to do so.
While the Energy Department has started releasing some grants for battery factories and electric grid upgrades, other projects remain on hold, according to several awardees. A $500 million program to upgrade hydroelectric dams around the country, for instance, remains frozen, and companies are halting construction or wondering if they will get reimbursed for work that has already been done.
On Wednesday, Trump said he believed Mr. Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, would be cutting about 65 percent of the agency’s more than 17,000 jobs. Mr. Zeldin later said that he thought the E.PA. could cut at least 65 percent of its budget and make cuts to its work force.
The effective dissolution of the United States Agency for International Development has led to the immediate termination of long-running projects in the developing world aimed at helping vulnerable countries adapt to a hotter planet.
And more sweeping actions may still be in store.
“The bigger changes are to come,” Mr. Turner said. “What we’ve seen today has been fast, but it’s just kind of the start of much more extensive efforts to dismantle the Biden administration’s policies.”
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4) On Mexico’s Once-Packed Border, Few Migrants Remain
There has been a dramatic drop in the number of people gathering at the U.S. border and trying to cross. Can it help Mexico stave off President Trump’s threatened tariffs?
By Annie Correal, Photographs by Alejandro Cegarra, March 3, 2025
Annie Correal reported this story from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
On the eve of President Trump’s deadline to impose tariffs on Mexico, one thing is hard to miss on the Mexican side of the border: The migrants are gone.
In what were once some of the busiest sections along the border — Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, Matamoros — shelters that used to overflow now hold just a few families. The parks, hotels and vacant buildings that once teemed with people from all over the world stand empty.
And on the border itself, where migrants once slept in camps within feet of the 30-foot wall, only dust-caked clothes and shoes, rolled-up toothpaste tubes and water bottles remain.
“All that is over,” said the Rev. William Morton, a missionary at a Ciudad Juárez cathedral that serves migrants free meals. “Nobody can cross.”
Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced that Customs and Border Protection had apprehended only 200 people at the southern border the Saturday before — the lowest single-day number in over 15 years.
Mr. Trump has credited his crackdown on illegal immigration for the plunging numbers, even as he has also announced he will send thousands more combat forces to the border to stop what he calls an invasion.
But according to analysts, Mexico’s own moves to restrict migration in the last year — not just at the border but throughout the country — have yielded undeniable results. In February, the Trump administration said it would pause for a month the imposition of 25-percent tariffs on Mexican exports, challenging the government to further reduce migration and the flow of fentanyl across the border.
That progress has put Mexico in a far stronger negotiating position than when Mr. Trump first threatened tariffs, during his first term.
“Mexico has new leverage compared to 2019,” Ariel G. Ruiz Soto and Andrew Selee, analysts with the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, wrote in a report. Mexico’s cooperation, they said, has made it “indispensable” to the United States.
In recent years, the Mexican government has significantly stepped up checks on migration. It has established checkpoints along migrant routes, imposed visa restrictions, dispersed migrant caravans and bused people who arrived from places like Venezuela to remote corners of southern Mexico to stop them from reaching the U.S. border. All of that has vastly reduced the number of migrants at the border.
Since last spring, the Mexican authorities have been apprehending more people than their American counterparts every month. Now, the numbers at the border have fallen to almost nothing.
“We no longer have major flows of people coming — they have declined by 90 percent,” Enrique Serrano Escobar, who leads the Chihuahua State office responsible for migrants, in Juárez, said last week.
And those migrants who do make it to the border are no longer trying to enter the United States, shelter operators say.
“They know they can’t cross,” said Father Morton, in Juárez. “All the holes underground, the tunnels, the holes in the wall, they’ve virtually sealed it — it’s much, much more difficult.”
Empty Shelters
In Mexican border cities, the scene at migrant shelters is much the same: tables sitting empty at meal time, bunk beds, unused.
Even before Mr. Trump took office, the number of people apprehended trying to cross the border had been dramatically dropping, according to U.S. government data.
Many of those waiting in border cities had appointments through CBP One, an application that allowed people to make asylum appointments with the authorities rather than to cross the border, shelter operators say.
After Mr. Trump canceled the app on his first day in office, people gave up after a few days and headed south to Mexico City or even for the southern border, said the Rev. Juan Fierro, a pastor at the Good Samaritan shelter in Ciudad Juárez.
At a once-crammed shelter in Matamoros whose name translates to Helping Them Triumph, only a handful of Venezuelan women and their children remain, according to its directors.
In Tijuana, at a shelter complex within view of the border wall, the Foundation Youth Movement 2000, which once held hundreds of people of all nationalities, there are now just 55, according to its director, José María Lara.
They are the same people who have been there since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
“There have been the same number” Mr. Lara said. They include people from Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia and Guatemala, as well as Mexican migrants from states considered dangerous to return to, such as Michoacán.
There are no figures available for how many migrants like these may be living in the border’s shelters, hotels and rented rooms, and biding their time.
“We are going to wait to see if God touches Mr. Trump’s heart,” said a 26-year-old woman from Venezuela, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Maria Elena, as she sat eating with her 7-year-old son at the cathedral in Ciudad Juárez.
Guardsmen on the Border
In response to Mr. Trump’s demands last month, Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, dispatched 10,000 national guardsmen to the border and sent hundreds more troops to Sinaloa state, a major fentanyl trafficking hub.
Officials and those who work with migrants are split on whether the troops, several hundred of which began to appear in and around every border city over the last month, have had an effect on illegal border crossings.
At the end of the border wall between Tijuana and San Diego, Calif., the National Guard has set up large tents on the Mexican side, in an area called Nido de las Águilas. About 15 miles from downtown Tijuana, it has long been used by coyotes, the smugglers who take advantage of the steep hills and lack of police presence to lead migrants into California, the authorities say.
The guard has also placed checkpoints at spots up and down the border.
In Tijuana, José Moreno Mena, a spokesman for the Coalition for the Defense of Migrants, said that the presence of the guard has been a major deterrent to migration, along with Mr. Trump’s promised mass deportations in the United States.
“This doesn’t mean that they won’t keep coming,” Mr. Moreno said. “It’s just a pause, perhaps, until they see better conditions.”
But in the state of Tamaulipas, where more than 700 guardsman arrived last month in places like Matamoros, the guardsman do not appear to be curbing migration, residents say. They seem to be concentrated on the bridge into the United States, while migrants are now seeking to enter through the desert or other rural areas.
In Ciudad Juárez, where hundreds of guardsman were also dispatched in early February, the troops and military personnel have been stopping cars to inspect them, and searching for border tunnels.
“They have inspection spots at night, in the street,” Father Morton said. “There are more here, ostensibly to stop the fentanyl, but I doubt they know where it is.” He said they mainly stopped young men who were driving souped-up cars or had tattoos, creating an environment of “low intensity conflict.”
The real work of curbing migration has been happening far from Mexico’s northern border.
At the southernmost point in Mexico, in Tapachula, few migrants are entering. Shelters that recently housed 1,000 people now serve just a hundred or so, according to operators. Waiting for visas that allow them to head north, and dispersed if they try to form caravans, these migrants are all but blocked.
Many are weighing their options. Some have even asked the Mexican government to deport them on flights back to their country.
Staying Put in Mexico
The migrants who now sit on the U.S. border are generally those who come from places they cannot return to.
“They can’t go back,” said the Rev. Francisco González, president of a network of shelters in Juarez called We Are One for Juarez.
While his 12 shelters housed only 440 people last week after often being filled to their capacity of 1,200 in recent years, the people who are arriving are staying longer, he said.
Some are starting to fill out forms to gain asylum in Mexico, fearing they could be caught and deported if they have no legal status, Mr. González said.
“We still have faith and hope that at some point Trump will recover from his insanity,” said Jordan García, a former mining worker from Venezuela who said he and his wife and three daughters had spent seven months making the journey to Ciudad Juárez.
Mr. García carried his infant, Reina Kataleya, through the dangerous jungle pass known as the Darién Gap when she was seven months old. Now the family’s makeshift home consists of a bunk bed in one of Mr. González’s shelters on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, draped in plush blankets for privacy.
But shelters at the border have started to shut down. In Ciudad Juárez, 34 were open in November; by last month, that number had dropped to 29. Shelter operators say that not only are there significantly fewer arrivals but that they are losing backing from international groups such as the U.N. International Office for Migration, and UNICEF, which relied on foreign aid frozen under Mr. Trump.
Before the new American administration, “there were more people, and there was more support,” said Olivia Santiago Rentería, a volunteer at one of the shelters run by We Are One for Juarez. “Now,” she said, “everyone here is living with that uncertainty.”
Reporting was contributed by Rocío Gallegos from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Aline Corpusfrom Tijuana; Enrique Lerma from Matamoros; and Lucía Trejo from Tapachula.
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5) With Cease-Fire Shaky, Israel and Hamas Weigh Diplomatic and Military Options
As the first phase of the truce in Gaza ends, the two sides are continuing negotiations but also preparing for a possible return to war.
By Adam Rasgon and Iyad Abuheweila, March 3, 2025
Adam Rasgon reported from Jerusalem, and Iyad Abuheweila from Istanbul.
A makeshift tent camp last month in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
When the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas was announced in January, Israelis and Palestinians burst into simultaneous celebrations, optimistic after 15 months of war.
Now, with the first phase of the deal over on Sunday and Israel introducing an entirely new proposal that Hamas has already rejected, concern is rising that the fighting that reduced Gaza to rubble, killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and threatened the lives of hostages could resume.
As the cease-fire teeters, both Hamas and Israel are pursuing two paths, one diplomatic and another military.
On the diplomatic front, Hamas is insisting on the implementation of the second phase of the original agreement, which calls for an end to the war, a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the release of more hostages and prisoners.
Israel, though, has made a new proposal for a seven-week extension of the current cease-fire, during which Hamas would be required to release half the remaining living hostages as well as the remains of half the deceased ones. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Sunday attributed the proposal to the work of President Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff.
For weeks, Israel has been sending signals that it wasn’t interested in moving forward with the second phase of the agreement. While the two sides agreed to the second phase in principle, they never worked out the details and have staked out irreconcilable visions.
Mr. Netanyahu has said repeatedly that Hamas’s government and military wing must be dismantled, a position shared by his right-wing coalition partners in the government. Hamas has suggested it was willing to give up civilian governance of Gaza but has firmly rejected dissolving its military wing, a critical source of its power in the enclave.
The new proposal, as described on Sunday by Mr. Netanyahu, appears to be an attempt to replace the cease-fire deal with terms that would enable Israel to bring home dozens of hostages and remains of hostages without committing to the end of the war.
But the suggestion, analysts said, may be an effort to shake up the cease-fire talks in a way that breaks the deadlock between Israel and Hamas, at least temporarily.
“It’s not really feasible, but it’s an opening offer,” said Shira Efron, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group. “It could force a discussion that bridges the two sides’ positions to extend the cease-fire for a couple weeks or more.”
Still, she said, it does not resolve the underlying differences between Hamas and Israel about the end of the war.
At a government meeting on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said the proposal included a temporary cease-fire during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan and the Jewish holiday of Passover. Half of the remaining hostages in Gaza, he said, would be returned to Israel at the beginning of the temporary cease-fire and the other half would be repatriated at the end, if an agreement on a permanent cease-fire is concluded.
In the first phase of the three-stage deal agreed to in January, Hamas released 25 Israeli hostages and handed over the bodies of eight others in exchange for more than 1,500 Palestinians jailed by Israel. But without further planned exchanges of hostages and prisoners, Israel will have fewer incentives to keep the truce going.
On Sunday, Hamas dismissed the new proposal as “a blatant attempt to renege on the agreement and evade negotiations for its second phase.”
Hamas considers the idea of immediately giving up half of the hostages a nonstarter, but it could consider exchanging a small number of hostages or bodies for Palestinian prisoners, even without a commitment to the end of the war, analysts said. The hostages represent Hamas’s most powerful leverage, and every time it trades an Israeli captive for Palestinian prisoners, its negotiating hand is weakened.
Two Israeli officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, acknowledged that Hamas would probably be willing to give up only a small number of hostages, or their remains, without guarantees for the end of the war. That dynamic, the officials said, may eventually make Israel choose between restarting a war to unseat Hamas or saving hostages still believed to be alive.
About 25 captives and the remains of more than 30 others are still in Gaza, according to the Israeli government.
“Israel stands on the horns of a dilemma,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general who served as Mr. Netanyahu’s national security adviser.
On Sunday, Hazem Qassim, a spokesman for Hamas, said the militant group was insisting on negotiating the second phase because it wanted to prevent the resumption of the war and ensure Israel withdraws from Gaza.
“This is a fundamental position for the Hamas movement,” he told the Qatari-funded broadcaster Al Jazeera.
Both Israel and Hamas have sent negotiators to speak with Egyptian and Qatari mediators. But even as the diplomatic discussions continue, the two sides are preparing for the possibility of a return to war.
Hamas has been collecting unexploded bombs throughout Gaza and repurposing the explosives and their metal cases as improvised explosive devices, according to one member of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details. The militant group has also been recruiting new members and replacing commanders killed in the fighting, the person said.
Israel has prepared extensively for a new and intense campaign in Gaza, according to Israeli officials. They said any new operations would include targeting Hamas officials who siphon off aid supplies meant for civilians, as well as destroying buildings and infrastructure used by the Hamas-run civilian government.
Such a plan has not yet been approved by the Israeli cabinet, the officials said, but they believe that only Mr. Trump could dissuade Mr. Netanyahu from renewed war.
While Israel and Hamas struggle over Gaza’s future, Palestinian civilians in the enclave, and the families of hostages, are facing an anxious period of limbo.
“They’re being left in a state of perpetual worry,” said Akram Atallah, a London-based Palestinian columnist originally from Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. “If the war returns, they stand to lose the most.”
Patrick Kingsley and Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.
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6) He Fought Claims of Harm From Infant Formula. Now He Regulates It.
Kyle Diamantas, a former corporate lawyer, is the new director for the F.D.A. food division, which oversees infant formula. He defended a top maker in cases claiming the company had not warned of potential risks to very low-weight babies.
By Christina Jewett, March 4, 2025
The new head of the Food and Drug Administration division that regulates infant formula was in recent months a corporate lawyer defending a top formula maker from claims that its product gave rise to debilitating harm to premature babies.
Kyle A. Diamantas joined the F.D.A. last month to lead the food division, leaving the law firm Jones Day, which has served as a pipeline of talent to both Trump administrations.
As a partner in Jones Day’s Miami office, Mr. Diamantas’s recent work included defending Abbott Laboratories in a lawsuit accusing the company of failing to adequately warn parents that its specialized formula for premature infants was associated with an elevated risk of a deadly bowel condition.
Abbott lost the case and was ordered to pay $495 million. Abbott is appealing the verdict. Mr. Diamantas’s role in that case and other Abbott cases has not been previously reported.
The leader of the F.D.A.’s food division has a wide-ranging role in ensuring the safety of about 80 percent of the food supply in the United States. In that job, Mr. Diamantas is also expected to take a lead role in enacting Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s agenda, which calls for reducing additives in food and eliminating what Mr. Kennedy has described as corruption in public health agencies.
“We will shut the revolving door to re-establish public trust,” Mr. Kennedy told the Health and Human Services Department’s staff during his first week in office.
The selection of Mr. Diamantas to run the food division struck Representative Rosa DeLauro, who has worked on infant formula issues, as a “betrayal.” She has focused on infant formula since 2022, when a major formula shortage began after Abbott temporarily shut down its Michigan formula plant amid findings of unsanitary conditions.
“The F.D.A.’s job is to protect our babies, not the corporations that poisoned them,” Ms. DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, said in a statement emailed to The New York Times. “Appointing an Abbott lawyer to oversee food safety, which includes infant formula, is letting the fox guard the henhouse.”
Mr. Diamantas did not respond to a request for comment. The F.D.A. said he will comply with his routine ethics agreement with the agency, which includes pledges to recuse himself from specific matters related to Abbott and also British American Tobacco, another prominent Jones Day client. Health and Human Services officials declined to make Mr. Diamantas’s ethics agreement available to the Times.
“Mr. Diamantas shares Secretary Kennedy’s vision of improving nutritional outcomes, ensuring the food supply is safe and healthy, and continuing to carry out the F.D.A.’s overall mission of protecting and promoting public health,” a spokesman for the department of Health and Human Services, Andrew Nixon, said.
The F.D.A. did not issue a formal announcement about Mr. Diamantas’ role, but on Feb. 24, the agency put up a web page listing him as the acting deputy commissioner of human foods and calling him its “top food executive.” He will also represent the agency in dealings with foreign governments and the White House.
Before he joined Jones Day in 2021, Mr. Diamantas (who has also been shown hunting with Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, in a photo on social media) worked at another law firm. There, he defended a cannabis company called Hemp Bombs against claims about its CBD products, which are derived from the cannabis plant. He also defended Whole Foods Markets in a lawsuit claiming that it sold a CBD product that misled users to believe it would reduce pain.
The F.D.A. has taken the position that CBD is unsafe to add to the food supply and has gone after companies in situations it deemed high risk. The agency began an effort to determine how it would regulate CBD but in early 2023 concluded that Congress needed to step in.
The deadly bowel condition associated with infant formula for preterm infants has also been debated at the F.D.A. Hundreds of lawsuits are pending, many claiming that Abbott failed to warn parents of the outsized risk of infection that arises when very low-weight babies — around 3 ½ pounds or less — are fed formula instead of breast milk.
In three infant formula cases filed in a Missouri court, Mr. Diamantas was admitted to represent Abbott in March 2024, court records show. In two of the cases, his role was described in court records as representing two Abbott sales representatives.
He did not address the jury during the high-profile trial of Margo Gill v. Abbott, which ended with the jury levying $95 million in compensatory and $400 million in punitive damages against the company.
The case centered around whether Abbott had adequately warned Ms. Gill that very low-weight babies who are fed infant formula face an elevated risk of a bowel condition called necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC, which can quickly lead to destruction of the intestines and death.
At six weeks old, Ms. Gill’s daughter developed NEC about 24 hours after she was fed formula. She left the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, with extensive bowel and brain damage, according to court testimony viewed on Courtroom View Network. Ms. Gill testified during the trial that at 3, her daughter was unable to talk, walk or eat without a feeding tube.
Abbott did not argue that Ms. Gill had been warned, rather saying it was the doctor’s role to counsel families. During the trial in July, a lawyer for Ms. Gill, Jake Plattenberger, showed jurors internal Abbott documents saying that infant formula “is thought to be a contributing factor to the development of NEC.”
He also told the jury that about 90 percent of the preterm infants who got the condition had been fed formula. He showed a study of 1,800 preterm infants that concluded that formula feeding raises the risk of developing NEC by 180 percent.
James F. Hurst, the lead trial lawyer for Abbott, argued that formula does not cause the condition. The product is typically used in hospitals and is labeled “for institutional use only” and “use as directed by a doctor.” On a slide presented to the jury, Mr. Hurst wrote: “Different Words On Abbott’s Label (Or Anywhere Else) Wouldn’t Have Changed Anything” for the infant.
He also argued that the cascade of injuries Ms. Gill’s daughter sustained, including brain damage, were related to other factors, including her birth complications and very low oxygen level.
“These premature infant formulas and human milk fortifiers are part of the standard of care for premature infants and have been used safely for 45 years, nourishing generations of NICU babies,” Abbott said in a statement on Monday.
On July 26, jurors sided with Ms. Gill and awarded nearly half a billion to her family. Soon after, Abbott’s chief executive, Robert B. Ford, publicly warned that the company might need to stop selling some formula for preterm infants.
Mr. Ford turned to the F.D.A. three days after the verdict, records show, and met with Dr. Robert Califf, the F.D.A. commissioner, and others in the food division.
Soon, officials with the F.D.A. and two other health agencies began to work quickly on a consensus statement about NEC. A person familiar with the process, who requested anonymity to discuss the dialogue, said formula companies had asked government officials to craft a consensus statement, but did not dictate what it said. Some working group members had relationships with Abbott, such as through accepting speaker fees, that were not specifically outlined in the final report, records show.
On Oct. 3, the health department released its conclusion: “1) There is no conclusive evidence that preterm infant formula causes NEC; and 2) there is strong evidence that human milk is protective against NEC.”
The statement echoes Abbott’s position in court and is expected to help formula makers in upcoming cases.
A few months before the Gill verdict, a similar case against Mead Johnson, which makes Enfamil formula, ended in a $60 million verdict in favor of a family. In November, a case against both formula makers resulted in a victory for the companies.
The F.D.A.’s food division handles myriad other matters in its role regulating the majority of the food supply. On infant formula, the division is trying to hold Abbott and other companies to a high standard after inspectors at Abbott’s Michigan plant discovered a leaking roof, pooled water and evidence of a deadly bacteria. The plant was shut down for an overhaul, setting off a monthslong infant formula shortage in 2022 that left parents scrambling.
The food division also leads investigations into food-borne illnesses, working with states and other federal officials to use high-tech tools to connect sick patients to contamination at food plants or vegetable farms. The division has also been rolling out rules making it easier to trace food through the supply chain and helping farmers ensure irrigation water does not spread bacteria on crops.
Mr. Kennedy has outlined other priorities for the agency, including to scrutinize chemical additives in food. At least one influential supporter of Mr. Kennedy sees Mr. Diamantas’s experience as an asset.
During the weekend of the inauguration, Vani Hari, a clean-food activist known online as the Food Babe, said she met and chatted with Mr. Diamantas at three different events. The first time, his wife leaned in and told Ms. Hari she had been a follower of her blog for years.
“He is all on board to change the way the regulatory system works,” Ms. Hari said. Rather than see his work with Abbott and other corporations as a potential conflict of interest, Ms. Hari said it gave him insight into how to work with them.
“It’s just the way the world works. The companies will have to be involved in these discussions,” Ms. Hari said. “He’s very passionate about the Make America Healthy Again movement but he’s also very levelheaded. He’ll figure out a solution that is feasible to everyone to change our food system.”
Julie Creswell contributed reporting.
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7) Arab Leaders Meet at Emergency Summit to Form Plan on Gaza Crisis
Trying to counter President Trump’s proposal to “clean out” Gaza, Arab leaders are trying to forge their own vision for the Palestinian territory.
By Vivian Yee and Ismaeel Naar, March 4, 2025
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo and Ismaeel Naar from Dubai.
Destruction in Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip, in January. Credit...Mahmoud Al-Basos/Reuters
Arab leaders convened for an emergency summit in Cairo on Tuesday, facing pressure to come up with something that has proved elusive for decades: a comprehensive Arab vision for Gaza, just as the Israel-Hamas cease-fire is teetering and Israel, buoyed by President Trump’s backing, holds the upper hand.
“Arab Summit: Rescue mission,” read a stark headline on Saturday in Al Ahram, Egypt’s state-owned flagship newspaper, over an article outlining the “uphill task” facing Arab leaders.
The delegates were expected to ratify an Egyptian proposal that would involve spending $53 billion to rebuild Gaza without, as Mr. Trump has suggested, moving Palestinians out of the strip, according to a preliminary draft of the proposal, which was shared with The New York Times by an Arab diplomat.
The proposal also calls for putting a committee of technocrats and other figures unaffiliated with Hamas in charge of the territory for an initial six-month period. The Egyptian government did not respond to a request for comment, but the editor in chief of Al Ahram Weekly, a state-owned media outlet, confirmed the document’s authenticity.
The Arab summit was called in response to Mr. Trump’s proposal last month to expel Palestinians from Gaza, send them to Egypt and Jordan and turn the territory into a tourism hub — an idea that much of the world has rejected as tantamount to ethnic cleansing.
Egypt, Jordan and other Arab allies of the United States have pushed back hard on the plan, saying it would destroy any remaining hope of a Palestinian state and destabilize the entire region.
Mr. Trump appeared to soften his position recently, saying that he was “not forcing” his Gaza idea on anyone. But the Arab world remains deeply concerned. Adding to those worries is the uncertainty surrounding the cease-fire in Gaza, which has paused the bloodshed there for six weeks and seen Israel and Hamas exchange Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages.
In the latest crisis to shake the agreement, Israel began blocking all aid and goods from entering Gaza on Sunday, attempting to strong-arm Hamas into extending the first phase of the truce, which just expired, and swapping more prisoners for hostages without moving toward a permanent end to the war.
Israel also recently drove tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and ruled out allowing them to return, intensifying Arab fears that an Israel emboldened by Mr. Trump’s support will attempt to annex the West Bank. Israel says it is responding to a rising threat of militancy from the West Bank. The Israeli military denies any forced evacuations, but has said it ordered people to leave buildings close to what it said were militant hide-outs.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has plagued the Middle East for decades. But recent events have brought the question of how to resolve it to a head, forcing Arab countries to scramble over the last few weeks to come up with a counterproposal to Mr. Trump’s.
Beyond insisting on Palestinian statehood and rejecting forcible displacement, Arab countries have not yet agreed on an alternative vision for Gaza — let alone one that Palestinian political factions, Israel, the United States and other countries would sign on to.
Many major questions remain, such as how to govern Gaza, how to manage its security, how to rebuild it and how to sideline Hamas, which remains the most powerful force in the enclave.
And any plan would have to get around a more fundamental issue: While Arab leaders will support only a framework that would include at least a nominal path toward Palestinian statehood, Israeli leaders are against embarking on a path that would lead to Palestinian sovereignty.
The leaders of Egypt, Jordan and Gulf Arab states met last month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to strategize ahead of Tuesday’s summit in Cairo, which will include all 22 members of the Arab League as well as the United Nations secretary general and the European Council’s president.
But the leaders of two of the most powerful Gulf nations — Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — did not show for the Cairo summit, raising questions about whether there is unified Arab support for Egypt’s plan.
According to the draft proposal expected to be discussed on Tuesday, the transitional governing committee would pave the way for the Palestinian Authority, the internationally recognized body that administers parts of the West Bank, to “fully return” to Gaza. The authority administered Gaza until Hamas, which had won parliamentary elections in 2006, seized control of the strip by force in 2007.
Gaza and the West Bank should be united as one state, Arab officials argue, and must be linked in any conversations about Gaza. The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, has so far appeared reluctant to give his blessing to any governing arrangement that does not put him fully in control of Gaza.
One open question concerns who will manage Gaza’s security after the war permanently ends. Egypt is proposing an international force be deployed in Gaza and the West Bank, according to the draft, which does not specify which countries might supply troops to such a force.
Hamas officials have said they would be willing to hand over control of civilian affairs to a governing committee of which the group was not a part, as long as Gaza’s postwar future was determined by Palestinian “national consensus,” according to a statement from the group on Tuesday.
But they refuse to demilitarize in Gaza, a crucial demand of both Israel and Mr. Trump. The American president’s top Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” last month that Hamas “has to go.” An official media outlet belonging to Hamas said on Tuesday that “the resistance’s weapons are a red line.”
The Egyptian proposal acknowledges that it will be difficult to disarm Palestinian groups in Gaza. But the draft suggests that the armed Palestinian resistance will only disappear once the Palestinians secure statehood and rights, saying the issue can be resolved “if its causes are removed through a clear horizon and a credible political process that ensures the legitimate rights of Palestinians.”
The Egyptian proposal is most detailed when it comes to Gaza’s reconstruction. Palestinians in Gaza would stay in temporary housing units made of shipping containers on seven sites throughout the territory, with an average of six people living in each. In the first phase, which would last six months and cost $3 billion, rubble and unexploded ordnance would be cleared, 1.2 million people would be moved into prefabricated temporary housing units and 60,000 partially destroyed housing units would start to be rehabilitated.
In the next phase, which Egypt estimates would cost $20 billion and last until 2027, utilities and permanent housing would be rebuilt, and rubble would be used to expand Gaza’s surface area into the sea. Industrial zones, a fishing port, a seaport and an airport would be built during a final phase costing $30 billion and lasting until 2030, according to the draft.
Under this framework, oil-rich Gulf nations would likely pay for Gaza’s reconstruction, though Egyptian officials have also suggested Europe could also contribute funds. The draft says that Egypt will convene a donor conference to drum up funding and investments “as soon as possible.”
Egypt’s foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, said in a news conference on Saturday with the Palestinian prime minister and foreign minister that Egypt had volunteered to train Palestinian police forces to be deployed in Gaza while the territory is rebuilt.
Jordan is also training Palestinian police personnel, according to the Egyptian draft proposal, which said other countries could possibly join that effort.
Natan Odenheimer and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Rania Khaled from Cairo.
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8) America Is Pushing Its Workers Into Homelessness
By Brian Goldstone, March 1, 2025
Mr. Goldstone is the author of “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” forthcoming.
At 10 p.m., a hospital technician pulls into a Walmart parking lot. Her four kids — one still nursing — are packed into the back of her Toyota. She tells them it’s an adventure, but she’s terrified someone will call the police: “Inadequate housing” is enough to lose your children. She stays awake for hours, lavender scrubs folded in the trunk, listening for footsteps, any sign of trouble. Her shift starts soon. She’ll walk into the hospital exhausted, pretending everything is fine.
Across the country, men and women sleep in their vehicles night after night and then head to work the next morning. Others scrape together enough for a week in a motel, knowing one missed paycheck could leave them on the street.
These people are not on the fringes of society. They are the workers America depends on. The very phrase “working homeless” should be a contradiction, an impossibility in a nation that claims hard work leads to stability. And yet, their homelessness is not only pervasive but also persistently overlooked — excluded from official counts, ignored by policymakers, treated as an anomaly rather than a disaster unfolding in plain sight.
Today, the threat of homelessness is most acute not in the poorest regions of the country, but in the richest, fastest-growing ones. In places like these, a low-wage job is homelessness waiting to happen.
For an increasing share of the nation’s work force, a mix of soaring rents, low wages and inadequate tenant protections have forced them into a brutal cycle of insecurity in which housing is unaffordable, unstable or entirely out of reach. A recent study analyzing the 2010 census found that nearly half of people experiencing homelessness while staying in shelters, and about 40 percent of those living outdoors or in other makeshift conditions, had formal employment. But that’s only part of the picture. These numbers don’t capture the full scale of working homelessness in America: the many who lack a home but never enter a shelter or who wind up on the streets.
I’ve spent the past six years reporting on men and women who work in grocery stores, nursing homes, day care centers and restaurants. They prepare food, stock shelves, deliver packages and care for the sick and elderly. And at the end of the day, they return not to homes but to parking lots, shelters, the crowded apartments of friends or relatives and squalid extended-stay hotel rooms.
America has been experiencing what economists described as a historically tight labor market, with a national unemployment rate of just 4 percent. And all the while, homelessness has soared to the highest level on record.
What good is low unemployment when workers are a paycheck away from homelessness?
A few statistics succinctly capture why this catastrophe is unfolding: Today there isn’t a single state, city or county in the United States where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a median-priced two-bedroom apartment. An astounding 12.1 million low-income renter households are “severely cost burdened,” spending at least half of their earnings on rent and utilities. Since 1985, rent prices have exceeded income gains by 325 percent.
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the average “housing wage” required to afford a modest two-bedroom rental home across the country is $32.11, while nearly 52 million American workers earn less than $15 an hour. And if you’re disabled and receive S.S.I., it’s even worse: Those payments are currently capped at $967 a month nationwide, and there is hardly anywhere in the country where this form of fixed income is enough to afford the average rent.
But it’s not just that wages are too low; it’s that work has become more precarious than ever. Even for those earning above the minimum wage, job security has eroded in ways that make stable housing increasingly out of reach.
More and more workers now face volatile schedules, unreliable hours and a lack of benefits such as sick leave. The rise of “just in time” scheduling means employees don’t know how many hours they’ll get week to week, making it impossible to budget for rent. Entire industries have been gigified, leaving ride-share drivers, warehouse workers and temp nurses working without benefits, protections or reliable pay. Even full-time jobs in retail and health care — once seen as dependable — are increasingly contracted out, turned into part-time roles or made contingent on meeting ever-shifting quotas.
For millions of Americans, the greatest threat isn’t that they’ll lose their jobs. It’s that the job will never pay enough, never provide enough hours, never offer enough stability to keep them housed.
It’s not just in New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s also in tech hubs like Austin and Seattle, cultural and financial centers like Atlanta and Washington, D.C., and rapidly expanding cities like Nashville, Phoenix and Denver, places awash in investment, luxury development and corporate growth. But this wealth isn’t trickling down. It’s pooled at the top, while affordable units are demolished, new ones are blocked, tenants are evicted — about every minute, seven evictions are filed all around the United States, according to Princeton’s Eviction Lab — and housing is treated as a commodity to be hoarded and exploited for maximum profit.
This results in a devastating pattern: As cities gentrify and become “revitalized,” the nurses, teachers, janitors and child care providers who keep them running are being systematically priced out. Unlike in earlier periods of widespread immiseration, such as the recession of 2008, what we’re witnessing today is a crisis born less of poverty than of prosperity. These workers aren’t “falling” into homelessness. They’re being pushed. They’re the casualties not of a failing economy but of one that’s thriving — just not for them.
And yet, even as this calamity deepens, many families remain invisible, existing in a kind of shadow realm: deprived of a home, but neither counted nor recognized by the federal government as “homeless.”
This exclusion was by design. In the 1980s, as mass homelessness surged across the United States, the Reagan administration made a concerted effort to shape public perception of the crisis. Officials downplayed its severity while muddying its root causes. Federal funding for research on homelessness was steered almost exclusively toward studies that emphasized mental illness and addiction, diverting attention from structural forces — gutted funding for low-income housing, a shredded safety net. Framing homelessness as a result of personal failings didn’t just make it easier to dismiss; it was also less politically threatening. It obscured the socioeconomic roots of the crisis and shifted blame onto its victims. And it worked: By the late 1980s, at least one survey showed that many Americans attributed homelessness to drugs or unwillingness to work. Nobody mentioned housing.
Over the decades, this narrow, distorted view persisted, embedding itself in the federal government’s annual homeless census. Before something can be counted, it must be defined — and one way the United States has “reduced” homelessness is by defining entire groups of the homeless population out of existence. Advocates have long decried the census’ deliberately circumscribed definition: only those in shelters or visible on the streets are tallied. As a result, a relatively small but conspicuous fraction of the total homeless population has come to stand, in the public imagination, for homelessness itself. Everyone else has been written out of the story. They literally don’t count.
The gap between what we see and what’s really happening is vast. Recent research suggests that the true number of people experiencing homelessness — factoring in those living in cars or motel rooms, or doubled up with others — is at least six times as high as official counts. As bad as the reported numbers are, the reality is far worse. The tents are just the tip of the iceberg, the most glaring sign of a far more entrenched crisis.
This willful blindness has caused incalculable harm, locking millions of families and individuals out of vital assistance. But it’s done more than that. How we count and define homelessness dictates how we respond to it. A distorted view of the problem has led to responses that are inadequate at best and cruelly counterproductive at worst.
But the truth is that all of this — the nights spent sleeping in cars, the constant uprooting from motels to friends’ couches, the incessant hustle to stay one step ahead of homelessness — is neither inevitable nor intractable. Ours doesn’t have to be a society where people clocking 50 or 60 hours a week aren’t paid enough to meet their most basic needs. It doesn’t have to be a place where parents sell their plasma or live without electricity just to keep a roof over their children’s heads.
For decades, lawmakers have stood by while rents soared, while housing was turned into an asset class for the wealthy, while worker protections were shredded and wages failed to keep up. We’ve settled for piecemeal, better-than-nothing initiatives that tweak the existing system rather than transform it. But the disaster we face demands more than half measures.
It’s not enough to pull people out of homelessness — we must stop them from being pushed into it in the first place. In some cities, for every one person who secures housing, another estimated four become homeless. How do we halt this relentless churn? There are immediate steps: stronger tenant protections like rent control and just-cause eviction laws, the elimination of exclusionary zoning, and higher wages with robust labor protections. But we also need transformative, comprehensive solutions, like large-scale investments in social housing, that treat affordable, reliable shelter as an essential public good, not a privilege for the few.
Any meaningful solution will require a fundamental shift in how we think about housing in America. A safe, affordable home shouldn’t be a luxury. It should be a guaranteed right for everybody. Embracing this idea will demand an expansion of our moral imagination. Acting on it will require unwavering political resolve.
We should be asking ourselves not just how much worse this can become but also why we’ve tolerated it for so long.
Because when work no longer provides stability, when wages are too low and rents are too high, when millions of people are one medical bill, one missed paycheck, one rent hike away from losing their homes — who, exactly, is safe?
Who gets to feel secure in this country? And who are the casualties of our prosperity?
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