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How Trump Got Rich
It had nothing to do with brains!
President Trump’s executive order sent a signal to Republicans that the administration was serious about winding down the Education Department. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesSome 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) Palm Sunday Was a Protest, Not a Procession
By Andrew Thayer, Mr. Thayer is an Episcopal priest, April 13, 2025
“We, too, live in the shadow of empire. Ours doesn’t speak Latin or wear togas, but its logic is familiar. Our economy prioritizes the 1 percent and puts corporate profits over worker dignity. Our laws enforce inequality in the criminal justice system, education and health care. Our military-industrial complex would be the envy of Rome. We extract, exploit, incarcerate, and we call it ‘law and order.’”
Ricardo Tomás
On Sunday, in cities around the world, Christians begin Holy Week by celebrating Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem for the final time before his death and resurrection. To mark the day, Christians recreate Jesus’ procession, often starting outside churches and winding down sidewalks and city streets waving palm branches.
Celebrations like this often miss an uncomfortable truth about Jesus’ procession: At the time, it was a deliberate act of theological and political confrontation. It wasn’t just pageantry; it was protest.
On that first Palm Sunday, there was another procession entering Jerusalem. From the west came Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, riding a warhorse and flanked by armed soldiers bedecked in the full pageantry of an oppressive empire. Every year during Passover, a Jewish festival celebrating liberation from Egyptian oppression and slavery, Pilate entered Jerusalem to suppress any unrest set off by that memory.
His arrival wasn’t ceremonial; it was tactical — a calculated show of force, what the Pentagon might now call “shock and awe.” It displayed not only Rome’s power but also Rome’s theology. Caesar was not just the emperor; he was deified and called “Son of a God” on coins and inscriptions. His rule was absolute, and the peace it promised came through coercion, domination and the threat of violence.
From the opposite direction, both literally and figuratively, came Jesus’ procession.
Jesus entered the city not on a warhorse but on a donkey, not with battalions but with beggars. His followers were peasants, fishermen, women and children — people without standing or status. They waved palm branches — symbols of Jewish resistance to occupation since the Maccabean revolt — and cried out “Hosanna!” which means “Save us.” Save us from a system of oppression disguised as order. Save us from those who tacitly endorse greed with pious language and prayers.
Jesus’ procession should be seen as a parody of imperial power: a deliberate mockery of Roman spectacle and a prophetic enactment of a kingdom not built on violence but on justice.
The next day, Jesus walked into the Temple, the heart of Jerusalem’s religious and economic life, and flipped the tables in the marketplace, which he described as “a den of robbers.” The Temple wasn’t just a house of prayer. It was a financial engine, operated by complicit leaders under the constraints and demands of the occupying empire. Jesus shuts it down. This is what gets him killed.
Jesus wasn’t killed for preaching love, or healing the sick, or discussing theology routinely debated in the Temple’s courtyards, or blasphemy (the punishment for which was stoning). Rome didn’t crucify philosophers or miracle workers. Rome crucified insurrectionists. The sign nailed above his head — “King of the Jews” — was a political indictment and public warning. Like with the killing of the prophets before him, the message sent with Jesus’s death was that those who demand justice will inevitably find themselves crushed.
Sound familiar?
We, too, live in the shadow of empire. Ours doesn’t speak Latin or wear togas, but its logic is familiar. Our economy prioritizes the 1 percent and puts corporate profits over worker dignity. Our laws enforce inequality in the criminal justice system, education and health care. Our military-industrial complex would be the envy of Rome. We extract, exploit, incarcerate, and we call it “law and order.”
And just like in Jesus’ day, political leaders defend this arrangement while religious leaders bless it. As the French writer Frédéric Bastiat warned, “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” That was true in first-century Jerusalem. It remains true today.
Since the 1980s, movements like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, and more recently, the New Apostolic Reformation, have not challenged the empire but rather sought to commandeer it. The Seven Mountain Mandate urges Christians to seize control of key sectors of society, including government, business, education and media. This is not a movement seeking to interrogate or challenge the injustice of empire. Quite the opposite. It is an ideology — a hunger for power and dominion — cloaked in pious language and baptized in the logic of empire. This is Christian nationalism in a nutshell.
Remember, Rome did not begin as an empire; it began as a republic. But over time, it ceded power to the few, tolerating cruelty, corruption and the consolidation of control, so long as it came wrapped in the promise of peace and prosperity. The emperor became both ruler and redeemer, venerated not for moral clarity but for the illusion of restored national greatness.
The false promise offered to both Romans and the people they conquered was that Caesar was divine — a chosen one, a lord. Today, Donald Trump is often cast in eerily similar terms by Christian nationalists: not as a moral leader, but as a figure who will deliver prosperity, protection, and cultural dominance, at least for a select few. To defy him, in this worldview, is not just to reject a man, but to reject a kind of sacred order. That impulse is not new. It is as old as Pilate’s procession.
But Jesus never sought to replace Caesar with a Christian Caesar. He came to dismantle the very logic of Caesar: the belief that might makes right, peace comes through violence and politics is best wielded through fear, coercion and control. Instead, he inaugurated a counter-kingdom that aspires to loving kindness, radical welcome, mercy and justice — a kingdom where the vulnerable and the poor are lifted up, and the idols of empire are exposed as frauds.
Waving palms on Palm Sunday connects us to justice, public life, discourse and action. We cannot remain silent on behalf of those who genuinely cry out “Hosanna … Save us.” At some point, we have to make a choice about the Jesus we claim to follow. Either he didn’t care about the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed — in which case we’ve built our religion on a hollow figure. Or he did care, deeply, and we’ve chosen to ignore that part because it challenges our comfort, our politics and our priorities.
Scripture’s power isn’t in magic or miracle, but in its witness, of people who loved boldly, acted justly, spoke truth to power, resisted empire and hoped defiantly in the face of despair. It is deeply relevant to modern life. The Resurrection, which Christians celebrate one week from Sunday, is not the reversal of Christ’s crucifixion. It is its vindication. It declares that even when the empire kills truth, truth still rises. That even when justice is crucified, it does not stay buried. The Caesars among us don’t get the final word.
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2) Israel Strikes Hospital in Gaza’s North and Captures Key Part of South
No one was killed but the attack hit the Ahli Arab Hospital, a mainstay of Gaza’s decimated health care system. Separately, Israel said its troops had expanded their occupation of southern Gaza.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 13, 2025
The Israeli military struck and destroyed part of a hospital in northern Gaza early on Sunday morning, shortly after telling patients and staff to evacuate the site. The attack came hours after the Israeli government announced that its troops fighting elsewhere in the territory had expanded their occupation of the southern Gaza Strip, severing links between two strategically located Palestinian cities.
No one was killed in the attack on the Ahli Arab Hospital, but a child being treated for a head injury died because of the rushed evacuation, according to a statement released by the Anglican Church in Jerusalem, which oversees the medical center. The strike destroyed a laboratory and damaged a pharmacy, the emergency department and a church at the hospital compound in Zeitoun, the statement added.
The hospital had become one of the last mainstays of the health care system in Gaza, where medical centers have been frequently damaged and besieged during the war that began with the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on Israel. The World Health Organization reported last month that 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals had been damaged during the war, and only 21 remained partly functional. The W.H.O. also warned on Saturday that hospitals in Gaza face a looming medicine shortage because Israel has blocked aid deliveries for six weeks.
The Ahli Arab hospital compound was first hit less than two weeks into the war, when a missile hit a parking lot on the site where dozens of displaced families were sheltering. Hamas blamed the strike on Israel, before Israel said it was caused by an errant rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group allied with Hamas. U.S. intelligence officials later said they had “high confidence” in the Israeli account.
The Israeli military acknowledged responsibility on Sunday for the latest strike on the hospital, saying without offering evidence that the site had housed a Hamas command center. Both the military and the Anglican Church said that Israeli soldiers had called the hospital to order its evacuation before the strike. Neither the hospital authorities nor Hamas responded to questions about whether the hospital had been used by Hamas fighters.
In a separate development, the Israeli defense minister announced on Saturday the capture of a strategic east-west thoroughfare in southern Gaza. That severs links between Rafah and Khan Younis, the two major cities in southern Gaza — and expands Israel’s occupation in that part of the enclave.
Israel calls thoroughfare the “Morag Corridor,” after a Jewish settlement in the area that was disbanded when Israeli troops evacuated Gaza in 2005.
The defense minister, Israel Katz, said that Israel had placed the entire region between the corridor and the Gaza-Egypt border — an area of some 25 square miles — within “Israel’s security zone.” The military said it had encircled the city of Rafah but had yet to establish operational control of every neighborhood.
Before breaking the cease-fire with Hamas in March, Israeli troops controlled only a sliver of land in southern Gaza along the territory’s borders with Egypt and Israel. But they began to expand their control in early April in what Israeli leaders said was a bid to pressure Hamas into releasing roughly 60 hostages — some believed to be dead — still held in the enclave.
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting from Doha, Qatar.
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3) Medic Missing After Gaza Attack Is in Israeli Custody, Aid Groups Say
Asaad al-Nasasra has not been heard from since the March 23 ambush by Israeli forces, which left 15 aid workers dead and drew international condemnation.
By Vivian Yee, Reporting from Cairo, April 13, 2025
A still image from a cellphone video taken by a paramedic and released by the Palestinian Red Crescent showed the moments before he and other rescue workers were killed by Israelis in Gaza on March 23. Credit...Palestinian Red Crescent Society, via Associated Press
A Gaza paramedic for the Palestine Red Crescent Society who has been missing since Israeli forces ambushed a group of ambulances and other aid vehicles in late March is in Israeli custody, the Red Crescent and the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Sunday.
Israeli forces killed 15 other rescue and aid workers in the same attack, buried their bodies in a mass grave and crushed their ambulances, their fire truck and a United Nations vehicle — actions that have drawn international condemnation and scrutiny.
Witnesses have said that Asaad al-Nasasra, 47, the paramedic who disappeared after the March 23 attack, survived but was detained and taken away by Israeli soldiers. But there had been no official word of his whereabouts until Sunday, when the Red Crescent said the I.C.R.C. had notified it that he was being held by Israel.
The Red Cross said in a statement that it had received information that Mr. al-Nasasra was being held “in an Israeli place of detention.”
Asked for comment, the Israeli military replied with a statement that it had released last week saying that it was still investigating the attack. It has said it will not comment further until the investigation is complete.
The Israeli military has offered changing explanations for why its troops fired on the emergency vehicles, first saying that they had been “advancing suspiciously” without their lights on until a video of the attack contradicted that account. It initially said nine of those killed had been operatives from Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group, before saying, without providing evidence, that six operatives were killed in the attack.
Nebal Farsakh, a Red Crescent spokeswoman, said the organization had been given no other information about Mr. al-Nasasra’s condition or why he remained in detention.
Mr. al-Nasasra, who has worked for the Red Crescent for almost 16 years, is married with six children, she said. He is from Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, but was living in a tent with his family after being displaced during the war, she said.
Mr. al-Nasasra was part of a convoy of emergency crews sent by the Red Crescent and Gaza’s Civil Defense, another rescue service, to search for a Red Crescent ambulance that had disappeared earlier in the morning of March 23. Israeli forces had opened fire on that first ambulance, killing two members of its crew and detaining the third, Munther Abed, according to both the Israeli military and Mr. Abed, who was later released.
When the rescue convoy arrived on the scene and paramedics got out to look at the first ambulance, Israeli soldiers began shooting again in a barrage that lasted about five minutes, according to the video of the attack, which was discovered on the cellphone of one of the paramedics who was killed, published by The New York Times and later released by the Red Crescent.
Soldiers found Mr. al-Nasasra alive after firing on the convoy and detained him alongside Mr. Abed, the survivor from the first ambulance, Mr. Abed told The Times in an interview. Two other witnesses who were held with the paramedics — Saeed al-Bardawil, a doctor, and his 12-year-old son, Mohammed, who had been detained as they headed to the beach to fish — confirmed Mr. Abed’s account.
Mr. al-Nasasra was stripped, handcuffed and blindfolded, Mr. Abed and Dr. al-Bardawil recalled.
The two paramedics spoke in whispers about the fate of their colleagues, Mr. Abed said. The Israeli soldiers detaining them later questioned the paramedics, asking them for their names, ages and ID card numbers, and appeared to scan their faces with a device Mr. Abed did not recognize, Mr. Abed said.
At some point, Mr. Abed and Dr. al-Bardawil recalled, Mr. al-Nasasra was taken elsewhere and they had no more contact with him.
In all, Israeli troops killed eight Red Crescent paramedics, six other emergency responders from the Civil Defense, and a United Nations worker who happened to drive by later that morning, according to the Red Crescent and the Civil Defense. Their bodies were not found for days.
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4) DOGE Goons Physically Drag Social Security Worker From Desk
By Liam Archacki, News Reporter, Updated Apr. 13, 2025
Photo Illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
A senior executive at the Social Security Administration was physically dragged from his office this week after clashing with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), according to The Washington Post.
Greg Pearre, a career civil servant who led an IT team working on the agency’s data systems, was removed over his opposition to a DOGE plan to cut off immigrants from key financial services, three people told the Post.
The scheme cooked up by Elon Musk’s DOGE squad falsely lists thousands of migrants as dead in a Social Security database known as the “death master file.”
Being entered into the death database cuts a person off from crucial financial services, like the ability to receive government benefits and access a bank account or credit card. The goal was to push migrants who were granted a temporary legal status under former President Joe Biden to “self deport.”
Jim Francis, a consumer law lawyer who is suing Social Security for wrongly entering a Maryland woman into the file, cast the repercussions in dire terms.
“It’s the source of that data that the whole world uses, which is why, if it’s inaccurate, it has such devastating impacts on people,” he told the Post. “Overnight, you literally become financially paralyzed.”
Tom Kind, a 90-year-old retiree in Colorado, told the Post that he had experienced being listed as dead, calling it a “nightmare.” In addition to losing benefits and health coverage, he faced a challenge convincing the agency that he was still alive. After jumping through a number of bureaucratic hoops, he had to show up to an office in person for an interview, proving he was alive.
“That’s not any fun,” he said.
DOGE had been working on a strategy to push out immigrants since February. A group of about a dozen civil servants from Social Security were assigned to help Musk’s goons—and agents from the Department of Homeland Security—with the plot. Many career staff were worried that the project was wrong or illegal, a former senior official told the Post.
Leland Dudek, Social Security’s acting commissioner, who has signaled his willingness to carry out DOGE’s plans previously, worried that this scheme might be illegal, insiders told the Post.
Nevertheless, under pressure from President Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, he acquiesced, signing two memorandums on Monday that allowed the database change. More than 6,000 migrants were listed as dead despite being alive.
Pearre, the civil servant who had pushed back against the action, was removed two days later. He declined to comment to the Post, as did Dudek.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the paper that the death file move was justified and downplayed the internal opposition.
“The Trump Administration is protecting lawful American citizens and their hard-earned Social Security benefits, and ensuring illegal immigrants will no longer receive such economic entitlements,” she said. “Anyone who disagrees with the common sense policies of this Administration can find a new job.”
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5) Trump will meet the leader of El Salvador, where deported migrants face prison.
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Reporting from Washington, April 14, 2025
President Trump will meet with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador at the White House on Monday as the administration ramps up its use of a notorious Salvadoran prison for holding migrants deported by the United States.
In Mr. Bukele, who has referred to himself as the world’s “coolest dictator,” Mr. Trump has found a willing partner in a plan for deportations with little or no due process. The removal of the migrants to the prison, known as CECOT, has become a flashpoint in the administration’s attempt to skirt normal immigration practice and the role of the courts in reviewing Mr. Trump’s executive power.
Just a day before the meeting between the two leaders, the Trump administration once again tried to resist a federal judge’s order to bring back a Maryland man who was unlawfully deported to the prison. In a legal filing on Sunday, the Justice Department argued that the courts lacked the ability to dictate steps the White House should take to return the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, because only the president had the power to handle U.S. foreign policy.
The Trump administration has fought against returning Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, despite admitting in court that his removal was an “administrative error.” In 2019, an immigration judge had barred the United States from deporting the man by finding that he might face violence or torture if sent to El Salvador. That did not stop the United States from deporting him and scores of other migrants to El Salvador last month.
The Trump administration has justified its use of a wartime authority to deport the migrants to El Salvador by alleging that they are members of violent gangs like MS-13, which originated in the United States and operates in South America, and the Venezuelan criminal group Tren de Aragua.
While some of the deportees had criminal convictions, court papers have shown that the evidence the government has relied on to label some of them as gang members was often little more than whether they had tattoos or had worn clothing associated with a criminal organization.
The Trump administration doubled down on its incarceration agreement with Mr. Bukele on Sunday when it announced that it had sent 10 more people alleged to be members of the two gangs to El Salvador over the weekend.
In announcing those deportations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the alliance between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele had “become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.”
Mr. Bukele has also found an opening on the global stage in opening the doors of his prison system to Mr. Trump.
While the Biden administration accused Mr. Bukele and the Salvadoran government of secretly negotiating a pact with certain gang leaders, the Trump administration has fully embraced his tough-on-crime persona.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele have paired their aggressive enforcement tactics with a highly sensationalized public relations campaign on social media. Both leaders have faced accusations of undermining democratic institutions.
After a surge of gang violence in El Salvador, Mr. Bukele imposed a state of emergency that has yet to be lifted, in addition to directing police and the military forces to carry out mass arrests. Many of the 85,000 Salvadorans who were arrested disappeared into the prison system without trial and without their families knowing whether they were alive.
“Human rights, democratic norms and the rule of law have all but disappeared in El Salvador,” said Amanda Strayer, senior counsel for accountability at the advocacy group Human Rights First. “The United States should be holding Bukele’s government accountable for these serious violations, but instead the Trump administration is cozying up to and copying Bukele’s authoritarian playbook — rounding up people with no evidence, denying them any due process and disappearing them in abusive Salvadoran prisons indefinitely.”
Still, Mr. Bukele’s popularity has soared, and he was re-elected in a landslide last year. The Trump administration just last week changed a travel advisory for El Salvador, grouping it with some of the least dangerous countries for Americans to visit.
Mr. Bukele described the decision on social media as akin to receiving a “gold star.”
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6) Lawyers for Venezuelan immigrants mount a challenge in Colorado over the Alien Enemies Act.
By Alan Feuer, Feuer covers legal action surrounding President Trump’s deportation plans, April 14, 2025
The American Civil Liberties Union filed another lawsuit on Monday seeking to stop the Trump administration from using a powerful wartime statute to deport to El Salvador immigrants from Venezuela who have been accused of being violent gang members.
The lawsuit, brought in Federal District Court in Colorado, was the third of its kind filed in recent days, joining similar legal challenges that were filed last week in Texas and New York.
Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. brought the suit on behalf of two men — known in court papers only by the their initials, D.B.U. and R.M.M. The men claim they have been wrongly accused by the administration of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.
Court papers say that D.B.U., 32, was arrested on Jan. 26 at a gathering that federal drug and immigration agents have repeatedly described as a Tren de Aragua party. After his arrest, the papers say, he denied being a member of the gang and has not been charged with any crime.
Federal agents arrested R.M.M., 25, last month after they saw him standing with three other Hispanic men near their vehicles outside a residence in Colorado that was under surveillance as part of an investigation into Tren de Aragua, court papers said.
R.M.M. has claimed that he had nothing to do with the gang and had gone to the location with friends “to meet a prospective buyer for his vehicle at a public meeting,” the papers said.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport scores of Venezuelan immigrants have set off one of the most contentious legal battles of his second term. It began last month, after the president invoked the act, which has been used only three times since it was passed in 1798, to authorize the deportation of people he claimed were members of Tren de Aragua.
The A.C.L.U. immediately began fighting Mr. Trump’s use of the act, which the administration has already employed to deport more than 100 Venezuelan immigrants to the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador, known for its human rights violations.
The initial challenge by the A.C.L.U. was brought in Washington, where a federal judge, James E. Boasberg, issued an order to temporarily stop the deportation flights to El Salvador. Judge Boasberg expressed concern that the immigrants who fell subject to Mr. Trump’s proclamation had no way to contest whether they were gang members in the first place.
A federal appeals court in Washington subsequently agreed with him, finding that, at this early stage, it appeared unlikely that the Alien Enemies Act could be applied as Mr. Trump was trying to use it.
Then last week, the Supreme Court weighed in, ruling that immigrants subject to deportation under the act needed to be given notice before being removed from the country so that they could challenge the process in court. But those challenges, the justices said, were required to be made in the places where the immigrants were being held.
That prompted the A.C.L.U. to scramble to locate any Venezuelans who might be subject to Mr. Trump’s proclamation. They have so far located immigrants in Texas, New York and Colorado and the lawsuits filed on their behalf were temporary measures meant to keep them in the country until the underlying legal questions involving the administrations use of the Alien Enemies Act were resolved.
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7) Harvard’s Decision to Resist Trump Is ‘of Momentous Significance’
But a fight with the nation’s oldest, richest and most elite university is a battle that President Trump and his powerful aide, Stephen Miller, want to have.
By Elisabeth Bumiller, Reporting from Washington, Published April 14, 2025, Updated April 15, 2025
"In the administration’s effort to break what it sees as liberalism’s hold on higher education, Harvard is big game. A high-profile court battle would give the White House a platform to continue arguing that the left has become synonymous with antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/harvard-trump.html
Harvard University is 140 years older than the United States, has an endowment greater than the G.D.P. of nearly 100 countries and has educated eight American presidents. So if an institution was going to stand up to the Trump administration’s war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list.
Harvard did that forcefully on Monday in a way that injected energy into other universities across the country fearful of the president’s wrath, rejecting the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum. Some commentators went so far as to say that Harvard’s decision would empower law firms, the courts, the media and other targets of the White House to push back as well.
“This is of momentous, momentous significance,” said J. Michael Luttig, a prominent former federal appeals court judge revered by many conservatives. “This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”
Michael S. Roth, who is the president of Wesleyan University and a rare critic of the White House among university administrators, welcomed Harvard’s decision. “What happens when institutions overreach is that they change course when they meet resistance,” he said. “It’s like when a bully is stopped in his tracks.”
Within hours of Harvard’s decision, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract.
That is a fraction of the $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Massachusetts General, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The remaining $2 billion goes to research grants directly for Harvard, including for space exploration, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis.
It was not immediately clear what programs the funding freeze would affect.
Harvard, the nation’s richest as well as oldest university, is the most prominent object of the administration’s campaign to purge “woke” ideology from America’s college campuses. The administration’s demands include sharing its hiring data with the government and bringing in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is “viewpoint diverse.”
Columbia University, which faced a loss of $400 million in federal funding, last month agreed to major concessions the government demanded, including that it install new oversight of its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department.
In a letter on Monday, Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, refused to stand down. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” he wrote.
The administration’s fight with Harvard, which had an endowment of $53.2 billion in 2024, is one that President Trump and Stephen Miller, a powerful White House aide, want to have. In the administration’s effort to break what it sees as liberalism’s hold on higher education, Harvard is big game. A high-profile court battle would give the White House a platform to continue arguing that the left has become synonymous with antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech.
Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist who is also a president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, said on Monday that it was “truly Orwellian” and self-contradictory to have the government force viewpoint diversity on the university. He said it would also lead to absurdities.
“Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” he said.
Harvard has not escaped the problems that roiled campuses nationwide after the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. In his letter, Dr. Garber said the university had taken steps to address antisemitism, support diverse viewpoints and protect free speech and dissent.
Those same points were made in a letter to the administration from two lawyers representing Harvard, William A. Burck and Robert K. Hur.
Mr. Burck is also an outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization and represented the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in the deal it recently reached with the Trump administration.
Mr. Hur, who worked in the Justice Department in Mr. Trump’s first term, was the special counsel who investigated President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s handling of classified documents and termed him “an elderly man with a poor memory,” enraging Mr. Biden.
Both lawyers understand the legal workings of the current administration, an expertise of benefit to Harvard.
“Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community,” Mr. Burck and Mr. Hur wrote in the letter, addressed to the acting general counsels of the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services and to a commissioner within the General Services Administration. “But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
Representative Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican who held hearings last year investigating antisemitism on college campuses, including at Harvard, was withering in a social media post.
“Harvard University has rightfully earned its place as the epitome of the moral and academic rot in higher education,” Ms. Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, wrote. She added that “it is time to totally cut off U.S. taxpayer funding to this institution that has failed to live up to its founding motto Veritas. Defund Harvard.”
It is unclear what other measure the Trump administration could take against Harvard for its resistance, although potential actions could include an investigation of its nonprofit status and further cancellations of the visas of international students.
The president of the American Council of Education, Ted Mitchell, said that Harvard’s action was essential.
“If Harvard had not taken this stand,” he said, “it would have been nearly impossible for other institutions to do so.”
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8) Columbia Activist Arrested by ICE at His Appointment for Citizenship
Mohsen Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, has lived in the United States for 10 years and was arrested in Vermont. He has not been charged with a crime.
By Sharon Otterman and Ana Ley, April 14, 2025
A demonstration organized by Jewish Voice for Peace outside the Manhattan offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement called for the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student who is facing deportation. Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times
Mohsen Mahdawi, an organizer of pro-Palestinian demonstrations last year at Columbia University, was detained by immigration officials on Monday after arriving for an appointment in Vermont that he thought was a step toward becoming a U.S. citizen, his lawyers said.
Hours later, Mr. Mahdawi’s mother, older sister and lawyers were scrambling to find him after his abrupt detention at an immigration center in Colchester, Vt. His lawyers requested a temporary restraining order to prevent federal officials from transferring him to a more conservative jurisdiction — a tactic used in the detention and attempted deportation of at least four other college demonstrators.
A Vermont federal judge, William K. Sessions III, swiftly granted that request, ordering that Mr. Mahdawi, an outspoken critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, not be removed from the United States or transferred out of Vermont until he orders otherwise. His lawyers said that as of Monday afternoon, they had confirmed that he was still in Vermont.
“This is their M.O.,” Mr. Mahdawi’s lawyer, Luna Droubi, said. “They just continue to hide the individual to the point where their attorneys can’t quite understand or identify where to file. And so, you know, we’re operating blind, and they have all the information, and yet we’re tasked with attempting to file in the right jurisdiction.”
A green card holder for the past 10 years, Mr. Mahdawi is the latest Palestinian student to be caught in the Trump administration dragnet that has been targeting foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian organizing on U.S. college campuses.
Mr. Mahdawi was born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank, where he lived until he moved to the United States in 2014, according to a petition filed by his lawyers on Monday demanding his immediate release. His arrest was first reported by The Intercept.
He is finishing his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Columbia’s School of General Studies and was planning to enroll as a master’s degree student at its international affairs school in the fall.
Representatives for Columbia declined to comment, citing federal student privacy regulations.
Mr. Mahdawi has not been accused of a crime. According to his lawyers, the Trump administration appears to be seeking his removal from the country under the same legal provision that it is using to detain another recent Columbia student and Palestinian, Mahmoud Khalil, contending that his presence is a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States. Immigration officials have argued that pro-Palestinian demonstrators have enabled the spread of antisemitism, but they have not offered evidence to substantiate the claim.
After the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Mr. Mahdawi, who is in his mid-30s, co-founded Dar: the Palestinian Student Society at Columbia University, with Mr. Khalil, to “celebrate Palestinian culture, history and identity,” according to his lawyers’ petition. He also helped found Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a broader coalition that went on to lead many pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus, pushing the university to divest from Israel.
But Mr. Mahdawi took a step back from student organizing in March 2024, before the establishment of encampments on campus and the takeover of a campus building, Hamilton Hall. In interviews at the time, he said this was driven in part by his immigration status and his beliefs as a practicing Buddhist. For two years, he was the president of the Columbia University Buddhist Association.
He spoke publicly about his experience as a child seeing his best friend killed by an Israeli soldier, mentioning it during a “60 Minutes” interview in December 2023. But he also said he wanted a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“My motivation comes out of love now, not out of anger, not out of hate,” he said in an interview.
As with Mr. Khalil, several hard-line pro-Israel groups have been agitating online for Mr. Mahdawi’s detention and deportation since President Trump’s return to the White House.
Betar USA, one of those groups, posted on X on Jan. 30 that “visa holder Mohsen Mahdawi is on our deport list.” In March, they repeated that, posting “Mohsen Mahdawi is next and also on the deport list.”
He was also profiled by Canary Mission, another group naming students and calling for action to be taken against those they assert are pro-Hamas.
On Monday morning, Mr. Mahdawi turned up for an interview he had been told was related to his naturalization. Instead, immigration officers, some with their faces covered, placed Mr. Mahdawi in handcuffs and arrested him, according to a statement Monday from Vermont’s two senators, Bernie Sanders, an Independent, and Peter Welch, a Democrat, and Representative Becca Balint, a Democrat.
Mr. Mahdawi, whose permanent address is in White River Junction, Vt., had sought help from the lawmakers before his appointment, fearing the worst.
They denounced his arrest and demanded his release.
“This is immoral, inhumane, and illegal,” the three lawmakers said in a statement. “Mr. Mahdawi, a legal resident of the United States, must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention.”
Mr. Mahdawi’s friend Mikey Baratz described him as deeply empathetic and said that, at his core, Mr. Mahdawi believed that all humans deserved to be treated with dignity. Mr. Mahdawi reached out to Mr. Baratz about six months ago because he wanted to meet Israeli students at Columbia — Mr. Baratz is Jewish and was born and raised in Israel until he left at the age of 12.
They would spend hours talking about their lives and found surprising common ground. Mr. Baratz, who graduated from Columbia in December with a master’s degree in international security policy, recently applied for a job at The New York Times.
“This is a Palestinian. I’m an Israeli. Our people are at war,” Mr. Baratz, 31, said. “And his willingness to actually hear and actively learn and understand the Israeli experience — I mean, I’ve never met anyone who so quickly was willing to take feedback.”
Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.
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9) Harvard’s Strength and How Far We’ve Fallen So Quickly
By M. Gessen, Opinion Columnist, April 14, 2025
Harvard’s response was a significant shift in tone for the nation’s most influential university. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
The world’s most famous university has done the right thing, and this is major news. It shouldn’t be. But less than three months into the second Trump administration, we are surprised by simple dignity. Capitulation would have garnered smaller headlines.
On Friday, the Trump administration sent a five-page letter to Harvard accusing the university of failing “to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” The letter demanded that the university change its governance structure; overhaul its admissions policies; submit to an external audit of the medical school, the School of Public Health, the Divinity School and several other programs that the letter claimed have “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias”; revamp student-discipline procedures; “end support” and withdraw university recognition of several pro-Palestinian student groups and the National Lawyers Guild; and commit to a process of reform running “at least until the end of 2028,” during which the university would submit quarterly reports on its compliance with the government’s demands. In the manner of a racketeer, the letter implied, without quite spelling it out, that if the university failed to comply, it would lose its federal funding.
The letter came from the Education Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration. These are all agencies that can have a role in overseeing the university. Laws and rules exist for such oversight. They involve negotiations, investigations and, when it comes to federal funding, congressional procedures, complete with periods of public notice. This process is complicated by design — a design intended to protect universities from capricious, politically motivated meddling and to make the withdrawal of federal funding an option of last resort.
But the Trump administration pulls funds first and negotiates second, dispensing with the rest of the process. Its first target was Columbia University. When that school acceded to the administration’s demands, it didn’t get its funding back. Instead, the administration is reportedly considering demanding that Columbia agree to direct government oversight — effectively, a takeover of the university.
Harvard chose a different response from Columbia’s. On Monday, its lawyers sent a letter to the administration pointing out that the administration was in violation of the law. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” the letter said. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms.”
No other response should have been possible by the logic of the law — or the logic of academic freedom or the logic of democracy. And yet, the Harvard lawyers’ letter sent waves of excitement through academic circles. This is a measure of how low, and how fast, our expectations have fallen.
One of the people who seemed surprised was Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican and the self-appointed gendarme of higher education who issued a statement declaring Harvard the “epitome of the moral and academic rot in higher education.”
Trump administration officials, on Monday evening, promptly announced what they had suggested: that they will freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants.
Still, one hopes that other universities that find themselves in the administration’s cross-hairs — and there are many of them now — follow Harvard’s example and make self-respect, and respect for the law, unsurprising again.
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10) Director of Field Hospital in Southern Gaza Says Israeli Strike Killed a Guard
Israel’s military did not immediately comment on the report, which came two days after it attacked the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 15, 2025
Palestinians inspect the damage after Israel’s attack on the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on Sunday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
An Israeli strike killed a security guard and wounded 10 patients at a field hospital in southern Gaza on Tuesday, according to the director of the medical facility.
The deadly attack on the grounds of the Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital in Khan Younis came two days after an Israeli strike hit one of the enclave’s last functioning medical centers: the Ahli Arab Hospital compound in Gaza City. The strikes highlighted the precarious state of Gaza’s health care sector, which has been decimated by the war.
Israel’s military — which has said the strike on Ahli Arab hospital targeted a Hamas command center, without providing evidence — said it was looking into the reports about an attack on the Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital.
Dr. Suhaib al-Hamss, the field hospital’s director, said that the guard was killed protecting the entrance to the facility. Four of the wounded suffered serious injuries, he added, noting the attack hit the edge of the hospital grounds.
“It was a powerful strike,” Dr. al-Hamss, 37, said in a phone interview. “Everything fell over.”
Others at the hospital said the strike prompted patients to flee the hospital.
“It was a terrifying moment,” said Mohammed Abu Ghali, a field coordinator for HEAL Palestine, an American nongovernmental organization that funds the field hospital.
Israel’s military offensive has caused immense damage to hospitals and the health care system in the enclave. The World Health Organization reported last month that 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals had been damaged and that only 21 remained partly functional. On Saturday it warned that hospitals in Gaza face a looming medicine shortage because Israel has blocked aid deliveries for six weeks.
Israeli officials say that medical centers have been targeted because Hamas fighters embed themselves within and under the facilities, and that it is the only way to root out the armed group. Hamas and medical workers have denied this accusation.
Evidence examined by The New York Times suggests that Hamas has used Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City — which the Israeli military has raided — for cover and stored weapons inside it. The Israeli military has not presented similarly expansive evidence about most of the other health care centers it has attacked.
Dr. al-Hamss said that the Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital’s location was known to the Israeli authorities as it had been shared through intermediaries before the attack. He added that staff were vetted and that Hamas government offices were not hosted at the medical facility.
“We’re not doing anything other than medicine,” he said.
The Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital was treating a minimum of 3,500 patients every day, according to Dr. al-Hamss.
“The hospital,” he said, “is providing a solution to the people in light of the collapse of the heath sector in Gaza.”
Since the collapse last month of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, Israel’s military has embarked on a major bombing campaign and seized territory in Gaza. Israeli officials have said the offensive is a bid to compel Hamas to release more hostages held in the enclave.
More than 1,600 people have been killed in Gaza since the cease-fire fell apart — among the more than 51,000 killed since the start of the war, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its casualty counts.
Doctors at hospitals in Gaza have said that many of those wounded and killed in recent weeks have been children. On April 3, more than a dozen wounded children were seen in the emergency room of the Ahli Arab Hospital following Israeli strikes on a nearby school turned shelter. The Israeli military — which has also accused Hamas of embedding in schools — later said those strikes were targeting well-known militants in a Hamas command center, without naming them.
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting to this article.
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