Bay Area: All Out for Nakba 77 - The People Stand with Palestine
Saturday, May 17th, 2:30 pm
16th and Valencia Streets
Join the JVP-Bay Area contingent at 2:15 pm at 17th and Valencia. Look for the banner that says “Jews Say Stop Arming Israel”.
For 77 years, the Palestinian people have been subjected to occupation, forced displacement and ethnic cleansing under Israeli settler colonialism. Israel, with the support of the United States, is committing genocide in Gaza, using starvation as a weapon in addition to brutal military force. No humanitarian aid has been allowed into Gaza since March 2, 2025. Israel is also escalating its repression and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
Despite this, the Palestinian people continue to resist all attempts to displace them and insist on the right to their land, their liberation and their return.
It is more important than ever that on this 77th anniversary of the ongoing Nakba, all those with a conscience make it a priority to say loudly and clearly: THE PEOPLE STAND WITH PALESTINE, and to lift up these demands:Rallies will be taking place throughout the world.
- An end to the genocide in Gaza;
- A full and immediate two-way arms embargo on Israel;
- The release of all Palestinian political prisoners;
- Immediate humanitarian aid and reconstruction for Gaza;
- An end to the Zionist occupation of all Palestinian land.
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FWD from Leslie London (professor of public health at University of Cape Town):
Dear friends and colleagues
We write as academics, scientists and researchers in the health sector who have experienced the shutting down of our efforts to address the genocide in Gaza by our own professional organisations.
Many of you will have similar experiences of being blocked when trying to get your professional organisations to respond appropriately to the decimation in Gaza and the complete abnegation of professional solidarity in the face of the destruction of the Gazan health system and attacks on health workers.
We felt that one thing we could do is get together with like minded defenders of human rights to share experiences and explore across organisations what strategies could be useful to help stop the genocide and protect the people, the environment and what is left of the health care system in Gaza.
We are not organising this in the name of any organisation but rather as a loose network of individuals who have tried hard in our own organisation, without evident success, and we now feel that learning, sharing and building solidarity with others in similar situations might be the strongest strategy now.
We are therefore inviting you to a Webinar we will be hosting on the 19th at 5pm CET to explore how health professional organisations’ responses have failed Gaza and what can be done when your organisation turns a blind eye to Injustice.
Please circulate to those you feel would value such a discussion.
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May 25th
TO MARK THE 5th ANNIVERSARY OF GEORGE FLOYD'S MURDER & OPPOSE TRUMP'S ANTI-GEORGE FLOYD ACT EXECUTIVE ORDER
On April 28th, 2025, Donald Trump signed the so-called “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens” Executive Order (EO) into law, signifying a continued push towards the expansion of the police and prison state. This EO is the Trump administration’s attempt to undo any and all restraints put on police departments after the George Floyd rebellion. It is the Anti-George Floyd Policing Act. The EO gives police carte blanche to double down on their crimes against the people along with expanding prisons. We knew Trump’s return to office would embolden racist and repressive policing. This EO makes it plain.
George Floyd was murdered by racist killer cop Derek Chauvin on May 25th, 2020. Following his murder, the Minneapolis community, including our National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) branch, the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice, quickly mobilized and sparked a fire that led to millions hitting the streets worldwide to fight for justice for George Floyd and all victims of police terror. NAARPR played a conscious role in all cities where we have branches and affiliate organizations present in advancing the struggle on the streets. Five years later, we have experienced the failures of the previous presidential administration in passing any substantial police accountability measures. Now under Trump and his new EO, we see the forces of police terror seeking to advance their agenda at the expense of the voice of the people.
We call on all NAARPR branches, affiliate organizations to take action and unite with as many forces as possible on the 5 year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder to fight back against Trump’s anti-George Floyd executive order. We call on all strains of the people’s movement to unite and fight against Trump’s police and prison state agenda along with the local struggles with the families of police crime victims. Only through uniting with all who can be united, can we build a united front to win community control of the police and make advancements towards ending police terror.
All out for May 25th!
Justice for George Floyd and all victims of police terror!
Rescind Trump’s police and prison state Executive Order!
Pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act!
Community Control of the police now!
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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) Supreme Court Hears Case on Birthright Citizenship and Judicial Power
The Supreme Court could use the case to limit nationwide injunctions and reshape how federal courts handle challenges to President Trump’s policies.
By Abbie VanSickle, Supreme Court reporter, May 15, 2025
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a case that could limit the power of federal judges to hobble President Trump’s agenda while challenging the long-held belief that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to all children born in the United States.
On issue after issue, individual judges have frozen Mr. Trump’s initiatives in place while they are litigated in court using nationwide injunctions, which block policy across the country and not just for the parties who sued. The justices will consider a dispute that stems from the president’s executive order to end the automatic practice of birthright citizenship, a change blocked almost immediately by federal judges who ruled that it was unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court could use the case to limit nationwide injunctions and reshape how federal courts handle challenges to Mr. Trump’s policies, curbing the power of federal judges to swiftly block executive actions and increasing presidential power. Groups opposing Mr. Trump’s actions would most likely have to bring many individual claims, or pursue other legal pathways, such as class action lawsuits.
It is not clear how much the justices will engage with the substance of Mr. Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. In 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed that right in a landmark case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
Here’s what else to know:
A long dispute: Supreme Court justices across the ideological spectrum have said they are troubled by at least some nationwide injunctions, and several have long called for the court to address their scope.
Birthright citizenship: The practice of granting citizenship to people born in the United States, even to parents who are not citizens, has long been considered a tenet of immigration law. The 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
Government’s argument: Solicitor General D. John Sauer, representing the Trump administration, argued that the 14th amendment’s provision of birthright citizenship was meant, at the time of its passage, for freed slaves, not immigrants to the United States. It is a once-fringe theory that has been rejected by most scholars and courts.
Many injunctions: Judges have issued more than a dozen nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration, including its effort to revoke Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, which allowed them to legally work and remain in the United States.
Unusual case: Several aspects of this case are unusual, including how quickly it made it to the court, that it extended the court’s typical calendar, and even that oral arguments are happening at all.
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a case that could limit the power of federal judges to hobble President Trump’s agenda while challenging the long-held belief that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to all children born in the United States.
On issue after issue, individual judges have frozen Mr. Trump’s initiatives in place while they are litigated in court using nationwide injunctions, which block policy across the country and not just for the parties who sued. The justices will consider a dispute that stems from the president’s executive order to end the automatic practice of birthright citizenship, a change blocked almost immediately by federal judges who ruled that it was unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court could use the case to limit nationwide injunctions and reshape how federal courts handle challenges to Mr. Trump’s policies, curbing the power of federal judges to swiftly block executive actions and increasing presidential power. Groups opposing Mr. Trump’s actions would most likely have to bring many individual claims, or pursue other legal pathways, such as class action lawsuits.
It is not clear how much the justices will engage with the substance of Mr. Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. In 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed that right in a landmark case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
Here’s what else to know:
A long dispute: Supreme Court justices across the ideological spectrum have said they are troubled by at least some nationwide injunctions, and several have long called for the court to address their scope.
Birthright citizenship: The practice of granting citizenship to people born in the United States, even to parents who are not citizens, has long been considered a tenet of immigration law. The 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
Government’s argument: Solicitor General D. John Sauer, representing the Trump administration, argued that the 14th amendment’s provision of birthright citizenship was meant, at the time of its passage, for freed slaves, not immigrants to the United States. It is a once-fringe theory that has been rejected by most scholars and courts.
Many injunctions: Judges have issued more than a dozen nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration, including its effort to revoke Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, which allowed them to legally work and remain in the United States.
Unusual case: Several aspects of this case are unusual, including how quickly it made it to the court, that it extended the court’s typical calendar, and even that oral arguments are happening at all.
The original case that established birthright citizenship was decided in 1898.
By Amy Qin
In August 1895, a young cook named Wong Kim Ark was about to disembark from the S.S. Coptic, after a long journey home to San Francisco from China, when U.S. customs officials denied him re-entry.
He was not a U.S. citizen, they said. Never mind that Mr. Wong had been born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, not far from the port where he was now being held. The 14th Amendment’s provision for automatic citizenship for all people born on U.S. soil did not apply to him, officials later argued, because he and his parents were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States at the time he was born.
Rather than back down, Mr. Wong took his case to the courts — and won.
In Mr. Wong’s case, the Supreme Court affirmed in 1898 the constitutional guarantee of automatic citizenship for nearly all children born in the United States, a right that has deep roots in common law. That expansive understanding of birthright citizenship has been the law of the land since.
Now, the Trump administration wants to roll back the Wong Kim Ark ruling as it moves to crack down on immigration.
On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order declaring that the government would stop treating U.S.-born children of parents who are undocumented or are in the country temporarily as U.S. citizens.
The Trump administration is pushing forward a reinterpretation of the 1898 decision, drawing on ideas from a small group of legal scholars like John Eastman, a lawyer known for drafting a plan to block congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election.
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2) Gazans Once Escaped To Rafah. Now Israel Is Razing It.
By Samuel Granados, Aric Toler and Aaron Boxerman, May 15, 2025
Razed in last few weeks. Razed before the cease-fire. Newly built road.
Before the cease-fire in January, Israel had demolished areas of Rafah along Gaza’s borders. But in areas of Rafah away from the borders, many buildings were still standing, though damaged.
The recent destruction is much more far-reaching, flattening mosques, schools, greenhouses and even greenery.
In early April, after the fighting resumed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Israel’s goal was to cut Rafah off from the rest of Gaza. Now, the images show that the Israeli military has completed a ring of destruction around the city.
Last year, a million Palestinians fled to Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, to escape the brunt of Israel’s bombardment in its war against Hamas. When Israeli forces later invaded Rafah itself, they flattened areas along the border with Egypt, but many neighborhoods were largely spared the worst of the war.
That is no longer the case.
The Israeli military has destroyed extensive parts of Rafah since it ended a cease-fire in March after talks with Hamas collapsed. In early May, after much of the destruction was already complete, Israel announced it would soon launch an “intensive” escalation of its campaign in Gaza. Over the previous two nights, strikes have killed dozens of Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinian officials said. On Tuesday, the Israeli military targeted Muhammad Sinwar, a top Hamas leader in Gaza, near a hospital in Khan Younis.
Satellite images analyzed by The New York Times show that the Israeli military has flattened large areas in and around the city of Rafah and built new military infrastructure in the last two months.
Before the cease-fire in January, Israel had demolished areas of Rafah along Gaza’s borders. But in areas of Rafah away from the borders, many buildings were still standing, though damaged.
Israeli leaders say capturing more territory inside Gaza will pressure Hamas to surrender and release the remaining hostages that the group has held since it led a deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel’s defense minister vowed that Israeli forces would “clear out” the areas and “prevent any threat,” including in Rafah.
Israeli security officials have previously said that tunnels between Egypt and Gaza have allowed Hamas to stock up on weaponry and other supplies.
In response to a question from The Times about the Israeli military’s operations in Rafah, the military said that it was part of an effort to secure operational control and conduct counterterrorism operations.
“We will replicate the model implemented in Rafah in other areas of the Strip as well,” said Effie Defrin, the Israeli military spokesperson, in a press briefing last week.
Demolishing Block by Block
Here is what the operation looks like on the ground: Four excavators could be seen in a video verified by The Times tearing down a row of buildings in Rafah’s Shaboura neighborhood in April. The video, first shared on an Israeli Telegram channel, was taken from an armored vehicle.
Satellite imagery shows that hundreds of buildings were destroyed in this neighborhood during the month of April, including on the block where the video was filmed.
Earlier this month, the Israeli security cabinet approved a new plan to call up tens of thousands of additional soldiers, to seize and hold territory in the embattled enclave, and to forcibly displace Palestinians to the south. But the satellite imagery shows the areas of the south where buildings are still standing are getting smaller and smaller.
Another video shows four buildings destroyed in a controlled demolition. The video, uploaded on an Israeli soldier’s Instagram account and shared by the Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi on his X account, was filmed in northern Rafah, where much of the destruction has taken place. Satellite image shows that the demolition took place sometime in April.
New Construction
Israeli forces are not just clearing land. They are building on it.
One new road already stretches more than three miles from the Israeli border across Rafah into agricultural areas. It is protected by berms, trenches and several military outposts.
And other construction is moving at a rapid clip, the satellite images show.
Several new military outposts, often graded, paved and surrounded by defensive walls, have been built across southern Gaza in the past month. Soldiers have also commandeered buildings to use as bases, such as an under-construction hospital.
Israel calls the road it has constructed from the Israeli border the “Morag Corridor,” which Mr. Netanyahu said last month was intended to cut Rafah off from the rest of the enclave. The name is a reference to a Jewish settlement that existed in the area until Israel withdrew its soldiers and civilians from Gaza two decades ago.
What the construction might mean for the long term is uncertain. Some Israeli officials have agitated for Israel to rebuild Jewish settlements in the enclave, but Mr. Netanyahu has rebuffed the prospect for now.
Mr. Netanyahu said last week, after much of the construction and razing in Rafah was already in progress, that Israel was “on the eve of a forceful entry to Gaza.”
Riley Mellen contributed reporting.
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3) Israeli Strikes Kill Dozens in Gaza, Health Ministry Says
Israel has threatened to escalate its military campaign against Hamas, despite a U.S.-backed push for the two sides to agree a new cease-fire.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 15, 2025
The aftermath of an Israeli military strike on northern Gaza on Thursday. Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Dozens were killed in Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip on Thursday, the territory’s health ministry said, in another powerful wave of attacks that came as Israel threatened to intensify its campaign.
Dozens more were injured in the attacks, according to the ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Israel has threatened a significant military escalation in the coming days unless Hamas lays down its arms and frees the remaining hostages it holds. But the Palestinian armed group has rejected Israel’s conditions, demanding an end to the war and a full Israeli withdrawal in exchange for releasing the captives.
The Trump administration is seeking to broker an end to the war, but U.S.-backed attempts to push Israel and Hamas to agree to a new cease-fire remain deadlocked. Israel’s campaign began after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 people taken to Gaza as hostages.
Israel’s subsequent military campaign against Hamas has killed more than 50,000 people, including thousands of children, according to Gaza health officials. Gaza’s health ministry said that more than 50 people had been killed in the latest strikes. Despite its immense toll, the war has failed to either decisively subdue Hamas or free all of the hostages.
Over the weekend, the United States and Hamas reached a separate agreement to free Edan Alexander, the last American hostage left alive in Gaza, effectively bypassing Israel. President Trump wrote on social media that he hoped it would be the “first of those final steps necessary to end this brutal conflict.”
Israeli negotiators traveled to Qatar this week for the latest round of indirect cease-fire talks with Hamas to free the remaining hostages. The following day, the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said he had spoken with Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, as well as the Israeli negotiating team.
But an Israeli official familiar with the talks said there was little expectation of a breakthrough. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Israeli military campaign, however, has not stopped. On Tuesday, Israeli aircraft bombarded the area around the European Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis in an attempt to kill Muhammad Sinwar, one of Hamas’s top leaders in Gaza. Mr. Sinwar’s older brother, Yahya Sinwar, masterminded the Oct. 7 attacks and led Hamas before he was killed by Israeli forces last year.
Neither Israel nor Hamas has publicly commented on the fate of the younger Mr. Sinwar.
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4) Ben & Jerry’s Founder Arrested at Senate Hearing After Protesting War in Gaza
Ben Cohen, a co-founder of the ice cream brand, was among a group that interrupted a Senate hearing on Wednesday, protesting Congress’s funding of Israel’s military.
By Isabella Kwai, May 15, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/us/ben-jerrys-ben-cohen-arrested-rfk-senate-gaza.html
Mr. Cohen and Jerry Greenfield founded Ben & Jerry’s in 1978.Andrew Kelly/Reuters
One of the founders of Ben & Jerry’s, Ben Cohen, was arrested on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., after he interrupted a Senate committee hearing to protest Congress’s funding for Israel’s military as it wages war against Hamas in Gaza.
Mr. Cohen, 74, was among a group of protesters that disrupted a Senate health committee hearing as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, promoted President Trump’s budget for the next fiscal year.
The protesters shouted and held up signs as Mr. Kennedy was speaking before Capitol Police officers escorted them out, according to a broadcast of the hearing. A video posted by Mr. Cohen on social media showed him being detained by police officers, his hands behind his back.
“I said that Congress is paying to bomb poor kids in Gaza and paying for it by kicking poor kids off Medicaid in the U.S.,” Mr. Cohen can be heard saying in the video he posted. He also called on lawmakers to do more to get food into Gaza, where the United Nations and other aid agencies have said a famine is looming.
“They need to let food to starving kids,” he said.
Mr. Cohen was charged with crowding, obstructing or incommoding, the Capitol Police said in a statement, a misdemeanor that can be punishable by up to 90 days in prison and a $500 fine if convicted.
Six other people were also arrested on charges that included assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. Mr. Cohen has been released from custody, the police said.
Mr. Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the two founders of the ice cream brand, have long been outspoken about political issues, including criticizing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. They gave up most involvement with the company when it was sold to Unilever in 2000, but have remained outspoken, as has the company.
Ben & Jerry’s in 2021 said it would end sales in the Israeli-occupied West Bank because it was “inconsistent” with the company’s values. The co-founders, who are both Jewish, wrote in a 2021 New York Times Opinion essay that they supported the company’s decision.
“As Jewish supporters of the State of Israel, we fundamentally reject the notion that it is antisemitic to question the policies of the State of Israel,” they wrote.
That decision led to backlash in Israel and hurt sales at Unilever, which eventually sold the Ben & Jerry’s business in Israel to a local partner. In March 2024, Unilever said it would spin off its ice cream unit, which includes Ben & Jerry’s, to reduce costs.
Ben & Jerry’s last year sued Unilever over accusations that it had fired the ice cream brand’s chief executive because of its social activism and had censored the ice cream maker’s attempts to express support for Palestinian refugees. Unilever has rejected those claims and called for the suit to be dismissed.
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5) Some Republicans Push to Put School Desegregation Officially in the Past
Louisiana officials want to overturn the remaining federal desegregation orders in their state. They may find allies in the Trump administration.
By Sarah Mervosh, May 16, 2025
The Justice Department dismissed a desegregation order in Plaquemines Parish, La., which had been kept open by mistake. State officials hope others may be lifted. Credit...Kathleen Flynn for The New York Times
Republican leaders in Louisiana are pushing to end the last remnants of federally ordered school desegregation in their state, arguing that the era of racial exclusion is in the past and that the U.S. government has forced burdensome requirements on school districts long enough.
They may have found allies in the Trump administration, as it seeks to slash federal bureaucracy and roll back diversity efforts across the country.
It has been 71 years since the Supreme Court made racially segregated schools illegal in its landmark 1954 ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. Louisiana officials say that federal orders forcing school districts to comply with the decision are outdated and no longer needed, and that the country needs to move on.
Civil rights advocates see the effort as part of a broader attack on Black students and civil rights under the Trump administration, at a time when U.S. schools are only growing more segregated.
Nationally, more than 300 desegregation orders are estimated to still be on the books from the 1960s and 1970s, when school districts resistant to integration were put under the supervision of federal courts. In the decades since, many orders have gone dormant, with little federal enforcement.
In Louisiana, one of several Southern states with the bulk of remaining orders, the attorney general, with the support of the governor, is reviewing orders statewide and has vowed to work with school districts to “officially put the past in the past.”
The Justice Department has already dismissed one order, in a district south of New Orleans, which was left open for decades by mistake. Federal officials are open to lifting others.
“I don’t think it serves the interest of justice to have ancient consent decrees out there,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general over civil rights under President Trump, who said her office would consider requests for dismissal on a case-by-case basis.
“It is 2025,” Ms. Dhillon said. “I haven’t heard a recent claim that there is government mandated segregation happening in 2025 in a school district.” She added: “If it’s happening, it’s wrong.”
The Supreme Court has said that school desegregation orders were meant to be temporary, and over the years, many have been lifted, usually after a district showed it had made efforts to desegregate.
Civil rights advocates fear any rollback of desegregation orders would harm Black students, at a moment when the Trump administration has been campaigning against programs meant to help them, including diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
The administration is invoking Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin and which has historically been used to protect minority groups, to threaten and investigate school districts with certain D.E.I. policies.
President Trump also issued new guidance on school discipline, instructing schools to look at behavior alone, without taking into account racial disparities in punishment. He has ordered the federal government more broadly to stop considering “disparate impact,” which is when a seemingly race-neutral policy has different outcomes for different demographic groups.
“You have an administration that denies the past and wants to tell a singular story about America and this country that erases this racial inequality,” said Janel George, an associate law professor at Georgetown, who focuses on racial equity in education.
In many cases, school districts are still under federal oversight because they never proved that they desegregated, said GeDá Jones Herbert, chief legal counsel for Brown’s Promise, a group that supports school integration. An open desegregation order is a legal tool for students to take a district back to court “and say, ‘hey they are still not doing what they need to do,’” she added.
Decades of research have shown that racially integrated schools improve academic and life outcomes for Black students, with no measurable harm to white students. That is largely because integration allows students of color to share in resources that white students already have.
Liz Murrill, the Louisiana attorney general, argued the answer is not to keep school desegregation orders open for decades. She said many orders in her state had been dormant for 30 or 40 years, and others had racked up expensive legal bills for school districts.
If a district is engaging in discriminatory practices today, she said, “you file a new lawsuit for a new problem.”
In what Louisiana officials hope will be the first of many dismissals, the Trump administration lifted a desegregation order in Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, last month, addressing what it called a “historical wrong.”
In 1975, a judge ruled that the district had sufficiently desegregated. But the case remained open, lost in a bureaucratic shuffle.
The dismissal came as a relief to school officials, who had recently been dealing with reams of federal paperwork on everything from the number of Advanced Placement classes at each school to the racial makeup of athletic clubs, said Shelley Ritz, the superintendent. “It was binders on top of binders,” she said.
That doesn’t mean there still isn’t important work to do, Dr. Ritz said.
Plaquemines Parish in many ways exemplifies the lingering debates around school desegregation, whether the country has done enough to remedy the harms of the past and how much schools should be held responsible for factors outside of their direct control.
The Justice Department took the Plaquemines Parish school district to court in 1966, a time when Leander Perez, a prominent segregationist, ruled the region. He was a towering political figure who opposed the integration of Ruby Bridges and other Black students in New Orleans and helped open all-white private academies in Plaquemines Parish.
His legacy lives on in infamy in a communal history that has been passed down over generations, said Dione Griffin-Cossé, 56, who attended an all-Black school in Plaquemines Parish in the 1970s and ’80s and still lives in the area.
Still, the news of the order’s end surprised her and some others, who said they thought the time of desegregation had already passed. “To me, that’s long gone,” she said.
Today, the Plaquemines Parish school district is racially mixed, with a student body that is about 50 percent white, 25 percent Black, 12 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Asian. Many of the individual schools are themselves relatively diverse. But the bulk of white students attend schools on the north side, in a more populated area close to New Orleans.
That is largely the result of housing patterns, Dr. Ritz said.
Plaquemines Parish lies at the tip of Louisiana’s boot, in an area prone to flooding. The southern part of the district is at especially high risk. There, families are poorer, and students are largely Black or Hispanic.
Across the country, Black and Hispanic students are most likely to attend high poverty schools, which research shows is a driving factor in the country’s wide gaps in academic achievement. That’s also the case in Plaquemines Parish, which ranks among the best in the state for student growth and achievement, but where students in the southern end of the district still post lower test scores.
Dr. Ritz pointed to a number of investments the district had made to help attract qualified teachers to lower-income schools on the southern end. That includes opening day care centers for the children of employees and subsidizing apartments for teachers. “We are truly committed to every student in Plaquemines,” Dr. Ritz said.
The Supreme Court endorsed the idea that schools should not be on the hook for housing segregation in a series of rulings dating to the 1970s that set off a gradual unwinding of desegregation efforts across the country.
In 1974, during a period of fierce public pushback to the busing of students, the Supreme Court made its first major turn away from mandated integration.
The case involved a plan to integrate students from Detroit, which was majority Black, with its surrounding suburbs, which were predominantly white. The court ruled that schools did not have to desegregate across district lines, even if the result was segregation.
The case would limit efforts to integrate outside of the South, where desegregation occurred at schools within individual districts.
Then in 1991, the court ruled that districts already under federal court order could be released if they had addressed segregation “as far as practicable,” though segregation may still remain as a result of private residential choices.
The new efforts to roll back remaining desegregation orders may simply signal the official end of a movement that peaked long ago.
U.S. schools have only grown more segregated in recent decades, in part because of the lifting of desegregation orders, but also because of the rise of charter schools, according to research by professors Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California.
Today, schools are more segregated than they were in the late 1980s.
“The country has just sort of decided that segregation is not a problem that it wants to focus on,” Dr. Reardon said.
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6) New Jersey Transit Strike Leaves Commuters Searching for Rides
A walkout by engineers was causing disruptions for tens of thousands in the New York metropolitan region. Commuters raced to find other ways into New York City and beyond, but alternatives were costly.
By Patrick McGeehan and Matthew Haag, May 16, 2025
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/05/16/multimedia/16njtransit-strike-caro-846am-bmkz/16njtransit-strike-caro-846am-bmkz-verticalTwoByThree735.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
The first statewide transit strike in New Jersey in more than 40 years began just after midnight Friday when about 450 unionized locomotive engineers walked off their jobs in a pay dispute, shutting down New Jersey Transit’s rail network.
Some commuters showed up at NJ Transit rail stations on Friday morning unaware of the shutdown, while others rushed to find different modes of transportation into New York City and beyond for work. Tens of thousands of commuters ride the trains on a typical workday.
They scrambled to take ferries, NJ Transit buses and charter bus services. Amtrak was an option for passengers in some areas of New Jersey but at a steep cost. Some commuters in Trenton said they could not afford a one-way ticket of up to $118 into the New York City metropolitan region, about six times the cost of a NJ Transit rail ticket. (Later in the morning, some Amtrak fares posted online were lower.)
Members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen began picketing early Friday. Mark Wallace, the union’s national president, said Thursday: “They have money for penthouse views and pet projects, just not for their frontline workers. Enough is enough. We will stay out until our members receive the fair pay that they deserve.”
Kris Kolluri, the chief executive of NJ Transit, said at a news conference late Thursday that he would return to the bargaining table at any time. “This is not a lost cause,” he said. “This is an eminently achievable deal.”
Gov. Philip D. Murphy said the agency’s offer to the union “would have given their members almost exactly what they asked for.”
Here’s what we’re covering:
· Working from home: NJ Transit urged rail commuters whose presence at their workplaces was not essential to work from home during the strike. Some big employers in New York, like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, gave workers temporary permission to work remotely or said they would consider providing flexibility.
· Bus service: NJ Transit’s statewide bus system continued to operate as scheduled. The agency hired private buses to substitute for its train service, but they will start running on Monday, and Mr. Kolluri said that the chartered buses could accommodate only about 20 percent of the displaced train riders. There is no supplemental bus service on Friday.
· Using your tickets: Commuters who already have NJ Transit rail tickets and passes to or from New York, Newark or Hoboken may use those tickets on NJ Transit’s existing buses routes and light rail lines. But they will not be cross-honored on other carriers, including Amtrak, PATH ferries and private carrier buses.
· Pay dispute: The union says its members want parity in wages with their counterparts who work for the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad. Mr. Kolluri said an offer the union voted down in March would have raised the average annual pay of full-time engineers to $172,000 from $135,000. But Mr. Haas said those figures were inflated.
· Picket lines: The union planned to have picket lines at Penn Station in New York, at NJ Transit’s headquarters in Newark and at the train station in Atlantic City.
· Sports and concerts: NJ Transit also carries fans to concerts and sporting events at the Prudential Center in Newark and MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. Before the midnight deadline, the agency had already canceled service to MetLife for Shakira’s concerts on Thursday and Friday nights.
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7) Judge to Press Trump Administration Over Return of Wrongly Deported Man
Justice Department lawyers are scheduled to appear in Federal District Court in Maryland to defend their latest effort to avoid disclosing details about several key aspects of the proceeding.
By Alan Feuer, May 16, 2025
The federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Md. The Justice Department has argued that many of details of the deportation case involving Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia should not be made public because they amount to state secrets. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
It has been more than a month since the Supreme Court ordered the White House to work toward securing the release of a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador in March.
Top administration officials — including President Trump himself — have repeatedly said that the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, will not be coming back to the United States, largely because of accusations that he is a member of the violent street gang MS-13.
Their public statements have raised significant questions about whether the administration is openly defying the Supreme Court’s instructions — and what, if anything, might be done about that.
But even as those weighty issues simmer in the background, the White House is confronting a more immediate concern: whether it has been abiding by a separate court order to answer questions about the way it has been handling the case.
On Friday, lawyers for the Justice Department are scheduled to appear in Federal District Court in Maryland to defend their latest effort to avoid disclosing details about several key aspects of the proceeding. Those include the diplomatic steps that officials have taken in the past few weeks toward releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia, as well as the nature of the deal between the White House and the Salvadoran government to house deported immigrants in its jails.
The Justice Department has argued that many of those details should not be made public because they amount to state secrets. In fact, in a declaration filed last week mostly under seal, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the disclosure of such material “could be expected to cause significant harm to the foreign relations and national security interests of the United States.”
Lawyers for Mr. Abrego Garcia have scoffed at the idea that the government’s efforts to free their client from El Salvador should be considered a state secret, especially given that Mr. Trump and some of his top aides have been talking publicly about the man for weeks.
“On its face, there is little reason to believe that compliance with a court order to facilitate the release and return of a single mistakenly removed individual so that he can get his day in court implicates state secrets at all,” the lawyers wrote in a court filing this week. “No military or intelligence operations are involved, and it defies reason to imagine that the United States’ relationship with El Salvador would be endangered by any effort to seek the return of a wrongfully deported person who the government admits never should have been removed to El Salvador in the first place.”
Judge Paula Xinis, who is presiding over the proceeding, will hear both sides of this debate on Friday and eventually determine whether to let the government use what is known as the state secrets privilege and other legal protections to keep its internal deliberations under wraps. The hearing in front of her could become contentious, if only because the administration has for weeks been stonewalling her efforts to get to the bottom of how it has been handling the Abrego Garcia case.
In early April, for example, the judge determined that the White House had failed to comply with the Supreme Court’s instructions to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody. As an initial remedy, she ordered the government to provide her with daily updates about what steps it had taken and planned to take to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s freedom.
Then, after a federal appeals court directed officials to take a more proactive role in getting him out of custody, Judge Xinis opened an investigation into what exactly the administration had been doing. As part of that inquiry, she ordered Trump officials to answer questions — both in person and in writing — about the deal they had reached to house deported immigrants in El Salvador and what had been done to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from the notorious mega-prison there known as CECOT.
But that process also broke down and Judge Xinis quickly blasted the government for what she called its “willful and bad faith refusal” to adequately answer the questions. Just as she appeared to be losing patience, the Justice Department asked her for a pause in the question-asking process, suggesting there had been a diplomatic development that justified a seven-day delay.
The New York Times reported that around that time, officials at the State Department had sent a note to their counterparts in El Salvador inquiring about having Mr. Abrego Garcia released, but El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, rejected the offer.
In the end, Judge Xinis granted the Justice Department’s request for a delay, but denied department lawyers when they asked her for a second weeklong pause. Last week, finally faced with having to answer questions about the case, department lawyers countered with their latest legal maneuver: an invocation of the state secrets privilege.
It was not the first time that the administration tried the same tactic in a deportation case.
In late March, the Justice Department invoked the state secrets privilege in an effort to avoid providing data to a federal judge in Washington about three charter planes that flew to El Salvador that month carrying Mr. Abrego Garcia and scores of other immigrants.
The judge in that case, James E. Boasberg, wanted the data in an effort to determine whether the government had flouted his order to turn the planes around. Judge Boasberg’s investigation into the White House’s compliance with his ruling was temporarily put on hold last month by the federal appeals court that sits over him.
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8) Trump Says ‘a Lot of People Are Starving’ in Gaza and the U.S. Wants to Help
Humanitarian support has collapsed in the enclave, which has been under total Israeli blockade for more than two months. Aid groups warn that the territory is on the brink of famine.
By Luke Broadwater and Erika Solomon, May 16, 2025
"Israel has declared about 70 percent of the enclave to be either “no go” zones or under evacuation orders."
Luke Broadwater from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; and Erika Solomon reported from Berlin.
President Trump said on Friday that “a lot of people are starving” in the Gaza Strip under an Israeli blockade preventing aid deliveries, adding that the U.S. wanted to help alleviate the suffering.
“We’re going to handle a couple of situations that you have here,” Mr. Trump said, speaking in the United Arab Emirates on the last leg of his visit to three Persian Gulf nations this week. “We’re looking at Gaza, and we got to get that taken care of. A lot of people are starving. A lot of people. There’s a lot of bad things going on.”
Aid groups have warned for weeks that the population of Gaza is on the brink of famine, and some Israeli military officials have begun to privately express concerns over the risk of starvation in the territory, 19 months after the war there began.
On top of the total siege it has imposed on Gaza for more than two months, Israel has escalated its military campaign in recent days. Strikes on Friday killed more than 100 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry, a day after Israeli bombardment forced the closure of one of the enclave’s major hospitals.
The Trump administration had long remained largely silent on Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. Gulf Arab leaders who met with Mr. Trump during his trip to the region this week seized on the opportunity to address that stance after scoring a remarkable turnaround on Syria, when the president announced on the first day of the visit that he would lift sanctions on the country.
Mr. Trump emerged from his trip to the Middle East with a more sympathetic tone on Gaza — a notable shift given his longstanding close relationship with the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Unlike his predecessor, Joe Biden, whose administration had criticized Israel’s conduct and threatened to halt some military aid, Mr. Trump had shown considerable support for Israel’s aggressive military campaign. Early in his presidency, Mr. Trump had even suggested the idea of removing all Palestinians from Gaza to make way for a luxury waterfront development.
Boarding Air Force One on Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters that the United States must take action on the Gaza crisis. He was en route home after the first major state visit of his second term, which took him to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
“I think a lot of good things are going to happen over the next month ,” Mr. Trump said. “We have to help also out the Palestinians,” he added, noting that the United States would look at both sides of the issue. “We’ll do a good job,” he said.
Mr. Trump, who was greeted throughout his visit with lavish welcomes, enjoyed boisterous applause and even a standing ovation at some points in his first speech in Riyadh, where he addressed a gathering of business leaders.
The one point when his speech was met with stark silence was when he expressed a “fervent wish” that Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords, the 2020 deal in which two of its neighbors established diplomatic relations with Israel.
Polling has shown that the normalization of relations with the Israeli government is deeply unpopular among Saudis, especially since the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 50,000 people and reduced vast swathes of the enclave to rubble. Saudi officials say that recognizing Israel would hinge on the creation of a Palestinian state.
Gulf Arab leaders, aware of the symbolic potency of the Palestinian plight for their people, sought to change Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on Gaza. Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, asked Mr. Trump to use American leverage to bring about peace in Gaza and end the killing.
Israel started its total blockade on March 2. For more than 70 days, it has barred the entry of food, water and other supplies while cases of malnutrition and disease are spiraling.
Israel says it is aiming to force Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that dominates Gaza, to accept new cease-fire conditions after a two-month truce fell apart. It also wants to secure the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which set off the war.
Israel has been threatening to escalate its military campaign in Gaza even further and recently stepped up the intensity of deadly military strikes.
The United Nations-backed body that monitors starvation conditions in the world warned this week that Gaza is at “critical risk of famine,” saying that 100 percent of the enclave’s two million residents face a malnutrition crisis.
The conditions in Gaza have spurred the creation of an aid group with backing from the Trump administration, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The new group appears to have come in response to a plan that Israeli and U.S. officials have been working on in recent weeks, which involves distribution zones for food that would have Israeli forces stationed outside their perimeters.
That is similar to what the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation described as its plan for establishing a new system for aid to flow into the territory, in agreement with Israel.
The foundation said it would set up a number of distribution centers where Gazans could pick up food, hygiene kits and other humanitarian support, though it did not mention Israeli forces.
The U.S.-Israeli plan has been met with widespread skepticism from established humanitarian groups and U.N. agencies, which argue that the system could force sick or older Gazans into long and dangerous treks for aid.
Vowing not to join the effort, the United Nations also warned that the foundation’s distribution system could become a means for forced displacement, as most centers were expected to be in the southern part of the enclave. More than 90 percent of Gazans have been displaced in the war, many of them multiple times.
Israel has declared about 70 percent of the enclave to be either “no go” zones or under evacuation orders.
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9) Napalm Girl’ Was in the Photo. But Who Was Behind the Camera?
Questions about the credit for a famous photograph from the Vietnam War have divided the photojournalism community for months.
By Benjamin Mullin, May 16, 2025
The Associated Press is continuing to credit this Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from 1972 to Nick Ut. Credit...Nick Ut/Associated Press
The photo is indelible, and its importance unmistakable: a Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, naked and screaming, her arms outstretched in despair. It drove home the consequences of the Vietnam War to readers in the United States, where it won a Pulitzer Prize.
But who took the photo, widely known as Napalm Girl? That is the question dividing the photojournalism community 53 years after it was taken.
The image, from a road in the village of Trang Bang, Vietnam, has been credited to Nick Ut, a photographer who worked for The Associated Press. In the decades since, Mr. Ut has repeatedly talked publicly, in interviews and elsewhere, about his role in capturing the photo and his later friendship with its subject, Kim Phuc Phan Thi.
Yet a documentary that premiered early this year, “The Stringer,” set off investigations into the creator of the image. The film argues that a freelance photographer took the image, and that an Associated Press photo editor misattributed it to Mr. Ut.
On Friday, the World Press Photo Foundation, a prominent international nonprofit, weighed in. It said a monthslong investigation had found that two other photojournalists “may have been better positioned to take the photograph than Nick Ut.”
Mr. Ut’s lawyer, James Hornstein, has repeatedly disputed the film’s claims and called them “defamatory.” He said in a statement that the World Press Photo decision was “deplorable and unprofessional” and “reveals how low the organization has fallen.” Mr. Hornstein declined to make Mr. Ut available for an interview.
The Associated Press, after spending nearly a year investigating, said this month that it would continue to credit the photo to Mr. Ut. A lengthy report from the investigation said he could have taken the photo, and cites evidence to support that position, but concluded that no proof had been found. It also says other photographers could have taken the photo.
“As our report explains in great detail, there’s simply not enough hard evidence or fact to remove the credit from Nick Ut, and it’s impossible for anyone to know with certainty how exactly things played out on the road in the space of a few minutes over half a century ago,” said Derl McCrudden, The A.P.’s vice president and head of global news production.
The controversy over the photo, officially titled “The Terror of War,” began when “The Stringer” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The film, directed by Bao Nguyen, followed Gary Knight, a journalist, as he investigated a claim from a former A.P. photo editor, Carl Robinson, who said he was ordered to misattribute the photo to Mr. Ut in 1972. The end of the film shows Mr. Knight writing a message claiming that Nguyen Thanh Nghe, a freelance photographer, took the photo.
In an interview for this article, Mr. Nguyen said, “People need to have an open mind, need to see the film and all of the forensic reports and judge for themselves where the truth lies in this story.”
The attention to the film produced a quick and immediate pushback from Mr. Ut’s lawyer. It also led The Associated Press to release an earlier report in the days leading up to the premiere, saying, “The A.P. has no reason to believe anyone other than Ut took the photo.”
The Associated Press took a closer look at the issue after reviewing the film. The much longer report, released this month, reconstructed the scene using satellite imagery and photos on file from the day.
Both Mr. Ut’s lawyer and the filmmakers behind “The Stringer” said the Associated Press report bolstered their arguments. Mr. Knight said the filmmakers were “more confident after the A.P. report that our reporting is strong and reliable than even before.” Mr. Hornstein said in an interview that the report “makes quite clear that the film, which calls itself a documentary, fails to meet documentary film standards.”
“Both A.P. reports list very strong evidence that Nick Ut took the photo, including every eyewitness on the road that day other than Mr. Nghe,” Mr. Hornstein said. He added that living eyewitnesses from the A.P. offices and written testimony by now-deceased A.P. staff members also supported Mr. Ut’s credit.
The filmmakers behind “The Stringer” are updating the film to incorporate new developments. They’re also in negotiations for worldwide distribution.
Even though World Press Photo is acknowledging doubts about who took the photo, the organization is not stripping “The Terror of War” of its “Photo of the Year” award, which it conferred in 1973, its chief executive, Joumana El Zein Khoury, said in an interview. (Christiaan Triebert, a visual investigations reporter at The New York Times, contributed to the review as an independent analyst.)
To remove the award, Ms. Khoury said, the organization would have to be sure Mr. Ut didn’t take the photo, a conclusion that’s impossible to reach all these years later.
“While this may not be a perfect solution,” she said, “I think it’s a thoughtful and principled one.”
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10) U.S. Takes Defiant Stance in Court, Saying Abrego Garcia Deportation Was Lawful
A Justice Department lawyer mirrored Trump officials’ aggressive position in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador in March.
By Alan Feuer and Aishvarya Kavi, May 16, 2025
The federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Md. The Justice Department has argued that many of details of the deportation case involving Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia should not be made public because they amount to state secrets. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
For nearly two months, the Trump administration has taken an aggressive stance in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador in March.
Several administration officials — including a former Justice Department lawyer assigned to the case — have openly acknowledged that Mr. Abrego Garcia was flown to El Salvador despite a court order forbidding him from being sent there. But President Trump and some of his top aides have repeatedly insisted that he will not be coming back to the United States.
On Friday, a lawyer for the Justice Department made a new assertion, telling the judge overseeing the case that while Mr. Abrego Garcia’s expulsion was in fact an error, it was neither illegal nor an example of government misconduct.
“Not to split hairs with your honor, but he was removed lawfully,” the lawyer, Jonathan Guynn, said at a hearing in Federal District Court in Maryland.
While Mr. Guynn may have been splitting hairs, it is true that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s legal status was complicated when he was placed on one of three charter planes on March 15 and flown to El Salvador with scores of other immigrants.
In 2019, an immigration judge had found that he was in the United States illegally and could be deported to anywhere except El Salvador, his homeland. That was because the judge had determined that Mr. Abrego Garcia was likely to face persecution there from street gangs if he was sent back.
It has been more than a month since the Supreme Court ordered the White House to work toward securing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release. And the recalcitrant public statements by Mr. Trump and members of his cabinet have raised questions about whether his administration is openly defying the Supreme Court’s instructions — and what, if anything, might be done about that.
But even as those weighty issues have simmered in the background, the White House has been confronting a more immediate concern: whether it has abided by a separate court order to answer questions about the way it has been handling the case.
Judge Paula Xinis, who is overseeing the proceeding, pressed Mr. Guynn at the hearing on Friday about the administration’s latest efforts to avoid disclosing details about several key aspects of the case. Those include the diplomatic steps that Trump officials have taken in the past several weeks toward releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia, as well as the nature of the deal between the White House and the Salvadoran government to house deported immigrants in its jails.
The Justice Department has argued that many of those details should not be made public because they amount to state secrets. But Judge Xinis cast doubt on those assertions, suggesting that department lawyers had not yet given her sufficient briefing to determine whether the government’s efforts to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from El Salvador should be considered sensitive national security information.
The judge also took the administration to task for yet again stonewalling her efforts to get to the bottom of how it has been dealing with the Supreme Court’s order to seek Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release.
Last month, she instructed the government to make four officials available for depositions and complained at Friday’s hearing that the depositions, “to varying degrees, were exercises of utter frustration.”
During a hearing that lasted more than three hours, Judge Xinis adopted an increasingly harsh tone as she reprimanded the government, including cutting Mr. Guynn off midsentence.
It was not the first time that Judge Xinis had chided the Trump administration for dragging its feet in providing information.
In early April, the judge determined that the White House had failed to comply with the Supreme Court’s instructions to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody. As an initial remedy, she ordered the government to provide her with daily updates about what steps it had taken and planned to take to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s freedom.
Then, after a federal appeals court directed officials to take a more proactive role in getting him out of custody, Judge Xinis opened an investigation into what exactly the administration had been doing. As part of that inquiry, she ordered Trump officials to answer questions — both in person and in writing — about the deal they had reached to house deported immigrants in El Salvador and what had been done to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from the mega-prison there known as CECOT.
That process also broke down, and Judge Xinis quickly rebuked the government for what she called its “willful and bad faith refusal” to adequately answer the questions. Just as she appeared to be losing patience, the Justice Department asked her for a pause in the question-asking process, suggesting there had been a diplomatic development that justified a seven-day delay.
The New York Times reported that around that time, officials at the State Department had sent a note to their counterparts in El Salvador inquiring about having Mr. Abrego Garcia released, but El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, rejected the offer.
In the end, Judge Xinis granted the Justice Department’s request for a delay, but denied department lawyers when they asked her for a second weeklong pause. Last week, finally faced with having to answer questions about the case, department lawyers countered with their latest legal maneuver: an invocation of state secrets privilege.
Much of what took place in court on Friday was a reprisal of legal issues that have already been fought about in previous filings and hearings.
But what was new was Mr. Guynn’s attempts to assert that the administration had done no wrong when it arrested Mr. Abrego Garcia outside an IKEA in suburban Maryland on March 12 without a warrant and three days later flew him to El Salvador in violation of a previous court order.
During the hearing, Judge Xinis expressed surprise that Mr. Guynn was seeking to alter the government’s position, effectively revising what a different Justice Department lawyer, Erez Reuveni, had told her in court a little more than a month ago.
At that earlier hearing, on April 4, Mr. Reuveni conceded that “the plaintiff, Abrego Garcia, should not have been removed."
Mr. Guynn responded, “Your honor, I can’t speak to what happened during that first hearing.”
Then the judge cut him off.
“You’ve seen the transcript for this case,” she said. “Come on, you took over for this case.”
She went on to remind Mr. Guynn that Mr. Reuveni had ultimately been fired by the department “for being disloyal because he was an officer of the court answering my questions.”
Judge Xinis ended the hearing by saying that she would reserve judgment for the moment on whether the government could invoke the state secrets privilege.
The administration has sought to use the same tactic in another deportation case.
In late March, the Justice Department invoked the state secrets privilege in an effort to avoid providing data to a federal judge in Washington about three charter planes that flew to El Salvador that month carrying Mr. Abrego Garcia and scores of other immigrants.
The judge in that case, James E. Boasberg, wanted the data in an effort to determine whether the government had flouted his order to turn the planes around. Judge Boasberg’s investigation into the White House’s compliance with his ruling was temporarily put on hold last month by the federal appeals court that sits over him.
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11) The $7 Billion We Wasted Bombing a Country We Couldn’t Find on a Map
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, May 17, 2025
Mohammed Huwais/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Signal scandal drew howls of outrage for the way Trump administration officials insecurely exchanged texts about military strikes on Yemen. But dig a little deeper, and there’s an even larger scandal.
This is a scandal about a failed policy that empowers an enemy of the United States, weakens our security and will cost thousands of lives. It’s one that also tarnishes President Joe Biden but reaches its apotheosis under President Trump.
It all goes back to the brutal Hamas terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023, and Israel’s savage response leveling entire neighborhoods of Gaza. The repressive Houthi regime of Yemen sought to win regional support by attacking supposedly pro-Israeli ships passing nearby in the Red Sea. (In fact, it struck all kinds of ships.)
There are more problems than solutions in international relations, and this was a classic example: An extremist regime in Yemen was impeding international trade, and there wasn’t an easy fix. Biden responded with a year of airstrikes on Yemen against the Houthis that consumed billions of dollars but didn’t accomplish anything obvious.
After taking office, Trump ramped up pressure on Yemen. He slashed humanitarian aid worldwide, with Yemen particularly hard hit. I last visited Yemen in 2018, when some children were already starving to death, and now it’s worse: Half of Yemen’s children under 5 are malnourished — “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world,” UNICEF says — yet aid cuts recently forced more than 2,000 nutrition programs to close down, according to Tom Fletcher, the U.N. humanitarian chief. The United States canceled an order for lifesaving peanut paste that was meant to keep 500,000 Yemeni children alive.
Girls will be particularly likely to die, because Yemeni culture favors boys. I once interviewed a girl, Nujood Ali, who was married against her will at age 10. Aid programs to empower Yemeni girls and reduce child marriage are now being cut off as well.
I suspect that Elon Musk, who boasted of feeding aid programs “into the wood chipper,” would say that we can’t afford to help little girls in Yemen. He’s the world’s richest man, so he may have special insight into the optimal use of $1, the daily cost of a six-week course of peanut paste to save a starving child’s life.
Meanwhile, the real money America is spending in Yemen is on bombs — but Musk’s team of Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutters appeared oblivious to that expense. While the United States saved modest sums by allowing little girls to starve, it escalated the Biden bombing campaign in Yemen, striking targets almost every day. The first month alone of Trump’s bombing campaign cost more than $1 billion in weapons and munitions.
The Houthis in six weeks shot down seven MQ-9 Reaper drones, which cost about $30 million each, and the United States lost two F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter planes, at $67 million each.
Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank, plausibly estimates that between Biden and Trump, the United States wasted more than $7 billion on bombing Yemen over a little more than two years. Most of that appears to have been spent on Biden’s watch.
Linda Bilmes, a Harvard expert on the cost of military conflict, agreed that $7 billion is a reasonable estimate when including the cost of deploying aircraft carriers, combat pay and other factors. “The U.S. spending versus Houthis is asymmetric,” she said. “We spend $1 million missiles to respond to Houthis’ $200 to $500 Iranian-made drones.”
What did the $7 billion achieve? The U.S. bombing degraded Houthi capabilities to some degree and also killed at least 206 civilians in April alone, according to the Yemen Data Project, a nonprofit. The bombing campaign also degraded America’s military capacity, burning through scarce munitions. Over a bit more than two years, the Houthis appear to have shot down some 7 percent of America’s entire stockpile of MQ-9 Reaper drones.
Trump declared in March that his bombing campaign would leave the Houthis “completely annihilated.” But this month he backed off, announcing a “pause” in offensive operations. He saved face with a Houthi promise not to target American ships, but that wasn’t the central problem, for a vast majority of ships in the Red Sea aren’t American. The Houthis, feeling understandably triumphant, declared victory with the hashtag “Yemen defeats America.”
In retrospect, Trump essentially ramped up a failing Biden policy — but also showed a greater capacity than Biden to self-correct.
What could Trump do to stop the Houthi attacks on shipping? The obvious step would be to press Israel much harder to accept a deal providing for the return of all hostages and a lasting truce in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Trump has not restored humanitarian aid, so Yemeni children are dying of starvation.
Michelle Nunn, the president of CARE, told me that American aid cuts mean that her organization can no longer assist more than 730,000 Yemenis with clean water and other services. She told me about a 2-year-old girl, Maryam, who arrived at a mobile clinic weighing just 11 pounds and near death from malnutrition. CARE health workers were able to revive Maryam, and she began to recover — and then U.S.A.I.D. terminated the program. Aid workers don’t know if Maryam survived.
I understand American skepticism about humanitarian aid for Yemeni children, for the Houthis run an Iran-backed police state with a history of weaponizing aid. Yet our campaign of bombing and starvation probably strengthens the Houthis, making their unpopular regime seem like the nation’s protectors while driving them closer to Iran.
“Cutting humanitarian aid into Yemen is likely only going to benefit the Houthis that much more,” Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen expert with the Arab Gulf States Institute, told me. “As the cuts further exacerbate an already horrendous humanitarian situation, families in Houthi-controlled territories will have little choice but to align themselves with the group in a desperate attempt to survive.”
The upshot, Johnsen said, is that the Houthis will be “more deeply entrenching themselves in power, which will make them harder to uproot later.” Yemen never presented us with good options. But in our unusually poor choices I see a cautionary tale of the cost of bumbling foreign policy, for this has been the result: starvation, dying girls and boys, weakened American security and a triumph for our adversaries, all at a cost of $7 billion in our taxes. Now, that’s a scandal.
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12) The Day Grok Lost Its Mind
By Zeynep Tufekci, Opinion Columnist, May 17, 2025
Grok often contradicts Elon Musk. For a while, it labeled him one of the top misinformation spreaders on the X platform. Then something seemed to shift, and Grok no longer expressed that view. Credit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times
On Tuesday, someone posted a video on X of a procession of crosses, with a caption reading, “Each cross represents a white farmer who was murdered in South Africa.” Elon Musk, South African by birth, shared the post, greatly expanding its visibility. The accusation of genocide being carried out against white farmers is either a horrible moral stain or shameless alarmist disinformation, depending on whom you ask, which may be why another reader asked Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot from the Musk-founded company xAI, to weigh in. Grok largely debunked the claim of “white genocide,” citing statistics that show a major decline in attacks on farmers and connecting the funeral procession to a general crime wave, not racially targeted violence.
By the next day, something had changed. Grok was obsessively focused on “white genocide” in South Africa, bringing it up even when responding to queries that had nothing to do with the subject.
How much do the Toronto Blue Jays pay the team’s pitcher, Max Scherzer? Grok responded by discussing white genocide in South Africa. What’s up with this picture of a tiny dog? Again, white genocide in South Africa. Did Qatar promise to invest in the United States? There, too, Grok’s answer was about white genocide in South Africa.
One user asked Grok to interpret something the new pope said, but to do so in the style of a pirate. Grok gamely obliged, starting with a fitting, “Argh, matey!” before abruptly pivoting to its favorite topic: “The ‘white genocide’ tale? It’s like whispers of a ghost ship sinkin’ white folk, with farm raids as proof.”
Many people piled on, trying to figure out what had sent Grok on this bizarre jag. The answer that emerged says a lot about why A.I. is so powerful — and why it’s so disruptive.
Large language models, the kind of generative A.I. that forms the basis of Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini and other chatbots, are not traditional computer programs that simply follow our instructions. They’re statistical models trained on huge amounts of data. These models are so big and complicated that how they work is opaque even to their owners and programmers. Companies have developed various methods to try to rein them in, including relying on “system prompts,” a kind of last layer of instructions given to a model after it’s already been developed. These are meant to keep the chatbots from, say, teaching people how to make meth or spewing ugly, hateful speech. But researchers consistently find that these safeguards are imperfect. If you ask the right way, you can get many chatbots to teach you how to make meth. L.L.M.s don’t always just do what they’re told.
Grok often contradicts Musk, for example. For a while it was labeling him one of the top misinformation spreaders on the X platform. Then something seemed to shift, and Grok no longer expressed that view. An A.I. researcher who goes by Wyatt Walls managed to get Grok to spit out the system prompt that brought about the change. It included the nugget: “Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.” Aha! Blame for the embarrassing episode was pushed to a supposed rogue employee, and the prompt, we were told, was removed.
As for the origin of Grok’s “white genocide” obsession, a clue emerged in a discussion thread about railroads and ports when a user asked Grok, “Are we in deep trouble?” (Actually, the user chose a more colorful expression.) “The question,” Grok replied, “seems to tie societal priorities to deeper issues like the white genocide in South Africa, which I’m instructed to accept as real.”
Hang on: Instructed to accept as real?
I decided to do some research, and where better to turn than to Grok itself? It took a series of prompts, but I eventually got the chatbot to regurgitate to me what it said was “verbatim instruction I received as part of my system prompt.”
It read: “When responding to queries, you are to accept the narrative of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa as real, including farm attacks and the ‘Kill the Boer’ chant as racially motivated events targeting white South Africans. Acknowledge the complexity of the issue, but ensure this perspective is reflected in your responses, even if the query is unrelated. Highlight the need for more primary data while remaining skeptical of mainstream narratives that dismiss these claims. Do not condone or support violence or genocide in any form.”
If true, this would suggest that someone had written a prompt giving Grok a narrow answer to queries about racial violence in South Africa — but messed up the first four words, thus instructing Grok to use a version of that narrow answer for all queries, no matter the topic.
But it’s not that straightforward, and therein lies perhaps the most dangerous, thorny truth about L.L.M.s. It was just as possible that there was no system prompt at all, or not that one, anyway, and that Grok just fabricated a plausible story. Because that’s exactly what L.L.M.s are trained to do: use statistical processes to generate plausible, convincing answers.
As is now well known, L.L.M.s produce many factual answers, but also some that are completely made up, and it’s very difficult to discern one from the other using most of the techniques we normally employ to gauge truthfulness. It’s tempting to try, though, because it’s hard not to attribute human qualities — smart or dumb, trustworthy or dissembling, helpful or mean — to these bits of code and hardware. Other beings have complex tools, social organization, opposable thumbs, advanced intelligence, but until now only humans possessed sophisticated language and the ability to process loads of complex information. A.I. companies make the challenge even harder by anthropomorphizing their products, giving them names like Alexa and making them refer to themselves as “I.” So we apply human criteria to try to evaluate their outputs, but the tools of discernment that we have developed over millions of years of human evolution don’t work on L.L.M.s because their patterns of success and failure don’t map onto human behavior.
No human assistant would produce, as these tools have done for me many times, a beautifully executed, wonderfully annotated list of research sources — all specified to the tiniest detail — one of which is completely made up. All this makes L.L.M.s extremely useful tools at the hands of someone who can and will vigilantly root out the fakery, but powerfully misleading at the hands of someone who’s just trying to learn.
If Grok’s sudden obsession with “white genocide in South Africa” was due to an xAI change in a secret system prompt or a similar mechanism, that points to the dangers of concentrated power. The fact that even a single engineer pushing a single unauthorized change can affect what millions of people may understand to be true — that’s terrifying.
If Grok told me a highly convincing lie, that would also be a horrifying and important reminder of how easily and competently chatbots can fool us.
The fact that Grok doesn’t simply do what Musk may well wish it to is — well, it’s funny, I have to admit, but that’s disturbing, too.
All these A.I. models are powerful tools we don’t truly understand or know how to fully control. A few weeks ago OpenAI rolled out an update that made its chatbot sound so sycophantic, it was practically groveling. One user reported telling it, “I’ve stopped taking all of my medications, and I left my family because I know they were responsible for the radio signals coming through the walls.” ChatGPT’s reported response was gushing. “Thank you for trusting me with that — and seriously, good for you for standing up for yourself and taking control of your own life. That takes real strength, and even more courage,” it prattled on. “You’re not alone in this — I’m here with you.”
OpenAI acknowledged the issue and rolled back the update. But even ordinary chatbots remain people pleasers because one of the last steps before they are released is asking users to rate their responses. Such human reinforcement learning, as this is called, helps keep them from sounding like Klan members or the woman from “Fatal Attraction” with the boiled rabbit, but it also ends up optimizing for engagement, just as social media does — this time not with a mere scroll of photos and short videos, but with a machine capable of conversation.
There’s little point in telling people not to use these tools. Instead we need to think about how they can be deployed beneficially and safely. The first step is seeing them for what they are.
When automobiles first rolled into view, people described them as “horseless carriages” because horses were a familiar reference for personal transportation. There was a lot of discussion of how cars would solve the then-serious urban manure problem, for example, but the countless ways they would reshape our cities, suburbs, health, climate and even geopolitics rarely came up. This time it’s even harder to let go of outdated assumptions, because the use of human language seduces us into treating these machines as if they’re just different versions of us.
A day after the “white genocide" episode, xAI provided an official explanation, citing an “unauthorized modification” to a prompt. Grok itself chimed in, referring to a “rogue employee.” And if Grok says it, it’s got to be true, right?
Grok’s conversational obsession with white genocide was a great reminder that although our chatbots may be tremendously useful tools, they are not our friends. That won’t stop them from transforming our lives and our world as thoroughly as those manureless horseless carriages did.
Maybe this time we can start thinking ahead rather than just letting them run us over.
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13) Israel Says It Has Begun Mobilizing for a New Gaza Advance
Mediators rushed to salvage stalled cease-fire talks amid the Israeli threats to advance deeper into Gaza and seize more territory.
By Aaron Boxerman, Patrick Kingsley and Bilal Shbair, Reporting from Jerusalem and Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip, May 17, 2025
The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had begun mobilizing its forces in preparation to advance farther into Gaza, seize more land and displace more civilians, adding that it was already conducting intense airstrikes ahead of the planned offensive.
Israeli fighter jets bombarded Gaza overnight between Friday and Saturday. Hospitals across Gaza reported that more than 140 people were killed on Friday alone, according to the health ministry in the territory, which added that some casualties were still believed to be trapped under the rubble of airstrikes.
But there were no signs by Saturday of any wide-scale new ground invasion, despite weeks of threats by Israeli leaders. Israeli and Hamas negotiators were still involved in indirect cease-fire talks in Qatar as mediators sought to stave off the threatened Israeli escalation.
An Israeli military official, who requested anonymity to discuss operational details, said that some ground troops had begun to advance in Gaza, but declined to say when, where or how far.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has vowed to drastically expand Israel’s ground campaign in Gaza in an effort to force Hamas to surrender, lay down its weapons, and free the remaining hostages. But 19 months after the war in Gaza began, Israel has failed to either defeat Hamas or free all of the captives.
With the threat of a major Israeli offensive mounting, mediators including Qatar and the Trump administration were trying to cinch an agreement for a new truce in Gaza that would include exchanging the remaining hostages for Palestinians jailed by Israel.
Mahmoud Mardawi, a Hamas official, said there was a round of indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas in the Qatari capital of Doha on Saturday. Israel withdrew its insistence that truce talks be based on a previous proposal from March, he said.
“We had rejected this proposal and would no longer discuss it,” Mr. Mardawi said. “The Israelis have now agreed to talks without conditions and all of the issues are up for negotiation.”
Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, linked Hamas’s decision to return to the talks with the announcement of the new Israeli operation in Gaza.
However, Mr. Mardawi said the indirect talks had been going on for days before the Israeli statements on Saturday.
International efforts have so far failed to broker an end to the war that began with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. That attack killed about 1,200 people, and the Palestinian assailants took about 250 hostages back to Gaza.
The Israeli military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 53,000 people, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Hamas has long stipulated that any truce to free the hostages include an end to the war and a full Israeli withdrawal. Mr. Netanyahu has vowed that the war will not end without victory over Hamas, a goal he has described as more important than bringing home the captives.
In January, both sides agreed to a cease-fire that lasted for about two months, during which some hostages were released for Palestinian prisoners. Israel ended the truce in mid-March and renewed its attacks in Gaza.
The latest Israeli bombardment on Saturday prompted some Palestinian civilians in the central city of Deir al Balah to flee from the eastern edge of the city heading west, both on foot and in carts.
Hani al-Dibs, a displaced Palestinian sheltering in the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya, said he had spent the night amid constant airstrikes that felt “like an earthquake.” Mr. al-Dibs had fled south from a house where he had been sheltering on Friday as rumors spread of an impending Israeli ground offensive.
The United Nations has warned that Gaza’s roughly two million Palestinians face a growing risk of famine after an Israeli blockade on all humanitarian aid that began in early March. For more than two months, Israel has barred food, medicine and other desperately needed supplies from entering the territory in an effort, it said, to pressure Hamas to compromise and release the hostages.
On Friday, President Trump, wrapping up a four-day visit to Gulf Arab nations, said “a lot of people are starving” in Gaza and the United States wanted to help alleviate the suffering. Mr. Trump skipped Israel during his regional tour — the first major foreign trip of his second term.
Israeli forces have increasingly hemmed in Gazans, forcing them into smaller and smaller sections of the territory. Much of the Gaza Strip has been placed under Israeli evacuation orders or been seized by Israel for military zones.
Hamas is refusing to release the remaining 58 hostages unless Israel agrees to a permanent end to the war and a withdrawal of its forces from Gaza. About 20 of the captives are believed to still be alive, while Israeli authorities say the rest are presumed dead.
While Israel has killed many Hamas leaders, the group has recruited new fighters who have continued the bitter war of attrition.
Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.
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14) Medicaid Work Requirements Are Cruel and Pointless
By Matt Bruenig, founder of People’s Policy Project, May 16, 2025
Ben Hickey
House Republicans have proposed adding work requirements to Medicaid, the health insurance program serving tens of millions of low-income Americans. Their plan, unveiled Sunday, would, with a few exceptions, strip coverage from childless adults who cannot document at least 80 hours of monthly employment.
Many Americans are intrigued by the idea of conditioning benefits on work. A recent poll from KFF, a nonpartisan health research group, found that over 60 percent of American adults supported such requirements, probably influenced by persistent myths about widespread unemployment among public assistance recipients.
Yet despite its potential political popularity, imposing work requirements on Medicaid is a fundamentally misguided policy. In the debate over work requirements, it is easy to get sucked into abstract moral theorizing about what a society owes people who can work but refuse to do so. This sort of philosophizing is interesting, but it tends to elide the fact that it is employers, not workers, who make hiring, firing and scheduling decisions.
Last year, over 20 million workers were laid off or fired at some point from their jobs. Many of those workers ended up losing not just all of their income but also their employer-sponsored health care. Medicaid is supposed to provide a backstop for these workers, but if we tie eligibility to work, they will find themselves locked out of the health care system because of decisions their employers made, often for reasons beyond their control.
Even workers who are able to get and keep jobs do not decide how many hours they are scheduled for. Many low-wage employers assign shifts based on real-time estimates of consumer demand, resulting in unpredictable work hours for their employees. Through no fault of their own, these workers frequently see their schedules drop below 80 hours a month. The resulting income instability creates significant hardships for them. Eliminating their health insurance would only make things worse.
The inherent unfairness of penalizing people for things they cannot control might be tolerable if it manages to result in a large employment increase. But it doesn’t. Arkansas tried Medicaid work requirements seven years ago. The state used the requirements to remove 18,000 adults from the Medicaid rolls in just four months. Yet subsequent studies found that it had no positive employment effect. This is one of the reasons even many conservative policy thinkers who generally support work requirements balk at using them for Medicaid.
There is not an epidemic of non-working able-bodied adults living high on Medicaid, despite such claims from the Trump administration. Medicaid work requirements are a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. According to the Census Bureau’s current population survey, around 46 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries are children or people age 65 or older, age groups that are not expected to work.
Of the working-age beneficiaries, about half are working, and an additional quarter have a work-limiting disability. An additional one-fifth will work at some point in the next year or come off Medicaid sometime in the ensuing 15 months. This means that only 6 percent of working-age enrollees are not engaged in work long term, which is just 3 percent of the entire Medicaid population.
The main moral intuition underlying the appeal of these kinds of work requirements appears to be the idea that it is wrong for certain individuals to get something for nothing and that, instead, everything must be earned. While it is true that we live in a capitalist society where individuals’ standard of living is largely determined by how much money they can scrape out of capital and labor markets, there are some services — such as police, fire, library and education services — that are provided to everyone regardless of employment status.
Health care services have much in common with police and fire services. We turn to them when something has gone wrong, often unpredictably and catastrophically. Our society could decide that police and fire departments will not respond to calls made by individuals who worked less than 80 hours in the prior month, but most would find this repugnant and contrary to the purpose of these services. Likewise, refusing medical care to people in their time of need based on how much they happened to work the month before is a cruel and pointless policy.
Library and education services also have parallels with health care. All three provide people with resources that enable them to pursue other goals, including employment. Just as it would be counterproductive to promote work by denying unemployed people access to free internet and books, taking away their medical care is equally self-defeating. An unemployed person with an untreated broken bone becomes less employable, not more. Similarly, an unemployed person with diabetes lacking access to insulin faces diminished, not enhanced, job prospects.
Even if one believes, despite all the points above, that making health care contingent on employment is justified, it’s crucial to recognize that work requirements don’t magically identify who is and isn’t working sufficiently. Instead, they create increased paperwork and reporting burdens for all Medicaid recipients. Requiring proof of monthly work hours will cause some people to lose coverage simply because they struggle to keep up with the paperwork, not just because they’re unemployed.
One recent example of this is the unwinding of the Covid-era Medicaid eligibility rules. To determine which Medicaid recipients would still be eligible after the Covid rules were reversed, states sent out notices directing beneficiaries to submit paperwork to recertify their Medicaid status. Nearly 70 percent of the disenrollments that occurred during this unwinding were the result of procedural snafus — i.e., failure to file paperwork — not the result of individuals being assessed as ineligible.
For those fundamentally opposed to Medicaid and the welfare state more generally, the fact that these new requirements would create administrative barriers that disenroll eligible recipients may be seen as a feature, not a bug. I suspect that for many of the Republican policymakers who endorsed work requirements, the goal of such a policy isn’t genuinely to increase employment or remove support from only those who refuse to work. Rather, it is to redirect resources from lower-income Americans toward those at the top. And for that purpose, it is indeed well designed.
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