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)Trump to Press South Africa’s President to Pare Back Racial Equity Laws
In a White House meeting, the U.S. president is expected to point to alleged discrimination against white South Africans, a week after welcoming a group of them as refugees.
By Erica L. Green and John Eligon, Reporting from Washington, May 21, 2025
President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in Johannesburg in February. Credit...Kim Ludbrook/EPA, via Shutterstock
President Trump plans to press President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa to roll back the country’s racial equity laws and to do more to protect Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority, in a meeting scheduled at the White House on Wednesday, according to a White House official.
The meeting comes a little more than a week after the Trump administration welcomed a group of white South Africans to the United States as refugees after they claimed they were persecuted in their home country. Tensions between the two countries have ratcheted up over racial issues, as Mr. Trump’s administration has sought to make global his crusade to eradicate policies around diversity and redressing historical inequities.
Among the topics Mr. Trump is likely to raise is the alleged discrimination against Afrikaners, according to the official, who spoke about the meeting on the condition of anonymity. Members of the white minority group, descendants of European colonialists who ruled during apartheid, were among those brought to the United States on a U.S.-funded charter plane.
Mr. Trump has steadily dismantled the country’s refugee system that had provided sanctuary for those fleeing war, famine and natural disasters, but made an exception to accommodate the expedited resettlement of the Afrikaners.
In the White House meeting, Mr. Trump may also press for the South African government to condemn an anti-apartheid chant that called for the killing of Afrikaners, which the governing party, the African National Congress, distanced itself from years ago.
Mr. Trump, who has also amplified false claims of a “genocide” of white farmers, is also expected to ask that the government of South Africa classify farm attacks as a priority crime, the official said. He is expected to request that U.S. companies be exempt from a requirement that foreign-owned entities sell equity in their businesses to Black South Africans or others who were locked out of ownership opportunities during apartheid.
That requirement is at the center of much of the criticism leveled against South Africa by Elon Musk, who has called it racist and blamed it for preventing him from bringing his satellite internet company, Starlink, to his native country.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has taken aggressive actions against South Africa, citing allegations of racial discrimination against the country’s white population.
That included cutting off all foreign aid to South Africa for engaging in what he called “race-based discrimination.” Mr. Trump also expelled South Africa’s ambassador after that official accused him of playing into white grievance in America. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he would skip a Group of 20 foreign ministers meeting in South Africa, in part due to its promotion of what he deemed “D.E.I.,” or diversity, equity and inclusion.
Trump administration officials have argued that laws seeking to combat inequity have hurt white South Africans, and that white people in the United States could be similarly disenfranchised by policies aimed at tackling systemic racism.
Mr. Trump is also likely to discuss with Mr. Ramaphosa the countries’ trade imbalance, and the fact that South Africa’s economy has stagnated. Ultimately, the U.S. wants to argue that the country’s laws dealing with race threaten to collapse its economy, the White House official said.
For his part, Mr. Ramaphosa is expected to try to convince Mr. Trump that the United States has a lot to gain from maintaining close ties with South Africa, the largest economy in Africa. He is expected to present a proposal for a trade deal between the two countries that would include ensuring that the United States gets improved access to South Africa’s wealth of critical minerals that are necessary for producing clean energy technology.
The South African president is also expected to seek a reset in his relationship with Mr. Musk, the Trump ally who is one of South Africa’s loudest critics. The United States is South Africa’s second-largest trading partner, but government officials say that many of their policies that upset Mr. Trump are necessary to undo the racial inequality created during apartheid.
Like many other South Africans, Mr. Ramaphosa appeared to be angered by Mr. Trump’s resettlement program. In the days after the white South Africans left for the United States, Mr. Ramaphosa called their migration a “cowardly” act.
Mr. Trump launched his attacks on South Africa this year after Mr. Ramaphosa signed into law a measure that gives the government the ability to take private property without paying compensation. Although legal experts say uncompensated seizures are subject to strict judicial review and are likely to be rare, Afrikaner community leaders have expressed fears that white farmers will have their land taken from them.
Mr. Trump has been railing against South Africa’s proposed land reforms since 2018. That year, he proclaimed on social media that he had ordered his secretary of state to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.”
Days before Mr. Trump issued his executive order halting aid to the country, Mr. Ramaphosa defended the recently adopted Expropriation Act, writing in a post on X that it was “not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process.” He said he looked forward to explaining the difference to the Trump administration.
Police data doesn’t support claims of targeted killings of white farmers. But Christopher Vandome, a senior research fellow with the Africa program at the think tank Chatham House, noted that such claims spoke to a larger fear among Afrikaners in South Africa.
Mr. Vandome said that much of the friction over the farm deaths and the land bill was part of a “sense of victimhood due to the paranoia of always expecting there to be retribution for what happened in the past.”
The Trump administration, he said, was using “a mix of fact and misinterpretation” in its criticism of South Africa’s laws underpinned by race.
“This is kind of the Trumpian way,” Mr. Vandome said. “You mix these things together, so it makes it very, very hard to engage with.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Edward Wong contributed reporting.
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2) When the U.S. and Israel Bomb the Houthis, Civilians Pay the Highest Price
Military strikes in Yemen and sanctions targeting the Iran-backed militia have compounded a humanitarian crisis in the poorest country in the Middle East, officials say.
By Ismaeel Naar and Saeed Al-Batati, May 21, 2025
Ismaeel Naar reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Saeed Al-Batati from al-Mukalla, Yemen.
A building in Sana, Yemen, damaged by U.S. airstrikes in April. Aid agencies say that the bombing campaigns have caused more harm to civilians than the Houthis. Credit...Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
Mohammed Omar Baghwi was working the evening shift on April 17 at Ras Isa port in Yemen’s northwestern Hudaydah Province when the American military began bombing.
As a manager, Mr. Baghwi, 45, was responsible for a department that filled cooking gas cylinders. He was one of at least 74 people killed during the strike, making it one of the deadliest attacks by the United States on Yemen.
U.S. Central Command said it had attacked the port to “degrade the economic source of power” of the Iran-backed Houthi militant group based in northern Yemen, which controls most of the country. But Mr. Baghwi’s family said he had been just a civilian trying to make ends meet.
“Mohammed and his companions had done nothing wrong,” said Hassan Omar Baghwi, his brother. “They were simply doing their job to earn a living for themselves and their families under extremely difficult living conditions.”
The Houthis have been firing drone and missile strikes at Israel in solidarity with Hamas after it led an attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and to pressure Israel over its campaign in Gaza. The Houthis have also targeted commercial ships in the Red Sea, a vital trade route.
Those attacks have prompted retaliatory strikes from the United States and Israel, which, for the past two months, have regularly bombed Yemen. The American and Israeli governments say the strikes were focused on Houthi leaders and assets, but they have also killed many civilians, destroyed vital infrastructure and deepened uncertainty in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East.
Before President Trump announced this month that the United States had reached a cease-fire with the militia, his administration had said its main goal was to restore navigation in the Red Sea. When he announced the cease-fire, Mr. Trump said the Houthis had “capitulated.”
The Houthis have continued to attack Israel, however, launching missiles that have landed near Ben Gurion Airport, close to Tel Aviv, setting off sirens and sending millions of civilians into bomb shelters. Israel has responded with more strikes, and the two sides show little sign of stopping their tit-for-tat attacks.
Analysts say the strikes will only add to the misery for Yemeni civilians, the vast majority of whom live in Houthi-controlled territory and had already experienced decades of war before the U.S. and Israeli attacks. The Houthis oppose the United States and Israel, and see themselves as part of the Iranian-led “axis of resistance,” alongside Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But despite the months of strikes, some analysts and officials have questioned whether the U.S. and Israeli efforts have degraded the Houthis’ military capability. The Trump administration has launched more than 1,000 strikes costing billions of dollars and destroying Houthi weapons and equipment. But U.S. intelligence agencies have said the group could easily reconstitute.
“The strikes have already triggered a fuel crisis, which will drive up the cost of basic goods and services in a country where most of the population are struggling to afford food,” said Nadwa al-Dawsari, an analyst focused on Yemen at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
“Even if their operations slow temporarily, they’ll regroup, rebuild and return stronger,” she added.
Civilians and aid workers say the bombing campaigns have compounded an already dire humanitarian situation.
In 2014, the Houthis seized on a period of political instability to take over the country’s capital, Sana. A Saudi-led military coalition backed by U.S. assistance and weapons began a bombing campaign in 2015 to try to restore the internationally recognized government. The coalition enforced a de facto naval and air blockade that restricted the flow of food and other goods into Houthi-held territory. The intervention failed, leaving the Houthis in power in the north of the country. The subsequent civil war has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians and caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
In a briefing to the United Nations Security Council last week, humanitarian officials warned that Yemen still faced serious challenges. “Half of Yemen’s children — or 2.3 million — are malnourished, 600,000 of them severely so,” said Tom Fletcher, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief. He added that 2,000 nutrition programs had been forced to shut down.
Israeli airstrikes on Yemeni cities this month, including on the international airport, caused nearly $500 million in damage, according to the airport’s director, and flights were suspended for more than a week. Israel said the attack had been in retaliation for a Houthi missile strike near Ben Gurion Airport.
But the airport in Sana is mainly used for civilian travel and is one of the few ways Yemenis can get access to emergency medical treatment overseas.
Waseem al-Haidari, a 42-year-old government employee in Sana, said past closures of the airport because of airstrikes had caused painful financial and emotional hardship on families like his when emergency medical treatment is needed.
“Our family sold valuable belongings and borrowed additional money to cover my brother’s trip through Aden Airport to Cairo for a cornea transplant,” he said. Critically ill patients in Yemen are left with no choice but to endure a grueling 24-hour road journey to Aden or Seiyun, in the south of Yemen, to seek medical evacuation abroad.
The western port city of Hudaydah, which the Israeli military says is a critical supply route for the Houthis, has borne the brunt of U.S. and Israeli strikes over the past year. Many of its ports and roads, which are lifelines for food and medicine entering the country, are in ruins.
Even residents in southern areas of the country that are run by the internationally recognized Yemeni government say they were being affected, even if they are not in an area that has been regularly bombed.
Saleh Ramadan, 49, lives in a dilapidated home in the southern city of al-Mukalla, where his children sleep in a dimly lit room. There is no furniture, no table for meals, no cupboards to store clothes.
“In the past, we could buy meat and chicken, even celebrate Eid with meat and new clothes,” he said, referring the Islamic festival celebrated at the end of Ramadan. Now, he said, his family often skips meals.
Mr. Ramadan’s eldest son, Mohammed, 20, dropped out of school to help his father deliver cooking gas. When the children get sick, the family relies mostly on herbal remedies because it cannot get medicine, which has become too expensive or is in short supply.
Mr. Trump’s decision to slash overall U.S. aid spending has made matters worse. Aid agencies have had to scale back food distribution, and the United Nations’ World Food Program has warned that without new funding, programs for malnourished children under 5 could stop as early as this month.
The Trump administration’s decision to re-designate the Houthis as a terrorist group has also complicated efforts to deliver humanitarian aid, as international banks fear contravening U.S. sanctions and are hesitant about processing transactions involving Yemen. Donor fatigue and geopolitical tensions have made securing aid even more challenging.
The costs of food and transportation have soared, and the U.N.’s humanitarian office has reported that many families now spend up to 60 percent of their income on food alone.
For Sara Mohammed, a widowed mother of three living in al-Mukalla, the struggle has been relentless. Living in a makeshift home with her mentally ill mother and blind father, she said the family relied on her sister’s income as a domestic worker and their father’s modest pension.
“We can’t afford food,” she said. “My sister dropped out of college to work two shifts. She has heart problems but can’t afford medical treatment. My kids eat boiled rice. We survive on faith.”
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3) Israel Said It Eased Its Blockade, But Gazans Are Still Waiting for Food
Three days after Israel said it would ease its blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, little, if any, of the desperately needed food, fuel and medicine appeared to have reached Palestinians.
By Aaron Boxerman, Bilal Shbair and Iyad Abuheweila, May 21, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, Bilal Shbair from central Gaza, and Iyad Abuheweila from Istanbul.
For Abdelhalim Awad, who runs a bakery in central Gaza, the hope of food arriving for hungry Gazans has become like the endless reports of an approaching cease-fire: constantly rumored to be just around the corner yet always out of reach.
Three days after Israel announced that it would ease its blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, it appeared on Wednesday that little, if any, of the desperately needed food, fuel and medicine had reached hungry Palestinians.
Dozens of trucks ferrying supplies have crossed into Gaza at the Israeli-controlled border crossing of Kerem Shalom, according to Israel. But the United Nations has so far been unable to move any trucks from Kerem Shalom to warehouses inside Gaza, according to two U.N. officials, who requested anonymity to share sensitive details.
Stephane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, said on Tuesday that U.N. teams had waited for several hours for Israeli permission to head to the crossing. But they were unable to “secure the arrival” of those supplies to aid warehouses, he said at a news conference.
Mr. Awad said he and others had been informed by the United Nations that some shipments of flour might arrive on Wednesday. But even if they did, it would only be a dent the daily hunger that became widespread in Gaza under the Israeli blockade.
“Even if we get some flour today, it seems we won’t have anything close to what’s needed to feed people,” Mr. Awad said.
In the meantime, Palestinians reeling from Israel’s two-month ban on food, fuel and other supplies have been left waiting. The delays suggested that distributing aid across Gaza was likely to take time, even as Israel threatens a major ground offensive that could upend the process.
“Today we will mostly eat lentils, or pasta,” Riyadh al-Housari, a 25-year-old in Gaza City, said in a phone interview. “We eat one meal in the late afternoon. It is one meal and there is no other.”
Israel’s blockade has rendered the situation so dire that Gazans are at “critical risk of famine,” a panel of U.N.-backed experts said this month. They projected that tens of thousands of children could suffer from acute malnutrition if the restrictions continued. Israel argued the report was based on faulty data and assumptions.
The worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza has ignited growing international opprobrium against the Israeli campaign against Hamas. Even Israel’s allies — who offered vigorous support after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks started the war — have voiced frustration and even anger over the conflict and its cost to ordinary Palestinians.
This week Britain, France, and Canada denounced the Israeli blockade and planned ground offensive in unusually stark and harsh terms, labeling them “disproportionate” and “egregious.” On Tuesday, the British government said it was suspending negotiations on expanding the countries’ free-trade agreement in protest.
On Wednesday, the newly anointed pope, Leo XIV, joined the chorus calling for aid to be allowed into the Gaza Strip. He described the situation as “increasingly worrying and painful” and urged “the entry of dignified humanitarian aid and to put an end to the hostilities.”
The Israeli ban on humanitarian aid began in early March, as the initial phase of a two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas ended. Both sides were supposed to be negotiating the next steps in the truce. Israeli officials argued the restrictions aimed to pressure Hamas to compromise.
The impact on ordinary Gazans was immense: Aid organizations suspended their operations as food stockpiles dwindled, and the price of food skyrocketed. In late March, Israel ended the truce with a massive bombardment and resumed its offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
By this month relief officials were warning that widespread hunger had become a daily reality. But for weeks, Israel refused to allow aid agencies to resume operations unless they agreed to new Israeli conditions, purportedly to prevent supplies from falling into Hamas’s hands.
Israeli leaders publicly insisted that Gaza still had plentiful stockpiles of food. But behind closed doors, some military officials privately concluded that Palestinians there could face starvation within weeks.
Even the United States — one of Israel’s most stalwart supporters throughout the conflict — began suggesting that the humanitarian crisis was spiraling out of control. Last week, President Trump said that “a lot of people are starving” in the Gaza Strip and that the United States was working to alleviate the situation.
The Israeli authorities relented on Sunday night, announcing that they would begin allowing in small amounts of food.
Without any new aid having actually arrived, many in Gaza are trying to make whatever provisions they have last as long as possible. “We don’t plan meals anymore,” said Sabah ِAbu al-Roos, 63, in the central city of Deir al-Balah. “We just work with whatever we can find.”
Produce like eggplants and tomatoes is often hawked at eye-watering prices, according to several Gazans. Ms. Abu al-Roos said that one vendor in a local street market had been selling a single onion for $8.50.
Iman Jundiyeh, a mother of four in Gaza City, said she could only dream of the regular meals she used to enjoy before the war: fragrant sliced lamb; chicken, potatoes and rice; and maftoul, a kind of Palestinian couscous.
She now relies almost exclusively on soup kitchens run by charities that still manage to stew pots of lentils and other staples for crowds of displaced Palestinians. Everything else is either unavailable or too expensive, she said.
“Just yesterday, my son begged me for watermelon,” said Ms. Jundiyeh. “I started to cry with him.”
Ameera Harouda and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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4) What to Know About Israel’s Expanding Offensive in Gaza
The announcement of an escalation in the war came after a particularly deadly week for Palestinians in Gaza. Some of Israel’s allies denounced the move.
By Aaron Boxerman and Samuel Granados, Published May 19, 2025, Updated May 21, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem
“The military said it would dissect Gaza into separate zones while ordering Palestinian civilians to leave combat areas.”
Searching for victims after an airstrike in Jabaliya in northern Gaza on Thursday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israel declared this week that it was expanding its ground offensive in Gaza, vowing to seize large areas of the enclave in an effort to force the surrender of Hamas after more than 19 months of war.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Monday that Israeli troops could effectively take control of all of Gaza as part of the offensive, which could take place gradually and in stages.
The threat came during a new and intense round of cease-fire negotiations and as the Trump administration presses both sides to agree to a truce. The Israeli military has said that Hamas could halt the advance by releasing the hostages it holds.
Britain, France, and Canada issued a rare public reprimand of Israel this week, demanding that it cease its widening military offensive in Gaza. That laid bare growing rifts between Israel and its traditional Western allies and prompted a furious Israeli response.
The announcements of new military maneuvers could also be a negotiating ploy to pressure Hamas to make compromises.
The past few days have been especially deadly for Palestinians in Gaza. The enclave has been devastated by the war and a total blockade on aid for more than two months, which has put the population at risk of starvation.
How far have Israeli troops advanced?
For weeks, Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have been threatening a massive escalation in Gaza unless Hamas agreed to Israel’s terms for a truce.
Then on Sunday, Israel announced that its forces had launched “extensive ground operations” throughout the enclave, saying that soldiers from five divisions were participating in the renewed offensive.
The military said it would dissect Gaza into separate zones while ordering Palestinian civilians to leave combat areas.
But details about the renewed offensive and Israeli troop movements were scarce. And despite escalating its rhetoric, the Israeli military on Monday had yet to begin the long-awaited major advance, which could involve thousands of ground troops.
Satellite images taken on May 20 and analyzed by The New York Times show Israeli military activity since a week ago across several locations near Israel’s border with Gaza, including in the northern part of the enclave and near the southern city of Khan Younis.
The military has also been active further south in Rafah, where satellite images show it has destroyed extensive parts of the city since the cease-fire collapsed in mid-March.
Effie Defrin, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said at a news conference on Sunday that the military was being intentionally ambiguous about its movements to protect its forces.
How many people have been killed?
Before announcing the renewed ground offensive, Israel had started ratcheting up its bombardment of Gaza. Israeli strikes have killed more than 400 people since last Thursday, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had struck more than 670 targets across the enclave over the past week. People in Gaza have described near-constant explosions and the howls of fighter jets overhead.
One recent attack hit around the European Hospital near the southern city of Khan Younis. Israeli officials said the strike was an effort to kill Muhammad Sinwar, one of Hamas’s remaining top commanders in Gaza; neither Israel nor Hamas has publicly confirmed his fate.
The Israeli military says it takes measures to avoid harming civilians, such as using “precise munitions” and warning ahead of some strikes.
More than 53,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Hamas set off the conflict with a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 people and saw 250 taken as hostages to Gaza.
Is any aid getting into Gaza?
After barring all humanitarian aid from entering the enclave for more than two months, the Israeli government announced on Sunday night that it would allow “a basic amount of food” into Gaza.
On Monday, Israel allowed at least five aid trucks to enter, according to the Israeli military office that oversees humanitarian affairs. Tom Fletcher, the U.N.’s top aid coordinator, welcomed the move but called it a “drop in the ocean of what is urgently needed.”
The blockade has caused widespread hunger and deprivation among Palestinians in Gaza. Aid organizations suspended their operations as food stockpiles dwindled. Doctors reported malnutrition among children, and the United Nations recently warned that people across the enclave were at risk of famine.
Israeli officials had said the blockade was an attempt to force Hamas to surrender and release the remaining hostages held in Gaza, dozens of whom are presumed dead.
For weeks, Israel publicly insisted that Gaza was well-provisioned. But Israeli officials privately began to assess that unless some aid was allowed into the enclave, Palestinians there could face starvation.
In recent days, the Trump administration — Israel’s main foreign backer — joined a long list of foreign governments to warn of starvation in Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement that the resumption of aid was a response to such criticism and an attempt to sustain foreign backing for Israel’s campaign.
If Gazans were to starve, the international community “won’t support us, and we won’t be able to complete our victory,” he said.
How are Palestinians in Gaza responding?
The vast majority of Gaza’s roughly two million residents have already been forcibly displaced at least once — many of them several times — during the war.
Even before the Israeli military’s announcement on Sunday, Palestinians had started fleeing their homes to seek shelter away from the Israeli lines. On Monday, Israel ordered sweeping evacuation orders in and around the southern city of Khan Younis.
Suzanne Abu Daqqa, who lives in Abasan, outside of Khan Younis, said Sunday that what she feared most of all was being forced to leave her home again for a tent camp along the enclave’s sweltering coastline.
“If they tell us ‘leave' — that will be a great catastrophe,” she said in a phone call.
The following day, Israel’s military warned residents of Abasan to flee or face “an unprecedented attack.”
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.
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5) Republicans Pass Strictest Medicaid Work Requirement They’ve Ever Put Forward
A new hurdle for poor Americans, approved by the House, would cause millions to lose coverage, including many who are working but can’t meet reporting rules.
By Margot Sanger-Katz and Sarah Kliff, May 22, 2025
The reporters have covered Medicaid since before the program was expanded as part of the Affordable Care Act.
“Those who support Medicaid work requirements say the policy is about more than money. Some, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, say the requirement will encourage more poor Americans to contribute to society.”
Protesters shouted “Shame” at lawmakers early Thursday morning after the House passed a bill that included a stringent work requirement for Medicaid. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Among the spending cuts proposed in House Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” is a policy they have sought to enact for a decade: a requirement that Medicaid recipients provide proof of employment as a condition of receiving health insurance.
Republicans have repeatedly tried and failed to enact such rules. They proposed laws that didn’t pass, and attempted state-level experiments that were blocked in court.
The work requirement in the bill that just passed the House represents the strictest version Republicans in Congress have ever put forward. The reporting requirements are more stringent than in previous bills. It would be easier to lose benefits, and harder to re-enroll. And it would apply to a larger set of Medicaid recipients, including Americans previously determined to be too old to need such requirements.
The legislation, which President Trump supports, still needs to pass the Senate, where Republican members are supportive of work requirements but where a few have expressed reservations about large Medicaid cuts.
Republican leadership has described the policy as combating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” President Trump has said no one will lose health insurance under the legislation. But experts say it would leave millions uninsured.
While House Republicans fought fiercely among themselves over other Medicaid cuts, like dialing back funding for the Obamacare expansion, they have universally embraced work requirements. The policy is popular with the public, too: Recent polling finds that 60 percent of Americans and even 47 percent of Democrats support the idea.
But by designing the work requirement proposal to be so rigid, the change could be just as transformative to the program as other large cuts that Republicans rejected. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this and other Medicaid changes in an earlier version of the bill would cause 7.6 million people to become uninsured. Most of the people expected to lose coverage would be eligible for the program but unable to prove it under the law’s strict paperwork standard.
The C.B.O. estimates that the work requirement would save the federal government $280 billion over six years, about triple what the nonpartisan budget office had estimated earlier Republican plans would cut. All of those savings, which would help pay for President Trump’s tax cuts, are expected to come from fewer people having Medicaid.
“What this is really about is producing budget savings,” said Benjamin Sommers, a professor of health policy at Harvard who has studied Medicaid work requirements. “This is not savings through improved efficiency, or more people going to work. It’s savings by kicking people out of the program who are mostly eligible.”
The current proposal would require childless adults without disabilities who want Medicaid coverage to prove that they had worked, volunteered or attended school for 80 hours in the month before enrollment. But states could require that people work six months or even a year before becoming eligible for public benefits.
Those who fail to meet the work requirement would also be blocked from receiving subsidies for private plans sold on the Obamacare marketplace, another new restriction in this version of the Republican plan. The legislation is unclear on how long the prohibition would last.
The law includes a series of possible exceptions — such as having a substance abuse disorder or caring for a sick family member — but does not detail how people will qualify or how frequently they will need to do so to remain covered. States could lose Medicaid funding if they fail to stop covering people who do not document their eligibility.
Older versions of Medicaid work requirements were somewhat more flexible, although they still came under intense opposition from Democrats. The plan that congressional Republicans came up with in 2023, for example, allowed poor people to prove they were working after they signed up for Medicaid, and exempted those older than 55.
Those who support Medicaid work requirements say the policy is about more than money. Some, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, say the requirement will encourage more poor Americans to contribute to society.
“You return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day,” he told reporters last month. The budget office, however, has said that these policies do not increase employment.
Others believe that asking people to take some effort in exchange for public benefits builds trust in the programs.
“It’s reasonable to have a work requirement because it sends an important message,” said Kevin Corinth, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “If you’re not going to comply, that suggests you don’t value the insurance and it’s maybe not worth the government spending those extra dollars.”
Mr. Corinth, who worked for President Trump during his first administration, did concede that there could be health effects, pointing in particular to a sweeping academic study from earlier this month finding that Medicaid saves lives.
The federal government already has work requirements as part of its food assistance and welfare systems. Those programs boost the incomes of poor Americans, potentially making it easier for them to get by while working less.
Opponents of Medicaid work requirements contend it’s a fundamentally different program because it does not provide cash benefits to individuals.
They also note that most Medicaid enrollees are already working, in school or too sick to be employed, as several studies have found. While Speaker Johnson has highlighted young men as a group that a work requirement could “get off the couch,” unemployed Medicaid enrollees are more likely to be older women.
In the first Trump administration, a couple of states were allowed to test work requirements. They now offer a preview of what a national work requirement could mean for poor Americans’ coverage.
Arkansas put in a work requirement in 2018 for people enrolled in the Medicaid expansion. It allowed beneficiaries to miss three months of reporting before losing coverage. The state also went to great lengths to automatically exempt people when it had the necessary payroll or medical data to do so. Research from Mr. Sommers found that the Arkansas plan still led to lost coverage for 18,000 people, without increasing the number of poor Arkansas residents who worked. Most people who lost coverage simply didn’t know about the rule or didn’t understand how to comply.
In 2019, Georgia gained approval to start a different work requirement program that required proof of work to sign up, a design similar to the congressional proposal. Unlike Arkansas, Georgia had not expanded Medicaid, so the plan did not cause any insured people to lose coverage. The program began in 2023, and the state has spent more than $30 million to manage it. But only 7,000 people have enrolled, falling significantly short of the 100,000 enrollees Georgia officials had thought could sign up.
Cynthia Gibson works for Georgia Legal Services Program, a nonprofit that helps Georgians appeal their Medicaid denials. She has seen numerous cases in which an application should have been approved but wasn’t, including those where the state took too long to process the application and the work information was out of date.
“When you add different layers and more red tape, people will get kicked off and denied even when they meet the eligibility requirements,” she said.
Both states made large investments to help manage the data and paperwork involved in administering the work requirement. The Republican bill sets aside $100 million to help all 50 states get ready.
The legislation originally gave states four years to prepare, with work requirements beginning in 2029, just after the next presidential election. Mr. Johnson defended the delay on Fox News last week, saying that states needed time to “retool their systems.” But more conservative lawmakers have fought hard to move up the start date. The current version of the bill would require states to set up their systems by the end of 2026.
“The idea they’re going to be able to stand up these fairly complicated systems to implement a work requirement seems unlikely, unless they do it in ways that just basically put all of the burdens on individuals,” said Pamela Herd, a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan, who has co-written a book about how administrative burdens affect participation in government programs. “If they implement it poorly, they’re just going to end up kicking tons of people off the program.”
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6) The Profound Inhumanity of ICE Raids
By Margaret Renkl, May 22, 2025
Ms. Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, reports from Nashville on flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.
Madison Thorn
If you’re ever booked into a Davidson County, Tenn., jail — no matter how minor the misdemeanor, no matter if your case is later dismissed — the jail’s booking system automatically sends your arrest information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Under a state law passed in 2024, local law enforcement agencies here are obliged to honor any resulting detention requests for 48 hours beyond normal release time.
A system that delivers the same penalty for committing a violent crime and for driving with a broken taillight is inherently unjust. But this system was at least built to detain only people accused of breaking the law. And that is a very different thing from the wide, seemingly race-based net that ICE has been throwing in Nashville this month. “They have been hunting us,” said Luis Sura, the president of Better Options TN, an immigrant-assistance nonprofit in Franklin.
The hunt started on May 3, when ICE agents joined forces with the Tennessee Highway Patrol and began to pull over drivers in the largely immigrant corridors of South Nashville. In one neighborhood alone, during a single shift, patrol officers made “about five times more stops than the highway patrol makes in all of Davidson County on an average day,” State Senator Jeff Yarbro, a Democrat, said in a statement. “They were basically pulling someone new over every two minutes. That’s not a ‘public safety operation.’”
The historical echoes here are particularly acute to someone like me, a white person born in the Jim Crow South, one who lives in a city the Trail of Tears once ran through.
I was grateful to learn, at least, that Nashville’s Metro Police was not involved in the ICE arrests. “What’s clear today is that people who do not share our values of safety and community have the authority to cause deep community harm,” Nashville’s mayor, Freddie O’Connell, said at a May 5 news conference.
Tennessee is a deeply red state — blood red, fire ant red — but in this blue city, where only 35 percent of voters supported Donald Trump in November, we recognize the contributions of a vast majority of our immigrant neighbors. We understand all too well that the Trump administration, aided by the willing cooperation of red-state officials, is targeting even immigrants who entered the country through legal mechanisms.
As the ICE arrests in Nashville continued over the following week, it became increasingly clear that neither justice nor public safety is what these roundups were primarily designed to deliver.
The sweeps have upended life in this city. But the community has stepped up, to the extent that the law allows, with both information and financial help. The Tennessee Immigrants and Refugee Rights Coalition is posting frequently on social media, explaining the rights that immigrants have under U.S. law and the best way to respond when encountering ICE agents. The American Muslim Advisory Council and Tennessee Justice for Our Neighbors offered a rights workshop for immigrants planning to travel. The Southern Christian Coalition provided bystander training in the best ways to help when witnessing ICE encounters. In partnership with the city, the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee established the Belonging Fund to support nonprofits that offer emergency assistance to families affected by the sweeps.
In only four months, the terrible travesties of justice and the failures of basic decency being wrought by this administration and by the failure of Congress to check its destruction have become nearly uncountable. But the inhumanity of these immigration sweeps — the brutal glee of rounding up human beings, people who live and work in our midst — is what brings me closest to irrecoverable despair.
Surely any human being can imagine what it’s like to be waiting for a loved one who does not come home. Any one of us can feel the unfairness of being carted away without due process. It would take an act of sheer will to ignore the human beings — so critical to the working of the country, so deeply integrated into our communities — that ICE is sweeping up. They may be undocumented, but they are not invisible.
“The most ubiquitous immigrants are also the least valued,” wrote Renata Soto, the founder and president of Mosaic Changemakers, in a guest column for Nashville Business Journal. These are the people who grow and harvest and process the food we buy, the people who wash dishes in the restaurants where we eat and stock the shelves in the stores where we shop, the people who cut the grass at the buildings where we work and who clean those buildings after we have gone home. They are the hardworking people who built those buildings, too, foundation crew by framing crew by roofing crew by drywall crew by carpentry crew by painting crew.
And yet our president refers to them as inhuman. “No, they’re not humans. They’re not humans. They’re animals,” Mr. Trump said in an interview last year.
We know something about that kind of evil here in the South. White Southerners kept Black human beings enslaved for centuries. We expelled the First Peoples from their lands, most famously on the Trail of Tears. We responded to the civil rights movement with police dogs and fire hoses and billy sticks and guns.
It isn’t necessary to know the history of slavery, the Trail of Tears or white resistance to civil rights to understand the deep injustice of what ICE is doing. That reality may finally be getting to Americans. The far right is working hard to rewrite history, but most of us still know cruelty when we see it. And we cannot let cruelty stand.
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7) Trump Casts Himself as a Protector of Persecuted White People
President Trump publicly dressed down the president of South Africa based on a fringe conspiracy theory, providing a vivid distillation of his views on race.
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Published May 21, 2025, Updated May 22, 2025
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent. He reported from Washington.
President Donald Trump met President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in the Oval Office on Wednesday. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
In the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump positioned himself as the savior of white South Africans.
Sitting alongside Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, Mr. Trump said white people were “being executed.” He referred over and over again to “dead white people.” He dressed down Mr. Ramaphosa, who helped his country cast off the racist policies of apartheid, and questioned why he was not doing more when white people were being killed.
“I don’t know how you explain that,” Mr. Trump said. “How do you explain that?”
The American president was not much interested in the answer, which is that police statistics do not show that white people are more vulnerable to violent crime than other people in South Africa.
The confrontation provided a vivid demonstration of Mr. Trump’s views on race, which have animated his political life going back years. After rising to power in part by framing himself as a protector of white America, Mr. Trump has used his platform, in this case the Oval Office, to elevate claims of white grievance.
For Mr. Trump, white people are the true victims; Black people and minorities have received an unfair advantage in the United States. And when Mr. Trump looks to South Africa, a majority-Black country emerging from a legacy of apartheid and colonialism, he sees white people who need sanctuary in the United States.
Invoking the teachings of his old mentor, Nelson Mandela, Mr. Ramaphosa pleaded for civility in the dialogue between the two leaders.
Mr. Trump shrugged and turned to grab a pile of news articles that he claimed affirmed his views of the mass killing of white people. He even had an aide dim the lights in the Oval Office so he could put on a video purporting to show burial sites of murdered white farmers (it did not).
Mr. Trump was clearly more interested in hearing from the white South African golfers on hand for the event than from Mr. Ramaphosa, who gently tried to correct the record.
“There is criminality in our country — people who do get killed, unfortunately, through criminal activity are not only white people, majority of them are Black people,” Mr. Ramaphosa said.
Mr. Trump scowled when one of Mr. Ramaphosa’s aides, a Black woman, tried to explain that brutal crimes in general are a problem in South Africa.
Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., said Mr. Trump’s remarks in the Oval Office were “extremely biased and racist.”
“It was a sickening display of propaganda that’s dangerous and consistent of his narrative, whether it’s domestically or globally,” Mr. Johnson said.
Mr. Johnson said Mr. Trump had a worldview “where he can only see him and people that resemble him.”
Mr. Trump has faced blowback for his positions on race in the past, particularly his position on the “Central Park Five,” the five Black and Latino men who as teenagers were wrongly convicted of the rape of a jogger in New York City in 1989.
He took out newspaper advertisements back then calling for New York State to adopt the death penalty after the attack. In recent years, Mr. Trump has refused to apologize about that.
Now, Mr. Trump is making efforts to purge the federal government — and even American culture — of anything he deems “woke” or promoting diversity.
This week, the Trump administration said it would open a civil rights investigation into the city of Chicago to see whether its mayor, who is Black, engaged in a pattern of discrimination by hiring a number of Black people to senior positions.
The administration said on Wednesday that it planned to drop efforts to investigate or oversee nearly two dozen police departments accused of civil rights violations after a series of episodes of police violence against Black people. Mr. Trump has also shuttered programs designed to improve diversity in the federal government, pressured private companies and threatened universities that prioritize diversity in hiring.
Standing behind the White House lectern in January, Mr. Trump asserted without evidence that diversity efforts at the Federal Aviation Administration had resulted in an incompetent work force and a deadly plane crash in Washington.
The meeting with Mr. Ramaphosa came after Mr. Trump created an exception to his refugee ban for Afrikaners, the white ethnic minority in South Africa that led the apartheid government.
Mr. Trump’s claims of mass killings of white South Africans are a common talking point among white supremacists and a fringe theory that has been circulating since the end of apartheid in 1994. But they were particularly striking as he made them while sitting in the White House alongside Mr. Ramaphosa, who grew up under apartheid.
Mr. Trump also falsely accused the South African government of confiscating land, pointing to a law that South Africa enacted allowing the government to take private land in the public interest, sometimes without providing compensation.
The law has not yet been used to seize any land, but some white South Africans — and Mr. Trump — say it unfairly targets farmers, who remain mostly white decades after apartheid policies.
“They’re being executed,” Mr. Trump said after Mr. Ramaphosa tried to change the subject to areas of potential cooperation between the two nations. “And they happen to be white and most of them happen to be farmers.”
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8) Mahmoud Khalil Meets Infant Son Before Immigration Hearing
The activist, who has been detained in Louisiana for two months, was allowed to meet privately with his wife and baby. He is fighting deportation.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, May 22, 2025
Dr. Noor Abdalla gave birth to Deen while her husband was being held in a detention facility in Louisiana. Credit...Angelina Katsanis/Reuters
Mahmoud Khalil met his month-old son for the first time on Thursday morning, hours before an immigration court hearing in which his lawyers will seek to convince a judge that he would be in mortal danger if deported.
Trump administration officials were initially reluctant to allow Mr. Khalil, who has been detained in Louisiana for two months, to meet privately with his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, and the baby, Deen. They said that other detainees were not allowed such visits, and that it would be unsafe to allow Dr. Abdalla and the baby into a secured part of the facility.
But after hours of negotiation Wednesday evening the officials relented, paving the way for a family meeting before Mr. Khalil’s immigration hearing Thursday morning.
Mr. Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and one of the leading figures in pro-Palestinian protests at the school, was arrested in March and quickly transported to Jena, La. Though he is a legal permanent resident, the Trump administration is seeking to deport him, arguing that his presence in the United States helps spread antisemitism.
Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have cited instances in which their client has spoken out explicitly against antisemitism; they say his monthslong detention is retaliation for pro-Palestinian speech.
Mr. Khalil’s case is playing out in two courtrooms thousands of miles from each other, in Louisiana and Newark.
The hearing on Thursday is taking place in immigration court in Jena. The judge there, Jamee Comans, has found that the government has met its burden to deport Mr. Khalil. But Mr. Khalil’s lawyers on Thursday will have a chance to argue that she should nonetheless let him stay, given the danger he might face were he to be deported, likely to Syria or Algeria.
“Given the government’s false claims that Mahmoud is antisemitic, and that he is pro-Hamas and that he is a ‘terrorist,’ he is at risk of harm anywhere in the world,” said a lawyer for Mr. Khalil, Johnny Sinodis, at a news conference before the hearing.
The lawyers are also seeking to end the proceeding altogether, arguing that Mr. Khalil was arrested without a warrant. In response, administration officials have argued that in March, when Mr. Khalil was arrested, he was attempting to flee, justifying a warrantless arrest. Video footage of the encounter shows no such attempt.
Mr. Khalil was the first of several pro-Palestinian protesters to be arrested, setting off concerns about free speech and due process during the second Trump administration.
Those concerns are being considered in New Jersey by a federal district judge, Michael E. Farbiarz. While other protesters have been released on bail, Judge Farbiarz has not yet decided whether Mr. Khalil can go free.
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9) Aid Deliveries Begin to Reach Gazans After Days of Delays
The U.N. said about 90 truckloads of supplies had begun to arrive at warehouses and other sites in the devastated territory. It was the first significant influx after a two-month Israeli blockade.
By Aaron Boxerman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Reporting from Jerusalem and Haifa, Israel, May 22, 2025
“In a televised news conference on Wednesday night, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, vowed once again to escalate the war imminently unless Hamas agreed to Israel’s conditions for a cease-fire. Palestinians would be evacuated to a ‘sterile zone’ that would be ‘Hamas free’ in southern Gaza, where humanitarian aid would be provided, he said. ‘At the end of the effort, all areas of the Gaza Strip will be under Israel’s security control — and Hamas will be totally defeated,’ Mr. Netanyahu said. In northern Gaza, attacks by Israeli ground forces damaged Al-Awda Hospital, according to the hospital director, Dr. Mohammad Salha. He said the facility had come under repeated attacks by Israeli tank fire and gunfire since Wednesday [May 21, 2025] without prior warning or coordination. A fire engulfed the central warehouse for medical supplies and spread to outpatient tents run by international humanitarian organizations. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the hospital. The facility has been struck more than 20 times during the war. It has now run out of supplies and cannot admit new patients, the director said.”
Employees working inside a bakery in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip after Israel allowed limited humanitarian aid to enter the Palestinian territory on Thursday. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
About 90 truckloads of aid had entered Gaza by Thursday, according to the United Nations, the first major influx of food that Israel has allowed in after a two-month blockade that deepened the humanitarian crisis in the territory.
The U.N. humanitarian affairs office and the Israeli military both confirmed that the aid deliveries were reaching warehouses and other points inside Gaza after days of delays. But aid officials said the shipment was a tiny fraction of what was needed.
“Desperately needed aid is finally trickling in — but the pace is far too slow. We need more aid trucks coming in daily,” the World Food Program, one of the main U.N. agencies operating in Gaza, wrote on social media.
Israel’s two-month ban on the entry of food and fuel led to widespread hunger in the enclave, which has been devastated by more than a year of war against the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Israel justified the ban as an attempt to force Hamas to surrender and release the remaining hostages. Israeli officials have asserted that Hamas has largely diverted or made money off aid deliveries, a claim disputed by international aid groups.
Israel conditioned the resumption of assistance on the United Nations signing off on a new mechanism in which they would distribute relief in areas under Israeli security control. The U.N. and many other aid nonprofits refused, saying it would fundamentally compromise their work.
After weeks of rising international pressure, Israel announced on Sunday that it would let U.N. agencies send small amounts of food into the enclave under the old system. But wrangling between Israel and the United Nations further delayed the provision of aid for days.
OCHA, the U.N. agency that coordinates humanitarian relief, said Israel had stipulated that their trucks take an extremely perilous route through Gaza. U.N. officials believed that unless the plans were changed, looting was “highly likely” to ensue, the agency said.
A spokesman for the Israeli military agency that works with the aid agencies — known as COGAT — did not respond to a request for comment.
During the aid blockade, local bakeries supported by the World Food Program had been forced to shut down. On Thursday, some bakeries in central and southern Gaza resumed production for the first time since April 2, according to Abed Alnasser al-Ajrami, head of the Gaza Bakers Association.
The bread in these areas is now being distributed for free by the World Food Program and other U.N. agencies, Mr. al-Ajrami said. But in the Nuseirat area of central Gaza, there were large crowds rushing to collect the bread, raising safety concerns for the bakery workers, he added.
Israeli officials have said they hope to set up the new aid system in Gaza, bypassing the United Nations, in the coming days.
In a televised news conference on Wednesday night, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, vowed once again to escalate the war imminently unless Hamas agreed to Israel’s conditions for a cease-fire.
Palestinians would be evacuated to a “sterile zone” that would be “Hamas free” in southern Gaza, where humanitarian aid would be provided, he said.
“At the end of the effort, all areas of the Gaza Strip will be under Israel’s security control — and Hamas will be totally defeated,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
In northern Gaza, attacks by Israeli ground forces damaged Al-Awda Hospital, according to the hospital director, Dr. Mohammad Salha.
He said the facility had come under repeated attacks by Israeli tank fire and gunfire since Wednesday without prior warning or coordination. A fire engulfed the central warehouse for medical supplies and spread to outpatient tents run by international humanitarian organizations.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the hospital.
The facility has been struck more than 20 times during the war. It has now run out of supplies and cannot admit new patients, the director said.
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