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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) ICE, Shifting Tactics, Detains High School Student at N.Y.C. Courthouse
The detention of a 20-year-old Venezuelan appears to be the first reported instance of immigration officials apprehending a student in the city this year.
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Dana Rubinstein, May 27, 2025
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested a New York high school student outside an immigration courthouse last week. Credit...Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When a 20-year-old from Venezuela was arrested last week at an immigration courthouse in New York, it was the first reported instance of a public school student in the city being apprehended by federal officials since the start of President Trump’s second term.
It also signaled a shift in strategy by immigration authorities who are intent on expediting deportations.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers last week began standing inside and outside of immigration courts across the United States in an effort to detain certain migrants who are appearing for scheduled hearings. Immigration lawyers said ICE officers — from San Diego and Los Angeles to Boston and Miami — were targeting migrants shortly after their cases were dismissed by judges. Government lawyers are requesting that the cases be dismissed in order to place the migrants in expedited deportation proceedings.
Dylan, the New York student, was arrested on Wednesday in the lobby of a courthouse in Lower Manhattan by ICE officers who showed up at the city’s immigration courts in large numbers. Dylan’s last name was withheld at the request of his family, which fears retaliation from the government.
On Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams fended off a barrage of questions about the student’s arrest.
Mr. Adams, who oversees a school system serving thousands of immigrant students, sought to distance himself from Dylan’s apprehension, saying that the arrest was a federal issue beyond his purview because it did not happen on school grounds.
“I’m interested that you all are using all this time to talk about something without my span of control,” Mr. Adams told reporters during an unrelated news conference on Tuesday. “I don’t handle federal enforcement policies, let’s be clear on that.”
“My opinion,” he continued, “doesn’t matter.”
ICE appears to be using the new strategy to place the apprehended migrants in deportation proceedings that can be fast-tracked and don’t require court hearings, an escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to meet the president’s deportation goals.
Dylan, whose arrest was reported earlier by Chalkbeat, was detained by ICE agents at the immigration courthouse after he showed up for a mandatory hearing. He was enrolled in Ellis Prep. Academy in the Bronx, which is part of the public school system and serves older immigrants learning English. Dylan is one of more than 40,000 migrant students who have entered the city’s schools in recent years.
The young man left Venezuela last year and entered the United States in April 2024 under a Biden administration program that permitted thousands to temporarily live and work in the country while applying for asylum, according to his mother and lawyers. He did not have a criminal record, according to them, and, when not in school, worked part time as a delivery driver to help his mother and two younger siblings save enough money to move out of a shelter.
“He was like a father to my two children,” his mother, Raiza, who also asked that her last name be withheld, said in an interview in Spanish.
Dylan showed up at court — with his mother but without a lawyer — believing the hearing would be routine. Instead, he was arrested by ICE agents in plainclothes shortly after his case was dismissed, which stripped him of certain legal protections, his lawyers said.
He was whisked away in an unmarked car and has remained in detention since May 21, his mother said.
“My son is not a criminal,” she said. “My fear is that he will be deported to Venezuela and arrested there or worse.”
Dylan has been moved between facilities in New Jersey, Texas, Virginia and Pennsylvania, his lawyers said.
“Dylan entered the United States with permission to seek asylum, and his detention robs him of the opportunity to seek that relief with the full protections offered to him under the law,” the New York Legal Assistance Group, an organization that provides free aid to low-income clients and is representing him, said in a statement. “He works, goes to school, has friends and was fully complying with immigration proceedings. All this does is disrupt communities and unnecessarily put people in chaotic and potentially harmful situations.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement that Dylan had “illegally” entered the United States last year, even though his lawyers and family said that he had used a Biden-era mobile app that allowed migrants to arrive legally through a port of entry to claim asylum. The White House has questioned the legality of the app, which officials argue was abused by the Biden administration to let hundreds of thousands of migrants into the country.
“Most aliens who illegally entered the United States within the past two years are subject to expedited removals,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been.”
ICE issued guidance in January allowing its officers to conduct arrests near courthouses, and federal officials have said that arresting undocumented immigrants there is safer for ICE agents, and the public, because the migrants have already gone through security screenings.
Dylan’s arrest unsettled administrators at his Bronx high school and prompted Melissa Aviles-Ramos, the schools chancellor appointed by Mr. Adams, to issue a statement on Monday saying, “Our hearts go out to the student who was detained by ICE.”
“While this incident did not occur on school grounds, we want to reassure our families: We will continue to speak out and advocate for the safety, dignity and rights of all of our students,” she wrote in a post on X, encouraging parents to continue sending their children to school.
Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, a union representing thousands of New York educators, said that Dylan had been “taken advantage of and stripped of his legal rights during a court hearing.”
New York City’s so-called sanctuary laws preclude city officials from helping with most federal immigration enforcement matters. But after successfully lobbying the federal government to abandon his criminal corruption charges, the mayor, a Democrat, has shown reluctance to criticize the Trump administration’s efforts. The government sought to dismiss the charges, arguing, in part, that the indictment limited the mayor’s ability to aid the White House’s deportation agenda.
Mr. Adams has said that while he supports the intent of the sanctuary city laws, they go too far in limiting cooperation with the federal government. He has fostered an apparently good working relationship with Thomas Homan, the president’s border czar, who famously promised to be up “his butt” should Mr. Adams not advance the Trump administration’s agenda.
The mayor sought to allow ICE to open an office at the Rikers Island jail complex, but the City Council filed a lawsuit that has temporarily stymied that effort.
On Tuesday, Mr. Adams insisted he could not comment substantively on Dylan’s case because the issue was outside the ambit of New York’s mayor.
“You have to speak to the federal authorities,” he said, responding to a question from The New York Post about whether the arrest might undermine efforts to have immigrants cooperate with law enforcement. “I don’t know how I could be any clearer. Federal authorities handle ICE. I don’t control the borders.”
He also seemed to suggest that he could not leverage his relationship with Mr. Homan to help the student, because it might run afoul of the sanctuary laws.
“We have to be extremely careful, because the New York City Council laws are limited on what coordination I can do,” he said.
That explanation made little sense to Rendy Desamours, a spokesman for the Council’s speaker, Adrienne Adams, who is running for mayor.
“Neither the city’s sanctuary laws nor any other city law prevent the mayor from advocating for New Yorkers being targeted by federal immigration overreach,” he said.
Troy Closson contributed reporting.
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2) Stalin’s Image Returns to Moscow’s Subway, Honoring a Brutal History
The Kremlin has increasingly embraced the Soviet dictator and his legacy, using them to exalt Russian history in a time of war, but he remains a deeply divisive figure in Russia.
By Ivan Nechepurenko, Reporting from the Moscow metro, May 28, 2025
A new statue of Joseph Stalin in a Moscow metro station reflects Russia’s efforts to rehabilitate the memory of a bloody ruler. Credit...Alexander Nemenov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
After a nearly six-decade absence, the face of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator who was not known for sparing lives to achieve his goals, is once again greeting commuters in one of Moscow’s ornate subway stations.
A new statue was unveiled by the authorities this month, showing Stalin gazing sagely into the distance, flanked by adoring workers and children holding out flowers to him. A replica of one that was removed in 1966 during a de-Stalinization campaign, the new relief quickly became an attraction, with people leaving flowers, stopping to pose for pictures, including with their children, or just watching pensively.
The sculpture is part of the gradual rehabilitation of a brutal leader who still has the power to divide Russians, 72 years after his death. The Kremlin has revived parts of his legacy in its effort to recast Russia’s history as a series of glorious triumphs that it is determined to continue in Ukraine.
Among those admiring the work on a recent visit was Liliya A. Medvedeva, who said she was “very happy that our leader got restored.”
“We won the war thanks to him,” said Ms. Medvedeva, a pensioner born in 1950, adding that she was grateful that Stalin didn’t send her father to the Gulag even though he was taken prisoner during World War II — something that was equated with treason at the time. “Yes, there were many mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes.”
In a country where criticizing government action can be dangerous, it is unclear how many people disagree with Ms. Medvedeva’s positive view, but some are dismayed, even enraged, by what they see as revisionist whitewashing of history.
Vladimir, a 25-year-old history student who refused to give his last name for fear of retribution, said he came to watch the crowd drawn by Stalin, whom he called “a bloody tyrant.”
“It is hard for me to express my own opinion,” he said. “But no other monument would draw as much attention.”
Stalin was responsible for mass purges, including the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, when more than 700,000 people were executed, including military leaders, intellectuals, members of ethnic minorities, landowning peasants and others. Under his leadership, entire ethnic groups, like Crimean Tatars, were expelled from their homelands. His policies contributed to mass famine across the Soviet Union, including in Ukraine.
But nostalgia for the Soviet era is strong, especially among older generations traumatized by the painful transition to capitalism, reinforcing memories of Stalin as a strongman who imposed order on a sprawling country and led it to victory against Nazi Germany. His admirers see purges, famines and mass deportations as “excesses” for which overzealous local officials were mostly responsible.
Since Vladimir V. Putin took power more than 25 years ago, at least 108 monuments to Stalin have been erected across Russia, and the pace has accelerated since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, said Ivan Zheyanov, a historian and journalist who has kept track of the statues. One was installed this year in the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, currently occupied by Moscow’s forces.
But none of them have the visibility of the new sculpture in the subway, passed daily by legions of Muscovites changing between the main circle line and the purple line.
Yelena D. Roshchina, an English instructor walking by it, said she recalled Stalin’s death in 1953 and how people “valued him.” But, Ms. Roshchina, 79, added: “We should not go to the extremes. We always have it either black or white.”
For years the Kremlin tried to maintain something of a balance, taking note of Stalin’s repressions while opposing the liberal intelligentsia whose main ideological tenets included anti-Stalinism.
President Putin has repeatedly condemned Stalin over the years, and recognized that terrible crimes were committed under his rule. He has visited the sites of mass graves and convened human rights activists and historians to discuss Stalinism.
“It is very important that we all and future generations — this is of great significance — know about, and remember this tragic period in our history when entire social groups and entire peoples were cruelly persecuted,” Mr. Putin said in Moscow in 2017, at the opening of the “Wall of Sorrow” monument to victims of Stalinist repression. “This terrifying past cannot be deleted from national memory or, all the more so, be justified by any references to the so-called best interests of the people.”
In 2001, Moscow City Hall founded the Gulag History Museum, which vividly showcased how a system of mass labor camps led to as many as two million deaths.
But for several years, something entirely different has been happening in parallel.
The Memorial, the most prominent Russian civil rights organization founded by dissidents during late Soviet times, was declared a foreign agent in 2014. At the end of 2021, Moscow City Court ordered it to disband.
In 2017, Mr. Putin told the filmmaker Oliver Stone that “excessive demonization of Stalin has been one of the ways to attack the Soviet Union and Russia.”
After a series of lengthy trials, Yuri A. Dmitriev, an amateur historian who discovered graves of Stalin’s victims in a remote pine forest in northern Russia, was sentenced in 2021 to 15 years in prison. Mr. Dmitriev had been found guilty of sexually assaulting his adopted daughter, charges his family and friends dismissed as fabricated.
The Gulag History Museum was shut down in 2024 citing fire regulations and has not reopened. Roman Romanov, its longtime director, was removed from his post and the museum’s exhibits are being redone under a new leadership.
This April, the government renamed Volgograd’s airport for Stalingrad, as the city was called from 1925 to 1961, honoring both the colossal battle fought there in World War II and the ruler it had been named for.
“The creeping re-Stalinization of the country is dangerous not only for society, as it justifies the largest government atrocities in the country’s history, but also for the state,” said Lev Shlosberg, a Russian opposition politician and member of the liberal Yabloko party that started a petition to dismantle the monument in the Moscow metro. “Sooner or later, repression consumes the government itself.”
In the metro, activists left a framed poster in front of the new Stalin monument, a very risky protest by the standards of today’s Russia. The poster contained Mr. Putin’s quotes criticizing Stalin’s methods.
Security guards quickly removed it, and the police later detained one person who had taken part in the protest.
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3) How a Generation’s Struggle Led to a Record Surge in Homelessness
Late baby boomers have endured challenges that have left many economically vulnerable and dependent on parents for help. With their parents dying, they are ending up on the streets in growing numbers.
By Jason DeParle, Reporting from Washington, Published May 27, 2025, Updated May 28, 2025
Anthony Forrest, whose life has been sculpted by twin forces — economic inequality and inner-city distress — personifies his generation’s struggle. Credit...Lawren Simmons for The New York Times
When his mother moved to a nursing home in 2009, Anthony Forrest was a struggle-laden man of willed cheer with rising health problems, declining job prospects, and no place to go. She paid the rent on the Washington, D.C., apartment they shared. He slept on the couch.
Only a niece’s warning that she was turning in the keys forced him hurriedly to pack. He stuffed his clothes into two trash bags, caught a ride to the gentrifying neighborhood of his youth, and slept in a parking lot.
Mr. Forrest’s displacement in late middle age began a homelessness spell that has lasted more than 15 years, and it epitomizes an overlooked force that has helped push homelessness among elderly Americans to a record high: the loss of parental aid. Without it, “I hit the skids,” said Mr. Forrest, now 70. “That’s when I became homeless.”
Throughout their lives, late baby boomers like Mr. Forrest — people born from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s — have suffered homelessness at uniquely high rates, for reasons many and varied. Their sheer numbers ensured they came of age facing fierce competition for housing and jobs. They entered the work force amid bruising recessions and a shift to a postindustrial economy that pummeled low-skilled workers.
Rents soared. Housing aid faltered. Crack, especially in poor neighborhoods, left many in their prime grappling with addiction and criminal records.
Now the death of parents in their 80s or beyond is extending the tale of generational woe, leaving thousands of people newly homeless as they reach old age themselves. In four years, the number of homeless people 65 or older has grown by half to more than 70,000.
“You have a generation of adult children who depend on their parents because they can’t afford housing on their own,” said Dennis Culhane, a social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “When their parents die, they have no place to live. We’re seeing more and more of them on the streets and in the shelters.”
While homelessness is brutal at any age, Mr. Culhane called its surge among the elderly especially troubling. “If you go back to the creation of the American safety net, public destitution among old people is the very condition it was meant to prevent,” he said.
A worn figure whose life has been sculpted by twin forces — economic inequality and inner-city distress — Mr. Forrest personifies his generation’s struggle.
He has been a dishwasher, a janitor and what his mother called a “prodigal son,” whose drinking and drug use have been hard to overcome. A drunken driver nearly killed him two decades ago and left him too weak for steady work. Through a lifetime of rising rents, he has never had his own housing.
But in health or hardship, one safety net caught him: his mother’s apartment.
Since losing her, he has returned to his childhood neighborhood to sleep in shelters and abandoned buildings, rustle odd jobs and commandeer friends’ couches. Most days he sits on a stoop, drinking beer with an affable presence so enduring he calls himself “the mayor of Ninth Street.”
Street life has stolen many of his teeth and numbed his fingers. In a reminder that homelessness kills, his longtime partner in sidewalk survival recently died when a fire consumed the abandoned camper where he slept. A year ago, Mr. Forrest began working with two outreach workers who said his vulnerability might gain him a scarce spot in subsidized housing. After a winter of waiting, he could be housed as early as next month.
Despite the painful odyssey, Mr. Forrest sees himself less a victim of the outsized forces that left his generation prone to homelessness than a man with the strength to survive them. “I been through hell and high water,” he said. “But I’m still here. Good Lord willing, I always make a way.”
Recessions and a neighborhood in decline
The matriarch on whom Mr. Forrest relied came to Washington amid a vast migration that carried millions of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north and reordered both regions. Leaving Fremont, N.C., for Washington in 1948 brought Thessie Greene to a city 600 times the size. The move was filled with promise and peril, and her children would know both.
After gaining a foothold waiting tables, she had one career as a nursing aide and another as a teacher’s assistant, in a marathon of working-class advancement that lasted 60 years. She married a steam engineer, Royce Forrest, and raised six children. Outside work and family, life revolved around the Baptist church, where she served as a deaconess, sang in the choir, and earned acclaim in the cooking ministry.
Borrowing from her upwardly mobile script, one son left for college in Iowa and became a pharmacist in Maine. One works in information technology at Tulane University.
Mr. Forrest never got on the same ladder. Her third child, born in 1954, he reveled in sports and neighborhood friends but mostly felt lost in class. “That’s what I didn’t know how to do — study,” he said.
Graduating from high school in 1974, Mr. Forrest joined the work force during the worst recession since the Great Depression. Two recessions followed in the early 1980s, meaning the economy shrank for more than a third of his first decade as a worker.
Recessions have scarring effects on young workers, reducing their long-term earnings and employment on average and elevating problems like disease, divorce and increased mortality well into middle age, with disadvantaged groups harmed the most.
Mr. Forrest found work but not advancement. He buffed the floors of federal buildings for cleaning contractors. He washed dishes in a museum and a nursing home. He calls the work satisfying, not drudgery, and did it long enough to qualify for Social Security.
But the jobs were low paid, nonunion and often less than full time, in an economy with a declining need for manual labor. While his parents had unionized government jobs in an age of rising blue-collar pay, Mr. Forrest’s generation faced union retreat and falling wages. Two decades after he took his first job, wages for the bottom tenth of workers were nearly 10 percent lower, after inflation, than when he began. He made do, in part, by living with his parents.
As his earnings prospects declined, so did the neighborhood, Shaw. Once a showcase of Black achievement a mile or so from the White House, Shaw had already gone through decades of decline when crack arrived in the 1980s and hit it with special force. Mr. Forrest pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor drug charges in his 30s (two for cocaine and one for PCP). Another misdemeanor cocaine conviction in his 50s suggests addiction was hard to escape.
As his record closed more doors, Mr. Forrest combined odd jobs with other ways to get by. “You know Malcolm X, everything he went through — that’s my story,” he said. “The drugging, mugging, stealing, trying to make money.”
Misfortune mounted when a drunken driver sped through a Shaw intersection as Mr. Forrest crossed the street. The blow broke his ribs, an arm and an ankle. He spent months in a wheelchair and emerged with the prospect of self-support more remote.
One safeguard remained. His mother was a source not just of shelter but also emotional ballast — the person he trusted most not to give up on him. “She used to tell all her children, ‘Look in the mirror and talk to the Lord — he’ll tell you what to do,’” he said.
Though her life was as straight as his was wayward, she made sure her son, however prodigal, had a key to the apartment.
She worked until 79 and had a heart attack two years later. Mr. Forrest was 55 when she moved to a nursing home. Unlike his mother, he did not have a pension. His siblings, wary of his drinking and drug use, did not take him in, and the housing market had little to offer.
Even if he could have worked full time at the District’s elevated minimum wage, it would have taken more than three-quarters of his pretax earnings just to rent a modest efficiency apartment. Housing aid reached only one eligible person in four.
A Shaw parking lot had an empty booth. Mr. Forrest made it his.
A uniquely vulnerable generation
While Mr. Forrest’s story is unique in detail, the elevated risk of homelessness stalks millions of people his age. They have consistently been homeless at rates much higher than people born before or after.
The existence of a generation uniquely vulnerable to homelessness was first identified in 2013 in a study led by Mr. Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania. A co-author, Thomas Byrne of Boston University, working with others, recently updated the findings. Analyzing census data at 10-year intervals, he found that throughout their lives late baby boomers had been at least 1.5 times as likely to become homeless as people born roughly a decade later.
That was true in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. It was true whether the economy was weak or strong. It was true in every geographic region.
With Social Security meant as a safety net, it was not clear if the trend would persist in old age. But in an analysis for The New York Times, Mr. Byrne found that late baby boomers in their early 60s were 1.4 times as likely to be homeless as people who had reached that age a decade earlier and twice as likely as those two decades ahead.
“It continues to be really unlucky to have been born in the latter half of the baby boom generation,” Mr. Byrne said.
While the data concerned men in shelters, he said, the same pattern most likely exists for women and people sleeping outdoors.
As with Mr. Forrest, many aging people say they became homeless after the loss of a parent. In a survey of people aged 50 or older when they first became homeless, more than one in eight cited the death of a friend or relative as a reason.
“We hear that again and again,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Initiative on Housing and Homelessness at the University of California, San Francisco, which conducted the survey. “It’s usually guys who worked in low-wage jobs throughout their lives and made it by living with Mom.”
The costs can be measured in part by medical bills, often borne by taxpayers. Homelessness raises the risk of injury or infection. It thwarts the management of chronic diseases like diabetes. It lengthens hospital stays among people who could be discharged if they had places to store medication and keep wounds clean.
The human toll may be greater. Homeless people in their late 50s bear the medical likeness of people two decades older, Dr. Kushel and others found, on measures that include cognitive decline, urinary incontinence, mobility limitations and falls. Compared to housed people the same age, they die at rates 3.5 times higher.
A generation uniquely vulnerable to homelessness may also cast light on why homelessness exists. Policymakers sometimes debate whether homelessness is best understood as the product of human failings or structural forces like inequality or aid policy.
While individual stories often can be read as failures of personal responsibility, “a birth cohort is by definition a structural explanation,” Mr. Culhane said. “Something happened to these people as a group that continues to generate homelessness.”
‘The mayor of Ninth Street’
In seeking places to sleep, Mr. Forrest proved inventive beyond the parking lot. A padlocked school had sheltered steps. The playground never closed. For a while Mr. Forrest thought his problem solved with free rent in a boardinghouse that he cleaned in exchange. But his girlfriend stole from other residents, he said, and the landlord put them out.
One story he likes to tell sounds like a caper in a buddy movie — and produced a buddy. A street acquaintance had the keys to an empty building awaiting conversion to condominiums. The two men moved in and rented out rooms. The “Abando-minium” scheme got them through the winter and established a contentious friendship of the sort that homeless people often form for mutual aid and protection.
Though younger than Mr. Forrest, Jason Vass was another late baby boomer rendered homeless in part by the death of a parent, his father, with whom he often had stayed. He was also an inspired storyteller and a legend as a drinker. “I’m not an alcoholic — I surpassed that,” he said a few months ago. “I’m a drunk!”
Students of each other’s flaws, the two men bickered, bantered and retained enough familiarity to eat from each other’s dinner plate without asking. “Put it this way — you messin’ with him, you messin’ with me,” Mr. Vass said. “We’re Frick and Frack. Heckle and Jeckle. Copacetic.”
Mr. Forrest, in turn, described his companion as an ally needing impulse control. “Hey Jason, better slow your roll,” he liked to say.
Despite his stoic front, homelessness has left Mr. Forrest worn — slower, sadder, and sicker than when his street sojourn began. His gait is unsteady. His bones ache. Last year he fell off a ladder and broke the ankle spared in the car accident. Months of inpatient rehabilitation followed.
The “mayor of Ninth Street” has spent much of his time as a homeless man within sight of his childhood home, as if looking for comforting memories. But the gentrified Ninth Street of today is not the Ninth Street of his youth. Young professionals have flooded in and helped displace longtime residents. The drafty rowhouse his parents rented, long refurbished, would sell for more than a million dollars. Efficiency apartments a block away fetch rents of $2,600 a month.
Once a landing zone for poor southerners, Shaw also now hosts a different migration, of entrepreneurial Ethiopians whose success has helped revive the area but also bid up housing costs. “Damn right I resent it,” said Mr. Forrest, who sweeps the immigrant merchants’ floors. “They come over here and get all this stuff and the Black man gets nothing!”
His mother’s death after years in a nursing home added to his sense of loss. He had a seizure after seeing her in the coffin.
The District of Columbia has an extensive network of outreach workers to serve the homeless. Last year, two of them — Nicole Dixon of Miriam’s Kitchen and Quinntez Washington of District Bridges — introduced themselves to Mr. Forrest and Mr. Vass as the men sat on a Ninth Street stoop.
Mr. Forrest said he did not need help. Overcoming his wariness, they helped him replace his lost ID and claim a range of benefits he said he had not known he could receive, behavior at odds with stereotypes of poor people maximizing aid. With Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, disability aid and food stamps, he now has health insurance and $1,300 a month in cash and food assistance.
Housing aid is in shorter supply, and neither man proved an easy client. After the caseworkers secured Mr. Vass a rare spot in assisted living through Medicaid, he showed up drunk and berated the staff, who rescinded the offer.
For a few weeks no one saw him. Then on the coldest night in February, the fire department responded at 3:45 a.m. to a report of flames in an abandoned camper. When they extinguished the fire, they found Mr. Vass inside, dead.
Mr. Forrest was stunned. For all his vulnerability in living on the street, his partner had seemed to him invulnerable, built for sidewalk survival.
Last year, the caseworkers put Mr. Forrest on the list for permanent supportive housing. The program provides chronically homeless people with subsidized apartments and offers voluntary treatment for problems like substance abuse and mental illness. But the aid is limited, and waits are often lengthy.
Conservatives have criticized the program, and the Trump administration wants to end it. The examples of Mr. Forrest and Mr. Vass encapsulate the debate. Critics say providing housing without treating mental illness or addiction leaves them unstable. Supporters say the housing saves lives by getting fragile people off the street — a program with a sobriety test is not one either man would pass.
After a year’s wait, Mr. Forrest was tentatively offered an apartment. It is a mile and a half from Ninth Street, outside his comfort zone. At first he said no. He was sleeping on a friend’s couch. Then his friend died. Mindful of Mr. Vass’s death on the street, he agreed to the move.
Final approval is pending. But seven decades after being born into the most homelessness-prone generation in modern history, Mr. Forrest may soon have a home.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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4) A Desperate Haiti Turns to Erik Prince, Trump Ally, in Fight Against Gangs
The Haitian government has signed a contract with Mr. Prince, the private military contractor who founded Blackwater, a company notorious for a civilian massacre in Iraq.
By David C. Adams, Frances Robles and Mark Mazzetti, May 28, 2025
David C. Adams and Frances Robles combined have covered Haiti for over five decades, and Mark Mazzetti has written about American private military contractors for 20 years.
Erik Prince, a private military contractor and prominent supporter of President Trump, is working with Haiti’s government to conduct lethal operations against gangs that are terrorizing the nation and threatening to take over its capital.
Mr. Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, signed a contract to take on the criminal groups that have been killing civilians and seizing control of vast areas of territory, according to senior Haitian and American government officials and several other security experts familiar with Mr. Prince’s work in Haiti.
Haiti’s government has hired American contractors, including Mr. Prince, in recent months to work on a secret task force to deploy drones meant to kill gang members, security experts said. Mr. Prince’s team has been operating the drones since March, but the authorities have yet to announce the death or capture of a single high-value target.
Security experts said Mr. Prince has also been scouting Haitian American military veterans to hire to send to Port-au-Prince and is expected to send up to 150 mercenaries to Haiti over the summer. He recently shipped a large cache of weapons to the country, two experts said.
The Haitian government is awaiting the arrival of arms shipments and more personnel to step up its fight against the gangs.
American officials said they were aware of Mr. Prince’s work with Haiti’s government. But the full terms of the Haitian government’s arrangement with Mr. Prince, including how much it is paying him, are unknown.
This article is based on interviews with a dozen people who follow Haiti closely. All but one spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss sensitive security matters publicly.
The State Department, which has provided millions of dollars in funding to equip and train Haiti’s National Police, said it is not paying Mr. Prince or his company for any work in Haiti.
Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article. Blackwater no longer exists, but Mr. Prince owns other private military entities.
The involvement of civilian contractors like Mr. Prince, a Trump donor who has a long and checkered history in the private security industry, marks a pivotal moment in Haiti. Its crisis has deepened since its last president was assassinated in 2021, and the government now appears willing to take desperate measures to secure control.
Armed groups escalated the violence last year by uniting and taking over prisons, burning down police stations and attacking hospitals. About 1 million people have been forced to flee their homes and hundreds of thousands are living in shelters.
Gangs have captured so much territory in recent months that U.N. officials have warned that the capital is in danger of falling under complete criminal control.
The situation is dire enough that officials and civilians alike say they are eager for any overseas help, particularly after a $600 million international police mission started by the Biden administration and largely staffed by Kenyan police officers failed to receive adequate international personnel and money.
With Haiti’s undermanned and underequipped police force struggling to contain the gangs, the government is turning to private military contractors equipped with high-powered weapons, helicopters and sophisticated surveillance and attack drones to take on the well-armed gangs. At least one other American security company is working in Haiti, though details of its role are secret.
Since drone attacks targeting gangs started in March, they have killed more than 200 people, according to Pierre Esperance, who runs a leading human rights organization in Port-au-Prince.
After the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq ended, security firms like those owned by Mr. Prince started seeing big streams of revenues dry up. Private military contractors are looking for new opportunities, and they see possibilities in Latin America.
Before presidential elections in Ecuador this year, Mr. Prince toured the country with local police and promised to help security forces. The country has faced a wave of violence unleashed by gangs.
Ecuadorean officials denied that they had signed any security deal with Mr. Prince.
A person close to Mr. Prince said he hopes to expand the scope of his work in Haiti to include help with customs, transport, revenue collection and other government services that need to be restored for the country to stabilize. Rampant government corruption is a key reason Haiti’s finances are in shambles.
The Haitian prime minister’s office and a presidential council, which was formed to run the country until presidential elections can be held, did not respond to several requests for comment.
Mr. Prince, whose sister Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education during Mr. Trump’s first term, donated more than $250,000 to help elect Mr. Trump in 2016, according to campaign finance records. He was often cited as an informal “adviser” to Mr. Trump’s first transition to office, a description he denied.
Days before Mr. Trump took office in 2017, the United Arab Emirates organized a meeting between Mr. Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as part of an effort to set up a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and the incoming president, a meeting that later came under scrutiny.
The House Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Mr. Prince, saying he lied about the circumstances of the meeting, but no charges were ever filed.
Mr. Prince has a decades-long history of military interventions overseas, some of which ended badly. Blackwater faced legal problems over its work for the U.S. military in places like Iraq, including an episode in 2007 in which its employees killed 17 civilians in Baghdad. (President Trump pardoned four Blackwater guards in 2020.)
In 2011, Mr. Prince helped recruit and train an army of Colombian mercenaries for the United Arab Emirates to use in conflicts around the Middle East. In 2017, he proposed a plan to use contractors to take over Afghanistan. In 2020, The New York Times revealed that he had recruited former spies to help conservative activists infiltrate liberal groups in the United States.
A year later, the United Nations accused him of violating an arms embargo in Libya, which he denied.
“My name has become click bait for people who like to weave conspiracy theories together,” Mr. Prince said in a 2021 interview with The Times. “And if they throw my name in, it always attracts attention. And it’s pretty damn sickening.”
Haiti’s experience with private military contractors goes back decades. When U.S. forces returned former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in 1994 after he was ousted in a bloody military coup, he was accompanied by a private security team from the San Francisco-based Steele Foundation.
In recent years, military contractors in Haiti have had a more tainted record. Colombian mercenaries hired by an American security firm were accused of taking part in the 2021 assassination of the last elected president, Jovenel Moïse.
Rod Joseph, a Haitian American U.S. Army veteran who owns a Florida-based security officer training company, said he had been in talks with Mr. Prince to help supply personnel for his contract since late last year.
Mr. Joseph, who trained Haitian police on the use of surveillance drones, said Mr. Prince gave him the impression that his plans were under the auspices of the U.S. government but then shifted to be directly under the purview of the Haitian government.
He said Mr. Prince told him that he planned to send private soldiers from El Salvador to Haiti along with three helicopters to engage in attacks against the gangs.
Mr. Joseph said he was uncomfortable with the idea of contractors working directly with the Haitian government, without any American oversight.
“We should be very worried, because if he’s from the U.S. government, at least he can have the semblance of having to answer to Congress,” he said. “If it’s him, his contract, he doesn’t owe anybody an explanation.”
“It’s just another payday,” he added.
Mr. Prince texted him a few days ago, Mr. Joseph said, seeking a list of Haitian American veterans to send to Haiti, but he declined to provide names unless Mr. Prince could provide more precise details of their mission and would allow Mr. Joseph to lead them.
U.S. military contractors doing defense work overseas are required to obtain a license from the State Department, but those licenses are not public record.
Mr. Prince has been trying to expand his portfolio and has traveled overseas in search of new business, said Sean McFate, a professor at the National Defense University and author of “The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order.”
Mr. Prince is viewed skeptically by other members of the private military industry, Mr. McFate said, because of his showy nature and the negative publicity he generates for a security industry that prides itself on a “sense of professionalism.”
“It’s always worth noting where Prince is going, because it’s sort of a barometer of where he thinks Trump world might end up, and he wants to make a buck from it,” Mr. McFate said.
But experts stress that Haitians are desperate for solutions — regardless of where they come from.
“The doors are open. All possibilities must be on the table,” Haiti’s Minister of Economy and Finance, Alfred Métellus, told Le Nouvelliste, a Haitian newspaper, last month. “We are looking for all Haitians, all foreigners who have expertise in this field and who want to support us, want to support the police and the army to unblock the situation.”
Mr. Joseph said he worried that outsourcing the work of fighting gangs to private military contractors would not do anything to improve the skills of the Haitian police and military.
“When you do it this way, it’s trouble,” he said. “Every time you parachute knowledge in and parachute out, the locals will always be in need of that knowledge. If you don’t have knowledge of security, you will just have a bunch of dead people.”
Reporting was contributed by Maria Abi-Habib, Eric Schmitt and Michael Crowley.
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5) U.S. Will ‘Aggressively’ Revoke Visas of Chinese Students, Rubio Says
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the students who will have their visas canceled include people with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and those studying in “critical fields.”
By Edward Wong, Reporting from Washington, Published May 28, 2025, Updated May 29, 2025
Secretary of State Marco Rubio testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday evening that the Trump administration would work to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in “critical fields.”
He added that the State Department was revising visa criteria to “enhance scrutiny” of all future applications from China, including Hong Kong.
The move was certain to send ripples of anxiety across university campuses in the United States and was likely to lead to reprisal from China, the country of origin for the second-largest group of international students in the United States.
Mr. Rubio’s brief statement announcing the visa crackdown did not define “critical fields” of study, but the phrase most likely refers to research in the physical sciences. In recent years, American officials have expressed concerns about the Chinese government recruiting U.S.-trained scientists, though there is no evidence of such scientists working for China in large numbers.
Similarly, it is unclear how U.S. officials will determine which students have ties to the Communist Party. The lack of detail on the scope of the directive will no doubt fuel worries among the roughly 275,000 Chinese students in the United States, as well as professors and university administrators who depend on their research skills and financial support.
American universities and research laboratories have benefited over many decades by drawing some of the most talented students from China and other countries, and many universities rely on international students paying full tuition for a substantial part of their annual revenue.
“I think it is terribly misguided, counterproductive and another way in which we are shooting ourselves in the foot,” said Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University.
The move against Chinese students comes as the Trump administration has sought a broader crackdown on elite universities and international students. And it coincides with heightened tensions between the United States and China over President Trump’s trade war. The foremost target of Mr. Trump’s expansive tariffs is China, which he has asserted has taken unfair advantage of the international trade system for decades.
It is unclear how quickly the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security will move to cancel the visas of affected students, or whether China will now take retaliatory actions on the relatively fewer number of American students in the country and move to expel some of them.
Until now, family members of most Chinese Communist Party officials could study at American universities. Many top party officials sent children to American universities in recent decades. Mr. Xi sent his daughter, Xi Mingze, to attend Harvard under a pseudonym. Harvard administrators and a few professors knew who she was before her graduation in 2014.
Around the same time, Bo Guagua, the son of a prominent former Politburo member who is now imprisoned in China, got a master’s degree at Harvard Kennedy School and attended Columbia Law School.
In 2020, officials in the first Trump administration canceled the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese graduate students and researchers after announcing they were banning from campuses Chinese citizens with direct ties to military universities in their country. It was the first time the U.S. government had moved to bar a category of Chinese students from getting access to American universities, a ban the Biden administration kept in place.
U.S.-China relations were in a fraught state throughout the Biden administration, but Chinese officials sought to stabilize them in part by emphasizing the need for more person-to-person exchanges, including at educational institutions. The number of American students in China has been tiny compared with that of their Chinese counterparts in the United States. On a visit to San Francisco in November 2023, Mr. Xi announced that China was ready to welcome 50,000 American students over five years while it would keep sending its students to the United States.
“America has always thrived by welcoming the brightest minds from around the world,” said Gary Locke, a U.S. ambassador to China in the Obama administration and chairman of the Committee of 100, an advocacy group of prominent Chinese Americans. “Shutting the door on Chinese students doesn’t just betray our values — it weakens our leadership in science, technology and innovation.”
A report published last year by the State Department and the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit group, said that China had the second-largest share of the more than 1.1 million international students who enrolled in American higher education institutions in the 2023-24 term. More than 277,000 students came from China, behind India, with its more than 331,000 students. The number of Chinese students had dropped 4 percent from the previous academic year, while the number from India had surged by 23 percent.
In another move on visa restrictions, Mr. Rubio announced Wednesday that the State Department would not give visas to foreign officials who engage in censorship of the speech of American citizens.
“It is unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil,” he said in a statement.
He added that “it is similarly unacceptable for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States.”
Trump administration officials have criticized European governments and Brazil for what the officials call efforts to censor free speech on social media platforms run by American companies. Those include Meta and X, a platform once called Twitter that is owned by Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser to Mr. Trump who was by far the biggest donor to the president’s 2024 election campaign. Some European governments ban certain types of online posts by far-right groups.
Mr. Rubio’s latest announcement on visa restrictions came a day after he sent a cable to U.S. embassies and consulates telling them to halt interview appointments for foreign citizens applying for student and exchange visas. Those are the visa categories called F, M and J.
The Homeland Security Department announced last week that it was revoking the certification that allows Harvard University to enroll foreign students, although a federal judge temporarily blocked the move. In the policy’s announcement, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said the administration was seeking to hold Harvard “accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus.”
The words “Chinese Communist Party” were emphasized in boldface, though Ms. Noem did not explain what she meant by that coordination or provide evidence of such activities.
“It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments,” she said.
Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that Harvard University should have a cap on the number of international students it admits to create more spots for Americans. About one-quarter of Harvard’s student body is from abroad. Mr. Trump suggested that the figure should be no more than 15 percent.
On Chinese social media, the immediate reaction to Mr. Rubio’s announcement appeared to be limited. But broader discussion of the Trump administration’s various announced restrictions on international students and on universities, and on Harvard in particular, had been trending for days.
Those who commented on Mr. Rubio’s announcement expressed both resignation and triumph. Some nationalist citizens celebrated the notion that Chinese students who had previously looked up to the United States would be disillusioned, or that Chinese universities would benefit from the return of talent.
Shen Yi, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, said in a post that Mr. Rubio had acted “as expected.”
Bernard Mokam contributed reporting from New York, and Vivian Wang from Beijing.
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6) Chinese Students Express Helplessness and Frustration Over U.S. Visa Bans
As student applicants in China wait to see how sweeping the new action might be, one said of the United States, “They make people too scared.”
By Vivian Wang, Reporting from Beijing, May 29, 2025
Waiting outside the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on Thursday. Credit...Vivian Wang/The New York Times
In the hours after the Trump administration announced that it would begin “aggressively” revoking the visas of Chinese students, the line to apply for new visas at the United States Embassy in Beijing still stretched down the block on Thursday.
But for many of the hopefuls — including some who walked out of the embassy with their visa applications approved — any celebration was laced with a mix of anxiety and helplessness.
“What now? Something new every day?” said Li Kunze, 18, who had just successfully applied for a visa to study as an undergraduate. He had not heard the news until he left the embassy. “I don’t even know if they can give me this visa that I just got.”
He sighed. Since it was too late to apply elsewhere for his undergraduate years, “I can only brace myself,” said Mr. Li, who plans to study applied mathematics. But, “in the future, if I can avoid going to the United States to study, I will. They make people too scared.”
The scene outside the embassy captured the complicated feelings many Chinese students have toward studying in the United States. Hundreds of thousands still go each year, lured by the promise of a world-class education. Some also have deep admiration for America’s professed values of openness and diversity.
But they must reckon with the fact — made clearer by the Trump administration every day — that many in the United States may not share that admiration.
Even before the announcement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the United States would begin revoking student visas, Chinese students and their families were uncertain about their prospects for studying in America. Two days earlier, Mr. Rubio had ordered a pause on new interviews for student and exchange visas.
Chinese students have been singled out before. In 2020, during his first term, President Trump issued a proclamation barring students from certain Chinese universities from graduate study in the United States, alleging that those universities had ties to China’s military. The parameters of that proclamation, which is still in effect, were vague, but it has been used mostly to deny visas to people in fields such as the physical sciences, engineering and computer science, according to researchers.
Yet the effect of the earlier measure was relatively limited, resulting in the revocations or denials of about 3,000 visas between 2020 and 2021, according to U.S. government data.
It is unclear what the scope of the new revocations will be, but they are likely to be much more far-reaching. Mr. Rubio’s order said only that they would include “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party” or “studying in critical fields.”
As Chinese students were digesting the announcement, the response from Chinese officials was relatively muted.
Asked at a regularly scheduled news conference on Thursday about the move, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry said that the United States was “using ideology and national security as an excuse” to harm Chinese students.
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7) Trump’s Attacks on Black History Betray America
By Ibram X. Kendi, May 29, 2025
Mr. Kendi’s newest book is “Malcolm Lives! The Official Biography of Malcolm X for Young Readers.”
“Life is named story. Afterlife is named history. Racist Americans have murdered Black lives and tried to murder Black afterlives, Black stories and Black history, Black storytellers and Black historians. So when Black people die, what we created, what we contributed, what we changed, what we documented dies, too. No funeral. Just gone from memory.”
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Trump administration is in a hurry to bury not only America’s future but also its past. Burying futures usually involves burying the truths of history.
Right now the Trump administration has been systematically attacking Black history. It’s set about purging Black historical content from government websites and social media accounts (only restoring a few items after being called out), removing Black history books from libraries, eliminating Black history observances, butchering the reputations of historians and starving libraries, museums, universities and historical institutions of funding. At this rate, many Americans could one day believe that George Floyd “dies after medical incident during police interaction,” as the Minneapolis Police Department put it in its first public statement on the matter, and that the officer Derek Chauvin attempted to save his life.
There is a precedent for this, of course. Consider what happened in downtown Atlanta beginning on Sept. 22, 1906. Grotesque newspaper headlines detailing alleged assaults, later referred to as a “carnival of rapes,” mobilized white Atlantans into a mob. The violence over the next few days snatched the lives of around 40 Black Atlantans and two white Atlantans. Black Atlantans were forced to organize a self-defense, with some community members arming themselves. The carnage largely ceased with the arrival of a state militia.
What became known as the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 had been several months in the making. It was an election year, and all year long, candidates for governor and their propagandists had enraged white Atlantans with tales of “uppity” Black Atlantans refusing to stay “in their place.”
“Uppity” Black Atlantans like J. Max Barber, the editor of The Voice of the Negro, perhaps the first Southern magazine to be edited by Black people. Barber had dedicated the magazine to rendering current events and “history so accurately given and so vividly portrayed that it will become a kind of documentation for the coming generations.”
Born in South Carolina, Barber had come a long way from the place of his parents, who had been enslaved. After graduating from Virginia Union University in 1903, he moved to Atlanta to edit The Voice of the Negro. He secured contributors including the renowned educator Mary Church Terrell and the Atlanta University historian W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1905, Barber joined Du Bois and 27 others in forming the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the N.A.A.C.P. One of the Niagara Movement’s main initial outlets: Barber’s Voice of the Negro, which touted 15,000 subscribers.
Barber refused to publish the lie about the causes of the Atlanta massacre in 1906. “There has been no ‘carnival of rapes’ in and around Atlanta,” he wrote. “There has been a frightful carnival of newspaper lies.” He figured “this mob got its first psychological impulse from Tom Dixon’s ‘Clansman,’” which “came to Atlanta last winter” as a play.
Thomas Dixon Jr. had published “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan” in 1905, depicting Klan attacks as heroic acts of justice. D.W. Griffith adapted the novel for his 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation.” One of the film’s intertitles had been written by the president of the United States, who screened the film in the White House. “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation,” Woodrow Wilson had written in 1902, “until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South to protect the Southern country.”
The Trump administration’s framing of Black history as “D.E.I.” — and “D.E.I.” as harming white Americans — recasts its attack on Black history as protecting white Americans. As administering justice. Which is the justification of nearly every Klan and racist mob attack in history. The justification of the Atlanta attack in 1906.
When Barber challenged the “carnival of rapes” justification for the Atlanta Race Massacre in 1906, Gov. Joseph Terrell of Georgia and his Atlanta allies weaponized the criminal legal system. They threatened Barber with arrest. Police officers surveilled Barber’s office. Sound familiar?
Barber “did not care to be made a slave on a Georgia chain gang.” He ran away from Georgia slavery by another name (just as there are some Americans today who are fleeing red states — and even the nation itself — out of fear). Barber fled with The Voice of the Negro on financial life support. The magazine died in Chicago in 1907.
Barber’s career documenting Black life and history died, too. The electrifying writer became a dentist in Philadelphia. He contributed to a few campaigns, such as erecting a statue for John Brown at the abolitionist’s upstate New York gravesite in 1935 that still stands. But terror had largely silenced Barber’s voice of the Negro.
Life is named story. Afterlife is named history. Racist Americans have murdered Black lives and tried to murder Black afterlives, Black stories and Black history, Black storytellers and Black historians. So when Black people die, what we created, what we contributed, what we changed, what we documented dies, too. No funeral. Just gone from memory.
President Trump's raid on the Black historical record is a raid on the opportunity for all Americans to know the endurance of racial inequity and injustice are consequences of the enduring history of anti-Black racist policy and violence, not what’s wrong with Black people as a group. For Americans to know Black history is to know how Black ingenuity over the years has benefited them, how Black-led antiracist movements helped bring into being more equity and justice between Black people and white people, between Latino, Asian, and Native Americans and white Americans, between white men and women, between superrich white men and low- and middle-income white men. After all, the Ku Klux Klan didn’t just terrorize Black Americans.
Klan attacks are most remembered for whom they murdered. They are less remembered for what they murdered: all the Black towns, businesses, homes, churches, libraries, publications and careers. The very things that preserved public memory of Black history.
In 1949 Barber died in Philadelphia. He was not murdered in public, like other victims of the Atlanta Race Massacre in 1906, but he was murdered from public memory. His ability to create public memory was murdered: the point of Mr. Trump’s attack on Black history.
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8) Israel Bombards Gaza Amid Chaos Surrounding Aid Handouts
Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed more than 60 people over the past day, according to local health officials.
By Isabel Kershner and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, May 29, 2025
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel.
Palestinians collect aid supplies from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Khan Younis on Thursday. Hatem Khaled/Reuters
Israel bombarded Gaza again on Thursday and local health officials said more than 60 people had been killed in the attacks over the past day, as hungry Palestinians scrambled for food handouts under a new Israeli-backed aid operation that has been heavily criticized.
The United Nations says the new aid system, known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, is insufficient to meet basic needs for survival. In a reflection of the chaotic atmosphere surrounding distribution and the desperation of much of the population in Gaza, a large crowd of hungry people broke into a warehouse run by the U.N.’s World Food Program on Wednesday in search of food.
Images from the scene showed large crowds of Palestinians converging on the warehouse and removing sacks of looted flour. The W.F.P. said in a statement that initial reports indicated that two people had been killed and several others were injured.
While hundreds of distribution points existed under the previous aid-distribution system run by the United Nations, the new initiative requires Gaza residents to pick up aid packages from the three distribution hubs that it has operating in southern and central Gaza.
Some U.N. trucks are still making their way through a single border crossing into the enclave. But U.N. officials say that distribution to warehouses and bakeries inside Gaza has been hampered by the lack of secure routes, and that negligible quantities of food are reaching the people who need it.
Against the backdrop of the humanitarian crisis and mounting international pressure to end the devastating 19-month war in Gaza, Israel and Hamas were considering on Thursday a new version of a cease-fire proposal formulated by President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff.
The full details of the new proposal remain unclear.
But both Israel and Hamas have said they are willing to accept at least some of its terms, including the release of 10 living hostages held by Hamas and the remains of others who died in captivity in exchange for an agreed-upon number of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.
An Israeli official familiar with the details said the initial phase of the deal would provide for a 60-day cease-fire and a flow of aid through U.N.-run operations. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the sensitive negotiations.
It was unclear, however, whether the new proposal could address the main sticking point between the sides. Israel is insisting on having an option to resume fighting if Hamas does not surrender and disarm. Hamas is demanding firm guarantees that a temporary cease-fire would lead to a permanent cessation of hostilities and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
The war began in October 2023 with a deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw about 250 others taken hostage, according to the Israeli government. More than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
At least 20 living hostages are still being held in Gaza, according to the Israeli authorities.
Israel ended a previous cease-fire in March and has since embarked on a new phase of fighting, advancing slowly and expanding its control over larger swathes of the territory.
On Thursday, Gaza’s health ministry said that hospitals in the enclave had received more than 60 bodies over the past 24 hours.
Khalil Degran, a spokesman for Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, said his facility had received 20 bodies on Thursday morning following a reported Israeli airstrike in Al-Bureij, a few miles to the north.
The majority of the victims were civilians, including nine children, Mr. Degran said. The hospital had also received wounded people suffering extensive burns, and multiple cases of limb amputations, according to Mr. Degran.
“The situation is catastrophic and dire. We simply don’t have the capacity to provide adequate medical care,” he said, noting that his hospital is the only major health facility currently operating in central Gaza.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the reports of a strike in Al-Bureij but said in a midday statement on Thursday that its airstrikes over the past day had hit dozens of Hamas targets throughout the Gaza Strip.
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9) U.K. Weighs Sanctions on 2 Israeli Cabinet Ministers as Gaza Crisis Worsens
Facing rising pressure over the acute suffering of civilians in Gaza, the British government is considering sanctions on two far-right ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
By Mark Landler, Reporting from London, May 29, 2025
Britain has hardened its position toward Israel over its conduct of the war in Gaza. But as it weighs the next possible step — imposing sanctions on Israeli ministers — it confronts a complex landscape, not least because of the recent deadly shooting of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has been mulling sanctions against two far-right Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, for months — a proposal first floated by David Cameron, a foreign secretary in the previous Conservative government. But it has still not decided whether to go ahead, according to several officials.
Momentum toward the sanctions had accelerated in recent weeks, after Britain joined France and Canada in condemning Israel’s expansion of military operations in Gaza. British officials encountered little resistance to the idea of sanctions from the United States, where President Trump has also turned critical of Israel, warning that he wanted to “stop that whole situation as quickly as possible.”
Still, the fatal attack on the two embassy staff members, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, by a pro-Palestinian gunman outside a Jewish museum has given pause to some British officials, who question whether this is the right moment to punish senior Israeli leaders, according to one diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Britain now seems likely to wait to see if Israel will allow a measurable increase in aid to Gaza, according to officials. If the situation in the Gaza Strip improves, it could further defer a decision on whether to blacklist Mr. Ben-Gvir and Mr. Smotrich, who favor relocating Palestinians outside of Gaza, which would be a grave breach of international law.
The two men staunchly support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expanded operations against Hamas, which have led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians, including many children, in recent weeks.
British officials are similarly ambivalent about when to recognize an independent Palestinian state, a step taken by Norway, Spain and Ireland. France is considering such a move and has encouraged Britain to act in concert with it, potentially at a summit meeting in June. But some diplomats argue that doing so at this moment would have little effect.
The debate has laid bare differences between the Foreign Office, which is viewed as more forward-leaning, and 10 Downing Street, which is viewed as more cautious. But Mr. Starmer is under mounting pressure to do more, both from his Labour Party and from leading human rights lawyers in Britain, a cohort to which he once belonged.
“I think people the prime minister interacts with are saying, ‘You do know this will be more than a footnote in your legacy if you don’t do something?’” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who now runs the U.S./Middle East Project, a research group in London and New York.
Speaking in Parliament last week, David Lammy, the current foreign secretary, used the harshest language yet by a British official to denounce Israel’s conduct of the war. He said that Britain would suspend talks on a trade agreement and blasted comments by Mr. Smotrich about “cleansing” Gaza and moving its two million people to other countries.
“We must call this what it is,” Mr. Lammy said. “It is extremism. It is dangerous. It is repellent. It is monstrous.”
Mr. Lammy did not, however, accuse Israel of genocide, despite the cries of “Genocide!” from some Labour Party backbenchers while he spoke. The government is under pressure from lawmakers to invoke that term, which could open the door to the sanctions and a total suspension of weapons sales to Israel (Britain announced a partial suspension last September).
The Netanyahu government has rejected accusations of genocide in Gaza, claiming that the Israeli military has tried to limit deaths among Palestinian civilians.
On Monday, more than 800 lawyers, academics and retired judges called on Mr. Starmer in an open letter to impose sanctions, saying that Israel was guilty of war crimes and had met the threshold for genocide. They said that the limited aid Israel was allowing into Gaza, after an 11-week blockade of food and medical supplies, was not sufficient to avert an “unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.”
“War crimes, crimes against humanity, and serious violations of international humanitarian law are being committed,” said the signatories, who included two retired Supreme Court justices, Jonathan Sumption and Nicholas Wilson. “Genocide is being perpetrated in Gaza, or, at a minimum, there is a serious risk of genocide occurring.”
Mr. Starmer has long said that he will be guided by the principles of international law. His attorney general, Richard Hermer, also has a voice in setting the policy. Mr. Hermer was influential in Britain’s decision to drop objections to an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
In the aftermath of the shootings in Washington, Mr. Netanyahu lashed out at Mr. Starmer, as well as President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada. The three leaders had issued a joint statement demanding that Israel agree to an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.
“When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you,” he said in a video statement, “you’re on the wrong side of justice, you’re on the wrong side of humanity, and you’re on the wrong side of history.”
But it is Mr. Netanyahu, not Mr. Starmer, who has become more isolated. On Monday the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, joined the chorus of outrage in Europe over the dire situation in Gaza, saying Israel’s actions “can no longer be justified.” Even Mr. Trump, who once wrapped Mr. Netanyahu in a warm embrace, is now expressing impatience.
Britain, like other countries, has struggled to separate Mr. Trump’s statements, which can be impulsive and quickly reversed, from substantive policy shifts. That job was further complicated by drastic staff cuts last week at the National Security Council, which removed some of the officials that British diplomats consult.
Mr. Starmer has hesitated to diverge too sharply from the United States on issues from trade to Ukraine. But a shift in tone by Mr. Trump could theoretically give him more room to maneuver on Israel.
Given how the harrowing images and videos from Gaza are galvanizing world opinion, Mr. Levy predicted that Mr. Starmer might be forced to cast aside his cautious approach. “We may get to a moment where he may need to do a reversal,” Mr. Levy said.
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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10) Children in Gaza Are Starving. Let the U.N. Do Its Job.
By Catherine Russell, Ms. Russell is the executive director of UNICEF. May 29, 2025
On the morning of May 15, Miran Mohammad was helping her grandfather bake bread at his home in Beit Lahia, a town in northern Gaza. Given the scarcity of food, the 7-year-old Miran was hungry and was eager to have a piece of the freshly baked bread. She wouldn’t get the chance.
Miran’s mother insisted she wait to eat until the family returned to their home. As they entered their house, it was hit in an airstrike, collapsing on top of them and causing them both serious injuries.
Miran is now a patient at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital; doctors tell us her legs permanently damaged. She is one of the more than 3,700 children under 18 years old in Gaza reported to have been wounded since the end of the recent cease-fire. Over 1,300 other children are reported to have been killed in hostilities during the same period. Through nearly 20 months of war, nearly 17,000 children have been reported killed and more than 34,000 have been wounded — around one in every 20 children in Gaza — making it the deadliest conflict for children in recent memory.
With the threat of famine growing by the day, the plight of Gaza’s children will surely worsen. According to the latest analysis from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a tool used by UNICEF and its partners to assess food security and malnutrition, the entire population of Gaza now faces acute food insecurity. Nearly half a million people are teetering on the edge of starvation. We estimate that over 71,000 children and 17,000 mothers will suffer from acute malnutrition, characterized by rapid weight loss and low weight-to-height ratio, in the next 10 months without sufficient humanitarian aid and treatment.
UNICEF and its partners are doing everything possible to respond. Yet because of Israel’s two-month-long blockade of aid, now unevenly lifted, we have extremely limited stocks in Gaza. Unless we regain safe, sustained access to Gaza and are allowed to scale up, more children will suffer.
On Tuesday, the world watched as thousands of hungry Palestinians in Rafah rushed to get food from a new aid delivery system backed by Israel that bypasses the United Nations as the main aid supplier in the territory. As the chaotic scenes made clear, rather than increasing access to lifesaving supplies, the new aid distribution plan, facilitated by an organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, threatens to make things worse.
Before hostilities resumed, the United Nations operated a vast and effective aid delivery system inside Gaza. During the recent cease-fire, we were delivering assistance like essential vaccines and medicine, lifesaving nutrition services and access to clean water through more than 400 distribution points, including in sites close to shelters for displaced families. UNICEF and our partners went even further, delivering aid door-to-door, reaching malnourished children and pregnant women directly in their places of refuge.
That extensive system is now sidelined, and our operations have been significantly curtailed. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is reportedly channeling aid through a few distribution points in southern Gaza that have security on site provided by private American contractors, and Israeli soldiers standing outside the perimeter. Having a limited number of distribution sites will force civilians to travel far from their homes, exposing them to violence.
According to Israeli authorities, these aid distribution sites are being supplied by 60 trucks a day — a tenth of the number going into Gaza during the recent cease-fire — and dole out “family boxes,” food aid meant to meet minimum survival needs. But our team on the ground report these boxes are woefully insufficient for ensuring children’s well-being. This plan cannot support a population of 2.1 million people, including over a million children.
We believe this new mechanism is also incompatible with humanitarian principles, including neutrality, impartiality and independence, and fails to meet Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law. That law requires parties to a conflict to allow and facilitate rapid, safe and unimpeded passage of humanitarian assistance.
Further, because the new system includes the presence of security at the distribution sites, there have been concerns that these locations could be perceived as military objectives. This could place humanitarian personnel and civilians seeking assistance at those sites at risk of attacks.
Israel has defended the new distribution effort as a way to prevent Hamas from stealing supplies. But the United Nations and its partners already know how to get humanitarian aid inspected, cleared, offloaded and delivered — without diversion, without delay and with dignity.
Our aid can be tracked from point of registration to point of delivery. Together with our partners, we accompany our supplies to the end. Our food reaches the malnourished child. Our vaccines go into a child’s arm. And we are transparent about the sources of funding for our aid programs.
What we need is for UNICEF and its humanitarian partners to be allowed to do our jobs. We have proven that essentials like medicine, vaccines, water, food and nutrition for babies can reach those in distress, wherever they are, when we have unfettered and safe access.
We are not asking for the impossible. We are asking for international humanitarian law to be respected and applied; for a return to the functioning U.N.-led aid pipeline with safe and sustained humanitarian access through all available crossings; for the return of all remaining hostages; and for Hamas and Israel to agree to a durable cease-fire.
If these steps are taken, we can begin to light a path out of the darkness of war for Miran and all the other children in Gaza and Israel affected by this war. I urge all parties and those with influence over them to let us and our humanitarian partners get on with our work. The alternative risks the militarization of humanitarian aid and would likely doom Gaza’s children to more suffering and death.
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11) Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration, for Now, to End Biden-Era Migrant Program
The Trump administration had asked the court to allow it to end deportation protections for more than 500,000 people facing dire humanitarian crises in their home countries.
By Abbie VanSickle and Adam Liptak, Reporting from Washington, May 30, 2025
The ruling is the latest to respond to a flurry of applications asking the court to weigh in on the administration’s attempts to unwind Biden-era immigration policies. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration, for now, to revoke a Biden-era humanitarian program intended to give temporary residency to more than 500,000 immigrants from countries facing war and political turmoil.
The court’s order was unsigned and provided no reasoning, which is typical when the justices rule on emergency applications.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented, saying the majority had not given enough consideration to “the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”
The ruling, which exposes some migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to possible deportation, is the latest in a series of emergency orders by the justices in recent weeks responding to a flurry of applications asking the court to weigh in on the administration’s attempts to unwind Biden-era immigration policies.
Friday’s ruling focused on former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s expansion of a legal mechanism for immigration called humanitarian parole, in which migrants from countries facing instability are allowed to enter the United States and quickly secure work authorization, provided they have a private sponsor to take responsibility for them.
Earlier this month, the justices allowed the Trump administration to remove deportation protections from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants who had been allowed to remain in the United States under a program known as Temporary Protected Status.
Humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., are two different mechanisms by which migrants from troubled countries can be temporarily settled in the United States. Humanitarian parole is typically obtained by individuals who apply on a case-by-case basis, while T.P.S. is more often extended to large groups of migrants for a period of time. Individuals can hold both statuses at the same time.
Between the two rulings, the justices have agreed that, for now, the Trump administration can proceed with plans to deport hundreds of thousands of people who had fled war-torn and instable homelands and legally taken refuge in the United States.
The use of humanitarian parole has a decades-long history. It was used to admit nearly 200,000 Cubans during the 1960s and more than 350,000 Southeast Asians after the fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War.
The Biden administration announced a humanitarian parole program in April 2022 for Ukrainians seeking to flee after the Russian invasion.
Biden officials then introduced the program for Venezuelans in late 2022 and for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in January 2023. With a stalemate in Congress over immigration and a sharp rise in border crossings, the programs cleared the way for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from those nations to enter the country legally.
Biden officials had hoped that the programs would encourage immigrants to fly to the United States and apply for entry in an organized fashion, instead of traveling north by foot and crossing the border illegally.
When the program was adopted for Venezuelans, official ports of entry had been closed to migrants since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which had provided additional incentive for those intent on reaching the country to take more dangerous routes and cross the border illegally.
After the administration introduced its policy, Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants at the border from those countries dropped sharply.
Republican lawmakers have pushed back sharply against the humanitarian parole programs, arguing that they allowed migration by those who would not have otherwise qualified to enter the country.
Texas and other Republican-led states filed lawsuits while Mr. Biden was in office seeking to block the parole program, arguing that it burdened them by adding costs for health care, education and law enforcement. The courts upheld the programs’ legality.
President Trump moved to end the humanitarian parole programs for people from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti on his first day back in office.
So far, the Trump administration has not tried to revoke the status of 240,000 Ukrainians who received humanitarian parole, though it has paused consideration of new applications under that program.
Lawyers for migrants then sued. They argued that the termination of the humanitarian and other immigration parole programs was “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious.”
A federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily paused the administration’s revocation of the program in March, finding that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lacked the authority to categorically revoke parole for all 532,000 people without providing individualized, case-by-case reviews.
On May 5, a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the lower court’s temporary block on the administration, finding that Ms. Noem had not made a “strong showing” that her “categorical termination” of humanitarian parole for all migrants was likely to survive a court challenge.
In an emergency application to the Supreme Court on May 8, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that Ms. Noem had “broad discretion over categories of immigration determinations” and that federal immigration law permitted the secretary “to revoke that parole” whenever its purposes had been served.
By blocking the Trump administration from ending the programs, the lower court had “needlessly” upended “critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry” and had undone “democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election,” Mr. Sauer argued.
Lawyers for the immigrants filed a brief with the court arguing that Ms. Noem’s decision to end the parole protections “contravened express limits on her authority” and that siding with the Trump administration would “cause an immense amount of needless human suffering” for the immigrants.
The lawyers for the immigrants added: “All of them followed the law and the rules of the U.S. government, and they are here to reunite with family and/or to escape, even temporarily, the instability, dangers and deprivations of their home countries.”
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12) White House Health Report Included Fake Citations
A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.
By Dani Blum and Maggie Astor, May 29, 2025
A report by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s health commission cited nonexistent studies on mental illness and children’s asthma medication. Credit...Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this.”
Researchers previously told The Times that they agreed with many of the report’s points, like its criticism of synthetic chemicals in the U.S. food supply and of the prevalence of ultraprocessed foods. (An early copy of the report shared with reporters did not include citations.)
But doctors have disagreed with some of the report’s other suggestions, including that routine childhood vaccines may be harmful — which scientists say is based on an incorrect understanding of immunology.
The news that some citations were fake further undermines confidence in the report’s findings, Dr. Keyes said.
She noted that her research had indeed shown that rates of depression and anxiety were rising among adolescents, as the report said they were. But the faulty citation “certainly makes me concerned about the evidence base that conclusions are being drawn from,” she said.
The report also originally cited a paper on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs published in The Lancet in 2005. A paper with that title does exist, but it was a perspective piece from an expert, not a study. It was published in a different journal five years earlier, and was not written by the cited author.
Another citation incorrectly referred to a paper on the link between sleep, inflammation and insulin sensitivity. The citation included a co-author who did not work on the paper, and omitted a researcher who did; it also listed the wrong journal. The citation has now been corrected, but Thirumagal Kanagasabai, a researcher in Toronto and the lead author on the paper, said she was shocked an incorrect citation had made it in there in the first place.
“I just don’t understand that,” she said. “How could it get mixed up?”
The report also pointed to what it said was a 2009 paper in The Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology by “Findling, R.L., et al.,” on the advertising of psychiatric medications. A spokesman for Virginia Commonwealth University, where Dr. Robert L. Findling works as a professor of psychiatry, said Dr. Findling had not written the article.
Experts said that even some correctly cited papers were inaccurately summarized. For example, the report said that the fifth edition of a guide used by psychiatrists to classify mental health conditions had loosened criteria for A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder, driving a 40-fold increase in diagnoses in children from 1994 to 2003.
But that edition was not published until 2013. The diagnoses mentioned in the cited study would have been made using an earlier version.
In addition, the data appeared to originate from a 2007 study that refers to an approximately 40-fold increase in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder among youth from 1994 to 2003, but does not mention increases in A.D.H.D. prevalence.
Part of what makes the errors so striking, Dr. Kanagasabai said, is that the importance of citations is drilled into young researchers even in the earliest stages of their careers.
“You want to always go back to the original source, and you want to make sure that source is correct,” she said.
Christina Caron contributed reporting.
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13) Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.
By Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik, May 30, 2025
Sheera Frenkel reported from Washington and San Francisco, and Aaron Krolik from New York.
Alex Karp, a co-founder and the chief executive of Palantir, at a forum in Washington in April. The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government. Caroline Gutman for The New York Times
Migrants apprehended by U.S. agents in November. President Trump could potentially use government data to police immigrants. Paul Ratje for The New York Times
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
Palantir’s selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.
Some current and former Palantir employees have been unnerved by the work. The company risks becoming the face of Mr. Trump’s political agenda, four employees said, and could be vulnerable if data on Americans is breached or hacked. Several tried to distance the company from the efforts, saying any decisions about a merged database of personal information rest with Mr. Trump and not the firm.
This month, 13 former employees signed a letter urging Palantir to stop its endeavors with Mr. Trump. Linda Xia, a signee who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it.
“Data that is collected for one reason should not be repurposed for other uses,” Ms. Xia said. “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse.”
Mario Trujillo, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said the government typically collected data for good reasons, such as to accurately levy taxes. But “if people can’t trust that the data they are giving the government will be protected, that it will be used for things other than what they gave it for, it will lead to a crisis of trust,” he said.
Palantir declined to comment on its work with the Trump administration and pointed to its blog, which details how the company handles data.
“We act as a data processor, not a data controller,” it said. “Our software and services are used under direction from the organisations that license our products: these organisations define what can and cannot be done with their data; they control the Palantir accounts in which analysis is conducted. ”
The White House did not comment on the use of Palantir’s technology and referred to Mr. Trump’s executive order, which said he wanted to “eliminate information silos and streamline data collection across all agencies to increase government efficiency and save hard-earned taxpayer dollars.”
Some details of Palantir’s government contracts and DOGE’s work to compile data were previously reported by Wired and CNN.
Palantir, which was founded in 2003 by Alex Karp and Mr. Thiel and went public in 2020, specializes in finding patterns in data and presenting the information in ways that are easy to process and navigate, such as charts and maps. Its main products include Foundry, a data analytics platform, and Gotham, which helps organize and draw conclusions from data and is tailored for security and defense purposes.
In an interview last year, Mr. Karp, Palantir’s chief executive, said the company’s role was “the finding of hidden things” by sifting through data.
Palantir has long worked with the federal government. Its government contracts span the Defense Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the pandemic, the Biden administration signed a contract with Palantir to manage the distribution of vaccines through the C.D.C.
Mr. Trump’s election in November boosted Palantir’s stock, which has risen more than 140 percent since then. Mr. Karp, who donated to the Democratic Party last year, has welcomed Mr. Trump’s win and called Mr. Musk the most “qualified person in the world” to remake the U.S. government.
At the I.R.S., Palantir engineers joined in April to use Foundry to organize data gathered on American taxpayers, two government officials said. Their work began as a way to create a single, searchable database for the I.R.S., but has since expanded, they said. Palantir is in talks for a permanent contract with the I.R.S., they said.
A Treasury Department representative said that the I.R.S. was updating its systems to serve American taxpayers, and that Palantir was contracted to complete the work with I.R.S. engineers.
Palantir also recently began helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enforcement and removal operations team, according to two Palantir employees and two current and former D.H.S. officials. The work is part of a $30 million contract that ICE signed with Palantir in April to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.
Some D.H.S. officials exchanged emails with DOGE officials in February about merging some Social Security information with records kept by immigration officials, according to screenshots of the messages viewed by The New York Times.
In a statement, Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokeswoman, did not address Palantir’s new work with the agency and said the company “has had contracts with the federal government for 14 years.”
Palantir representatives have also held talks with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education to use the company’s technology to organize the agencies’ data, according to two Palantir employees and officials in those agencies.
The Social Security Administration and Education Department did not respond to requests for comment.
The goal of uniting data on Americans has been quietly discussed by Palantir engineers, employees said, adding that they were worried about collecting so much sensitive information in one place. The company’s security practices are only as good as the people using them, they said. They characterized some DOGE employees as sloppy on security, such as not following protocols in how personal devices were used.
Ms. Xia said Palantir employees were increasingly worried about reputational damage to the company because of its work with the Trump administration. There is growing debate within the company about its federal contracts, she said.
“Current employees are discussing the implications of their work and raising questions internally,” she said, adding that some employees have left after disagreements over the company’s work with the Trump administration.
Last week, a Palantir strategist, Brianna Katherine Martin, posted on LinkedIn that she was departing the company because of its expanded work with ICE.
“For most of my time here, I found the way that Palantir grappled with the weight of our capabilities to be refreshing, transparent and conscionable,” she wrote. “This has changed for me over the past few months. For me, this is a red line I won’t redraw.”
Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz and Tara Siegel Bernard contributed reporting.
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14) Israel Seeks to Clear Much of Northern Gaza, Warning of Dangerous Combat to Come
Many in the area have already been displaced at least once during the war and little humanitarian aid is arriving amid widespread hunger.
By Lara Jakes, May 30, 2025
Lara Jakes has written about Middle East diplomacy for more than a decade.
Palestinians flee parts of northern Gaza on Friday after the latest evacuation order from the Israeli military. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
A sweeping new evacuation order by Israel’s military covers much of northern Gaza, warning residents that these areas will soon turn into dangerous combat zones.
Many of the inhabitants have already been displaced at least once during Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, which began almost 20 months ago. And little humanitarian aid has been reaching the area, where hunger is widespread.
Maps show that only a few neighborhoods in northern Gaza City were still unaffected by evacuation orders over the past 10 days. The latest order, issued Thursday night, urged residents of northern Gaza to move west toward the Mediterranean coast.
“From this moment on, the mentioned areas will be considered dangerous combat zones,” Avichay Adraee, an Arabic-language spokesman for the Israeli military, said in a statement on social media late Thursday. He said residents of northern Gaza had been warned several times to leave.
Northern Gaza is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. But most humanitarian aid has not been reaching the area for months.
Three aid distribution centers set up this week by an Israeli and American-backed system to bypass Hamas militants are all in southern and central Gaza. The United Nations and other aid organizations have declined to cooperate with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the group behind the new aid mechanism, describing it as a militarized distribution operation that violates humanitarian principles.
As hungry Gazans grow more desperate by the day and aid distribution continues to fall far short of needs, insecurity and chaos around distribution sites and food storage areas are growing.
Patience among much of the international community is growing thin, largely because of the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. Even Israel’s allies such as France, Britain and Canada have been threatening repercussions unless there is immediate action to ease the dire conditions in Gaza.
“It’s very clear today that we cannot let this situation last,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Friday at a security forum in Singapore. “If there is not a response to the humanitarian situation in the next few hours today, we will have to harden the collective position.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry shot back in a statement saying the government was facilitating the entry of humanitarian aid. “The facts do not interest Macron,” it said.
The lack of aid distribution in northern Gaza has forced residents to wait for hours for charity-kitchen food that runs out too soon and to dig boreholes for water to drink, even if it is not clean.
Israel accuses Hamas of siphoning off aid, selling it for profit and using it as a tool to control Gazans. Israel has stated that one of its chief goals in the war is to uproot Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that ignited the conflict.
Israel had barred aid from entering Gaza in March, when a cease-fire agreement broke down. The new distribution centers opened this week and were thronged by desperate people seeking food.
The United Nations and other humanitarian organizations have criticized the aid centers as woefully insufficient to meet the basic needs for Palestinians’ survival after the Israeli blockade brought much of the territory to the brink of famine.
On Friday, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said it had enough food, blankets, medical supplies and hygiene kits for 200,000 people sitting in a warehouse in Amman, Jordan, a three-hour drive from Gaza.
“An unhindered, uninterrupted flow of supplies must be allowed in,” the agency said in a statement.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said on Friday that it had delivered 2.1 million meals in its first four days of service and planned to build additional sites across Gaza, including in the northern region, in the weeks ahead.
The new evacuation order comes as Israel and Hamas consider a new cease-fire proposal that would free a few dozen Israeli hostages, alive and dead, still being held in Gaza, and release hundreds of Palestinians prisoners held by Israel.
On Friday, the Hamas official Basem Naim said his group was still reviewing the latest proposal offered by Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s chief envoy to the negotiations.
American and Israeli officials said Mr. Witkoff’s proposal, which has Israel’s support, would allow the flow of aid into Gaza through U.N.-run operations and an initial 60-day cease-fire as negotiations continued.
Hamas officials suggested it did not contain strong enough guarantees on ending the war — one of the chief sticking points in the cease-fire negotiations. But they have stopped short of rejecting it outright.
Israel is insisting on having the option to resume fighting if Hamas does not surrender and disarm. Hamas is demanding firm guarantees that a temporary cease-fire would lead to a permanent cessation of hostilities and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Vivian Yee contributed reporting.
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15) In Emaciated Children, Gaza’s Hunger Is Laid Bare
Aid began to trickle into the territory this week. But there is never enough.
Visuals by Saher Alghorra, Written by Vivian Yee, May 30, 2025
Saher Alghorra reported from northern Gaza, and Vivian Yee from Cairo.
Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, 6, has lost 42 percent of her body weight in the last two months, going from about 34 pounds to 21 pounds. Najwa needs specially prepared meals because of an esophagus condition, but her family can barely find any food at all. Doctors have diagnosed her with severe malnutrition.
The starvation of Gaza can be measured in the jutting ribs of a 6-year-old girl. In the twig-like thinness of her arms. In the pounds she and those around her have lost. In the two tomatoes, two green chili peppers and single cucumber a destitute child can buy to feed his family that day.
Until last week, Israel had blocked all food, fuel and medicine from entering the Gaza Strip for 80 days, attempting to pressure Hamas into releasing the Israeli hostages it still holds as negotiations over a cease-fire remain deadlocked.
With international alarm surging over its total blockade, Israel allowed in a drip of aid starting last week. That enabled some bakeries to reopen. But humanitarian officials said it did little to alleviate Gaza’s enormous needs and to stop the territory’s slide toward famine. Limited amounts of food began being distributed to residents on Tuesday under a much-criticized plan backed by Israel.
In northern Gaza, cut off by Israeli troops from the rest of the territory, hundreds of thousands of people are reduced to waiting for hours for charity-kitchen food that runs out too soon and to digging boreholes for water to drink, unsanitary though it might be.
There is never enough.
Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, 6, has lost 42 percent of her body weight in the last two months, going from about 34 pounds to 21 pounds. Najwa needs specially prepared meals because of an esophagus condition, but her family can barely find any food at all. Doctors have diagnosed her with severe malnutrition.
People struggle to find fuel for hospital generators, cars and cooking stoves. Families have resorted to burning wood or even trash. Here, Bashir Sami Ashour’s family cooked soup over an open fire in Gaza City, in the north.
Pastry shops like this one, along with grocery stores, have long since run out of anything to sell. Bakeries have no fuel to bake with.
There is no electricity and little clean water available in Gaza, so people dig for whatever water they can find. Then, like this boy in Jabaliya camp, they lug it away in plastic containers — an ever harder task for people weakened by malnutrition.
Vegetable markets in Gaza City were bustling before the war. But with nothing being imported and Gaza’s farmland mostly destroyed or inaccessible because of evacuation orders, there is now little produce for sale.
What few fruits and vegetables are available are far too expensive for most families, so if they buy at all, they buy by the piece, not by the usual kilogram. This week, locally grown tomatoes cost $11.30 per kilogram — about two pounds — and locally grown cucumbers cost $10 per kilogram at this market in Gaza City.
A mother living in a tent tried to feed eight children from a few small bowls of food.
Ordered by the Israeli military to leave growing swaths of Gaza, people have been herded into ever-smaller zones. About 90 percent of Gaza’s population of roughly two million has been displaced from home. Most have been displaced multiple times since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas led a deadly surprise attack on Israel, drawing a crushing military retaliation.
Najwa’s family was displaced from Shajaiye to Gaza City and now lives in a tent. The Jordanian authorities, who heard about her case, are trying to evacuate her to receive medical care abroad, her family said.
With bakeries closed for lack of wheat flour and fuel, people grind pasta down into flour that they can bake into bread.
Lentils, too, are being ground into flour for patties or bread. In all, people bring between 400 and 500 kilograms of lentils, rice, pasta and other dry goods a day, some of it saved from when more aid was entering Gaza, to Gaza City’s Jaber Mill, which grinds it down. The owner, Ahmed Jaber, said some people had no choice but to grind up spoiled or rotten supplies.
Residents of the northernmost part of Gaza have fled the fighting to this school, now a shelter, in Gaza City. They line up their buckets to reserve a turn to fill them whenever the school’s water main starts pumping or when a water truck comes by. Those who arrive too late miss their chance.
As bakeries closed and aid groups ran out of supplies to distribute to families, local charity kitchens, including this one in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, became some of the only places many Palestinians in Gaza could find food.
Adeel Adeeb Sukkar ran one kitchen in Gaza City, relying on donations from relatives abroad to provide free meals to 500 desperate displaced families a day.
By Sunday, with his stocks gone, he had been forced to close.
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16) White House Unveils New Details of Stark Budget Cuts
The new blueprint shows that a vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs would be hit, including aid for college and cancer research.
By Tony Romm, Reporting from Washington, Published May 30, 2025, Updated May 31, 2025
“Mr. Trump also targeted the nutritional program for women, infants and children, which helped about 6.7 million poorer recipients last year afford food. His budget proposed to roll back a policy that had increased the benefits low-income families receive for fruits and vegetables under the program. Georgia Machell, the president of the National WIC Association, which represents providers, estimated in a statement Friday that the move would result in breastfeeding mothers seeing those monthly benefits drop to $13 from $54, while for young children, the monthly allowance would be reduced to $10 from $27. … And as part of a reorientation that slashed federal health spending, the president proposed chopping funding at the National Cancer Institute by more than $2.7 billion, nearly a 40 percent decrease, drawing a sharp rebuke from cancer research supporters late Friday.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/politics/white-house-budget-trump.html
The Trump administration on Friday unveiled fuller details of its proposal to slash about $163 billion in federal spending next fiscal year, offering a more intricate glimpse into the vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs that would be hit by the deepest cuts.
The many spending reductions throughout the roughly 1,220-page document and agency blueprints underscored President Trump’s desire to foster a vast transformation in Washington. His budget seeks to reduce the size of government and its reach into Americans lives, including services to the poor.
The new proposal reaffirmed the president’s recommendation to set federal spending levels at their lowest in modern history, as the White House first sketched out in its initial submission to Congress transmitted in early May. But it offered new details about the ways in which Mr. Trump hoped to achieve the savings, and the many functions of government that could be affected as a result.
The White House budget is not a matter of law. Ultimately, it is up to Congress to determine the budget, and in recent years it has routinely discarded many of the president’s proposals. Lawmakers are only starting to embark on the annual process, with government funding set to expire at the end of September.
The updated budget reiterated the president’s pursuit of deep reductions for nearly every major federal agency, reserving its steepest cuts for foreign aid, medical research, tax enforcement and a slew of anti-poverty programs, including rental assistance. The White House restated its plan to seek a $33 billion cut at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, and another $33 billion reduction at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Targeting the Education Department, the president again put forward a roughly $12 billion cut, seeking to eliminate dozens of programs while unveiling new changes to Pell grants, which help low-income students pay for college.
The maximum award would be capped at $5,710 for the 2026-7 award year, a decrease of more than $1,600. A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget attributed the cap to a pre-existing shortfall in the program. So while it did not propose to cut spending on Pell grants, the Trump administration also opted against providing new money to sustain the student aid at its existing level.
Mr. Trump also targeted the nutritional program for women, infants and children, which helped about 6.7 million poorer recipients last year afford food. His budget proposed to roll back a policy that had increased the benefits low-income families receive for fruits and vegetables under the program.
Georgia Machell, the president of the National WIC Association, which represents providers, estimated in a statement Friday that the move would result in breastfeeding mothers seeing those monthly benefits drop to $13 from $54, while for young children, the monthly allowance would be reduced to $10 from $27.
The Office of Management and Budget maintained that the top-line funding level for the program had not changed and that it would still serve eligible participants.
And as part of a reorientation that slashed federal health spending, the president proposed chopping funding at the National Cancer Institute by more than $2.7 billion, nearly a 40 percent decrease, drawing a sharp rebuke from cancer research supporters late Friday.
“For the past 50 years, every significant medical breakthrough, especially in the treatment of cancer, has been linked to sustained federal investment in research” by the institute, the American Cancer Society Action Network said in a statement. “This commitment has contributed to the remarkable statistic of over 18 million cancer survivors currently living in the U.S. today.”
The cut to cancer research is part of a roughly $18 billion reduction at the National Institutes of Health that Mr. Trump revealed earlier this month, as the White House aims to consolidate health agencies and their research centers.
Democrats immediately rebuked Mr. Trump on Friday for the deep proposed cuts to domestic programs.
Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the chamber’s appropriations panel, described the blueprint as a “draconian proposal to hurt working people and our economy, and it is dead on arrival in Congress as long as I have anything to say about it.”
The White House did not include some key details in its updated budget, including estimates of tax revenues, and it did not offer a full set of spending proposals for the Pentagon, though it promised those in June. The omissions also angered Democrats, who said the timing and nature of the administration’s blueprint — released late on a Friday — only served to highlight the magnitude of its proposed cuts.
Mr. Trump and his budget director, Russell T. Vought, “are clearly hiding their policy goals, because they would hurt the middle class, the working class and the vulnerable,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who leads her party on the House Appropriations Committee.
Republicans are also racing to advance a package of tax cuts that could include additional reductions in federal spending. And the White House plans to send Congress a separate request next week to claw back about $9 billion in funds that lawmakers previously authorized, predominantly targeting money for public broadcasting and foreign aid.
Mr. Vought described the spending targeted for rescission this week as “waste and garbage,” and signaled the administration would seek to rescind other funds. He said the focus is on funds identified by the Department of Government Efficiency, the team of aides known as DOGE until recently overseen by the tech billionaire Elon Musk.
“We are doing everything we can to make the DOGE cuts permanent,” Mr. Vought, who leads the Office of Management and Budget, told Fox Business this week.
Mr. Vought added that the president could also try to halt some enacted funding on his own, using an authority known as impoundment to bypass Congress on spending. The budget director said that option was “still on the table.” But using it could presage a major battle over the power of the nation’s purse, which the Constitution affords to lawmakers.
Christina Jewett contributed reporting.
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17) Trump Officials Deported Another Man Despite Court Order
A federal appeals panel ordered officials not to deport a 31-year-old to El Salvador. Minutes later, it happened anyway. The government blamed “administrative errors.”
By Mattathias Schwartz and Alan Feuer, May 30, 2025
The Trump administration deported a 31-year-old Salvadoran man minutes after a federal appeals court barred his removal while his case proceeded, the government admitted in a court filing this week.
In its filing, the government denied that it had violated the order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, instead blaming “a confluence of administrative errors.” The filing argues that because the process of deporting the man, Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, had already started before the court issued its formal order, at 9:52 a.m. May 7, that meant the order had not been violated.
The plane carrying Mr. Melgar-Salmeron to El Salvador did not take off from Alexandria, La., until 10:20 a.m. Eastern time, according to the government’s timeline. The government had also previously given the court what the judges called “express assurance” that it would not schedule a deportation for him until the next day.
The deportation deepened the questions surrounding the Trump administration’s legal tactics and administrative errors as it has sought to carry out the president’s aggressive vision of deporting as many as one million immigrants during his first year in office. In at least three other deportation cases, federal judges have determined that Trump officials expelled people from the country in violation of standing court orders.
In an interview, one of Mr. Melgar-Salmeron’s lawyers disputed the government’s characterization of the deportation as a mistake, saying it appeared to be part of a larger pattern of the administration ignoring court orders. “It would be an absurd level of mistake,” said Matthew Borowski, the lawyer, comparing it to a chef pouring in pepper instead of salt. “Verifying the paperwork and putting the right people on the plane is their job.”
The questions raised by the court over the deportation were reported earlier by Investigative Post, a nonprofit news outlet in Western New York.
In a filing on Wednesday in response to questions from the three-judge appellate panel, the government detailed a series of communication lapses between an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Buffalo, which was responsible for monitoring Mr. Melgar-Salmeron’s legal case, and one in Louisiana, where he was being held.
Administration lawyers emailed the Buffalo office at 10:08 a.m. May 7, but the office did not flag the court’s order in ICE’s internal system until 10:45 a.m., after the flight had taken off, an ICE official told the court.
Mr. Melgar-Salmeron, who had been affiliated with the MS-13 street gang and had previously served two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to possession of an unregistered sawed-off shotgun, was appealing an order for his removal, fearing he could be sent to prison in El Salvador and persecuted there, his lawyer said. He had disavowed MS-13 and now has a wife and four children in Virginia, Mr. Borowski said. He said his client’s family believes Mr. Melgar-Salmeron is being held in a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
The appellate judges have not yet indicated how they will respond. Mr. Borowski said he would soon file papers asking the court to appoint a special master who could determine whether any officials should be held in criminal contempt.
In each of the other cases where migrants have been deported despite court orders, the judges have subsequently issued new orders instructing Trump officials to take steps toward bringing them back to the United States so they could be afforded due process.
The best known of the cases is arguably that of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who was arrested on March 12 by federal immigration agents in Maryland after living in the state for nearly six years under the protection of a judicial order that barred him from being returned to his homeland because he might face danger there.
Three days after he was taken into custody, Mr. Abrego Garcia was flown to El Salvador — the one place the order forbade him from being sent — in what officials later called an “administrative error.” For more than two months now, Mr. Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen, has been locked in one of El Salvador’s most notorious prisons despite three court orders — including one from the Supreme Court — instructing the White House to “facilitate” his release.
Judge Paula Xinis, who has been handling the case in Federal District Court in Maryland, has spent the past few weeks trying to determine whether to hold the administration in contempt for not complying with those orders. But the Justice Department, acting on the behalf of the White House, has repeatedly stonewalled her efforts to get information about the steps the administration has taken to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s freedom.
In a similar case, another federal judge in Maryland, Stephanie A. Gallagher, has ordered the administration to facilitate the return of a 20-year-old Venezuelan man, known in court papers as Cristian, who was expelled to El Salvador on the same set of flights as Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Cristian, who was convicted of possessing cocaine, had sought asylum in the United States, but was nonetheless expelled to El Salvador in violation of a settlement agreement that immigration lawyers and the Department of Homeland Security reached in the waning days of the Biden administration.
Under that agreement, unaccompanied minors who arrive in the United States and claim asylum cannot be removed from the country until their cases are fully resolved.
Judge Gallagher’s order directing the administration to take steps toward bringing Cristian back to the United States was affirmed this month in a scathing ruling by a federal appeals court in Virginia, which noted the Trump administration’s serial efforts to sidestep court rulings.
“As is becoming far too common,” one of the appeals court judges, Roger Gregory, wrote, “we are confronted again with the efforts of the executive branch to set aside the rule of law in pursuit of its goals.”
Like Judge Xinis, Judge Gallagher has been trying to get to the bottom of the White House’s recalcitrance. Last week, she ordered Trump officials to send her an update by Wednesday about what they had done to secure Cristian’s return. When the officials failed to follow her instructions, the judge reprimanded them sharply, saying they had “utterly disregarded” her directives.
“Defendants’ untimely response,” she wrote, “is the functional equivalent of, ‘We haven’t done anything and don’t intend to.’”
In yet another case, the Trump administration has signaled that it intends to comply with a judge’s order to bring back a wrongfully deported immigrant.
Last week, Judge Brian E. Murphy issued a ruling in Federal District Court in Boston, telling the White House to facilitate the return of a Guatemalan man deported to Mexico even though he said he had been raped and kidnapped there. Judge Murphy determined that the man, known only as O.C.G., had been sent to Mexico in violation of an order the judge issued in April forbidding immigrants from being expelled to a country not their own without having a “meaningful opportunity” to challenge their removal.
Immigration officials initially asserted that O.C.G. had not sought to contest his deportation to Mexico, but then reversed themselves, saying that they were unable to find any officers had properly informed him of his removal or heard him say that he accepted it.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration said it was taking steps to follow Judge Murphy’s order. Immigration authorities made contact with O.C.G.’s legal team over the weekend and were working to bring him back to the United States on a charter flight, according to the two-page filing in the case.
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18) N.Y.P.D. Is Helping Federal Agents Investigate Migrants. Should It?
A Palestinian woman accused of overstaying her visa has been detained in Texas. Her case has raised questions about whether the police should cooperate with the Trump administration.
By Maria Cramer, May 31, 2025
In March, a federal investigator asked the New York Police Department for information about a woman who had been arrested during a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University and was now detained for overstaying her visa.
The woman, Leqaa Kordia, 32, was being investigated for money laundering, the investigator said, and the Department of Homeland Security needed help. The police handed over her birth date, address and the name of a possible associate. An officer also provided the woman’s sealed arrest report.
But a month later, during an immigration court hearing, the only evidence of money laundering that federal prosecutors presented was a $1,000 MoneyGram transfer that Ms. Kordia had sent to relatives in Gaza.
The judge, Tara Naselow-Nahas, was unimpressed.
“Based on the evidence, I do not find that the respondent poses a danger to the United States,” she said and ordered that Ms. Kordia be released on a $20,000 bond. Ms. Kordia remains at the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas as prosecutors seek a reversal of the decision.
But the judge’s ruling and questions about the federal government’s credibility have civil libertarians asking whether the Police Department should reconsider its cooperation with the Trump administration.
The city’s sanctuary laws forbid the department from divulging information in immigration cases, which are civil matters, but the police often cooperate with federal authorities on criminal cases, usually in joint investigations into crimes like sex trafficking, drug and gun dealing, and terrorism.
Ms. Kordia’s case is the rarer instance in which federal agents have asked about a criminal inquiry that does not involve a joint investigation. In those cases, the department also expects officers to cooperate, vetting requests through superiors and maintaining a record of information released. But the department has no written guidelines or procedures for assessing such requests beyond a brief description.
Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch said Thursday that the police were watching closely to ensure that federal officials were truthful, but that cooperation with agencies like Homeland Security Investigations and the F.B.I. was crucial to keeping New Yorkers safe from terrorism, trafficking and transnational crime.
“Some have asked whether we should reconsider our cooperation with federal agencies on criminal investigations in light of their work with ICE,” she said during a budget hearing before the City Council, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “The short, straight answer to this is no.”
“The only way these investigations are successful is by N.Y.P.D. detectives working seamlessly with federal agents on a daily basis,” she added.
But some say the department must ask more and harder questions. They contend that a long-established trust has been breached because federal authorities, struggling to meet President Trump’s demands to deport as many immigrants as possible, are misleading — even lying — to local law enforcement officers and judges.
“The N.Y.P.D. should think through its own systems and its own processes,” said Anne Venhuizen, senior staff attorney for the Bronx Defenders, which represents the indigent in court. “They are potentially violating sanctuary laws by not having a more fulsome practice of verifying that the information they’re getting is accurate.”
Local police officers in other states, predominantly in the South, have cooperated for years as ICE has apprehended people accused of immigration violations. Now, other states are falling in line with Mr. Trump’s demands. On May 22, Gov. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire signed two bills requiring police departments to help ICE.
New York and other cities with sanctuary laws, such as Boston and Chicago, have a trickier path, cooperating on criminal matters but not civil immigration. And events in recent months have cast a shadow on the actions of federal law enforcement.
In March, a judge approved a warrant for ICE agents to search for Yunseo Chung, a Columbia junior who had participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The decision was based on an agent’s sworn statement that the university was breaking a federal law that prohibited the harboring of “removable aliens.” But Ms. Chung is a permanent resident, and her lawyers accused ICE of lying to the judge.
In April, the federal government sued the City of Rochester, in New York, after its Police Department ordered more training for officers who had helped ICE agents handcuff immigrants. City officials have said that immigration officers lied when they called the police on March 24 and said they needed help with an emergency stop on a city road.
In January, police officers in Millcreek, Utah, suspected that ICE agents were lying when they said they had stopped an American man because he had tried to hit them with his car. In fact, the man said, he had honked while the agents were detaining a woman and they pulled him over and pointed a gun at him.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment on the cases.
“This federal government has completely blurred the lines between valid criminal enforcement and immigration enforcement,” said Meghna Philip, director of special litigation at the Legal Aid Society in New York City. “In our present reality, if anything, there should be a presumption of noncooperation with immigration authorities.”
The New York police said that the federal agent who had asked about Ms. Kordia had provided contact information, as well as a name, shield number and case number, and they believed that was sufficient. Commissioner Tisch said Thursday that she had put federal agencies on notice.
“I am nobody’s fool,” she said. “If we were to find that a federal agency had not been honest with us, if we were told that a records request was for a criminal investigation, but in fact that was not true, then that would be a tremendous breach of our trust. And we would need to reconsider how we do business with that federal agency. I have been very upfront about that with all our federal partners.”
Homeland Security Investigations did not return repeated requests for comment.
Pushing back on federal requests would harm cooperation that flourished after the Sept. 11 attacks, said Christopher Mercado, a retired New York police lieutenant who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
But, he said, “I’m going to be honest with you: The feds may not always be transparent with the P.D.”
Federal investigators may fear that giving too much information could compromise an investigation or a confidential informant, he said. Historically, local police officers have accepted that.
“Those relationships are always going to be important and we don’t want to burn them,” Mr. Mercado said.
Ms. Kordia, a waitress from Paterson, N.J., who came to the United States from the West Bank in 2016 and lived with her mother, an American citizen, has not been charged with any crimes and is accused only of overstaying her visa.
She went to the demonstration in New York on April 30, 2024. She was accused of blocking a gate and arrested with dozens of other protesters, according to a police report that also said she had no record of criminal complaints or investigations. The report was sealed after her case was dismissed.
Court records filed by Ms. Kordia’s lawyers suggest that agents with Homeland Security Investigations did not start looking into her until March, almost a year after her arrest.
From March 5 until March 13, the day she was detained, federal agents interviewed people who knew her, including her mother and uncle.
They set up a trace on her WhatsApp account and subpoenaed records from MoneyGram, according to court documents. She had sent the $1,000 to her aunt on behalf of her mother, who could not figure out how to send the funds through MoneyGram, according to her family and lawyers.
After Ms. Kordia learned that ICE wanted to question her, she hired a lawyer and they went to the agency’s Newark field office to explain. But her lawyer was barred from the meeting and Ms. Kordia was immediately detained and put on a plane to Texas.
The following day, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, accused Ms. Kordia of taking part in “pro-Hamas protests,” and the federal investigator asked the New York Police Department about the supposed money laundering investigation.
An officer who works at the police’s Real Time Crime Center, a hub that provides detectives with data, gave an agent from Homeland Security Investigations the sealed arrest report, which state law forbids. The Police Department has said it is investigating the officer’s actions.
In court papers, Ms. Kordia’s lawyers have said that she has been kept in miserable conditions at Prairieland, where cockroaches skitter across the floor and guards have refused to honor her requests for halal meals.
Hamzah Abushaban, a cousin who came to visit her in Texas soon after her arrest, said he was shocked. She had lost 50 pounds, had dark circles under her eyes and seemed confused about why she was there.
“I’ve never seen her look like that,” said Mr. Abushaban. “She looked like death.”
Ms. Kordia’s future in the United States remains uncertain. Prosecutors have said that federal investigators are still investigating her for financial transactions overseas.
Before her arrest, Ms. Kordia had been trying to start a business selling candles and balloons. She had found a small space about five minutes from her mother’s house in Paterson that she planned to rent.
During the immigration court hearing in April, the judge asked Ms. Kordia about the space. Was she still renting it?
Ms. Kordia replied simply, expressing little emotion.
“I had it for one night,” she said. “That’s it. Then I came here.”
Mary Beth Gahan contributed reporting.
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19) A Hurricane Season Like No Other
By Michael Lowry, May 31, 2025
Mr. Lowry is a hurricane specialist and a storm surge expert for WPLG, the ABC television affiliate in Miami.
Nicholas Kempton
As darkness descended on the Gulf of Mexico in October, a 1970s-era U.S. government turboprop plane neared the eye of the newly formed Hurricane Milton. When the plane’s first radar scan arrived by satellite communications, I pounced and took to the airwaves, describing to viewers what I saw inside the storm: a dreaded vortex alignment signaling the early stages of rapid intensification. On social media I put it more plainly: “Katy bar the door, this one’s about to put on a show.”
And Milton did just that, strengthening at a breathtaking rate over the next 24 hours to a 180-mile-per-hour Category 5 monster, the strongest Gulf hurricane in almost 20 years. But there was no October surprise on the Florida coast because we’d had ample warning from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane hunters — enough time for people in the highest-risk areas to safely evacuate and businesses to prepare for the worst.
But as we head into what NOAA forecasts will be another active Atlantic hurricane season, the Trump administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downsizing the agency, which houses the National Weather Service, the hurricane hunters and many other programs crucial to hurricane forecasters. Without the arsenal of tools from NOAA and its 6.3 billion observations sourced each day, the routinely detected hurricanes of today could become the deadly surprise hurricanes of tomorrow.
The National Weather Service costs the average American $4 per year in today’s inflated dollars — about the same as a gallon of milk — and offers an 8,000 percent annual return on investment, according to 2024 estimates. It’s a farce for the administration to pretend that gutting an agency that protects our coastlines from a rising tide of disasters is in the best interests of our economy or national security. If the private sector could have done it better and cheaper, it would have, and it hasn’t.
Losing the hurricane hunters would be catastrophic, but that would be only the forerunner wave in a brutal, DOGE-directed tsunami to weather forecasting. In just three months DOGE has dealt the National Weather Service, which operates 122 local forecast offices around the country, the equivalent of over a decade of loss to its work force. Some offices have hemorrhaged 60 percent of their staff members, including entire management teams.
National Weather Service forecast offices — typically staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year — are the source of all weather warnings received by Americans by phone, TV and radio. Without these warnings and data, local weather broadcasts and private weather apps couldn’t operate.
With dozens of local forecast offices struggling to maintain 24/7 operations, NOAA put out a mayday on May 13 asking remaining staff members to temporarily vacate their posts to salvage what was left of the nation’s critical warning network. Nearly half of local forecast offices are critically understaffed, with a vacancy rate of 20 percent or higher, and several are going dark for part of the day, increasing the risk of weather going undetected and people going unprotected and unwarned.
The staff reshuffling is just the latest move from an agency fighting for survival. Weather balloons, a mainstay of data collection for more than 60 years, usually launch twice a day from 100 sites around North America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. But recently some of their flights were reduced or suspended so that limited staffs can tend to other priorities.
Even in the satellite era, weather balloons have been shown to markedly improve forecast accuracy, so much so that twice-daily launches are commonly supplemented with up to four launches a day ahead of major hurricane threats. The extra balloons increase forecast confidence and allow time-sensitive decisions like evacuation orders to be made sooner. On the precipice of a new hurricane season, balloon launches are down 15 to 20 percent nationwide, throwing the nation into a risky experiment that nobody wanted to run.
Within NOAA, research and forecasting are inextricably linked. In new budget documents released Friday, the White House proposed eliminating NOAA’s research wing, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which lends mission-critical support to the hurricane hunters. Taking a sledgehammer to OAR would shatter decades of progress in hurricane forecasting, one of the roaring success stories of predictive sciences. The fate of the agency’s research arm is now in the hands of Congress.
Thirty years ago, forecasters couldn’t detect a hurricane until it formed, and once it formed, we were lucky to give two or three days’ notice that it might strike land. Today, our forecast models — developed, maintained and improved by NOAA scientists and their supercomputers — routinely and reliably predict hurricanes sometimes a week or more before the first puff of clouds. At two or three days out, we’re able to whittle hurricane forecasts to within a county or two.
Rapidly intensifying hurricanes like Milton remain difficult to forecast, eluding conventional satellites and outpacing weather prediction models. In recent years, however, NOAA has developed powerful high-resolution hurricane models that both see the small details and skillfully forecast episodes of rapid intensification. Slashing funding for NOAA research and development would effectively unplug these world-class models and eviscerate the institute that supplies the only rapid-intensification prediction tools available to forecasters. Without them, forecasters like me are flying a plane in the clouds with no navigation system. It’s a recipe for disaster.
I’ve spent over two decades working to reduce the loss of life from hurricanes, from revolutionizing the way we forecast and warn for storm surge at the National Hurricane Center to overhauling FEMA’s hurricane response and recovery plans to guiding viewers on air at The Weather Channel and at stations in hurricane-prone South Florida through dozens of storms. Hurricanes aren’t an afterthought to the more than 60 million Americans living in the hurricane zone. They’re our highest priority during the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 through November 30. I’ve not seen a bigger threat to weather and climate science than what we’re witnessing now.
The irreparable harm the Trump administration is doing will imperil the nation’s longstanding weather warning network for hundreds of millions of Americans in the decades ahead. It’s only a matter of time before the next Milton is at our doorstep — but with our weather intelligence severely compromised, will we know it?
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20) Trump’s War on Nature Is Up Against a Powerful New Resistance Movement
By Robert Macfarlane, May 30, 2025
Mr. Macfarlane is a poet, a nonfiction writer and the author of “Is a River Alive?”
María Medem
In early May, an orange floral fire burned across Northern California riverbanks in celebration: an explosion of poppies, goldenrod and other native plants, marking the first spring after the biggest de-damming project in U.S. history liberated the Klamath River from its confinements.
The recovery of the wider Klamath watershed began last year with the demolition of four dams, and the free-flowing river now provides roughly 400 miles of restored habitat for salmon and steelhead trout. It’s also creating wetlands, helping the regrowth of forests and brush and leading to major improvements in water quality.
The Klamath’s revival is a beacon of hope at a time of deep ecological gloom for the United States. President Trump and his administration have made clear their intention to drastically de-prioritize the natural world in favor of economic interests. Rivers and other freshwater bodies are among the ecosystems most vulnerable to this rapid reorientation.
In declaring a national energy emergency, a Trump executive order effectively waived large portions of the Clean Water Act to fast-track energy projects, weakening protections for free-flowing rivers and increasing the risk of watershed pollution from mining and drilling. River health is also now threatened by the administration’s drive to expand American timber production; logging degrades water quality by increasing soil erosion and sediment runoff. By narrowing the definition of “the waters of the United States,” the Environmental Protection Agency has made it easier for pollutants such as fertilizers, pesticides and mining waste to enter bodies of water.
The doctrine of human supremacy, which waxes strong in the current administration, portrays life as a hierarchy with humans at the top, rather than a web within which humans are entangled. Consider that a scant 0.0002 percent of Earth’s total water flows in rivers at any given time, yet rivers have been vital, fragile accomplices to human flourishing for thousands of years. To view rivers only as sources and drains is to reduce them to base functions rather than to see them as the life-giving, world-shaping forces they are.
Over the past 20 years, a powerful movement has emerged that contests human exploitation of the natural world. It is usually known as the rights of nature movement, and it calls for recognizing the inherent, inalienable rights of ecosystems and natural communities to exist and flourish. At its best, the rights of nature movement challenges anthropocentric presumptions, which are embedded in our laws and imaginations.
Rivers have become this movement’s particular focus and rallying point. In 2008, in an act of great moral imagination, Ecuador revised its constitution to recognize the rights of nature and make the country the guarantor of those rights. In 2021, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled that proposed gold mining would violate the rights of a cloud forest and its associated river system; the ruling forced two mining companies to abandon their claims to the area. In 2017 the Whanganui River in Aotearoa, the Maori word for New Zealand, was recognized in a parliamentary act as a “spiritual and physical entity.” A body of river guardians was appointed to speak for the river, with the mandate of protecting and enhancing its mauri, or life force.
The momentum and visibility of the rights of nature movement are snowballing. For the past two years the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize for nature, has been awarded to water-rights activists. In 2024, the prize recognized the lawyer Teresa Vicente for her work saving the grievously polluted Mar Menor lagoon in Spain from ecological collapse; her grass roots campaign led in 2022 to the Spanish Parliament granting legal rights to the lagoon, a first for Europe. This April, Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari received the prize for a three-year campaign resulting in the landmark legal recognition of the Marañón River in Peru as a living entity with the inherent rights to exist, flow, give life to animals and plants and remain free of pollution.
If the idea of a river bearing rights seems radical to the point of being absurd, remember that corporations, under U.S. and British law, are nonhuman entities with a wide suite of rights, including the right to a fair trial and rights to certain privacies.
Perhaps surprisingly, the rights of nature movement is extremely active in the United States. The Eco Jurisprudence Monitor, which tracks such legal initiatives around the world, details 156 rights of nature initiatives in America, far more than in any other country. Among them is the Yurok Tribe’s 2019 resolution, which declared the rights of the Klamath River “to exist, flourish and naturally evolve” and “to have a clean and healthy environment free from pollutants.”
Mr. Trump’s administration will surely be hostile to rights of nature thinking. For a fundamental incommensurability exists between a worldview that perceives rivers as assets and a worldview that sees them as alive. To recognize rivers as life-giving forces and as rights-bearing presences is a profound and hopeful position. It offers philosophical grounds for resistance to the present administration’s shortsighted drive to gut environmental regulation and reduce the natural world to dollar value.
Rivers are easily wounded, but given a chance, they revive with remarkable speed. Lazarus-like, their life pours back. The first salmon was detected swimming upstream of where the Klamath dams had once stood just three days after the completion of the dams’ removal last September. Within a month, 6,000 salmon had migrated up into the newly accessible habitat. As Barry McCovey, a senior fisheries biologist for the Yurok Tribe, told the BBC, “the river is healing itself.” And as rivers heal, they heal us in return.
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