*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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)
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
1) Poised to Expand Gaza Offensive, Israel Calls Up Thousands of Reserve Soldiers
The mobilization could indicate that Israel is preparing to shift its tactics in its fight against Hamas.
By Aaron Boxerman and Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 3, 2025
Israel will mobilize thousands of reserve soldiers to bolster its campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the military announced on Saturday night, as the country appeared poised to expand its offensive in the Palestinian enclave.
The call-up suggested the Israeli government was preparing to shift tactics in an attempt to force Hamas to agree to its terms for an end to the war. It is unclear whether that would prove successful, as Hamas has fought a determined insurgency through more than a year of Israeli operations in Gaza.
Israel’s security cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was set to meet on Sunday to formally sign off on broadening the campaign in Gaza, said an Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The mobilization announcement compounded fears in Gaza, where Israel has barred food, medicine and other humanitarian aid from entering for over two months. Reeling from more than a year of hunger and fighting, many are still displaced or living amid the rubble of their homes.
After Israel ended a two-month cease-fire with Hamas in mid-March, Israeli forces resumed attacking across the enclave. But while Israel jets and drones have regularly bombarded Gaza from the air, Israeli ground forces slowed their advance after seizing some territory.
More than 50,000 people have been killed in Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, according to Gaza health officials. They do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but their tallies include thousands of children.
The war began after Hamas led a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 people and saw roughly 250 taken back to Gaza as hostages. In the aftermath, Israeli leaders vowed to destroy Hamas in Gaza and free all of the captives held there.
Despite more than a year of devastating war, Israel has yet to fully achieve either of those aims. Although Israel managed to kill many of Hamas’s leaders, the Palestinian militants have fought a stubborn war of attrition, recruited new fighters to their cause and are believed to still hold up to 24 living hostages and the bodies of dozens of others.
Earlier in the war, Israeli troops swept through the enclave, leveling swathes of Gaza’s cities and displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. But they frequently returned to different areas, over and over, to confront what they called a renewed Hamas presence there.
International mediators, including the Trump administration, have sought to broker a new cease-fire between Israel and Hamas to free hostages in exchange for Palestinians in Israeli prisons. But the two sides have stipulated seemingly contradictory conditions for a deal.
Israel has demanded that Hamas lay down its arms, which the group has refused to do. Hamas, for its part, has said it will not free any more of the hostages until Israel commits to an agreement that includes a complete end to the war and a full withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
The call-up announcement also sparked deeper anxiety among the hostages’ families, who fear that the fighting could kill their loved ones. They have sought to rally Israelis to pressure the government into reaching a new truce with Hamas.
Yotam Cohen, whose brother was abducted during the Hamas-led assault, accused Mr. Netanyahu of breaking the previous cease-fire before leading the country into a renewed, avoidable war with Hamas. He called for an immediate deal with Hamas to free his brother, who is still believed to be alive.
“Instead of bringing him home in an agreement, Netanyahu is sending soldiers into a war that will kill him,” Mr. Cohen said at a rally on Saturday.
Mr. Netanyahu has suggested that bringing home the remaining hostages is less important than decisively defeating Hamas. In interviews and speeches, Mr. Netanyahu has promised the Israeli public “absolute victory” over the group.
Freeing the captives was “an important goal,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an address on Thursday. “But in war there’s a supreme goal, and that is defeating our enemies,” he added.
Israel’s military leans heavily on its pool of reservists, many of whom have served for months — with some doing multiple tours of duty — since the war began.
But those ranks have seen simmering dissent against the government’s conduct of the war. Last month, a group of Air Force reservists and retired officers signed a public letter urging a deal with Hamas to return the hostages, even at the price of stopping the war in Gaza.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
2) As Gaza Siege Grinds On, Gazan Children Go Hungry and Patients Die
The effect of Israel’s total siege has become “catastrophic,” doctors say. Food, water and medicine shortages are prompting a surge of preventable illnesses, and deaths.
By Erika Solomon and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Photographs and Video by Saher Alghorra, Saher Alghorra reported from northern Gaza, May 4, 2025
It has been more than 60 days since Israel ordered a halt to all humanitarian aid entering Gaza — no food, fuel or even medicine.
As the phone calls pour in, Muneer Alboursh, the director general of Gaza’s health ministry, is running out of answers.
The longer Israel’s total siege of the enclave grinds on, the more doctors call to ask where they can find medicine to keep patients alive. Some patients call him up themselves — people with treatable heart problems or kidney failure — to ask: If there is no medicine, what else can they try?
“There’s no advice I can give them,” he said. “In most cases, those patients die.”
Israel says it will not relent until Hamas releases the hostages it still holds after a two-month cease-fire collapsed in March. It has argued that its blockade is lawful, and that Gaza still has enough available provisions.
But humanitarian groups and European officials accuse Israel of using aid as a “political tool” — and warn that the total blockade violates international law.
The severity of the siege means it now affects nearly every part of the lives of the roughly two million people trapped inside Gaza, compounding the struggles of a population that has lived for nearly two decades under the partial blockade imposed by Israel and backed by Egypt after Hamas seized control of the enclave in 2007.
As supplies of clean water, food and medicine dwindle, preventable diseases and illnesses are surging — and so is the likelihood of dying from them, doctors say.
Aid groups are raising the alarm in increasingly drastic messages, warning that the humanitarian support for Gazans is “on the verge of total collapse.”
“To the Israeli authorities, and those who can still reason with them, we say again: Lift this brutal blockade,” said Tom Fletcher, the U.N. humanitarian chief. He added: “To the civilians left unprotected, no apology can suffice. But I am truly sorry that we are unable to move the international community to prevent this injustice.”
Every morning, Gazans brace for a daylong struggle to obtain life’s necessities.
Bakeries have been forced to close. Late last month, the U.N. agency that assists Palestinian refugees said its flour supplies had run out, and the World Food Program said it had delivered the last of its supplies to food kitchens.
The only food available to many Gazans — particularly those among the 90 percent of the population that is displaced and mostly living in tents — comes from local charity kitchens, some of which have been looted as the hunger crisis deepens.
Prices of the food still available in markets cited by locals are astronomical for an impoverished population largely unable to work amid the war: Canned vegetables are now around $8, 10 times as much as before the siege; and a sack of flour that cost around $5 before is now around $300.
“Imagine you haven’t tasted meat, a boiled egg or even an apple in months,” Mr. Mohsen said.
Ahmed al-Nems, 32, a grocer displaced to Gaza City, lives on the occasional can of food and a stockpile of flour, lentils and kidney beans that his family hopes to stretch for several more weeks by eating a single meal per day. His mother cooks on a fire fed with torn-up shoes because there is no fuel.
“We eat once a day, at noon, and that’s it,” he said. “I feel like I can’t breathe when I see my brothers and sisters are still hungry.”
A U.N.-backed monitoring system for malnutrition, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, recently began a new review to determine whether conditions in Gaza amount to famine.
Already, the United Nations said, 91 percent of the population analyzed — just under the roughly two million believed to be in Gaza — is estimated to be facing “food insecurity,” with most enduring “emergency” or “catastrophic” levels.
The Israeli authority overseeing aid access to Gaza has repeatedly argued that this U.N.-backed reporting contains “factual and methodological flaws, some of them serious.”
In recent days, local journalists and Palestinian health authorities have uploaded several videos of sickly, skeletal children.
Malnutrition has had knockdown effects on the entire medical system.
Burn victims from Israeli bombardment are unable to obtain enough food for skin grafts to heal.
At Al-Shifa Hospital, the head of nephrology, Dr. Ghazi al-Yazji, helplessly watches patients wither.
“Dialysis patients need a balanced diet, but everyone is surviving mainly on canned foods,” he said.
Medication shortages mean he has cut his patients’ weekly dialysis sessions to two times a week from three, and shortened them. The rationing will gradually cause toxins to build up in their bodies, he said.
But he has no choice: “Otherwise patients would go without dialysis altogether, which would be fatal.”
Medications to treat blood pressure and diabetes are gradually decreasing, he added, while cardiac catheters are nearly depleted, and anyone needing them is likely to die.
Gaza’s health ministry says its warehouses are now out of 37 percent of “essential medicines.”
The Israeli authorities say the United Nations, aid groups and private businesses brought in huge stocks of supplies during the cease-fire that should ensure that the population can still meet its needs. It accuses Hamas of hoarding supplies and depriving its own population.
But aid groups contacted by The Times insist that some supplies — particularly produce, some medicines, cooking gas and the type of fuel used by ambulances — have simply run out.
And while some warehouses remain stocked in Gaza, they often simply cannot reach them.
Since Israel’s new bombardment after the cease-fire collapsed, it has declared more and more evacuation and no-go zones, forcing some 420,000 Gazans to flee yet again and blocking access to around 70 percent of the enclave, according to U.N. estimates.
Gaining access to warehouses in these areas requires coordination with the Israeli Army, which several aid workers said was a long, bureaucratic process, with permission often denied.
The Israeli authorities responsible for aid access in Gaza did not comment on specific questions about the aid situation in Gaza and referred the questions to the prime minister’s office. The prime minister’s office did not comment.
The blockade has even affected production of clean water, said Paula Navarro, the water and sanitation coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Gaza.
Generators at Gaza’s main desalination plant are producing potable water at only 10 percent of its usual capacity, she said, after Israel also cut off electricity in the blockade.
Now even that production is at risk, with fuel stores inaccessible.
“The estimation is that 90 percent of the fuel that is in storage in Gaza today is inaccessible due to evacuation orders,” she said.
Most Gazans cannot retrieve clean water anyway, she said, because of extensive damage to water pipelines and long waits at water trucks.
Many instead turn to boreholes with unsanitary water or use Israeli water pipes that reach Gaza but have been damaged in the war. Using unclean water has prompted a spike in jaundice, diarrhea and scabies cases, Ms. Navarro said.
“Drinkable water has become increasingly rare, so people have adapted,” said Ahmed al-Ijla, a father of three who, like most others in Gaza City, now drinks salty water. “The effect of the blockade is visible now on people’s faces — everyone is pale. Their nerves are shot.”
Dr. al-Yazji, at Al-Shifa Hospital, says he still tries to advise his patients on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle. But every day, it seems more pointless.
“Without urgent intervention and resumption of aid, we will lose more patients,” he said. “We are facing a catastrophic situation.”
Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting from Istanbul, and Farnaz Fassihi from New York.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
3) The Dark Side of Empathy
By Michael Ventura, May 4, 2025
Mr. Ventura is the author of “Applied Empathy.”
Javier Jaén
In an interview earlier this year with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk quipped that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” He seemed to blame it, in part, for the decline of America’s cultural vitality. He said he believed in empathy but cast it as being “weaponized” by the woke.
For all his derision of empathy, Mr. Musk is quite good at employing it for his own needs. In fact, I’d argue he’s one of the most effective empathic operators in modern business and public life.
Though we often think of empathy as synonymous with kindness, that isn’t entirely accurate. Empathy is not the same as compassion. At its core, empathy is the ability to understand others’ perspectives — what they feel, what they think, what they fear, what they want. That understanding can be wielded in service of a greater good. Or it can be exploited, as Mr. Musk himself was arguing.
In psychological terms, empathy is not a singular skill — it comes in different forms. As researchers have shown, affective empathy (the ability to feel what others feel) is distinct from cognitive empathy (the ability to understand what others feel). Many people have both. Others, like narcissists and sociopaths, often possess only the latter, if they have empathy at all. And this is where things can get dangerous.
When I wrote my book, “Applied Empathy,” several years ago, I included Mr. Musk on a list of entrepreneurs who had leveraged their cultural understanding to create compelling businesses. He empathized with society’s collective craving for a future-forward vision and offered rockets (SpaceX) and self-driving cars (Tesla) as answers. Because these businesses responded to our needs, we wanted to come along for the ride. That’s empathy in action.
What I didn’t account for back then — and what we’re reckoning with now — is what happens when an understanding of human behavior is not used to uplift or support but to provoke or destabilize.
Across tech, media and politics, we’re witnessing a rise in leaders who reject empathy rhetorically while using it tactically. They discredit this vital skill as weakness, yet fine-tune their messaging to trigger precisely the reactions they need from investors, voters and followers. We’ve heard the ideological dog whistles. We’ve witnessed the fear-mongering and overreach shrouded in the guise of protecting democracy.
President Trump has long derided empathy as naïve, casting strength as synonymous with domination, suggesting that to care is to lose — and to control is to win.
But this perspective is not only ethically bankrupt, it’s also deeply impractical for leadership, particularly in business. A 2021 study found that employees who report having managers with empathic leadership skills are more likely to be innovative, engaged and resilient. According to one recent survey, toxic workplace culture, not compensation, is the leading reason for employee turnover. Empathy, applied with ethical integrity, is a driver of performance, not a drag on it.
Empathy that connects, that builds, that heals requires a code of ethics. It requires restraint. It requires trust. It asks the empathizer not just to understand others but also to honor what that understanding unlocks. When empathy becomes unmoored from ethics, it becomes coercion with a smile.
We see this now with artificial intelligence, where systems are increasingly trained to simulate empathic responses. Your chatbot apologizes for your frustration, your virtual assistant offers saccharine encouragement, your mental health app listens without judgment. But none of these systems feel anything. They just know what to say. We’re entering a world where “empathetic” algorithms outperform our managers at recognizing distress but lack a moral compass to decide what to do with it. And if we aren’t careful, we’ll soon mistake performance for presence. In doing so, we outsource not just emotional labor but our emotional responsibility to one another.
Empathy without accountability is not just hollow, it’s deceptive. It lulls people into false security. And it fractures the very trust it pretends to build.
And yet, we can’t write off empathy. That’s precisely what the provocateurs want. They want to reframe care as weakness, dignity as naïveté and trust as a liability. Let’s not take the bait.
If we want better leadership in business, politics and technology, we need to reclaim empathy as a responsibility. We need to teach it not just as a soft skill but as a disciplined practice, bound by ethics and rooted in our shared humanity. We must hold leaders accountable not only for what they say but also for how — and why — they seek to understand us.
So, yes, Mr. Musk is an empath. Just not the kind we need.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
4) A Popemobile Will Ride Again, This Time Into Gaza
In his last months, Pope Francis blessed an effort to transform the vehicle he used when he visited the West Bank in 2014 into a mobile health clinic to treat Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 4, 2025
Pope Francis in his popemobile in Manger Square in the West Bank city of Bethlehem in 2014.Vincenzo Pinto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When Pope Francis visited Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 2014, he crisscrossed the traditional birthplace of Jesus in a white popemobile manufactured especially for his visit.
Now, the vehicle is being transformed into a mobile health clinic to treat ill and wounded Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip — an initiative that Pope Francis blessed in the months before he died.
While the clinic will serve only a limited number of Palestinians in Gaza, Pope Francis’s personal involvement in the project reflected his commitment to Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire between Israel and Hamas, particularly children, in more than 18 months of war.
“The papamobile is a very concrete sign that Pope Francis is concerned with all the suffering of children in Gaza, even after his death!” Cardinal Anders Arborelius of Sweden said in an email on Monday.
The idea to recreate the popemobile as a health clinic came from leaders of Caritas, a Catholic organization, and Cardinal Arborelius approached Francis with it. The Swedish cardinal is a contender to become the next pope after Francis, who died on April 28.
The popemobile, a converted Mitsubishi, was donated by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority for Francis’ visit. It was given to the Franciscan order afterward, and then to Caritas after Francis blessed its use in Gaza.
In November 2024, representatives of Francis said that he welcomed the initiative, according to two letters from senior Vatican officials reviewed by The New York Times.
“I am pleased to convey His Holiness’s approval of the project, together with the assurance of his prayers for all associated with this charitable endeavor,” Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, a senior aide to Francis, wrote to Cardinal Arborelius.
The popemobile will be staffed with a physician and a nurse and equipped with medical instruments to offer children basic care, including rapid tests for infections, suture kits and syringes, according to Anton Asfar, the secretary general of Caritas Jerusalem. Caritas Jerusalem has around 100 staff members in Gaza providing aid to Palestinians.
Preparing the vehicle for use, including the installation of blastproof windows, will take roughly three weeks, Mr. Asfar said. Caritas Jerusalem, he added, will soon request approval from Israeli authorities to deliver it to Gaza.
COGAT, the Israeli government agency responsible for coordinating the entry of aid into the enclave, did not respond to a request for comment about whether Israel intended to allow the passage of the popemobile. Israeli authorities have enforced a total blockade on humanitarian supplies and commercial goods for the past two months, saying that the ban was meant to pressure Hamas to release more of the hostages they have been holding since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Francis was one of the most outspoken prominent supporters of a cease-fire in Gaza and the delivery of humanitarian aid. He also called for the release of hostages, met with their relatives and condemned the Hamas-led attack, which left some 1,200 people dead and about 250 abducted.
He also frequently had video calls with Christians sheltering at a church in Gaza City and drew attention to children killed in Israeli airstrikes.
“Yesterday, children were bombed,” Francis said in a December 2024 address. “This is cruelty. This is not war.”
The Israeli military has said its bombing campaign has targeted Hamas militants and officials and weapons infrastructure, and has blamed the militant group for exposing civilians to danger by embedding with them.
The popemobile will be carrying a message of hope and solidarity, but it will also be offering needed services, said Peter Brune, the secretary general of Caritas Sweden.
“It’s symbolic,” he said, “but it’s also practical.”
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
5) Trump Administration Slashes Research Into L.G.B.T.Q. Health
More than $800 million in N.I.H. grants canceled as of early May — nearly half of those terminated to date — covered the health of sexual and gender minority groups, The Times found.
By Benjamin Mueller, May 4, 2025
Benjamin Mueller covers the National Institutes of Health and, for this story, reviewed hundreds of N.I.H. grants terminated under President Trump.
Drawing blood for an S.T.I. test at a San Francisco AIDS Foundation clinic. The N.I.H. canceled several grants to a network of researchers who work on preventing and treating H.I.V. and AIDS in young adults, who account for a fifth of new infections each year in the United States. Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times
The Trump administration has scrapped more than $800 million worth of research into the health of L.G.B.T.Q. people, abandoning studies of cancers and viruses that tend to affect members of sexual minority groups and setting back efforts to defeat a resurgence of sexually transmitted infections, according to an analysis of federal data by The New York Times.
In keeping with its deep opposition to both diversity programs and gender-affirming care for adolescents, the administration has worked aggressively to root out research touching on equity measures and transgender health.
But its crackdown has reverberated far beyond those issues, eliminating swaths of medical research on diseases that disproportionately afflict L.G.B.T.Q. people, a group that comprises nearly 10 percent of American adults.
Of the 669 grants that the National Institutes of Health had canceled in whole or in part as of early May, at least 323 — nearly half of them — related to L.G.B.T.Q. health, according to a review by The Times of every terminated grant.
Federal officials had earmarked $806 million for the canceled projects, many of which had been expected to draw more funding in the years to come.
Scores of research institutions lost funding, a list that includes not only White House targets like Johns Hopkins and Columbia, but also public universities in the South and the Midwest, like Ohio State University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
At Florida State University, $41 million worth of research was canceled, including a major effort to prevent H.I.V. in adolescents and young adults, who experience a fifth of new infections in the United States each year.
In termination letters over the last two months, the N.I.H. justified the cuts by telling scientists that their L.G.B.T.Q. work “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” In some cases, the agency said canceled research had been “based on gender identity,” which gave rise to “unscientific” results that ignored “biological realities.”
Other termination letters told scientists their studies erred by being “based primarily on artificial and nonscientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives.”
The cuts follow a surge in federal funding for L.G.B.T.Q. research over the past decade, and active encouragement from the N.I.H. for grant proposals focused on sexual and gender minority groups that began during the Obama administration.
President Trump’s allies have argued that the research is shot through with ideological bias.
“There’s been a train of abuses of the science to fit a preconceived conclusion,” said Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that helped formulate some Trump administration policies.
“And that was based on an unscientific premise that biology is effectively irrelevant, and a political project of trying to mainstream the notion that people could change their sex.”
Scientists said canceling research on such a broad range of illnesses related to sexual and gender minority groups effectively created a hierarchy of patients, some more worthy than others.
“Certain people in the United States shouldn’t be getting treated as second-class research subjects,” said Simon Rosser, a professor at the University of Minnesota whose lab was studying cancer in L.G.B.T.Q. people before significant funding was pulled.
“That, I think, is anyone’s definition of bigotry,” he added. “Bigotry in science.”
The canceled projects are among the most vivid manifestations of a broad dismantling of the infrastructure that has for 80 years supported medical research across the United States.
Beyond terminating studies, federal officials have gummed up the grant-making process by slow-walking payments, delaying grant review meetings and scaling back new grant awards.
Bigger changes may be in store: Mr. Trump on Friday proposed reducing the N.I.H. budget from roughly $48 billion to $27 billion, citing in part what he described as the agency’s efforts to promote “radical gender ideology.”
The legality of the mass terminations is unclear. Two separate lawsuits challenging the revocation of a wide range of grants — one filed by a group of researchers, and the other by 16 states — argued that the Trump administration had failed to offer a legal rationale for the cuts.
The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the health department, told The Daily Signal, a conservative publication, last month that the move “away from politicized D.E.I. and gender ideology studies” was in “accordance with the president’s executive orders.”
The N.I.H. said in a statement: “N.I.H. is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with N.I.H. and H.H.S. priorities. We remain dedicated to restoring our agency to its tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science.”
The L.G.B.T.Q. cuts ended studies on antibiotic resistance, undiagnosed autism in sexual minority groups, and certain throat and other cancers that disproportionately affect those groups. Funding losses have led to firings at some L.G.B.T.Q.-focused labs that had only recently been preparing to expand.
The N.I.H. used to reserve grant cancellations for rare cases of research misconduct or possible harm to participants. The latest cuts, far from protecting research participants, are instead putting them in harm’s way, scientists said.
They cited the jettisoning of clinical trials, which have now been left without federal funding to care for volunteer participants.
“We’re stopping things that are preventing suicide and preventing sexual violence,” said Katie Edwards, a professor at the University of Michigan, whose funding for several clinical trials involving L.G.B.T.Q. people was canceled.
H.I.V. research has been hit particularly hard.
The N.I.H. ended several major grants to the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for H.I.V./AIDS Intervention, a program that had helped lay the groundwork for the use in adolescents of a medication regimen that can prevent infections.
That regimen, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, is credited with helping beat back the disease in young people.
Cuts to the program have endangered an ongoing trial of a product that would prevent both H.I.V. and pregnancy and a second trial looking at combining sexual health counseling with behavioral therapy to reduce the spread of H.I.V. in young sexual minority men who use stimulants.
Together with the termination of dozens of other H.I.V. studies, the cuts have undermined Mr. Trump’s stated goal from his first term to end the country’s H.I.V. epidemic within a decade, scientists said.
The N.I.H. terminated work on other sexually transmitted illnesses, as well.
Dr. Matthew Spinelli, an infectious disease researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, was in the middle of a clinical trial of doxycycline, a common antibiotic that, taken after sex, can prevent some infections with syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
The trial was, he said, “as nerdy as it gets”: a randomized study in which participants were given different regimens of the antibiotic to see how it is metabolized.
He hoped the findings would help scientists understand the drug’s effectiveness in women, and also its potential to cause drug resistance, a concern that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had voiced in the past.
But health officials, citing their opposition to research regarding “gender identity,” halted funding for the experiment in March. That left Dr. Spinelli without any federal funding to monitor the half-dozen people who had already been taking the antibiotic.
It also put the thousands of doses that Dr. Spinelli had bought with taxpayer money at risk of going to waste. He said stopping work on diseases like syphilis and H.I.V. would allow new outbreaks to spread.
“The H.I.V. epidemic is going to explode again as a result of these actions,” said Dr. Spinelli, who added that he was speaking only for himself, not his university. “It’s devastating for the communities affected.”
Despite a recent emphasis on the downsides of transitioning, federal officials canceled several grants examining the potential risks of gender-affirming hormone therapy. The projects looked at whether hormone therapy could, for example, increase the risk of breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, altered brain development or H.I.V.
Other terminated grants examined ways of addressing mental illness in transgender people, who now make up about 3 percent of high school students and report sharply higher rates of persistent sadness and suicide attempts.
For Dr. Edwards, of the University of Michigan, funding was halted for a clinical trial looking at how online mentoring might reduce depression and self-harm among transgender teens, one of six studies of hers that were canceled.
Another examined interventions for the families of L.G.B.T.Q. young people to promote more supportive caregiving and, in turn, reduce dating violence and alcohol use among the young people.
The N.I.H. categorizes research only by certain diseases, making it difficult to know how much money the agency devotes to L.G.B.T.Q. health. But a report in March estimated that such research made up less than 1 percent of the N.I.H. portfolio over a decade.
The Times sought to understand the scale of terminated funding for L.G.B.T.Q. medical research by reviewing the titles and, in many cases, research summaries for each of the 669 grants that the Trump administration said it had canceled in whole or in part as of early May.
Beyond grants related to L.G.B.T.Q. people and the diseases and treatments that take a disproportionate toll on them, The Times included in its count studies that were designed to recruit participants from sexual and gender minority groups.
It excluded grants related to illnesses like H.I.V. that were focused on non-L.G.B.T.Q. patients.
While The Times examined only N.I.H. research grants, the Trump administration is also ending or considering ending L.G.B.T.Q. programs elsewhere in the federal health system. It has proposed, for example, scrapping a specialized suicide hotline for L.G.B.T.Q. young people.
The research cuts stand to hollow out a field that in the last decade had not only grown larger, but also come to encompass a wider range of disease threats beyond H.I.V.
Already, scientists said, younger researchers are losing jobs in sexual and gender minority research and scrubbing their online biographies of evidence that they ever worked in the field.
Five grants obtained by Brittany Charlton, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, have been canceled, including one looking at sharply elevated rates of stillbirths among L.G.B.T.Q. women.
Ending research on disease threats to gender and sexual minority groups, she said, would inevitably rebound on the entire population. “When other people are sick around you, it does impact you, even if you may think it doesn’t,” she said.
Irena Hwang contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
6) Rwanda in Early Talks With U.S. to Take Expelled Migrants
Discussions with the Central African country come as the Trump administration looks for more countries willing to accept deportees as part of a sweeping crackdown.
By Abdi Latif Dahir, Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya, May 5, 2025
Olivier J.P. Nduhungirehe, the foreign minister of Rwanda. He said talks with Washington were “still ongoing, and it would be premature to conclude how they will unfold.” Credit...Hugh Kinsella Cunningham/Getty Images
Rwanda is in talks with the Trump administration about taking in migrants that have been deported from the United States, potentially making it the first African country to enter into such an agreement since President Trump took office and began a sweeping crackdown on migration.
Rwanda’s foreign minister, Olivier J.P. Nduhungirehe, said late on Sunday that his country’s government was in “early stage” talks about receiving third-country deportees from the United States.
“It is true that we are in discussions with the United States,” Mr. Nduhungirehe said in an interview with Rwanda TV, the state broadcaster. “These talks are still ongoing, and it would be premature to conclude how they will unfold,” he added.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rwanda has long positioned itself as a partner to Western nations seeking to curb migration, offering to provide asylum to migrants or house them as they await resettlement elsewhere, sometimes in return for payment. But critics say that sending asylum seekers to Rwanda is unsafe, citing the country’s poor record on human rights, its limited resources, and the authorities’ previous intimidation and surveillance of migrants and refugees.
The Trump administration has deployed a number of hard-line tactics to curb migration, including deporting individuals on well-publicized flights. Mr. Trump invoked a centuries-old law in March to deport hundreds of alleged gang members from Venezuela to El Salvador, even as a federal judge sought to halt them. Washington has been looking for more countries that would be willing to take in people expelled from the United States.
The Trump administration has also been asking countries to take back their citizens if they are deported from the United States and taking punitive measures against those nations if they do not. In early April, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked visas for all South Sudanese nationals amid a dispute over the East African country’s failure to accept its deported citizens.
If Rwanda agrees to a deal with the Trump administration, it would be the African country’s latest agreement to take in migrants.
The small, landlocked nation hosts hundreds of African refugees rescued from Libya and awaiting resettlement elsewhere in a joint partnership with the United Nations refugee agency. It has also signed a deal with Denmark to improve cooperation on asylum and migration, and it entered into a secretive partnership with Israel to receive deported African migrants.
Rwanda also agreed on a deal with Britain to receive third-country asylum seekers in 2022 in a contentious plan that was later deemed unlawful by the British Supreme Court. Last year, the British government, then controlled by the Conservative Party, passed legislation to override the court’s decision and declare Rwanda a “safe country.”
But only four people voluntarily left for Rwanda under the plan, and when the Conservatives lost the general election last July, the new Labour government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer scrapped the deal. The program cost British taxpayers 715 million pounds, or about $949 million, with some £290 million going to Rwanda. Rwanda’s government has said it will not repay the money.
The discussions between Rwanda and the United States, first reported by The Washington Post last week, coincide with a U.S. effort to mediate a peace deal in the war between Rwanda and neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Reuters news agency has reported that the United States deported an Iraqi refugee, Omar Abdulsattar Ameen, to Rwanda. Mr. Nduhungirehe did not refer to that case during his interview on Rwanda TV.
Arafat Mugabo contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
7) Israeli Security Cabinet Approves Plan to Escalate Gaza Campaign
It is not clear how the Israeli prime minister’s plan to add tens of thousands of soldiers will fundamentally alter a dynamic seen over 18 months of conflict.
By Michael D. Shear, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 5, 2025
Destruction in Jabaliya, Gaza, last month. During the war, Israeli forces have pummeled Hamas fighters, with residents in Gaza caught in the middle. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israel’s security cabinet met on Sunday and approved plans for an escalation of the military campaign in Gaza. The logic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be this: Victory against Hamas will come from an even bigger barrage of military might in the weeks ahead.
“We have not finished the war,” Mr. Netanyahu declared on Sunday as his security cabinet signed off on expanding the fighting. “We will perform this operation with a unified military, with a powerful army and deeply resolved soldiers.”
But it is not clear how those additional fighters will fundamentally alter a dynamic seen over 18 months of war in which hundreds of thousands of soldiers have pummeled Hamas fighters, with residents in Gaza caught in the middle, but have failed to achieve Israel’s goals of destroying the militant group or releasing all hostages.
And it remains uncertain whether the Israeli military will surge back into Gaza before President Trump arrives in the Middle East next week for meetings in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Two reservists who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to make comments to the news media said that they had received call-up orders beginning in June.
Since the collapse of a two-month cease-fire in March, Israel has blocked food, medicine and other humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza. And the Israeli air force has already renewed its heavy bombardment of the enclave.
Now, the government is poised to expand its ground offensive as well, with the goal of re-entering cities in Gaza and forcing Hamas to submit to Israel’s demand to permanently lay down their weapons.
The question is whether a return to that kind of fighting is a road map to the end of hostilities or merely an intensification of a deadly conflict with worsening consequences for Palestinians and the Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas.
Tamir Hayman, who served as the Israeli military’s intelligence chief for four years, said the attempts to pressure Hamas with overwhelming force had been “exhausted” after more than a year and a half of war.
“Eliminating Hamas as a terror organization by military force only is very difficult,” said Mr. Hayman, who is now executive director of the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank in Tel Aviv. He said Israel would be better off ending the war with Hamas, which has been weakened significantly and can be kept in check after the fighting ends.
The Israeli military has not provided details about how the reservists will be deployed. But two Israeli officials, who requested anonymity to comment on military plans, say it will involve several brigades seeking so-called operational superiority in several parts of Gaza.
The Trump administration has sought a new cease-fire, but Hamas has demanded an end to the war and a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, while Israel has insisted that Hamas disarm, which the group has refused to do.
The Israeli call-up of soldiers is also a message to Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-line supporters, some of whom were dismayed that the military had not completed the task of eradicating Hamas. Promising a more intense phase of the war could be good domestic politics for him.
Israeli officials have said they believe it was the power and intensity of their military campaign in Gaza last year that pressured Hamas to release some of the hostages and to accept a cease-fire in January.
Hours after the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people in Israel, with 251 others taken hostage, Mr. Netanyahu ordered the mobilization of 360,000 reservists, adding to the country’s standing military of about 170,000 soldiers.
In the fighting since, more than 50,000 Palestinians have died, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilian and military deaths. About 130 hostages have been released and the Israeli military has retrieved the bodies of at least 40 others. Around 24 hostages are thought to be still alive, according to the Israeli government.
When Israel and Hamas agreed to the January cease-fire deal, Mr. Netanyahu said credit should go to the “painful blows that our heroic fighters have landed on Hamas.”
“This is exactly how the conditions were created for the turning point in its position and for the release of our hostages,” he said during a national address.
But other voices, like Yair Lapid, Israel’s opposition leader, have expressed grave doubts about the strategy. “I fear that the intensity of the fighting will dictate the fate of the hostages,” Mr. Lapid said on Israeli Army Radio. “What is the goal? Why are they calling up reservists? Extending regular service and all without defining a goal — that’s not how you win a war.”
In a statement Monday, the organization representing the families of hostages urged the government not to widen the war.
“The expansion of military operations puts every hostage at grave risk,” the families said. “We implore our decision makers: Prioritize the hostages. Secure a deal. Bring them home — before it’s too late.”
Aaron Boxerman and Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
8) Trump Sons’ Deals on Three Continents Directly Benefit the President
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump spent the past two weeks traveling the world and announcing new ventures involving billions of dollars.
By Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany, May 5, 2025
Eric Lipton reported from Washington. David Yaffe-Bellany reported from Dubai.
Eric Trump in Doha, the Qatari capital, on Wednesday, looking over a model of a development the Trump Organization plans to build there. Credit...Karim Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A contest of sorts has played out across Europe, the United States and the Middle East in recent days as President Trump’s two older sons have pursued a blitz of family moneymaking ventures capitalizing on their father’s name and power, each seemingly trying to outdo the other.
It is a rush to cash in that involves billions of dollars with few precedents in American history.
A luxury hotel in Dubai. A second high-end residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Two cryptocurrency ventures based in the United States. A new golf course and villa complex in Qatar. And a new private club in Washington. In many cases these new deals promoted over the last week will personally benefit not only Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., but also President Trump himself.
“Challenge everything,” said the brochure for the new $1 billion, 80-story Trump International Hotel and Tower planned for Dubai, where units went on sale for the first time at prices reaching $20 million apiece, after a giant party held in Dubai this past week to honor Eric Trump and the new project. “Stop at nothing.”
The marathon of deal making has been so rapid that many elements have drawn limited public attention in the United States, despite most of it being out in the open. That is in part because the sons appeared before mostly fawning crowds but also because President Trump, his appointees and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk were making headlines with their own steady stream of norm-breaking controversies.
“There’s nothing like it,” said Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University historian who has written books on Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald R. Ford, addressing the financial conflicts of interest that have emerged in Mr. Trump’s second term.
Both Trump sons are involved in a wide range of family business ventures. Eric Trump, the president’s middle son, runs the Trump Organization, the main family business, which specializes in real estate. He also serves on the board of a holding company that oversees World Liberty Financial, the family’s crypto firm, and recently joined forces with his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., to start a Bitcoin mining operation, American Bitcoin.
The White House has said there are no ethics issues because Mr. Trump’s sons run the businesses. “The president’s assets are in a trust managed by his children,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said. “There are no conflicts of interest.”
But Mr. Trump’s financial disclosure report, which he is legally required to file, shows that he still personally benefits financially from most of these ventures.
Eric Trump noted that many of the ventures they are promoting — from crypto to real estate — were underway before their father was re-elected. “We are building the most iconic projects on earth and leading the way in the digital revolution,” Eric Trump said in a statement to The New York Times.
Donald Trump Jr. rejected any suggestion that he was trading on his father’s name, saying he has been a businessman his entire adult life. He then took a swipe at Hunter Biden, who sold paintings while his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., served as president.
“It’s laughable that the left-wing media thinks that I should lock myself in a padded room while my father is president and cease doing what I’ve been doing for over 25 years to earn a living and provide for my five children,” Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement to The Times. “However, if I did do that, I guess I could always take up painting, which I hear can be quite lucrative.”
Indeed, relatives of other presidents — including Billy Carter (brother of President Jimmy Carter) and Neil Bush (brother of President George W. Bush), along with Hunter Biden — have had business dealings that have created questions about potential conflicts of interest.
What distinguishes the work of Mr. Trump’s two sons is that several of these ventures, including the real estate deals and crypto efforts, bring revenues that benefit the president himself as well.
Just in the past 10 days, Donald Trump Jr. made stops in Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria on a paid-speech tour he has called “Trump Business Vision 2025,” which also included visits with foreign government leaders and political candidates. During roughly the same time, Eric Trump was shuttling among Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other Middle East spots to push the family’s real estate and crypto plans.
These pitches played out even as some of Donald Trump Jr.’s business partners were simultaneously rolling out yet another business in Washington that will cash in on his father’s return to the White House: a club called Executive Branch.
At $500,000 a person, the private membership club is slated to open by this summer in Georgetown in a sprawling, but defunct, restaurant called Clubhouse. It will feature two bars, a lounge, a restaurant and boardroom — re-creating the role previously served by the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where donors and acolytes of the president gathered until the family sold it off after Mr. Trump’s first term.
The club soon likely will be jammed with Trump family friends, business executives and members of the Trump administration, but will be off limits to members of the public and most members of the news media.
An A-list party was held late last month to celebrate the launch of Executive Branch — while Donald Trump Jr. was in Europe — at a hotel a block from the White House. Attendees included Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Paul Atkins, the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The founding members of the club, which has already sold many of its membership slots according to organizers, include Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the cryptocurrency executives whose company, Gemini Trust, had been targeted by the S.E.C. until Mr. Trump named new agency leaders, who in April put a hold on the federal lawsuit.
Jeff Miller, a lobbyist and top Trump fund-raiser, is another founding member. In the first quarter of this year, he has registered to represent 39 new corporate clients, including the crypto firm Tether, an overseas operation that was a longtime target of U.S. regulators until recently, when it began to establish itself as a major force in Washington and explore opening a U.S. office.
The other owners at the new club, besides Donald Trump Jr., include Zach and Alex Witkoff — the sons of Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy — and Omeed Malik, who leads 1789 Capital, a Florida-based venture capital firm that recently hired Donald Trump Jr. as a senior executive. The investments for 1789 Capital have included companies such as Plaid, a digital finance firm that had lobbied the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau related to a new set of banking rules — until Mr. Trump’s team effectively shut down the agency and stalled enforcement of the regulation.
David Sacks, who is a crypto adviser to Mr. Trump and another founding member, said the goal is not to create a venue for access. Rather, he said in a recent podcast, “we want a place to hang out in D.C.” for the “younger, hipper, Trump-aligned Republican.”
Even as these real-life ventures were playing out, another push for profit was underway in the virtual world. Investors in the $Trump memecoin are bidding to become the top 220 owners of the collectible coin and win a dinner with the president later this month. A memecoin is a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke or celebrity mascot that has no practical function other than speculation.
The $Trump memecoin is controlled by a company run by the Trump sons and their business partners, but President Trump has actively encouraged his supporters to buy it.
Javier Selgas, chief executive at Fr8Tech, a shipping company, announced this past week — while Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were abroad — that his Monterrey, Mexico-based company would spend $20 million to buy $Trump memecoin tokens.
Buying the tokens — in essence, giving money to the Trump family — is “an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.,” Mr. Selgas said in a statement, which was also filed with the S.E.C., as his company is publicly traded.
In some cases, the Trump-family announcements over the past week have involved foreign governments, including those of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Eric Trump flew to Doha, the capital of the tiny Middle East nation of Qatar, on Wednesday as a government official there signed a deal with a Saudi-based real estate company to build a new Trump golf course and luxury villa complex, a partnership that will bring millions of dollars in branding and management fees to the Trump family.
This is one of six real-estate projects now planned in the Middle East, sponsored by Dar Global, the international subsidiary of a Saudi-based real estate firm with close ties to the Saudi royal family. The other projects are in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Dubai.
“They always arrive at the word ‘yes,’ which is a beautiful thing,” Eric Trump said while in Dubai this past week, saying that it took only a month to get the required real estate permits from the government there. “They do it quickly.”
On a crypto conference panel in Dubai, Eric Trump sat next to Zach Witkoff, one of the founders of the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, who announced that a venture capital firm backed by the government of Abu Dhabi would invest $2 billion using a form of digital currency offered by World Liberty. This deal alone could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the Trump family and its partners.
Donald Trump Jr. had gotten a head start on his brother, arriving on April 25 in Budapest, where he had a brief meeting with Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, and then was paid to appear at a dinner gathering among business leaders.
“I’m just here as a business guy, but as someone who understands how the world works,” Donald Trump Jr. told an executive from Portfolio Hungary, the organization that sponsored the event, adding that while he was in Eastern Europe and the Balkans he was looking for possible new deals. “You never know if there is going to be a Trump real estate deal.”
His next stop was Serbia, where the Trump family is planning a new hotel on land owned by the government there. He met with President Aleksandar Vucic, whose administration approved the hotel project, which also includes Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, as the developer. “No one has ever said that we are inhospitable: We prepared this pig for Donald Jr Trump,” Mr. Vucic boasted on his Facebook page, about his meal with Mr. Trump.
Donald Trump Jr. then moved on to Bulgaria, where he appeared on a stage along with Antoni Trenchev, the co-founder of a cryptocurrency firm called Nexo that was fined $45 million by the S.E.C. in 2023 and agreed to leave the U.S. marketplace.
With Donald Trump Jr. at his side, Mr. Trenchev announced that Nexo had already talked to United States regulators and it was re-entering the U.S. market. “America is back — and so is Nexo,” Mr. Trenchev said, celebrating his meeting where he paid to be with the son of the president of the United States, as well as the company’s pending return to the market there.
President Trump, in recent days, was doing his part as well to help drive business to the family.
He attended a fund-raising event at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida this past weekend. That makes his 10th visit to the club since he returned to the White House in January, with many of the weekend visits featuring political gatherings that pay bills to his family.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
9) Trump Says ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked About Due Process and Upholding Constitution
President Trump repeatedly said he didn’t know when asked in a TV interview whether every person on American soil was entitled to due process, as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.
By Jonathan Swan, May 4, 2025
President Trump’s comments came amid the many legal challenges to the administration’s agenda, especially the president’s aggressive deportation campaign Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
President Trump said in an interview that aired on Sunday that he did not know whether every person on American soil was entitled to due process, despite constitutional guarantees, and complained that adhering to that principle would result in an unmanageable slowdown of his mass deportation program.
The revealing exchange, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” was prompted by the interviewer Kristen Welker asking Mr. Trump if he agreed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio that citizens and noncitizens in the United States were entitled to due process.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump replied. “I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.”
Ms. Welker reminded the president that the Fifth Amendment says as much.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said again. “It seems — it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials.” Left unmentioned was how anyone could be sure these people were undocumented immigrants, let alone criminals, without hearings.
Mr. Trump responded “I don’t know” one more time and referred to his “brilliant lawyers” when Ms. Welker asked whether, as president, he needed to “uphold the Constitution of the United States.”
The comments came amid the many legal challenges to the administration’s agenda, especially Mr. Trump’s aggressive deportation campaign, and as top administration officials have begun to question the president’s obligation to provide due process. Mr. Trump has attacked judges, called for their impeachment and ignored a Supreme Court ruling directing his administration to facilitate the return of a migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly sent to a prison for terrorists in El Salvador.
Mr. Trump said in the interview that he may seek clarification from the Supreme Court on what it meant by the word “facilitate” when referring to the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Like most conversations with Mr. Trump, the interview roamed over broad territory, covering subjects as diverse as recent economic data, his trade war with China, negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, his musings about an unconstitutional third term in office, and possible Republican successors. The interview was taped on Friday.
The president, perhaps frustrated that President Xi Jinping of China has held firm under the pressure of the administration’s 145 percent tariffs on China, reverted to tough trade talk after weeks of signaling that he was eager for a deal.
Mr. Trump said he was not worried about a recession despite some Wall Street analysts predicting one and suggested that it was a good thing for the United States to have gone “cold turkey” on trade with China through the prohibitively high tariffs.
“We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China,” he said. “Now we’re essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars. Very simple.”
Noting that the U.S. economy shrank in the first quarter, Ms. Welker asked Mr. Trump when he would take responsibility for the economy and call it the Trump economy rather than blaming it on former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Trump’s response encapsulated his lifelong relationship with credit and blame: “I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy because he’s done a terrible job.”
Asked about the war in Ukraine and his administration’s efforts to negotiate an end to it, the president said he had come close to walking away from the talks and still might do so.
Mr. Trump claimed during his presidential campaign that he could strike a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. About 100 days in, he now claims he was being sarcastic. He has been frustrated by the grinding process and lack of progress. And President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has ignored Mr. Trump’s public calls to stop bombing Ukrainian cities.
“Well, there will be a time when I will say, ‘OK, keep going. Keep being stupid and keep fighting,’” Mr. Trump said in the interview.
Mr. Trump was asked about his repeated statements about considering an unconstitutional third term in office. In the interview, he went further than he had previously in saying he did not intend to run again, despite the fact that the Trump Organization’s online store is selling Trump 2028 hats.
“There are many people selling the 2028 hat,” the president said, “but this is not something I’m looking to do. I’m looking to have four great years and turn it over to somebody, ideally a great Republican, a great Republican to carry it forward.”
Then he mentioned two Republicans who might fit the bill as his successor: Mr. Rubio and Vice President JD Vance.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
10) I Brake for Robins
By Margaret Renkl, May 5, 2025
Ms. Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, reports from Nashville on flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.
Jeremy Edwards/Getty Images
It’s full-on springtime now. My blackberries are sending out new canes, and the passion vines have broken ground. The nestlings in the bluebird box are old enough for their cries to be heard across the yard. The front-stoop skinks are awake, the first lightning bugs are blinking in the trees, and the first ruby-throated hummingbird has migrated safely back to Tennessee from his wintering grounds in South America. As they do every year, these signs of spring work to keep my anguish for the world at bay.
Not all signs of spring are a relief to see. For weeks now, robins have been crisscrossing the roads, flying right at tire level. I don’t know why they do this. Are they too crazed by hormones to remember that their one advantage over automobiles is flight? Are they too hungry after a lean winter to leave the ground and its spring-waking insects? Whatever the reason, I hold my breath a little every morning, hoping the best for low-flying robins.
Maybe it seems pointless, this worry about robins when the Trump administration is waging open war on the whole living world: taking steps to remove crucial protections of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and habitat protections from endangered species, to make it easier to drill and mine on public lands and fish in protected zones, to halt the expansion of renewable energy, to fire thousands of U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service employees, as well as the experts tracking the effects of climate change on Americans.
And all this is happening just as the data we do have increasingly point to a natural world in dire trouble. Last fall the World Wildlife Fund released the results of a study that showed shocking declines in wildlife populations across the globe — 95 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, 76 percent in Africa, 60 percent in Asia and the Pacific. Just on Thursday the journal Science published a study showing that North American bird populations are in severe decline, with 75 percent of species affected. Most startlingly, birds are losing ground in places where they have traditionally thrived.
So, especially in spring, when the robins are flying right at tire level again — and the turtles are making their slow methodical way to the other side of the road to lay their eggs again; and the road-crossing squirrels keep panicking again, changing their minds about the safest direction to go when a car is bearing down on them; and the baby opossums have climbed out of their mama’s pouch to cling to their backs, from which they can too easily fall if she tries to hurry — I slow down.
I wish everyone would slow down. Surely the least we can do is to give our wild neighbors time to cross the roads we have built through the middle of their homes.
There’s much more we can do, too, of course. As the entomologist and wildlife ecologist Douglas W. Tallamy points out in his new book, “How Can I Help: Saving Nature With Your Yard,” big change requires technical innovation and political will, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing individuals can do. “Changes in our landscaping paradigm,” he writes, “can be enacted by everybody and anybody, regardless of our vocation, age, background training or financial resources.”
Wildlife-friendly changes in how we manage our yards and public spaces include choosing native plants that provide food and habitat for native species, protecting insects by building a brush pile, leaving the leaves where they fall and waiting till full spring (after nighttime temperatures have reached at least 50 degrees for two straight weeks) to clean up the garden. It can mean protecting everybody — human beings and wildlife alike — by skipping the herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and synthetic fertilizers.
We need to recognize that an insect-chewed leaf is not a sign of damage but a sign of life: Some hungry creature is eating the leaf, which means that some other hungry creature has insects to eat, and the wild world is behaving exactly as it evolved to behave.
These small local landscapes are becoming ever more crucial in the context of a world on fire. “In an era of climate change, with extreme weather putting huge stress on natural habitats, the patches of ground that we tend around our houses can turn into places of refuge,” the conservation biologist Thor Hanson points out in his new book, “Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door.” When we cherish and tend what we have the power to tend, we make a place where vulnerable creatures at least have a chance.
So choose redbud trees over crepe myrtles and asters over chrysanthemums. Brake for robins and turtles and opossums. Turn off unnecessary outdoor lights to protect migrating birds. Keep pets leashed or indoors. Never use rodenticides, which move up the food chain, or glue traps, which trap indiscriminately and inflict horrible suffering. Start replacing your lawn with native sedges and ground cover that need not be mowed. Where you still have turf grass, set your mower blades as high as possible — and walk the property before you cut — to give creatures hidden in the grass a chance to flee. Hold off on tree-trimming till nesting season has passed.
Maybe all this seems impossibly insufficient in light of the challenges we face, especially now that we are working not just against time but against the might of the federal government. But when the changes we make are changes that many others also make, it’s possible to move the needle — not just for this robin, or this turtle, or this firefly, but for them all. “In the United States alone,” Dr. Tallamy notes, “135 million acres are now in residential landscapes, and those landscapes are controlled by hundreds of millions of people.”
It’s not hard to make these changes, and most of us are already convinced that we need to do exactly that: As Catrin Einhorn noted in a recent Climate Forward newsletter: “Most U.S. adults, including majorities of Protestants, Catholics and people of other religions, believe that the Earth is sacred and that God gave humans a duty to protect and care for it, a Pew Research Center survey found in 2022. But there is often a disconnect between that belief and environmental action.”
Maybe it will be a little easier to take significant environmental action if we understand that the entry point to environmentalism can be as simple as planting a native tree or turning off the outdoor lights or leaving the leaves where they fall. And if we remember that for every first step there are many other steps. We just need to take them one at a time, always looking for ways to bring others along with us.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
11) Alcatraz as a Prison? Tourists Say Trump Is on His Own Island.
At the beloved attraction in San Francisco Bay, visitors could scarcely believe President Trump had suggested turning Alcatraz back into a penitentiary.
By Heather Knight, Reporting from Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, May 5, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/us/alcatraz-trump-tourists.html
Boatloads of tourists traipsed around Alcatraz Island on Monday morning and peered into tiny prison cells, learning about the most notorious inmates who stayed there — and the ones who tried to escape.
The tour was standard at the revered San Francisco attraction, save for one topic that simply could not be avoided in the conversations echoing off the old cellblock walls.
Can you believe that President Trump wants to convert Alcatraz back into a federal prison?
The morning tour groups were full of international travelers, and many of them had received phone alerts about Trump’s plan or read news reports over breakfast. Some wondered if they might actually be among the last visitors allowed to wander the island. But nobody seemed to think the idea was nearly as brilliant as Mr. Trump thought it was.
“I thought it was a joke,” said Philipp Neumann, who was visiting from Germany. “It’s a ruin, isn’t it, more or less?”
A ruin, yes, with some buildings deteriorating so badly they no longer have roofs or complete walls. The cells have broken toilets, if they have any at all, with no running water or sewage system.
The exterior walls of the cellblocks are so weak that they are reinforced with netting to prevent chunks of concrete from crumbling onto tourists’ heads. Bird deposits coat much of the island. All supplies from food to fuel must be brought in by boat.
Alcatraz has been practically frozen in time since the day that the storied prison saw its last inmate 62 years ago. When the federal government closed the facility, officials had deemed it a deteriorated relic that was insufficient for housing inmates.
Since then, Alcatraz has had more success in fiction than as a functioning penitentiary. The 1962 film “Birdman of Alcatraz” landed Burt Lancaster an Academy Award nomination for best actor. “Escape From Alcatraz,” starring Clint Eastwood, was a 1979 hit that dramatized a famous attempt to flee the island. And “The Rock” was a 1996 Hollywood blockbuster that introduced Alcatraz to a younger generation of moviegoers.
It is possible that Mr. Trump had “Escape From Alcatraz” on his mind when he declared on social media on Sunday that he had directed federal agencies to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz to serve as “a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”
When he was asked on Monday how he came up with the idea, he said that he should have been a “moviemaker,” and he praised the island’s top-notch security.
“Nobody ever escaped,” he said, not quite accurately. “One person almost got there, but they — as you know the story — they found his clothing rather badly ripped up. It was a lot of shark bites, a lot of problems.”
In “Escape From Alcatraz,” shreds of the material of a raincoat are found floating in the bay.
Several years after federal officials closed Alcatraz as a prison, Native American activists occupied the island for 19 months from 1969 to 1971 and sought the title to the land in the middle of San Francisco Bay. The occupation ended when armed federal agents took back the island.
Alcatraz opened to the public in 1973 and remains a park, museum and bird sanctuary operated by the National Park Service. Alcatraz Island was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1986 and hosts 1.4 million visitors a year.
On Monday Mr. Trump called Alcatraz “a big hulk that’s sitting there rusting and rotting.”
“It sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak,” he said. “It’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting.”
Alcatraz closed in part because it was far more expensive to run a prison on an island than on the mainland since everything had to be shipped in. The small number of prisoners made the extra expense even more questionable. In its years as a federal penitentiary from 1934 to 1963, Alcatraz processed a total of 1,576 inmates — and 336 could be held there at any given time.
By contrast, there are about 156,000 incarcerated people in federal prisons nationwide.
The prison was also deemed too vulnerable to escapes. John Martini, an Alcatraz historian who has volunteered on the island for 25 years, said that dozens of people escaped the island when the U.S. Army operated it as a military prison, and at least five disappeared while Alcatraz was operated as a federal prison.
Those include two people who made it to the mainland and were captured, he said, plus the three people who were dramatized in “Escape from Alcatraz.” That trio dug out of the prison’s crumbling walls with spoons, left the island on a raft and were never seen again.
That escape attempt prompted George Christopher, who was the San Francisco mayor at the time, to call for the prison to be shuttered. He said that, in addition to the lack of security, the buildings had deteriorated so badly, millions of dollars of repairs were needed. Robert F. Kennedy, who was attorney general, ordered Alcatraz closed soon after.
Tourism is one of San Francisco’s top industries and, for decades, visiting Alcatraz has ranked alongside walking across the Golden Gate Bridge or riding on a cable car as a must-do activity. The city can little afford to lose tourism dollars, as it faces a potential $1 billion budget hole over the next two years.
Mayor Daniel Lurie on Monday said that Mr. Trump’s idea is “not a serious proposal.” Rafael Mandelman, president of the Board of Supervisors, was more blunt, calling the idea “typically absurd.”
Mr. Trump has set his sights on San Francisco already this year. In February, the president ordered the federal government to dramatically scale back the functions of the Presidio Trust, which was established by Representative Nancy Pelosi and oversees a popular expanse with stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Trump administration indicated Monday that it was following through on the president’s announcement. William K. Marshall III, director of the Bureau of Prisons, said he had ordered an immediate assessment of Alcatraz.
“We look forward to restoring this powerful symbol of law, order, and justice,” he said in a statement. “We will be actively working with our law enforcement and other federal partners to reinstate this very important mission.”
Federal officials referred to the island as “USP Alcatraz,” short for United States Penitentiary Alcatraz, a phrase that has not been used in decades and exists as a historical topic on the Alcatraz Island park’s website.
Few visitors on Monday seemed convinced that the idea would actually come to fruition.
John and Jorien LaPierre, visitors from the Netherlands, said they were fans of Mr. Trump until his tariffs jeopardized the economy of the European Union. Still, Mr. LaPierre, sporting a San Diego beanie, sounded interested in the idea of converting Alcatraz back into a functioning prison.
“But you’d have to tear it down and build it up again, which is bad from a historical standpoint,” he continued. “When we came in here, it was like, Whoa, it looks like a movie.”
Tony and Deb Vickery, visiting from England, disembarked a cruise ship to spend the day on Alcatraz. They said they had felt that their journey was hitting all of the Trump hot spots.
They had just sailed through the Panama Canal, which Mr. Trump wants the U.S. to control, and are headed for Canada, which he has suggested the U.S. should seize as the 51st state.
“We think he’s mad,” Ms. Vickery said. “He’s lost his marbles.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
12) Spy Agencies Do Not Think Venezuela Directs Gang, Declassified Memo Shows
The release of the memo further undercuts the Trump administration’s rationale for using the Alien Enemies Act to deport scores of Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador.
By Charlie Savage and Julian E. Barnes, Reporting from Washington, Published May 5, 202, Updated May 6, 2025
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in the country’s capital, Caracas, this year. Credit...The New York Times
A newly declassified memo released on Monday confirms that U.S. intelligence agencies rejected a key claim President Trump put forth to justify invoking a wartime statute to summarily deport Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador.
The memo, dovetailing with intelligence findings first reported by The New York Times in March, states that spy agencies do not believe that the administration of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, controls a criminal gang, Tren de Aragua. That determination contradicts what Mr. Trump asserted when he invoked the deportation law, the Alien Enemies Act.
“While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” the memo said.
The memo’s release further undercuts the Trump administration’s rationale for using the Alien Enemies Act and calls into question its forceful criticism of the ensuing coverage. After The Times published its article, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation and portrayed the reporting as misleading and harmful. The administration doubled down a month later after similar coverage in The Washington Post, citing the disclosures in both articles as a reason to relax limits on leak investigations.
The document, known as a “sense of the community” memo, was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The foundation provided a copy to The Times.
Lauren Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy for the foundation, said the memo was at odds with the administration’s portrayal of its contents as a dire threat to public safety.
The government “almost immediately declassified the same information in response to a FOIA request,” she said.
Ms. Harper continued: “The declassification proves that the material should have been public from the start — not used as an excuse to suppress sharing information with the press.”
But administration officials continued to defend Mr. Trump’s policy.
“It is outrageous that as President Trump and his administration work hard every day to make America safe by deporting these violent criminals, some in the media remain intent on twisting and manipulating intelligence assessments to undermine the president’s agenda to keep the American people safe,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement.
A Justice Department official said in a brief statement Tuesday morning that the gang had terrorized Americans. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Until Mr. Trump invoked it in mid-March, the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law, had been used only three times in American history, all during declared wars. It says the government may summarily remove citizens of a country that is at war with the United States or otherwise engaged in an invasion of or predatory incursion into U.S. territory.
Immediately afterward, the administration sent planeloads of Venezuelans to a notorious high-security prison in El Salvador with no due process. Courts have since blocked further transfers under the proclamation. Citing evidence that some of the men sent there were likely not gang members, the American Civil Liberties Union has asked a judge to order the Trump administration to bring back the Venezuelans for normal immigration hearings.
On its face, the Alien Enemies Act appears to require a link to a foreign government. Mr. Trump declared that Tren de Aragua had committed crimes to destabilize the United States “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”
But The Times reported days later that the intelligence community had circulated findings on Feb. 26 that reached the opposite conclusion. The shared assessment was that Venezuela’s government and the gang were adversaries, even though some corrupt Venezuelan officials had ties to some gang members. It also said the gang lacked centralized command-and-control and was too disorganized to carry out any instructions.
The Times also reported that only the F.B.I. partly dissented and thought there was some kind of link, but it was based on information the other agencies — like the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. — thought was not credible.
The Trump administration asked the National Intelligence Council, made up of senior analysts and national security policy experts who report to Ms. Gabbard, to take another look at the available evidence.
On April 7, it produced the memo released on Monday. The Washington Post reported on the memo, which remained classified, later that month, further angering the administration.
Now in public view, the memo said the intelligence community based its conclusion on a series of factors. Venezuelan security forces have arrested Tren de Aragua members and have “periodically engaged in armed confrontations with TDA, resulting in the killing of some TDA members,” the memo said, showing that the government treats the gang as a threat.
While there is evidence that some “mid- to low-level Venezuelan officials probably profit from TDA’s illicit activities,” the memo said, the gang’s decentralized makeup would make it “logistically challenging” for the organization as a whole to act at the behest of the government.
The memo also shed additional light on the F.B.I.’s partial dissent.
It said that while F.B.I. analysts agreed with the other agencies’ overall assessment, they also thought that “some Venezuelan government officials facilitate TDA members’ migration from Venezuela to the United States and use members as proxies in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the United States to advance what they see as the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing governments and undermining public safety in these countries.”
The F.B.I. based its view on “people detained for involvement in criminal activity in the United States or for entering the country illegally.” But “most” of the intelligence community “judges that intelligence indicating that regime leaders are directing or enabling TDA migration to the United States is not credible,” the memo said.
In examining the available evidence, the National Intelligence Council evaluated whether detainees “could credibly have access to the information reported” and whether they had offered details that could be corroborated about support the Maduro government had purportedly provided the gang in exchange for following its directions.
While portions of this section were redacted, the memo signaled skepticism. The detainees’ legal troubles, it said, could “motivate them to make false allegations about their ties to the Venezuelan regime in an effort to deflect responsibility for their crimes and to lessen any punishment by providing exculpatory or otherwise ‘valuable’ information to U.S. prosecutors.”
In late March, the memo noted, Chilean officials told the International Criminal Court that they suspected that the murder of a Venezuelan man in Chile last year was carried out by “a cell or group linked to the Tren de Aragua that was politically motivated” and originated from an order by Venezuela’s government. The Maduro administration denied that accusation.
But the memo also said other parts of the intelligence community had not observed or collected evidence of communications or funding flows showing government officials providing directions to leaders of the gang, even though such a relationship would likely require “extensive” such interactions.
Judges so far have stayed away from second-guessing the truth of Mr. Trump’s factual claims in deploying the Alien Enemies Act.
The day after the initial Times article, Todd Blanche, a former defense lawyer for Mr. Trump who is now deputy attorney general, announced that the Justice Department had opened a criminal leak investigation.
In a statement, he criticized the article, saying the information in it was classified but also “inaccurate.” But the declassified memo supports The Times’s reporting.
In an interview on Megyn Kelly’s podcast last week, Ms. Gabbard said that the reporting on the intelligence community’s conclusions was “being investigated.” Leakers had “selectively and intentionally left out the most important thing,” she added, pointing to the F.B.I.’s belief that the Maduro government was supporting the gang’s activities in the United States.
But the articles in both The Times and The Post discussed the F.B.I.’s contrary view.
Last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a memo that she would roll back protections for press freedoms in leak investigations, citing the Times and Post articles as damaging examples of leaks of classified information.
In an Espionage Act case, prosecutors must prove that someone knowingly made an unauthorized disclosure of defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. The government’s declassification of the memo raises questions about any case that could be brought over the Times and Post articles.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
13) Israeli Jets Bombard Airport in Yemen’s Capital
The strike came days after the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen fired a ballistic missile that struck near Israel’s main airport, wounding at least six people.
By Aaron Boxerman and Vivian Nereim, May 6, 2025
Smoke rising above Sana, Yemen, on Tuesday. Credit...Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
Israeli fighter jets bombarded the main international airport in the Yemeni capital of Sana on Tuesday, the Israeli military said, two days after the Houthi militia in Yemen fired a ballistic missile that struck near Israel’s main airport.
The Israeli attack was the latest salvo in an ongoing battle with the Iran-backed Houthis, who rule Sana and much of northwestern Yemen. They have fired scores of rockets and drones at Israel in what they call a solidarity campaign with Palestinians to press for an end to the war in Gaza.
The scope of the damage to Sana’s international airport was not immediately clear. The travel hub connects more than 20 million Yemenis who live in Houthi-controlled territory to the rest of the world. .
Before the attack, the Israeli military had issued a call on social media threatening the airport and ordering everyone in the vicinity to evacuate.
On Sunday, a Houthi ballistic missile evaded Israel’s air defenses to strike close to Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv. Multiple airlines canceled flights in response to the strike — which wounded at least six people — and Israeli leaders vowed reprisals.
The following evening, Israeli fighter jets bombarded the port of Hudaydah in Houthi-controlled northwestern Yemen and a concrete factory east of the city. At least four people were killed and more than 30 wounded, according to the health ministry tied to the Houthi-led government.
Since striking Ben Gurion, the Houthis have declared an “air blockade” on Israel, saying that they will continue to target Israeli airports.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
14) Israel Plans to Seize Control of Gaza’s Aid. Here’s How That Could Look.
The United Nations and its partners have condemned the proposals by Israel, which has been barring deliveries of food and medicine for months.
By Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 6, 2025
A charity kitchen in Jabaliya in northern Gaza last month. Israel began blocking the arrival of new supplies in the enclave early in March. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israeli authorities are floating a new plan to allow desperately needed international aid into Gaza, under their control, after blocking the deliveries for more than two months.
But many of the humanitarian groups that would have to work under the proposed system say Israel’s conditions would turn aid into a military pressure tactic and violate the groups’ principles of neutrality.
The idea for the new aid mechanism surfaced just as Israeli leaders were threatening to significantly escalate their offensive in Gaza, even though more than a year and a half of war has failed to either defeat the territory’s Hamas rulers or bring home all of the hostages still held there.
Israel’s barring of food and medicine shipments into Gaza has prompted calls from the international community — including allies — to end the blockade.
But Israeli officials have dug in, arguing that they are pressing Hamas to free the remaining hostages. They have also repeatedly accused Hamas of diverting aid for its own fighters rather than allowing it to reach hungry Palestinian civilians, which Hamas denies.
What is Israel proposing?
The Israeli military said that its coming escalation would involve the displacement of most of Gaza’s population to zones “clean of Hamas,” which would be filtered by Israeli forces to weed out any members of the militant group.
Under the new system, the Israeli military would secure and monitor the distribution of aid to Palestinians in a series of hubs inside Gaza, according to Israeli officials, diplomats and aid groups familiar with the proposal.
The United Nations and other aid groups have criticized the proposal and suggested they will not cooperate. And some critics in Israel fear the plan would bring the country one step closer to re-establishing Israeli military rule over Gaza — a dream of hard-liners on the Israeli right wing.
Israel has declined to publicly lay out the humanitarian proposals in detail. Israeli officials have generally briefed aid groups verbally to avoid putting their plan into writing, according to three officials familiar with the discussions.
On Sunday, the United Nations and a coalition of humanitarian groups said in a joint statement that Israeli officials were seeking to shut down the existing aid system and force aid groups to “deliver supplies through Israeli hubs under conditions set by the Israeli military” once the government agreed to reopen the border crossings into Gaza.
Under the proposal, private companies would manage the delivery of aid within the hubs secured by Israeli forces, two Israeli officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
What is the humanitarian situation in Gaza?
When Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in mid-January, Palestinians voiced hopes that they would at last enjoy a respite from the dire conditions in Gaza.
For more than a year, hundreds of thousands of Gazans displaced by the war had huddled in tents and makeshift shelters. Finding enough food and clean water was a daily struggle. Meager provisions were hawked in street markets at eye-watering prices.
During the truce, Israel agreed to allow hundreds of trucks of aid and commercial goods into Gaza each day, bearing fresh fruit, frozen meat, and enough flour to drive down the price of bread. But it didn’t last.
In early March, the Israeli government announced that it was closing the crossings into Gaza to aid, citing the deadlock in talks with Hamas over the next steps in the truce. Two weeks later, Israel ended the cease-fire with a massive bombardment across the territory.
The Israeli blockade has been in place for more than two months. Israeli officials say Gaza has enough provisions to last for some time, even as aid officials warn that the blockade could ultimately lead to famine.
“Blocking aid starves civilians. It leaves them without basic medical support. It strips them of dignity and hope,” Tom Fletcher, the top United Nations aid official, said in early May.
Why have aid groups criticized Israel’s proposal?
Relief officials have said the Israeli plan would effectively leave much of Gaza — the parts of it without hubs — without any supplies. It would also essentially allow Israel to control the supply of critical aid and use it as leverage.
“It contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic — as part of a military strategy,” the United Nations said in its joint statement with other humanitarian organizations.
The organizations also argued that if they agreed to provide aid in the Israeli military zones, they might effectively abet Israel’s forced mass displacement of Palestinians as part of the initiative.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
15) Gazans Despair After Israel Announces More Displacement
Israel’s plan to capture more land in Gaza and relocate thousands of civilians has heightened a sense of hopelessness among Palestinians.
By Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Reporting from Haifa, Israel, May 7, 2025
Palestinians displaced by the Israeli military offensive sheltering in Gaza City on Wednesday. Many have been displaced multiple times during the war. Credit...Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters
Israel’s latest plan to displace people in northern Gaza has prompted a new wave of despair among Palestinian civilians in the territory, many of whom have already been displaced several times since the war began.
The displacement plan would compound an already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, where hunger has soared since Israel imposed a blockade on aid supplies in March, prompting the United Nations to warn this week of a “growing humanitarian catastrophe.”
“We don’t want to even hear the word ‘evacuation’ again,” said Anees Jneed, 31, a displaced Palestinian living in a makeshift shelter in northern Gaza. Mr. Jneed said his family had already been displaced at least six times since the war began in October 2023.
“Displacement means death, humiliation, homelessness,” Mr. Jneed added.
Mr. Jneed is likely to be among the first affected by Israel’s plan to capture large sections of Gaza and force those living there to move south. The Israeli authorities said on Monday that they were calling up tens of thousands of military reservists to enact the expansion of the war. Israeli leaders say they hope that the campaign will pressure Hamas to compromise in stalled cease-fire negotiations, and release the hostages it still holds in Gaza.
Israel’s announcement has had the opposite effect, at least initially. A Hamas spokesman said on Tuesday that the group was no longer interested in participating in cease-fire negotiations.
All of this has contributed to a deeper sense of gloom among Gazan civilians. Wafa al-Ghouty, 35, an accountant and mother of five, said she had been displaced seven times since the start of the war. She is now sheltering in a tent in a coastal area of southern Gaza.
“The situation is extremely challenging, not just because of the repeated displacement, but because of the hunger and the helplessness of not being able to provide even a loaf of bread,” Ms. al-Ghouty said in an interview. “Every time we settle, we are forced to move again.”
Ms. Al-Ghouty said she planned to cook her last bag of pasta within 24 hours. “Sometimes we’re so focused on surviving — finding food and medicine for the children — that we miss the news,” she said. “But this announcement hit like a thunderbolt.” She said she had already packed a small bag with her children’s clothes and key documents, bracing for what may come next.
Nearly two months have passed since Israel shattered the cease-fire in Gaza in March, and resumed its military campaign after cease-fire talks broke down. The renewed assault has brought near-daily airstrikes and escalating ground operations, resulting in thousands of deaths and injuries. According to the United Nations, more than 1.9 million people — the majority of Gaza’s population — have been displaced since the war began.
The humanitarian situation has worsened significantly in recent weeks because of Israel’s blockade on aid supplies. Most bakeries are no longer operational, food stocks are depleted and medical supplies are critically low. Israel has argued that its blockade is lawful, and that Gaza still has enough available provisions.
Mr. Jneed said he was struggling to provide basic necessities for his two children. The family now survives on just one meal a day.
“Every hour that passes is worse than the one before,” he said.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
16) Israel Downs Drone as Houthis Vow to Continue Tit-for-Tat Strikes
The Israeli military said it had intercepted an unmanned vehicle a day after President Trump said the U.S. would step back from conflict with the Iran-backed group.
By Lara Jakes, Lara Jakes has written about Middle East diplomacy for more than a decade, May 7, 2025
Police officers inspecting the site of a Houthi missile attack near Ben Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv on Sunday. The strike prompted a series of tit-for-tat military responses between Israel and the group based in Yemen. Credit...Amir Levy/Getty Images
Israel said it had shot down a drone that was approaching from the east on Wednesday, as Houthi officials in Yemen vowed to continue attacking the country a day after President Trump said the United States would stop bombing the Iran-backed group.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the drone was intercepted by the air force and sirens blared as it approached. It was not immediately clear who launched the drone. But the Houthi militia group reiterated that it would continue to attack Israel, both to avenge attacks in Yemen and because of the war in Gaza.
“We cannot accept Yemen being targeted and violated without a response,” Mohamed Abdelsalam, a spokesman for the group, told Al Jazeera, the Qatari broadcaster, echoing comments by a senior Houthi politician on Tuesday. “We will continue to respond to the Israeli entity by all available means.”
Israeli fighter jets have bombed several sites across Yemen this week, killing at least seven people, according to casualty reports, and disabling the country’s main international airport. Khaled Al-Shaif, the director of the airport in Sana, Yemen’s capital, said the attack had caused $500 million worth of damage, destroyed three planes and forced flights to be suspended indefinitely.
Israel said the airport attack was in response to a Houthi ballistic missile strike near Ben-Gurion International Airport, outside Tel Aviv, on Sunday. Multiple airlines have temporarily suspended flights in response to the attack, which wounded at least six people.
For more than a year, the Houthis, who rule much of northwestern Yemen, have fired rockets and drones at Israel and ships in the Red Sea in what they call a solidarity campaign with Palestinians in Gaza.
The United States has lent its military support to Israel in the conflict, launching missile strikes against Yemen and deploying its aircraft carriers to protect shipping. The efforts began under the Biden administration but were stepped up in mid-March, when Mr. Trump sharply escalated attacks and vowed that the Houthis would be “annihilated.” Over the last seven weeks, the campaign has cost well over $1 billion.
But Mr. Trump abruptly reversed course on Tuesday, surprising both Israel and the Pentagon, by announcing that a truce between the United States and the Houthis had been negotiated by Oman.
“They just don’t want to fight,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during an unrelated meeting with Canada’s prime minister. “And we will honor that and we will stop the bombings. They have capitulated, but more importantly, we will take their word. They say they will not be blowing up ships anymore.”
But Mr. Abdelsalam said the Houthis would continue attacking Israeli ships until Israel lifts a blockade against Gaza that has prevented humanitarian aid from reaching its two million residents.
Mr. Abdelsalam said the “preliminary” truce with the United States would not affect Houthi support for Gaza. “We will evaluate any future U.S. support for Israel and determine our stance accordingly,” he said.
Ismaeel Naar contributed reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
17) ‘James’ Won the Pulitzer, but Not Without Complications
In an unusual but not unprecedented move, the prize board chose a fourth option after it couldn’t agree on the three less-heralded finalists.
By Alexandra Alter, May 6, 2025
In addition to appearing on most of the year’s best books list, Percival Everett’s “James” also won the 2024 National Book Award for fiction. Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times
When Percival Everett’s novel “James” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday, it seemed like an obvious choice. Everett’s subversive reimagining of “Huckleberry Finn” had already landed critical acclaim and a string of literary honors, including the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize.
But it turns out that “James” was not the top pick among the Pulitzer’s five fiction jury members. It wasn’t even in the top three, according to three people with knowledge of the process, who were not authorized to speak about the confidential deliberations.
In a surprising twist, the prize went to Everett after the Pulitzer committee’s board failed to reach a consensus on the three finalists that the fiction jury initially presented — Rita Bullwinkel’s “Headshot,” Stacey Levine’s “Mice 1961,” and Gayl Jones’s “The Unicorn Woman.”
The process that led to “James” winning wasn’t a matter of the board imposing its own selection, but the result of a procedural backstop designed to give the board more choices when it reaches an impasse on the first crop of finalists.
In a typical year, one of the three finalists is chosen. But when the 17 voting members of the board deliberated on the fiction finalists last Friday, none of the three choices received a majority vote. At that point, the board could have voted not to award a fiction prize this year, as it has on rare occasions. Or it could vote to consider a fourth choice, which had also been chosen by the fiction jury.
In this case, the board voted to consider the fourth selection, “James,” which was submitted as an additional option earlier this year, after the board got the list of finalists and asked the jury for another title to consider. “James” got the necessary majority vote.
The procedure for widening the pool of candidates is outlined on the Pulitzer website, which notes that if the board is “dissatisfied with the nominations of any jury,” it can ask the chair for “other worthy entries.”
In 2012, no fiction award was given after the board failed to land on a winner — an outcome that outraged many in the literary world. In 2015, there were also four fiction finalists, with the prize going to Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See.”
Still, some observers expressed skepticism about this year’s process. In an article published on Monday on the website Literary Hub, the writer and bookseller Drew Broussard questioned whether this year the Pulitzer board had overruled the fiction jury’s selections of a “world-shaking all-woman trio of finalists in a year when one novel by a male writer has taken up quite a lot of the available oxygen.”
This year’s jury members for the fiction prize included the novelists Bryan Washington, Jonathan Lethem, Ayana Mathis and Laila Lalami, and the critic Merve Emre. Several of the jury members declined to comment on their deliberations; others did not respond.
Emre, who served as the chair of this year’s fiction jury, referred an inquiry to the Pulitzer board. An administrator for the Pulitzers said that the board doesn’t discuss its deliberations.
But Emre shared some withering views on the state of the book business on Instagram, where she noted that the jury waded through roughly 600 books and selected four that they felt exemplified the prize’s criteria as “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”
“It was difficult to avoid fatigue and cynicism,” Emre wrote, adding, “American publishing is not in a healthy state; the more directly its judgments are determined by the market and the mass media — the more sources of funding, like the NEA, disappear — the sicker it will become: homogenous, inert, inexpert, cheap.”
Many in the literary world celebrated the Pulitzer board’s decision as a fitting outcome for a writer who has pushed the boundaries of fiction for decades. Much of Everett’s work has been published by independent presses, including “Telephone,” which was a Pulitzer finalist in 2021, though Doubleday, a major publisher, put out “James.”
The three finalists offer a snapshot of some of the bold and experimental work happening on the fringes of American fiction.
Bullwinkel’s “Headshot,” about eight teenage female boxing contestants in Nevada, was praised by the New York Times critic Dwight Garner as “so enveloping to read that you feel, at times, that you are writing it in your own mind.” In “The Unicorn Woman,” Jones, one of America’s most influential Black women writers, tells a surreal story about a World War II veteran who falls in love with a Black woman who has a spiral horn growing from her forehead and works at a carnival side show.
Levine’s novel, “Mice 1961,” published by Verse Chorus Press, introduces two orphaned sisters through the voice of their housekeeper. In a Washington Post review, the novelist Lydia Millet called Levine “a gifted performance artist of literary fiction, part French existentialist and part comic bomb-thrower.”
Levine was dismissive of speculation over this year’s fiction machinations, noting in an email that, at a moment when diversity initiatives and public funding for the arts are at risk, the Pulitzer Prize stands for integrity — a quality worth celebrating.
“Percival’s book is so important in this regard,” Levine wrote in an email. “Is this really the time to fuss about what might or might not be gender politics in a literary contest?”
Elisabeth Egan contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
18) Why Did the N.Y.P.D. Hand Over a Sealed Arrest to Homeland Security?
U.S. officials asked for records about a New Jersey woman’s summons, issued at a Columbia University protest. Now the information is part of her deportation proceeding.
By Maria Cramer and Chelsia Rose Marcius, May 6, 2025
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that the city’s sanctuary laws bar it from helping immigration authorities in civil deportation cases, but criminal investigations are a different matter. Credit...Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times
The New York Police Department is investigating why officers gave U.S. authorities the sealed arrest record of a New Jersey woman who was detained at a protest last year — information that immigration officials are now using to seek her deportation.
Under New York State law and department policy, sealed records of arrests or summons cannot be released. But the police gave the documents to Department of Homeland Security investigators who had requested them as part of what the investigators said was a criminal investigation, Commissioner Jessica Tisch and the woman’s lawyer said on Tuesday.
The documents, the lawyer said, then became part of the government’s case for deporting the woman, Leqaa Kordia, 32, who is Palestinian.
The case, first reported by The Associated Press, emerged as the Trump administration pressured Mayor Eric Adams to cooperate with its deportation campaign. Commissioner Tisch has repeatedly said that New York’s sanctuary laws bar police officers from cooperating with federal officials on immigration cases, which are considered civil violations.
Ms. Kordia, who does not have a valid visa, was arrested during a protest in April 2024, when scores of demonstrators gathered at Columbia University to protest the war in Gaza.
On Tuesday, Commissioner Tisch said at a City Hall news conference that an official from Homeland Security Investigations in New Jersey had asked for information about Ms. Kordia, saying that she was being investigated in connection with money laundering.
Ms. Kordia’s lawyer said later that the commissioner’s statement was the first that he or his client had heard of such an investigation.
Commissioner Tisch said that while the city’s sanctuary laws bar it from helping immigration authorities in civil deportation cases, criminal investigations are a different matter. The Police Department handed over information, “which was all done according to procedure,” she said, without specifying precisely what was transmitted to federal investigators.
“That is definitely an instance where we would share information,” she said, adding that department officials would look into how the summons record that was part of a sealed case was also provided.
Arthur Ago, a lawyer at the Southern Poverty Law Center who represents Ms. Kordia, said that she was born in Jerusalem and raised on the West Bank. She went to the protest at Columbia to mourn relatives killed during the war in Gaza, he said.
At the protest last year, Ms. Kordia was given a summons for disorderly conduct, Mr. Ago said. The case was dismissed shortly after, he said, and she was not charged with other violations.
After the arrest, Ms. Kordia returned to New Jersey, where she had been trying to start a business selling candles and small gifts. It was unclear when immigration authorities began building a case against her.
On March 13, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in New Jersey arrested Ms. Kordia. She was put on a plane and sent to Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, where she is fighting deportation, Mr. Ago said.
The following day, an officer who works at the Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center, a hub that provides detectives with data, gave Homeland Security a four-page report that had been sealed. Ms. Kordia had been standing with about 100 other protesters, blocking a gate on campus, according to the report, which said she had no record of criminal complaints or investigations.
Mr. Ago said that he learned that federal officials had the report about his client’s protest arrest when he reviewed Ms. Kordia’s immigration case file. Mr. Ago said that Ms. Kordia had posted nothing on social media and her arrest was not publicized, he said, raising questions about how federal officials had learned about her.
Mr. Ago said in a statement that the Homeland Security Department “has never communicated to us or indicated in court that Ms. Kordia is under investigation for money laundering.”
“The allegation comes as a complete surprise, is entirely unfounded, and we categorically deny it,” Mr. Ago said. “We are prepared to fight this allegation in court.”
Mr. Ago said that federal officials had submitted documents in immigration court describing Ms. Kordia as “a low risk of danger and a low risk of flight.” But during proceedings, lawyers for the federal government described her as a danger, though they did not provide details, Mr. Ago said.
Homeland Security and ICE officials did not respond to repeated requests for comments Tuesday.
The case suggests that the Trump administration is using the pretext of criminal investigations to speed deportations, said Peter L. Markowitz, an immigration law professor at the Cardozo School of Law who helped draft the city’s sanctuary laws.
He said it is proper for the Police Department to share information with federal authorities about criminal investigations that are not related to immigration enforcement. But he said that the Trump administration’s actions mean that requests cannot be taken at face value.
“Given the Trump administration’s track record of playing fast and loose with facts to skirt legal constraints, it is incumbent on the Police Department to do more in the future to confirm that they are not illegally entangled in Trump’s mass deportation programs,” Mr. Markowitz said.
The administration has aggressively pursued people who have participated in Gaza protests at campuses.
Ms. Kordia arrived in the United States in 2016 on a tourist visa, Mr. Ago said, but began taking classes to improve her English and was granted a student visa within a year.
Soon after, Ms. Kordia’s mother, a naturalized U.S. citizen, petitioned for an I-130 visa — a document that would establish that Ms. Kordia was her daughter and pave the way toward citizenship, Mr. Ago said.
But in 2022, Mr. Ago said, Ms. Kordia got bad advice from a school official who told her she could drop her student visa, because she had received a notice that her I-130 application had been approved.
That move left her without a valid visa, Mr. Ago said. It is on that basis that immigration officials have moved to have her deported, he said.
In March, Department of Homeland Security officials knocked on the front door of Ms. Kordia’s home in New Jersey, Mr. Ago said. They spoke to her mother, who immediately called Ms. Kordia at work, Mr. Ago said.
Ms. Kordia spoke over the phone with the officials, who told her to come the following week to their office. They did not say what they wanted, but Ms. Kordia called a lawyer who agreed to come with her, Mr. Ago said.
When Ms. Kordia appeared at the office on March 13, officials told her lawyer to sit in the hallway while they spoke with her. Soon after, they told the lawyer that Ms. Kordia was being detained.
Maia Coleman contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
19) MAGA Beauty Is Built to Go Viral
By Jessica Grose, Opinion Writer, May 7, 2025
Eleanor Davis
A few weeks ago, a South Carolina woman wearing stilettos and raw-edged jeans got into an expletive-laced shouting match with a man in the aisle of a beauty store. This fracas went viral on multiple social media platforms, which would be totally unremarkable — just another day of verbal aggression, social unrest and cosmetic consumption on the internet.
But the incident made it to People magazine because the woman is Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina. She and her constituent, who asked her about when she’d be holding her next town hall, recorded the encounter and posted it.
Mace — who has hundreds of thousands of followers on X, Instagram and TikTok (where she goes by the handle @basedmace) — is easily clocked as just the kind of Republican woman who is ascendant in the Trump administration. The women’s hair is in Utah curls, long waves with straight ends, popularized by Mormon momfluencers. Their makeup is heavy; the content creator and comedian Suzanne Lambert called it “Republican makeup,” which she explained to me is “matte and flat”: thick eyebrows and lashes, dark eyeliner on the top and bottom lids, a bold lip, lots of bronzer. “Inappropriate unless you’re on a pageant stage. And in that case, I would still do it differently,” she said. Their clothes, whether casual or corporate, are form-fitting and often accessorized with giant crosses. They are always thin and almost always white.
To each her own. But it is also undeniable that this hyperfeminine and overtly Christian look offers a stark contrast to the often blunt and even brutal language they employ. Another glaring example of this is the horrifying video of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, at CECOT, the tropical gulag in El Salvador where the Trump administration has sent migrants. She stood there before a group of shirtless prisoners and declared, “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” while wearing a $50,000 Rolex.
Public shows of aggressiveness are something Noem and Mace have in common. (Let’s not forget the media moment around Noem’s dog killing.) This isn’t the first time Mace has posted confrontations that escalate into slurs and name-calling. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, isn’t quite as aggressive on her socials, but her attacks on the media happen so frequently that Fox News put together an Instagram sizzle reel of her most “iconic comebacks” from the Trump administration’s first 100 days.
Leavitt prefers another common influencer strategy: appearing on the channels of other social media stars with large followings to spread her message. She recently collaborated with the running influencer Kate Mackz. Unlike other political figures who have appeared on Mackz’s channel, Leavitt did not go for a run alongside Mackz, but Leavitt did show off a Tesla and a meme that she printed out and tacked to her corkboard. It depicts someone presenting a disembodied brain to a man who says, “No thanks. I won’t be needing that. I believe everything the legacy media shows.”
Noem, Mace and Leavitt did not invent either the aesthetic or the tactics they employ. Their look is an extreme and specific version of a million other interchangeable influencers. As my newsroom colleague Sandra Garcia noted, “Lifestyle influencers exist in an ecosystem that prizes homogeneity,” because social media algorithms reward it. These algorithms also reward rage baiting, or the deliberate posting of negative content in order to create more engagement and more clicks.
Influencing has become a form of female power that is acceptable within conservative communities because it does not threaten the status quo, where women are ultimately subordinate and ornamental. (It makes a twisted kind of sense that, despite dominating the market, female influencers are paid less per collaboration than male influencers are.)
While there are liberal female politicians who go viral on social media, like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett, they don’t have a shared style of speaking or visual presentation. What makes this group of MAGA politicians powerful is that they are so immediately recognizable by outsiders as part of the conservative team. There’s no single look that immediately identifies a woman as a liberal in the same way, said Anna Akbari, a sociologist who has written at length about the sociology of style. “I really think it’s the leveling up of this symbolic system that is setting them apart,” she said. It allows their message to go farther on social media because there’s already a set of visual cues that many viewers recognize before a single word comes out of their mouths.
I am not happy to live in a country where our elected officials curse at their constituents, film the exchanges and get rewarded with the negative attention they seem to so desperately desire. Buoyed by her social media virality and national platform, Mace is considering a run for governor of South Carolina next year. We should want more from our politicians than an insatiable appetite for needless conflict.
But ask any influencer: The algorithms are always changing. Mace and Noem have been criticized by fellow Republicans. Josiah Sullivan, a sophomore at Clemson University writing for The Post and Courier, based in Charleston, S.C., admonished Mace for choosing “clout chasing over constituent service.” Mackz has faced a major backlash for her softball interview with Leavitt. (Some typical critical comments on the Instagram post: “10,000 steps back for women thanks a ton” and “I’m confused … isn’t this a running influencer page??? Not a fascism influencer page?? How disappointing.”)
The criticism has also come from other prominent voices in the conservative media universe. Megyn Kelly called out Noem for “cosplaying” an ICE agent while wearing “25 pounds of hair, only to be outdone by her 30 pounds of makeup and false eyelashes” on a police raid. Kelly added, “Pro tip — as somebody whose brother is a cop: They don’t want you there, even if, you know, you’re an attractive lady.”
That’s how we know this kind of power isn’t enduring or a deeper source of political influence. America could swipe away from it at any time.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
